Welcome to your new Kafka state!

It'll be a "Trial" for you everyday, from now on in!

Someone wrote:

"It is not unlawful in Britain to 'misgender' someone - not even in Scotland"

.

I replied:

It is not yet unlawful to 'misgender' someone. We now live in a Kafka state - where the cops, spooks, and authoritarians make it up as they go.

1. Watch the recent Shellenberger interview on Triggernometry.
2. Also watch this extract: Benjamin Boyce interview with Helen Roy (ex-CIA), ( Time: 32:06 )

   "A huge part of like the whole political reversion for me was actually a sort of like a really close examination of gender roles and the narrative: the feminist narrative. The Narrative around like what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman and at the time, I was really, I was on this track, Like I said earlier, like I'd really thrown myself into my studies I'd done very well. I was actually working in the intelligence community. Total glowy fed over here. But I mean I was in Chinese; so it made sense right? But like it was just all OFF. It was all off. It was disordered and I just felt like: there was a huge issue in the American government of a total lack of grand strategy; a total lack of a sort of a grounding narrative and understanding of who we are and why we exist in the world. Basically, the only thing that they could come up with, I think, this is true across agencies and now in the military too, is just global gay rights; and we'll just, we're just gonna, you know, fight the trans fight in every country we can [Laugths]. I found that disturbing. Anyway, I found that radicalizing to be honest. So while I was doing that I was I was writing and I was thinking about about all this stuff and I started to just write about it and think about it. And I became friends with people in politics, and then this sort of evolved and I started the podcast and still this is really what I'm interested in is the American family. That masculinity and femininity. I hate, I don't like, the way that - your words - are sort of used to describe very superficial characteristics I think manhood and womanhood are very deep spiritual realities."

Impersonal Skepticism

Impersonal Skepticism is the version of skepticism which began 400 years ago with The European Enlightenment. It is also called empiricism; since the difference between skepticism and empiricism is scant.

I'm calling it impersonal because the skeptic isn't worried about any of the old anti-skeptic arguments such as how can one distinguish between experience, dreams, hallucinations, or a Matrix-world? The skeptic knows reality (actual experience); and doesn't get confused between these kinds of experiences. The skeptic is based, and doesn't fall for word-games, gaslighting, nor brain-washing.

Skepticism is essentially an epistemology. It has no metaphysics I know of. It may have ethics. If we wish to go further into philosophy, go past skepticism; then I recommend either/or psychology and experimental philosophy. By all means, study or read other philosophies - but these philosophical schools and branches all have massive weaknesses; apart from skepticism.

Psychology

Why learn psychology? I think the answer to that question is obvious. Psychology studies how actual people think and behave. We live in the world of actual people. Yet, beware: just as in philosophy - there's too much speculation in psychology, and, worse, there's also bad research wherein researchers make claims about psychology based on weak statistics. With all research you read, ensure sample sizes are in the hundreds (at minimum) and are a true sample of the population being researched.

Experimental Philosophy

Experimental philosophy is an interdisciplinary approach that uses the methods of psychology and cognitive science to answer questions philosophy traditionally poses us. For example, perhaps we can use eperimental philosophy to give empiricists and skeptics a better ethics?

What's New?

I've changed my own personal philosophy and ethics since since studying more psychology. In terms of ethics, I no longer absolutely hold to the golden rule. I think the golden rule isn't applicable when it can and is used against you. For example, psychopaths will always use everthing you give them against you. Not necessarily immediately, but surely when it's to their advantage. Psychopaths are about 1% of other people.

Arson, environmentalism and psychopathology

I wrote this in response to a news story about forest fires. Someone made another daft claim: "The Climate Crisis is Burning Chile", so a poster replied with ten arrested for arson as 260 fires burn and dozens of people die in Chile.

I'd been listening to a lot of psychologists talk about psychopathology recently; such as Understanding Psychopathy | with Jon Uhler, LPC. I was particularly interested in how to recognize a psychopath when talking to one. For example: 10 Signs You're Dealing With A Psychopath - How To Spot Psychopathy. An even better video than that is: signs you're dating a psychopath.

Environmentalism / psychopathology

I cannot tell the difference between a psychopath and an environmentalist. Both groups lie habitually to us. I, personally, cannot remember the last time I spoke to an environmentalist without them lying to me. So from my view-point: environmentalism has precipitated a crisis of psychopathology. Environmentalists think they have legitimate reasons to hate humanity because we are supposedly "burning the planet". This kind of language, this fanaticism, encourages their anti-humanism and promotes polarization in politics. Because the enviros live in an echo-chamber of their own they entered a pathological circle of doom. No one is allowed to tell them the truth on pain of cancellation.

I cannot remember an environmentalist telling me the truth about anything in the past 30 years. What other group of people lie uncontrollably? What other group think they will always get away lying to us? You guessed: psychopaths and sociopaths. The parallels between psychopathology and environmentalism are so striking they scare me. What can happen when we give license to an entire group to lie to us about the "earth literally burning"?, as the UN Secretary General said recently. So that they can both feel smug and save the planet with their virtuous white lies. Just a little exaggeration here and there. A little becomes a lot. 35 years of lying generates a smug feeling of entitlement to lie. I believe such a group - who have carte blanche to lie - will attract lots of other habitual liars to seek a career or fellowship within. These habitual liars are otherwise known as psychopaths. I can no longer tell the difference between the two groups. They seem to have merged.

Can the planet burn up?

There's a famous book called Fahrenheit 451. It's called that because it's the temperature at which paper spontaneously ignites. In nature the warmest temperate ever measured for the climate was at Death Valley, California in 1913: 134.1°F. 451°F is 317°F warner than 134.1°F. Paper is made from cellulose and much dried-out vegetation is mostly cellulose. So the temperature at which dried wood spontaneously ignites will be similar to that for paper. Wood is a mixture of cellulose and lignin. Research shows: Biomass with volatile content up to 78% had ignition temperatures from 236C (457°F) to 270C (518°F), while lignite with volatile content of 58% ignited at 274C (525°F). In practice this tells us that a hot, baked out field or wood cannot spontaneously ignite. It must be set alight by either arson, lightning, or an electrical fault. This is because a chemical reaction (AKA a fire) must reach an activation energy before it can start to burn. So anyone who wails that the earth is on fire is lying to us. If we let them continue to lie to us we're destroying the public sphere.

Social Contagion

Social contagion is a theory about how certain new ideas and memes spread in society. For example "trans kids", or "I think I was born in the wrong body". Back before 2012 there were hardly any 'trans kids' anywhere. Two years later, in 2014, they are all over the internet. A new identify fashion bloomed for a certain kind of progressive youth - especially young women. Time and again, when these trans youths are interviewed, we find they developed their new identity online. In particular: often on Tumblr, within a closed group of like-minded peers.

Many people, such as Jonathan Haidt (see: The Righteous Mind) blame the Internet itself for social contagion, the growth of divisive ideas, and increasing political polarization in society.

What promotes extremism?

1. One implication is that the Internet divides us against each other because it enables polarized, extremist forums to propagate. For example: I was a member of at least one Internet forum which specifically excluded people based on arbitrary criteria. In particular I was a member of an energy discussion forum which excluded other people (who discussed energy, and wanted to join) on the basis that the other person was too republican, libertarian or not progressive enough!

Some people imply that the cure for social contagion is more Internet censorship and control. Presumably banning extremists will enable reasonable progressives to discuss among themselves to arrive at reasonable conclusions? [Many progressives certainly seem to act as if this were so!]

Contra to this growth in extremism argument, I say extremist groups have always existed and always will. Before the Internet we had physical discussion groups, clubs, societies, political parties.

With more internet censorship many critics of new ideas, such as 'trans kids' were censored and banned.

I think the point of "social contagion" is that the new meme being promoted often has a built-in censorship meme too. Consider GM corn with the Bt gene added - making it resistant to insects. Insects kill off wild competitors, so the GM plant quickly grows to become the dominant mono-culture on the farm (a good thing). Likewise with woke ideas. Censorship kills off competing ideas enabling a new idea to grow with nothing inhibiting it.

When we accept one of these woke memes we also accept the necessity to censor heterodox thinkers and non-believers; such censorship is part of the same package of ideas. Without censorship a bad meme cannot multiply as it will be exposed for the gibberish it almost always is. Censorship enables bad memes to quickly spread online.

Q: how is this censorship enabled?

A: Woke memes are often victim memes: "If we don't censor - terrible things will happen to victims". Hence the outlandish claims:

• words are violence
• people refuting woke are "hateful"
• those who don't want expensive renewable energy are DESTROYing the planet.
• those opposing race "equity" policies are "white supremacists", AKA racists (even when they're black!). Because woke is anti-racist, therefore everyone criticising woke must be anti- anti-racist, AKA: racist!

So Helen Joyce is right about defamation. The woke are intrinsically defamatory because defamation, and demonization of opponents is intrinsic to how these new extremist memes spread. Accusations of evil enable censorship, cancel culture and growth of irrational mono-cultures.

Advice?

Unless I try to answer my own question I'll feel I've stolen your time. So, if my questions is how to we stop this extremist, censorious, cancel culture in society? I can only cite evidence in my life. I became far more rational after I studied philosophy. Learning all the isms didn't help: Marx, Freud, existentialism, pomo - did not help me. This did:

• Learning debating skills. Recognizing and avoiding philosophical fallacies
• Understanding evidence-based arguments; and how to recognize good and bad evidence; including good and bad statistical evidence. How to distinguish good from fake science.
• Advocating for free-speech.

These are the key skills a person must learn to become rational. Rationality is a skill; it's not an innate trait of humanity. You are not born rational. Begin with a book on philosphical fallacies. So that you can recognise when people who use them to promote their (bad) ideas. Prefer free-speech advocates, but we don't really care to give free-speech to pornographers but care for free speech when debating politics and social theory. We must support free-speech in general because we don't want judges and politicans deciding what to ban. That's why pornographers get free speech too. Recognize evidence. Learn basic scientific theory such that one understands what scientific laws are; and what makes a scientific theory. How such theories are validated and falsified by experiment and observation. Know basic statistics; enougth to know when statistics are misused. So: I'm giving no advice regarding politics, economics, social theory, human rights, nor even psychology. No need to learn any isms. A lot of advice regarding how to recognize and avoid bad arguments.

Social Justice

The phrase "social justice" draws its roots from Christian theology, with the first noted use occurring in the early 1840s in "Theoretical Treatise of Natural Right Based on Fact", 1840-43, by Luigi Taparelli. Taparelli was an Italian Jesuit priest writing during the rise of Risorgimento, a 19th-century Italian nationalist movement, and debates around the unification of Italy. This work, was translated into German, French, and Spanish in the nineteenth century, but never into English!

Natural Right is a synonym for Natural Law. Much of the European Enlightenment (~1640 to ~1790) criticised and deconstructed previous Christian Natural Law; it a major preoccupation of the earlier (17th century) philosophes. Ealier Christian Natural Law (17th century) had become a totalizing conception of the world and humanity's place in it. The Christian conception of Natural Law was whittled down by the philosophes as they compared each part of it with empirical reality to refute Natural Law which contradicted reality until there was little left over. So 50 years after the Enlightenment ended (1840's) it's fitting that Christians would revise Natural Law, and base the revision "on fact". AKA: provide an empirical foundation for this Natural Law: Theoretical Treatise of Natural Right Based on Fact

It's weird that a 180 year old book giving the intellectual roots for social justice is still not translated into English!, despite current popularity of social justice; dominating Left and Institutional thought today. This is slack. I'd have thought there'd be no limit to wannabe translators! A neutral observer might even think The Powers That Be don't want us plebs to read about the origin social justice. Kind of like how the Church made sure plebs were unable to read The Christian Bible for centuries by preventing its translation into everyday languages.

Climate alarmist evidence = models based on models, based on models

Models all the way down

In a dispute on YouTube over climate (Why the sun CANNOT be behind global warming | by Simon Clark) I complained that the explanation given lacked empirical support, and that other factors are also responsible for atmospheric warming; so one cannot prioritise one cause over another without empirical support. Later 4 citations of studies were given, as 'evidence'. But when I looked into the 4 studies I found the first 3 were entirely model based. This is very typical of how climate alarmists reason. They actually think the models they write of how the atmosphere supposedly generates a greenhouse gas effect are 'settled science'. So settled that they can subsititute models for data at every level.

I ask for empirical studies, you give me model studies; our reasoning is incommensurable.

'Evidence'

2006) The first paper, Hansen et al. opens with: "We use a global climate model to compare the effectiveness of many climate forcing agents for producing climate change" <- so no empirical research - just the opinions and biases of climate alarmist modellers.

2010) 2nd paper, Schmidt et al, is more promising: "we review the existing literature and use the Goddard Institute for Space Studies ModelE radiation module to provide an overview of the role of each absorber at the present-day and under doubled CO2" <- ModelE eh? Surprise!, it's another model: https://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE/

2016) The 3rd: by Shine et al.: "New calculations of the radiative forcing (RF) are presented for the three main well-mixed greenhouse gases, methane, nitrous oxide, and carbon dioxide." <- The calculations are done by modelling

2020) 4th, Sherwood et al.: "We assess evidence relevant to Earth's equilibrium climate sensitivity per doubling of atmospheric CO2, characterized by an effective sensitivity S. This evidence includes feedback process understanding, the historical climate record, and the paleoclimate record" <- this is the only paper of the 4 which uses actual data, but the data will not do. The climate record is disputed. A sensible solution to this is for greenhouse-gas-climate fans to figure out a way to empirically measure the radiative climate forcing they believe in. This has been attempted over clear skies; so my request is not fanciful.

The 4 papers presented as empirical evidence are models piled on models piled on models. The 'evidence' is effectively hidden or secret because most of them are computer code. Even were I able to see the code, I'd need to reverse engineer it to understand it. This code (unlike my clean code) is probably dirty and oblique; because most computer code isn't very well written. But that is not my main complaint: I basically dispute the working of those models. Althought they never tell us what their models are, we do actually know something about climate alarmist greenhouse gas model (AKA: GHGE). Falsification of the GHGE | GHGE is not a scientific concept

Citations

2006. : Efficacy of climate forcings. Journal of Geophysical Research, 2006.
2010. : Attribution of the present-day total greenhouse effect. Journal of Geophysical Research. 2010.
2016. : Radiative forcing of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide: A significant revision of the methane radiative forcing. Geophysical Research Letters, 2016.
2020. : An Assessment of Earth's Climate Sensitivity Using Multiple Lines of Evidence. Reviews of Geophysics. 2020.

Marxian myth: "determination ‘in the last instance’ by the economy"

For example read this essay by Louis Althusser from 1962. Althusser's essay relates to the relationship between superstructure (ideas, ideologies, and institutions producing such) and the base. We can call the 'base' the economy if we want to (as Marxists do) but it really refers to the material base, as it relates to an ideological superstructure. It seems Althusser, and many Marxists, believed this base was determinant. Not always; but always in the 'last instance'. This belief is a facet of Marxian materialism; Marx famously called himself a materialist, to counter-pose his ideas against the establishment; with their faith in traditional institutions such as religion, family, law, philosophy and education; aspects which Marx might claim to be ideological.

I'd argue this is a false understanding of how Marxists really see the human condition. Dont't take a Marxist at face value; by what they say. Judge them on what they do. For Marxists, politics is determinant; in the first and last instance. Seen Engels: 'The Role of Force in History', 1887. I believe this paradox of the chicken versus egg (what is determinat - ideas or material existance?). The Marxian myth of "determination ‘in the last instance’ by the economy" is simply a rule for prioritising matter; and so, justifying calling oneself a 'materialist'.