I've spent most of the day wrestling with an article about lying. Specifically, the kinds of lies that are mistaken for virtue nowadays. Obesity is healthy, men are women, everybody is beautiful, all group disparities are proof of white supremacy. People use lies as markers of group affiliation or signifiers of moral virtue. As justification for their failings or just a way to get attention.
You shouldn't waste your time trying to explain basics to someone who hasn't taken the trouble to learn anything. "Mental illness" incles maladies that lead people to erupt into violence for no reason. I was nearly murdered by a roommate who deteriorated before my eyes into a helpless schizophrenic. When you see a knife miss you by inches and go into the wall up to the hilt, you don't quibble about sparing the mentally ill any judgment.
I'm sure you know about the MMPI. It needs to constantly be renormalized as we keep on getting crazier.
We accept far too much, and I don't just mean attention-starved people claiming "trans." Change a few words of what religious people believe without substantively changing their beliefs and you could commit them to mental institutions. But we accept this.
And I am not saying we need to expect everyone to think logically; logic is learned, not inborn. But that's another topic.
We, as a world, are getting crazier. Look at the House of Representatives. Jewish space lasers, white supremacy. Look at "woke." Look at the collapsing ecosystem.
""Mental illness" incles maladies that lead people to erupt into violence for no reason."
Absolutely. But sadly people like Rivka aren't interested in the messy realities of mental illness (or any aspect of life really). Life needs to fit within the narrow confines of whatever they find palatable, and anything outside of that is "Nazism".
Thomas Sowell made an interesting (if a little simplistic) point on this. He breaks people down (he uses liberal and conservative but that's *really* simplistic) into those who think that human nature is good and that only systems need to be changed, and those who accept that aspects of human nature re deeply flawed and that there's a limit to how much that can be changed.
The tension between these two extremes is healthy, I think. But a significant number of SJWs don't know how to frame the flaws in human nature and psychology in any other way than to call them evil (they never notice their own flaws of course). And to dismiss people as evil, you have to ignore any extenuating factors like mental illness or the simple possibility that you're wrong.
I think liberal/conservative is the wrong way to slice the pizza. As I’ve said, the SJWs have more in common with NAGA that with real progressives or with good people in general.
I see the slice more as inborn/teleological and retrofit. The reason liberals keep losing is the belief that other people are as logical and reasonable as they are and that appeals to rational thought will win. Conservatives appeal to resentment and hate and hew closer to reality.
People are born with drives, they aren’t born with logic. Logic and reason and reciprocity are acquired, except they usually aren’t.
As for liberals and conservatives, it appears their brains are different.
I’ll write more details when I wake up. Back to sleep.
That’s better than I expected from AEI and I almost stopped reading when the writer went into that “market” crap, but he wasn’t as doctrinaire as I was expecting.
I think economics is mostly pseudoscientific bunk and market forces are pure religion, and I walk out of any discussion that turns to supply and demand.
I’d love to believe that human unity is achievable but I can’t.
I believe we will become extinct before people alive today die of old age, maybe before I do, the only question is how much of the natural kingdom we take with us. And what will kill us is conservatives.
Mental health is an area far outside my knowledge. My way of looking at the complex issue is probably too simplistic.
Autism, born with a brain that processes information in ways outside norms that present varying degrees of dealing with life.
I think of mental illness as a difference in brain process less about autisms deficiency and more about a lack of rationally. Rationality is related to logic but they are not quite the same. People who can apply logical process can at the same time be irrational.
I've seen drugs and alcohol turn once normal individuals into people properly considered insane and not just while under the influence. Trauma can cause it too.
Kanye is not just anyone. He is a very public figure with a huge platform and the ear of former Presidents. He is therefore fair game, whatever his mental condition is.
Yes, kind lies are still lies. Civilized society would likely be impossible without some measure of lying. You don't really want to tell your dinner host that your dinner made you want to puke.
But there are limits. You don't want your doctor to refrain from telling you that you are on the verge of liver failure to avoid upsetting you. You want to be told to cut out the booze. Nor do you want to tell children that they all are "champions" because you then cheapen the will to succeed. If truth telling is equated to "violence," we will, as a culture, become delusional and therefore much weaker. Yet that is precisely what is happening now in Anglophone cultures.
As you also point out, lying about reality is also a way of signaling "belonging" to a tribe or ideology. Humans are profoundly mimetic, and ostracism for failure to adhere to the fictions of an ideology is a central method of achieving group cohesion through scapegoating.
In other words, it takes quite a bit of courage--and perhaps an independent income--to speak the truth. But I personally feel that a minority of people are just wired that way and damn the consequences. There are a few of these people who become leaders. But many will just suffer because the majority could care less about the truth--they just want approval. And the majority will punish. Maybe "the truth shall set you free," but not always in a good way.
"You don't want your doctor to refrain from telling you that you are on the verge of liver failure to avoid upsetting you. You want to be told to cut out the booze."
Exactly. Or rather, they may *not* want to be told to cut out the booze. But the right thing to do, the kind thing to do, is to tell them anyway. True kindness is a willingness to make an uncomfortable choice, perhaps even a choice that is detrimental to us in some way, because it's better for the person/people we're being kind to.
This has always taken courage. But it's such a shame that it takes so *much* courage nowadays.
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. 640 questions whose correlations with mental illness are entirely statistical without regard to how they might relate to illness; over a thousand ways to analyze the answers.
Example: "I liked to play 'Dopt The Handkerchief' as a child" correlates with schizophrenia. I've never heard of "Drop the Handkerchief."
I might be on the autism spectrum, I will likely never know.
[I do know as of this morning I don't have prostate cancer. I had a complete blood work done here, there are some alarms (I was told not to eat or take insulin after 6PM the previous evening and my blood sugar was emergency room high), but my PSAs are smack in the middle of normal and before my age my father had prostate cancer twice.]
Not being a drinker I knew nothing about alcohol, then a friend of fifteen years whom I had not seen in ten came to visit. He weighed twice what he used to and after a few days here I noticed this weird temper I had never seen before. Since then I have seen it in others and now know a marker for alcoholism: an increasing temper that feeds on itself. MOST unpleasant.
Rationality ≠ Logic. Perfectly logical thinking predicated on false information can lead to floid irrationality. Read Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason"; one of those books like Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations" that everyone intelligent needs to know.
It is not a matter of political correctness that I think of Kanye as a man with issues rather than insanity. His successes in life indicate a bit of genius but celebrity seems to sometimes remove people's filters. Are the things then revealed something that was always there, or something new?
"t is not a matter of political correctness that I think of Kanye as a man with issues rather than insanity"
Yeah, I guess "insanity" has just been folded under the umbrella of what we call "mental health issues" in 21st Century speak. And, to be fair, I think that's a good thing. It allows for more precision.
According to numerous sources, Kanye has an official diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Which will certainly modify people's filters. I think his divorce sent him into a spiral too.
I feel like this is a complicated thing to talk about because while being mentally ill should not be an excuse for bigotry, often times, it can definitely influence a part of it. As you said, mentally ill people are a large, diverse group of people and even two people with the same illness can find that it affects them differently. For example, Elliot Rodgers who was autistic fell into incel behavior and murdered a whole group of women. His behavior while absolutely horrendous and inexcusable was also a product of the isolation he felt due to the way he was treated as an autistic person. Omitting that does my community no favours. But, this obviously does not mean that the entire autistic community only consists of incel mass murderers. The main difference between Elliot Rodgers and another autistic person who is mentally stable is the presence of a good support system. I think it would help to focus on that instead of demonizing the autism itself. This applies to all other mental health conditions.
From my experience of mental illness, the availability of "the presence of a good support system" is relevant only if the patient is willing to avail her or himself of it. I don't know about autistic people, but my 40 years of experience with a schizo-affected manic depressive taught me that getting the patient to accept the support weas 90% of the battle.
"being mentally ill should not be an excuse for bigotry, often times, it can definitely influence a part of it"
Yeah, I think you could make a strong case that everybody who lacks a good support system will end up suffering some degree of mental illness. And yes, I certainly don't think Elliot Rodger should be considered at all representative of autistic people. Any more than a "neurotypical" murderer should be considered representative of people who don't have autism.
Autistic people tend to struggle a bit more with the complexities of social interaction and abstract though, and that makes them more vulnerable to certain types of bad thinking. But I'd never heard anybody suggest that Kanye is autistic before Rivka. As far as I'm aware he's not autistic.
But as far as mental illness goes, I guess the question is, is it bigotry if one is saying something because they're mentally ill? Or maybe it's worth going one step back and thinking carefully about what we mean by bigotry. If Kanye "loves Hitler," is that bigotry? How about if he thinks the Holocaust didn't happen? These are varying degrees of stupid, but are they bigotry? I honestly don't think so.
The word "bigotry" (as it's commonly used today) implies hatred that I genuinely don't believe Kanye feels. I think he's a lost, confused man who allows his emotions much more than any thought process to guide him and words. This might work pretty well for music. But not so much for socio-political commentary.
Ah yes, that definitely is true. I think that one of the main issues with most current mainstream discourse is that we're so quick to label everything as bigotry or some form of phobia or supremacy without even examining where it stems from. People can't say that certain elements of autism might make people of the neurotype more vulnerable to harmful ideologies without it either ending with people villanizing autism entirely or the person making the claim being accused of some form of ableism. And yes, we do often confuse misinformation or ignorance for hatred too.
His statements about Jews and Hitler are simply beyond the pale and wholely inexcusable. Whether or not his behavior has roots in mental illness is of only the mildest interest. He's a Nazi. Nazis should be shunned; they should not be esteemed in any way, they should not be allowed in the police, military, or representative government. They should be denied employment but the most menial. Society must express its disapproval in every way short of murdering them.
And I don't regard that crap Kanye creates to be music. That insults all of us who stayed home playing scales and arpeggios while our friends were out drinking and playing foosball.
You shouldn't waste your time trying to explain basics to someone who hasn't taken the trouble to learn anything. "Mental illness" incles maladies that lead people to erupt into violence for no reason. I was nearly murdered by a roommate who deteriorated before my eyes into a helpless schizophrenic. When you see a knife miss you by inches and go into the wall up to the hilt, you don't quibble about sparing the mentally ill any judgment.
I'm sure you know about the MMPI. It needs to constantly be renormalized as we keep on getting crazier.
We accept far too much, and I don't just mean attention-starved people claiming "trans." Change a few words of what religious people believe without substantively changing their beliefs and you could commit them to mental institutions. But we accept this.
And I am not saying we need to expect everyone to think logically; logic is learned, not inborn. But that's another topic.
We, as a world, are getting crazier. Look at the House of Representatives. Jewish space lasers, white supremacy. Look at "woke." Look at the collapsing ecosystem.
""Mental illness" incles maladies that lead people to erupt into violence for no reason."
Absolutely. But sadly people like Rivka aren't interested in the messy realities of mental illness (or any aspect of life really). Life needs to fit within the narrow confines of whatever they find palatable, and anything outside of that is "Nazism".
Thomas Sowell made an interesting (if a little simplistic) point on this. He breaks people down (he uses liberal and conservative but that's *really* simplistic) into those who think that human nature is good and that only systems need to be changed, and those who accept that aspects of human nature re deeply flawed and that there's a limit to how much that can be changed.
The tension between these two extremes is healthy, I think. But a significant number of SJWs don't know how to frame the flaws in human nature and psychology in any other way than to call them evil (they never notice their own flaws of course). And to dismiss people as evil, you have to ignore any extenuating factors like mental illness or the simple possibility that you're wrong.
I think liberal/conservative is the wrong way to slice the pizza. As I’ve said, the SJWs have more in common with NAGA that with real progressives or with good people in general.
I see the slice more as inborn/teleological and retrofit. The reason liberals keep losing is the belief that other people are as logical and reasonable as they are and that appeals to rational thought will win. Conservatives appeal to resentment and hate and hew closer to reality.
People are born with drives, they aren’t born with logic. Logic and reason and reciprocity are acquired, except they usually aren’t.
As for liberals and conservatives, it appears their brains are different.
I’ll write more details when I wake up. Back to sleep.
Thomas Sowell's book, "A Conflict of Visions" https://www.amazon.com/Conflict-Visions-Ideological-Political-Struggles/dp/0465002056 offers a more complete view of the issue than the simple Liberal/conservative labels in common usage. I don't know how many of his books you've read, but he is deeper than that.
Here's a well written review. Obviously different reviewers will have different takes on it. https://www.aei.org/economics/review-thomas-sowells-a-conflict-of-visions/
That’s better than I expected from AEI and I almost stopped reading when the writer went into that “market” crap, but he wasn’t as doctrinaire as I was expecting.
I think economics is mostly pseudoscientific bunk and market forces are pure religion, and I walk out of any discussion that turns to supply and demand.
I’d love to believe that human unity is achievable but I can’t.
I believe we will become extinct before people alive today die of old age, maybe before I do, the only question is how much of the natural kingdom we take with us. And what will kill us is conservatives.
The MMPI is need to me. I must read up on it.
Mental health is an area far outside my knowledge. My way of looking at the complex issue is probably too simplistic.
Autism, born with a brain that processes information in ways outside norms that present varying degrees of dealing with life.
I think of mental illness as a difference in brain process less about autisms deficiency and more about a lack of rationally. Rationality is related to logic but they are not quite the same. People who can apply logical process can at the same time be irrational.
I've seen drugs and alcohol turn once normal individuals into people properly considered insane and not just while under the influence. Trauma can cause it too.
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
I wrote a long answer and clicked delete by accident
I saw it before it vanished. Thanks. Or maybe it was the one that's still there at the top level that I perceived as a reply.
Oh, good
Kanye is not just anyone. He is a very public figure with a huge platform and the ear of former Presidents. He is therefore fair game, whatever his mental condition is.
Yes, kind lies are still lies. Civilized society would likely be impossible without some measure of lying. You don't really want to tell your dinner host that your dinner made you want to puke.
But there are limits. You don't want your doctor to refrain from telling you that you are on the verge of liver failure to avoid upsetting you. You want to be told to cut out the booze. Nor do you want to tell children that they all are "champions" because you then cheapen the will to succeed. If truth telling is equated to "violence," we will, as a culture, become delusional and therefore much weaker. Yet that is precisely what is happening now in Anglophone cultures.
As you also point out, lying about reality is also a way of signaling "belonging" to a tribe or ideology. Humans are profoundly mimetic, and ostracism for failure to adhere to the fictions of an ideology is a central method of achieving group cohesion through scapegoating.
In other words, it takes quite a bit of courage--and perhaps an independent income--to speak the truth. But I personally feel that a minority of people are just wired that way and damn the consequences. There are a few of these people who become leaders. But many will just suffer because the majority could care less about the truth--they just want approval. And the majority will punish. Maybe "the truth shall set you free," but not always in a good way.
"You don't want your doctor to refrain from telling you that you are on the verge of liver failure to avoid upsetting you. You want to be told to cut out the booze."
Exactly. Or rather, they may *not* want to be told to cut out the booze. But the right thing to do, the kind thing to do, is to tell them anyway. True kindness is a willingness to make an uncomfortable choice, perhaps even a choice that is detrimental to us in some way, because it's better for the person/people we're being kind to.
This has always taken courage. But it's such a shame that it takes so *much* courage nowadays.
You have a friend on chemo. She is in her early 20s and looks 90. "I look terrible, don't I." Truth would be cruelty.
"Oh yeah, you look half dead. It disgusts me to glance in your direction."
No. You lie.
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. 640 questions whose correlations with mental illness are entirely statistical without regard to how they might relate to illness; over a thousand ways to analyze the answers.
Example: "I liked to play 'Dopt The Handkerchief' as a child" correlates with schizophrenia. I've never heard of "Drop the Handkerchief."
I might be on the autism spectrum, I will likely never know.
[I do know as of this morning I don't have prostate cancer. I had a complete blood work done here, there are some alarms (I was told not to eat or take insulin after 6PM the previous evening and my blood sugar was emergency room high), but my PSAs are smack in the middle of normal and before my age my father had prostate cancer twice.]
Not being a drinker I knew nothing about alcohol, then a friend of fifteen years whom I had not seen in ten came to visit. He weighed twice what he used to and after a few days here I noticed this weird temper I had never seen before. Since then I have seen it in others and now know a marker for alcoholism: an increasing temper that feeds on itself. MOST unpleasant.
Rationality ≠ Logic. Perfectly logical thinking predicated on false information can lead to floid irrationality. Read Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason"; one of those books like Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations" that everyone intelligent needs to know.
Glad you got the all-clear!
It is not a matter of political correctness that I think of Kanye as a man with issues rather than insanity. His successes in life indicate a bit of genius but celebrity seems to sometimes remove people's filters. Are the things then revealed something that was always there, or something new?
"t is not a matter of political correctness that I think of Kanye as a man with issues rather than insanity"
Yeah, I guess "insanity" has just been folded under the umbrella of what we call "mental health issues" in 21st Century speak. And, to be fair, I think that's a good thing. It allows for more precision.
According to numerous sources, Kanye has an official diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Which will certainly modify people's filters. I think his divorce sent him into a spiral too.
"Some people are just assholes"
Laughing...Yep.
Steve, I would love to see a column about this:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/02/02/ohio-officials-are-investigating-pro-nazi-home-schoolers/
I feel like this is a complicated thing to talk about because while being mentally ill should not be an excuse for bigotry, often times, it can definitely influence a part of it. As you said, mentally ill people are a large, diverse group of people and even two people with the same illness can find that it affects them differently. For example, Elliot Rodgers who was autistic fell into incel behavior and murdered a whole group of women. His behavior while absolutely horrendous and inexcusable was also a product of the isolation he felt due to the way he was treated as an autistic person. Omitting that does my community no favours. But, this obviously does not mean that the entire autistic community only consists of incel mass murderers. The main difference between Elliot Rodgers and another autistic person who is mentally stable is the presence of a good support system. I think it would help to focus on that instead of demonizing the autism itself. This applies to all other mental health conditions.
From my experience of mental illness, the availability of "the presence of a good support system" is relevant only if the patient is willing to avail her or himself of it. I don't know about autistic people, but my 40 years of experience with a schizo-affected manic depressive taught me that getting the patient to accept the support weas 90% of the battle.
The biggest problem with schizophrenics is that they stop taking their medications.
Ah, that's an excellent point I hadn't thought of. Accepting the help is definitely a huge part of it.
"being mentally ill should not be an excuse for bigotry, often times, it can definitely influence a part of it"
Yeah, I think you could make a strong case that everybody who lacks a good support system will end up suffering some degree of mental illness. And yes, I certainly don't think Elliot Rodger should be considered at all representative of autistic people. Any more than a "neurotypical" murderer should be considered representative of people who don't have autism.
Autistic people tend to struggle a bit more with the complexities of social interaction and abstract though, and that makes them more vulnerable to certain types of bad thinking. But I'd never heard anybody suggest that Kanye is autistic before Rivka. As far as I'm aware he's not autistic.
But as far as mental illness goes, I guess the question is, is it bigotry if one is saying something because they're mentally ill? Or maybe it's worth going one step back and thinking carefully about what we mean by bigotry. If Kanye "loves Hitler," is that bigotry? How about if he thinks the Holocaust didn't happen? These are varying degrees of stupid, but are they bigotry? I honestly don't think so.
The word "bigotry" (as it's commonly used today) implies hatred that I genuinely don't believe Kanye feels. I think he's a lost, confused man who allows his emotions much more than any thought process to guide him and words. This might work pretty well for music. But not so much for socio-political commentary.
Ah yes, that definitely is true. I think that one of the main issues with most current mainstream discourse is that we're so quick to label everything as bigotry or some form of phobia or supremacy without even examining where it stems from. People can't say that certain elements of autism might make people of the neurotype more vulnerable to harmful ideologies without it either ending with people villanizing autism entirely or the person making the claim being accused of some form of ableism. And yes, we do often confuse misinformation or ignorance for hatred too.
His statements about Jews and Hitler are simply beyond the pale and wholely inexcusable. Whether or not his behavior has roots in mental illness is of only the mildest interest. He's a Nazi. Nazis should be shunned; they should not be esteemed in any way, they should not be allowed in the police, military, or representative government. They should be denied employment but the most menial. Society must express its disapproval in every way short of murdering them.
And I don't regard that crap Kanye creates to be music. That insults all of us who stayed home playing scales and arpeggios while our friends were out drinking and playing foosball.