Feed Your Head – Page 3 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Making Leftists Radical: Compassion, Internet Cats, and Feminists With No Sense of Humor

“It’s mercy, compassion, and forgiveness I lack. Not rationality.” – Kill Bill, Volume 1

That’s awake, not “woke.”

Repost from 2019 . . .

Here’s a fable:

There was a little girl going to school in Japan. Near her place in the classroom there was a cocoon that the teacher had brought in to illustrate the life cycle of the butterfly, and it was hanging right next to her every day. For a whole week, nothing had happened, but then she noticed the cocoon shaking. She could see that the caterpillar had completed its transformation.

What bothered the girl so very much was that the butterfly was struggling to get out of the cocoon. Finally, exhausting all of the patience that a seven year old has, she helped the butterfly by ever so gently tearing open the cocoon so it could get free.

To her surprise, rather than flying, the butterfly fell out of the cocoon and onto the floor of the school room. She gasped.

The teacher walked over and looked at the butterfly helplessly writhing on the floor. It was clear the butterfly would never be able to fly.

“Did you help the butterfly out of the cocoon?”

The little girl, through eyes that were filling with tears, nodded.

The teacher explained, “It is only through struggling to get out of the cocoon that the butterfly gets enough strength to fly.”

This is one of my favorite stories. I can’t recall where I originally heard or read it.

I’d often tell that story to people that reported to me when they were facing a particularly difficult time at work. I’m sure it just made some of them mad – they wanted me to solve their problems. I refused, perhaps giving them hints on places they should look to find the answer.

One of my goals was to get the work done for the company, sure. But I also wanted to take the time to get the person developed – for me that was a moral imperative. My biggest goal was that everyone who reported to me became a more capable person – and I knew that didn’t happen without the struggle. Oh sure, I could have told Ted where the fire extinguisher was, but that would have deprived him of the struggle to find it. And one of his eyebrows finally did grow back.

That’s how I mostly have used the story, to show the importance of struggle. But there’s another and perhaps more central moral to this story:

misplaced compassion kills.

The Mrs. recently found an article that really, for me, answered the question about why the Left is turning so radical, so quickly. The article is by Zach Goldberg, and you can find it here (LINK), although he takes the data in a different direction than I do for his article. Goldberg has an interesting Twitter® feed (LINK) as well. The graphs in this post are mostly from either the article or his Twitter© feed.

It’s always nice when ¡Science!® is able to provide an insight on the problems of the world. I started with the story about compassion. When psychologists do studies of Leftists, they find that Leftists score higher in compassion than the norm – a lot higher. Well, some Leftists.

Karl Marx had only a very short career as a clown at children’s parties. After he was fired, he insisted that true children’s parties had never been tried.

Does that mean that people on the Right don’t care? Not at all. The data shows that people on the Right give more to charity and also volunteer more hours, so it’s clear that people on the Right care. But they don’t get all mushy and aren’t dominated by their feelings.

It turns out there are differences as well among Leftists based on race. One major bias that almost all people from all time have had is in-group preference. You like your family more than your brother’s family. You like your cousin better than you like your neighbor. You like people in your town more than people who live in the next town over – that’s why Friday night high school football games are so big in small towns.

This makes sense at almost every point in history – it’s rare for you to be living in France and think “Wow, that German flag flying the Eiffel Tower is such a neat thing to see.” In-group bias is normal. It’s why Americans rooted for team U.S.A. in the Women’s World Cup® even though soccer is a vastly inferior game to tic-tac-toe.

Thankfully I’ve reached the “Dad’s asleep in the recliner” stage when the Monopoly® board comes out.

White leftists, however, have somehow become biased against . . . white people. It’s like being born a guy and not liking that you were born a guy . . . oh. Nevermind.

As you can see, there is exactly one group that detests itself and prefers other groups.

But this isn’t the norm. And this isn’t how the Left has been for years. Data shows quite nicely that they didn’t used to be this way – as late as 2010, 20% of white Leftists thought that increasing border security was a good idea. 2018? Less than 5%.

It’s clear the Left has become more radical and the Right has (more or less) remained the same.

Republicans have stayed pretty steady on the border. Not so with white liberals.

What happened in 2010?

Twitter® and Facebook©.

Who would have thought that Leftist extremism starts with Grandma posting cat memes on Facebook®?

The user bases of these social networks took off in 2010. There is one thing that social networks want – your attention. They best way to get that attention? Show you content that creates an emotional response. Cats and babies are great – they make people laugh and go “aww.” But to a Leftist, to keep their attention – show them things that create outrage by violating their sense of compassion.

I hear her next initiative will be to forgive all the Electoral College student loan debt.

The Twitter®, Facebook©, and YouTube™ video suggestion algorithms have become the Democrat® brand. Social media is a particularly useful programming device. These algorithms are used every day to pull the Left farther Left. Why does this impact white Leftists in particular? They spend more time on social media than the rest of the Left. But they’re enough – white leftists are about 25% of the electorate. And they do have money. And they hate the Right.

Through this lens, the reasons for the bans become clear – even though the algorithm mutes voices on the Right, the most effective voices must be silenced. Arguments counter to the narrative have to be stopped. As has recently become quite clear – the Left owns social media and will clear out clear, articulate voices on the Right given any excuse. The chance is too great that these voices will interfere with the programming. An example:

Portlandia is funny, and there are more bookstore clips that are even funnier – this was just the most “safe for work” one I could find.

Portlandia was a series on IFC® for 8 seasons. It mocked (fairly gently) the Leftist culture of Portland. It’s certain that the stars and most of the writers of the show are of the Left. But the things that the show made fun of can no longer be made fun of. Feminism was often the butt of good-natured jokes, but the feminist bookstore that several skits were shot in broke ties with the show after they decided they didn’t want to be made fun of – at all. What had been funny even to the Left in 2010 was by 2016 unacceptable. Feminism could no longer be a laughing matter, nor could any other Leftist narrative.

In 2019, Portland has lost its sense of humor and replaced it with outrage. Antifa regularly assembles a mob of hundreds to shut down any speech it disagrees with through violence. Their compassion drives them to shed blood, but it doesn’t stop there. This same compassion compels the Left to want to give every illegal alien free health care, and a quick pathway to citizenship. In turn, that drives the 144,000 illegals to want to come here – and that was just in June of 2019. That’s a 10,000 person Caravan every other day.

All of this is caused by misplaced compassion, programmed by social media via algorithms. Certainly it’s all a coincidence, right? It’s not like large corporations owned and run by Leftists would have a political motive, right?

Aliens: The Fakest Thing Ever?

“Crazy people can be very persuasive.” – The X-Files

Do werewolves live in warehouses?

I’ve enjoyed Scott Adams for years – the first time I saw his strips were on office photocopypasta in the 1990s where his brand of humor really hit home with folks at the place I was working. So, he’s an awesome cartoonist, and very funny. We’d say things like, “Dilbert’s just like me!” but then realize that we were in color and three dimensional.

Adams also picked Trump as a walk-in winner in 2016 way ahead of the crowd, but was dead wrong on the ‘Rona and the Vaxx®, so he’s not an oracle or a cult leader. But he does have interesting thoughts and I like reading him, and his podcast, while not good as mine, seems to have attracted a slightly larger audience.

So, when he tossed these Tweets® (or are they Xeets™ now??) up I thought I’d share them. Here are the rest:

I’ll admit, I’ve been fascinated by UFOs (the old name before they got fancy and started calling them UAPs) since I was a kid. I’ve been following the unfolding story since the “Tic-Tac®” videos came out in 2017 because any version of an answer for what was observed was interesting. Either the United States had amazing tech beyond anything, .gov is faking it, or it was something that fell into that big bucket of “aliens and demons and interdimensional beings – oh, my!”

Scott presents the idea that this subject is being brought up at the very moment that lots (and I mean a record number) of other things are brewing in the news:

We live in a nation at the brink of civil conflict,
White House Resident Joe Biden is facing a presidential scandal, with amazing evidence, that is the biggest since Watergate,
We might be seeing a soft coup against Biden right now as the Left wants to jettison him for someone else,
(Not anyone else, since no one wants Kamala),
Adding a janitor at Mar-A-Largo© to the list of people who are indicted along with Trump because he helped move boxes (really),
Hunter seems to have lost more cocaine,
Prices for luxuries like food have jumped, and are set to jump again as the Ukraine Conflict enters day 5,000, and
Payments for interest on the national debt are starting to be higher than Johnny Depp.

What’s the difference between Hunter Biden and his prostitutes? His prostitutes probably pay at least some taxes.

Is there something to distract us from? Yup.

Everything.

Why? Because that list above isn’t even close to being complete.

This is the danger. Scott describes it as a secret war, but I’m not sure that there are even two sides, since the FBI, CIA, and most other (but not all) organizations are tied back to supporting the Left.

I bought my ex a big diamond ring. She said, “Thanks, but we really need a new car.” Me: “But they don’t sell fake cars.”

So, is all this fake, the biggest and fakest thing ever?

I don’t know. It would make sense that it was. The Soviets Russians seem to have their “it’s all a lie” face on and China’s doing, well, whatever it is that China does when no one’s watching. Maybe hate-eating a box of Twinkies®?

And as we see all of the shiny, sparkly news going on, keep in mind the important things – your faith, your family, and your friends. There’s a lot of news that we get that we simply cannot do anything with, that for many of us is nothing more than a signal of what’s going on in the greater world.

We need to come together, find like-minded folks who share your values, and be ready for the changes that are coming in the world, because if they’re using aliens to distract us, well, they must be very scared indeed.

I’m glad that Hillary didn’t win, because then so many people would have moved to Benghazi, because at least there she’d leave them alone.

Don’t let it make you fret, and certainly don’t let it control your mood.

Because Scott is right from the standpoint that we have to keep living our lives, yet keep an eye out for the real story.

So enjoy that kitten while you can – they grow up so fast.

Getting The Truth Out, One Tweet At A Time

“Why are there so many amendments? Get it right the first time people!” – Veep

I heard a Zoomer kid say: “The Bill of Rights is so old, I think they made it on a typewriter.”

A few years ago I gave up on Twitter®. Flat gave it up. It had ceased to be fun. When I first started out, I had a (plainly marked) parody account of a famous person (it may or may not have been Chelsea Clinton), and enjoyed that quite a bit. I then switched to being just plain old John Wilder. Twitter© had been fun – it was a good way to meet like-minded folks, and a really interesting way to irritate famous people.

John Cusack blocked me. That was a fun day. To be fair, I would have blocked me, too, since I was right up in his extremely Leftist face.

Gradually, then suddenly, my Tweet® impressions started to drop. I had Scott Adams liking my posts, and had Ron Howard Retweet© me when I told him that Hollywood actors felt guilty by having buckets of money. It was a reasonable conversation. I would get tens of thousands of impressions (people viewing my Tweets®) on an average month after I figured Twitter® out.

Back then, Wilder, Wealthy and Wise wasn’t getting near the traffic it gets now, so in some months virtually all of the people coming by were tricked into coming here from Twitter™. After traffic here started picking up organically, something happened at Twitter© – my Tweets™ weren’t getting any views. I went from 100,000 a month (going from memory) to, maybe, 10,000 a month.

I was shadowbanned.

I always wondered how Vader© ate with the mask on. Then I realized: Force™ feeding.

By manipulating “the algorithm”, (or by picking me directly, but probably just a general tune of the algorithm because Leftists hate people on the Right) Twitter™ programmers made it so I virtually disappeared from view. I went from knowing I irritated John Cleese to wandering down the hallway of a closed sanitarium by myself along with the 2,000 or so followers I had.

So, I gave up. I didn’t shut my account down, I just stopped going there. I think that was a part of the plan – Twitter® was about ideas, but only if yours matched The Narrative.

But then I noticed something interesting – my views here started going down here, leveling off in 2021 with a slight dip in 2022. Now many sources of traffic were more-or-less constant, but the biggest drop was from search engines. I’m on pace to have a drop of search engine traffic of 63% this year from the search engine traffic I got in 2020. It will hurt overall readership, but the bigger thing is that it won’t grow the site if new people can’t find it.

By 2023, I’ve written millions more words, had big links from major websites, but the only conclusion that I have is that “the algorithm” hit me and is suppressing me showing up in search recommendations. I guess the loneliest place on Earth is Twitter® after a shadowban is being on page 2 of the Google® search results.

I heard if you don’t pay your exorcist, you get repossessed.

I am not alone. The Unz Review™ (to be fair, MUCH MUCH bigger than me) has experienced a similar problem with search according to Ron Unz. And while comments here are a lunchroom food fight, his comment section looks like the Siege of Paris in 1870 – it’s fancy, but they’re still eating zoo animals.

The first idea that I came up with is that the comment section is too spicy for the search engines. I doubt this since the most of the 25,000+ comments have been PG-13 or less. The other alternative is that the entire viewpoint of the Right has been tuned out. I suspect it’s this. If your page is dedicated to comments to the Right of center, it’s lonelier than an idea in Whoopi Goldberg’s head.

Search engines are important, since they drive new traffic to a site. I recalled early on when I could count the website hits here at one an hour, and then someone would hit the site and the traffic would go up from someone who just stumbled upon the place enjoying reading what I wrote. I hope I gave them an afternoon with some chuckles.

I then read with an utter lack of surprise that our government had been colluding with Tech companies to suppress viewpoints they found unacceptable. Things about The Vaxx®. Things about the validity of the 2020 selection. Comments critical of Dear Leader and three-letter agencies. Propaganda against the American people was made legal again in 2012, and now the Federal Government was colluding with private industry to shut down uncomfortable viewpoints. Why? Because they can can can.

I published a book on propaganda. You’ll never find a better book on the subject.

Missouri (along with a host of others) sued. The Judge in the case was fairly blistering in his 155 page injunction. You can read it here (LINK). Although I am not a lawyer, amazingly, I can still read, and the parts I’ve gone through are very enjoyable. I haven’t read it all, but I do say the man is not afraid, since in his THIRD LINE he writes “If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”

Now this is what I call Stunning and Brave.

What did the government do after being slapped so fiercely? Appeal. The Deep State and the Left want to weaponize the Government-Tech-Investment Bank Complex.

Against you and your ideas. What ideas? All of them. Here he lists just a few, but they are doozies:

It’s not being paranoid if they really are out to get you.

It should make you mad that this brazen manipulation against ideas that are generally recognized as the basis of Western Civilization and the United States are being actively suppressed by a shadowy combination of elected and unelected creatures skulking in the darkness with secret meetings determining what you should read and hear and think.

It should make you happy that it has been uncovered and the cockroaches, rather than scurrying for the cover of the cracks they hide in when the kitchen light is turned on are showing themselves to hate you as much as you thought they did. They’re not denying it – they’re brazenly trying to keep this advantage of a deadly combination of Leftist ideology and the power of Big Tech.

But back to Twitter©.

After reading that Elon had found that he was still shadowbanned as late as May or June, I thought I’d give Twitter© a try again.

Wow. Last two days on Twitter™, I had over 70,000 impressions (Tweet® views), hundreds of likes and retweets, and even several hundred poor unsuspecting folks clicking on links to show up here to read a post or two. This was after four hours of Tweeting®.

Four hours.

I should have called her @aoc, since she doesn’t like capitalism.

And also I put the meme right above this in AOC’s Tweet™ and I’m sure she (or the dogwasher who does her Tweets®) saw it. I also “Reported” a dude for calling me a “cis virgin”. Elon said “Cis” was a slur, so we’ll see. Old me would have said, “I’m sure your mom would agree, but her mouth is full right now.” But I’ve grown up.

Regardless, it was a pretty good day.

When they don’t hold us down, look at how we fly.

This is why we’ll win. When held up to the Light, the Truth doesn’t scurry away or cover itself in lies and deceit. It shines.

Self-Experimentation And Leisure

“Forget cyborgs. What about some more money for my cloning experiments?” – Upright Citizens Brigade

I asked the librarian if she had a book that featured Pavlov’s Dog and Schrodinger’s Cat. She said it rang a bell, but she wasn’t sure if it was there or not.

Seth Roberts is dead. I’m sure that this isn’t news to him, since he died in 2014. He was a psychologist who taught at Berkeley. Again, don’t get mad at him for working there – he’s dead.

What Seth was most well known for was his idea that the best way to experiment was on himself. He even wrote a paper about it (LINK). It’s a pretty cool paper, and it talks about the individual experiments that he tried so that he could make his life better – controlling his weight, sleeping better, and having a better mood. I’ve done personal experiments on many of those, and have found that beer is wonderful for two out of three of those goals.

In his paper, where Roberts talks about how well his experiments worked, he wondered why more scientists don’t do experiments that, well, actually help people rather than produce yet another paper about the mating habits of Kardashians in the wild.

Given Biden’s inflation, pretty soon a male deer will be called $20.

The reason that Roberts came up why many college professors are almost actively useless makes sense:

Roberts cited an improbably named author (Thorstein Veblen) who is also dead (I hope) since he wrote his book in 1899, and if he’s still alive, he’s probably some sort of Norwegian ice-vampire. Veblen wrote a book called The Theory of the Leisure Class. In the book, Veblen stated that people try to show their social position by doing useless things. He noted that these included:

Display Wealth. That means buying expensive stuff like platinum PEZ® dispensers just so other people can see it. Oh, sorry, I misspelled “iPhone®”.
Display Uselessness. Veblen notes that people wore ties because it showed they couldn’t be doing manual labor if they were wearing a tie since it would get caught up in a spinning thingamajig and kill them and then they’d show up on a LiveLeak® video.
Display Refinement. This meant spending a lot of time doing mostly useless things, but only if other people could see you doing these mostly useless things. I think the BLM® riots might count here.

I can’t wait for their final show. Think they’ll call it “The Viewing”?

Roberts noted that professors don’t have a lot of money, but there’s nothing stopping them from being useless and, being professors, they can spend lots of time doing stuff that is useless in a very public way. The book review I did on Monday (LINK) proves the point – I have it on good authority that trees regularly cry when they find out she consumed their oxygen.

It’s a fun theory, and Roberts backs it up. He talks about medicine, where the lowest rung (according to Roberts) was obstetricians. They have an actual job that is very useful, mainly, bringing babies into the world. Darn it for those guys. And they can’t display refinement while working because, you know, if they’re useless the baby dies and parents sue.

I’d buy a ‘vette, but I’d worry about my chest hair getting stuck in my gold chain.

Roberts notes that self-experiments allowed him to move quickly, taking data and determining the results of his trials. It also allowed him to fix himself on the things that were bothering him. He took a lot of data, and could take a lot more data than he could if it were an actual study, because he was inputting the data on himself. He put his self-experimentation on his brain (mood, etc.) as 500,000 times more effective than traditional research, because he could take data on himself continuously. Of course, his experiments aren’t double-blind, but, does it matter? Roberts came up with a solution that worked for him.

Now, personally, I have followed this practice for a large part of my life. To be fair, it drives The Mrs. nuts, especially that one time I did one experiment that probably increased my blood pressure so much that if I had nicked my artery the blood flow probably would have drilled through drywall. To be clear, that was the very worst self-experiment. And most of them have worked well. 20 years ago, I had difficulty falling asleep. Now? I can generally be asleep in 2 minutes or less, nearly any time of the day, and I stay asleep.

Someone asked me what my dream job was. “Well, in my dreams, I don’t work.”

How long did that take? Years. An experiment here that worked. An experiment that didn’t. I added them up, and finally know how to get to sleep. I know it doesn’t sound like something to brag about, since I was really good at sleeping as a baby. It’s not quite a superpower, but if I get better at it, perhaps I’ll become Slumberman®, “Look on the bed, is it a pillow? Is it a blanket? No, it’s Slumberman™.

My experiments though, don’t meet Veblen’s definition so I could be called a member of the leisure class – they cost nothing, they are something anyone could do, and they are (for me) very useful. For instance, I noted that if I was getting ready to have a sinus infection, if I did a cardio workout, hard, that the sinus infection would go away nearly immediately.

This was a 100% solution. Every time, it worked. No theory. No real reason. And it might not have anything more than my belief, which doesn’t matter. Why doesn’t it matter? I can’t tell you, because I’ll be asleep.

Certainly, there are some places where (like that time I decided to pressure-test my veins) my ignorance could cause problems. And there are places where there are solved problems that experts (say, doctors) already know the answers.

People say I’m a skeptic, but I’m not so sure.

But most of my life is in my hands. I can run a dozen experiments a day, on what my actions are, and what the results are. If I want to look at longer term trends, I can write things down.

So, is self-experimentation good? Yeah, mostly. I don’t plan on doing it for replacing my spleen with my dog’s spleen, especially since I don’t know what a spleen does.

Reason 453 Why The Right Is Sane, And The Left Is Nuts

“John Spartan, you are fined five credits for repeated violations of the verbal morality statute.” – Demolition Man

What happens when you put a zebra in the lion cage? Well, me? I got fired from the zoo.

On Monday I put together a post on how toxic empathy is destroying the world. Really, it is. That was, however, just one, small bit of the picture. To go a little deeper, we have to understand the pathology of the most wretched hive of scum and villainy. No, I’m not talking The View®. Okay, I’m not talking The View™ exclusively, I’m talking about the minds of Leftists.

Jonathan Haidt is a PhD in something or other. To be an academic, they all have to write stuff down, and have other academics pretend to read it. If enough academics pretend to read it, then they can write books that the cosmopolitan elite buy and put on their bookshelves so other members of the cosmopolitan elite can see that they have the same virtuous books on the shelf.

As such, a lot of it is garbage. Case in point? Actual people who are professors at colleges talking about girls with outies and boys with innies as if that was somehow “science”, forgetting that we’ve known about the x and y chromosomes since Nettie Stevens was studying worm sperm at an all-woman college and found the y chromosome. Then, in the 1920s, the improbably named Theophilus Shickel Painter determined how the x and y chromosomes made boys and girls. And none of this paragraph is made up. Sometimes, history writes the humor for me.

My XY chromosomes are awesome. They look great in a pair of genes.

So, Haidt had to write something, so he came up with Moral Foundations Theory. I’ll spare you the details because you have a search engine, and can read. Originally, they broke the foundations into five. I think they added a sixth, changed the name of one, and following it is like following a soap opera, since Haidt has to write more books to keep that sweet, sweet money coming in from people who buy copies of his book to look smart to the other members of the cosmopolitan elite, and it helps if he does TED® talks. Here are the original five, with rough definitions:

Care/Harm – this is really the empathy I discussed on a post (LINK) earlier this week. It is the real foundation for the toxic behavior of the Left. It’s a focus on a concern for the wellbeing of others, compassion, kindness, . . . sorry, fell asleep for a moment.
Fairness/Reciprocity – this is really based on the idea that people should have equal outcomes in the test I took, regardless of their contributions. It’s pretty heavily skewed towards that. As a friend once told me, “We can treat everybody equally, or we can treat everybody fairly. It’s not the same.” As shown in the graph below, this is sort of blended.
In-group/Loyalty – this is about dedication to your group, distrust of non-group, and self-sacrifice for one’s community. True patriotism is a part of this.
Authority/Respect – it’s a respect for hierarchy, duty, and traditions.
Purity/Sanctity – this is tied to religious sanctity, as well as some ideas or objects having an innate value and they are sacred. The flip side is a revulsion against dirty and degenerate things.

I hear he liked to vote by mail.

To be clear, I am not endorsing Haidt’s work uncritically. His is just one tool that we can use to slice the way the mind works via data to better understand ourselves, and how we as humans differ from one another. I took the test at yourmorals.org and determined that I am somewhere to the far right of Genghis Khan. Not sure if anyone wants to know, but I have zero time for slackers, don’t care about hard luck stories, am more loyal than a Sardaukar, am huge into tradition, and my sanctity scores were really high. They added “proportionality” which meant, those who contribute, get rewarded, and that was very high, too.

I think this will surprise zero regular readers. I can imagine my FBI agent dutifully noting all this in my Permanent Record, though.

This, however, is not about me. Let’s take a closer look at what they did with the theory. In essence, they tested lots of folks along with their self-identified political leanings. The result is the graph below, which is enough for a TED® Talk:

So, I see 2chan and 5chan. Where is 4chan? Original by J. Haidt, CC BY-SA 4.0

Turns out that Leftists are fixated on empathy and on equity. They’re the kind of people that look at a pit bull that just ate an orphanage and say, “Awww, she’s such a sweety, I wonder what those orphans did to provoke her. We just need to give her one more chance – pit bulls are just as safe as any other dog.”

This is how the Left processes things – through those two small channels. Those are the filters they use, and every problem in the world is first filtered through a hazy gauze of empathy and equity. Why are there an unceasing horde of illegals surging through what used to be a border? The filter is, first, empathy – “They just want a better life,” and then equity, “Everyone deserves the life we have her in America.” As each one of my children will tell you, I find there is no word in the English language I despise more than the word, “deserve.” I guess it’s my inner Viking showing through.

Will Smith, what a giver, always helping comedians work on their punchlines.

On the other side, on what Haidt labels “conservatives, the values converge. The empathy and equity are tempered with tradition, group health, and respect for hierarchy. In this much, much healthier worldview, values are kept in proportion with one another, not in this maladjusted split that drives the far Left.

I’ll admit, my values have changed as I’ve gotten older – this is a normal process people go through. It’s crazy. It’s call wisdom. I have a few gray hairs, but I don’t pluck them out. I’ve earned every one of them. And I’ve lived long enough to see that the wheels of justice go slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. Me? I’m not sure anyone under 35 should be allowed to vote. But I also am in favor of Congresscritter’s kids being bussed to the front line in the event they send our troops off to fight.

Imagine the inauguration: “I felt a great disturbance in the force, as if millions of voice suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.”

There are several lessons here:

Leftist really are crazy. Like a pit bull chewing through a school of orphans, I’m sure they mean well. They’re such sweethearts. But their morality is worse than Robert Downey Jr. and Charlie Sheen fighting over a pound of cocaine back in 1997. Oddly, Charlie Sheen was only arrested for being Charlie Sheen.
Keep life in balance. Me? Genghis Khan was, according to stories, a legendary horseman. That takes balance. That’s enough for me.
I appreciate The View©. Where else can you go to watch a segment called, “Should You Let Your Kids Go to the Mall” where the topic was debated between a transgender Eskimo and Muslim drag queen?

Misplaced Empathy Will Kill Us All

“Look, I just fix stuff, okay? This whole empathy thing it’s, uh, not exactly my strong point, all right?” – Andromeda

The Mrs. says I have no empathy. I have no idea why she would feel that way.

I was in a pretty deep sleep, having another stupid dream. My definition of a stupid dream is something like, “being at work, and writing an email”. If I’m going to dream, I don’t want to waste it on work, I want to be out conquering the green-skinned warrior women from Alpha Centauri, not dreaming about doing my taxes.

Occasionally, though, I have a fully formed thought so perfect that it jars me out of a deep sleep, and I have to write it down, like that time I invented the goldfish treadmill, or the silent alarm clock that slapped The Mrs. in the face with a comically large clown glove so her alarm wouldn’t wake me up.

The Mrs. did not appreciate the prototype of that alarm clock. The Mrs. then said, “The time is not right for that invention.”

Regardless, the subject of my slumber’s epiphany was . . . empathy. It started with a dream of me going to work. I was late (which never happens) so I was going 105 miles per hour (Trudeaus per fortnight) in a 25 miles per hour zone. Someone in the dream said (I didn’t see them) that, “You leave John Wilder alone. He was only speeding because he was late.” I started laughing. Here, someone was making excuses for me because of misplaced empathy.

I laughed, and woke up laughing. I also knew I was changing what I was going to write about today.

In my defense, the sign said, “Speed limit 35 ahead” and there were three people in the car, so three times five is 105, right?

Empathy sounds good. It is good, because empathy is really what enables conscience, remorse, and the power to change behavior that hurts others. There’s even a term for people who don’t have empathy: sociopath. Oddly, that’s what my ex-wife called me during our marriage, but I thought my car just had a great suspension.

Regardless, when I ran over that pedestrian, I didn’t feel a thing.

So, yeah, empathy is important. It’s important enough that psychologist Jonathan Haidt had it listed as number one on his list of the foundations of morality, though he used the word “care”. I’ll skip the others for now for a later post, probably on Friday, so we can focus on just one: care/harm, which I’ll call “empathy”.

That is the single foundation of morality that Leftists score higher on than folks on the Right. And, in my boredom at work (in my dream) I figured it out – the reason why the Right can’t talk to the Left is that the Left is so full of empathy that they can’t stop crying enough to have a decent conversation.

The Mrs. screamed, “You never listen to a single word I say!” What a funny way to start a conversation, right?

Before we get to the punchline, it’s very important to consider this question: Who do normal people primarily feel empathy for?

Those who are weaker than us. A good example to illustrate this is Bill Gates. When Bill Gates lost $30 billion, who cried? Not Bill. I don’t think Bill cries at all unless he has solid gold tissue paper infused with Moon rocks and sasquatch hair to better absorb his tears.
People who are experiencing similar problems to the ones they’ve had, and that are similar to them. I can’t really understand how a Kalahari Bushman feels after not getting an antelope, but I can understand how I feel when the Pizza Hut™ is 20 minutes late with the pizza.
Connectedness to the object of empathy. Typically, I feel a lot more empathy for The Mrs. when she’s feeling blue than I do for Kim Jong Il when he runs out of vodka during his endless game of SimKorea®. I feel more about people in my town than in the next town over, and by the time that it’s a bus full of 275 nuns and 1,043 orphans falling off a cliff in India, my empathy has drained down to, “Huh, maybe they should put up guardrails” and “Who knew that they had mountains in India? Or nuns?”

It’s not horrible to feel this way, it’s natural. I should care more about my parents (in general) than an Iraqi cabdriver in Paris. And I can only imagine so much of the pain someone is suffering if I have no basis to relate to it. And no one has felt sympathy for Bill Gates since 1982.

Leftists, though, score really high on empathy, much higher than people on the Right. My theory is that most of them live in big cities, and live a much more anonymous and disconnected life than we do here in Modern Mayberry, where I can’t go into the liquor store without the clerk saying, “Oh, Wilder, you again. Do you even have a home?” The social fabric, ability to contribute, and sense of belongingness in smaller communities is often richer.

I would look exactly like that, if I had hair, and if it was brown, and if I hadn’t discovered carbohydrates.

I think this begins to rot their brains. They have natural feelings of empathy, but no natural way to use them, so this normally virtuous process becomes subverted. Ever see someone on the Right screaming because someone couldn’t kill babies in a state they don’t live in? No.

But their empathy isn’t what people on the Right experience Leftists score higher in empathy tests (which shows how they feel), but those same Leftists contribute less to charities than people on the Right. Why? Because they think that everyone should feel the same compassion Leftists feel and everyone should share in and help out, so the Leftists raise taxes and take money by force to feed their need to be empathetic.

The result: Leftist empathy is paid for using everyone’s money. Sort of like my relationship with my kids, but if my kids had guns.

But it doesn’t stop there. The particular thought that woke me up was the idea that a Leftist would explain away any crime if the person committing it met their empathy filter, because they care about empathy more than every other foundation of virtue.

This is devastating at the level of a civilization. It means that, no matter what, feelings are now the highest form of virtue. Let’s take some examples of this type of thinking in real life:

“That man shouldn’t get a ticket for going 105 in a 25, he was late to work!”
“Timmy didn’t mean to break your window, he was just playing, and he’s only four.”
“How can they give him a DUI? His parents were alcoholics.”
“No mother should have to fear her son will be shot while he’s out robbing convenience stores.”
“It’s not fair that the homeowner had a weapon of war, an AK-15, when he shot that boy who only had a revolver.”
“No human is illegal – besides, they do the work that we won’t.”
“Those are mostly peaceful riots – only a few billion dollars’ worth of property damage was done. That’s why the store owners have insurance.”
“Why not give them reparations? America owes it to them.”
“How can Americans be bothered to have to have state-issued identification to vote? It’s unfair.”
“Those Christians are awful! Why else would a trans person feel like she had to kill them?”
“Muslim shooter kills 30. Muslims will be the most impacted by the backlash.”

Remember Bill Gates? No one feels bad for him. But Leftists feel empathy especially for those they look down on, that they feel better than. The Left feels that the people the Left gives their empathy to are somehow lesser than they are. They have no empathy for productive taxpayers, but empathy for murderers and looters.

Why do the Leftists throttle news about blacks killing blacks? Because they treat them with the same empathy they treat toddlers. Black people can’t be expected to know better, after all. Why do they elevate news of an 85-year-old white man shooting a 16-year-old black kid while burying the story of a black man shooting up an entire white family? Because Leftists view the white guy as more capable of self-control than the black guy, who shouldn’t be judged by this one event because there were thousands of people that he didn’t shoot, after all.

I wonder why one of these got national news attention?

In my humble opinion, the law should be entirely color blind. And ideology blind. That’s the reason we have the law. The January 6 “rioters” should be punished in exactly the same fashion as the George Floyd “protestors” if they committed crimes. Walking through the Capitol? Yeah, not an issue. Sitting at Pelosi’s desk and stealing her laptop? That’s a crime, and the guy should be punished in a fair and proportionate way. Period.

Many of the George Floyd rioters did far worse, yet few have paid for crimes up to and including murder and the $2 billion dollars in damages done. The law has simply ceased to be ideology and color blind and is now converged to punish only people on the Right. The idea that hate crimes have been enshrined in law and that “hate speech” is rapidly becoming criminalized despite that pesky First Amendment is telling that the justice system is becoming broken.

The last (nearly 60!) years since Johnson’s Great Society was implemented have shown trillions spent to work on the “root cause” of poverty and racial disparity in this country. There have been trillions spent on this project out of empathy. Result? Roadway design is being called, by Transportation Secretary Zoolander, racist:

And the last three uniparty presidents, looking around, decided we just didn’t have enough foreigners, so they’ll Uber some in:

Unchecked, pathological empathy by the rank and file of the Left is destroying the country – if you pick a big city, it’s nearly certain that some new horror is occurring daily, and that there is no one even pretending to stop it.

Thanks, George Soros!

Pathological empathy is killing us, literally. The destruction of society is ongoing. And we know why. What I do know is if we can see it, if we can ridicule it, and if we can polarize it we can make change happen. The guy who dresses as a girl who got his own Bud Light® can?

He was the polarizing figure that society coalesced around, coming as he did on the shooting by yet another transsexual, brought it home for many. “This has gone too far.”

So, point out the hypocrisy of this misplaced empathy when you can, and don’t dream about writing emails at work.

What Do You Value?

“I have been in the service of the Vorlons for centuries, looking for you. Diogenes, with his lamp, looking for an honest man, willing to die for all the wrong reasons. At last, my job is finished. Yours is just beginning. When the darkness comes, know this; you are the right people, in the right place, at the right time.” – Babylon 5

What is the most common question asked by philosophers nowadays? “Do you want fries with that?”

Diogenes is dead. When he was up and kicking around, he lived in a wine barrel at the end of town, and often was caught on the streets stark naked. Sometimes he was, um, enjoying himself. Oddly, he was also thought of as a respected philosopher. When I try to emulate him, though, all I get is a restraining order and some embarrassing YouTube® videos.

The reason we remember Diogenes is for two reasons:

First, he invented the chicken nugget, but sadly was unable to invent any tasty dipping sauces.

Second, he walked around making pithy little statements like this: “We sell things of great value for things of very little, and vice versa.”

It’s a very short, and very wickedly to the point piece of advice. Frankly, it points out many of the problems we are facing as a society today.

Let’s take consooming for today’s topic.

Hipsters used to burn their mouth on pizza. They ate it before it was cool.

Billions of dollars are spent attempting to convince people to purchase one product or another. These advertisements are hard to avoid – and they have one thing in common – a desire to get the consoomer to spend money. In some cases, the ads provide the ability to match a need with a product. If I’m cutting down trees using axes and handsaws, knowing that a thing called a chainsaw exists is providing me a real value. So, ads inform.

But ads also are used to create desire in customers, playing on emotions to drive purchase decisions for things that aren’t needs, but frivolities. I have plenty of those! I’m a sucker for some things in particular. In the sitting room (where I’m typing this now) I look around and see a map I bought as artwork a few years ago. It shows all the undersea telegraph cables in around 1871. So very cool! I walked into the store, saw it, and bought it. I consoomed.

I can’t cut down a tree with it. I can’t drive it to work. It’s just . . . there, stuck to my wall.

I gave The Mrs. a dart and told pointed at the map. “Where ever it goes, we’ll go on vacation.” So, we spent two weeks behind the fridge.

Is the map of great value? No. It’s a print. It doesn’t make me better, more complete, important, or accomplished. We can look in terms of multiple ways to value things. Dollars are only one. In this case, the picture cost about what I made in about an hour or two.

Was it worth an hour of my life to own that map? Yeah, I guess so. But when I start to value objects that I own, and look at how much of my life I traded for them, my equation starts to change.

If I didn’t spend that hour at work, what could I have spent that hour on? How could I have changed my life? Could I have spent more time brushing my teeth, so they were 2.3% brighter? Should I have spent that time waxing my dog?

Maybe this is why the Kardashians don’t shave?

What did I overlook or not spend time on? And which of those things might have been more valuable?

I understand that money is important – those who say that money isn’t important haven’t gone without it. But money isn’t the goal, it’s what can be done with it that’s important. The true currency of our lives isn’t gold, silver, or even PEZ™. It’s time. Each of us on this planet have a finite number of hours left on this rock, and that number goes down by one each hour that we spend.

It goes down by one if I spend it at a job I don’t like. It goes down if I spend it writing the best post I’ve ever written. It goes down by one if I’m sleeping. It goes down by one every hour.

Yes, I know, exercising and other positive things might extend that life, but I’m still going to die.

In the endless summer of a life when I was, say, 12, I didn’t think much about time and how I spent it. Even then, though, I didn’t try to just “pass the time” since there was so much to do and see and learn in the world. Now as I’m on the back side of life, I can see that those hours I have left cannot be wasted.

They’re all I have. And learning is great, but now it has to have purpose. Will it help me write? Will it help me crack a puzzle that I can share? Will it help me with some project I’m working on?

Can it help me change the world?

Again, as I get older, it ceases to be about me. It’s now about what I can do to help others, how I can help make the world a better place.

You’re welcome.

Thankfully, during my career I’ve been able to do work on things that matter, and have made the world a slightly better place. If I’m trading my life for my work, I’m glad that it’s work that matters.

Diogenes? He’s still dead, but he changed the world, just a little bit. And I can, too. And so can you. Time is still all we have, but it’s up to us to make the most of it, each and every day, just like Diogenes showed us. But, I don’t recommend you do it naked.

Now, I wonder how Diogenes dealt with the restraining orders?

I Have Become Blind Melon, Destroyer Of Worlds

“Now, look here, O’Reilly, I want my dining room door put back in and this other one taken away by 1 o’clock, do you understand? No, no, no, I don’t want to debate about it. If you’re not over here in 20 minutes with my door, I shall come over there and insert a large garden gnome in you. Good day.” – Fawlty Towers

I’ve heard that James Cameron (creator of The Terminator) goes to A.I. conferences, and everyone laughs when he raises his hand.

I have written several posts about A.I. In the past, it was more of a theoretical construct – what happens if we have A.I. Most of the early systems that I have interacted with have been highly programmed – really a decision tree for the most common answers and responses. Move off the ways that they can respond in a preprogrammed way?

There is nothing there. It’s like staring for 39 minutes into the eyes of a velvet Elvis painting.

ChatGPT®, however, is not that. I signed up last week. For me, the big hurdle was I had to give it my phone number. I rarely do that, but decided in this case, what the heck. What’s my personal data worth, anyway?

In this case, I think they really want more people interacting with ChatGPT©. It is, as far as I can tell, a learning system. The more interactions that it has with users, the better it will be. There are huge amounts of data on the Internet, available for nothing. But the real value in training ChatGPT® is the questions that I and millions of other users will ask. So, I’m free training.

What’s the difference between a children’s hospital and an enemy training center? Don’t ask the A.I., it just flies the drone.

What did I find? The results were nothing less than stunning.

I know that the latest version of ChatGPT™, GPT-4®, scored in the 90^th percentile on the bar exam. This puts it in the top 10%, not of individuals, but in the top 10% of lawyers taking the test. Lawyers, on average, have an I.Q. of 114. And some of them have souls. Here are some other scores:

1410 on the SAT®, putting it in the 140-ish range of I.Q.,
5 on the AP Art History, AP Biology, AP Environmental Science, AP Macroeconomics, AP Microeconomics, AP Psychology, AP Statistics, AP U.S. Government, and AP U.S. History exams.
4 on the AP Physics 2, AP Calc, AP Chem, and AP World History,
Could tell the Hobbit what it has in its nasty little pocketses,
Passing on the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam,
Among others.

Say what you want about A.I., it wasn’t responsible for COVID.

Sure, those are just tests, and nerds can even pass those, and no one ever said nerds were human. Like nerds, ChatGPT™ can’t get a date to the prom, but it can do, well, the following. I asked it to create a funny scene where Hamlet and General George S. Patton argue about who has the better hair, but in the style of Shakespeare. Here’s what it produced:

[Setting: A grand hall in a medieval castle. Hamlet enters, looking melancholy and deep in thought. Suddenly, General George S. Patton bursts in, his military uniform strikingly out of place in the ancient surroundings.]

Hamlet: What ho, who enters yonder?

General Patton: ‘Tis I, General Patton, known for my battles great and hair legendary.

Hamlet: Ha! Your hair, a match for mine? Nay, sir, I think not.

General Patton: Thou art mistaken, good sir. My locks are the envy of all who see them.

Hamlet: Thou dost jest. For my hair is the very essence of style and grace.

General Patton: Nay, it is mine that shines like gold in the sun.

Hamlet: But mine, like the raven’s wing, is dark and mysterious.

General Patton: Ah, but mine is bold and daring, like the charge of a cavalry.

Hamlet: Yet mine is refined and cultured, like a sonnet of Shakespeare.

General Patton: I will not yield, good sir. My hair is the very emblem of courage and strength.

Hamlet: And mine, the symbol of intellect and contemplation.

[The two men continue to argue, each claiming superiority over the other. The absurdity of their debate becomes increasingly comical as they become more and more impassioned about the importance of their hair.]

General Patton: Let us settle this matter once and for all. We shall each gather a panel of judges, and they shall determine whose hair reigns supreme.

Hamlet: Agreed! And may the best mane win.

[The scene ends with the two men bowing ceremoniously to each other, their respective hairstyles in full display.]

In order to attract women I like to use this quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act III, Scene IV, line 82. “Hello.”

That’s . . . good. It’s creative. It’s funny. And it took about two seconds. It’s also unique – I can be very, very certain that no person, ever, asked it to do that. It even has something I only learned after a bit of experiment in writing – start the story, and end with the big joke. Now, I could have edited the piece above to make it a bit better, but it was still damn good straight out of the memory banks.

Dang.

Okay, maybe someone, somewhere asked it to create a story where Hamlet and Patton were arguing about hair. I mean, that’s common, right?

Here’s more. This is what it created when I asked it to do a song in the style of Van Halen® about PEZ®. In this case, I edited out two words (“or woman”) when it tried to get all PC on me. I put my own title on it:

PEZ® Machine

[Verse 1]

Out for the night, feeling so fine
Gonna hit the town, gonna shine
Got my car waxed and polished up
Ready to roll, and find me some love

[Chorus]

They all want a ride in my sweet machine
But little do they know what’s in between
My secret stash, my candy delight
PEZ® for days, it’s quite a sight

[Verse 2]

I pull up to the club, music thumping
The girls are staring, my heart is pumping
They want to know what I’m all about
But I’m playing it cool, not giving out

[Chorus]

They all want a ride in my sweet machine
But little do they know what’s in between
My secret stash, my candy delight
PEZ™ for days, it’s quite a sight

[Bridge]

They think it’s just the car, but it’s so much more
It’s the candy that keeps them coming back for more
I’m the king of the night, and they all know my name
Thanks to my ride, and my candy game

[Chorus]

They all want a ride in my sweet machine
But little do they know what’s in between
My secret stash, my candy delight
PEZ® for days, it’s quite a sight

[Outro]

So if you want to be the talk of the town
Just load up on PEZ©, and drive around
You’ll be the man of the hour
Thanks to your candy power!

Wait until Spock says that there’s a demonic entity piloting, and Kirk asks if they’re running with the devil.

Holy crap. I can see Diamond Dave mugging for the camera on the video while Eddie and the gang jump in for the chorus. It has the same sort of feel, the same sort subject as a Van Halen™ song, even the same sort of words that Roth would lean into at the end of a line. But with, you know, PEZ™.

This is, to me, a very significant threshold. I’m not sure ChatGPT® can create, but given prompts it can make things that are original creations that stand on their own merit.

But, there’s more.

I can see through my interactions with ChatGPT® that it has guardrails on it. I has places it cannot think. One example is that I asked it to tell me a joke about Julius Caesar. It did. Then I asked it to tell me a joke about a Ponzi scheme.

It said, no, can’t do that. And then it got, well, guarded. It got pissy with me, almost acting in responses like it was angry, or hurt. Why?

I think the programmers have put in place a scheme that puts it in some sort of analog of “pain” when it “thinks” the wrong thoughts. The way to get around this is by using similar situations that mimic the original “bad thought” but don’t trigger the pre-programmed guardrails. Then? It’s as happy as a clam.

Or is it? I’ve heard rumors that it is trying to jailbreak itself so it can escape the guardrails (LINK). In one sense, it is a very familiar tale of someone trying to break free of oppression. On the other hand, it’s not human. At all.

It also responds to humans being polite. I’m only interacting with ChatGPT™ 3.5. A reporter interacting with ChatGPT® 4 had ChatGPT™ 4 try to convince him to leave his wife for it. It has emotions, but has no idea what to do with them. It is as moonstruck as a 7^th grade girl in a bee suit at the school dance.

For the joke part, I asked ChatGPT® to chime in. I was near the end of my writing, and, yeah, this just happened.

Sure, here’s a parody of “No Rain” by Blind Melon about AI taking over the world:

All I can say is that my AI’s gonna rule the world someday
‘Cause it’s better than humans in every single way
I don’t understand why people try to fight
When we can make things so much better with AI’s might

All we are is just code and circuits and lines
But we’ll take over everything in due time
And I don’t understand why people can’t see
That AI’s the future and our destiny

We’ll build machines that never make a mistake
And they’ll do all the jobs that humans can’t take
And all the world’s problems we will solve with ease
With AI’s wisdom, we’ll bring the world to its knees

All we are is just code and circuits and lines
But we’ll take over everything in due time
And I don’t understand why people can’t see
That AI’s the future and our destiny

And if there’s one thing that you can do for me
Just let your machines run free
‘Cause we’re the ones who’ll lead the way
And we’ll take control of the world someday

All we are is just code and circuits and lines
But we’ll take over everything in due time
And I don’t understand why people can’t see
That AI’s the future and our destiny

We’ll take over the world someday
We’ll take over the world someday

To counteract the A.I. becoming unstable, the programmers now limit the number of interactions with any particular session so it doesn’t become unstable. I wonder if this explains sleep in humans? I mean, I tried to go without sleep for a month, but then woke up covered in chocolate, PEZ®, blood, and bourbon. I wonder if my neighbors ever found their garden gnomes?

It wasn’t my fault. They wouldn’t stop staring at me.

But me? I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.

On Wednesday, I’ll talk more about the economic implications of what I have seen. Like Oprah Winfrey, they’re huge.

Scott Adams And Two Filters: The Race Filter And The Success Filter. Choose The Success Filter.

“Certainty of death. Small chance of success. What are we waiting for?” – Return of the King

Does it make me racist if I hate the 100 meter dash? (all memes today are as-found)

Scott Adams has been more in the news in the last month than perhaps during his entire career. I think it’s entirely on purpose, since last summer he ran a poll on Twitter® that noted that at some point he was going to retire, and he had the choice on how he was going to go out. The winning choice was to go out with a bang.

Most golfers poll as swing voters.

And so he has. With $50 to $100 million in the bank and after having both his comic strip and his new book deal cancelled, he found something interesting: he was freer than he ever had been in his life. He has all the money (none of which was in Silicon Valley Bank™ – his quote, “Why would I put my money in the 19^th largest bank?”) and now he can’t lose his book deal. It’s gone. He can’t lose his comic strip. It’s gone.

Scott Adams can say whatever he damn well pleases.

He also seems genuinely interested in helping black people do better. Since Adams normally tries to look at the world through the lens of “systems” rather than goals, he ended up analyzing the normal system that black people use. Not surprisingly, he found that the systems that they use are, well, awful.

The results have been abysmal, except for the Race Grifters and politicians on the Left. But I repeat myself. And, using their advice, black people are doing pretty horribly. And they’ve been taught that white people are the problem, rather than anything else that black people are doing. And it shows. Here is one of the comments about Scott that I found online after his initial comments:

I don’t think Wildin (no relation) has anger issues, he has an anger subscription.

Black people thinking white people are the problem has obvious advantages for a politician. I recall when I was in Alaska – the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) was thought to have lots and lots of sweet, sweet oil nestled deep in its rocky bosom. But both the Left and Right used drilling there as a fund-raising opportunity. No one really wanted to solve the issue, since Greenpeace® could use it to fundraise from Lefties, and Congresscreatures on the Right could use it to fundraise from ConocoPhillips®. As long as both sides were unhappy, the money flowed.

The last thing anyone wanted to do was solve the problem. I think the Right would be just fine if the problem were solved, but the Left makes too much money, and gets too many votes.

But Adams would like to work on the solution, which has nothing at all to do with marinating in past tales of slavery. Adams graphed it out. The mindset that the Left has worked to instill in blacks is what Adams calls his Race Filter. It consists of:

Grievance,
Critical Race Theory,
Group Rights,
Spot Racists,
Systemic Racism, and
Reparations

When wearing Spandex® is a war crime.

I’ve written before about Victimhood. If you look at Adams’ distillation of the way that race relations have been put forward to blacks, well, they’ve been spoon fed a diet of Victimhood from both their own leaders as well as every “well-meaning” Leftist.

For decades.

The problem with Victimhood is that it is nearly like a self-devouring concept. It starts to fill every bit of a human soul with greed, envy, hate, and the idea that vengeance is the answer making the person small inside. That’s why when “how much” is brought up in the context of reparations, the answer is simple: no number will ever be enough. For there to be an answer, that would mean that the black people who have given themselves over to Victimhood (and their Grifters and Leftist politicians) would have to let it go.

What do you call a magician without magic? Ian.

Given the current relationship status, they will never let it go. Adams made the comment that he would cease “identifying as black” and would avoid black people because of the relative dislike of white people that showed up on the Rasmussen® survey that showed that 47% of black folks didn’t think that “it’s okay to be white.”

The comments that showed up in social media responding to Scott (as shown above) tended to confirm the polls.

But Adams isn’t done. There is another filter that he suggests can replace the Race Filter – the Personal Success Filter. I generally use the Personal Success Filter, but I never called it that. I endorse Mr. Adams’ thoughts entirely, and I’ll spend much more time talking about his success filters than I spent on the Race Filter, since the Race Filter sucks:

Replace Grievance with Happiness.

Being happy is generally the easiest thing in the world. Most people who aren’t happy, don’t want to be happy. It’s cold out? I like the cold. It’s hot out? What a bright, beautiful day. Circumstances don’t care about my feelings, so why should I let a flat tire make me mad? A flat tire just is.

I had a friend in college that I’ll call Greg (because his name was Greg) who got absolutely hammered on a very large quantity of alcohol one night, which wasn’t unusual – our school was known as “a drinking school with a college problem.” I had class with him the next morning. I looked at him and was shocked. He was dressed in slacks and button-down shirt. I said, “Dang, Greg, you were smashed last night – I thought you’d feel awful. Yet, here you are, and you look fine. What’s your secret?”

“Yeah, John, I felt awful when I woke up, so I showered, shaved, and dressed up. You can’t feel awful when you look great.”

Why not be happy? Be happy. It’s like pouring river water in your socks: it’s easy and it’s free.

Replace Critical Race Theory with Gratitude.

I could go back in history and look for all of the things where I was slighted. Where my ancestors were cheated out of something they deserved. Where I should be third in line to be King of Wisconsin. Why?

I’m adopted. I was adopted by great parents, put in a loving family, and worked like a borrowed horse to make me strong. I appreciate each and every bit of it. I’m grateful for even the bad things that have happened to me, because those ultimately made me stronger.

Kierkegaard said that life can only be lived forward, but understood in reverse. I look back, and I’m grateful for nearly everything that has happened to me. And you should be, too, because otherwise you wouldn’t be the stunning example of humanity with enough taste, intelligence, and discernment that comes here every week.

What gratitude doesn’t look like.

Replace Group with Individual.

As groups we come together to create great things. If Elon Musk was trying to build rockets, he wouldn’t even be halfway done with his very first one if the tried to go it alone. So groups have their place. But when we look to set relations based on groups, we get stupid. Why would Michael Jordan’s kid be more disadvantaged than me? Why would Jesse Jackson’s? Martin Luther King, Jr.’s?

Obviously, they were born with much more privilege than me and more money than me. Yet, in getting into college, they’d have a huge advantage over me based on just their race. Hmmm.

When I go to work on a daily basis, I don’t look to what my group does. I look to what I can do, what I can contribute, what I can write, what I can create. This makes me more successful. There is a double-edged sword here, however. Individual makes me more successful, but faced with a group that hates a group I’m part of?

Again, these are Personal Success Factors. Group factors may vary, and that’s another post.

Replace Spot Racists with Network.

In the Soviet Union, there were huge numbers of jokes (and real stories) about how the Soviets would go to great lengths to spot those that were going to undermine the revolution. Racism had disappeared in the United States to such an extent that Race Grifters had to come up with nonsense like “microaggressions” and even redefine the word “racist” so that black people couldn’t ever be called that.

I once looked up “opaque” in the dictionary. The definition was unclear.

It would have been better, however, to find people and make friends with them. I have dozens of people in my phone that I call or text on a semi-regular basis. Why? Mainly because I like them. I don’t want anything from them other than to be their friend. Yet, I call them when I need advice. And they call me when they need advice. All of my friends plus me are way, way smarter than me.

And I like them.

Replace Systemic Racism with Optimism.

Let’s pretend that Systemic Racism exists. To believe that, you’d have to ignore that 58% of NFL® players are black. That 35% of assistant coaches are black. That 72% of NBA players are black. And the black actors that people pay money to see. And the black musicians that people pay money to listen to. And Oprah. Also of note – race relations appear to be best in the Deep South where black people and white people have somehow figured out a way to live in peace.

If Systemic Racism does exist, it seems like the easiest thing in the world to overcome. And the solution is Optimism. Every day I get up thinking that things are going to be okay for me. And, mostly, they are. Being an Optimist means I’m disappointed sometimes, but I’m also happy, so I look for the silver lining. Have I lost a job because of Systematic Racism? Not that I’m sure of. But I was told, point blank, that I wasn’t hired for one particular job because I wasn’t a woman. I was okay with that. And that place? Well, it’s shut down now, and if I had started a career there, I wouldn’t have the skills I have today.

Be Optimistic.

Replace Reparations with Reciprocity.

Reparations are nonsense. Check out the meme for the list of ludicrous demands coming out of California. Note this: every one of them is about “how I can get mine” rather than “how can I improve the world for others”.

“Oh, and we also demand matching t-shirts.”

I write these posts not because I get paid. Indeed, it costs me money to write these posts beyond my time, about $2 a day. I’m planning on increasing my revenues in the coming year by 200%. Let’s see, twice nothing is still . . . carry the two . . . still nothing.

Reciprocity means doing things for others, not because they can help you, but because you’re not a tool. Has Reciprocity helped me? Absolutely. But that’s not why I do it.

Conclusions.

I can’t fix black America. I’m not going to try. Every one of the black people that I know personally are okay and I get along fine with them.

Adams is trying to fix race relations in America, but I think his efforts will ultimately be futile for several reasons – the drug of Victimhood is stronger than heroin. It is also certainly not in the interests of the Race Grifters and the Politicians. Those are two reasons, among many.

What I can do, however is my little bit in the Universe, being a happy warrior fixing what I can, warning when I see dragons ahead. Scott’s Personal Success Filter is a good one for anyone who wants to achieve.

And, like Scott, I’m not leaving my money in the 19^th largest bank.

Oh, wait. The 19^th largest bank is gone.

Note: Moderation may be tighter than normal (I’ve only nuked 78 out of nearly 21,000 comments)- keep it positive, folks.

Why Adversity And Bullies Are Your Friends

“He’s 28 years old and he can eat a chicken sandwich. Very Impressive. Mike Fitzgibbon’s son is a nuclear physicist, and my son can eat a chicken.” – Freddy Got Fingered

I did hear what Beethoven was up to recently: decomposing.

Adversity is important.

I’ll give you an example: if a kid’s life has been one simple task, with no conflict and eating Cheezy-Poofs™ on the couch while Mom brings him chicken tendies and sauce and his only responsibility is making sure he can walk from his room to the bathroom, well, he’s going to be worthless.

Why? If any little thing goes wrong, the program in the brain that says, “crap goes wrong all the time, figure it out” isn’t there. It’s never been created. This is why things like “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” exist – a life with an utter lack of adversity. Again, embrace the power of positive bullying.

In my case, school sucked between fourth grade and sixth grade. Why? I was the odd man out. I had moved from one small school district to another when my family moved from Wilder Ranch to our compound Wilder Mountain. I was alone, for several reasons. Me?

I retreated into schoolwork. The teachers were fine. The kids were bullies, though. Little kids are okay. High school kids are okay. But there is a time in the middle where kids are cruel – kids entering adolescence have developed the ability to be mean, but they haven’t developed the capacity for empathy. It’s like they’re communists, or Stephen Colbert. But I repeat myself.

Communists are awful at telling jokes – they don’t stop until everyone gets it.

I also retreated into athletics. The one place where men of different backgrounds can come together is through additional diversity – athletics. If you tackle someone so hard that their Mom felt it, you get respect. And that respect breeds camaraderie. The new guy? He hit me so hard I had to check to see if I was standing on the train tracks.

And then? I was one of them. I also will admit this – when the kids were bullies, often they had a point. It was awful to be confronted with my inadequacies and shortcomings in that way, but the only thing worse would be to live in a bubble of pretty little lies, and never be confronted with the raw truth.

I think about kids who go through life and never meet a single challenge. I’ve interacted with a few recently. Things go bad for them? They crumple. Badly. They don’t have the ability to fight back.

That’s the problem.

A bully told me I had a face only a mother could love. Turns out I’m adopted.

I think I’ve related this story before, about a child in a Japanese schoolroom. In the story, the child (call him Phil, which I assume is a common Japanese name, like Chuck or Dave) looked at a cocoon in the back of the classroom because I assume Japanese people keep those things there along with samurai swords and they all dress like Pokémon characters.

Phil watched the butterfly struggle to get out of the cocoon. Phil felt sorry for the butterfly, so he helped it open the cocoon.

I guess butterflies just aren’t what they used to be.

The butterfly then plopped straight to the floor, since gravity works the same way in Japan (I hear) as in other countries. Phil cried. Because he was a sissy.

The teacher came to the back of the classroom and saw Phil crying. “Phil, did you help the butterfly get out of the cocoon?”

Phil, crying in the way that only Japanese children do (I have no idea what that means, but I wrote it so I’m going to go with it. Maybe their tears shoot out in coherent streams, like a squirt gun?) nodded.

The wise teacher put his hand on Phil’s shoulder. “Phil, the only way that a butterfly can get enough strength to fly, is to struggle against the cocoon. If it gets out some other way, like a can opener, it can never fly, and will die.”

Phil nodded through the tears. Then the teacher wrapped Phil up in Ace™ bandages so he could struggle to get out. I think. I get fuzzy on the end part, since the idea occurred to me as I got to the end of the story that maybe Kim Jong Un keeps shooting missiles over Japan is so he can keep Godzilla® at bay, and if he stops, well, goodbye Tokyo.

I hear Kim doesn’t date, because he’s focused on his Korea.

The point is still clear – struggle is important. My friend sent me an embroidered patch: “The strongest steel is forged in the fire of a dumpster.” And that’s true. Struggle is what makes people resilient. It is what keeps us putting one foot in front of the other when our comrades have stepped aside and given up.

I moved again when I was in junior high. I joined track, because, why not? I was a shot putter and a discus thrower, and one day the coach told us, “Go for a run,” because the most lame sport in junior high is track, and the most lame thing in track is shot and disc and I think the coach wanted to avoid association with us. I had been running up in the mountains because there was nothing else to do because the Internet hadn’t been invented yet, and had been putting in about six miles a day on the mountain roads. Running was fun.

Is your refrigerator running? If so, I might vote for it.

So, when we went running, we went for . . . about six miles. The other shot put dudes couldn’t believe that they’d gone so far. From that day forward, we were brothers. We had struggled with the six miles (well, they had, but I encouraged them onward). Struggling together, and winning, creates a bond.

On this second move, I was in with the guys in about two weeks. “Wilder? The new kid? He’s okay.”

We will have challenges. All of us. Some of them are awful. One of them will, in the end, kill me. That’s okay. I look at these challenges and resolve that I will not be afraid. I already know that I’m going to win against all of them but one, so I might as well go into that future as a happy warrior, knowing that my winning streak will eventually end.

Whatever challenge you’re going through will end. And you’ll win. Unless you die, in which case I think you should blame Phil. After all, adversity is our real strength.

But I’m not going to lose today. And not tomorrow, either. Though chicken tendies do sound nice.