Elsewhere (263)

MC,

In other news:

“Across the three studies, we found consistent evidence that women reported higher levels of incivility [in the workplace] from other women than their male counterparts,” Gabriel said. “In other words, women are ruder to each other than they are to men, or than men are to women.”

This my shocked face.

Lower professional status women jockeying for dominance (in, say, HR, The “Diversity” Department or PR surely wouldn’t disrupt a company’s core business in any way, would it?

they compete against each other for dominance in the workplace.

I kept hens for a very short period of time a few years ago and only at my wife’s request. I never wanted livestock, too much work. Work that I would be forced to do after the luster and shine wore off and the reality of caring for a dozen extra living beings really set in.
Sure enough, a few months into it I was primary care provider. The gals really took to me; I could feed them from my hand and even pet them. They wouldn’t come when I called, but they came running whenever I came into sight so it didn’t really matter.
The thing is, they really hated my wife. I complained a few times about being the one caring for them even though she is the one who wanted them, but they went berserk as soon as she stepped into the pen. They would charge her, scratch and peck her, and one particularly ferocious one would even fly onto her back and peck at her neck and head.
It occurred to me that she hadn’t established herself as the dominant hen so they had to put her in her place, which was last.
When I mentioned it as a possibility, she got mad.

You’re lucky to have lived to tell the tale!
I assumed he was typing from a camp bed in the neighbour’s garage.

I can’t imagine the hot water I’d find myself in if I were to imply that the animals were better at playing the game.
Dog owners know this well. When one gets a new pup, one has to establish the “pack order” in the house from the get-go. Many years ago, I made the mistake of getting a female Malamute pup before my wife and I got married. It was a struggle to get the dog to understand her place as the “beta” female in the pack. It took about 12 months of intensive (and expensive) training to get there, but ultimately, the dog minded my wife better than me . . . because I was a softie and she (the dog) was a big sweetie, yes she was.

R.Sherman,
I keep rereading your last post. Ever consider trying your hand at short story writing?

The elephant in the room is the impact of illegal immigration on social trust. Diversity erodes social trust, trust being that extremely valuable form of social capital that enables people to make handshake deals, leave their doors unlocked, and trust institutions to treat them fairly. Sociologist Robert Putnam was so shocked to discover this that he sat on his results for seven years before publishing. In diverse communities trust drops not only between ethnolinguistic groups but within them. It’s insidious and very harmful – low-trust societies are bad, bad places to live.
The U.S. has a proud tradition of assimilating legal immigrants into a high-trust society, but it succeeds in this by making them non-diverse – teaching them to assimilate folk values and blend in. Putnam’s work suggests strongly that without the ability to rate-limit immigration to be within some as yet undetermined maximum, the harm from erosion of trust would exceed the benefits of immigration. We are probably above the optimal legal immigration rate – the highest compatible with avoiding net decrease in social trust over time – already.

Eric Raymond, here.

We are probably above the optimal legal immigration rate
As I recall, the United States has, in the past, severely curbed immigration in reaction to such a problem, and did not relax the curbs until the previous huge cohorts had been assimilated.

“I want my country back, and if I can’t have it back then I wish to go someplace less nutty.”
I’ve thought much the same thing many times in recent years, and have come to the conclusion that the only place less nutty than my country these days is America. I think you’re more or less screwed.
“I think the Parliament of Funk could govern better than those bozos we have now.”
e.g., the Parliament of Bunk.

Well, Sam, I was afraid that would be the case. I will live out my life here and request that I be cremated in the CVS parking lot atop a pyre of their own coupons that they refused to accept during my lifetime.

Gangsta bagpipes: Does that explain wars with the English?

Fat woke-ling is outraged …
From the same larger than life individual 22 hours ago.
Who saw that coming?

I’ve often said that modern leftism can be seen as a kind of malign counsel, a way to ruin your psychology and your life, and the lives of others; but I’m still sometimes caught out by just how often that’s true.
I’m curious: Considering about a half dozen comments in this thread – I read them all – is progressivism considered an outright disorder? Has it been considered a disorder for some time? Will it be considered a disorder in the future?
I realize the question is conditioned by to whom are you referring, you [epithet], but that’s also open-ended: by folks who generally think about progressivism via its unique intellectual (and emotional) challenges, I suppose.
I’ve felt progressivism was mental ever since realizing it embodied what I understood to be the trifecta of mental illness, those elements being the lie, appearances-obsession (a component of lying) and blaming everyone for everything. Add the progg’s friendliness with theft – they call it redistribution – and the die is cast.
It’s obvious the thing is the functional equivalent of a (bad) religion, and it’s clear it prefers the less robust psyche but I’m curious if the group’s members widely earn the conscious intellectual labeled of nutso or if they’re seen more as political opponents.
I wouldn’t categorize every single professing member as such – some are clearly indoctrinated into it – but as a semi-formal, self-recognized, and resilient faction of humanity it seems clear the clinical diagnosis applies to its various rites, practices, and personalities.
The upshot is obvious: Such a broad-based analysis, if correct and adopted widely, is how to survive the damn thing. In fact, it’s like surviving an abuser in the household. Put another way, what’s preventing society’s psychologically-informed from organizing.
Well, nothing, actually.
If you’ve ever suffered a clinically whacked ex, you know the patterns. Imagining for a friend, naturally.

Fat woke-ling is outraged that a cancer charity should dare to acknowledge obesity as a risk factor.
To steal from Ayn Rand, this really is returning to the Primitive. Thus, we dare not speak certain words in the dark of night, i.e. “obesity,” lest the demon (cancer) is summoned and overwhelms us. Better to keep muttering our incantation that “fat is beautiful” while we throw a virgin cancer charity into a volcano somewhere.
But remember: these people are progressive.

Fat woke-ling is outraged …
Having seen her picture, I can understand why she is so thin-skinned.

@Farnsworth
I love the part about “Irregular Migration.” Perhaps Jerry Brown can extend his high-speed rail all the way from Tijuana to Vancouver, BC to give our Canadian cousins an assist. Or Trump’s infrastructure plan could include a tunnel underneath I-35 from Brownsville to Thunder Bay.

Jesus Christ, most modern mothers don’t understand this with kids either!
Yep. After I wrote most of that about dogs, the wife and I not having any children, as I went on I realized it fit toddlers/teenagers as well. Went back and re-edited but missed that sentence. I was initially blind to the parallel as my own mother understood these things. As did her aunt, probably the second most influential woman in my young life. Though it was my mother’s uncle who is famous in the family (mostly for me repeating it) for saying, “The child will eat what is put in front of him and be damn glad he has it”. Praise God and pass the brussel sprouts.

is progressivism considered an outright disorder?
…
those elements being the lie, appearances-obsession (a component of lying) and blaming everyone for everything.

I’m afraid I have some bad news for you. If you look at the vast majority of people in the vast majority of places over the vast majority of history, this is pretty much standard human nature. We (being generous to include myself) are the ones out of order. And if you dig deep into many of “us”, especially in regard to “appearances-obsession”, you will find the circle getting even smaller. Think #NeverTrump and similar elsewhere. From what little I understand of UK politics (something I really shouldn’t say much about because every time I think I understand something of it, I realize how wrong I am) the Tories seem to me to have a strong streak of this.
In fact, it’s like surviving an abuser in the household. Put another way, what’s preventing society’s psychologically-informed from organizing.
I presume that last bit was a question. The answer being, again just MNSHO, most of the psychologically-informed are whacked themselves. The shrink profession is chock full of nut jobs. But perhaps that’s just a US thing…Though FWIR I doubt it. But then I’m guessing from your post immediately after the first one, you kind of get my point.

Could you summarize disorder, WTP? Or offer some tangible demarcation?
My experience involves adequate contact with genuine evil and enough corroborating clinical confirmation thereof to settle on pathological lying and a rather complete apathy to others as key elements. The appearances-centrism I borrowed from Peck and his rather starkly realistic definition of evil. And theft is just theft.
In other words, national public aired commentary and swaths of the academy.
I find that per its approximate theory, the progressive movement is quite agreed to aspects of clinical disorder while its more zealous practitioners can look like pathological.
This doesn’t absolve anyone else of delusion – and gauged by its own hidebound egotists, culture-signallers, crusading statists, and Pharisees the political right has its own plagues and malignancies – but the general strain of progressivism can raise the question. If you wanted to make a movement out of mental misfits it’s what you’d pretty much end up with, if only for their magnificent ability to proudly invert reality and then brag about their superiority to Normals.

Jesus Christ, most modern mothers don’t understand this with kids either!
“Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area – crime, education, housing, race relations – the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.”
–Is Reality Optional? by Thomas Sowell
“There once was a woman with notions quite new.
She never told children the things they should do.
She pulled all the covers up over her head
When people explained where her theories led.”
–from “The Space Child’s Mother Goose”

Hopp Sing: Would that be Schmoomageddon?

The great success the left has had over decades, in becoming dominant in so many institutions of Western societies, has hinged upon infecting guilt cultures with weaponized shame cultures; cancers that can slip past the society’s immune system until it is too late for that immune system’s natural tendencies alone to be sufficient in beating back the tumor.
That’s the precise fear.
In a normal world normal folks would see this stuff and exorcise it; We’ve the forethought to make hopefully proscriptive laws against crime, so would there be wide recognition of the psychotic defects that threaten Western society and culture. You can’t legislate against behavior and wouldn’t want to, but adequate social pressure against nutso alone would be a conscious factor in the maintenance of a stable society.
It’d start by retracting every vestige of the state from the public sphere.
I think my complaint stems from the realization that the right is turgid, complacent, commonly enabling, reactionary, and thus merely rhetorical and ultimately ostensible. For example, in the US it’s had two and a quarter centuries to erect a visible, public edifice to its own historical structuralism and other than enshrining some documents, has yet to. How hard is it to maintain a box of proven recipes?
Impossible, apparently. No wonder anything goes.

Do help yourself to refreshments.

Peck? M. Scott Peck? The guy who decided one of his patients was evil because she liked cloudy, gray weather? I’d be cautious in looking to him for insight. To me he always seemed like one of those headshrinkers who’s nuttier than his patients. He did write a fairly good novel about demonic possession, starring himself (as the exorcist, not the demon). The first half’s dull but the second half, about a lady possessed after she encounters an evil book, is quietly creepy. The evil book is real, adding a note of verisimilitude.
Speaking of demons, Peck claimed to have been a friend of Malachi Martin, the laicized Jesuit who wrote “Hostage to the Devil.” I say “claimed” because Peck described Martin as one of the biggest liars he’d ever known, not the kind of thing a man ordinarily says about a trusted friend.
“Hostage” is presented as fact but I suspect it’s also fiction. It describes 5 exorcisms that were supposed to have taken place in the U.S. in the mid- to late 20th century. A Roman Catholic priest has to get permission from his bishop to perform an exorcism. At that time you’d have been hard-pressed to find 5 American bishops who believed in God, much less Satan, and allowing an exorcism would have been unthinkably old-fashioned and un-hip. “Hostage” is still worth reading. Martin’s a lively writer and, since he was educated when the Jesuits still believed in God, his theology is sound. Enjoy!