Category Archives: Psychology

Quote of the day—David Frum

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“After Newtown, nothing changed, so don’t expect anything to change after Las Vegas.” 

How often have you heard that said? Yet it’s not true. The five years since a gunman killed 26 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, have seen one of the most intense bursts of gun legislation in U.S. history—almost all of it intended to ensure that more guns can be carried into more places.

David Frum
October 3, 2017
Mass Shootings Don’t Lead to Inaction—They Lead to Loosening Gun Restrictions
[Gee… I wonder why that is? Could it be that people realized that having the ability to protect yourself is a good idea?

One would think this is the obvious answer. But Frum is apparently immune to such thoughts:

This may explain why gun advocates insist that the immediate aftermath of a spectacular massacre is “too soon” for the gun discussion. They want the pain and grief and fear to ebb. They want ordinary citizens to look away. Then, when things are quiet, the gun advocates will go to work, to bring more guns to places where alcohol is served, where children are cared for, where students are taught, where God is worshipped. More killings bring more guns. More guns do more killing. It’s a cycle the nation has endured for a long time, and there is little reason to hope that the atrocity in Las Vegas will check or reverse it.

The mind of an anti-gun person is broken. Some can be repaired but for the most part we need to point them out to those who haven’t yet drank the Kool-Aid and let reality sink it. It’s generally a better use of our time.

But if you look at the psychology of the these type of people there is a way to win them over. You remove social support for their position and/or you give them unequivocal disconfirmation of their beliefs.—Joe]

Quote of the day—George Clooney

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Don’t you think the next Democrat who runs should just run with a blue hat that says, ‘Make America Great Again?’

George Clooney
September 24, 2017
Hillary Clinton blames many things for her loss. George Clooney blames her ‘frustrating’ speeches.
[The political left just doesn’t get it. Perhaps they can’t.

Read The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. This book was recommended to me by Mike B. (Idaho friend, firearms instructor, and lobbyist for gun owner rights). I was impressed with the book as was daughter Jaime. It explains a great deal of the frustration on every side of political and religious debates.—Joe]

Personality test

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While we were driving around doing errands last night Barb read an online personality test to me and I gave her the answers. Here are the results:

According to the test I am an “AnonymousVirtuoso”. Details follow…

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Revolver re-build, Field Carry system, and deer hunt

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Deer season is upon us (Joe; no Hunting category?) so I thought this a good time to post it.

Following is a very long, detailed account of customizing a reproduction Colt 1847 Walker percussion revolver and using it in a deer hunt in the 2016 muzzleloader season. It assumes the reader has some understanding of the Colt open top revolver design and its inherent problems, and contains lots of technical photos and jargon. I also introduce a paper cartridge “Field Carry” system which I’ve developed for percussion revolvers, making things simpler and easier for the shooter while in the field on the move. There are bloody butchering (necropsy) photos cataloging the terminal performance of the gun and ammunition. You have been warned– If you read on you may be extremely bored, fascinated, or shocked or disgusted, or all of the above.
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Quote of the day—Caity

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I’m the village extravert.

Caity
September 12, 2017
Overheard at work.
[I’m on the Threat Intelligence team at work. Caity is one of the analysts. Everyone on the team has a few “quirks”. So Josh, also on the team, decided we should take an Asperger test. Josh scored a 14, Jodie scored a 12, Devin scored a 24, Greg refused to take the test, and Caity had a 17. But Caity said if she wasn’t so social it would have been much higher. She then came up with the QOTD which caused Josh and I to burst into laughter. If you knew Caity you would not be surprised that a few weeks ago Caity was voted the social replacement for Brett on our team.

I stomped the competition within our team on the Asperger test with a 32.—Joe]

Update: Greg finally succumbed to peer pressure (but we aren’t sure if he answered the questions honestly) and scored a 15.

Quote of the day—Defens

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If DOAbayman and his ilk really think that us gun folk sit around and dream about shooting people, what must be going through his head? Does he dream of boxcars, re-education camps, and gibbets? Or just more mundane things like beatings and stonings?

Defens
September 8, 2017
Comment to Quote of the day—DOAbayman
[Good question.

But, from long experience dealing with people with mental health issues, it’s not a productive use of your time to try and understand the chaos inside their minds. Just avoid them as best you can and have simple and effective plans for your encounters with them.—Joe]

It’s the radiation, Stupid

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They started with weightlessness as the reason, they did drop the R-word in the middle (can’t throw out all credibility), but only in passing, then reinforced the weightlessness meme again at the end.

I see it like this (because this is how it is); you can’t get the money if you aren’t offering the hope of something exciting (like a Mars colony) or something excitingly catastrophic (like the end of the world unless government has total control). Therefore you can’t come out and say that a Mars colony is a stupid idea because then you lose your funding.

In fact you’d have to live underground on Mars, or die of radiation. If you’re going to live underground, well, you can do that here on Earth much more easily and cheaply. AND…you don’t want to do that anyway, because living underground forever is boring, so forget the whole thing.

On second thought, no; I’m wrong about all of that so give me a hundred billion dollars and I’ll get you’re dumb ass to Mars. You’ll need to pay in advance.

God’s Pistol*

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Not quite sure how I missed this little coincidence.

Any guess on the subject of Revelations 19:11?


1911

1911

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Quote of the day—Brett

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Three weeks of utilities are all that separate us from savagery.

Brett
June 23, 2017
[Brett is a co-worker of mine.

I’m not sure it will take three weeks, but it’s in the ballpark.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Peter Dreier

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Incidents like the Virginia and San Francisco shootings inevitably lead to a debate over gun control. Here again the media, politicians, and advocacy groups play their scripted roles. The media quote Republicans and conservatives repeating their claims that tougher gun-control laws wouldn’t have prevented the Virginia shooting, because the shooter could have obtained the gun illegally. And, they add, gun control undermines our liberties. 

To provide “balance,” the media quote Democrats and gun-control advocates, repeating their claims that this specific shooting, and the epidemic of mass shootings, would be dramatically reduced if we restricted the sale of guns and ammunition, including sales across state lines, because shooters often obtain guns in states with lax laws and bring them to states with tough laws.

Peter Dreier
June 16, 2017
The Virginia Shooting Isn’t About Bernie. It’s About the Right’s Embrace of Guns.
[I’m more and more convinced that, as Michael Savage says, Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder. I haven’t read his book but I took a college class on, and have experienced enough, abnormal psychology to recognize it. In this case it is conclusive because he cannot see that his political beliefs contributed to the bad results. One thing common to all personality disorders is that, in their minds, they didn’t contribute, in any way, to a bad outcome. It is always someone else’s fault.

With that mindset he goes on to describe a delusional world that is nearly unrecognizable to normal people.

This nut job, Dreier, not only gets things wrong, but he gets his “facts”, essentially, backwards. In this case the guns were purchased legally in a state, Illinois, with some of the most strict gun control laws and brought the gun to a state with much more relaxed laws. Although I didn’t quote that portion of the article, he repeatedly claims the gun was an AR-15 (it was actually an SKS). Furthermore, gun sales across state lines are already restricted.

This idiot thinks he knows what his writing about but his story is very nearly wrong in a fractal way. There is no attention given to fundamental principles, he does not address the infringement of specific enumerated rights, his conclusions are wrong, the theme is wrong, the paragraphs are wrong, nearly every sentence is wrong, and some of the words are wrong.

He has crap for brains.—Joe]

Quote of the day—John Robb

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It appears that western society is in the process of killing something of equal import in this century.  Something that has been a foundational building block of the psychology of our species for millions of years.  Something that IS causing a vacuum of meaning and deep psychological trauma.

We are killing masculinity.  Maleness in all its forms has been deprecated as an outdated bit of software.  Something to be rewritten for the modern world.

…

We’re rewriting it and we can already see its ill effects.   We can see it in the deep psychological distress it is causing in men and women.  We can see a vacuum of meaning forming all around us.  A void that new social movements are starting to fill from the online tribal nihilism that propelled Trump into the oval office to identity utopians who are being manufactured by the millions in US Universities. 

As it stands right now, we’re likely screwed.  If the last Century is any guide, it’s going to require oceans of blood to resolve this loss…

John Robb
June 2, 2017
“Man is dead, and we have killed him, you and I!”
[Interesting hypothesis.—Joe]

Quote of the day—6Gunner

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I’ve worked with and trained with law enforcement officers from all over the world (including British LEO’s), and inevitably we have discussed the realities of criminal violence in our respective jurisdictions and shared our exasperation with just how… misguided… most private citizens are regarding the realities of crime. A lot of people state they “never felt the need” to worry about their own protection or security, and sure, the odds that you’ll ever be accosted – even in the most crime-ridden societies – are relatively low. BUT… even the safest societies still have crime. Even the safest societies still have innocent people who get brutalized and murdered by criminals… and a lot of the victims of violent crime would NOT have been victimized if only they had taken even the most rudimentary steps to protect themselves.

6Gunner
April 27, 2017
Posted to the thread Gun control in the UK
[Self defense is more than just possessing a firearm and knowing when and how to use it. It requires awareness of your surroundings, the nature of people, and criminal methods.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Michael Z. Williamson

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This supports an hypothesis of mine that most such “social justice” types are themselves exceptionally shallow, narrow-minded bigots.  When something even more blatant than “Friday” comes along, and they are forced to be aware of their own human failings, they over-react, as does the reformed alcoholic or druggie who suddenly “Finds God” and obsesses over religion (versus faith or piety) to the point where it’s apparent it’s merely a substitute addiction.

Once aware of their own failings, their form of denial is to project their shortcomings onto all “normal” people, who obviously feel as they do, about those “non-normal” people they suddenly realize were in fact human beings all along.

Michael Z. Williamson
May 20, 2017
The Failure of the Science Fiction Reader
[“Friday” refers, of course, to Robert Heinlein’s science fiction novel.—Joe]

Mere practice does NOT make perfect

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I learned that concept early on in the music business, from similar observation.

Although there is a small percentage of people who pick things up intuitively, most anyone will benefit from quality instruction. It applies to pretty much everything.

Then again; how did the instructor learn what he knows? Who taught his teacher and where did that person get the knowledge and insight? At some point someone had to figure things out on his own, we benefit from generations of those people’s combined knowledge, and ideally we can add to it. Competition or other direct comparison is the way to prove you know what you know, or to disprove that which you think you know but don’t.

Here is where I restate the side benefits of hunting (the primary benefit being the harvest of wonderful protein from wonderful nature by your own hand). You can do all the range shooting in the world, and even excel at it, and be under-prepared for “shooting for real”. Even though game animals generally don’t shoot back, if you hunt for several seasons you will realize this in ways you cannot otherwise imagine. Here’s another man who sees it that way;

I’m in a practical shooting match as I type this

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Tam has a good funny.

I’ve said before that it would be cool to design an IPSC stage in which there are no “shoot” targets (only “no shoots”). Maybe even, everyone goes home without firing a shot that day, because that’s more “real life” than anything else you could set up.

The most unrealistic thing about a Practical Shooting match, then, is that you go to one knowing for a fact that shots will be fired, and you are thus prepared for it. In real life on the other hand, you never have that advance notice, there are no rules, no scratch lines on the ground, no range Nazis to correct your “mistakes”, no timers, no “walk throughs” prior to shooting your stage, and probably not even any safe places to shoot at all.

In that most realistic sense then, I’m in an IPSC match right now, as I type– I’m carrying a gun and assessing the environment, seeing no immediate threats. I’ve been in this particular “IPSC Match” for over 20 years already and have yet to draw my pistol, much less take a shot. This isn’t merely similar to real life; it IS real life. I only draw and fire my gun when I’ve decided to pause the “IPSC Match” for a while, and find a safe place to shoot.

The range mentality has gotten so insane that I’ve seen multiple gun demonstration videos in which the shooter loads five of six, in a percussion revolver (which is stupid right there if you understand how a percussion revolver differs from a cartridge gun), fiddle farts around trying to lower the hammer on the empty but inadvertently lowers it on a live chamber instead and has to fiddle fart with the gun some more to be sure it’s “safe”, walks five feet to the firing line, confident that he’s “being safe”, and then looks down and shuffles around a bit to make sure his feet are right on the scratch line. Stuff like that.

Don’t even try to talk to me about it. I’m just…not…listening…anymore. I’ve hear it all before anyway. Hell I wrote some of those the rules, literally– I was once the president of a Practical Shooting club.

Go ahead and call me crazy though. I’m accustomed to it, as you may well imagine.

Measuring success in one metric

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For some things, measuring success is pretty obvious, and the metrics are nicely binary. e.g., “Did the boomer go BOOM after you pulled the trigger?”

In other things the metrics are either much harder to measure, or there are “good” reasons that the people measuring success don’t want a good metric; it would show they are failing miserably. Or, worse, they are no longer needed to “do the job.” Pick just about any political appointee and the example writes itself.

Anyway, the reason I ask is that I am, among other things, a teacher. Yeah, I know, taking one for the team here guys, leave me alone about that, will ‘ya? So in preparing for an upcoming interview, I started to think about what sorts of things I can ask them – that’s always a “fun” place for the interview to go, because it can’t be any trivia you can just read off the school web-site, but it also cannot be something that exposes glaring problems or hypocrisy in their system, because after they uncomfortably give you a non-answer you’ll not be offered a job. So it’s a balancing act.

So this question popped into my head, and I thought I’d bounce it off ya’ll to see what sort of trouble I might get myself into, but also maybe find some good follow-ups. I’ve got what I think it’s a pretty good measure of success, but it would likely open a huge can of zombie attack worms the size of anacondas, which I don’t want to deal with just yet. So, the question is: Continue reading →

Quote of the day—Rob Morse

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The antipathy towards gun owners is not based upon stopping violence, but upon reducing the discomfort felt by idealists.  For the idealist, letting society take the burden removes both the duty and the emotional cost of facing an imperfect world. For the idealist, protecting the fantasy narrative is more important than respecting the facts.

Rob Morse
March 27, 2017
Violence and Utopia- Realism and Idealism in the age of Gun Control
[This is probably fair to the majority of the anti-gun people. But, I wouldn’t use the word “idealist” to describe a large minority of them.

“Idealist” is far, far too generous to those in power who know and understand the facts. They want a monopoly on power and the existence of a large number of gun owners are an obstacle to them.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Rachel Dolezal

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People didn’t seem able to consider that maybe both were true. OK, I was born to white parents, but maybe I had an authentic black identity.

Rachel Dolezal
March 24, 2017
Rachel Dolezal struggling after racial-identity scandal in Spokane
[And maybe I’m standing upright and on my head at the same time.

It’s not surprising that she changed her legal name in hopes it would help her get a job. But, “Nkechi Amare Diallo”? And then she tells the AP her new name?

The political left not only is the party of criminals it’s the party of the mentally ill (see also my post on Peterson Syndrome)..—Joe]

Quote of the day—Andrew Heaton

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We threw the baby out with the bathwater when we kicked the monarchy out of America, and we ought to bring it back.

…

In America we’ve combined power and reverence in the office of the presidency, but legal authority and veneration compliment each other about as well as Scotch and back pain medication. It’s safer to ingest them separately.

Andrew Heaton
March 18, 2017
Why America Needs A Monarchy
[I find it hard to disagree with this point. There many be some interesting psychology going on here that could be affecting politics adversely.—Joe]

Expendable men

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Times change.
But it ain’t all progress.

There has been a lot of social upheaval in recent years on the topics of equality, “equality,” women’s rights, men’s rights, patriarchy, the wage gap, marriage, MGTOW, misogyny versus misandry (I note the spell-checker has the previous but not the latter word), marginalizing men, etc. websites like Men of the West, videos like this Continue reading →