Category Archives: Reason

Idiots Amplify Each Other

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Gender, Intelligence, Race, Racism, Reason, Republicans

Do you find yourself listening to TV talkers and trying to decipher word-salads that result from linguistic imprecision and irrational thought processes?

DANA DITZ PERINO stood in for Gretta Van Susteren (whose viewers detected ditz material). She chatted to an affiliate about the Knock-Out Game, or polar-bear hunting. This last term, devised by perps way cleverer than Perino, is wonderfully precise.

The ensuing conversation was one that could only have taken place between two ditzes. The idiot effect was exponential. Each woman, Dana and Fox affiliate fool, bounced stupid stuff off the other.

Soon the women were nodding over the apparent need to look into the Knock Out game, It warranted an investigation, repeated Dana’s buxom interlocutor, again and again. In order to help her think remotely logically, Danna needs smarter people around. In the absence of such a quantity, she just nodded and paraphrased her friend. The two rehashed the wisdom of investigation the attacks.

None mentioned that “polar-bear hunting” was played by black youth at the expense of Other, Paler People. I could be wrong (no video clip or transcript is available), but I believe the words, “boys behaving badly” were mouthed a few times too. (Only 5 or so deaths so far, so yeah, like, yeah, bad behavior, for sure.)

Explaining Austrian Economics And Much More

Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, libertarianism, Liberty, Reason

“First and foremost, Austrian economics is not an empirical science as is mainstream economics, but a branch of logic.” As always, Professor Walter E. Block, friend and mentor, explains Austrian economics beautifully.

Here is the full, behind-the-scenes interview Walter did with a local, NBC affiliate, from which too few pearls were culled for the final segment.

A doff of the hat to EPJ for the story.

MORE.

Exculpating Evil: Depravity Or Deprivation?

Crime, Justice, Morality, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Race, Racism, Reason

CORRESPONDENT DON LEMON is a (piss-poor) prime-time reporter for CNN. Deprivation was the theme of Lemon’s sympathetic segment on 14-year-old (alleged) slasher Phillip Chism. Chism killed his 24-year-old math teacher with a box cutter.

According to Lemon’s editorializing , the possible source of Chism’s deprivation, boohoo, was not depravity but an absent father. Bill O’Reilly—and all other “conservative” pundits—is also prone to backwards logic, namely that if someone does something evil, then you work backwards in search of exculpating factors. Anything but pure unmitigated evil.

Controlled studies show that well-functioning individuals tend to report as many pathological experiences as do people who don’t function well. The same faulty reasoning must lead us to conclude that their trauma caused their successes.

Investigation Discovery featured a gaggle of Australian lasses who murdered a girl who had made their leader jealous. These feral females beat their victim and then set her alight as she begged for mercy. The stiffest sentence received by one of them was 17 years.

It’s a consolation that here in the U.S., Chism will be tried and sentenced as an adult.

Lemon:

DON LEMON, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The students are back at Danvers High School.

COLLIN BUTLER, JUNIOR, DANVERS HIGH SCHOOL: I’m trying to return to some essential of normalcy.

LEMON: The school’s flag at half-staff and pink ribbons on the trees — reminders that thing are still far from normal.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Why would someone do this to someone so nice?

LEMON: Still, more questions than answers as to what made 14-year-old Phillip Chism allegedly kill his math teacher Colleen Ritzer with a box cutter on Tuesday and then dump her body in the woods behind the school’s athletic field. He then went to this theater to see Wood Allen’s “Blue Jazzman”.

Chism’s uncle in Tennessee among those who still can’t understand why.

TERRENCE CHISM BLAINE, UNCLE OF PHILLIP CHISM: This is the furthest thing from reality for me to believe that Phillip could, you know, get entangled in something like this.

LEMON (on camera): His uncle told CNN that Chism’s parents are separated. Chism’s father, a former military man, is now living in Florida. The question is, could trouble at home be one of the reasons behind his alleged attack?

CARRIE KIMBALL-MONAHAN, SPOKESPERSON, ESSEX COUNTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY: An investigation is a broad and painstaking effort. So they’re all, any and all information that’s pertinent and relevant to proving our case is taken into consideration.

LEMON: Would something like that be relevant?

KIMBALL-MONAHAN: It could be.

LEMON (voice-over): The freshman student Cambria Cloutier sat near Chism in Ritzer’s math class. She said he was a good student but that something was different about Chism’s behavior on Tuesday.

CAMBRIA CLOUTHIER, FRESHMAN, DANVERS HIGH SCHOOL: He was a little more quiet than usual. He had his ear buds on. He was drawing. He was not doing math. He wasn’t paying attention.

LEMON: Clouthier says Ritzer teacher asked Chism to stay after class to help him with what he missed, telling CNN’s Pam Brown that she walked by the classroom after school and saw the two of them together.

PAMELA BROWN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: What did you see in the classroom at 3:15?

CLOUTHIER: I saw Ms. Ritizer standing at her desk computer smiling at me. And then I saw Phillip slouching in his chair, staring at me when I walked by.

LEMON: Just 15 minutes later, according to sources close to the investigation, Colleen Ritzer was brutally killed in the school’s second floor bathroom.

CLOUTHIER: If I had walked by there 15 minutes later, what could have happened? If I witnessed that, what could I have done?

(END VIDEOTAPE)

LEMON: And sources close to the investigation say there is no indication that there is anything in this young man’s path that would lead him to this type of behavior. And they also say that reports of him having a crush on the teacher are unfounded. In the meantime, Erin, 24-year-old Colleen Ritzer will be laid to rest on Monday.

BURNETT: Thank you, Don.

UPDATED: Philip Chism, Killer Kid (Allegedly)

Crime, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Race, Racism, Reason

“He wasn’t violent at all. He was really the opposite of agressive [sic].” Predictably, that’s how a classmate has described a black, 14-year-old, who murdered his white math teacher, near Boston, Massachusetts.

Philip Chism, the alleged killer, was clearly aggressive enough to kill.

The other options the idiocracy will opt for—they set the parameters of the debate on crime—are 1) racism. The white teacher’s or the white kids’, but never the black student’s. When blacks take the life of a white, it is never taken as a sign of racial hatred.

2) An “illness.” From “EVIL, NOT ILL”:

the tele-experts, understandably self-serving, … work to place bad behavior beyond the strictures of traditional morality, making it amenable to their “therapeutic” interventions. … conjuring so-called mental diseases either to control contrarians or to exculpate criminals. 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 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.

This mode of thinking amounts to backward logic. It’s logically fallacious.

Poor Colleen Ritzer was only 24. This beloved teacher had “graduated magna cum laude from Assumption College in Massachusetts with a math degree.”

UPDATE (Oct. 24): “A law-enforcement source said authorities believe Chism attacked Ritzer with a box cutter. The source said the boy was seen on school security video pushing a large recycling bin, which authorities believe he used to take her body outside.”

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