Science of the SpiritS


People

Preference Falsification and Cascade

Jeffrey A. Tucker
Brownstone Institute
Wed, 18 Dec 2024 00:00 UTC
broken mirror
Tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen posted the following: "We are living through the most dramatic preference cascade of my life. Every day I am hearing the most amazing things."

What an unusual phrase, I thought, so I looked it up. It comes from a book written 30 years ago: Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification, by Duke University economist Timur Kuran.

I downloaded and read it. It's brilliant. It seems to explain everything. Maybe it explains too much. Regardless, Kuran has given us a language to describe a remarkable feature of our times.

How is it that only a few months ago, people were afraid to wear MAGA hats and then Trump, having survived multiple assassination attempts, won not only the Electoral College but also the popular vote, sweeping the House and Senate in with him?

How can it be that during this transition time, people widely assume that the president and vice president is already not Biden/Harris but Trump/Vance?

How can it be that foreign leaders are making pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago while Royals praise him as a great leader?
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Fire

From Gaza to California: The flames that connect us all

Ahmad Ibsais
Mondoweiss
Sat, 11 Jan 2025 00:00 UTC
Palisades fire
© California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection/Cal Fire/FLICKRThe Palisades Fire that started in the City of Los Angeles • January 2025
The fires burning in Palestine and Los Angeles today are symptoms of the same disease: a system that values conquest over conservation, profit over people, and expansion over existence.

For the last few days, I have stared at my phone watching houses, history, and memories burn. But this time, it wasn't Gaza. I was watching the Palisades burn. The hills are alive with fire, a haunting echo of another inferno raging thousands of miles away. For fifteen months, I've witnessed Gaza's land, and people, burn through screens and headlines, and now as I watch the skies over an American city fill with smoke, the distances between these catastrophes collapse into a single, searing truth: these flames speak the same language of destruction - colonialism.

The fire consuming the Palisades isn't just a California wildfire - it's a mirror reflecting a global crisis of connected catastrophes. When I close my eyes, the images blur together: hills ablaze in California, olive groves burning in Gaza and historic Palestine, horizons choked with smoke that knows no borders.
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Cross

'Rosary' beats Rogan: Is faith-based media becoming mainstream?

comLaura Carrione
Fox News
Fri, 10 Jan 2025 18:26 UTC
joe rogoan rosary podcast
Podcast legend Joe Rogan's 'The Joe Rogan Experience' currently sits at #3 on Apple Podcast's Top Shows, just behind Father Mark-Mary Ames' 'The Rosary in a Year,' which fell to #2 on January 4th after three consecutive days of topping the chart.
Self-described 'country club kid' turned friar hosts the new Rosary in a Year podcast that's beating the best of them

The number one podcast in the world to start off the new year doesn't belong to Joe Rogan.

It doesn't belong to Alex Cooper, Mel Robbins, or anyone from the Kelce clan.

It belongs to Father Mark-Mary Ames of Ascension Press. Or, really, as he told Fox News Digital, it belongs to God.

In a time when Bible sales are seeing a sudden spike amid research that suggests people are unsubscribing from religiosity at large, it comes as somewhat of a surprise that The Rosary in a Year (with Fr. Mark-Mary Ames, CFR) climbed to #1 on Apple Podcasts to start off the new year — holding that spot for three consecutive days before falling to a noteworthy #2 on January 4.
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Cell Phone

Why Dostoyevsky is trending on TikTok

Dmitry Samoilov
RT
Fri, 03 Jan 2025 01:33 UTC
Dostoyevsky white nights tiktok graphic
© Dasha Zaitseva / gazeta.ru
How Russia's darkest writer became trendy among British teenagers

Throughout December, the internet buzzed with surprise over the sudden popularity of Fyodor Dostoevsky's novella White Nights among British youth. Thanks to viral posts on TikTok, people in the UK quickly snapped up a new edition of the book. This phenomenon isn't entirely surprising; social media can turn any topic into a trend overnight. However, it's nice to think of White Nights as something special — an enduring fragment of Russian culture that can't be dismissed. And that's true.

White Nights has been adapted for film 30 times, with only five adaptations produced in Russia; the rest come from the United States, Spain, Italy, South Korea, India, and Germany. In just the past 20 years, this novella has been translated into English five times. There's something about it that calls out for regular reinterpretation and revival.
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Cross

Richard Dawkins: The new 'Cultural Christian'

William A. Dembski
Evolution News
Mon, 30 Dec 2024 23:52 UTC
billboard no god enjoy life
© Steve Jurvetson/flickrRichard Dawkins and Ariane Sherine, the founder of the Atheist Bus Campaign, in 2009
EN editor's note: Welcome to an Evolution News tradition: a countdown of our Top 10 favorite stories of the past year, concluding on New Year's Day. This article was originally published on May 1, 2024. Our staff are enjoying the holidays, as we hope that you are, too!
Richard Dawkins has an endearing habit of rewriting history. For almost four decades, from the mid 1970s onward, he wrote of the human genome as mainly junk. It suited his Darwinism to do so, underscoring how evolution cobbles living forms together opportunistically, and that waste and inefficiencies in the genome are simply part of the messy process that is Darwinian evolution, focused as it is on natural selection acting on random variations.

And then in the early 2010s the results of the ENCODE project were announced, showing that hardly any human DNA, and perhaps none of it, was functionless. And so Dawkins claimed that this result — showing an overwhelming absence of junk in the genome — was consistent with Darwinian evolution. Natural selection, it seems, was more efficient and less messy than previously suspected. For the account of his flip-flop, see Chapter 7 of my book The Design Inference (the second edition, co-authored with Winston Ewert).

Dawkins' flip-flop regarding junk DNA pales when compared to his flip-flop in recent weeks regarding Christianity. He now calls himself a "cultural Christian," saying he prefers Christianity to Islam, and especially enjoys Christmas carols. And while he cheers the waning of Christian faith as such, he intimates a longing for things Christian that are disappearing from the culture.
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Warning

The mouth in the void

empty vessels
Medium
Thu, 14 Nov 2024 00:00 UTC
Creature thing
© unknown
Man's coma revelation raises disturbing questions about reality.

On April 12, 1983, James Ridley awoke from a 67-day coma at St. Mary's Hospital in Detroit, screaming about "the mouth in the void." What followed would disturb neurologists and philosophers for decades.
Ridley
© Unknown
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Bad Guys

Pathocrats Want To Destroy You

Harrison Koehli
Political Ponerology
Wed, 20 Nov 2024 17:43 UTC
communism struggle session psychopaths
Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, Part 5 here, Part 6 here and Part 7 here.

Areas of contention and other issues covered in Chapter 5 of Mitchell's thesis

Chapter 5 of Dr. Mitchell's thesis concerns a number of "points of contention and other issues." I will only cover a handful of the issues as the rest are covered briefly in my previous articles.

On the Spectrum?

The first is whether or not "continuum models" of normal personality are useful in identifying dark personalities (DPs). These models consider all attributes to exist in the general population to greater or lesser degrees, like the "Big Five" personality traits. If DP existed on a continuum, everyone would place somewhere on the spectrum; some would have a very low DP score, some very high, and others in between.

The response from participants was mixed on this issue, with academics defending continuum models and practitioners holding more of a categorical view of dark personality (i.e. you're a predator, or you're not). In their expert opinion, DPs "have a discrete set of specific attributes," and continuum models aren't specific enough to capture these attributes and subtleties (especially in the use of tactics); nor do they capture the degree of malevolence, which is usually unimaginable to most people.
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Toys

Mental health therapy has become fluff and wokeness: How it happened

Ryan Rogers
The Multilevel Mailer
Fri, 15 Nov 2024 15:37 UTC
protest minneapolis burning arby's
© John Minchillo / APMinneapolis protestors outside of a burning Arby’s, Friday, May 29, 2020.
Leftist ideology is perverting the mental health fields

The way we train therapists is not only useless, but it can also exacerbate mental illness. I learned the true purpose of my graduate program in clinical mental health counseling early on. During my first semester, my professor for my Counseling the Culturally Diverse class said that our primary objective as therapists is to become political activists so that we can "burn it all to the ground."

That objective might seem bizarre to outsiders, but in my program, questioning it would look morally and intellectually suspect. The theory goes that all mental anguish is caused by oppression, and if we can dismantle the systems of oppression then we can relieve the distress... except that isn't the real goal. In my program and in academia more broadly, social justice is the objective, not simply a means to an end.

My professors frequently say that gender affirming care is the only appropriate way to treat gender confused minors. Never mind that most of them will probably grow out of these feelings. Never mind the damning evidence in the WPATH files or the Cass Report. Gender affirming care is the goal because it represents social justice. The broken bodies of detransitioners are considered a small price to pay for such a noble vision.
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Black Cat

Psychopaths: Dead Inside

Harrison Koehli
Political Ponerology
Mon, 21 Oct 2024 15:19 UTC
Criminal psychopath “Wayne”
© CopyrightCriminal psychopath “Wayne” after describing the premeditated murder of his brother. He smirks slightly while doing so. Wayne scored 40/40 on the PCL-R.
Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, Part 5 here and Part 6 here.

Karen Mitchell's fourth group of dark attributes

The fourth and final set of five attributes in Dr. Karen Mitchell's persistent predatory personality (PPP) model has to do with the inner landscape of such people: "they don't experience feelings in the same way as others."

Attribute 16: Without Authentic Emotion; Emotional Responses Are Acted

As noted in the previous set of attributes, when a PPP isn't playing a role, they present as having no real emotion ("shallow affect"). This seems to be their default state, and study participants repeatedly referred to their "limited, deficient, or nonexistent emotional experience," often in the context of an "incongruence between events and reactions."
"The way he spoke was very flat, very monotone, pertaining to how he killed the child, dismembered the child, and eviscerated the child." (Category 3)1
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Arrow Down

De-westernizing ourselves

Patrick Lawrence
The Unz Review
Tue, 15 Oct 2024 00:00 UTC
BustHerodotus
© Bradley Weber/Flickr/CC BY 2.0Herodotus
The barbarities of Zionist Israel force fundamental questions upon us: Where is our humanity as the Israelis prosecute their terror campaigns before us daily? What shall we do as we find ourselves powerless to react meaningfully because, as the West Asia crisis has suddenly forced us to realize, our institutions have failed us?

Now many of us recognize the need to defend our humanity — the humanity of humanity, as I think of it.

I previously addressed this question as it relates to public space and argued that it is time to look again at multilateral institutions, the United Nations chief among them, with a view to reviving them after a long period during which they have been discounted and devalued.

Now I want to turn the questions just posed in another direction and suggest we consider the matter from a personal, individual perspective.

What must each of us do, in the privacy, so to say, of our consciences, our thoughts, our surmises and judgments, to take up the work of defending humanity's humanity? It is at bottom a psychological question. It is a matter, very simply, of "changing our minds."

We must begin, it seems to me by recognizing who we think we are. Note right away: I speak not of who we are but who we think we are, who we assume ourselves to be.
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