Love on the Spectrum

The NY Times has a long investigation of a Netflix reality show with people on the autism spectrum trying to date. The 39-year-old single woman reporter draws two main conclusions.

First, the show is authentic. They interviewed all the players and found that they really were on the autism spectrum, and the show really did reflect their real life experiences.

Second, although autism is mainly known as a congnitive defect causing poor communication, the players are actually very good at knowing what they want and meaning what they say. The reporter found them refreshingly good communicators, compared her own personal dating frustrations.

I think she has hit upon something. Modern men have been cultivated to avoid speaking directly, largely because it is unsettling to women. Those who do are treated as if they have a mental disease.

Bill Maher believes in Space Aliens

Comedian and political pundit Bill Maher made a 2008 movie Religulous, making fun of religion. So he qualifies as a hard-headed atheist.

Last week he gave a tv monologue on how he now believes that we are being visited by space aliens.

If at this point you don’t believe aliens are here and observing us, maybe you’re the conspiracy theorist. They're here, they came in a sphere, get used to it.

The evidence is some of the new UFO/UAP videos that have been released.

Yes, I think a space alien invasion is as ridiculous as the religions he mocks.

Separately, Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder says We pretty much have evidence for life in other solar systems. This is based on finding signatures of non-equilibrium compounds in alien planet atmospheres.

Maybe Maher is just making a joke. Some comments:

It’s clear that Maher, like me, doesn’t believe that these aliens and their craft really exist. He’s just using the notion to criticize what’s wrong with America. If craft and aliens did exist, and we possess crashed ships and alien bodies, then somehow there has been a massive conspiracy to hide it by both Democratic and Republican governments—as well as by the press— to cover up the greatest news story in the history of humanity.

[reply] Bill Maher genuinely seems to believe in aliens—he’s not just entertaining the idea. He appears to be as convinced of their existence as he is that COVID originated from a lab leak. He has interviewed the creator of the documentary Disclosure twice — once on Real Time and once on Club Random — and was very supportive in both conversations. In a previous Overtime segment, he was also asked about Area 51 and suggested that the government is hiding evidence of extraterrestrial life. In my personal opinion Maher has been smoking too much weed.

(The first comment was retracted here.)

I am coming around to a view where it is meaningless to talk about what others believe it. I cannot judge Maher's sincerity, nor can I be sure whether he is joking. And I don't think it makes a difference.

Nor can I say whether Pres. Trump believes in God, or whether Richard Dawkins is really an atheist. It is much better to judge people based on their actions.

Lots of people have weird beliefs. I am inclined to think that if someone has some very wacky belief, like space alien visitors, then all his other opinions should be discounted. But this leaves me discounting everyone.

Another example of this is free will. Many educated people say they do not believe in free will. To me, that reduces them to a mindless automaton, or to a schizophrenic following voices in his head. When they give opinions while denying free will, they are literally saying that the opinions are not their own. But it is also possible that they believe in free will, and only deny it because of some defect in their mental logic.

Dominoes Falling or Dice Rolling

Sam Harris rants against free will, and apparently his model of the universe is falling dominoes and rolling dice. He says:

i mean just 46:11 viewing people as physical systems that are not separate from the universe. there really is just the universe doing its 46:17 thing it's doing its thing deterministically. you know just one domino is falling and hitting the next 46:23 and if you if you believe that there's a component of randomness in there then there's some you know jiggle to the 46:30 system that is that is in indeterministic and uh therefore 46:36 intrinsically unpredictable, but in neither case neither with dominoes 46:41 falling or dice rolling do you get a picture of a will that can that tr can 46:48 independently author its own uh doings.

Wow, what a silly argument. His theory is that his brain works by either falling dominoes or rolling dice, and neither has free will. Neither is conscious either.

When he is not denouncing Pres. Trump or free will, he is promoting meditation. What is the point of meditation if the mind is just dominoes and dice? Does that somehow get those dominoes and dice to function better?

He charges $150 per year to listen to these wacky rants.

People hold him up as a rational leftist, but he is not.

Everyone Believes in Free Will

Noam Chomsky argues that 100% of humans act as if they have free will. Some scholars deny it, but it is better to judge peoples' beliefs by how they hehave, rather than what they say. (Apparently extracted from this longer interview.)

I think that's right, but for the possible exception of people like Sam Harris, who took a lot of psychedelic drugs and claims to not have any feeling of free will. Sometimes he talks about politics, and seems to have no voluntary control over his opinions. On the other hand, he seems to like meditation because it lets him imagine that he has free will.

His New Year's Message argues that the Apocalypse is near, as evidenced by the likelihood that the J6 protesters would have hanged Mike Pence, if they had the chance. No, I do not believe that. They were unarmed, and did not appear to want to harm anyone. Some did use force to get into the Capitol building, but only to protest a defective electoral system.

Chomsky says science cannot answer whether we have free will. I think that is correct. Opinions about free will today are not much different from those of ancient Greek philosophers.

He says it is puzzling how smart people can act as if they have free will, and yet deny it.

Chomsky is not a mind-body dualist, and says that there must be a mechanical explanation for whatever the mind is doing, but free will might be beyond our understanding.

I guess his point is that he believes in free will, but leaves open the possibility that there is no free will, but it is a mysterious limitation of the human brain that we have to believe in it anyway.

For a contrary view, Robert Sapolsky argues against free will. He says that if you really had free will, you would be able to somehow show that your decisions were independent of the socio-economic status of your parents, and everything else that may have influenced your past and brain. He denies this, so he says that it makes no sense to reward or punish anyone for anything. He rejects our criminal justice system, as well as everyone else that keeps our society orderly.

He seems sincere, but he also appears to be trying to convince us that he is right. Why bother, if we have no free will? So I think Chomsky is right, and Sapolsky behaves as if he has free will, in spite of everything he says.

Evolutionist Jerry Coyne denies free will in humans, and in other life as well

This is the third and last of a series of posts on the misguided concept of “agency and purpose in biology,” which one can take as the statement that “organisms have goals, and guide their own development and evolution towards those goals”.

He goes on to denounce research in the subject, as an unscientific waste of money. He does not quite say it, but he appears to believe that only a religious bigot would think anything so silly.

I do not know whether dogs have goals. I am just confident that I have free will; that most humans say they have free will; that all humans act as if they have free will, at least occasionally; and possibly some people like Harris, Sapolsky, and maybe some schizophrenics do not.

Society is Divided into Free Men and Slaves

Leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne writes in another of his anti-free will rants:

Legal systems are grounded on the notion that we are morally responsible, but under determinism we’re not. Yes, we can be responsible for an act, but “moral” responsibility is intimately connected with libertarian free will; it’s the idea that we have the ability, at any given time, to act either morally or immorally (or make any any other alternative decision, even if it doesn’t involve morality). Yes, I know there are some who think that the justice system already implicitly accepts determinism, but they are wrong. For if it did, we wouldn’t have any form of retributive punishment, including capital punishment.

As for rewarding good behavior, well, yes, you couldn’t have done otherwise than, say, saved a drowning person. But rewarding people who do good is a spur for other people to do good.  Even if the rewarded people don’t “deserve” plaudits in the sense that their accomplishments didn’t come from LFW, handing out rewards for things that society approves of is simply a good thing to do—for society.

So the criminal does not deserve punishment, but it is good to punish him anyway to deter others. Likewise we reward do-gooders, not because they deserve it, but to provide an incentive for others.

Coyne says he is a hard determinist, who believes that everything people do is pre-determined.

I believet that some people have free will, and some do not. Those without free will are essentially slaves, or robots.

If a wild dog kills and eats your pet rabbit, then the dog does not deserve punishment. However I may forcibly separate it from my other pets. I can do this because I have free will.

If I do not have free will, then there is no sense is telling me what I ought to do, or what is moral to do. I will do whatever I have been programmed to do.

I am trying to make sense out of Coyne's position. I think it would make sense if many heroes and do-gooders have no free will, and our authorities and judges and morally conscious citizens do have free will. Then our leaders can make good decisions, and some citizens will respond to incentives. The others are slaves, and can be thrown in prison if they fail to follow orders.

Okay, but Coyne thinks that it is a law of physics that no one has free will. We are all automatons. It is no use trying to persuade anyone of anything. You cannot make a decision, and you cannot influence anyone else's.

As I always say, “It’s much harder to convince a free-willer of the truth of determinism than to convince a creationist of the truth of evolution.”

Not surprising. Why does he even try, if he is a determinist?

Trump is Vindicated

The US Supreme Court has just determined that the President is immune from prosecution for official acts The Biden DoJ was doing politicizing prosecutions as had never been done before.

Most of the accusations against Trump, including both impeachments, depend on some mindreading. That is, there was nothing wrong with what Trump actually did.

In dividing official from unofficial conduct, courts may not inquire into the President's motives. Such a “highly intrusive” inquiry would risk exposing even the most obvious instances of official conduct toju- dicial examination on the mere allegation of improper purpose. Fitz- gerald, 457 U. S., at 756. Nor may courts deem an action unofficial merely because it allegedly violates a generally applicable law. Oth- erwise, Presidents would be subject to trial on "every allegation that an action was unlawful,” depriving immunity of its intended effect.

The court also ruled in favor of J6 protesters who were convicted of corruptly destroying court documents. They did not destroy court documents, they were trespassing on Capitol grounds. And they were not doing it corruptly. They were doing it as a political protest.

A criminal case should prove criminal intent. I am not disputing that. Convicting Hunter Biden required proving that he checked a box falsely, and that he intended to buy the gun under false pretenses. His real crime was collecting bribes in the name of his father, but that is another story.

In Trump's case, he said: "I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard." The prosecution is based on mindreading Trump to argue that this was some sort of code phrase for instigating a violent insurrection. Other cases also require bizarre stories for that Trump was thinking.

Update: Here is Biden, on the scotus immunity ruling:

So, now — now the American people have to do what the Court should have been willing to do but would not.  The America people have to render a judgment about Donald Trump’s behavior. ...

I concur with Justice Sotomayor’s dissent today.  She — here’s what she said.  She said, “In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law.  With fear for our democracy, I dissent,” end of quote. So should the American people dissent.  I dissent. 

So Scotus undermined democracy by forcing the American people to vote on the matter!

Mindreading Jurors have not told us Trump's Crime

I jus learned that the NY Trump judge is a South American!

The judge will probably order probation conditions designed to interfere with the election as much as possible.

Whatever you think of Pres. Trump, we should not have a Colombian deciding our next President Everyone who goes along with this, from Pres. Biden on down, is an enemy of American justice.

It is funny to see the press try to descrive the conviction on one sentence. They cannot do it. The essential charge was that his office recorded transactions as legal expenses, and they were falsified to cover up at least one of 3 possible unproved crimes, campaign finance, cheating voters, and tax evasion.

The important point is that he was not convicted of paying hush money, or interfering with the election, or misleading voters, or tax evasion, or anything like that. The jury found that Trump intended to cover up a crime, but there is no finding as to what that crime was. No one knows.

Maybe some jurors will speak up and tell us, but none have so far.

The case follows the pattern where Trump-haters investigate him for years looking for wrongdoing, fail, and end up accusing him of intent to commit some nebulous crime.

That is what happened in both the first and second impeachments. No direct evidence of a crime, and not even any direct evidence of intent, but somehow the mindreading Trump-haters claim to know what he was thinking.

Maybe that should have been a jury voir dire question: Do you believe in mindreading?

I used to regularly post here the evil effects of faulty mindreading. It explains much of what is wrong with our society.

The funny think about Trump is that he is exactly what he appears to be. More so that any other politician. He says what he means and he means what he says. There is no need to apply any mindreading skills.

There is a mental illness that a lot of people have, where they cannot take anything on face value. They cannot understand straightforward language, and jump to conclusion about everything meaning something else. Some even say that such behavior is neurotypical, and they are rattled by those who are more direct.

I am not saying that Trump has autism. He does not. But I think that he is hated for some of the same reasons that people with high-functioning autism are hated.

Trump did not know the extent of election fraud

Most of the legal attacks on Pres. Trump depend on mindreading.

Reason magazine reports:

Based on information from "four people briefed on the matter," The New York Times reports that the Washington, D.C., grand jury convened as part of Smith's investigation recently heard testimony about whether Trump "privately acknowledged in the days after the 2020 election that he had lost." One of the witnesses was Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, who reportedly said "it was his impression that Mr. Trump truly believed the election was stolen." ...

The difference between these dueling accounts is legally significant because it goes to Trump's state of mind when he pursued the tactics recommended by Giuliani et al. Was he honestly trying to correct what he mistakenly viewed as a grave injustice, or was he knowingly perpetrating a fraud?

The House select committee that investigated the January 6 Capitol riot by Trump's supporters recommended several criminal charges against the former president, all of which hinge on his intent.

It is odd that so many supposed experts spend so much time debating Trump's state of mind. Trump is the most transparent politician I have ever seen. He is easy to read.

In 2020, many election rules were changed, legally and illegally, to favor Biden. There were many irregularities. Was it enough to convince the courts or the Congress than the election was stolen? Apparently not.

Trump pursued some arguments that it was. It is foolish to discuss whether he knew Biden won the election. There is no way he could have known. Yes, he knew the reported vote counts, and he knew the allegations of irregularities. He could not know how it would all play out. Nobody did.

Pence now attacks Trump for Jan. 6, 2021, but listen to what he said on Jan. 4:

Vice President Mike Pence said that he understands that many people are skeptical about the election results, and promises they will "have their day in Congress" on Wednesday when the results are set to be finalized.

Pence was scheduled to preside over that day in Congress.

A Trump indictment is expected shortly. I am not sure how Trump is more to blame for the Jan. 6 protest, but I guess we will see soon.

Here is PBS TV interviewing a Jewish historian on how Trump would be an authoritarian, if elected in 2024. Her father was born in Israel. Only a Jew would make such a ridiculous argument.

Trump's presidency was less authoritarian than Obama's and Biden's. If Trump were authoritarian, he would have used the covid crisis as an excuse to claim executive powers. He did not. Biden is using his executive powers to prosecute his political enemies on bogus charges.

Jews are extremely authoritarian, as an ethnic group. Jewish supreme court jusstices are authoritarian. So is attorney general Garland. So are Jewish politicians. The Jews made Communism authoritarian. And yet Jews are always pointing toward their enemies and calling them authoritarian.

This particular PBS TV segment complains that Trump promises to dismantle some of the more authoritarian parts of the administrative state.

Here is a new political prosecution:

The state charges against Michigan's would-be electors present a similar puzzle. They face eight felony counts, including various forgery-related charges, all of which hinge on intent. Conspiracy to commit forgery, for example, requires a scheme to "falsely make, alter, forge, or counterfeit a public record, with intent to injure or defraud." The 16 defendants did that, Nessel says, by signing "fraudulent 'Certificates of Votes'" identifying themselves as Michigan's electors. But if they honestly believed that the official results were decisively corrupted by tricky election software, phony ballot dumps, or other kinds of chicanery—meaning they were in fact the true electors—it is doubtful that they had an "intent to injure or defraud."

They are facing decades in prison, and all they did was to sign up to be electors, in case the vote count is favorable to Trump. With VP Pence publicly saying that he would consider alternate slates of electors, I do not see how it can be a crime to volonteer to be on one of those slates.

Black and White Brains are Different

CNN reports on a new study of Black brains:

Researchers at Harvard University examined MRI scans of 7,350 White and 1,786 Black children ages 9 and 10. The data in the study was collected by the National Institutes of Health in 2019. ...

In the study, researchers found that Black children often developed behavioral problems later in life such as PTSD, anxiety and depression. These children also were susceptible to drug and alcohol abuse and suicide attempts and were likely to commit violence, the study said. ...

Harnett said his team began exploring a cognitive development study to dispel “this kind of folk belief that Black and White people have categorically different brains.”

But he found that the folk belief was true. From the study:

Relatedly, previous work outside the ABCD Study found lower neural reactivity to threat within the PFC, hippocampus, and amygdala in Black participants compared with White participants ...

Linear mixed-effects models revealed that Black and White children in the present sample differed in gray matter volumes in 11 of the 14 a priori regions of interest, after covarying for family relatedness, gender, age, and scanner type (Figure 1; Table 2). (An alternative visualization of the results is provided in Figure S1 in the online supplement.) White children showed greater gray matter volumes compared with Black children in the amygdala, hippocampus, frontal pole, superior frontal gyrus, rostral anterior cingulate, pars opercularis, pars orbitalis, lateral orbitofrontal cortex, caudal middle frontal gyrus, and caudal anterior cingulate and smaller gray matter volume compared with Black children in the pars triangularis (all p values <0.001).

The study was not able to find a cause for these differences. It could have been entirely genetic. They did note:

Researchers said Black children are much more likely to be exposed to violence, live in disadvantaged neighborhoods, and combat systemic racism daily than White children. They also are exposed to those factors at an earlier age, the study said.

The most recent US Census data shows that Black families have a lower median income, higher rates of unemployment and poverty, and lower rates of educational achievement compared to White families, the study notes.

The obvious conclusion is that Blacks have genes causing structural differences in the brain, and as a result their communities have more violence, less income, and less education.

The Harvard researchers do not say this, of course. They make no attempt to rule it out either. They have no control group, or any way to say whether low income is causing brain scan differences, or brain differences are causing low income. Or gene differences are causing both.

It is hard to see how income could be a causal factor. Black Americans live better than most of the world, and better than Whites of a couple of generations ago. Do all those people have brain irregularities just because of lower income? Obviously not, or researchers would have discovered it.

If Blacks have brains that particularly prone to violence, and society punishes violent criminals, is that systemic racism? I think the Harvard researchers would say yes to that.

Don't blame me if this subject is offensive. I am just the messenger. It would be great if we could just treat Blacks better and they would have normal brains. This Harvard study says otherwise.

How Bill Buckley purged conservatives

Steven Greenhut writes in an Orange County California op-ed:

One of the modern conservative movement’s greatest leaders, the late William F. Buckley Jr., retold a fascinating story from the run-up to the 1964 presidential election. As he explained in the Wall Street Journal in 2008, Buckley and his allies convinced Barry Goldwater to distance himself from the John Birch Society — a conspiracy-minded group that touted his candidacy.

Buckley noted that the society’s president, Robert Welch, had at the time a “near-hypnotic” influence on the right, despite his “wild” ideas: “(Welch) said Dwight D. Eisenhower was a ‘dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy,’ and that the government of the United States was ‘under operational control of the Communist Party.’”

Buckley realized that Welch’s fixations did a disservice to the anti-communist cause. So he convinced Goldwater to reject the core fallacy — “the assumption that you can infer subjective intention from objective consequence: we lost China to the communists, therefore the president of the United States and the secretary of state wished China to go to the communists.”

Goldwater, of course, gained the GOP nomination, and lost the general election vote by 23 percentage points. Thanks to Buckley’s efforts, however, the GOP vanquished various fringe groups.

This story has been told many times, including by Buckley himself.

The story was a simple power struggle. Buckley wanted control of the conservative movement. According to this, it was okay to lose an election by a landslide, as long as its leaders did not tolerate inferring subjective intention from objective consequence.

I sometimes denounce inferring subjective intention from objective consequence. I call it mindreading. I probably denounce it more than Buckley. But I do not agree with Buckley here.

You cannot win political office by purging the folks who only agree 90% with your principles. The above essay was praised by Libertarians, as they are even worse examples of ideologues who are content to lose all the elections.

Buckley is dead, but his National Review magazine continues his tradition by denouncing Donald Trump. The Left probably regards the magazine as the controlled opposition.

Opposition to the Birch Society has always been a little strange. The Society was primarily known for being anti-Communist in a time in which Communism was genuinely evil and a threat to America. So why oppose those who are fighting evil?

The Bircher critics fell into two camps. There were the Leftist Commie-sympathizers who objected to any criticism of the Left. And then there were the cuckservatives and controlled opposition who sought to appease those Leftists. Buckley and much of National Review is in the latter camp.

I have read a lot of criticism of Trump, and 90% of it infers subjection intention. Hardly any of it examine the objective consequences of his policies. Those consequences have been peace and prosperity. Instead, the criticism consists of name-calling and arguments about his supposed thought processes.

Here is another new article that details the Buckley story, and explains how he launched personal attacks on people and organizations he disliked. It adds:

Phyllis Schlafly had just graduated from City House, the now defunct Catholic high school in St. Louis, when Lindbergh gave his speech. It’s hard to imagine that the brightest girl at City House was unaware of America First, since Lindbergh had already given the same speech to 15,000 people attending an America First rally at the St. Louis arena.

Phyllis Schlafly was a tragic figure. She was the abused wife of the Republican Party, an organization which treated her with contempt until it was time to get out the vote. Then like the husband who had beaten her in a drunken rage the night before, the Republicans would apologize and sweet talk her into supporting them once more. Schlafly was a tragic figure because she was cut off from her natural constituency, which was Midwest, America First Catholics, in Alton, Illinois and St. Louis, most of whom were blue collar union members.

Phyllis was the victim of identity theft, perpetrated on her by the conservative movement by people like William F. Buckley, whose job was policing the conservative movement and expelling anyone who showed genuine, i.e., America First, conservative inclinations.

The article has a good discussion of how conservatism and Trumpism fit into history. Much of Trump's struggle has been against control-freaks like Buckley who do not want an open discussion of some issues.

Sam Harris is a mindless automaton

Sam Harris has posted another podcast rant on how much he hates Donald Trump. He has done this dozens of times.

The funny thing is that these rants have no substantive criticism of Trump's performance in office or his policies. They are just name-calling, based on an emotional reaction to Trump's personality. Harris has an extreme case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Harris denies it in the podcast, but obviously his friends have told him that he has it.

Harris is a leftist atheist Jew, who preaches his own brand of Buddhism. He would never vote Republican, but he actually agrees with Trump on guns, foreign policy, Islam, Atifa, free speech, cancel culture, and many other topics.

I am beginning to think that the key to understanding Harris, and others like him, is the issue of free will. Harris argues against free will, and wrote a whole book on it.

After listening to many of his podcasts, I believe that he does not have free will. He would vote for Trump if he did. He is working for a broad leftist consensus on many issues, and then he is happy for others and himself to go along with the consensus, without any voluntary choice.

When Harris attacks Trump, it is based on elaborate theories about hypothetical mental processes going on inside Trump's head. In short, mindreading.

I used to think Harris's religion was Buddhism, because he promoted meditation a lot. But really it is his theory of mind. He has a faith-based set of beliefs that guide everything he says.

Harris is smart enough to realize that he is a slave if he has no free will and Trump does. Trump's ability to do as he pleases, without following the Leftist consensus, drives Harris nuts.

This attitude is common among Jews. They hate it when anyone goes against the Leftist consensus.

Listening to Harris is like listening to a preacher ranting about how Trump is going to Hell. It is just a religious belief that has no bearing on whether he is a good President. The preacher does not know who is really going to Hell, and Harris has no mindreading skills.

The free will question extends to a lot of other political issues. A right-winger might think that it is fair to punish a criminal, because he chose crime. A leftist free will denier might say that the criminal deserves to be treated the same as every other human.

A right-winger might prefer low taxes so that people can spend their own money as they choose. A leftist might think choice is impossible, and so it is better for the state to control everyone's finances.

I used to think that it is obvious that everyone believes in free will, because everyone talks about making choices. Listening to Harris has convinced me otherwise. He does not have free will, and very much resents those who do.

Nobody talks about free will as a political issue. It sounds crazy to say that Harris is a mindless automaton. But it explains his philosophy perfectly, and he himself has written and lectured extensively on how he does not have free will. It is quite obviously at the core of his deepest beliefs.

Here is another example. Why would Democrats favor mask mandates, and Republicans not?

Democrats claim to be following the science, but that is plainly not true:

A large-scale study in Denmark that sought to determine if masks help stop the spread of Covid-19 has been rejected by several prestigious journals. The authors hinted that their findings were inconvenient to the status quo.

The Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the American Medical Association Journal all turned down the paper, Danish media reported on Thursday.

The study, which began in late April, involved 6,000 Danes, half of whom were asked to wear masks at all times in public places. The other half were selected as a control group and were instructed not to cover their faces. After a month, participants were tested for Covid-19 as well as for antibodies against the virus.

The study’s researchers have remained tight-lipped about their findings, but they’ve dropped plenty of clues that suggest it was the paper’s conclusion, not its methodology, that led to the journals’ rejections.

The paper has now been published, and showed that Danes who were randomly assigned to wear masks were just about as likely to get COVID-19 as those who did not.

The difference is that those who believe in free will also believe in the personal autonomy to carry out those choices. Others believe in conforming to a Leftist consensus, whether it makes any sense or not.

Even a Jewish NY Times columnist complains:

What, today, is leftism, at least when it comes to intellectual life? Not what it used to be. Once it was predominantly liberal, albeit with radical fringes. Now it is predominantly progressive, or woke, with centrist liberals in dissent. Once it was irreverent. Now it is pious. Once it believed that truth was best discovered by engaging opposing points of view. Now it believes that truth can be established by eliminating them. Once it cared about process. Now it is obsessed with outcomes. Once it understood, with Walt Whitman, that we contain multitudes. Now it is into dualities: We are privileged or powerless, white or of color, racist or anti-racist, oppressor or oppressed.

The list goes on. But the central difference is this: The old liberal left paid attention to complexity, ambiguity, the gray areas. A sense of complexity induced a measure of doubt, including self-doubt. The new left typically seeks to reduce things to elements such as race, class and gender, in ways that erase ambiguity and doubt. The new left is a factory of certitudes.

The Left has been taken over by groupthink. I think that free will denial is at the root of it.

The Dilbert filters

I like the Scott Adams Dilbert podcast for his filter on current events. In particular,

No mindreading. If some commentator is basing his analysis on telling you the intents, feelings, or thinking of someone else, then he should be disregarded by humans do not have such psychic abilities. Either he is a stage magician, or he is bluffing, or he is self-deluded. Regardless, his mindreading attempts will not yeild any useful info.

No wordplay gotchas. If somebody says something that sounds offensive, but a simple rewording of it is reasonable, then it is silly to get offended. A recent example is Joe Biden saying something stupid about blacks.

Consider the biases. If you are getting a news story from NY Times, NPR radio, or PBS TV about Donald Trump, you should remember that they have never done a fair story about him. So it is reasonable to assume that the facts have been twisted to support their ideology.

Persuasion. People are influenced by images, anecdotes, memes, and other non-rational communications. It is a mistake to pretend that people make rational decisions.

Another filter I like, but which Dilbert does not use, is the 3-year-old filter. Having talked to 3-year-olds a lot, I find the conversations very similar to adult conversations. The adults just use bigger words, and refer to a wider range of experiences.

Subjective motivations should be irrelevant

A law professor attacks this Bill Barr opinion:

The Supreme Court has traditionally refused, across a wide variety of contexts, to inquire into the subjective motivation behind governmental action. To take the classic example, if a police officer has probable cause to initiate a traffic stop, his subjective motivations are irrelevant. And just last term, the Supreme Court appropriately shut the door to claims that otherwise-lawful redistricting can violate the Constitution if the legislators who drew the lines were actually motivated by political partisanship.

What is true of police officers and gerrymanderers is equally true of the President and senior Executive officials. With very few exceptions, neither the Constitution, nor the Administrative Procedure Act or any other relevant statute, calls for judicial review of executive motive. They apply only to executive action. Attempts by courts to act like amateur psychiatrists attempting to discern an Executive official's "real motive" — often after ordering invasive discovery into the Executive Branch's privileged decision-making process — have no more foundation in the law than a subpoena to a court to try to determine a judge's real motive for issuing its decision. And courts' indulgence of such claims, even if they are ultimately rejected, represents a serious intrusion on the President's constitutional prerogatives.

Impeachment testimony is fourth-hand

Here is the lead NY Times impeachment story from the top of page 1:

Impeachment Hearings Open With Revelation on Trump’s Ukraine Pressure

As public hearings began, William B. Taylor Jr., the top American diplomat in Ukraine, said he was told President Trump cared more about investigating Joe Biden than he did about Ukraine.

WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives opened historic impeachment hearings on Wednesday and took startling new testimony from a senior American diplomat that further implicated President Trump ...

Mr. Taylor testified to the House Intelligence Committee that he learned only recently of a July telephone call overheard by one of his aides in which the president was preoccupied with Ukraine’s willingness to say it would look into Mr. Biden and work by his son Hunter Biden for a Ukrainian energy firm. Immediately afterward, Mr. Taylor said, the aide had been informed that Mr. Trump cared more about “investigations of Biden” than he did about Ukraine.

A powerful witness for Democrats, Mr. Taylor appeared as Congress embarked on the third set of presidential impeachment hearings in modern times.

Got that? The best evidence is fourth-hand hearsay.

Tayloy said that he had "authority" over the "regular channel" of communications to Ukraine, but was unhappy that Trump had used others for informal communications. Last week, one of Taylor's aides said that he heard Sondland express an opinion in July about Trump cares more about exposing Biden's corruption than advancing the Deep State agenda for reviving the Cold War.

Let's hope so. Some polls have indicated that Joe Biden is the frontrunner to be elected President in 2020. If he is a crook, we need to know that before he gets back into the White House.

Taylor has spent much of his career trying to revive the Cold War by putting troops on the Russian border in order to justify State Dept. budgets. Let's hope that Trump does not care to agree.

But only Trump knows what he cares about. Unless Sondland is a mindreader, he does not know Trump's state of mind. Any such opinion from Sondland is just second-hand hearsay. Taylor's aide is third-hand, and Taylor's testimony is fourth-hand.

If I went to the White House or anywhere else to push for some pet project of him, and didn't get what I wanted, then I might very well grumble that someone cares more about something else. Such grumbling could not possibly be evidence of wrongdoing.

And the pro-impeachment NY Times gushes that this is "startling new testimony"!

This is just a coup by Schiff-Nadler-Schumer, NYTimes-WashPost-CNN, and the Deep State Cold Warriors.

Schiff now claims that he doesn't know who the so-called whistleblower is, even tho Eric Ciaramella's name seems to be known to everyone else, and Schiff is known to have helped him write the complaint.

YouTube and Facebook said they would block people from identifying the government official thought to be the whistle-blower, so I may have to edit the previous paragraph. This is very strange, as I have never heard of a political accuser being protected in this way.

This will go down as the lamest impeachment attempt in American history.

The NY Times has a couple of articles that exemplify Jewish thinking.

David Brooks writes In Praise of Washington Insiders. He is an authoritarian of a sort that is common among Jews. He praises institutions making policy without much public accountability. He gives the impression that his ideal form of government is the Communist politburo.

We don’t celebrate these people. Trumpian conservatives say that Washington insiders are unelected bureaucrats, denizens of the swamp, the cesspool or a snake pit. Some progressives call Washington insiders the establishment, the power elite, the privileged structures of the status quo. ...

In reality, institutions are the only vehicles for legislative change. That’s because they are the way to wield power safely.

He is a Trump-hater, and he thinks it was great that Taylor and Kent were part of an institutional effort to undermine Presidential policy.

I am not sure what makes these views so common among Jews, but they are essential to impeachment. The whole basis for impeachment is the ideology that the President should submit to the Cold War policies of the Deep State instead of the voters who do not want to provoke war with Russia.

A NY Times op-ed exhibits such crazy Jewish thinking that it appears to be a parody:

I am a young, gay, left-wing Jew. Yet I am called an “apartheid-enabler,” a “baby killer” and a “colonial apologist.” ...

so many young Jews, myself included, can’t imagine being anything other than political progressives. As a gay abortion rights advocate and environmentalist, my place in such circles has always been welcomed and accepted. ...

I am a Zionist. It is because I, like 95 percent of American Jews, support Israel. ...

I viewed — and still view — the establishment of the state of Israel as a fundamentally just cause: the most persecuted people in human history finally gaining the right of self-determination after centuries of displacement, intimidation, violence and genocide. ...

At many American universities, mine included, it is now normal for student organizations to freely call Israel an imperialist power and an outpost of white colonialism with little pushback or discussion ...

While white supremacists plot to murder Jews across this country, “anti-Zionists” on college campuses seek to marginalize us as white supremacists. Consider the fact that at the University of Virginia — where white supremacists marched through campus shouting “Jews will not replace us!” — it was Jewish students who were barred from joining a minority student coalition to fight white supremacy (that decision is under review).

This is so sick, I don't know where to start. Why does someone identify himself as "a gay abortion rights advocate"? Gays don't get pregnant.

How can he think that Jews are "the most persecuted people in human history". Jews are the least persecuted people. Jews have more power, money, and influence that any other group, per capita.

While he spreads myths about white supremacists, he is obviously a Jewish supremacist. He believes Jews should advance policies to replace whites with non-whites.

His main annoyance is that other leftists lump together Jewish supremacists with White supremacists, while he an anti-White Jew. His distinctions don't make any sense to his fellow non-Jewish students.

Anyway, I post this as an example of Jewish thinking. There are no non-Jews who say stuff like this.

Leftist professors under mind control

Left-wing intellectuals are really hard to understand sometimes. Here is an example of strange thinking.

Leftist-atheist-evolutionist professor Jerry Coyne writes:

1.) You are always acting under compulsion, whether someone holds a gun to your head, you’re mentally ill, or you’re acting according to what your brain has made you do. As Sam Harris notes, your deciding to drink a glass of milk was just as compelled as your doing something bad under external force. You don’t feel compelled when you do something like walk one way to work rather than another, but you are, because you’re simply following the logic of your brain circuitry and the “decision” it’s spit out.

4.) The concept of “moral responsibility” is injurious because it underlies a vindictive and retributive view of punishment.

At least he believes in free speech. That makes him better than a lot of other professors.

Outside academia, if someone says that voices in his head are making his decisions, then he gets diagnosed with schizophrenia.

I believe that Coyne and Harris are sincere when they say that they are compelled to do what they do. That means that they are compelled to convince everyone else that they have no free will either.

Women cannot distinguish fantasies from reality

A Nautilus article explains why imagination and memories are so similar in the brain:

It’s long been common knowledge that imaginings are re-combinations of bits from memory. But now we’re seeing that the act of recalling something that happened to you looks very much like what happens when you imagine something new.

A large number of women have fantasies about having sexual relations with the President. After a while, it becomes impossible for the women to distinguish the memory of a real event from the memory of a fantasy.

A recent accuser got a lot of publicity, and many wondered whether she was telling the truth. That is the wrong question, as it is unlikely that she knows whether she is telling the truth. Her book told a lot of wild stories, so she probably has many fantasies and real experiences, and she cannot distinguish them. A reporter found a couple of women who said that she should be believed, but of course they say that all women should be believed.

Netflix has convinced the public that a confession could be a false confession, even if it is videorecorded in the presence of parents and lawyers and results in a long prison term. If so, then a MeToo confession can be a false one also. If someone might confess falsely and get a 40-year prison term, then someone might confess falsely to get a million-dollar book contract.

Here is a MeToo allegation in today's news:

For a year, Araoz said, she was brainwashed into giving Epstein massages while wearing only her underwear. He would masturbate until he finished — and then leave her $300.

But in 2002, Araoz claimed, Epstein told her to remove her underwear because he wanted to “try something a little bit different.”

Epstein is a creep with deep pockets, and the vultures are closing in on him. It sounds as if the accuser suddenly remembered this story after 17 years, and after signing a deal with a lawyer to make a claim.

Blaming Men on Fathers Day

There are lots of sites blaming men for all sorts of imaginary grievances. Here are a couple I just discovered.

Fathers Day seems to be mainly an occasion for blaming fathers for all society's ills.

Men are often blamed for wanting to much sexual relations from a wife, and this site says men are abusive for wanting too little:

Withholding Intimacy Can Be Abusive, Too ...

In many relationships, it’s often the man who asks for sex more often than the woman. But sometimes, roles are reversed. Weston freely admits she has “either a higher libido than most women or am more sexually liberated,” and it was something her abuser discovered he could use against her. ...

She says her abuser used the following tactics to assert his power over her: ...

3. Carrot tactic. “He also used to tempt me and taunt me with the expectation of sex to get me to be nice to him when I shouldn't have, or to lessen my the response to some other abuse he just inflicted. He used sex to reel me back in, time after time, when we’d break up.”

So the wife will decide that she should not be nice to her husband, but he engages in "abuse" by seducing her and reeling her back into being nice!

Some men speak precisely. They say what they mean and mean what they say. This site considers that a disorder:

Many men with AS are unaware they have the disorder, and in that case it’s far easier to spot. With that said, here are the signs:

Their speech is pedantic, meaning that it is filled with obscure, minute facts and details; is overly concerned with formalisms; displays a narrow concern for book learning and formal rules; and is overly concerned with the precise meanings of words.

They have difficulties with pragmatic, or social, language. This includes saying inappropriate things, not taking turns in conversations, speaking in a way that is not appropriate for an informal social setting, or speaking in the same manner to a two-year-old and an adult.

They may speak too fast, have a monotone or robotic voice, or speak too loudly.

They have difficulty with semantics, such as understanding the meaning of words within different contexts. They may not understand that you “love” pizza in a different way than you “love” your mother.

Their speech is marked by the use of “technical” or “scientific” words, or even a “high-brow vocabulary.” ...

They are always right. ALWAYS. They will frequently say that you are being irrational or illogical.

So the husband uses words according to their dictionary definitions. The wife is unhappy that he is not as dumb and sloppy as she is.

This site discusses crazy wives who get psychotherapy for their craziness, and still blames the husband:

Mental health professionals often exacerbate the party’s troubles by falling into the pattern of blaming the acutely distressed neuro-typical partner for being an alarmist, for having inappropriate anxiety which feeds into problems and for having unrealistic parenting expectations of the other parent. The more the non-neurologically impaired parent is blamed for the pseudo-conflict the worse it becomes. ... the neuro-typical partner has anxiety and is usually the party who winds up being investigated as being the source of the conflict.(8) This is more than ironic. It places children at risk and it places the neuro-typical parent at-risk of depression or despair.

So the wife is acutely distressed, has anxiety and unrealistic expectations, and is at-risk of depression or despair. But somehow she is called the "non-neurologically impaired parent", as if being a man is a neurological impairment. And these are situations where a mental health professional thinks the wife is the impaired one.

These sites often have wives complaining that they have trouble communicating their feelings. So they see a psychotherapist who gives them lessons in articulating their feelings. But that is not what she wants. She wants her husband to intuit her feelings from her body language.

Lisa Feldman Barrett writes that reading emotions from body language is impossible:

And yet ... despite the distinguished intellectual pedigree of the classical view of emotion, and despite its immense influence in our culture and society, there is abundant scientific evidence that this view cannot possibly be true. Even after a century of effort, scientific research has not revealed a consistent, physical fingerprint for even a single emotion. When scientists attach electrodes to a person’s face and measure how facial muscles actually move during the experience of an emotion, they find tremendous variety, not uniformity. They find the same variety — the same absence of fingerprints — when they study the body and the brain.

It is pretty crazy for a wife to blame her husband for not reading her emotions from body language, when expert psychologists cannot even do it.

Autism and schizophrenia are opposites

Autism and schizophrenia are severe mental illnesses, but they can also be just a bunch of personality traits in high-IQ high-functioning people.

Psychiatrist Slate Star Codex writes:

There’s been a lot of discussion over whether schizophrenia is somehow the “opposite” of autism. Many of the genes that increase risk of autism decrease risk of schizophrenia, and vice versa. Autists have a smaller-than-normal corpus callosum; schizophrenics have a larger-than-normal one. Schizophrenics smoke so often that some researchers believe they have some kind of nicotine deficiency; autists have unusually low smoking rates. Schizophrenics are more susceptible to the rubber hand illusion and have weaker self-other boundaries in general; autists seem less susceptible and have stronger self-other boundaries. Autists can be pathologically rational but tend to be uncreative; schizophrenics can be pathologically creative but tend to be irrational. The list goes on.

We might finally get some hard science:

For the past two decades, scientists have been exploring the genetics of schizophrenia, autism and other brain disorders, looking for a path toward causation.

It may turn out that some positive brain traits can be credited to Neanderthal genes:

On Thursday, a team of scientists revealed that two pieces of Neanderthal DNA may have another effect: They may change the shape of our brains.

The study, published in the journal Current Biology, wasn’t designed to determine how Neanderthal genes influence thought — if they do so at all. Instead, the value of the research lies in its unprecedented glimpse into the genetic changes influencing the evolution of the human brain.

Someone commented:

Neanderthals were ethnically cleansed from Europe by the invaders from the South. Neanderthals had lower fertility rates than the invading Home Sapiens from Africa, thus were overwhelmed demographically. The peak population of Neanderthals was just 150,000, they had a low fertility rate and could not maintain their species when faced with an invasion of thousands of fertile Africans , who were set on raping all the neanderthal females and killing off the males. Some of the DNA from the few female neanderthals who mated with the invaders can still be found in the DNA of Europeans today.

The same process can be observed today in Europe. The aboriginal Europeans are declining in population, because they have a low fertility rate, they are being invaded from the south by more fertile ethnic clans and thus the aboriginal peoples of Europe will be extinct. It will take just another 200 years at the current rate..in 5,000 years the people living in Europe may well have traces of DNA from the caucasians who once populated Europe. Just as the people of Europe today have some trace DNA from the Neanderthals who once populated Europe.

It is commonly remarked that the African invaders had greater Darwinian fitness, but that just means that they reproduced more.

Atlantic mag endorses Nazi opinions

Jewish organizations are claiming that there has been a recent increase in anti-Semitism. The evidence for this consists almost entirely of Jewish-perpetrated hoaxes.

The mainstream news media, like the NY Times, reports this supposed anti-Semitism as if it were a fact.

It is almost impossible to find any example of anti-Semitism in the USA. For example, the recent trial over Harvard's admissions policy has shown that the main biases are in favor of Jews and against Asians.

I am beginning to think that anti-Semitism is just some weirdo religious belief that Jews have.

Yes, some lone wolf shot up a Pittsburgh synagogue. But contrary to many news reports, he was not shooting his victims because of who they were or how they pray. He was mad at them for importing criminal migrants. There is no support anywhere for what he did.

The most anti-Semitic site I know is The Daily Stormer. It claims to be the most censored publication in history, as it has been aggressively blocked by Google and other internet companies for its political content.

It is mainly an Alt Right political site, with the distinction that it uses memes, humor, exaggeration, and trolling to make its political points. And it blames the Jews for almost everything bad.

It just does political commentary, and is very much against any violence like the Pittsburgh shooting.

The Daily Stormer writes:

Atlantic Jew: Yes, We Do Support Massive Nonwhite Immigration, And That is Why People Hate Us

So the Jewish response to the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting – commonly known as “The Gunfight at O.K. Synagogue” – has been very… strange.

The shooter wrote about opposition to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a Jewish group that is flooding America with the lowest form of life on earth from the entire third world.

Whereas the Jews have typically refused to answer or even acknowledge the question of “why do people hate the Jews?”, in the wake of this shooting, many are coming out and saying “oh yes, many people hate us because we are flooding them with brown people – it’s evil for them to disagree with us on this issue.”

The most shocking “yes, we did that” article thus far is from Peter Beinart, a Jewish professor of journalism at City University of New York. ...

This is a Jew, in The Atlantic – a magazine that once put me on their cover calling me evil – admitting that everything the Daily Stormer says about Jews is true.

The Atlantic magazine article explains that Jews really are overwhelmingly in favor of importing Third World migrants to destroy white Christian America, and therefore any American conservative movement like Trump's is necessarily anti-Semitic.

Yes, the Daily Stormer is anti-Semitic. Their excuse is that they are going to be called Nazis anyway, for taking their political positions, so they embrace the insult and move on. It is probably not a good strategy, as it gets them banned from Google, Facebook, and PayPal.

Jews control much of the news media (like NY Times and CNN), Hollywood, and internet giants (like Google and Facebook). So they can censor the Daily Stormer. But they can't hide the fact that they really are working to destroy white Christian America. Here is how the Jewish Atlantic explains it:

The segregationist anti-Semites of the mid-20th century and the nativist anti-Semites of today are wrong about Jews’ motives. Jews didn’t support civil rights then — and they don’t support immigrants’ rights now — because they want to subjugate white Christians. They’re just predisposed — because of their understanding of Jewish history — to identify with outsiders and fear ethnically and religiously exclusive definitions of Americanism.

Got that? Secular Jews oppose Trump's efforts to make America great again. No question about that. It is anti-Semitic to say that those efforts are motivated by wanting to subjugate white Christians.

Instead we are supposed to say that Jews are just acting out their historical prejudices against Americanism!

It is usually foolish to attribute motives to people. Most people are pre-programmed automatons who cannot explain why they do what they do, and lack the free will to do anything but what they have been told. Their behavior is complicated combination of nature and nurture, and it is very difficult to separate the genetic and cultural causes.

In the case of Jews, certain beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors have persisted for centuries. They even persist in Jews who do not appear otherwise to be religious. Why? Ask scholars who have studied the matter. There is no simple answer, as far as I know.

On this blog, I regularly criticize unjustified attempts to attribute motives to people. There is something about the human mind that wants to attribute motives, and sees motives when they aren't there.

So I am agreeing with the Jewish Atlantic article that Jews are not necessarily motivated by wanting to subjugate white Christians. Likewise, Trump supporters and Alt Right activists are not necessarily anti-Semitic or have any motivation to harm Jews. From what I have seen, most of them don't care about Jews at all, and are happy to see orthodox and Israeli Jews support Trump.

Secular Jews have abandoned what we normally think of as religious beliefs. Instead they maintain their social cohesion by calling everyone else anti-Semitic and working to undermine white Christians. This is confirmed by the Jewish Atlantic article. Just don't call it a motivation, and assume that Jews are pre-programmed to behave that way because of their peculiar understanding of Jewish history.

Asperger accused of Nazi collaboration

Asperger syndrome was dropped from the psychiatric manuals in 2013. It did not have a coherent definition.

In popular culture, it is known as "Asperger's", and popularized by TV shows like The Big Bang Theory. In fact the characters on that show were never intended to have Asperger syndrome, and they do not match what used to be the diagnostic criteria.

So now the term "Asperger's" has become an amateur psychobabble term for putting down nerds.

And now a new book claims that we should not use the term because the Austrian Asperger was a Nazi collaborator.

Edith Sheffer writes in SciAm:

Millions of people are identified with Asperger’s syndrome, as a diagnosis, an identity and even an adjective. Asperger’s name has permeated our culture—yet I believe we should no longer invoke it.

Naming medical diagnoses after individuals is an honor, meant to recognize those who discover conditions and to commend their work. ...

Personally, I agree with the reclassification of the Asperger’s diagnosis. For a psychiatric diagnosis, the subdivisions never made sense for my son, and got in the way of his care.

I don't care whether Asperger was a Nazi, but I do think that the term is just a slur to pathologize male behavior.

Supposedly Asperger boys are defective because they cannot read the minds of girls.

The TV show does mock various stereotypical behavior, such as male nerds, ditzy females, Jews, physicists, and Indians. But the males (who supposedly have Asperger's) do not have any more a a psychological disorder than the females.