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Those over the age of forty or so will remember when people regularly went to see a psychiatrist to discuss their troubles. This was far more common in the upper class than the middle-class, but it was not unknown even among the lower class. It was a regular feature on television shows starting in the 1960’s. By the 1970’s, characters regularly talked about their trips to the shrink. Even today, the shrink is inserted into popular culture, as with the television series The Sopranos.
Psychiatry has fallen out of fashion as it has become obvious that you cannot talk someone out of mental illness. In fact, it sounds primitive and superstitious to think that talking about your troubles with a shaman can help cure them. There are people still clinging to things like Freudian psychoanalysis, but people with some knowledge of the human science know it is quackery. In fact, the entire enterprise of talk therapy is just pseudoscience, like astrology or tarot card reading.
Even so, Freudian quackery had a big impact on the West. It was tangled up with larger assaults on the culture, like the attack on the family. Instead of relying on the culture to cope with the inevitable struggles of marital life, women were encouraged to seek psychiatric help, which preached a form of women’s liberation. This encouraged the adoption of divorce, which swung a wrecking ball through society. It is fair to say that Freud was one of history’s great monsters, as well as a quack.
We have been conditioned to think that we live in the age of reason and that our ancestors were superstitious and irrational. This is a part of the cultural campaign to disconnect us from our past, but it is also a conceit. Our material existence is better, so we assume our technology is better, which means we have a more reasonable and rational understanding of the world. We no longer believe in invisible sky gods that control the natural occurrences we see from our cave.
In some respects, this is true, but in general, those old superstitions were more rational and practical. The unhappy wife spending more time at church did more for her wellbeing than hours with a quack and an eventual divorce. The peace of knowing that after this life, there is a next life of eternal bliss did more for the psyche of regular people than handfuls of anxiety drugs. Those old superstitious primitives in the family album did not try to turn their boys into girls.
Even though some of the nutty ideas like psychoanalysis have been dumped in favor of actual science, we have new crackpot ideas. Panpsychism, for example, is promising to introduce a fresh batch of oogily-boogily into the human sciences. Panpsychism is the idea that consciousness is inextricably linked to all matter and simply grows stronger as a physical object become more complex. That means gravel in your driveway has a consciousness, just less complex than your consciousness.
If it sounds like something someone comes to believe after taking peyote during the bachelor party in Las Vegas, you would be right. It is right out of eastern religion, but it is being pushed by people with claims to science. This is how all quackery ends up in the general culture. People with claims to science dress up their new brand of Gnosticism with the authority of science. It may not be long before “science” is telling us Covid is mutating because it is offended by our vaccines.
The story of man is supposed to operate along the general plot line that starts with primitive superstition and works toward reason. Early humans thought the natural world was animated by spirits. Then it was the creation of the gods. That soon moved to a more complex set of rules imposed by one God. Then God was dropped altogether, and we are left with the rules of nature. That’s the official narrative, yet we are zooming back to the idea of the world being controlled by invisible spirits.
The IQ guys will argue that this is proof we are getting dumber, but modern quackery is always the product of elite culture. Freudian psychoanalysis was not invented and spread by rural mystics. It started in the cosmopolitan elite and then spread to the rest of the population. It was the lower classes that remained stubbornly skeptical about the guys with turtlenecks and pipes. The same thing will be true of panpsychism if it breaks from the laboratory like the Wuhan virus.
It may be that our elites are getting dumber and there is evidence of that, but that does not explain the rise of nonsense in the modern world. Marxism is obvious nonsense when you read it but it spread like a plague in the 19th century. According to the IQ guys, those elites were smarter than our elites, yet many of them fell for what amounts to monstrous quackery. They fell for it because they wanted to believe the glorious future free of conflict was an inevitable outcome of history.
It may be that in the fullness of time, the ape historians will look at what we call the modern age, the period kicked off by the Enlightenment, ending sometime soon, as the great quest for meaning. This is when Western man discarded his religious convictions and went on a long quest for the answer to the great question, but only managed to murder himself in the process. One bit of quackery after another until Western societies could no longer hold and they collapsed into ruin.
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I’m 3 days late to the party, so I’ll write this to myself. I suppose I don’t disagree with Z about psychology in general being of dubious value, as 99.9% of the people, including me decades ago, were looking for a magical fix to one’s character flaws. Church is better for that if they aren’t accidentally worshiping Satan, as many are these days. And I’m not a believer, in the way a religious person thinks of it. I think most people can’t find the words to describe much of their daily interaction with reality. That is because we don’t actually… Read more »
This piece by Codevilla is about right.
Cometh the hour, whence cometh the man?
https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/12/the-silence-of-the-shepherds/
https://youtu.be/6fVE8kSM43I
Filler for spam filter.
All societies seek and sustain irrational explanations for the big questions. But it is only in abundantly affluent societies that counter-productive, self-harming narratives are allowed to flurish. If subsistence level societies did this they would soon be history. Maasai warriors fighting lions with spears cannot afford the illusion that ‘women are just as good warriors’, the lions would very swiftly correct this delusion. But in a warm, comfortable Vienna apartment or Manhattan office, why not? Lions, Chinese soldiers or Taliban terrorists and others who would punish your mistake, are far away in exotic lands so anything goes. Until you’ve burned… Read more »
Good comment. Obviously women need to be seen and not heard. This goes to the deeper issue that men cannot rely on themselves to have a sane culture. We need help from a higher sourse!
Z Man’s getting psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and psychotherapy mixed up in places. Psychiatrists are physicians mainly prescribe drugs these days and don’t act like therapists. Most practitioners of the many types of psychotherapy, of which psychoanalysis is but one, if the main progenitor, are Ph.D’s, perhaps Psy.D.’s, and maybe the majority with master’s level degrees in counseling that vary by state, not MD’s. Here in California we have the MFT, which stands for Marriage and Family Therapist, not the most accurate title when mostly individual therapy is what’s practiced. We’re talking 50 years and more in the past when most talk… Read more »
You are right. Psychiatrists became drug pushers back in the 60’s-70’s as a reaction to a plethora of less qualified, but probably more competent competitors in “counseling”. The Docs can drug you, the others not.
Nietzsche wrote at the end of the 19th century that there would be two centuries of nihilism ahead.
By that estimation we are only half way through…
So, woke-ism and nihilism are mutually compatible? Consistent? Both are Godless.
What you call Panpsychism and characterize as primitive thought is pat of Western Philosophical thought. Liebnitz basically said that wee can “see” (apprehend) that we are physical objects made of flesh and blood existing in a world of other physical objects. Because the physical object is us, we can also “see” the inside of the object, consciousness, thought, aesthetic sense, morality. The other physical objects around us, the tree, the dog, the gravel in the road; we cannot see the inside of the objects, the consciousness. But would it not be consistent with Occums Razor to assume that absent other… Read more »
interesting, but can’t we tell what’s on their inside by seeing how they behave on the outside?
I am sure I am not the first one to ask this, but I do not have the patience to scroll through a couple of hundred comments . . . but why do you want somebody to buy you a bear?
Hope that’s a typo, or it’s a bruin that’ll bring him to ruin 🙂
It’s official Z had gone black pill. So Z where do you intend to build your off grid compound? I’m going with Appalachia, however up North doesn’t look bad either.
my comment didn’t pass ? First time it happen. Did I wrote something forbidden ?
2 questions, 1 for the Zman, 1 for the crowd. 1-Dear Zman, I’m astonished by your capacity to write 1 paper every day (+ the podcast -which I can’t enjoy because there’s no subtitles, but that’s not the today’s point. I seem to have read that in addition to your writing efforts you had an IRL job. If it is true, where do you find the high energy needed to do so much work ? 2-Dear Zmanreaders, wich are your favorite columnists, outside of Z ? And those you have give up with ? For my part (in alphabetical order)… Read more »
Hmm… think maybe your ungood English has anything to do with why you enjoy reading Y-Arvinator (same as my weakness for dubbed kung-fu flicks from the 70s)?The dude’s oeuvre is an impeccable parody of Medium/Substack avant la lettre.
Dave Cole is quite funny despite obvious sociopathy
I don’t like any of those people except Greg Johnson, even if he sounds like Napoleon Dynamite’s brother, Kip
Also I like Jared Taylor. Of the older guys, he seems the only one with a mind still fresh and able to change with the times.
Kip was a helluva quarterback tho..
Spilt my G20 and Sobieski
Vox Day was my only other required daily reading, but it looks like he was canceled a couple of days ago.
New site for Teddy Beale
Milobookclub.something….🙂
“Marxism” appears 15 times in the comments.
Don’t try to shoehorn every conflict into a Cold War paradigm.
Don’t say that everything you dislike is Marxism. Marxism is confusing enough. The term “Cultural Marxism” is conceals far more than it reveals.
Our elites are not Marxists. They are anti-white.
But they are also Marxist. No, not in the cartoon sense used by conservatives, but in the technical way in which we can understand why they do what they do.
You can have more than one club in the bag.
In what ways are they Marxist? In the Cultural Marxist sense, in that they have transformed the class struggle into a racial in gender struggle? If so, isn’t it clearer to say that they are anti-white male? Explanations that refer back to Marxism only lessens the impact of our current problems. I see dissident right explanations that rely on Marxism like the intractable epicycles of astronomers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle#Epicycles) who tried to retain the idea that the earth was the center of the universe. Our problems are only tangentially related to Marxism. The most direct explanation of our problems is that the… Read more »
I think Marxism is their tool of anti-white bigotry
You are right, it could be anything really, but Marxism is the set of tools they’ve decided on
Based on the fact that Karl komplained about the “reserve army of labor,” i.e. scabs, illegals, and technocratically cultivated un-/underemployment, and karped about the Industrial Revolution in general, I’d say our elites don’t seem too kommitted to the old man’s thoughts on some salient points. Call ’em “Cafeteria Marxists”
“Marxism” has been adapting into a self-serving elite ideology since…Marx.
“The last Christian died on the cross,” Nietzsche said. There is no last Marxist; there’s never been a first one.
Leninism, in contrast, did and does exist. It’s dominated human life for a century, I’d say.
Rigged elections are anti citizen, not just white citizens. A tyrannical government is tyrannical to all citizens, not just white citizens. Criminal income inequality. Economic policies that advantage the rich disadvantage the middle class of all color. We have a govt. that allows renters to stop paying rent. Our schools brainwash our kids with CRT, BLM, transgenderism and Marxism. Censorship applies to all dissenters. The pervasiveness of Marxist and anti-white propaganda. An American Pravda, the NYT. We live in a one party state, supported by the media, headed by a senile Marxist and advised by an American Politburo. Crime in… Read more »
Why I like what’s being called barstool conservatism Not that I’m on board with it, but I like it’s potential to throw a big wrench into the gears It unites American men of all races. The last thing they need. Interesting is that the other day a friend of mine was speaking openly about how letting women get the vote was the cause of so much of our dysfunction. It’s catching on Being critical of womyns , openly stating why you’d never vote for one because of x, y, and z, I would not be surprised in the least if… Read more »
Other than that, everything’s pretty awesome.
From Falcone: “Interesting is that the other day a friend of mine was speaking openly about how letting women get the vote was the cause of so much of our dysfunction. It’s catching on”
I’ve been saying this at my new job, a place where it has never been said before… It seems like it was never even thought before. It is getting traction. It has been much easier to get them to reject the rainbow coalition, the ridicule now travels in both directions.
Funny you should ask. The next two podcasts are on this topic. Cultural Marxism is a real thing that cannot be discounted. Sure, the mouth breathers of Conservative Inc. have soiled the term, but it is an important thing for our side to grasp.
When all you have is a hammer….
But yeah, the Marxism obsession with the American right in general is grating. And foolish.
I think you have a point. Even if the oppressor/oppressed idea comes form Marxism, does it advance our cause? Maybe not.
However, the earth IS the center of the universe.
They are authoritarians, whether fascist, Marxist, or globalist. Why dwell on a single term when the meaning boils down to revolutionaries who wish to destroy your history history? Obviously they are anti-white. You act as if Z hasn’t said so. Your quibble reminds me of Z’s essay this week on conservative “allies” picking fights over little things. Get over it and focus on the enemy.
BUT the Left conquered America with verbal warfare. SO we would do well to copy them.
Marxism, during the Cold War, had to do with economics – “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” The Marxism we experience now is a cultural Marxism adapted from the 20th century’s economic Marxism – “If you have ability, it doesn’t matter. To each according to whether he or she is not a white male.” I mean, did you ever read of Lenin or Marx advocating the subjugation or obliteration of the white race? It would be interesting to know what either of them would think about how their philosophy has been hijacked. Z, as… Read more »
Get it good and hard, that is, as per H. L Mencken.
When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.
G.K. Chesterton, one century ago
He may have been chubby, but he was very frequently correct!
“Psychiatry has fallen out of fashion as it has become obvious that you cannot talk someone out of mental illness.” Psychiatry has fallen out of fashion, because its a scam. The DSM is useless at detecting and labeling discrete mental disorders (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190708131152.htm#:~:text=A%20new%20study%20has%20concluded,identify%20discrete%20mental%20health%20disorders.&text=A%20new%20study%2C%20published%20in,identify%20discrete%20mental%20health%20disorders.) Psychiatrists only know their medical model. They always ignore other peoples behavior in a situation, and only seek to treat a persons reaction brought on by environmental, social, or legal variables. They are primed to view everything as a symptom of a mental disorder. It is a literal Satanic Pseudoscience used as a tool of social control. They… Read more »
“Morning Larks are more apt to adapt to our industrial society. Whereas night owls are not, and are discriminated against for that.”
Night Owl Nationalism!
My body wants to go to bed at 2 AM and get up at 9 AM. I joke that I am descended from night raiders.
I had a job for 9 years where I had to be at work at 6:30 AM but as soon as I was off the chain I was back to my night owl ways.
Thomas Szasz greatly overstates his case. If you don’t think mental illness exists, take a quick trip to any downtown. (They’re particularly thick on the ground in Seattle.)
No he doesn’t. Being homeless isn’t a mental illness. Its a sign someone doesn’t have the resources necessary to raise their station in life. In some instances they have been the victims of severe abuse. In some instances smear campaigns, by low IQ idiots. In some cases, external variables converge to force them into homelessness. Doesn’t mean they are mentally ill. Something Americans refuse to acknowledge exist. People like you are primed to see mental illness everywhere. Doesn’t surprise me as psychiatric language has dehumanized the human condition. You are no longer high energy, you just have Bipolar. You are… Read more »
And in the case of Bipolar 1, many patients labeled that way have been found having low thyroid hormones. Which would mean the patient has an endocrinological problem, not a mental disorder. A thyroid panel is one of the very first things a SERIOUS neuro-psychiatrist would order for you. A sober serious moral ethical [God-forbid CARING] medical professional would order an entire battery of tests before even starting to consider anything in the DSM*. The problem is that the Frankfurt School & its dutiful army of shabbos goyische ghey-ped0-faced hemlock-society sadistically-psychopathic nihilists have intentionally purposefully mindfully with-malice-aforethought infiltrated & seized… Read more »
No doubt there’s much abuse in the field. Still, mental illness is a real thing. And you’re wrong about the homeless. A large fraction of them are mentally ill. To be sure, their setting and history don’t help matters, nor does drug and alcohol abuse. Public service announcement: never, ever, if you have any choice in the matter (i.e. they ain’t family), get involved emotionally (indeed, in any way) with a person with a chronic, serious mental illness. I learned this the hard way, and getting out of such a relationship was very painful. In fact, if you’re not in… Read more »
“And you’re wrong about the homeless. A large fraction of them are mentally ill. To be sure, their setting and history don’t help matters, nor does drug and alcohol abuse.” I guess all those Van Lifers, RVers, and People Like Me, who are all homeless are mentally ill. All the 20,000 odd people in LA County who live in their vehicles are homeless right? INB4 “There homeless by choice.” The massive parts of reality that statement avoids is obvious to anyone who has deconstructed it. We live in an age where the Abusers are allowed to run free, and their… Read more »
To Nunya: >95% of homeless in Seattle are drug addicts.
Some of symptoms of addiction mimic the symptoms of mental illness. But the drugs in this case are the cause not the cure. The cure to homelessness, at least in Seattle, requires addressing drug abuse. Nothing that does not address this issue will solve this problem.
Everyone deserves blame for this problem: drug dealers, drug users, city leaders, politicians, prosecutors, defense attorneys, public health workers, voters etc. All have blood on hands.
Gotta admit, after years ago of reading Bill Bennett/Pete Wehner style neocons sniping over the baleful influence of that particular liberteriun nerd icon, I never actually read anything by Szasz. This is funny because when I saw the frequent GOPe think piece last year about the “intellectual foundation,” lol, of Defund The Po-po, I immediately dismissed not just the target but the writer of said piece; it is a risky, lazy habit of the Internet age to first encounter “foundational” writings of some villain/hero du jour through a grifter’s 50-cent-per-word blog post and believe you know something about the topic.… Read more »
America’s problems with mental illness and homelessness can be traced to one of the first truly bipartisan efforts by the ruling class to fuck the rest of us in the ass. Back in the 1980s the Left-elite wanted to turn the whole society into an experiment to try out their pet theories (like those of Szasz) about there being no such thing as mental illness. They knew this would probably result in ordinary folks wading through human waste on their way to work but hey, fuck those guys right, I went to Harvard! The right-Elite realized at the same time… Read more »
“Back in the 1980s the Left-elite wanted to turn the whole society into an experiment to try out their pet theories (like those of Szasz) about there being no such thing as mental illness.”
Its no pet theory. There’s no blood work or diagnostic test you an give to prove mental illness. Its quackery. Psychiatrists, Psychologists, and Therapists all use the DSM. Even though the pseudopatient study was proven flawed, there’s still merit to it.
In an era of cargo cults, quackery, and superstition, it’s interesting that superstition like the Virgin of Guadeloupe, has proven by far the least harmful, and even beneficial…The Virgin encourages a violent people to be less violent and better behaved, with some success….The cargo cult of vaccination, aimed at a largely harmless disease, has caused trillions of dollars of damage to the world economy and western peoples…The quackery of Freudian psychiatry, parts of which were created to shield Freud’s mentor, who had sex with children in Vienna, from scrutiny, caused immense damage to the culture, but not much short term… Read more »
Investigate the miracle. Its real.
And aren’t they endorsing all these little children to disfigure themselves via “gender transitioning”?
These people are dangerous quacks.
Elron created Scientology for one reason- $$$$. HIs hatred of psychiatry promoted his own version of the same thing. Scientology is 100% verbal therapy, i.e., talking folks out of not only their mental illness, but the contents of their wallet as well. Ascribing a nobler version of Hubtard’s motivations is pure fallacy.
I once got wrapped around the finger for a year by a woman with, in hindsight, very special talents.
Years later I came around a book about “histrionic personality disorder”. She checked literally ALL the boxes.
So I am not so sure about the DSM being worthless…
Eh, human types have been around forever (the drama queen, the stoic man, the life of the party, etc.). The problem with the DSM is that while it is good at listing cohesive descriptive criteria for a “disorder,” it doesn’t ever really say what a a normal, healthy personality would look like, nor does it say how much variance (or what sort of variance) would be normal, expect or tolerable. In essence, the flaw in psychiatry is that it views the human condition, in total, as a disease that needs to be drugged into oblivion.
Hard to see how you can talk about Freud without talking about his Jewishness. It may not be important to you, but it was important to Freud. And then there’s Marx. He may have not been Jew in a religious sense, but he was racially Jewish and you can be damn sure he viewed the world through that lens. Marx’s Father was a Rabbi and his parents didn’t convert till after he died. And there’s zero evidence either of Marx’s parents were believing Chistians – it was all for show.
Freud on his way to America in 1909:
“We are bringing them the plague. And they don’t even know it.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB124959127425412215
And then there are the “contributions” of his nephew, one Edward Bernays. One of his chief books was entitled, Propaganda. He pointed the way to how to undermine a white, gentile, high trust culture.
Why were our defense so weak? protestantism
Nietzsche quote today:
“Among Germans I am immediately understood when I say that theological blood is the ruin of philosophy. The Protestant pastor is the grandfather of German philosophy;”
(From “The Antichrist”)
Busted! Even a professed Atheist, Nietzsche was the son and grandson of Lutheran pastors, so I guess he too was a ruined (or at least, ruinous) philosopher. 😀
Off topic: Any thoughts on the ultra fast collapse of the Afghanistan regime to the Taliban? I think US military pulled out of Bagram less than 5 weeks ago. Now Herat, third largest city in country, has fallen to Taliban (see link). This is fast!
https://www.dw.com/en/afghanistan-taliban-take-control-of-herat-in-major-victory-reports/a-58836723
Just not said is that the Taliban taking back over if we left Afghanistan has been known for at least the last 15 years. The pundits and retired generals on CNN that kept repeating the mantra of the US bringing democracy and freedom knew as well what the logical conclusion would be when the US forces pulled out. Western Civilization and the ideals contained cannot be simply exported to other cultures. It is not just ideas. If that were the case, we could send them the Constitution with the USA part omitted with White-out. Afghanistan will level back to its… Read more »
Correct in all points. The pity of this is that neither Right nor Left is talking about what you so succinctly stated. The people of Afghanistan–and a dozen other regions I can name–don’t give a whit about democracy. It’s not in their genes. No lasting lesson will be learned from this debacle. It took the Russians 10 years to smarten up. 20 for the Americans. Sigh…
Just so, Compsci. And although some of you may get sick of my banging on about the pomos, I must say that they are right about one very important thing: they believed that human rights and democracy were Western constructs. According to the pomos–and for largely linguistic reasons–every culture, i.e. nation, was distinct from every other, and it was impossible for people from one nation to truly understand those from another. And more to the point, it was utter folly for the West to impose alien democracy and so-called “human rights” on other nations.
Based pomo! Seriously I notice this in a lot of the lefty thinking: they start with the ‘ultra-right’ premise and torture the hell out of it until it’s unrecognizable. I strongly suspect they see the truth more clearly than righty does but have a primitive fear of it.
The Afghans retain their original culture, have no interest in democracy, and will never allow the disease of feminism to enter their villages…When the West collapses, Afghanistan will be unaffected…
It helps to understand the role that evolution plays in this example. The peoples that inhabit that region (Afghanistan is an artificial man-made boundary and the more correct differentiation is an environmental consistency boundary) are the end-product of many millennia of natural selection pressures. This has resulted in a unique physiology and associated traits that are endemic to that area. In addition, the local customs & culture is also an end-product of evolutionary forces that ultimately “worked” to enhance survive & thrive success in that particular environment. IOW, the Taliban is attempting to restore the ancient traditions that were necessary… Read more »
Hashish and Opium.
And now Kandahar falls. Afghan government isn’t fighting for sh!t. Where did my $850B in weapons and training go? Everyone in US military over O-6 paygrade resign now!
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/12/taliban-claim-capture-kandahar-grip-on-afghanistan-grows
Afghanistan has always been in the hands of the Taliban.
I once saw a report about a supply convoy that paid off several Taliban checkpoints on its way to a US outpost from Pakistan.
The reporters said that this was the case throughout the occupation.
Someone explain to me what the point of all this was….
Mr. Zman, do you think the English language is fit for philosophy and metaphysics?
I state this because when I compare English with other languages (Arabic, Persian, and Urdu) that I am familiar with, I find English vocabulary wanting in philosophical precision and clarity.
I find great Western philosophical works like Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ more comprehensible in Persian, Arabic, and Urdu than in English.
Funny you should say that because many Germans prefer to read Kant in English.
Because English Kant is Not Kant, and that’s better. He’s translated extremely poorly (or was, back when I had to read him). The similarities of English and German are a translator trap, especially in European philosophy, where every word might be idiomatic. I own about thirty shelves of 20th century avant garde literature, but Thomas Common’s translation of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” is the weirdest book I’ve ever read. It’s…goth kid Conan as zen Shakespeare? If that was the dumbest thing in the world. It’s why American Nietzscheanism was sissy fascism, Leopold & Loeb, and the Church of Satan, and why… Read more »
It’s a poetic language
Things that can be said with precision in one language need layers of color and suggestion and momentary diversion in English, different roads leading to the same place
But in the end, the picture painted in English is usually the more full. Getting straight to the point doesn’t always make a lasting impression. I’d say the beauty of English is that it’s a language of romance for a bucolic and seafaring people
[…] ZMan looks within. […]
And let’s not forget the ass- burger on the Autism bun every child who comes in at below the 49% of the first grade class is diagnosed with. Literally every one I work with has one of those in their family. I’ve got two in mine. I won’t even look at them. “ they wanted it, now their going to get, I don’t like this anymore than you do”. Oh and by the way , staring at a phone 18 hrs a day has nothing to do with it. Said the pipe smoking man in the turtleneck. Same crap in… Read more »
That’s not really new: ADHD. Additionally, public school teachers have been batshit crazy a long time, too.
Really, when the “professional” credentialed class is ranked according to productivity and overall net “benefit” to society. Or in this example, the societal anchors bringing the vessel below waterline, I would say the worst and the dreadfully the most influential are:
Government teachers
Journalists
Helping Profession: Social Workers, psychologists, etc
They all just want to help so, so much. Or, cover for I have no marketable skills whatsoever.
Public school teachers do a disproportionate amount of evil for their numbers and are typically found near the front of any column of advancing Leftist idiots.
I date one once..she was a really hot elementary school teacher. She was dumber than a doornail with the state’s flagship U masters credential. She was also really, really funny, and 2nd graders could really relate to her. Fortunately, she was not political. Unfortunately, she was going to teach whatever she was told to teach. She probably wasn’t even aware of Randi W and its agenda (we can use “it” as an identifying is a pronoun right?) One only need to glance at this naturally childless Teachers Union President to understand that she hates you and your children
And that’s because of the anti-white indoctrination they received in Colleges of “Education.” Education profs are the stupidest on any college campus, and also the most virulently anti-white.
Hopefully this comment will appear right under Ostei’s comment.
About 50% of Negro PhD’s in the USA are awarded in Education* 🙂
*I could not easily confirm this, but did find articles about how under-represented they are in STEM. Wonder why 😀
Would suggest reading Yang today on “Emotional Support Peacocks.” (I thought he was being literary there, but it turns out, some freaks were actually bringing live peacocks into the DMV with them)
Autistic Kid is, while not the most glittery, just another contrived status symbol in this debased society.
It has no fixed meaning, it’s like “racism” or “fascism” or “diversity” or “progress.” Was Adolf H autistic? I want to see many BuzzFeed and Vox explainers on that urgent question
Eventually I’m sure I’m going to need a “therapy rhino”. The therapy of course being watching the rhino destroy, maim, and kill while the snowflakes around me are afraid to say a word for fear of being insensitive and hateful. I’m starting to understand Caligula and the horse a bit.
As I’ve said before, all I ask is that you delay the West’s final solution until I shuffle off. Won’t be long I promise.
Don’t you want to see the thrilling climax?
Probably not going to happen.
The controllers smell blood in the water, which is why they are doubling down on the anti-YT blood libel media campaign and the calls for forced jabs to stay employed, which disproportionately affects YT.
The opeds and other pieces about low jab uptake among the blegh and Hispanic communities are red herrings. That is a secondary or tertiary concern for the controllers.
Tito Perdue, an elderly dissident novelist, proposed a battalion of older men who were willing to die for their people.
They have lived full lives and want to sacrifice for their people.
That is not irrational. A person who has a terminal disease, but can still get around could decide to go out as a suicide bomber if they believed in their cause.
Contact me in about ten years. Don’t make it too complicated.
I might consider a role as an elderly pedestrian who an assailant didn’t know had a a powerful handgun. Think of me as, perhaps, a decrepit version of Charles Bronson in the 1970s movie “Death Wish.” 😀
Speaking of quackery, https://quackwatch.org/ is (surprisingly) still alive!
As I read the article a lyric from that old R Stones tune ran through my mind: “she goes running for the shelter of her mothers little helper”…
It seems highly likely that the legal – and…mmm…not so legal – pharmaceutical business would have had some serious and permanent mind bending effects over the last +/- 100 yrs. The legal stuff alone generating revenue north of an estimated USD$750 B annually. The not so legal stuff no doubt more…much more.
Consumers of hard drugs and alcohol making fun of some poor, White housewife on prescription drugs. Yeah, got it…..
I stated it reminded me.
I did not state I endorsed or approved.
Wasn’t aimed at you, meant to say that the Stone’s(ersatz “Black” Blues Men/Street Fighting Men – yeah, right)ridiculing a Middle Class mom was just another Leftist jab at White culture. All that crap that began Post War and really got rockin’ in the Sixties.
If you listen to the song, it can also be considered a social commentary, very timely I’d say, of the rather vapid lifestyle already widespread by the mid 1960s. About the only thing traditional in the song (implied) is a stay-at-home wife and mother. Nowadays, she wouldn’t even cook instant food, she’d just order GrubHub, Uber Eats or similar.
Here’s the lyrics if you’d like to parse them:
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/rollingstones/motherslittlehelper.html
The Joe Rogan listeners have been going in this direction for a long time. It usually involves mushrooms and some overrated place like Joshua Tree.
Another outstanding topic not found anywhere else on the internet. Allow me to add my 2 cents. First, mental disease is metastasizing in our modern highly affluent culture because our environment no longer culls these mutations at birth or in early life. Second, feminism has literally manufactured an epidemic of mental disease in modern women by coercing them into shirking their ancestral biological role as mother & primary nurturer of children. A woman who has failed in this essential biological role is going to feel bad about herself (its in the DNA), but that feeling will be in conflict with… Read more »
I love how effortlessly based some of the comments are here. I really could learn a thing or three from some of you.
Outstanding comment.
Let me add my two cents to your first observation: our environment encourages and enhances mental diseases.
It’s amazing how many bad mothers become depressed.
I took your advice…25 years ago.
The panoply of anti-rational nonsense in our age is indeed extensive, and Z has touched upon some of it. However, it’s most absurd and prevalent forms are the denial of biological sex and race. Denial is a river leftists perpetually seek for ablutions, much as Hindus wallow in the feculent Ganges. They cannot tolerate the physical limitations our world imposes upon their mad utopian fantasies, so they deny things such as the scientific reality of sex and race, all the while cloaking the denial in science. The smug, pseudoscientific conceit of the Leftist conceals their complete lack of awareness of… Read more »
Great comment. The Left is at war with reality.
Roger Kimball published a book called Experiments against Reality: the Fate of Culture in the Postmodern Age. I have not read it, but the title is wonderful.
Unfortunately so is the Right in many aspects. Currently harping on the Afghanistan bailout are the Neocon talking heads complaining bitterly about how we are leaving the Afghanistan government to the tender mercies of the Taliban. Guess we should have spent another $1T and a few more thousand American lives for folk who partake in child pedophilia with their “dancing boys”. Within months of leaving, Afghanistan will be right back where we found it–in the hands of the Taliban with all that entails.
Months? That seems overly optimistic. Although the ol’ Joe is sending the cavalry.
And which is why it’s virtually pointless to even try to have a discussion with them.
It’s an ancient disease: The theological instinct of German scholars made them see clearly just what had become possible again…. A backstairs leading to the old ideal stood open; the concept of the “true world,” [Plato’s “reality”, the Ideal] …Out of reality there had been made “appearance”; an absolutely false world, that of being, had been turned into reality…. — said a certain 19th century syphilitic who Must Not be Named 🙂 The idea goes back at least to Plato, c. 4 century BC, in his “Real” (I call it a mental reality) as opposed to his “apparent” (I call… Read more »
The closest the quacks came to actual science was when the Victorian era phrenologists started measuring African skulls and estimating brain size as compared to other races.
Phrenology made outlandish claims about what could be known from examining peoples’ skulls, and lost credibility as a result.
But cranial capacity/brain size is indeed correlated to intelligence. Asians on average have bigger brains than Whites, and Blacks have the smallest of all, which correlates with average IQ differences:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S016028960200137X
Interestingly, still done today by archeologists on extinct humans/proto-humans, but not on existent humans—least they be cast into the void! 😉
Exactly! When they find an ancient skull, and use it to determine what type of human it belonged to, that’s A-OK. But suggest that there are group racial differences in skull size which correspond with group differences in intelligence: ‘Off with your head!’
Yep, funny how brain sizes of all these extinct humanoids could vary in size and be correlated to how these humanoids created tools, hunted, and survived natural harsh conditions, like the Ice Age–yet, magically, homo sapien sapien, converged on a one size fits all brain.
I always liked Terry Pratchett’s description of a reverse phrenologist.
You told him what personality traits you wanted and he made them come true with a large mallet.
The quest for meaning in the present sense is really just wondering why you have all the stuff you have. It’s one of those modern luxuries made possible by material abundance. There’s a conceit to it, because spiritual meaning is essentially embracing mystery and suffering, and that has to be jettisoned to believe you can find meaning in yourself alone. Your material self, which is all of your possessions. Like the great philosopher Sting said, we’re spirits in a material world— both at the same time. Seems impossible to keep the middle. We’re always swinging back and forth until the… Read more »
I’ve often thought that when it comes to our material stuff, we all have a version of “survivor syndrome.” Those who survive plane crashes, battles, etc., I’m told, are almost always beset by a serious existential crisis: Why me? Why did I live, but the guy next to me get vaporized? I’m no better or worse than he was… Since there’s no answer that doesn’t involve a) divine intervention or b) the cold, merciless logic of randomness, and since we’re biologically incapable of handling b), inability or unwillingness to embrace a) really screws you up. Without constant reminders of the… Read more »
I went through that. Didn’t feel like a thief, only undeserving. So I made stupid choices and suffered until I realized there was no spiritual value in self-caused suffering.
That’s where I get my understanding of the bourgeois, btw. The self-hating squish, the LARPing revolutionary.
Fwiw my best answer at this point is to accept one’s fate. Strangely enough, there seems to be a lot of overcoming in that acceptance.
As I often say, Nietzsche was a genius!
Also (apologies for obnoxiously touting my beliefs) imo Nietzsche was a deeply Christian writer in spite of his best efforts to the contrary. Where he erred, as many do imo, was in getting hung up on the cross and missing the empty tomb. Or maybe it was the syphilis 🙂
He was of Polish extraction, which created some cognitive dissonance within his Protestant family. He must have wondered how in the hell he ended up where he did.
You indeed are correct. As I noted in another post, he was the son of at least two generations of Lutheran pastors. Part of his education would have been in the church. He studied enough at University to become a philologist and briefly taught as a professor. Clearly he was a brilliant mind and from the Christian point of view, was a turncoat. Naturally, his formation informed his very insightful writing, which often cites scripture to make his points. Definitely not recommended reading for anyone wishing to become (or remain) a Christian 😀
He understood as well as anyone I’ve read that Christianity had been subverted. Back in the 19th century no less! He was very anti-subversion. Why he also became anti-Christian puzzles me. Seems like throwing the baby out with the bath water.
You’ll pardon me, but it appears that based on your statement, you know litttle about Buddhism. If there is one thing life is not if you practice Zen, say, that would be “boring”.
Buddhism inspired a man to feed himself to a tiger. Can’t say if he was bored, but clearly he didn’t think there was anything better to do with his life 🙂
My FIL was a Psychologist who spent most of his time in the talk therapy sessions you describe. One interesting part of his strategy was that he would pore down into their family tree to ascertain possible genetic or upbringing issues in the family. Say dad was an alcoholic, mom was a hypochondriac, or an uncle was schizophrenic, he would ascertain if the same mental ticks were affecting his abilities to live a decent life. He was not licensed to dispense meds, but it did allow creating coping mechanisms and strategies to be able to navigate life. He also worked… Read more »
Chet Rollins, Alcoholism and schizophrenia— along with a host of other psychological conditions— are indeed genetically influenced (though not determined): a person with a history of schizophrenia in their family is indeed more likely to become schizophrenic, compared to someone with no family history of it. Most human traits— in fact, every trait they’ve studied— has been similarly shown to have a genetic component. And of course, genetics and experience— ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’— usually go hand-in-hand: a person with a violent impulsive parent is not only going to inherit their genes for violence and impulsivity, they’re going to be raised… Read more »
And the biggest meaning people found was conspicuous consumption (not the TB kind). Purchase a new phone or gender id and show it to the world. The marxist materialist world view led to the layman sense of materialism. One of the biggest accomplices was Freud’s nephew – Edward Bernays. His ability to capitalize on the world of 20th century western excess through marketing is possibly the most influential social engineering device of the past 100 years.
Lolz, at one point Duke U offered a generous mental health benefit.
Soon, every Tom, Dick and Tracy had a psychiatrist/ therapist. They had to retreat because I started to eat into even their deep pockets.
Panpsychism is straight out of Marx, too. Obviously someone in The Hive busted out its copy of “The Fundamentals of Marxist-Leninist Philosophy.” Mine is the 4th edition, I think, published in the early 70s for the instruction of fraternal socialist comrades worldwide, but you can find similar online. It says “consciousness is merely a property of highly organized matter.” It *must* be, comrade, because all is material and thus there is nothing more to this world than shoes, shit, and bread (I’m paraphrasing). These clowns have never had an original idea in their lives. At least the OG clowns found… Read more »
” they assume that anything they don’t know by definition doesn’t exist”
They also think things beyond their ken are intrinsically evil or otherwise they would know them. Today’s leftists are too moronic to live.
Panpsychism is a technical philosophical solution to a technical philosophical problem, the mind-body problem. The problem is becoming more acute as we’re now, perhaps, close to the time when heaps of semiconductors might actually be said to be thinking. People have been beavering away at this problem for centuries, without apparent success. Panpsychism is a way of saying that, hey, there is no problem, and simply walking away. Some philosophers are pretty adept at declaring a problem a non-problem.
Where there is no solution, there is no problem.
Pet rocks…….
as I was telling my dad the other day – it’s not so much HR as such. It’s that HR used to have a specific goal with the assumption that the other people in the corporation had differing goals. Now it’s like HR and the C-suite are converging.
Likewise, it’s one thing if there’s bs pseudoscience festering in therapeutic circles. But again the assumption was that if you wanted more serious research – that’s what medicine and the hard sciences were for. But what if there’s an increasing convergence between therapeutic culture and medicine? Z wrote about it here: https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=21333
I know psychiatrists — not psychologists; these are the ones with MDs — who claim to believe the grossest psuedo-Lamarckism, regarding the “trauma of slavery” etc. Apparently that gets in your DNA (as opposed to The Vaxx, which totally doesn’t).
MDs. Contemplate that on the tree of woe.
I think part of it is that psychologists are more pragmatic than psychiatrists. Psychiatrists are more the dreamers. They wanted the whole enchilada: Mercedes, trophy wife, tweed jackets with leather patches on elbows, etc. Psychologists just wanted a job. They are the ones that work for the county, running rehab programs for substance abusers. But, the scary thing about psychiatrists is that they have a license to prescribe drugs. And psychiatric drugs not only rarely work, but the side effect profile is unbelievable. For every Lithium prescription that sort of works, you have 20 prescriptions of antipsychotics and antidepressants, which… Read more »
Part of the problem with these psychoactive drugs is that they are misprescribed. They work best—if at all—in a short term basis while one attempts to change the underlying conditions in the patients life. As with pain med’s, they often become a crutch of diminishing effectiveness. In there lies the rub. We all want instant results and a pill for all that ails us. Getting truly better is a hard effort and we are lazy/weak.
Oh god, the happy pills. In my teaching days, which ended several years ago, every third college girl was on SSRIs. Student health handed out benzos like candy. Ambien and Ritalin everywhere, to “treat” all the BS “learning disabilities” they all claimed they had. Half a given classroom was on enough shit to boggle a horse. I can’t even imagine what it’s like now.
I was a Pharmacist in my pre-retirement days. The last 15 years of my career was spent doing Nursing Home consulting. You wouldn’t believe the number of residents that were on antipsychotics, like Quetiapine or Risperidone. The detail reps (sales people for the drug companies) assured everyone how safe and effective they were, and how grandma would benefit by them. After awhile, everyone noticed that grandma was a vegetable. The nursing homes didn’t mind because she was no longer a problem and required no staff intervention. Eventually the State and Federal governments started to require a specific psychiatric diagnosis to… Read more »
Severian, it might be better today. Really. The Fed’s are up everyone’s ass in the medical field these days. I’m not for that either, but as I’ve noted here before, during some recent hospital events, the institutions were pretty up front with me as to how and why and for how long they’d prescribe opioids. Indeed, one hospital said I’d need to visit their pharmacy for a pain pill–whether hospitalized or at home. No take home and never for more than 10 days.
My doctor does not treat mental patients/problems, nor chronic pain patients. Fed oversight just ain’t worth it.
How long until medications are prescribed to cure racism?
You’d best pray to every god you’ve ever heard of that it’s only pills. Google up “sluggish schizophrenia,” then learn that they’re already trying out “Patriot syndrome,” and behold your future.
On the upside, I’d like to meet some of you in person, and we’ll all have plenty of time to get acquainted in the labor camps.
More likely, whites will be forced to endure an anti-racism inoculation along with the interminable anti-Kovid boosters. And I’m not joking.
I don’t know how familiar you are with the controversy around the latest DSM, Severian, but basically every crime was an identified mental illness: “shoplifter syndrome” and so forth. Many left the APA over it.
So no doubt the inverse will happen and CRT criticism will be a committable illness. See you in the padded room.
If the trauma of slavery–or some other form of trauma–gets into your DNA, then we’re all equally afflicted because, if you go far enough back into your genealogy, you will find profound woe and victimhood.
At any rate, however, African in general were better off as slaves in America than they were as free men in Africa, so the point is moot.
“There are people still clinging to things like Freudian psychoanalysis, but people with some knowledge of the human science know it is quackery. In fact, the entire enterprise of talk therapy is just pseudoscience, like astrology or tarot card reading.” What I always found funny about idiots embracing Freud and his ilk was their cataloging of what dreams “mean”. Apparently, images in dreams have specific meanings for everybody. There may be more than one possibility of the meaning of a cigar and other things, but I always wanted to know who gave Sigmund the “The Complete and Fully Documented Encyclopedia… Read more »
Interpreting dreams is as old as the Bible itself. Freud was just the latest in a long line of interpreters starting with Joseph.
Joseph, and Daniel too, were just much better at it
Yeah, but God had a hand in that. Fraud just made the shit up as he went along.
I find Carl Jung to be more annoying in this regard (dream interpretation).
Panpsychism is the idea that consciousness is inextricably linked to all matter and simply grows stronger as a physical object become more complex. That means gravel in your driveway has a consciousness, just less complex than your consciousness. It’s a distortion of the truth that all creation was brought into being through God’s Fiat, his Divine Will, and that everything that exists, from hadrons, bosons and gluons to galaxies, planets and you are simply forms of the Divine Will. DNA is the unique 4-letter language the Divine Will employ s to allow morphogenetic expression of life on Earth. Atheists should… Read more »
Freudianism and Marxism are still the dominant ideologies of faculty in the humanities. Although nowadays, it is cultural marxism, which is more race oriented, than orthodox marxism, which is class oriented.
“Panpsychism is the idea that consciousness is inextricably linked to all matter and simply grows stronger as a physical object become more complex. That means gravel in your driveway has a consciousness, just less complex than your consciousness.” Panpsychism is madness. Consciousness is not in trees, and rocks, and I’m afraid it’s even worse than that.- Consciousness is not even in you. The last 40 years of quantum mechanics , double slit, entanglement, quantum eraser, ++ experiments are suggests s type of idealism is coming to smash the materialists. The universe looks more like the mind of God, and matter… Read more »
It’s all a mirage, huh?
This is a very old idea, as I’m sure you know
There is enough evidence and everyday things to suggest it’s not all a mirage.
Let me ask you, even if speaking rhetorically, if you are sitting next to your cat and you die all of a sudden, does he disappear and his existence erased? What about your children?
Maybe we old lib arts students can be of a little help to the STEM guys For my senior thesis I wrote about John Updike’s novel Roger’s Version. It was about a computer geek, highly intelligent, trying to prove Gods existence through a massive university computer. It’s a sympathetic portrait of this guy, but also about a Roger, a believer. Very good book as I remember and was thought provoking to my younger mind. I’m sure it still holds up. You may find it a good read. But it’s Updike, so you have to like artful literature and not very… Read more »
All the empirical data in the world does not resolve the mind-body problem, because the mind-body problem is not an empirical problem. And as far as quantum mechanics goes, there are multiple, mutually inconsistent, “interpretations” of quantum mechanics. The physicists are no more able to agree than are the philosophers.
Descartes solved the mind body problem, remember? It’s the pineal gland! 🙂
As my Early Modern Phil professor said, “to the inflamed imagination, the pineal gland does look like a little man.”
Are you familiar with Bernardo Kastrup? This sounds much in line with his works. Which is a good thing.
Very much aligned with Kastrup. The test of reality must be your experience of yourself, not what you have been taught. No one has ever experienced anything outside of awareness (just another word for consciousness). Your entire experience, is a little bundle of thoughts, sensations, and perceptions (hearing seeing tasting smelling touching). Most people think they are a collection of thoughts. But thought doesn’t know anything. Take the thought “the sky is blue”. Does that thought have any ability to understand this conversation we are having? No, thoughts, like sensations and perceptions know nothing, they have to be known, and… Read more »
This is the fundamental insight in the Hindu Vedanta non-dualist philosophy traced out in the Upanishads, the unity of Atman-Brahman, the direct experience of which is attainable through meditation or spontaneous mystical experience.
The Upanishads, once translated from the Sanskrit, made quite an impression in the West. Schopenhauer was certainly familiar with them, as were many others subsequently.
They are worthy of serious study, along with such other works as the Bhagavad Gita, in which the pathways, or yogas, to experience of the Divine may be pursued by people of different natures and capabilities.
capabilities… are described.
Ah, if only it were that simple 😀 It’s a fascinating question, for meditation or reflection, something like “What is the self? What, precisely, is this thing, the ‘I’?” I don’t offer you any answers, but it’s a question that is not easily answered. In fact, it seems to resist any easy answers. Try it and see! Even Nietzsche treats it, but doesn’t reach conclusions. He’s just sowing the seeds of philosophical doubt. During my readings about Buddhism, I hoped to find out what the “self” really is. I learnt enough that Buddha has a very clever answer. His purpose… Read more »
It may be of interest that David Skrbina, whose book “The Jesus Hoax” (tldr: the dirty Jews made it all up) has been bouncing around the Dissident Right (you can read my review at Counter-Currents and his response), is a proponent of panpsychism (he has a book tracing the idea through history, so it’s not a “new” idea in any sense). Panpsychism is an attempt to solve “the hard problem of consciousness” (there is no way, even in principle, to construct consciousness out of pure materialism). It’s wrong, but only because it’s a form of materialism as well. The real… Read more »
IS is. Awareness and consciousness are not synonymous. Consciousness depends upon the reflexive inner dialogue, awareness simply IS.
Quantum physics (or any other field of study) will never confirm the mystery, because our dual/simultaneous being of matter and energy cannot reduce IS to a cognitive or verbal construct that simply IS, bey9nd space and time. For my money, the best book on this is “Wholeness and the Implacate (that’s the correct spelling) Order”, by the late David Bohm, an eminent physicist indeed.
Implicate Order. Bohm’s book was one of the keys to my understanding of the Divine Will. How reality that we can perceive is constantly unfolding (explicate) from a hidden implicate (hidden) order.
Panpsychism is one of the challenges to the reigning secular religion of reductive materialism (i.e. the notion that “everything” can be explained by the actions and interactions of physical matter, down to and beyond subatomic particles). Botanical scientist Rupert Sheldrake rejects panpsychism but puts forth a theory of “morphic fields” as a possible foundation for understanding observations (e.g. how the Tarantula Hawk wasp does what it does) that cannot be adequately explained (at least not at this point) by reductive materialism. (The fact that Sheldrake’s TEDx talk was suppressed by the TED organization is a point in his favor.)
Say what you will about The Enlightenment, but darn it, our civilization had men wiping out disease, breaking the speed of sound, cracking atoms and walking on the moon.
We are all called to respect our ancestors, but my father and grandfather’s generation were like unto gods.
Enlightenment was 90% good but the 10% bad, namely the idea that everyone could become an Englishman, is going to wipe out civilization
Its certainly going to wipe out England.
………………………………You first.
Projection on your part,American.
The English have never believed that everyone is secretly English and just need a good dose of bombs to nudge them in the right direction.
Maybe it’s a republic trait as the French seem to share your optimism.
You can’t tell that it’s an expression and not to be taken literally?
A way of saying that the Enlightenment held that universally all men were essentially the same, that Enlightenment principles were universal
Not exactly rocket science, mate
A good book on this, now on Kindle, is John Murray Cuddihy’s “he Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Lévi-Strauss and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity”
Jack: Yes, Cuddihy’s work is excellent. Believe it or not, got it thru inter-library loan a number of years ago. I’m sure they’ve since removed it from whatever collection and burned it.
“Covid is mutating because it is offended by our vaccines.”
Well, yes, it is—in a sense. One theory I tend to subscribe to is that our massive and indiscriminate vaccination program is pressuring the virus to mutate, or at least provide an environment that supports and spreads mutation. The test of this is what we seem to be seeing now: mutation, after mutation, all more resistant to the current “vaccines”, to be followed by “booster” shots, which are in reality updated mRNA concoctions derived from the latest mutation(s).
As with the flu vaccine, this race can never be won.
Its not theoretical its known as Marek’s.
Freud was a coke head quack with an Oedipus complex.
Got thrown out of a head shrink session many years ago after I told Karen that the before Prozac (Pamelor?) pills were some of the worst things ever.
It turned out to be a turning point or fork in the road for good.
The medical field was conquered as part of the Long March as well and avoid it if you can.
Cue cutesy Tik Tok videos of “heroic” nurses dancing during the dastardly Black Death redux in a hospital so quiet you can hear a pin drop.
People are getting dumber and pet dogs and cats becoming smarter
My dog has a superior outlook on how to live and thrive than anyone in authority. Plants, the same. Want to see what it takes to never give up on life? Look to your plants in the garden. Or driveway. You can suffocate grass with a foot of concrete and it never gives up reaching for the sun.
But note there was always some resistance to the quackery. Vladimir Nabokov, for instance, called Freud the Viennese Witch Doctor. Nabokov born in 1899 for reference.
Indeed.
Many years ago walking through the streets of Dubrovnik, I noticed how savvy the street/alley cats were. They scared the hell out of any dog that got close. Saw one bulldog go in for an investigation, got swiped across it’s nose, and backed off. Saw it a number of times.
I suppose in hindsight a comparison between gangs of alley cats sucker-punching more docile and innocent creatures could apply to a particular group with whom we see the same behaviours…
I am routinely outwitted by my dog. I spend more time coming up with ever more elaborate “agility” stuff to play with him, than actually playing with him. Now it’s possible I’m dumb for a human, but that’s still pretty smart for a dog.
The “IQ guy” in me is demanding I point out that in living memory there were people like Nabokov—great elite minds, celebrity geniuses—and now there aren’t. Something hit us in the head and brain-damaged us. We’re good at math, still, but there have always been autistic dorks. Maladjusted goofballs like Yarvin and Houellebecq are the only “public intellectuals” who even slightly resemble the real ones of just fifty years ago. A Nabokov-like being existing today is *unimaginable.* Whatever happened to us, it was so big (and now we’re so dumb) we can’t see it.
Part of it, I think, is that it just isnt in our cultural repertoire anymore. There are no Medici anymore, either, though even middle class people theoretically have the money to make it happen. I couldn’t have my living room ceiling frescoed even if I wanted to. Who would do the work, or even know how to start figuring it out? I could “afford” to hire an artist (let’s stipulate), but who? And where? And how to make sure that if I did find one, they wouldn’t gender-swap Adam and give the Hand of God long painted tranny nails?
Houellebecq’s latest book – “Serotonin” – addresses the medication/shrink racket pretty well (morbidly and mordantly). In the end, the age-old benefits of family/God/community shine through the fog of medication.
Very true, Hemid
We do seem to have hit a wall
While pet-sitting a neighbor’s dog recently, I noticed a perfect anthill cone atop an otherwise flawless concrete driveway. 😀
Aristocratic Victorians, including the royals, actually got the surgery and carried colostomy bags under those fine clothes. That’s how batsh*t the elite quackery can get.
Gwyneth Paltrow’s vagina-scented candles don’t, er, hold a candle to ’em.
Not to be sniffed at, you cheeky lads.
Let’s never forget Rasputin
And today with have black girl magic
We human beings evolved to be pattern-seeking primates: noticing patterns in the world around us definitely added to our chances of survival, and thus was selected-for by the forces of evolution. Starting around a couple hundred thousand years ago, our human ancestors had brains roughly as big as ours; so they weren’t dummies by any means. But way back when, they had no accumulation of facts to build on, as we do today; so their pattern-seeking brains were forced to work with what they had, and came up with a variety of explanations, basically concocted out of the blue: religions.… Read more »
“the fact that much of our cognitive activity is unconscious, and the fact that our psyches are made up of competing drives, many of which are in conflict with each other.”
Strong grounds alone for the layman to reason as to why we’ve not created a true AI yet. And never will.
Yes, but as with chess playing computers, you might overcome the complexity of thought through brute force.
On an 8×8 matrix though. Only so many possible combinations. I’ve noticed that when I play the jukebox and it comes up with suggestions, it’s always wrong Because there are simply too many variables. Example, one day I wanted to hear men singing with deep voices. Then I wanted to hear men with tenor voices. One day I wanted to hear saxophones. This spanned all kinds of musical genres and eras, but because my first play was Waylon it went where you know it would. I know this is not the best example because the AI on a jukebox is… Read more »
Compsci: I do not think this true. One can get a Grandmaster level chess machine from brute force. In fact, this is the only way that it can be done. But an actual human consciousness via brute force? Never. I simply cannot see how it could be done. Claude Shannon was the first black man who thought deeply about how to build a chess computer and machine intelligence. He discussed to categories: Type ‘A’, which was brute force and Type ‘B’, which required ‘intelligence’ (whatever that meant). With the advent of cheaper hardware, all the bodies involved in chess computation… Read more »
What you say is the same said of the chess playing computer—until the world champion chess player was defeated.
I like to imagine the same thing, that I’m unique—of infinite possibilities wrt thought and action. But perhaps we are not?
CompSci: Can’t reply directly, so have replied to myself. Anyway: “What you say is the same said of the chess playing computer—until the world champion chess player was defeated.” You’re right, of course. But even then, the brute force version of the problem was tangible. Your average science guy could reason about how it ought to be done. The same could not be said then for a true AI, and it cannot be said now. How, where, would one start? Oddly enough it was the success of this approach which convinced many researchers to follow brute force and machine learning… Read more »
OrangeFrog, I have no thoughts on my uniqueness. I’m really a sham philosopher with only a few formal courses under my belt and really not smart enough to be a philosopher, hence my moniker, Compsci.
Let me just admit that the “Turing Test” has not been met yet. So that’s a point in your favor.
I don’t know the formal philosophy terms, but I’ll give it a try. For all its seeming miraculous powers, the human brain is simply a complex pattern recognition device, an analog computer if you like. No, we can’t build one now, maybe never. But we can model one. Reductionism has its place. Fact is, the brain is composed of billions of neurons, each of which has more or less predictable qualities, linked together by more-or-less understood means. Point: all the above could, in theory, be modeled in 1:1 detail in hardware or software. Yes, we are just machines. Very sophisticated… Read more »
The panpsychos would like a word with you. If consciousness arises out of organized matter we simply need the right kind of computer to bring out a conscious machine. Perhaps the current method of sending digital data through tiny switches can’t harness the phenomenon.
But I don’t really think this way anymore since I stopped taking drugs.
I can tell you how desperate some of the theories about an AI are. A while back I read a book by some fancy-pants professor in this field, maybe a neuroscientist. One of his lines of reasoning was that consciousness ‘just happens’.
That’s right. He suggested that at a certain point, complex systems (The Internet was his example) just ‘get conscious’. What a cop out. It just happens! Marvellous! Well, let us assemble all the widgets and just wait and see…
Gonna be waiting a long time, lads. A long time.
Orange Frog,
Yeah, as you probably know, whether or not AI duplicating human consciousness is possible is a hot topic in the field, about which the best minds differ.
I tend to agree with you: our human consciousness is grounded in experiences and emotions, and value judgements; so it’s hard to see how it could ever be duplicated by strictly logical reasoning.
If AI is to ever reach a certain potential, using only binary code will not suffice, no matter how much raw power is employed. A visual illustration is a screen with pixels, no matter how many pixels there are you still cannot replicate a true curve or non 45-degree diagnoal, it will always have a set of squares at its core. It’s the gap between the digital and the analog where the latter can get into the in-between spaces that digital can only approximate Needed is a computing system that is more organic and replicative of nature itself. If that’s… Read more »
Frank Herbert’s mentats, along with other peoples found in his Dune books are of interest. Under the conditions imposed by the Butlerian Jihad, the attempt to shut out quality- based mentation in preference to quantity-based “mentation” resulted in humans embracing quality-based mentation. Machine-based counterfeit mentation was tossed, and humans tose to the occasion. I found this interesting in the ways in which it played out with cultures drawing upon spiritual traditions, and consciously rejecting materialism as their basis.
Why I don’t buy evolution in total If we already had the brainpower to invent a wheel, just that it was untapped, then why did we evolve to have the brainpower to begin with? How were we selecting for intelligence leading up to our inventiveness if there was nothing to invent for thousands of years? Doesn’t add up. I also notice people like Steve sailer are a lot like followers of Freud. He will try to explain everything through the prism of natural selection. Natural selection is his Freudian psychoanalysis and answer to everything. It gets old, but everything he… Read more »
No, no, no Falcone.
Your understanding of the world and reasoning is wrong! You simply need to reduce everything to more charts, graphs, tables and averages… then it’ll all be good!
Dogs rightfully see a piece of paper with a graph on it and piss all over it
There’s your natural selection, Steve
Falcone, There’s no doubt that over the long term, ancestral human brains have gotten bigger over time: the fossil record shows it. Evolutionary theory claims that brainpower evolved in the course of meeting specific challenges. How would you explain the increasing size of human (homo sapien) brains over time? The DNA and bone trail shows humans leaving out of Africa and populating the rest of the world. Would you deny that? Evolutionary theory/natural selection claims that it was the constant challenges of encountering and mastering new environments which propelled human evolution. It’s why people up north tend to be smarter:… Read more »
How would I explain it?
Who the hell knows? But looking to evolutionary theory to explain everything is like using a car mechanic’s tools to rough frame a house. It has utility value in a specific set of circumstances but proves inadequate and has limitations in others. The problem is that people think this particular tool set can fix everything, then you get a house that falls down because no one had a hammer.
But way back when, they had no accumulation of facts to build on, as we do today
On an individual basis so-called primitives probably had more facts available to them than any modern bozo. In addition to an awareness and knowledge of their immediate surroundings, primitive man had the time and inclination to reflect on his place in the universe, something that moderns seldom engage in. Pre-literates are famous for having prodigious memories and their survivors are amazed at the forgetfulness of the moderns with whom they are associated.
nailheadtom,
All true: early humans had an understanding and intimate connection with the natural world that we moderns lack. There’s no doubt they knew plenty that we don’t. And that their memories were phenomenal compared to ours.
What I was referring to was the cultural inheritance of facts that every schoolkid learns. Human knowledge is cumulative, especially after the invention of the printing press.
In that sense, even moderately-intelligent modern humans know true facts about the Universe that Plato and Aristotle and Leonardo da Vinci didn’t.
Competing drives. … the spirit is wiling but the flesh is weak. St. Paul said it 1900 years earlier
c matt,
Indeed: radically-different (and mutually-opposing) contexts, but both expressing the same truth about human experience.
What’s true is true
Those over the age of forty or so will remember when people regularly went to see a psychiatrist to discuss their troubles.
Depiction of neurotics on a psychiatrist’s couch on black and white television sit-coms had nothing to do with popular culture. It was comedy, a specialty of Woody Allen at it’s height, and a satire on east coast life, particularly Manhattan. There’s never been a time when a significant portion of any population anywhere regularly went to see a shrink.
Perhaps not, I suspect a majority of the population don’t see MD’s either. However, after WWII the popularity of psychoanalysis grew and became part of the popular culture. As pointed out, aided by the popular media. To support this assertion, look up and watch the old 50’s sci-fi movie, “Forbidden Planet”. It completely depends on a general layman’s understanding of Freudian psychoanalysis for the plot.
It completely depends on a general layman’s understanding of Freudian psychoanalysis for the plot.
Let me see if I can find a 75 year-old general layman and have him explain Freudian psychoanalysis to me.
In the 50’s Hollywood bet a movie budget upon the underlying plot understanding (perhaps flawed) of the movie going public’s knowledge of psychoanalysis. It would seem strange to do so if the concept was unknown/alien to the general audience and relegated solely to a few academics in the university. But yes, the concepts of Id and Ego were generally known as was the concept of the mind not being completely and directly under our control. Freud was a famous personality prior to WWII, and perhaps second only to Einstein as a renown “scientist”. It also didn’t hurt that much of… Read more »
Other than that, everything’s pretty awesome.
You want to fuck your mother and kill your father. it’s a jew thing..
Er, “Oedipus the King” by Sophocles? Last I checked, the ancient Greeks weren’t Jewish. Although it is true that via a philosophical miscegenation, one of his fellow Hellenes (Plato) and Judaism (St. Paul) was born a new, popular religion 😀
Yes, seeing a shrink seemed to be a habit of Jews and single women based on my experience. The women wanted to complain and a shrink had to listen. Shrinks were looked down on in the working class world of my youth.
There are a lot of misconceptions about the 60s and 70s among the right such as all the boomers were hippies when most were working class and Nixon won the youth vote
My Comment: In high school (mid ’70s) many of us used sessions with the “resource counselor” as an easy way to get out of class and to shoot the shit. I don’t believe anyone ever took it seriously.
Things that will help males cure depression/other psychological ailments: – working out – having a goal – being part of a community with similar goals/values – connection with God – strong friend/family connections – sunlight and healthy eating Basically everything our “primitive” ancestors did – although the physical workout was usually on the job, rather than at the gym. Taking SSRIs won’t help. In cases of severe suicidal depression, they’re useful, but that’s about it. SSRIs mask the problem. Depression is your brain telling you that your lifestyle sucks, basically. Talking to leftist quacks doesn’t help either. I was talking… Read more »
You basically explained why elites of 19th century & current ones bought into crazy ideas such as marxism & critical race theory.
The moment the european elites stopped being real men they immediately adopted j*uwish behaviour & started acting like merchant oligarchs.They basically lost their connection to nature/God & they’re FAGGOTS, no martial spirit whatsoever.
Imagine a j*uw explaining psychoanalysis to Charlemagne, he’d probably lose his head. Vlad’s grandson fought off 6 assassins by himself, killed off 2 of them, those men didn’t play around or cared to listen to progressive mumbo jumbo.
President Andrew attacking his wannabe assassin is also a good one.
Let me add a caveat to your list, which otherwise I am in total agreement with Working out is not good if you’re doing heavy weightlifting. It will eventually aggravate your joints to the point where you have a lifetime of joint pains and problems Do things more natural and if you are going to jog don’t do it on paved streets but on dirt trails or the beach. If lifting weights, stick with barbell exercises. Best exercise is swimming. Talk about feeling good?! After a good romp in the pool or ocean and swimming around getting very little crevice… Read more »
Swimming’s great. Used to do it all the time. Then the shamdemic meant I had to book times to go and all that crap.
Now? Light calisthenics/stretching and James LaFond’s shadow boxing drills. Can do that at home. And in a prison cell, for that matter.
100% Exercise, relationships, diet, and sunlight are magic.
In RE: Alcohol
When I was a kid, I thought coffee was the “adult” beverage.
When I was a teen, I thought alcohol was the “adult” beverage.
Now I’m an adult, and I’ve learned that WATER is the “adult” beverage.
No you were right the first time with coffee/tea 😉
Martin had more sense and fewer neurosis’s than Frasier n Nels combined.
“The unhappy wife spending more time at church did more for her wellbeing than hours with a quack and an eventual divorce. The peace of knowing that after this life, there is a next life of eternal bliss did more for the psyche of regular people than handfuls of anxiety drugs”
Completely true, seen with my own eyes multiple times.
I do believe there is a romantic side to humans which needs to be fed constantly otherwise they become miserable goblins, i guess a religion of love like christianity soothes the souls of many people.
My grandfather used to tell my grandma to get that picture of a Jesus out of the hallway, it was the one we’ve all seen where Jesus is this gorgeous guy with long brown hair. Romantic indeed. I wonder how many Christian women kept the faith because Jesus was their dream guy.
The Covid hoax has neatly brought together all the quackery and organizational corruption in modern society especially SCIENCE! The idea that we will all die if we don’t wear masks that were invented for bacteria not viruses alone is enough to make me wonder if Africans who believe in Voodoo are more advanced than high IQ Asians and Whites. The idea that we must appease the Gods by forcing kids to wear masks and social distance all day, thus hindering their mental and emotional development, is enough to make me feel we would be better off worshiping tree Gods and… Read more »
I have a very high IQ but find that I can have more coherent conversations about what is going on with mid IQ working class and military types than I can with other highly educated and high IQ men.
Gee, you’re a great guy!
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. I liked the thought mostly, but the aspect of discussing/mentioning one’s “superior” IQ is old and I consider a “tell” of exactly what the commenter was decrying, i.e., if you have to talk about your “high” IQ it probably is not that high.
I have a very high IQ but find that I can have more coherent conversations about what is going on with mid IQ working class and military types than I can with other highly educated and high IQ men. Schooling has become little more than operant conditioning in deference to authority. Repeat what the authority wants get a gold star. Do it for an extended period of time get an “A” on your report card. Challenge the authority and get slap down. Continue doing so and get shamed in front of your peers. Or punished with detention. Fail to repeat… Read more »
The length of time the highly educated have spent in school has given them far more indoctrination but I think it goes farther than that. Once they come out of school many work in fields that are part of globohomo. To prosper they need to think a certain way. As smart, highly educated people they don’t want to think that they are saying stupid things so they rely on places like the NYT to give them the guidelines. If it is in the NYT, it must be smart so I can think it. To make matters worse they want to… Read more »
Yes. The missing word here is ‘sissy’. Smart people tend to be sissies. Even if they have an inquisitive mind that resists marination in leftism through their ‘education’; they still like their friends. Their job. Their material goods. Their FaceBerg account. If they know ‘X’ to be true, and that the statement of ‘X’ would actually help (gotta be cruel to be kind) but would get them uninvited to their neighbour’s dinner parties, they ain’t gonna say ‘X’. Because they are sissies. And they don’t even need to have the screws put to them. You can get these hollow men… Read more »
Haha yeah, I know what you mean. My IQ is 130+, and I also prefer talking to middle/lower IQ over the midwits. The problems are the midwits, the people with a college degree, IQ of 105-115, who think they’re smart. They’re very dull, arrogant, and lack introspection (thinking they’re super duper smart). They’re usually insufferable liberals who think they’re too smart for Sky God, or things like borders. People with lower IQ have a more concrete understanding of humanity. They’ve also accepted that they’re not Einstein, so they lack the arrogance. People with legitimately high IQ, 125+, also tend to… Read more »
The midwits with a college degree who want status as a smart person are indeed some of the worst and most vicious people out there. You run into them a lot in corporations and social media.
go to the lawyersgunsmoneyblog. It’s all full of that kind of stuff. It’s three college professors who run the site.
Another good example was William Shockley.
Yes, I recently read the SPLC page on Shockley. I haven’t checked it against outside sources, but it actually seemed fairly objective and I thought it presented Shockley’s beliefs “positively” (in a way he’d have liked them.) One can almost pity the poor SPLC for the quandry they must find themself in: They’re in the difficult position of wanting to vilify such opponents, yet they must explain in detail some of the intended victim’s philosophy. You can easily see how problematic this would be, for example, if he’s some racist white supremacist spreading evil lies like the Negro is a… Read more »
I was in a local association that had an organizer who couldn’t wait to tell people that A) He belonged to Mensa and B) Hillary was going to blow Trump out of the water. It kind of met my expectations though as, no offense to the commentors here, generally when someone talks about how smart they are it means they’re about to use it as cover to say something really stupid.
A lot of it comes down to embarrassment One of th biggest reasons people choose not to get into a fight is not the physical pain but the embarrassment of losing or looking foolish throwing a silly punch, etc. They don’t want to be found out. They don’t want people laughing at them. Needless to say, it’s quite liberating when you simply don’t give a shit, as with most blue collar guys, so you just go with what you’ve got and let the chips fall where they may. Smart people are much the same. Instead of just saying what they… Read more »
Highly intelligent people want status for being smart like what they got in school. Unfortunately many were nerds and are still seeking to be the big man on campus.
That’s been observed before. Yeah, a libertarian. And Jewish. But he still hits the mark.
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/policy-report/1998/1/cpr-20n1-1.pdf
I’ll have to disagree with most of your claims. Highly intelligent people can have disorders, of course, but your stereotypes are closer to a dumb fuck than a brain. If you do some reading about common personality traits of the below-average intelligence, one of their most debilitating traits is the “fixed idea,” basically the inability to realize when they’re incorrect. Parallel to this is they resist correction, sometimes stubbornly. Stupid people suffer from the infamous Dunning-Kruger syndrome: they think themselves more talented/smarter than they actually are, and they underestimate the competence of more intelligent people. In direct contradiction of one… Read more »
IQ measures the brain’s speed in processing patterns and abstractions. It is useful in predicting overall success in the world we now live in, but of course, “the world we live in” did not exist for 99% of human experience. Yet that IQ must have existed for millennia; unused, undervalued, unnoticed, advancing in spite of no known adaptive value for humanity. Humanity somehow crawled through the mud of 100,000 years and here we are, the inheritors, with our high IQ people. Can it be that high IQ, like having a 13″ love muscle – is maladaptive? Does anyone think we… Read more »
“So we are in a world that requires a shrewd and intelligent managerial class and leadership yet they are mainly fools and getting more delusional and superstitious all the time.”
So, you are saying that what the world requires are delusional, superstitious fools.
Oh no. Ohhh no, no way Jose’.
Umm, is my gravel driveway… going to call me racist?
Maybe…let me go dig through my gravel to divine some answers from the special pieces.
Depends: is the driveway pure, crushed limestone (white), sand & gravel (greyish/brown) or asphalt?
Marxism is not complete nonsense. His analysis of the problems of 19th century industrialization were spot on. His monomania wrt economics driving history was wrong because he universalized phenomenon that were relevant to Western Europe in the preceding half millennia. His predictions were wrong because they were projecting trends of his lifetime forward to some i determinant future. Which is an error that is all to common among people. Many DR do the same.