Category Archives: Pseudoscience

UPDATE II: Why I Am So Sad (It’s not About Libya, Israel or 9/11)

Democracy, Elections, Foreign Policy, Free Speech, Human Accomplishment, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Israel, libertarianism, Middle East, Private Property, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry

The current column, now on WND, is “Why I Am So Sad.” An excerpt:

“I AM SO SAD—and it is not because a justifiably angry crowd of Libyans in Benghazi stormed an embassy that represents the brute force that destabilized their lives for decades to come.

I feel for my countrymen who perished in that embassy, but the truth remains that they acquiesced in leveling Libya. And by so doing, they invited into that country the very lynch-mob that took their lives. The Americans targeted had become an irritant to the long-suffering Libyans, who will use any US provocation, real or imagined, to expel the people who “came, saw, and conquered.”

To those who imagine the death of our diplomats in Libya turns on American free-speech, I say this: You have no right to deliver your disquisition in my living room. You have only the right to request permission to so do from this (armed) private-property owner.

By extension, you have no universal right to “free speech” on another man’s land. More so than to America’s diplomats—Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Iran belong to the people of Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Iran.

I AM SO SAD—and it is not because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has chosen a most inopportune time to insert himself into the middle of a rancorous American election season, and by so doing, make Mitt Romney’s foreign policy bellicosity look good to a war-weary people that can ill-afford it.

Now is not a good time, Bibi. Israel is a wedge issue in the coming election. If Israelis love Americans as Americans love Israel, they need to understand that, “The Titan is Tired”:

We Americans have our own tyrants to tackle. We no longer want to defend to the death borders not our own—be they in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, wherever. And we don’t need our friends looking to us to do so.

I AM SO SAD—and it is not because another 9/11 has come and gone. The polls indicate that Americans want to move on; have moved on. Perhaps Americans have realized that it behooves our “overlords who art in DC” to keep them stuck in grief. By stunning us like cattle to the slaughter, the statists have been able to perpetrate in our name crimes way worse than 9/11.

I AM SO SAD because … ”

The complete column, “Why I Am So Sad,” can be read now on WND.

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UPDATE I: In answer to a Facebook reader, my saying that, “More so than to America’s diplomats – Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Iran belong to the people of Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Iran” is not collectivist. It is, overall, correct, not least as a just sentiment intended to discourage interventionism.

Moreover, as a libertarian thinker, I choose to offer meaningful insights that comport with reality, rather than score reductive, pedantic points for the sake of theoretical purity. Tell the Arabs rioting that YOU are one of them b/c you, an American, bought the city their ancestors inhabited for centuries. I’m a private property absolutist, but the institution of private property has a cultural and historical dimension and context.

UPDATE II (Sept. 14): For describing a reality the US brought on itself with its Lawrence of Arabia complex, I am accused by a reader of “sympathizing with these al Qaeda people.”

For one, how in logic do you arrive at sympathy for savages from this:

I feel for my countrymen who perished in that embassy, but the truth remains that they acquiesced in leveling Libya. And by so doing, they invited into that country the very lynch-mob that took their lives. The Americans targeted had become an irritant to the long-suffering Libyans, who will use any US provocation, real or imagined, to expel the people who “came, saw, and conquered.”

Force breeds force; nation building where you have no business imposing your will—will results in what transpired in Libya. Fact: Those idiotic and arrogant interventions have a price. These are the people our diplomats were working with in a patronizing foolish way. I just heard Hillary say as much. This was, in part, a reaction to imposed authority. Yes, Hillary is trying to separate the attackers from her lovely rebels. Our reader is buying what Hillary is selling because it feeds into a storyline neocons simply can’t resist.

I suggest the reader mine the Archives here. I’ve documented this vehement hate for the US—beginning in our decade long expeditions to the region—that have seen the US remain over there indefinitely.

Americans do not understand the culture. The writer actually grew up in the region, so I have a better inkling. I hear Hillary declare that the ambassador was working with the “rebels” and that they had come to love him. Oh yes? That’s Lawrence-of- Arabia type romantic rot. And can you be that dumb? A smile and outward charm don’t mean they like you! But our navel-gazing, patronizing (unarmed) diplomats think that everyone should love the US despite its actions in the region, in general, and in Libya, in particular.

I suggest the reader reconsider the logic of his accusation. Calling reality as it is does not imply sympathy for the offending parties on my part. I suppose the reader would prefer that I fulminate irrationally like some of the neoconservative Jihadi and Sharia trackers whom he probably follows. (And who never even mention the possibility that we should, as true patriots, defend our own porous borders, before we violate and then presume to “defend” the boundaries of other nations.)

Guys Do Double Duty For Feminist Delusions

Economy, Feminism, Gender, Labor, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Pseudoscience, Reason, Republicans

“Guys Do Double Duty For Feminist Delusions” is the new weekly column, now on RT. Here is an excerpt:

“A dual spigot for an exterior faucet”: We purchased this item at Home Depot, the shop where men roam to feel at home.

The item was without a sticker. A woman clerk was manning the checkout counter. She and her female colleagues congregated to solve the problem. A man at the back was contacted on the intercom system and asked for a price. Alas, and eventually, another man had to save the day. Not one of the ladies was able to coherently describe the 2-outlet faucet adaptor, for the purpose of pricing the item.

A young man who worked the floor staged an “intervention.” He arrived on the scene, held the thing comfortably in his hands, and intuitively blurted out the description above. It was second nature to him. A minute or so later, we were finally on our way.

No doubt, this youngster’s female coworkers on the Home Depot floor would describe the task they just failed to execute as one demanding “equal pay.”

In reality, this anonymous, symbolic guy is worth much more to his employers than the gals. If his bosses did not fear a class-action lawsuit from his always watchful female coworkers, the man would be paid commensurate with his worth to the company; or his productivity.

Yes, that young man is more productive than his female colleagues in delivering the service that is Home Depot’s stock-in-trade. He saves customers time (and time is money). And much more.

Everywhere you go, men are enabling—and compensating for—female incompetence in work to which women are unsuited.

Everywhere, men are doing double duty, sometimes endangering themselves (as in police work), to give girls the delusions of grandeur they demand. And they do this without question. I guess a guy doing unequal work for equal pay would get fired if he questioned this PC protocol. …

Inveighing against “income disparity between men and women,” House Minority Leader (who should seldom be taken seriously), had said this

Read the rest of “Guys Do Double Duty For Feminist Delusions,” now on RT.

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Evil, Not ILL

Crime, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology

CNN’s Erin Burnett tweeted incoherently that “The grandfather of #Chardon H.S. shooting says ‘no one has the right to shoot people because he had a rough life.'” It is unclear from the news anchor’s tweet whose grandfather spoke so unconventionally in favor of conventional morality on her OutFront show.

I saw this “grandfather.” He surprised Burnett with his implicit suggestions that, contra to her other self-serving tele-experts, bad behavior should not be placed beyond the strictures of traditional morality, making it amenable to their “therapeutic” interventions. To listen to the nation’s psychiatric gurus is to come to believe that crimes are caused, not committed. Perpetrators don’t do the crime, but are driven to their dirty deeds by a confluence of uncontrollable factors, victims of societal forces or organic brain disease. The Drew Pinskys of the world conjure so-called mental diseases either to control contrarians or to exculpate criminals.

The paradox at the heart of this root-causes fraud is that causal theoretical explanations are invoked only after bad deeds have been committed. Good deeds have no need of mitigating circumstances. These liberals (including most conservatives, who are now liberals in all but name) acknowledge human agency if—and only if—adaptive actions are involved.

As the psychiatric shaman has it, a killer is not evil, but ill. The modern-day witch doctor’s potions can thus exorcise evil, as evil is merely a manifestation of organic disease. Just like cancer.