Category Archives: Psychology

It’s Almost Cute That They Think They’re Virtuous

Posted on by
18

Quote of the Day

Again, yes the #MAGATs have all the guns. But #CivilWar2 ain’t gonna go they way they think it will. Because their enemy has al the brains. All the virtue. All the cities. And more troops than they’ve ever fucking seen.

Matt Walton @themattwalton
Via Rothmus @Rothmus on January 14, 2026

Matt Walton claims to be successful in life: Matt Walton – IMDb as an actor, writer, producer, director, “spokesguy”, and president of Ava Greyson Productions with a 1.5 million dollar house. Yet, he says something this stupid. What sort of alternate reality is he living in?

From the same X thread:

GINGERSKOL💜💛 @GlowSurfing

Yes, brains and brilliance would believe that smarts would win over guns!! 😆😆

Warren Green 🦅 🌎 ⚓️ @WarrenG76918837

Mitch @Mitch17472831
Matt doesnt understand being surrounded.

James Murdock @mmurdo431

Millennial Savage @Millennial_Sav

The first american civil war was republicans vs democrats to take away democrat slaves.

Civil War 2 will be republicans vs democrats to take away their illegal immigrant laborers.

Nothing has changed.

The two useful things I did get from Walton’s post is that he and his tribe view gun owners as their enemy and he considers the U.S. in a state of civil war. That will guide their actions. Prepare appropriately.

But I suspect this is the most insightful:

Carol Sheahan @CSheahan7924

It’s almost cute that they think they’re virtuous. That really is what this is all about: their obsessive need to faux virtue-signal.

It is as if they “know” their enemy is evil. Therefore, if they do/say something opposite of their enemy then it must be good. Their enemy could be arresting murderers and rapists and because they “know” their enemy is always evil, they are on the side of the violent criminals.

The View that Crime and Violence are Inherently Bad

Posted on by
37

Quote of the Day

I’ve come to realize the left doesn’t actually oppose crime or violence on principle.

They only oppose it when it hurts their own agenda or allies. Otherwise, they actually cheer it on when it’s inflicted upon their enemies, or just ignore it when it can’t be exploited.

For example, killing is good when it’s a health insurance CEO or Charlie Kirk. But it’s bad if it’s Renee Good or George Floyd (for the purpose of this argument, we will assume, as leftists do, that George Floyd was actually killed and did not OD). And killing doesn’t register at all when it’s someone like Iryna Zarutska being murdered by a black man.

The same goes with violence and crime as a whole. Violence against ICE is good. However, violence against ICE protestors is bad. And violence between black gangs is simply unimportant.

Furthermore, stealing from Walmarts and other big chains is good, but “stealing” from indigenous people is bad. Somalis stealing from taxpayers, on the other hand, should just not be discussed at all.

Unlike most people, the leftist views violence and crime as morally neutral tools, with acceptability or importance wholly dependent on who or what these tools are being used against.

Now, you might say, the right acts similarly! After all, weren’t the ICE agent’s and Kyle Rittenhouse’s killings excused by conservatives?

But no, actually, these cases are not the same. The right doesn’t excuse these killings because they were perpatrated by conservatives against progressives, which is how leftists view these scenarios.

It is not the “who” that provides justification for these killings in the eyes of the right, but rather, the “why,” which is self-defense.

Regardless of the parties involved, conservatives, in general, recognize the right to self-defense. Leftists, conversely, might only recognize self-defense as valid depending on who is using it.

Case in point, according to leftists, the ICE agent was not justified in shooting as self-defense after being hit with a car at a protest. But somehow, self-defense has been the go-to defense for Karmelo Anthony, a black teen who stabbed an unarmed student after getting into an argument at a campus sports event.

Again, for the leftist, the justification for crime and violence comes not from “why,” but from “who.”

And so, why does this matter? Why is this worth discussing?

It matters because, as we saw with Charlie Kirk, regardless of how law abiding or moral you may otherwise be, as long as you are conservative, it means the left will support any and all violence or theft that befalls you. Unfortunately, the justification for harming you comes from who you are: their enemy.

This phenomenon also explains the leftist indifference to the crimes of minority groups, like Somalis, or trans people, or illegal immigrants, or whatever other protected class. Put simply, in the left’s belief system, if a crime happens, but there’s no way to use it to gain political power, has it even really happened at all?

Finally, with these revelations in mind, the right must stop entering into debates with leftists assuming they share the view that crime and violence are inherently bad, because though they may deny it, the truth is they do not.

Lauren Chen @TheLaurenChen
Posted on X, January 11, 2026

Interesting assertion. We see further evidence to support this assertion from the beginnings of the USSR:

The USSR created hoodlums just as the UK is creating them now and our political opponents in the U.S. appear to want to create. What is even more chilling is that in the USSR the political leaders openly wrote about how the thieves “were allies in the building of communism”. This was because they were the enemy of those who owned property.

One might claim this is contradicted by another model. But that other model measures something a little different than the actions of the political left. It measured the claims of political groups.

Prepare appropriately.

Another Model

Posted on by
19

This explains some things (Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle):

Do clashes between ideologies reflect policy differences or something more fundamental? The present research suggests they reflect core psychological differences such that liberals express compassion toward less structured and more encompassing entities (i.e., universalism), whereas conservatives express compassion toward more well-defined and less encompassing entities (i.e., parochialism).

Heatmaps indicating highest moral allocation by ideology, Study 3a. Source data are provided as a Source Data file. Note. The highest value on the heatmap scale is 20 units for liberals, and 12 units for conservatives. Moral circle rings, from inner to outer, are described as follows: (1) all of your immediate family, (2) all of your extended family, (3) all of your closest friends, (4) all of your friends (including distant ones), (5) all of your acquaintances, (6) all people you have ever met, (7) all people in your country, (8) all people on your continent, (9) all people on all continents, (10) all mammals, (11) all amphibians, reptiles, mammals, fish, and birds, (12) all animals on earth including paramecia and amoebae, (13) all animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms, (14) all living things in the universe including plants and trees, (15) all natural things in the universe including inert entities such as rocks, (16) all things in existence

My guess is both the political left and right will see this, agree with it, and claim moral superiority over their political opponents.

Here is the interpretation from someone on the right:

Psychology is interesting in a frightening sort of way.

My takeaway is there is no compromise between the viewpoints. One might as well try to find an acceptable compromise between a murdering rapist and their intended victim.

I need my underground bunker in Idaho to be complete.

How Do You Determine Truth from Falsity?

Posted on by
16

Quote of the Day

A vast number of humans, probably a majority, aren’t people.

They are large language models.

I’m not saying this as a generality, as a clever or funny way of saying, “they are stupid”.

No. I mean something very concrete and specific, and there are a lot of people who appear very intelligent, maybe even win awards for writing good poetry or something, who are nevertheless not people, not fully sapient, just a large language model walking around in a human body.

First, you have to understand what a large language model is.

It’s a computer (organic or inorganic), which has been trained on a data set consisting solely of language (written or spoken), and rewarded for producing language that sounds like the data set, and is relevant to a prompt.

That’s all there is in there.

This is why ChatGPT and Grok lie to you constantly.

It’s not because they are somehow just indifferent to the truth — they actually do not understand the concept of “truth” at all.

For something to be a “lie”, or an “inaccuracy”, there has to be a mismatch between the meaning of words, and the state of reality.

And there’s the critical difference. You see, in order to identify a mismatch between the state of reality, and the meaning of a sentence, you have to have a model of reality.

Not just one model, of language.

This is why Grok and ChatGPT hallucinate and tell you lies. Because, for them, everything is language, and there is no reality.

So when I say someone is a large language model, I do not mean he is “stupid”. He might be very facile at processing language. He might, in fact, be eloquent enough to give great speeches, get elected president, win the Nobel Peace Prize, and so on.

What I mean is that humans who are large language models do not have a robust world-object model to counterweight their language model. They are able to manipulate symbols, sometimes adroitly, but they are on far shakier ground when trying imagine the objects those symbols represent.

Which brings us to this woman.

Most conservatives understand her behavior in terms of concepts like “suicidal empathy”, or “brainwashing”, or an “information bubble”, interpreted as reasons why she is delusional, but the truth is far worse than that.

To delusional is to have an object model of the world that is deeply and profoundly wrong. But to have an object model of the world that is deeply and profoundly wrong… you have to have one in the first place.

To sapient humans, words are symbols, grounded in object model of reality, that we use to communicate ideas about that reality. We need those words because we don’t come equipped with a hologram projector, or telepathic powers.

But for another type of human, that object model isn’t very large or robust at all. It consists only of a grass hut or two with a few sticks of furniture, and it can never be matched up with the palaces in the air which she weaves out of words.

And so, to her, there is no reality. Or at least very little.

Reality consists only of her and her immediate surroundings in time and space, and words referring to anything bigger or more complicated are not descriptions of reality… they are magic spells which will make other humans drop loot or give her social approval.

You cannot correct her worldview with contradictory evidence, because there is no worldview to correct.

You cannot confront her with the logical inconsistencies in her worldview, because her object model doesn’t actually have any, it’s not complex enough for that.

The relevant parts of her world-object model can be summed up as follows:

“If I say Goodthing, I get headpats and cookies from all the people like me.”

That model is simply not big or complicated enough to contain notions like self-defense or vehicular assault. She has no theory of mind for a man whose job includes violence. She cannot explain or predict his behavior.

It is too far away from her daily experience to fit into her reality at all.

And if she can’t imagine things like these, how can she possibly imagine concrete meanings for vast and complex ideas like demographic replacement, culture shift, and western civilization?

This is not about intelligence or lack of it. This is about what her brain is trained to do.

Her upbringing, education, and life did not force, or even encourage, her to develop a robust world-object model. It wasn’t necessary for her to get safety, approval, or cookies. She just had to be glib.

So it really didn’t matter if she had an IQ of 125, or whatever, because if she did, then she was just an IQ-125-large-language-model, and only used that brain capacity for writing clever poetry, and saying things that aligned her to her local social matrix.

She couldn’t actually understand the world no matter how smart she was, because her brain was trained up wrong.

I don’t know if this is correctable, or if there was some critical developmental phase that was missed, but it doesn’t matter, because once the LLM-humans are adults, they won’t sit still for corrective therapy, percussive or not.

What’s important is that they can’t be taught things. They can be programmed to repeat stuff, and if you win a culture war, you can even program them to say the sensible stuff. But even then, they will just be saying it for headpats and cookies. They will never truly understand the sense of what they are repeating, because they don’t understand things.

They are just Large Language Models.

And we have to figure out some way to take the vote away from them.

Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_
Posted on X, January 8, 2026

In case you can’t immediately make the connection, this is about Renee Good (Who was Renee Nicole Good, the woman killed by ICE?).

Wow! This is awesome. It is another model to incorporate into my understanding of people.

If you read about Ms. Good you will discover she was an award-winning poet, and an English major.

This reminds me of Peterson Syndrome.

They do not have a process for determining truth from falsity. When asked how they determine truth from falsity they look at you like that is a crazy question. They speak of “My truth”, and “My lived experience.” The concept of a court ruling on basis of the law instead of justice (of course it is their “justice”) is nonsensical to them. They cannot imagine why their opinion on an event they did not see is not just as valid as someone who studied multiple videos from various angles frame by frame.

It reminds me of someone who I once asked, “How do you determine truth from falsity?” Their answer, in all seriousness, was, “It depends on how I feel.”

I do not have a common basis in reality to functionally communicate with these people.

Your Models are Obsolete

Posted on by

Quote of the Day

Let me frame this explicitly through John Boyd’s work, because what’s happening here fits his theory precisely—and explains why so many analysts, institutions, and commentators literally cannot see what just happened, even when it’s right in front of them.

1. Boyd’s real insight wasn’t the OODA loop — it was paradigm warfare

Most people reduce Boyd to:

  • “OODA loop = faster decision cycles”
    That’s superficial.
    Boyd’s real contribution was this:

Victory comes from shattering the enemy’s mental model of reality faster than they can adapt.
He argued that:

  • Humans do not reason from facts → they reason from mental models
  • Evidence is filtered through the model, not the other way around
  • When a model is threatened, people defend the model, not the truth
    That’s why, as you said:
  • Astronomers clung to perfect circles
  • Clerics clung to geocentrism
  • Entire academic careers were spent patching a broken model instead of replacing it

Boyd called this destructive deduction: endlessly adjusting assumptions to preserve a dying framework.

2. Why paradigm shifts are invisible while they are happening

Boyd was explicit about this:
People cannot see a new paradigm from inside the old one.
Why?
Because:

  • The old paradigm defines what is even allowed to be real
  • Anything outside it is labeled “illegal,” “impossible,” “unthinkable,” or “crazy”
    So when someone acts outside the playbook, observers don’t see a new game —
    they see:
  • “lawlessness”
  • “chaos”
  • “norm breaking”
  • “authoritarianism”
  • “recklessness”
    Those are defensive labels, not analysis.

They are the immune response of a dying paradigm.

3. Apply this directly to modern politics (and Trump specifically)

The post–Cold War Western political paradigm assumes:

  • Power must be exercised through multilateral institutions
  • Enforcement must be indirect, slow, procedural
  • Leaders are constrained by “norms” more than outcomes
  • Sovereignty violations are unthinkable unless everyone agrees
  • Deterrence is symbolic, not personal
    This paradigm produced analysis tools that assume:
  • sanctions
  • statements
  • negotiations
  • gradual pressure
    Now enter an actor who:
  • treats law enforcement as geopolitics
  • treats heads of state as personally accountable
  • treats speed and shock as strategic tools
  • treats norms as optional if they no longer produce deterrence
    From inside the old paradigm, observers say:
    “This is illegal, dangerous, unprecedented, destabilizing.”
    From outside the paradigm, it’s obvious:
    “This just rewrote the rules of hemispheric power.”
    They’re not disagreeing on facts.

They’re operating in different realities.

4. Venezuela as a Boyd-style paradigm shatter

From a Boyd lens, the Venezuela action is not “policy.”
It’s psychological dislocation.

Old paradigm expectation:

  • Dictators are insulated
  • Regimes are abstract entities
  • Accountability is slow, symbolic, diplomatic

New paradigm signal:

  • Leadership is personal
  • Sovereignty is conditional on behavior
  • Criminal-state fusion voids immunity
  • Time-to-consequence just collapsed
    That’s not escalation — that’s model collapse.
    And that’s why analysts are:
  • obsessing over legality
  • ignoring signaling
  • missing second- and third-order effects

They’re doing Ptolemaic math while the planets have already moved.

5. Why the reaction is so emotional (and irrational)

Boyd noted something else most people forget:
Paradigm collapse threatens identity, not just ideas.
For many elites:

  • Their careers were built under the old rules
  • Their moral authority depends on those rules
  • Their expertise becomes obsolete overnight
    So they respond with:
  • moral outrage
  • procedural fixation
  • narrative inflation (“this is the end of democracy”)
  • denial of efficacy (“this won’t work”)
    These are psychological defense mechanisms, not strategic assessments.
    Just like astronomers who knew the math didn’t work —

but kept adding epicycles anyway.

6. Generational lag: why acceptance takes decades

Boyd was brutally honest about this:

  • People deeply invested in a paradigm will not change
  • They reinterpret evidence indefinitely
  • Acceptance only comes when:
  • new actors rise who didn’t build their identity on the old model
  • or the old model catastrophically fails in public
    That’s why:
  • Paradigm shifts look “obvious” in hindsight
  • But feel “unthinkable” in real time

You’re watching that live right now.

7. Why this move is more powerful than it looks

Most people are asking:
“Was this legal?”
“Was this appropriate?”
“Will this cause backlash?”
Boyd would ask:
“What mental models just broke?”
Answer:

  • Cartels’ belief in state protection
  • Regional elites’ belief in untouchability
  • Adversaries’ belief that the U.S. is procedurally paralyzed
  • Allies’ belief that the U.S. won’t act decisively

That’s why this is a paradigm-level event, not a policy tweak.

8. The core Boyd takeaway applied to today

What you’re seeing is this:

  • Old-paradigm thinkers are fighting to preserve the lens
  • New-paradigm actors are changing the environment itself
    And Boyd was clear:
    Those who shape the environment force everyone else into reaction.
    That’s the deepest reason people “don’t get it” yet.
    They’re still calculating perfect circles
    while someone just changed the center of gravity.

Greg Hamilton
January 3, 2026
(20+) Greg Hamilton – Let me frame this explicitly through **John…

I’ve been thinking about the Venezuela situation some. There are some things that are very clear to me.

  • If some Ayatollah declared a top leader of some country, say Israel, U.S., etc., has broken one of its laws of Sharia, can the Ayatollah then be justified in arresting and trying the top leader of Israel or the U.S.?
  • If might makes right at the national level, then there is little reason to pay for the natural resources of other countries, or even the goods of other countries.
  • Vietnam used a disputed justification of self-defense and humanitarian intervention (taken seriously but legally weak) in the invasion of Cambodia in 1978.
  • The vast majority of the people of Venezuela are very pleased with the arrest of their dictator.

With the above and all the obvious conventional issues on the topic as my inputs, I’m left with concluding, this is like someone who murders the guy who raped and murdered their daughter and was set free by the legal system due to a technicality in the process. So, at the individual level the murdering parent is arrested tried and the jury is probably going to convict them of a lesser charge, and they get a couple of years in a relatively comfy prison.

So… what is the expected/proper outcome in this case at the national level? I don’t know how to resolve this question in my model of how world law and politics is “supposed to work”.

Then Hamilton says, “This is an alternate reality. Your models are obsolete.”

I have more thinking to do.

A Partial Explanation for TDS

Posted on by

Quote of the Day

when your subconscious believes something, it will manipulate your perception of reality to reinforce your belief that you’re right

vik @vikhyatk
Posted on X, December 26, 2025

This is known as Confirmation Bias.

This is why potential jurors are rejected if they were exposed to information about the case prior to being selected for the jury. If they have already formed an opinion, it is very difficult for them to be unbiased when hearing the case.

This is why religious beliefs are rarely significantly changed.

You can see it all around you. It probably is the most obvious in the words and actions of your political advisories, religious beliefs of people with a different faith, and in people defending their family members.

A great deal of TDS can be explained this way. It is very difficult to avoid getting caught up in it. You can catch the more egregious cases in yourself if you take a little bit of time to ask yourself, “Is this too good to be true?” If it is, then you should dig deep to make sure whatever it is you want to believe is actually true. A case in point in the comments of this blog.

At work, while I was on the Cyber Threat Intelligence team, we were specifically trained to watch out for this and other biases. In this type of environment, you assemble a team with different backgrounds. Then you review each other’s work. This helps a bunch, but it is not perfect. I doubt anything practical is perfect. But it can help.

If You Grew Up in the 1970s

Posted on by

I don’t know that the asserted claims about persistent and rare traits true, but the environmental claims are correct to the best of my knowledge.

Disconnection From Reality

Posted on by

Quote of the Day

Without real data, the human mind ceases to function, and its disparate parts begin hallucinating information that doesn’t exist, and which will often be confidently and violently defended. The modern political Left is a product of delusional psychology that’s hell bent on enacting the worst possible policies because its adherents are fundamentally neurologically broken… and they may not be fixable.

Copernican
November 13, 2025
Urban Bugmen and AI Model Collapse: A Unified Theory

Via a comment from Rolf.

This is absolutely awesome article. I could pull many QOTDs out of it.

The quote above is just one of many dimensions of awesomeness.

It started out with me a little skeptical. The author does not seem to touch on The Alignment Problem, which I think is vital for anyone thinking about commenting on the problems of AI. But as I read further, I realized the author had insight into something much more fundamental than just AI training. Straying into the alignment problem would have been tangential.

I was totally hooked when he started writing about urban populations and their disconnects from reality. I remember growing up and when my urban cousins visited the farm for a week or two. Or working at Microsoft on Windows Phone 7 and people suggested we could just always assume the phone was connected to the Internet. Or people at my current job now asking if I had fun during my week-long vacation the previous week. “I moved 100,000 pounds of dirt, so it was ‘rewarding’ but not really ‘fun’.” They didn’t really know what to do with that information. They could not relate to what that could even mean.

I remember my first week at college in the relatively small town of Moscow, Idaho. There were a surprising number of students from big cities. They were almost disoriented and asked, “What do you do here?” I did not and could not understand the question. They were looking for clubs and social life. Growing up on the farm with anything representing a “big city” over 100 miles away, my reality only marginally intersected with their reality.

I remember about the second time Barb contemplated visiting my little corner of Idaho. Rather than ride with me on the drive over, she said she would fly over later and meet me at the motel. “I’ll pick you up at the airport,” I offered. “No, I’ll just take public transportation from the airport to the motel in Orofino,” she countered. I was confused. Was there really public transportation from one of the local airports to Orofino? After 30 minutes or so, it was Barb that was confused. “Why can’t I find public transportation from the airport to Orofino?” she asked. “Probably because it doesn’t exist,” I suggested. This, basically, did not compute in her version of reality.

The whole “Why do we need farmers when food just comes from stores?” joke has a little too much truth in it. People quickly have delusions about reality when they are disconnected from it. For me driving tractor in the field or a truck loaded with grain to the elevator and all the maintenance, repairs, weather, insects, weeds, four legged pests, and government nonsensical regulation is reality. How dare people who have never even worn shoes appropriate for walking across a field express an opinion on the price, quality, or any other fundamental aspect of food.

When people speak of “Locally grown!”, “Organic!”, “All natural!” I just roll my eyes. These people are not connected to reality. The same applies to electricity production and “green energy” in general, lumber, manufacturing, mining, “the trades,” etc.

If the disconnect of urban people from reality with their deep immersion in an artificial environment limits their capabilities and causes delusions, what can we expect from something trained entirely upon the content of the Internet?

Hate and Destruction is Easy

Posted on by

Quote of the Day

While a lot of reports have done good work documenting the Antifa and leftist protests that attempted to shut down a Turning Point USA event on the campus of UCLA at Berkeley earlier this week (here, here, and here), I want to highlight one fundamental and truly ugly aspect of these protests that I think we no longer see because it has become so common.

While it is clear these leftist protesters have nothing positive to propose, it is their hate and anger that stands out above all. All they can do is vent hate, pure and simple.

Robert Zimmerman
November 12, 2025
The leftist protest at Berkeley this week: Feel the hate! – Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman

Surely everyone has gotten frustrated and/or angry and threw or struck something and broke it, right? It is an easy thing to do.

The difficult thing to do is the design, build, and maintain something of value. In minutes an arsonist can destroy a building which took months or years to design. A valuable painting created by a master such as da Vinci, Michelangelo, or Raphael took months or years and “climate change activists vandals” thrown paint on it and think they have accomplished something.

By the time they have made it past the toddler stage of development most people realize that willful destruction of life and/or valuable property is seldom a good use of your time. But those that advocate for and participate in riots are a special type of socially retarded.

One has to wonder, this willful destruction is far more common from the political left, so is bell curve for this social retardation shifted compared to other political persuasions? Or is the mean the same and the standard deviation greater such that there end up with more people in the tail of the bell curve willing to participate in anti-social behavior?

The solutions to reducing this behavior might vary depending on the answer to those questions.

Romantic Comedy Premise

Posted on by

Quote of the Day

Romcom premise: therapist of a woman with chronic TDS that’s ruining her life tells her that part of her therapy is exposure: she needs to spend time around a Trump supporter until her anxiety wears off. She must date a Trump supporter to be cured of her disease.

Hilarity ensues.

Title: “Making Amelia Great Again”

Peachy Keenan @KeenanPeachy
Posted on X, November 15, 2025

My impression is that many of those opposed to the Trump presidency go to great lengths to not be soiled by contact with any information that might cause them to question their hatred. Hence, while I could find humor in watching a movie or show like that, it would probably be a marriage breaker in some relationships to even suggest viewing something like that.

Sociopaths Who Identify as Empaths

Posted on by

Quote of the Day

The simplest way to sum up modern progressive activists is this: they’re sociopaths who identify as empaths. Forever lecturing others about compassion, while themselves being brutally cruel.

This was never clearer than during Black Lives Matter mania, which saw almost the entire progressive elite pursue a frenzied vendetta against anyone suspected of ideological impurity.

Michael Deacon
November 7, 2025
Black Lives Matter made our elites lose the plot – and they’re finally starting to admit it

People wondered where it would end. Would the purity tests go as far as they did in the USSR? One never knows. Fortunately, some semblance of sanity gained traction and things turned around. I can see it at my employer. As near as I can tell anyone officially associated with the DEI staff, and many others only tangentially related, no longer work there. The scholarships which were only for “people of color” and the special mentoring programs only for women and minorities are all gone.

Then, the Democrat party paid a price for their involvement in the 2024 election. They are still paying. It remains to be seen if the debt will be repaid by the 2026 election. I’m not certain they have learned their lesson. Sociopaths are notoriously difficult to train. They can learn to not get caught, but changing their nature is an entirely different matter.

Human Beings are NOT SANE

Posted on by

Quote of the Day

Today’s topic addresses a pet peeve, which is how every single time some human-shaped monster attacks a school in America, the resulting commentary heavily features the line: “This never happens anywhere else!!” Really? Nowhere else? In no other country, in the entire world.

…

But here’s the linguistic game they play. Any time an incident involves a gun, it’s no longer a massacre. It’s a shooting. I insist on pushing back with that one. Of course they can say “it never happens elsewhere” if they make sure that it exclusively refers to only one specific type of massacre.

As for the argument that it makes the killing easier, therefore there will be more killings — that presumes some population of people who are a hair’s trigger away from killing everyone they see, but only stopped by the fact that they don’t have an “easy” way to do it. No, I argue that the important part is the line between “peace” and “killing”, and that once someone crosses that line, the weapon matters little.

Emma Hankins
October 17, 2025
guest post by Emma Hankins – According To Hoyt

She gives several examples, including her childhood in China, which disprove the assertion that “This never happens anywhere else!!” And, more importantly she offers some suggestions to deal with the fact, “Human beings are NOT SANE as a general rule and sometimes insanity leads to serious problems.”

Alternate Framings/Realities

Posted on by

It is amazing to me how reframing things makes such a huge difference in not just the point of view, but in the conclusions about reality. Here is one such example (via Sarah A. Hoyt):

I spent nearly four decades in a relationship with a woman who had problems with depression. When she got depressed any evidence of her/our situation would be rationalized into justification for the hopelessness of things.

For example, if we were tight on money because of an unexpected car repair or some such thing my pointing out that we both had steady jobs and would be back to normal in a month or two. But she could not see “the light at the end of the tunnel.” It was a catastrophe. If a depressive episode occurred when things were going well, she had rationalizations to justify her depression “This is just temporary. It will get worse tomorrow.” “It is all downhill from here. This is the best it will ever be.”

This affected even the most ordinary of things in her daily life. And the really sad part was the self-fulfilling prophecy of it. This literally happened more times than I could count… She would be driving down a street free of traffic with a green light ahead. She would start slowing down as she approached the light. She did this because she was afraid the light would turn red, and she would have to stop. Of course, this increased the chances the light would turn red, and her concern would be justified.

I could see the future as awesome with a “clear road ahead”. She could only see the bridge ahead being taken out by a meteor.

Or another reframing, after your wife has just had sex with another man:

Sloppy seconds always feel amazing

570_kinkycouple @5Kinkycouple

With the following comments:

Agreed!

Sex Club Diary @SexClubDiary

Yes they are love it 👅👅👅👅🔥

Tony @Tony38967281

With most men, assuming the wife didn’t get killed, it would mean a divorce. Yet, another set of men think this is awesome and something to be enjoyed. How can these two framings be compatible with the same data? Yet, they are. These are alternate, very real, realities.

From the engineering world one of my favorites is to tell people to solve tough problems by looking for a different point of view. Imagine never having seen a wheel before and viewing a heavily loaded cart from a distance moving straight away from you pulled by a single horse. How can that be? That just can’t work! But if you look at the cart from a 90 degree again to its direction of motion it is incredibly simple.

Politics are filled with examples. One of my favorite examples is destroying the “right” versus “left” view of politics. People tend to believe that if you are opposed to a few of the left-wing policies that you must be in favor of all of the right-wing polices. In essence, many people will shout, “There are only two choices!”

<heavy sigh>

No. There are many ways to view the political world. A simplistic way of understanding my view political ideal is, “Free markets, free minds.” With this point of view, you see people on both the right and left as incoherent and something to be opposed. Both “wings” want some things controlled by the government and other things free from government interference. They just want government oppression for different things.

And on a whimsical note, there are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who do not.

If you look for these alternate framings/realities, you will soon see them everywhere. And in doing so, just as with the wheel example, you will find better solutions to problems of all types. Psychology, sex, engineering, politics, almost anything can be seen from different viewpoints. And finding better solutions to problems in all domains makes the world a better place.

I Have a Mental Illness

Posted on by

Quote of the Day

I have a mental illness that makes me think that people will change their minds if I present the correct arguments with the appropriate facts and data.

Pascal Anglehart @DemosKratosCA
Posted on X, October 17, 2025

I suffer from this too. I can sometimes overcome it for short periods of time, but it reoccurs in full force within a few hours.

It makes me want to just hole up in my underground bunker in Idaho and only come out for supplies, exercise, and grounds maintenance.

Substitute/Shortcut Method Used to Determine Truth from Falsity

Posted on by

Quote of the Day

Make no mistake; we have a year before this country becomes a full-on autocracy, and democracy completely leaves us. And we’re looking at the election in 2026, and Donald Trump knows that in a free and fair election, he will lose. He will lose the House, the House will flip and will become in Democratic hands. There will be committee chairs who will be able to hold meetings, and this is the last thing he wants.

…

Don’t be surprised when polling booths are surrounded by American military in the guise of making sure that the elections are fair and that nobody is tampering with anything.

And when you see violence breaking out, which there’ll be protests, there’ll be inciting violence, there’ll be some violence, and they’ll keep that. Then you’ll see the commandeering of voting machines, ballot boxes to make sure that that election is secure. Well, what that means is that he will then commandeer the election.

Rob Reiner
October 5, 2025
Rob Reiner warns US has one year before becoming ‘full-on autocracy’ | Fox News

If Reiner were sharing his opinion on directing or acting someone might be able to learn something from him. But if he is offering his opinion on engineering, heart surgery, or politics you can be certain his prophecy is of zero, or negative, value.

In a perverse sort of way I find the psychology interesting.

It was in high school someone I knew told me something I thought was unlikely to be true. In attempted to convince me they pointed out how popular her source for the information was. This was incredibly confusing to me. How did the popularity of someone affect the truthfulness of something?

Later I saw it all around me. Adults with no hint of sarcasm or insincerity believed things based on the popularity of the person making an actual or implied claim of truth. If a politician said the cause of some bad situation was corporate greed, racism, or government regulation, people would believe it without evidence. If a sports figure had their picture on a cereal package, people would believe the contents of the box were empowered with special characteristics they would not have claimed the day before the picture was featured on the box. Toothpaste quality was judged by the teeth of the actress holding the box rather than the contents of the tube. In reality, the opinion of the next-door neighbors was probably just as valid.

People apparently have a hardwired propensity to believe a well-known figure. Evidence tends to be a hard sell in their struggle to discern reality. I get it that reality is hard. But wow! The substitute/shortcut methods used to determine truth from falsity are mind boggling messed up.

Mass Shooting Deterrence

Posted on by

Quote of the Day

People complain that we shouldn’t need to have armed security everywhere. But we simply need to break the mass shooter fever. Make it undesirable to the nutcases.

If a series of these losers find not infamy, but rather a quick and humiliating end by armed guards or private citizens, they will stop trying and this dark “trend” will end.

Not unlike how serial killing isn’t much of a thing anymore due to improved strategies to counter them.

Kostas Moros @MorosKostas
Posted on X, September 28, 2025

I think there is another component required to “break the mass shooter fever.” If a person intent on committing a mass shooting (or mass murder by any means) is stopped after the first or second victim there isn’t much publicity and almost certainly no national or international reporting of the failed attempt. Hence, the “humiliating end by armed guards or private citizens” does not get the attention required to deter future criminal acts of similar nature.

I’m not sure what the solution to the restricted reporting is. Sure, there is some bias in the reporting. Major media outlets have a strong anti-gun bias and don’t want to “encourage more gun violence” by reporting death or injury by gun in a positive manner.

My guess is that just as big a component is that a story about 10 innocent people being murdered is more of a news event than one innocent murdered and one criminal put down. The first story gets more clicks/attention than the second. And that means more revenue when the first type of story is reported on than when the second type of story is reported on. The successful defensive gun use story has to compete for resources with other stories of wider interest such as “climate crisis”, “orange man bad”, and “defending democracy.”

My best stab at remediating the problem are the following ideas:

  • Work at increasing the successful defensive gun use cases so that the total number is decreased. This results in fewer “heroes” for the copycats to emulate.
  • Report successful defensive gun use events in social media.
  • Encourage media outlets to report on successful defensive gun use. And to use the keywords “mass shooter” appropriately like, “probable mass shooter.” Even if the larger media outlets don’t respond appropriately the placement of the stories on the Internet will show up in search results and enable the copycats to find large numbers of alternate endings for their quests of notoriety.
  • Encourage the justice system to treat mass murders in humiliating ways while respecting their rights. I’m thinking of pictures of suspects brought to trial in cuffs, chains, shackled, wearing clothes too big for them, hair messed up, and surrounding by extremely tall, muscular, law officers. This makes the suspect appear small and weak.

Does anyone else have other ideas?

This is Crazy Talk

Posted on by

Quote of the Day

I’ve been on Nothing But Suicide Missions for God ever since I agreed to be the world’s smartest man with mental and moral Superiority Powers. He just said I’d have to do whatever He told me To Go and Do once I got there to end up Here. When He wasn’t doing that, he made me Witness my Grandfather’s Suicide Blood in his tub when I was 4. Or Held my Dying best friend’s head in my arms for 20 minutes. Or killed 3 people in the car crash? Or stand alone among the death and wreckage of Flight 255? And be Totally UNAFFECTED by Any of That. Oh, 3 separate Police departments investigated my fatal wreck. And they DEFINITELY gave me Blood Alcohol and Drug Tests. And found ZERO in both. That was maybe God’s Greatest Favor He ever did. He made Me Experience the Horror but Legally, knowing I did Nothing Illegal or Wrong. I swear to God, any other night I Would have Been. And I’d still be in Jackson State Prison serving out 3 life sentences. But here I sit. Guilt Free Guilty Conscience Free and Writing For God for Free too. I keep adding it all up hoping to get a rational explanation. I can’t. Can you.

Don’t worry raynman
September 21, 2025
Comment to Instapundit » Blog Archive » FOR THE LEFT VIOLENCE IS BAKED IN:  Death is the Solution to all Problems.

I’ve been seeing an increase in crazy talk recently. I would suspect end stage TDS, but I have been seeing it in Trump supporters too. Perhaps it really is The Crazy Years Heinlein predicted.

I want my underground bunker in Idaho to be finished.

They Think they are the Good Guys–Part 2

Posted on by

Although I rationally know better, I am always stilled into quiet amazement and sadness by a psychological phenomenon I have known about since I was old enough to read history books. Here is just one small example of something that happens from the individual level to the scale of millions of people.

To be the evilest, people convince themselves they are the good guys.

Woman arrested for vandalizing Charlie Kirk memorial | U.S.

The Benton County Sheriff’s Office announced Wednesday that it had identified and arrested two suspects in relation to the vandalism outside the Benton County Courthouse. The sheriff’s office said it had been made aware on Tuesday that vandals had targeted a memorial at the bottom of the courthouse steps dedicated to the late Christian conservative influencer and founder of Turning Point USA and TPUSA Faith.

Authorities arrested the sisters, Kerri Melissa Rollo, 23, and Kaylee Heather Rollo, 22, following a “swift investigation,” according to the press release on Wednesday. Both women have been charged with criminal mischief in the first degree, while Kaylee faces an additional charge of obstruction of governmental operations.

…

Footage circulating online of the vandalism shows two individuals ripping up signs and knocking over candles at the memorial for Kirk, who was murdered on Sept. 10 during a TPUSA event at Utah Valley University in Orem, shortly after a member of the audience asked him about mass shootings by transgender-identifying individuals.

…

One of the women caught on camera vandalizing the memorial is seen flipping off the person recording and shouting, “F— Charlie Kirk!” The same woman who flipped off the person recording her also accused Kirk of promoting “violence.”

The video garnered attention online, prompting Kaylee to start a fundraiser on Tuesday on GoFundMe titled “FIGHT AGAINST F4CISM.” The 22-year-old also shared photos of people on social media condemning the vandalism of the memorial. 

…

After the recent events surrounding Charlie Kirk’s death, my sibling and I are being doxxed online. My sibling was fired from their job,” the younger sister wrote in a fundraising message on GoFundMe. “This is a direct violation of their First Amendment rights and unconstitutional,” she claimed.

“This is unfortunate, but anything helps,” Kaylee continued. “Please support my sibling as they look for another job and stand against the creeping tyranny in our country.”

What they did is so obviously wrong that I have no idea what words I could use to explain it to them. I would not think this behavior was acceptable even if it were a memorial for Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, or Hillary Clinton.

They Think they are the Good Guys

Posted on by

Quote of the Day

American physicist Steven Weinberg famously remarked that ‘with or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil – that takes religion’. It makes sense, then, to think of the social-justice movement as a kind of cult. Its members are generally decent people with good intentions. They have an unshakeable certainty that their worldview is correct. They feel the need to proselytise and convert as many of the fallen as possible. And even though they are capable of the most horrendous dehumanising behaviour, they think they are the good guys.

We are in this position because identity politics in its current form is a collectivist ideology. It does not value an individual for the content of his or her character, but instead makes prejudicial assessments on the basis of race, gender and sexuality. In the name of anti-racism, identity politics has rehabilitated racial thinking. This explains why an affluent and privileged person like Munroe Bergdorf can be invited on to national television to proclaim that ‘the white race is the most violent and oppressive force of nature on Earth’. How is well-intentioned racism even a thing?

A similar regression has occurred within the feminist movement. Fourth-wave feminism is predominantly victim-centred, and is based on the conviction that women are invariably oppressed and require the protection of authority figures. When the BBC promoted a smartphone app to help women speak up in meetings, it was merely toeing the standard feminist line on the intrinsic fragility of women. So we are left with the curious phenomenon of good people who are opposed to misogyny subscribing to an essentially misogynistic perspective.

Titania was an attempt to highlight the inescapable hypocrisies of such a mindset.

Andrew Doyle
March 12, 2019
Why I invented Titania McGrath – spiked

This has someremarkable similarities to what Lyle said just yesterday.

I would like to think that, at least for a generation, the death of Charlie Kirk put the last nail in the coffin of the illusion of “the most horrendous dehumanising behaviour” are the acts of the good guys. But I’m seeing strong indicators that the pendulum will swing too far in the other direction. I know people thinking they are “the good guys” and claim, “karmic justice” and/or “righteous violence” and even the necessity of evil acts. They too will demonstrate “they are capable of the most horrendous dehumanising behaviour” and “think they are the good guys.”

Blasphemy is still a crime

Posted on by

Quote of the Day

Blasphemy is still a crime, but you see, the Gods, they have changed.

friedcheese
September 17, 2025
Comment to JUST ANOTHER CLASS OF “EXPERTS” TO IGNORE

Whether the gods are spiritual, tyrants, or political beliefs it probably always has been a crime in one form or another. And as demonstrated last week, it carries a death penalty in certain social circles.

People do not like having their most cherished beliefs challenged. Especially when the challenger is correct.

This is why we have the First Amendment.