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.