Category Archives: Psychology & Pop-Psychology

A Color-Coded Theory Of Causation In Mass-Shootings

Crime, Logic, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Race, Reason

A CNN profiler blamed the sense of white privilege for mass shootings carried out by white, young men. These men, the woman was saying, cannot adjust to a necessarily changing society. They cling to the way things were, when the country was predominantly white.

In other words, the oppressor in these young white men wants to continue to oppress. When whites commit unspeakable acts of violence, it only ever comes from a place of power and privilege.

With the same distressing regularity, we are lectured that when browns and blacks commit unspeakable acts of violence, it only ever comes from a place of powerlessness. Black or brown evil is a consequence of oppression.

Excuse me: You have to apply the same method in getting to the etiology/causation of crime.

You can’t have a color-coded theory of causation; one for whites; another for blacks and brows.

I’ve said in my pieces over the years, many times: These individuals all are evil, not ill. No good comes of medicalizing bad behavior:

“School Shootings Are A Moral-Health, Not Mental-Health, Problem”

The facts:

Two shootings: At least 31 people were killed over the weekend in mass shootings in Texas and Ohio.
El Paso: 22 people were killed in El Paso after a mass shooting on Saturday. Police said they found an anti-immigrant document espousing white nationalist and racist views, which they believe was written by the suspect. He may face hate crime charges in addition to capital murder charges.
Dayton: Another nine people were killed in a shooting in the Oregon District of Dayton, Ohio. The suspect in that shooting is dead.

NEW COLUMN: Christine Blah-Blah Ford & Her Hippocampus

Ethics, Gender, Ilana Mercer, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Science

“Christine Blah-Blah Ford & Her Hippocampus” is the current column, now on Townhall.com (slightly abridged).  

An excerpt:

One of many cringe-making moments in Christine Blasey Ford’s protracted complaint before the Senate Judiciary Committee—and the country—was an affectation-dripping reference to her hippocampus.

“Indelible in the hippocampus” was the memory of supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulting her, some 36 years back, asserted Ford in that scratchy, valley-girl voice of hers.

With that, the good “doctor” was making a false appeal to scientific authority. Ford had just planted a falsity in the nation’s collective consciousness. The accuser was demanding that the country believe her and her hippocampus.

All nonsense on stilts.

We want to believe that our minds record the events of our lives meticulously, and that buried in the permafrost of our brain, perfectly preserved, is the key to our woes.

Unfortunately, scientific research negates the notion that forgotten memories exist somewhere in the brain and can be accessed in pristine form.

Granted, we don’t know whether She Who Must Never Be Questioned recovered the Judge-Kavanaugh memory in therapy. That’s because, well, she must never be questioned.

Questioning the left’s latest sacred cow is forbidden. Bovine Republicans blindly obey.

I happened to have covered and thoroughly researched the “recovered memory ruse,” in 1999. Contrary to the trend, one of my own heroes is not Christine Blah-Blah Ford, but a leading world authority on memory, Elizabeth Loftus.

Professor Loftus, who straddles two professorships—one in law, the other in psychology—had come to Vancouver, British Columbia, to testify on behalf of a dedicated Richmond educator, a good man, who had endured three trials, the loss of a career and financial ruin because of the Crown’s attempts to convict him of sexual assault based on memories recovered in therapy. …

… READ THE REST.  “Christine Blah-Blah Ford & Her Hippocampus” is now on Townhall.com.

Unabridged, the column appears on other favorite sites: WND.com, The Unz Review, Constitution.com, and American Greatness.

School Shootings: A Moral-Health, Not Mental-Health, Problem

Education, Kids, Logic, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology

The NEW COLUMN IS “School Shootings: A Moral-Health, Not Mental-Health, Problem.” It’s now on WND.com. An excerpt:

The tele-experts assert that to do what he did—kill 10 and maim 13, at Santa Fe High School, in Texas—Dimitrios Pagourtzis had to be insane.

Likewise, Nikolas Cruz—killer of 17 in Parkland, Florida—and many shooters before him: All were victims of mental disorder. Or, so say the experts.

Come to think of it, the structure of argument coming from conservative and progressive corners is the same:

Conservatives blame mental health.

Progressives blame the National Rifle Association.

Both factions see the locus of responsibility for these murder sprees as beyond the reach and bailiwick of the individual and of what were once formative and corrective institutions: the church, for example.

As the language deployed in the culture might suggest, crimes aren’t committed, but are caused. Perpetrators don’t do the crime, but are driven to do their deeds by a confluence of uncontrollable factors.

The paradox at the heart of the disease theory of delinquency is that causal theoretical explanations are invoked only after bad deeds have been committed. Good deeds, however extravagant, are in no need of extenuation.

The evidence our tele-therapists advance for a killer’s “madness” is … the murder or murders he has committed.

Whatever the logical fallacy the psychiatrists commit—circular reasoning or backward reasoning—thinking people can agree: This is bad logic.

Fact: When they suggest a shooter is sick, they do so based on the fact that he committed murder.

Let’s run with this “logic”: The reductio ad absurdum of what the mental-health mavens are saying is that to kill, an individual must be deranged.

Does that not imply that the default condition of humanity is goodness?

Indeed, evil has been cast as a symptom of illness. It’s certainly so if to judge by the language used by the experts. …

… READ THE REST. “School Shootings: A Moral-Health, Not Mental-Health, Problem” is on WND.com. And on The Unz Review, Constitution.com., etc.

UPDATE IV (5/22): ‘Haters Gonna Hate, Hate, Hate, Hate …’

Anti-Semitism, Family, Gender, Ilana Mercer, Law, Logic, Political Correctness, Psychology & Pop-Psychology

As my dearest first cousin says, “You need to duck, cuz, and let the sh-t hit the wall.”

Quit trying to convince pathological haters you’re a good gal or guy, because, well … “haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.”

And they’ll hate you, even when you transform yourself in their image.

If people harbor hate for you—speak it and act it—there’s nothing you can do to transform that hate. Surround yourself with those who don’t think you’re drek. Surround yourself with people who know your heart and with whom you have reciprocal relationships.

In a related context, an articulate reader, a lawyer, reacted strongly to the habitual hatred this writer receives on the Unz Review:

imbroglio says:
May 18, 2018 at 2:00 pm GMT • 400 Words

Until recently, I’ve been an avid reader of the UNZ review one of whose leading contributors is Ilana Mercer. Ilana has great insight informed by natural gifts and the benefit of having lived in various cultures. Because of her (((background))), Ilana draws the mocking ire of trolls who hope to discount the value of what she says by means of their ad hominem attacks on her ethnicity. As we say in the legal world, argue the facts. If you haven’t got the facts, argue the law. If you have neither the facts nor the law, call your opponent unflattering names and argue to the jury that though the defendant didn’t commit the crime, he could have or at least he would have which makes him as guilty as if he had committed the crime.

Free speech enables people to say what they want. But there are consequences. When the UNZ Review lends itself to Jew-bashing, which is better done by those who write for Takimag and whose skill, in that regard, has been refined to a finer art than UNZ readers seem capable of; Ron Unz and his contributors lose credibility and start to become cliché and uninteresting. In addition, the men who engage in this business – I’ve yet to see a woman do so – come off as weasels and wimps. Let the P.C. crowd do as it pleases, its denizens are hardly avatars of healthy gender relations, but though a guy may take sharp issue with a woman, no self-respecting man would demean a lady with the kind of snide and baseless insults Ilana seems to attract.

There are two kinds of Jew-bashers: the ruthless, intelligent sociopaths who’d inflict violence on Jews if they thought they could get away with it. Their presence on this site is rare. More numerous are the clever but vacuous Jew-bashers who tend to end up as cannon fodder in their personal lives, conflicts and contests that have little to do with Jews. UNZ may find their comments useful, but why that would be so escapes me.

*****

Why, thank you sir—especially for fingering the unmanly men who suffer small-man syndrome.

Fact: There are other Jewish writers on the Unz Review. But they are men. They receive mostly obsequious, boot-licking adoration from the “weasels and the wimps.”

At play here is more than Jew-bashing. It is that the miserable, mediocre men in the Comments Section (for the most) hate it when a woman out-thinks men.

As a defender of men, this saddens—it’s been a huge disappointment—but it is, nevertheless, true.

Like the reader, I prefer the American Renaissance’s practice of a modicum of comments moderation. The Comments on said site are edifying even when negative.

An example of edifying criticism is the reader on Townhall.com. His comments yielded the 5/17 column, “Whodunit? Who “Meddled” with Our American Democracy?” (Part 2).

But hey, The Unz Review is private property. And weasels and wusses don’t scare me. I write my weekly piece, generally to positive reviews. (UPDATE III (5/21): Have done so since 1999, for almost 20 years.)

And I avoid reading the words of the weasels and the wusses as a real man would avoid email spam advertising penile enhancements.

BRING IT, BITCHES!

UPDATE I via Facebook:

Myron Robert Pauli Ilana Mercer: (1) There are, tragically, very few really good columnists of any sex M,F,LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ – and you are one of them. (2) Even among good writers, there are not too many women – not sure why {politically correct answer is the Intergalactic Sexist Conspiracy} – but there are just a few. (3) Can one find anti-Jewish/Zionist whatever stuff on the Unz sight – yes, and more than I would like to see but I try not to get into a pi$$ing contest with every skunky inference on the planet – one never “wins” these contests (4) Ironically, I am finding precious little to read in the Washington Post op-eds – I almost think it is the identically same op-ed “Trump Is Hitler” with a computer randomly toggling sentences and then putting a random name of Dana Milbank, Fareed Zakharia, Eugene Robinson, Jennifer Rubin, Greg Sargent, Kathleen Parker, Richard Cohen, Fred Hiatt, R2D2, … whomever’s turn it is for the by-line of the “Trump Is Hitler” op-ed-du-jour (5) On the latter point, I am not claiming this because I think Trump is perfect but to quote Johannes Brahms when someone pointed out that the last movement of his first symphony resembled a theme in Beethoven‘s Ode to Joy, “Any ass can see that!”. (6) Thus, it is the people who point out that the Iraq war was an impending disaster – the people who have the foresight to not follow the “prevailing” stupidity that I admire the most (such as Ilana).

UPDATE II via Twitter:

UPDATE IV (5/22): Wanda’s generosity of spirit means more than she knows.

Wanda De Lange Zanzi With dictionary by my side, I adore reading the workings of your mind. As a female you inspire me as a female… You have already and continue to teach me to think logically and laterally without gender (class, culture and or race) emotion, on many issues. As a female South African that says a lot, which, perhaps, would be greatly misinterpreted by a gazillion other people. Thank you for inspiring me to think.