Rob Henderson on Neuroticism; Peter Wallison on Mr. Trump's vulnerability; John Tierney on anti-male bias; Scott Alexander on evolutionary fitness and mental health
Dr. Kling writes "Given their timing, the goal of the indictments appears to be to reduce [Trump's] chances of winning in 2024."
I suspect that there's a darker motive afoot, as well, especially with the highly contrived New York charges. Some of that, of course, looks like Alvin Bragg throwing meat to a highly Democratic electorate in the expectation that he might run for higher office down the line.
But I can't overlook the fact that these contortions of the law will strengthen Trump's support in the Republican party, and make it more likely that he'll get the 2024 nomination, giving Biden or his Democratic successor a better chance of winning the general election. I suspect that Bragg knew this full well, and regards it as a desirable outcome.
In fact, this looks very much like the strategy that worked so well for the D's in the 2022 Congressional elections: support a noisy Trumpista in the Republican primaries, giving the Democratic candidate a greater likelihood of victory. This almost backfired in the case of the Arizona governorship: the D's backed Kari Lake against Karrin Taylor Robson in the Republican primary, figuring that Katie Hobbs would have a better chance against Lake, a notorious and noisy election-denier. Hobbs won in the general election, but by a margin of less than 1%; if fewer than 9,000 people had voted for Lake instead of Hobbs, she'd be the governor today.
I'm afraid that the Democrats are similarly gambling on being able to beat Trump in 2024. From a purely partisan standpoint, in which the only thing that matters is whether a candidate has a D or an R after their name, it makes sense. But if there're principles at play beyond "Democrats should always win, and one Republican is as bad as another", they're taking grave risks with the country's future.
The Democrats thought that Trump was the easier candidate to beat in 2016, too, and I agree it is why the leftist media promoted him so vigorously during the GOP primaries. They fooled themselves, however- Trump ended up being the only GOP candidate that could make states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania competitive for the GOP in the Presidential race. This is still true- the Democrats won't have to cheat to defeat Ron DeSantis- DeSantis won't be able to win any of those three states and will, at best, replicate Mitt Romney's loss except he will probably win Florida.
In short, the GOP cannot win the Presidency even if the candidate wins all the states Romney won in 2012 and adds Florida, Ohio, and Iowa- that only gets to 259 electoral votes, not 270 to win. It isn't even enough to win Wisconsin, too, unless the GOP candidate wins the individual electoral votes in Maine and Nebraska. Only Trump can win in the upper midwest and Pennsylvania as a Republican.
Exactly. Trump was indicted once it was clear his front-runner status was in jeopardy by Status. The Bragg indictment, in particular, was almost certainly was motivated by this. And the plan has worked. Barring a miracle, Republicans look to be stuck with Trump as the nominee.
Normally I'd add that this shows that the Republicans are the stupid party. But the Dems are stuck in an almost-equally bad spot with Biden. I still don't think that Trump can win, even against Biden. But if the Dems had anyone else running, it would be landslide. As is, it is going to be close. So I guess both parties, or more technically, their voters, are "stupid."
I'm not sure if I believe that another D could do better against Trump than Biden can. Recall that in 2020, Biden had a fairly narrow squeak past Trump in several of the swing states, despite having run as a conciliatory middle-of-the-road alternative to Trump. However, once inaugurated he started pushing leftward, with things like Build Back Better and the student-loan scheme. That's likely to damage him with small-government fiscal conservatives; certainly, that's where the No Labels movement is getting its support.
But could any other likely Democratic nominee depict themselves as more moderate? I doubt it—to get the nomination, they'd probably have to forthrightly declare their support for more radical redistribution of wealth, and for progressive positions on a variety of socio-cultural issues. Biden had a close race while pretending not to support leftist positions; could a different Democrat win after openly declaring their support for them?
In trying to avoid value judgements Emil can't stick the landing.
The tell on homosexuality being a mental illness is its correlation with so many other mental illnesses. Promiscuity to the point of being an STD factory, check. Hedonistic drug use, check. Narcissistic personality type, check. Etc. Obviously not all of these are present in every homosexual, but they are present more often in homosexuals when controlling for other facts (class, etc).
This is also why people don't associate lesbians with mental illness, because they don't share the same negative predilections of male homosexuals.
The bottom line is if I found out my daughter was a fag hag, I would assume it was having a negative influence on her. Just like if she was hanging out with promiscuous, hedonistic, narcissistic women.
"Is homosexuality a mental illness if everyone abhors it but not a mental illness if everyone is ok with it?"
I think part of the reason homosexuality has become more accepted is because promiscuity, hedonism, and narcissism have become more accepted. Is everyone being OK with those things a good thing?
"If there is a crisp, clean definition for mental disorder lying around, I don’t see it."
You know it when you see it, it can't be defined in abstraction. Jumping on a grenade to save your friends, heroic. Committing a banzai charge on Okinawa, mentally ill fanatic. It's all context.
A starting point of inquiry is to figure out why have "Human Resources" of government and educational institutions embraced abnormal behavior as normal. Do the people running these offices understand they are promoting insanity? Are these people crazy themselves? Is it not a concern for the institution to have crazy people deciding what are acceptable behaviors at the institution?
Setting side LGBTQ, simply consider the insanity of self-destructive Covid policies. How did we arrive at it being normal to mask children? Any person who would promote the masking of healthy children is delusional - they are acting out of fear and ignorance. And yet the fervor to mask children runs especially high in Blue city America. What is it about American Liberalism that fosters the willingness to be so cruel and selfish? To not only be fearful oneself but to impose that fear on others?
I think indoctrination matters. I think the people that develop into the jobs running HR policy and of running social institutions have been brainwashed in Cultural Marxism. They not only think it is normal to attack and destroy normal sociology they believe they have a mission to evangelize neuroticism - to elevate every edge case and emotional need as normal and acceptable. These people are mentally ill - at a minimum they have a broken mental model - and they should be resisted and removed from positions of influence over children. They also should not be at universities brainwashing young adults.
The phrase "Not that there is anything wrong with that" needs to go away. There is something wrong with that. The promotion of explicit sexuality and gender queerness in schools is wrong. Children imagining they are not their biology is wrong. Adults changing their gender identity is wrong. There are many harmful and destructive behaviors. There are healthy and positive behaviors. It is wrong to treat all behaviors as equal.
I think the reason homosexuality has become more accepted is that we have lost as a society our disposition to see it as a threat to the fertility of our group/community and so as a threat to the continuation of the group/community.
I attribute this partly to a change in the definition of what our in-group is.
I'm not sure you're correct about the correlation. I suspect if heterosexual men didn't have choosy, demure women to act as sexual gatekeepers, we'd all have STD's by about 25 or so. Men in general are promiscuous, or would prefer to be. Similarly, as is well known, marriage and family formation tend to have civilizing effects on men; if that's taken off the table, as is the case for homosexual men, hedonistic drug use rates would tend to be higher for this group. As for narcissism, I've never heard this; do you have any data to back this up?
I'm perfectly comfortable calling homosexuality a type of disorder, but I don't think psychological is the correct category; it's at least as much physiological, because a lot of homosexuals are physically atypical for their gender (ie, gay men are often effeminate and gay women are often quite butch), whereas there's no way to tell who suffers from depression or bipolar disorder or what have you, just by their appearnace.
I'm not sure what you say is correct but I think it has merit up until your very last point. The whole issue is that we don't know it when we see it. DSM did a reversal. Most people, including supposed experts, don't agree with you.
"Most people, including supposed experts, don't agree with you."
"Experts" might disagree, Stu, but "most people" clearly do not. Find me a majority of parents who would be happy to learn their son, Dennis, wants to become Denice, or that he wants to be a pot-smoking professional gamer who lives in the basement.
I have no idea how you got that from what I wrote but let me clarify. I said nothing about what activities of their son make parents happy or not. Forumposter suggested you know it when you see, referring to mental illness. I call that into question because most disagree with him on whether homosexuality is a mental illness, or even a disorder, and more importantly the DSM did a 180. Clearly not so easy to see.
Let me clarify then- a majority of people do see homosexuality, for example, as a mental disorder. They are silenced today because of the professional opprobrium than can come down on one for saying so, but not because they have done a 180 like the DSM.
I have known several in my life, Thomas. None were what I would call happy people. However, I personally don't care who is or who isn't a homosexual- I wasn't talking about my opinions, I was pointing out that acceptance of the behavior at the visceral level in society hasn't really changed despite polling data showing support for gay marriage- people don't change their opinions on issues like this, they only become silent or deceptive when the pushback against such opinions becomes dangerous to their livelihoods. The future may have a more neutral opinion on whether it is a mental illness, but that only happens when people die and are replaced with newer people.
Stu, just because someone says they support gay marriage doesn't mean they view homosexuality as normal behavior. Almost no parent is ever happy finding out their kid is gay- but no one polls that question. It was 70-30 against gay marriage not that long ago- those people haven't changed their minds, but what they can say in public about their beliefs in this area has changed.
Most people in Japan in the 1940s also would have disagreed with me about banzai charges being mental illness. Today the Japanese would admit it was all retarded.
I guess I'm proposing that there is some objective idea of "mental illness", but that it's hard to put into some kind of abstract definition that I can apply to every situation. It's just too complex to completely describe all possible situations.
For instance, whether or not your bravery on the battlefield is likely to lead to victory impacts whether it's brave or stupid. But how does one know in advance how likely it is to lead to victory? There are ways but they are imperfect. It's not like I can assess every single possible situation with a paragraph long DSM definition.
Brave/cowardly and stupid/smart are orthogonal. An act of bravery on the battlefield may well be stupid or futile, but that doesn't make it less brave. And one reason bravery is valued is precisely because one cannot know in advance whether a given act will lead to victory or not. On a smaller scale, if one somehow knew an opponent would not kill or maim or even seriously hit you in a brawl, fighting with that opponent would not call for courage. Same goes for 'protesting' the government: as the meme goes, rather than being communist in a free country, try being free in a communist country.
Perhaps what is missing is a combination word like "foolhardy".
Japanese troops engaging in banzai charges combine physical bravery with stupidity and futility, and they know it in advance (or should be able to know it). Not everyone ordered to do these things did them, and I don't think that shows "cowardice".
There is a certain bravery to admitting the truth of a situation. A Japanese that refuses to Banzai charge and finds a way to survive the war is "brave" for standing up to idiotic orders. The willpower needed to overcome the societal, peer, and disciplinary pressure in that situation is perhaps braver than giving in.
"one cannot know in advance whether a given act will lead to victory or not"
This is and isn't true.
It's true that in a war with millions of people, your individual action couldn't possibly alter the result.
But one can grasp that if the people on your side engage in acts of bravery what the likelihood of creating a better world is. "What you are fighting for." It's precisely when men don't believe in what they are fighting for (because it isn't desired or isn't perceived as remotely likely) that they tend to stop fighting.
To go on after that point should have been recognized is a kind negligent ignorance or cowardice towards facing the truth.
> There is a certain bravery to admitting the truth of a situation. A Japanese that refuses to Banzai charge and finds a way to survive the war is "brave" for standing up to idiotic orders. The willpower needed to overcome the societal, peer, and disciplinary pressure in that situation is perhaps braver than giving in.
Indeed. I don't disagree with any of the above,
> It's true that in a war with millions of people, your individual action couldn't possibly alter the result.
but not with this. First, this is not what I meant. I meant that in war, it's often impossible to say even about a large-scale collective action whether it will lead to victory/be successful or not, and by extension whether individual brave acts performed as part of the large-scale collective action will conduce to a victory. There are recent examples from both sides of the Russian war on Ukraine. Second, your statement, as you said, is and isn't true. It's true in the trivial sense, but the whole war is composed of individual actions like yours done by people who are not too dissimilar from yourself, so that what you perceive as your individual action is likely to be not as individual as you suppose. And in the aggregate, action absolutely can affect or even alter the result.
> To go on after that point should have been recognized is a kind negligent ignorance or cowardice towards facing the truth.
I understand what you're saying, but I can't entirely agree either, because what is desired and/or perceived remotely likely is too flexible a standard in the face of circumstances where one just cannot submit. Recall again your fight against people who wanted your children to wear masks all day in pre-K/grade school. You went to expensive lengths to save them from that, and, as you told me in AK's comment section last year, if you didn't have even this option and couldn't homeschool, you would fight and probably lose*. I for one couldn't bring myself to call this 'cowardice towards facing the truth'.
* I do not have the link at hand and Google is useless, but I can spend some time and find it if needed
On the one hand if everyone was a fanatic completely committed to winning a game of chicken no matter how utterly impossible and futile, our species would have stopped existing by now.
But if (almost) everyone was 100% committed to being "rational" in the game of chicken we would also have had our species end by now (or been replaced by people who weren't "rational" in such a way).
The number of factors affecting when it is or isn't (or mostly is or mostly isn't) correct to be "irrational" is complex.
I did go through a number of measures to keep my kids from wearing masks. But I also didn't storm the capital. Or assassinate my school superintended and say it was because of masks.
Could I have done those things? You know what, if I saw more people doing things like that and concluded that there was a reasonable enough chance it would work, then yeah I think COVID policy was that evil I would have done violence if I thought it would work. I felt that COVID policy went beyond the constitution and thus suspended a citizens duty to respect the authorities decrees. I suspect that Americans 100 years ago would have done more violence to defend their rights.
I simply didn't think it would work in my own time. That was my intuitive sense based on the evidence, but it could have changed based on different evidence.
I was bitter about that. And I wished there were a few people out there "more irrational than me" who got the ball rolling and created a new schnelling point for people like me to latch onto. If it had actually worked, I would hope they were praised as heroes.
Is that cowardice? Kind of. But I see a lot of brave people blow themselves up for no good reason all the time. This seems to me a complex problem, though I don't think "complex" is enough to stop one from weighing in, even in real time.
The Democrats have put us on the path of having political prisoners from now going forward. They should be ashamed, but they aren't- they have the upper hand politically and they are doing exactly what they feel they need to do to retain and strengthen it, and it is hard to argue that they are wrong. Too many in the GOP think that when Trump is gone, things go back to normal- they are foolishly naive. If Trump can be prevented from running by ridiculous criminal prosecutions, the Democrats will not hesitate to use the exact same method on any other GOP candidate.
The GOP had better figure out a way to use mail-in-balloting exactly the same way Democrats use it, or the GOP won't even be competitive in 60% of the House seats inside of the next three elections. It will probably take at least one Presidential election with turnout over 110% to get people to wake up to the fraud involved in such insecure balloting methods.
Being worried about the state of our nation or the world is not a sign that someone is mentally ill. It is a sign that he knows what is going on and/or is not on the side of politics that gets to write the official Big Media party line.
Once most of the public figures out that all this hatred and phony charges against Trump and his allies are being done to conceal the fact that they intend to take away normal diets and normal energy-use habits from everyone, not because of any real enviro danger but to turn us into serfs, we will be vindicated and proven right on all counts. But after 2024 it may be too late. Burn your TV.
Re: "If there is a crisp, clean definition for mental disorder lying around, I don’t see it."
See Thomas Szasz, The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary (1990):
"Psychiatric diagnoses are stigmatizing labels phrased to resemble medical diagnoses, applied to persons whose behavior annoys or offends others. Those who suffer from and complain of their own behavior are usually classified as 'neurotic'; those whose behavior makes others suffer, and about whom others complain, are usually classified as 'psychotic.' [... .] Mental illness is a myth whose function is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations. In asserting that there is no such thing as mental illness I do not deny that people have problems coping with life and each other. [,,, .] The business of psychiatry is to provide society with excuses disguised as diagnoses, and with coercions justified as treatments." (pp. 115 , 135, and 178)
What is the best extended refutation of the claims that there were only limited irregularities in the 2020 election? To be completely honest, I did not investigate the claims thoroughly, mostly for Occam's Razor reasons-- I wasn't surprised that a controversial President lost in very, very strange year. But did anyone actually take the time to carefully review and refute the claims in a non-condescending, non-Trump Derangement Syndrome way?
Considering how slow judicial process are, I think it is amazing t hat the indictments have come as soon as they did. I do ot find the timing "suspicious" at all.
Rules and laws were not followed, by definition illegitimate. courts gave “permission” to ignore them, can I get permission to ignore laws? I don’t watch Tucker, I do think.
"If someone is inclined to jump on a grenade to save his mates, he is not going to survive, but that does not make him mentally ill. Or to take a less dire example, an astronaut on a risky mission may be lowering his chances of reproducing, but we would not call him mentally ill. Conversely, a psychopath may be able to reproduce. That does not mean that we should regard him as mentally sound."
I don't know; I wouldn't be so ready to dismiss Kirkegaard's attempts to put it in evolutionary terms, even if he didn't get it quite right in his formulation. Altruism and self-sacrifice are clearly explainable in evolutionary terms, as is the willingness to undertake dangerous exploratory ventures. Psychopathy, likewise, I think you can categorize as a particular reproductive strategy that tends to be successful when utilized by a small fraction of the population, but becomes less so if/when its relative proportion of the population grows.
"....the general perception is that Mr. Trump was flailing". But is it not the case that, in the 2020 election, both candidates got more votes than any previous presidential candidate? I am no great admirer of Donald Trump but it is the case that his presidency received a level of MSM hostility that was quite unprecedented (way beyond anything meted to previous Republicans). The hysterical establishment reaction has been likened by someone (can't remember who) to the kind of reaction that would be appropriate if a huge meteorite was hurtling towards earth.
For him - in spite of this - to have got such a huge popular vote was hardly 'flailing'. Is it not also the case that most psephologists concede that, were it not for Covid, he would have won hands down because his administration up 'till then had been (perhaps in spite of him) surprisingly successful?
"If you think these indictments need to happen during election season, then you have given up on the system." I don't think these indictment need to happen during election season, but I am still dangerously close to giving up on the system.
Normal society accommodates a lot of human quirkiness. Society benefits from quirkiness. However, quirkiness that denies reality and demands society deny reality cannot be accommodated.
Us old timers can point to the character Klinger on the TV show MASH. Klinger dressed like and at times even acted like a woman. He did it to be certified crazy. The psychiatrist rightly pointed out Klinger was perfectly sane. Klinger did not want to be a woman, he only wanted a way out of the Army and he thought pretending to be a woman was his ticket out.
People who are not pretending - who do not know they are pretending - but have convinced themselves they are something they are not have a mental illness. Society used to frown on that condition. Such people are a danger to themselves and in their delusions they can be a risk to others.
"When kids play, this is an indication that they are comfortable. ... If kids are hungry or frightened or otherwise don’t have their needs met, they won’t play."
"This is one way you can tell whether your house is well-ordered and emotionally stable—if your kids are playing. This indicates that everything else they might need has been taken care of."
I can maybe agree with the first sentence of the quoted paragraph. The last two seem to reach too far.
Everything else is taken care of?
Kids without needs met never play?
I agree the timing of charges against Trump should concern all.
"Conversely, a psychopath may be able to reproduce. That does not mean that we should regard him as mentally sound."
Reproductive fitness - Ability to reproduce is not fitness. Homosexuality, depression, and anxiety don't prevent reproduction either. That said, I agree fitness is rather vague.
One is reminded of the famous photo of the boy whose job it was 10 hours a day to open and shut the door for the mine car. He or another such boy had drawn pictures on the door, perhaps with a chalk rock, that the photographer didn't see until he developed the plate.
Dr. Kling writes "Given their timing, the goal of the indictments appears to be to reduce [Trump's] chances of winning in 2024."
I suspect that there's a darker motive afoot, as well, especially with the highly contrived New York charges. Some of that, of course, looks like Alvin Bragg throwing meat to a highly Democratic electorate in the expectation that he might run for higher office down the line.
But I can't overlook the fact that these contortions of the law will strengthen Trump's support in the Republican party, and make it more likely that he'll get the 2024 nomination, giving Biden or his Democratic successor a better chance of winning the general election. I suspect that Bragg knew this full well, and regards it as a desirable outcome.
In fact, this looks very much like the strategy that worked so well for the D's in the 2022 Congressional elections: support a noisy Trumpista in the Republican primaries, giving the Democratic candidate a greater likelihood of victory. This almost backfired in the case of the Arizona governorship: the D's backed Kari Lake against Karrin Taylor Robson in the Republican primary, figuring that Katie Hobbs would have a better chance against Lake, a notorious and noisy election-denier. Hobbs won in the general election, but by a margin of less than 1%; if fewer than 9,000 people had voted for Lake instead of Hobbs, she'd be the governor today.
I'm afraid that the Democrats are similarly gambling on being able to beat Trump in 2024. From a purely partisan standpoint, in which the only thing that matters is whether a candidate has a D or an R after their name, it makes sense. But if there're principles at play beyond "Democrats should always win, and one Republican is as bad as another", they're taking grave risks with the country's future.
The Democrats thought that Trump was the easier candidate to beat in 2016, too, and I agree it is why the leftist media promoted him so vigorously during the GOP primaries. They fooled themselves, however- Trump ended up being the only GOP candidate that could make states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania competitive for the GOP in the Presidential race. This is still true- the Democrats won't have to cheat to defeat Ron DeSantis- DeSantis won't be able to win any of those three states and will, at best, replicate Mitt Romney's loss except he will probably win Florida.
In short, the GOP cannot win the Presidency even if the candidate wins all the states Romney won in 2012 and adds Florida, Ohio, and Iowa- that only gets to 259 electoral votes, not 270 to win. It isn't even enough to win Wisconsin, too, unless the GOP candidate wins the individual electoral votes in Maine and Nebraska. Only Trump can win in the upper midwest and Pennsylvania as a Republican.
Exactly. Trump was indicted once it was clear his front-runner status was in jeopardy by Status. The Bragg indictment, in particular, was almost certainly was motivated by this. And the plan has worked. Barring a miracle, Republicans look to be stuck with Trump as the nominee.
Normally I'd add that this shows that the Republicans are the stupid party. But the Dems are stuck in an almost-equally bad spot with Biden. I still don't think that Trump can win, even against Biden. But if the Dems had anyone else running, it would be landslide. As is, it is going to be close. So I guess both parties, or more technically, their voters, are "stupid."
I'm not sure if I believe that another D could do better against Trump than Biden can. Recall that in 2020, Biden had a fairly narrow squeak past Trump in several of the swing states, despite having run as a conciliatory middle-of-the-road alternative to Trump. However, once inaugurated he started pushing leftward, with things like Build Back Better and the student-loan scheme. That's likely to damage him with small-government fiscal conservatives; certainly, that's where the No Labels movement is getting its support.
But could any other likely Democratic nominee depict themselves as more moderate? I doubt it—to get the nomination, they'd probably have to forthrightly declare their support for more radical redistribution of wealth, and for progressive positions on a variety of socio-cultural issues. Biden had a close race while pretending not to support leftist positions; could a different Democrat win after openly declaring their support for them?
In trying to avoid value judgements Emil can't stick the landing.
The tell on homosexuality being a mental illness is its correlation with so many other mental illnesses. Promiscuity to the point of being an STD factory, check. Hedonistic drug use, check. Narcissistic personality type, check. Etc. Obviously not all of these are present in every homosexual, but they are present more often in homosexuals when controlling for other facts (class, etc).
This is also why people don't associate lesbians with mental illness, because they don't share the same negative predilections of male homosexuals.
The bottom line is if I found out my daughter was a fag hag, I would assume it was having a negative influence on her. Just like if she was hanging out with promiscuous, hedonistic, narcissistic women.
"Is homosexuality a mental illness if everyone abhors it but not a mental illness if everyone is ok with it?"
I think part of the reason homosexuality has become more accepted is because promiscuity, hedonism, and narcissism have become more accepted. Is everyone being OK with those things a good thing?
"If there is a crisp, clean definition for mental disorder lying around, I don’t see it."
You know it when you see it, it can't be defined in abstraction. Jumping on a grenade to save your friends, heroic. Committing a banzai charge on Okinawa, mentally ill fanatic. It's all context.
A starting point of inquiry is to figure out why have "Human Resources" of government and educational institutions embraced abnormal behavior as normal. Do the people running these offices understand they are promoting insanity? Are these people crazy themselves? Is it not a concern for the institution to have crazy people deciding what are acceptable behaviors at the institution?
Setting side LGBTQ, simply consider the insanity of self-destructive Covid policies. How did we arrive at it being normal to mask children? Any person who would promote the masking of healthy children is delusional - they are acting out of fear and ignorance. And yet the fervor to mask children runs especially high in Blue city America. What is it about American Liberalism that fosters the willingness to be so cruel and selfish? To not only be fearful oneself but to impose that fear on others?
I think indoctrination matters. I think the people that develop into the jobs running HR policy and of running social institutions have been brainwashed in Cultural Marxism. They not only think it is normal to attack and destroy normal sociology they believe they have a mission to evangelize neuroticism - to elevate every edge case and emotional need as normal and acceptable. These people are mentally ill - at a minimum they have a broken mental model - and they should be resisted and removed from positions of influence over children. They also should not be at universities brainwashing young adults.
The phrase "Not that there is anything wrong with that" needs to go away. There is something wrong with that. The promotion of explicit sexuality and gender queerness in schools is wrong. Children imagining they are not their biology is wrong. Adults changing their gender identity is wrong. There are many harmful and destructive behaviors. There are healthy and positive behaviors. It is wrong to treat all behaviors as equal.
I think the reason homosexuality has become more accepted is that we have lost as a society our disposition to see it as a threat to the fertility of our group/community and so as a threat to the continuation of the group/community.
I attribute this partly to a change in the definition of what our in-group is.
You oppose promiscuity? I can't imagine you support traditional modesty roles - how do you define promiscuity?
I'm not sure you're correct about the correlation. I suspect if heterosexual men didn't have choosy, demure women to act as sexual gatekeepers, we'd all have STD's by about 25 or so. Men in general are promiscuous, or would prefer to be. Similarly, as is well known, marriage and family formation tend to have civilizing effects on men; if that's taken off the table, as is the case for homosexual men, hedonistic drug use rates would tend to be higher for this group. As for narcissism, I've never heard this; do you have any data to back this up?
I'm perfectly comfortable calling homosexuality a type of disorder, but I don't think psychological is the correct category; it's at least as much physiological, because a lot of homosexuals are physically atypical for their gender (ie, gay men are often effeminate and gay women are often quite butch), whereas there's no way to tell who suffers from depression or bipolar disorder or what have you, just by their appearnace.
I'm not sure what you say is correct but I think it has merit up until your very last point. The whole issue is that we don't know it when we see it. DSM did a reversal. Most people, including supposed experts, don't agree with you.
"Most people, including supposed experts, don't agree with you."
"Experts" might disagree, Stu, but "most people" clearly do not. Find me a majority of parents who would be happy to learn their son, Dennis, wants to become Denice, or that he wants to be a pot-smoking professional gamer who lives in the basement.
I have no idea how you got that from what I wrote but let me clarify. I said nothing about what activities of their son make parents happy or not. Forumposter suggested you know it when you see, referring to mental illness. I call that into question because most disagree with him on whether homosexuality is a mental illness, or even a disorder, and more importantly the DSM did a 180. Clearly not so easy to see.
Let me clarify then- a majority of people do see homosexuality, for example, as a mental disorder. They are silenced today because of the professional opprobrium than can come down on one for saying so, but not because they have done a 180 like the DSM.
Do you literally not know any homosexuals? Or the ones you know you think have a mental disorder?
I have known several in my life, Thomas. None were what I would call happy people. However, I personally don't care who is or who isn't a homosexual- I wasn't talking about my opinions, I was pointing out that acceptance of the behavior at the visceral level in society hasn't really changed despite polling data showing support for gay marriage- people don't change their opinions on issues like this, they only become silent or deceptive when the pushback against such opinions becomes dangerous to their livelihoods. The future may have a more neutral opinion on whether it is a mental illness, but that only happens when people die and are replaced with newer people.
I hadn't even considered that possibility given ~70% support allowing gay marriage but I don't actually know. What is your evidence?
Stu, just because someone says they support gay marriage doesn't mean they view homosexuality as normal behavior. Almost no parent is ever happy finding out their kid is gay- but no one polls that question. It was 70-30 against gay marriage not that long ago- those people haven't changed their minds, but what they can say in public about their beliefs in this area has changed.
Most people in Japan in the 1940s also would have disagreed with me about banzai charges being mental illness. Today the Japanese would admit it was all retarded.
I guess I'm proposing that there is some objective idea of "mental illness", but that it's hard to put into some kind of abstract definition that I can apply to every situation. It's just too complex to completely describe all possible situations.
For instance, whether or not your bravery on the battlefield is likely to lead to victory impacts whether it's brave or stupid. But how does one know in advance how likely it is to lead to victory? There are ways but they are imperfect. It's not like I can assess every single possible situation with a paragraph long DSM definition.
Brave/cowardly and stupid/smart are orthogonal. An act of bravery on the battlefield may well be stupid or futile, but that doesn't make it less brave. And one reason bravery is valued is precisely because one cannot know in advance whether a given act will lead to victory or not. On a smaller scale, if one somehow knew an opponent would not kill or maim or even seriously hit you in a brawl, fighting with that opponent would not call for courage. Same goes for 'protesting' the government: as the meme goes, rather than being communist in a free country, try being free in a communist country.
Perhaps what is missing is a combination word like "foolhardy".
Japanese troops engaging in banzai charges combine physical bravery with stupidity and futility, and they know it in advance (or should be able to know it). Not everyone ordered to do these things did them, and I don't think that shows "cowardice".
There is a certain bravery to admitting the truth of a situation. A Japanese that refuses to Banzai charge and finds a way to survive the war is "brave" for standing up to idiotic orders. The willpower needed to overcome the societal, peer, and disciplinary pressure in that situation is perhaps braver than giving in.
"one cannot know in advance whether a given act will lead to victory or not"
This is and isn't true.
It's true that in a war with millions of people, your individual action couldn't possibly alter the result.
But one can grasp that if the people on your side engage in acts of bravery what the likelihood of creating a better world is. "What you are fighting for." It's precisely when men don't believe in what they are fighting for (because it isn't desired or isn't perceived as remotely likely) that they tend to stop fighting.
To go on after that point should have been recognized is a kind negligent ignorance or cowardice towards facing the truth.
> There is a certain bravery to admitting the truth of a situation. A Japanese that refuses to Banzai charge and finds a way to survive the war is "brave" for standing up to idiotic orders. The willpower needed to overcome the societal, peer, and disciplinary pressure in that situation is perhaps braver than giving in.
Indeed. I don't disagree with any of the above,
> It's true that in a war with millions of people, your individual action couldn't possibly alter the result.
but not with this. First, this is not what I meant. I meant that in war, it's often impossible to say even about a large-scale collective action whether it will lead to victory/be successful or not, and by extension whether individual brave acts performed as part of the large-scale collective action will conduce to a victory. There are recent examples from both sides of the Russian war on Ukraine. Second, your statement, as you said, is and isn't true. It's true in the trivial sense, but the whole war is composed of individual actions like yours done by people who are not too dissimilar from yourself, so that what you perceive as your individual action is likely to be not as individual as you suppose. And in the aggregate, action absolutely can affect or even alter the result.
> To go on after that point should have been recognized is a kind negligent ignorance or cowardice towards facing the truth.
I understand what you're saying, but I can't entirely agree either, because what is desired and/or perceived remotely likely is too flexible a standard in the face of circumstances where one just cannot submit. Recall again your fight against people who wanted your children to wear masks all day in pre-K/grade school. You went to expensive lengths to save them from that, and, as you told me in AK's comment section last year, if you didn't have even this option and couldn't homeschool, you would fight and probably lose*. I for one couldn't bring myself to call this 'cowardice towards facing the truth'.
* I do not have the link at hand and Google is useless, but I can spend some time and find it if needed
There is a kind of "logical insanity" problem.
On the one hand if everyone was a fanatic completely committed to winning a game of chicken no matter how utterly impossible and futile, our species would have stopped existing by now.
But if (almost) everyone was 100% committed to being "rational" in the game of chicken we would also have had our species end by now (or been replaced by people who weren't "rational" in such a way).
The number of factors affecting when it is or isn't (or mostly is or mostly isn't) correct to be "irrational" is complex.
I did go through a number of measures to keep my kids from wearing masks. But I also didn't storm the capital. Or assassinate my school superintended and say it was because of masks.
Could I have done those things? You know what, if I saw more people doing things like that and concluded that there was a reasonable enough chance it would work, then yeah I think COVID policy was that evil I would have done violence if I thought it would work. I felt that COVID policy went beyond the constitution and thus suspended a citizens duty to respect the authorities decrees. I suspect that Americans 100 years ago would have done more violence to defend their rights.
I simply didn't think it would work in my own time. That was my intuitive sense based on the evidence, but it could have changed based on different evidence.
I was bitter about that. And I wished there were a few people out there "more irrational than me" who got the ball rolling and created a new schnelling point for people like me to latch onto. If it had actually worked, I would hope they were praised as heroes.
Is that cowardice? Kind of. But I see a lot of brave people blow themselves up for no good reason all the time. This seems to me a complex problem, though I don't think "complex" is enough to stop one from weighing in, even in real time.
The Democrats have put us on the path of having political prisoners from now going forward. They should be ashamed, but they aren't- they have the upper hand politically and they are doing exactly what they feel they need to do to retain and strengthen it, and it is hard to argue that they are wrong. Too many in the GOP think that when Trump is gone, things go back to normal- they are foolishly naive. If Trump can be prevented from running by ridiculous criminal prosecutions, the Democrats will not hesitate to use the exact same method on any other GOP candidate.
The GOP had better figure out a way to use mail-in-balloting exactly the same way Democrats use it, or the GOP won't even be competitive in 60% of the House seats inside of the next three elections. It will probably take at least one Presidential election with turnout over 110% to get people to wake up to the fraud involved in such insecure balloting methods.
No good definition of mental illness/disorder exists. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1995-01851-001
Full article here: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/mwxgl7zu9my046uvr5po3/Greenberg-Bailey1994.pdf?rlkey=qyq714m5v6ljj1k93qoka37di&dl=0
Being worried about the state of our nation or the world is not a sign that someone is mentally ill. It is a sign that he knows what is going on and/or is not on the side of politics that gets to write the official Big Media party line.
Once most of the public figures out that all this hatred and phony charges against Trump and his allies are being done to conceal the fact that they intend to take away normal diets and normal energy-use habits from everyone, not because of any real enviro danger but to turn us into serfs, we will be vindicated and proven right on all counts. But after 2024 it may be too late. Burn your TV.
You may enjoy some of my posts about news: https://ishayirashashem.substack.com/p/whats-fit-to-print
https://ishayirashashem.substack.com/p/dont-check
Re: "If there is a crisp, clean definition for mental disorder lying around, I don’t see it."
See Thomas Szasz, The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary (1990):
"Psychiatric diagnoses are stigmatizing labels phrased to resemble medical diagnoses, applied to persons whose behavior annoys or offends others. Those who suffer from and complain of their own behavior are usually classified as 'neurotic'; those whose behavior makes others suffer, and about whom others complain, are usually classified as 'psychotic.' [... .] Mental illness is a myth whose function is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations. In asserting that there is no such thing as mental illness I do not deny that people have problems coping with life and each other. [,,, .] The business of psychiatry is to provide society with excuses disguised as diagnoses, and with coercions justified as treatments." (pp. 115 , 135, and 178)
What is the best extended refutation of the claims that there were only limited irregularities in the 2020 election? To be completely honest, I did not investigate the claims thoroughly, mostly for Occam's Razor reasons-- I wasn't surprised that a controversial President lost in very, very strange year. But did anyone actually take the time to carefully review and refute the claims in a non-condescending, non-Trump Derangement Syndrome way?
Considering how slow judicial process are, I think it is amazing t hat the indictments have come as soon as they did. I do ot find the timing "suspicious" at all.
Joe Biden may have won, but it was by definition illegitimate
There were many exception granted to election laws and rules by courts, which was also illegitimate per the constitution
Illegitimate: Being against established or accepted rules and standards.
"Illegitimate" Not entirely to Tucker Carlson's liking. :)
Rules and laws were not followed, by definition illegitimate. courts gave “permission” to ignore them, can I get permission to ignore laws? I don’t watch Tucker, I do think.
"If someone is inclined to jump on a grenade to save his mates, he is not going to survive, but that does not make him mentally ill. Or to take a less dire example, an astronaut on a risky mission may be lowering his chances of reproducing, but we would not call him mentally ill. Conversely, a psychopath may be able to reproduce. That does not mean that we should regard him as mentally sound."
I don't know; I wouldn't be so ready to dismiss Kirkegaard's attempts to put it in evolutionary terms, even if he didn't get it quite right in his formulation. Altruism and self-sacrifice are clearly explainable in evolutionary terms, as is the willingness to undertake dangerous exploratory ventures. Psychopathy, likewise, I think you can categorize as a particular reproductive strategy that tends to be successful when utilized by a small fraction of the population, but becomes less so if/when its relative proportion of the population grows.
"....the general perception is that Mr. Trump was flailing". But is it not the case that, in the 2020 election, both candidates got more votes than any previous presidential candidate? I am no great admirer of Donald Trump but it is the case that his presidency received a level of MSM hostility that was quite unprecedented (way beyond anything meted to previous Republicans). The hysterical establishment reaction has been likened by someone (can't remember who) to the kind of reaction that would be appropriate if a huge meteorite was hurtling towards earth.
For him - in spite of this - to have got such a huge popular vote was hardly 'flailing'. Is it not also the case that most psephologists concede that, were it not for Covid, he would have won hands down because his administration up 'till then had been (perhaps in spite of him) surprisingly successful?
"If you think these indictments need to happen during election season, then you have given up on the system." I don't think these indictment need to happen during election season, but I am still dangerously close to giving up on the system.
Mental illness has a large dimension of subjectivity, so there can never really be a precise definition. However, most people know when they see it.
Normal society accommodates a lot of human quirkiness. Society benefits from quirkiness. However, quirkiness that denies reality and demands society deny reality cannot be accommodated.
Us old timers can point to the character Klinger on the TV show MASH. Klinger dressed like and at times even acted like a woman. He did it to be certified crazy. The psychiatrist rightly pointed out Klinger was perfectly sane. Klinger did not want to be a woman, he only wanted a way out of the Army and he thought pretending to be a woman was his ticket out.
People who are not pretending - who do not know they are pretending - but have convinced themselves they are something they are not have a mental illness. Society used to frown on that condition. Such people are a danger to themselves and in their delusions they can be a risk to others.
"When kids play, this is an indication that they are comfortable. ... If kids are hungry or frightened or otherwise don’t have their needs met, they won’t play."
"This is one way you can tell whether your house is well-ordered and emotionally stable—if your kids are playing. This indicates that everything else they might need has been taken care of."
I can maybe agree with the first sentence of the quoted paragraph. The last two seem to reach too far.
Everything else is taken care of?
Kids without needs met never play?
I agree the timing of charges against Trump should concern all.
"Conversely, a psychopath may be able to reproduce. That does not mean that we should regard him as mentally sound."
Reproductive fitness - Ability to reproduce is not fitness. Homosexuality, depression, and anxiety don't prevent reproduction either. That said, I agree fitness is rather vague.
One is reminded of the famous photo of the boy whose job it was 10 hours a day to open and shut the door for the mine car. He or another such boy had drawn pictures on the door, perhaps with a chalk rock, that the photographer didn't see until he developed the plate.