Category Archives: Culture War

Antivirus For Your Mind: Answering the Gish Gallop

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While most know that computers can be hacked, what’s not as well known is that people can be hacked. While computers can be hacked with malicious code, people can be hacked with rhetoric.

To keep the Antivirus For Your Mind up to date, it helps to understand the intellectual trickery that’s being employed in the online world. To that end, today we’re looking at the Gish Gallop.

Sometimes, you hear someone make their case in a manner that’s compelling in its confidence, and with the rapid-fire delivery of his points. He’ll make one point after the other, hammering away as he makes his case. If you’re really paying attention, you may spot a point or two that could be answered. But overall, it seems like he really did his homework.

But, not so fast. What he just did may have been a Gish Gallop.

So, what is a Gish Gallop? A Gish Gallop is what a person is doing when they make their case by rapid-firing numerous claims that are selected as supporting the case, whether the claims are valid or not. A Gish Gallop is as effective as it is because any debate opponent that the arguer may have cannot answer each of the arguments presented in a reasonable amount of time, or the allotted time, as the case may be. What’s more, most people aren’t familiar with this debate tactic, making them more susceptible to being wowed over by the presenter’s confidence and apparent knowledgeability.

The Gish Galloper may even claim victory, because his opponent didn’t answer each of the claims made, which isn’t reasonable to expect considering that it takes more time to refute a claim than to make it.

On social media, a Gish Gallop may take the form of a list. And on a platform like X, where replies have a character limit, to answer each point might not be possible without going into a long thread.

The Gish Gallop was named for the famed creationist Duane Gish, who not only employed the tactic, but also frequently changed the topic before his claims could be answered.

Here’s an example of a Gish Gallop you may see:

The case for socialism is quite clear:

  • Capitalism tends towards one person owning the means of production, leading to an abusive power dynamic,
  • People cannot be trusted to manage their own finances, as evidenced by their stupid financial decisions,
  • Paying people only a fraction of the value that they produce is predatory,
  • A debt-based monetary system bankrupts the people,
  • Because the currency is produced by the government, they can control it as strictly as they please,
  • It’s more fair when everyone is paid the same,
  • People who own businesses are each like the top 1%, making them in a better position to pay their fair share.

What’s more, the idea of determining how I produce value on my own is mentally taxing.

Breadtoob Bradley

…And on, and on, and on.

Answering each of Breadtoob Bradley’s fallacious claims can take all day, and there are things that you could probably instead be doing. Breaking down each of these points can result in you typing up multiple paragraphs, so you’d probably be spending a disproportionate amount of time refuting each of the claims compared to the few seconds at a time that it took for Breadtoob Bradley to just fart them out.

And if someone is using the Gish Gallop deliberately, that may even be what they’re counting on. After all, someone in another ideological tribe cannot be counted on to respect your time.

However, Breadtoob Bradley’s rant might impress those who don’t recognize his tactic for what it is. In which case, it might be productive to step in and answer it.

But how does one go about it? What are some effective ways to answer the Gish Gallop?

For one thing, you can just call out the Gish Gallop. If you call attention to the tactic being employed, it’s not going to seem nearly as impressive. Once people know that such a tactic is being used to attempt to impress them, it will be understood for the psychological trick that it is, and the claims being made are more likely to be examined by others more critically.

Another effective way of dealing with the Gish Gallop is by choosing just one point that the opponent made, then hammering away at that.

Remember that the assumptions that the Gish Gallop appeals to is that if a person can present many points at a time, then they must be knowledgeable, and the assumption that if the opponent doesn’t answer all claims, then they can claim victory over any claim left unrefuted.

However, that’s not necessarily the reality of the matter.

Similarly to how a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, the entire Gish Gallop can fail if a carefully-selected point is sufficiently refuted. As a chain under load fails if just one link fails, if just one point in the Gish Gallop can be broken apart, the Galloper’s capacity for reasoning can be called into question.

Therefore, if you only have so much space or time to answer a Gish Gallop, select just one of the opponent’s arguments, then really hammer away at it.

You’re Gish Galloping. Many fallacious arguments does not a strong argument make.

What’s more, how does the state owning all the means of production prevent an abusive power dynamic? The state has the capacity to become abusive, not just individuals.

If that’s your first point, odds are, you didn’t think the rest of them the whole way through.

Based Benny

The party’s over.

But even if you don’t answer it, if you see the Gish Gallop at play and recognize it as the rhetorical trick that it is, you won’t fall for its hypnotic effect.

A Gish Gallop is less likely to be attempted in a format where a person is permitted ample time and space to answer a claim, such as on online discussion boards. So, you’re more likely to come across it in debates that are timed, or other formats where time and space are limited. Often, the Gish Gallop is designed to take advantage of the debate format in an attempt to impress the judges. Such debates are more of a game to exhibit one’s finesse with rhetoric than they are intended to discover the truth of a matter.

Outside of school debate clubs and the like, the use of dishonest tactics to “win” arguments is not a victory in which one can take true pride.

Speaking of, in high school debate clubs, there’s a phenomenon which is similar to the Gish Gallop. You’ve noticed it when you see a student talk super fast, often to the point of gasping for breath, in an effort to make as many points as they can in the allotted time. This is called “spreading” (a portmanteau of “speed” and “reading”), and it’s an embarrassment to the sport of timed debate.

Now that you know about the Gish Gallop, are you going to be as impressed when someone on social media attempts the shotgun approach in their pseudo-intellectualism?

Richard Wolff’s Capitalist Enterprise

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While this video is several years old, it caught my attention because it was trending. It has to do with Marxist Richard Wolff answering a softball question for his fellow socialists about how to debunk capitalists who say that they earn their money.

The video is about four minutes long, and here it is, so shields up:

I’ll point out, first of all, the tone with which Wolff speaks: he comes off as a mustache-twirler. He knows that he’s villainous, and he’s embracing it.

He doesn’t believe what he’s saying, he just understands the potential to profit off the economically naive who only understand Marxism because it’s the only economic school of thought that they studied, and their interest mainly stemmed from having heard a one-sided argument in favor of it.

But try asking these kids what the difference is between Austrian economics and Chicago economics, and you’ll usually just be treated to a thousand-yard stare. They’ll just lump it all together with laissez-faire classical economics and just call it “capitalism”, because like typical Marxist cultists, they just split the world in two.

But eventually, these kids are going to grow up, and realize that while the Keynesian economic system we currently have is not perfect, it’s still vastly superior to Marxism, and that a person of reasonable ability can thrive when given the opportunities presented in the current economic system. Until then, they’re going to have the kinds of minds that people like Wolff continue to prey upon.

With that out of the way, let’s get into deconstructing Wolff’s Bolshevik.

The conclusion that Richard Wolff is trying to lead you to is that because you’re not coming away with 100% of the value that you produce, you’re not actually “earning” your money, because capitalism is ripping you off.

He speaks like a man who never owned a business. Or, at least, he speaks as though he’s trying to appeal specifically to those for whom running a business is some great mystery, like a form of magic known only to rich people.

Suppose you earned commission for bicycles that you sell at a bike store, and you get $20 for each $200 bike that you sold. In a fair world, wouldn’t you get the full $200 for the $200 bike you sold?

Sure, that would be a great deal for you, but it wouldn’t work for the business that had to buy the bikes from the manufacturer to sell in the first place, or pay the taxes, rent, and other various overhead costs of running the business which includes utility costs. What’s more, the store manager would also require compensation for his own work of managing the finances, ordering merchandise, and making decisions that the staff counts on to be spot-on because they want the business to succeed so they can remain gainfully employed.

Or, suppose that you worked on the production line that produced those bicycles that have an MSRP of $200. If each person on the production line made $20 per hour, how many bikes must be produced per day to cover the wages of factory staff, such as yourself, and cover the overhead costs of running the factory? Perhaps the bikes must be sold to stores for as much as $120 just to pick an arbitrary but perhaps realistic number.

You might be getting the idea that the profit margins for running a business are razor-thin. They usually are, and many of the businesses that fail, fail by inches. Business ownership is no walk in the park.

And what’s more, the idea that a person is being ripped off because they’re getting paid what they agreed to be paid is intellectually destitute.

The next sentiment that Wolff could be dragged across rusty nails over is his implication that shareholding is some sport that rich people engage in, in an effort to extract value from the system without producing value, themselves. As though there’s no connotation of risk in trusting someone else with some of your value in the hopes that they’ll increase their value, and share some of that increased value with you. Nope, in the minds of the typical soy-cialist, the stock market is some mysterious box that goes “brrrrrrr”, and then rich people get richer.

I’m going to let you in on a little something: I’m a shareholder in my own employer. It wasn’t hard, either. All I had to do was opt into it, and a part of my paycheck is automatically invested. Does that make me some kind of wizard in the eyes of soy-cialists?

Here’s another one: if you’re reading this on a smartphone, odds are, you can download a crypto exchange app from your respective app store, then drop some of your fiat currency into a crypto of your choice. If you did, then you just invested.

Just, you know, do your research, first. Don’t be dumb about it.

To those who have not, those who have are a mystery. Where such differences exist, the gap is often filled with a combination of ignorance and resentment. Socialism is about appealing to that ignorance and resentment. It’s the main reason why it attempts to divide the world between the haves and the have-nots. Where understanding exists, ignorance and resentment dissipates, and often, the difference between the haves and have-nots begins to shrink.

It’s amazing how many people want money as badly as they do, but they’d have more if they simply spent less of their money on things they don’t need. I suppose that listening to influencers peddle divisive bullshit is more attractive than self-development.

Let’s not kid ourselves: socialist influencing is a capitalist enterprise. The lives and minds it destroys is out-of-sight of the influencers who profit from their endeavor.

Antivirus For Your Mind: Recognizing the Motte-and-Bailey Fallacy

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A motte-and-bailey town configuration, from castlesandmanorhouses.com

We know that computers can be hacked. It usually has to do with a third party installing software on your computer without your knowledge, which can then make your computer do as the hacker wants, which often has to do with collecting your data because they can somehow profit off of it.

But what about you? Can you be hacked?

The answer is yes. But while a computer can be hacked through code, you can be hacked through rhetoric. If this rhetoric has the desired effect on your mind, you can be made to perform as the hacker wills.

To prevent this, you need a defense. And usually, there’s no better defense against malicious rhetoric than to understand when it’s being employed.

It’s because of this that I’m thrilled that more social media personalities are expressing awareness of the motte-and-bailey fallacy, and are passing this knowledge on to their audiences, making them less susceptible to this tactic.

In spirit of this desire for understanding, I’ve decided to explore this topic, for to pass on this information to my reading audience. You can think of it as antivirus for the mind.

To understand the motte-and-bailey fallacy, think of a well-fortified town. This town is divided into two sections. One is a large common area, where the general population does business, which is called the bailey. The other is more strongly fortified, and is called the motte.

The idea is that, on typical days, most people will go about their business in the larger, less-fortified bailey part of town, but in the event that the town is attacked, the people will retreat into the motte part of town, for their own protection.

With this mental image, you’re in a much better position to understand the motte-and-bailey fallacy.

In debate, a motte-and-bailey is a statement that’s framed in such a way as to further a particular end, but in the event that it’s challenged, it’s defended according to an interpretation that’s easier to defend.

Once you understand the motte-and-bailey fallacy, it’ll become much easier to recognize it when it’s in use. You might even have seen it used by your own tribe. Once you know what it is, you’ll be in a better position to avoid using it, yourself.

To assist in understanding, here’s an example of the motte-and-bailey that you may see in the wilds of social media:

Zionism is an issue that needs to be addressed.

Beardy McMoonface

Decrying Zionism is a frequent rallying cry of those who promote antisemitism. So, one can easily call Beardy McMoonface out on it. But if you do, he’ll have a defense:

I didn’t mean all Jews. Just the Zionists.

Beardy McMoonface

To see through this rhetoric, it helps to understand what Zionism is. Zionism is a form of Jewish nationalism that asserts that the Jewish people must have their own homeland, and that that homeland must be their ancestral homeland according to the Scriptures. While there is a greater overlap of Zionism with Judaism, not every Jewish person is a Zionist. While it shouldn’t be a problem for Jews to have their own homeland, there are people out there who have a problem with it.

Beardy is falling back on a stricter definition of Zionism when making his defense, making his initial claim seem more reasonable. While he would have been happy to have reduced Judaism as a whole with his initial statement, he has another interpretation of his statement to fall back on to make his initial assertion seem more reasonable.

So, in the case of Beardy above, the bailey is to further antisemitism by framing Zionism as a problem that the whole of Judaism must answer for, without specifically saying so, while the motte that he retreats to is that he didn’t say that he had a problem with all Jews. When it’s explained this clearly, his deceptiveness is easy to see.

At first blush, it can seem as though the best way to handle the motte-and-bailey fallacy is to directly answer the claim. However, this can be tricky to do, because depending on how you answer it, the person making the initial claim can easily make you seem unreasonable, and accuse you of jumping to conclusions.

It’s tempting to call out the motte-and-bailey for what it is when you recognize it. But this has its own issue: it often takes a lot more time, space, and effort to refute a fallacious claim than it does to make it. This can be an issue in a structured debate format, or on a social media platform with a character limit, where a person can easily Gish Gallop, then claim victory, which is another form of deceptive rhetoric to watch out for.

By the way, if you were to scope out Beardy’s social media footprint and find that it’s heavily characterized by scathing criticism of Israel, it’s not going to be hard to guess what he’s really about.

In the next fictitious example, see if you can spot the motte-and-bailey:

Stop the genocide against trans people!

AstolfoFan1978

Did you get it? The bailey is that AstolfoFan1978 wants you to believe that there’s a genocide against trans people. The term genocide connotes a rounding up and systematic destruction of an entire group of people. If it can be established that this is taking place, it’s far easier for you to see them as victims, and you’d be far more likely to sympathize with them.

Thus, your mind would be successfully hacked!

But suppose you were to call AstolfoFan1978 out by saying that there is no trans genocide. After all, it’s not like trans people are being rounded up onto trains and shipped to concentration camps where they’d be worked to death.

But if you were to call him out by challenging his claim that a genocide is taking place, then he’d (?) retreat to his (?) motte, and present Stanton’s Ten Stages of Genocide, and then make the case that the genocide against trans people is on its third stage, saying that they’re being denied full civil rights. Whether this is true or not, it remains that this is a claim that AstolfoFan1978 would pivot to, because it’s easier for him (?) to make his (?) case based on Gregory Stanton’s scale.

Of course, AstolfoFan1978 is being overly dramatic in insisting that any opposition to policy positions equates to genocide, because by that same reasoning, any politically-involved faction can claim that there’s a genocide against them if their policy positions face any amount of opposition. Welcome to politics.

Basically, the motte-and-bailey is a form of equivocation, a category of fallacy that includes the likes of doublespeak. It’s considered deceptive because it relies on rhetoric to manipulate, rather than on reason to convince.

When you understand when it’s used, you’re in a much better position to resist a hacking attempt on your mind.

The Collab Between Chris Chan and Keffals Makes Kiwi Farms Easy To Justify

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Apparently, Chris Chan is planning a collab with Keffals. This was according to Chris, as he posted the following on X:

You may know who Chris Chan is, as he is considered the most well-known of all lolcows. A couple years ago, he committed a sexual offense involving his own mother, becoming a case study in true crime, and ascending to horrorcow status.

Keffals is a bit more obscure, but perhaps far more enraging. He became known for making HRT drugs at home to sell to minors without their parent’s knowledge or consent, and ran an infamous “catboy ranch”.

The packaging for his bathtub-made HRT contains the phrase, “Keep out of reach of parents.”

Both persons are males who pretend to be women, and both hate Kiwi Farms with a passion, so it wasn’t terribly unlikely that the two would have eventually found each other.

If you’re unfamiliar with Kiwi Farms, it’s an online message board that initially focused on discussing Chris Chan, but has since pivoted to discussing the ridiculous things that social media personalities do. It’s often made out to be a hive for online bullies, and while it’s true that many of its members are unsavory individuals, I think the board as it is now can be justified. In fact, I’ll go ahead and do that now.

Suppose that arson was legal. As in, you could do it, and the law wouldn’t lay a finger on you. Would you do it?

If you’re like most people, your answer would be, “No!”. This is because most people would see arson as immoral, regardless of what the law allowed.

But suppose that, not only was arson legal, it was actually incentivized. Five dollars for each house destroyed. Odds are, most people would still refuse to do it, and would be outraged at such an incentive, if it were to exist.

However, some people would jump at the offer. “Five dollars, per? Hells yeah!” they’d scream, before getting to work. We would call such people “sociopaths”, because what little they’d have to gain is something which, in their minds, outweighs the suffering that they’d cause.

But suppose that homes were being destroyed, but rather than by acts of arson, instead through influence. Suppose that a level of abstraction separates the act that destroys the home from the home being destroyed, in such a way that allowed for plausible deniability on the part of the influencer.

The influencer might influence people to drink base liquids, eat laundry detergent, dive from moving speedboats, take prescription drugs without a prescription, idolize dangerous terrorists, make self-destructive lifestyle choices, and many, many more acts which, if people were to try them, the likely outcome is that families could be torn apart, property could be damaged, and even lives could be lost. And while all this is going on, influencers are financially rewarded just for the attention that they get.

If this were to happen, and if it were financially incentivized, would you see that as a problem?

Let’s drop the hypotheticals. After all, you probably knew what I was getting at when I brought up the influencers. The fact is, influencers do encourage destructive behaviors. These behaviors have caused damage that these influencers didn’t have to face consequences for. And yes, these influencers are being financially incentivized to accrete attention to themselves, even if the attention is through the promotion of destructive and socially corrosive ideologies and activities.

These influencers are the sociopaths who don’t give a damn what damage that they might cause for you or for anyone else, so long as they’re getting the attention that they want, and the money that they really care about.

These sociopaths are among the many influencers on social media.

They don’t have to believe what they’re saying. And they usually don’t. They don’t have to see the communities, families, or individuals whose lives they are destroying. And they couldn’t bring themselves to care. They might even convince you that they’re your friend, when in reality, your mere attention only slightly enables the transaction that is their sincere desire.

By now, you’re probably wondering what can be done about these influencers. The answer is to shine a light on them, and subject them to the ridicule and satire that is richly merited.

That’s where Kiwi Farms comes in.

If it weren’t for Kiwi Farms, deviants such as Chris Chan and Keffals would have a much easier time being the predators that they are.

And now that the two have found each other, it’s become much more important that an eye is kept on the two. Because if the two are the miscreants that they are independent of one another, just imagine what they can come up with working together.

Why Biden Takes the Jan 6 Riot So Seriously

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It’s now been over three years since the riot that took place at the U.S. Capitol building on Jan 6, 2021. Since then, the left has taken to memorializing the event as a threat to democracy, and Biden himself has incessantly referenced it, including in his latest campaign ad.

No wonder Trump was such an effective real estate mogul, what with his ability to live rent-free in people’s heads.

It’s obvious that to the Biden administration the Capitol riot was no ordinary riot, even if all evidence points to it not being the deliberate insurrection that the left has made it out to be, but instead a demonstration that escalated to a level that was not originally intended.

What is it about the Jan 6 Capitol riot that gets under Biden’s skin? What follows is speculation about what might be happening with Biden’s thinking.

When a person would become President of the United States, they undergo a slight change in their thinking. They’ll begin comparing themselves to previous presidents.

While it’s true that there have been protests against the policy positions of previous American presidents, the Capitol riot was the first of its kind, in that people showed up in the thousands to resist the very certification of a man who supposedly had the support of the majority. While it’s true that the protesters don’t represent everybody, they acted on the frustrations of a significant portion of the electorate who believed that they weren’t being represented.

Again, this type of protest was unprecedented in its kind, and grand in scale. What’s more, it was a direct challenge to the Biden administration.

It seems as though a vast majority of people who would run for public office has at least a slight amount of narcissism. Seeing as though Biden has held office for roughly five decades, there’s higher potential for narcissism. In the eyes of a narcissist, they must be loved by most reasonable people, and anyone who would not love them must be unreasonable. This may be playing into how Biden has been coping with the Capitol riot: by making Democracy itself out to be in danger, and making himself out to be a hero, fighting the good fight. In this narcissistic fantasy, the people who don’t accept him must be acting out of malice or ignorance.

After all, to know a narcissist is to love one.

However, an American president doesn’t just compare himself to other American presidents, he compares himself to other world leaders, particularly other influential leaders like those who lead countries such as China, Russia, India, Japan, Germany, and the U.K., just to name a few examples. And, as it so happens, it’s rare for leaders of those countries to see such strong opposition to their leadership, particularly on a day as significant as the certification (or respective ceremony) of their particular appointments.

When you understand this, you understand why Joe Biden and his administration are as insecure as they are.

And, as a further blow to his pride, the candidate that serves as the spiritual representative of the frustrations against the Biden administration is the current frontrunner of the opposing political party, and it’s not even close. And this has occurred in spite of every petty legal obstruction that’s been waged against him, and every attempt to make him out to be an enemy of democracy.

In fact, if the upcoming election were to be held tomorrow, it’s likely that Donald Trump would win. If this were to happen, Joe Biden’s pride would be dealt the cruelest stroke. This would mean that the public, after hearing everything that he had to say about his opponent and his constituency, still sided against Biden. At that point, what would he have left?

While this was speculation, I think it’s reasonable to consider when pondering just what it is about the Jan 6 Capitol riot that Joe Biden seems to take so personally. I’m a bit concerned, because as history has shown us abundantly, when men of power are insecure, they tend to turn to desperate methods.

Personally, I think that this election year is going to be interesting. It’s obvious that there’s a whole lot of pride at stake. I’ve said before that in order for democracy to work, each side needs to see their opposition as legitimate. Both major factions have room to develop as far as that goes, and it doesn’t help that there are people all over who wouldn’t make that easy.

While people ascribe huge significance to the presidency, as I see it, his power should be limited to the point that it shouldn’t make much difference who he is. People should care more about local government, as that can make a far bigger impact on their lives. What’s more, other representatives are significant, considering that if one political party does not control all branches of government, they can’t just push through whatever they want.

Here’s hoping that cooler heads prevail, but to be honest, it’s hard to tell which ones those would be.

Goofball Finds Support For Israel In Fast Food Wrapper

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You’re not ready for this. You’re about to laugh the hardest you have laughed in a long time.

You sitting down? Here we go:

As much as I’d like to believe that this was all some act, I know that people like this actually exist. When you’ve had a job in which you have to interact with the public, you see many different kinds.

But this is truly special. Here’s the kind of person who listens to a televangelist, and thinks that the sermon had some kind of special, hidden message that was intended specifically for them. The kind of person who makes financial decisions based on horoscopes, and names their kids after the first name they hear after turning on the radio, because fuck any chance they could have at living normal.

“Wow. What does that resemble?” Could it be the McDonald’s logo? A helpful reminder of where you just spent your money? The icon to blame for making you fat?

The moment you heard the woman say, “This is in support of Israel.”, you couldn’t see the guy’s face, but you could hear it drop. I know that wage slaves are under enormous pressure to maintain a veneer of professionalism, but I can’t imagine any manager out there would fault him for saying, “Are you serious?”

But you heard her tone, she was as totes cereal as a sack of processed grains at the supermarket.

What are the odds that two basic colors used on fast food packaging could coincidentally resemble the colors of Israel’s flag? So low that, according to the people who put watermelons in their X posts because the colors are similar to the colors of the Palestinian flag, it couldn’t be a coincidence, and must necessarily indicate support for the state of Israel.

I get the fact that stupid people believe in synchronicities to help them cope with the fact that they’re going to die someday, and that there is nothing special about them, but it’s time to keep it real: belief in synchronicities can destroy your mind. And the above video has shown us a great example.

Things Are Starting to Move Right Along.

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A short while ago, I pointed out that unfettered immigration would lead to unrest. Since then, unrest has started to pick up in places like France, and particularly in Ireland, where things exploded after a piece of filth attacked children with a knife.

In light of this, I’ll go ahead and offer my opinion on the matter, and I’ll keep it brief, because that would suffice.

I don’t have a knack for seeing the future. I didn’t need it because I could already see the tension that was there. In this environment, all that’s needed for things to move along in a hurry is for someone to do something incredibly stupid, which will cause people to react in a way that expresses the tension.

Right now, the left is blaming the right for the public’s reaction, when in reality, the left bears the blame for what is the natural and expected outcomes of their policies.

The left believed that they could retire easier in spite of falling birth rates by inviting immigrants into their country with the idea that they could be put to work, and feed into the Social Security scheme. Such an idea is damnably idiotic. The outcome is that these very same immigrants have largely gone on welfare, turning into a drain on the system, rather than contributing. Worse yet, many of them turned out to be criminals on the run, some are human traffickers working for cartels, and some have brought a culture with them that is absolutely incompatible with a civil society.

As it turns out, assuming good intentions can be dangerously naive.

I’m not really worried that the political right is going to capitalize on recent trends, and gain institutional power with the support of a common population who would be more interested in leaders that more closely mirror their values. At this point, it’s all but a certainty. What’s worrisome is that those who assume authority will tend towards extremes in their positions. The right would do well to remember their own virtues regarding limited government and personal liberties, and know that the immigration crisis can be reversed in a responsible manner.

Having said that, it’s obvious that the responsible way to go about it involves mass deportations. The left will scream bloody murder over it, and bang their pots and pans together. They’re free to make their noise. But after decades of getting their way with minimal resistance, to not have their way would be something for them to get accustomed to.

The left has a bad habit of attempting to disassociate their policy positions from the consequences of those positions, even when the consequences are so obvious that any reasonable person could see them coming. To see such belligerent foolishness would be almost rewarding, if it weren’t the common population who pays the price.

In any case, it remains that one of the most rewarding things about basic observation of reality is seeing things play out predictably. And I hope you’re ready, because this is going to be quite a show.

Bin Laden and the Algorithmic Manipulators

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Before we get into this, I’m curious how many of you had “leftists voice agreement with Osama Bin Laden” on your bingo card for 2023. It’s understandable if you didn’t, but what a year this is turning out to be.

In the year 2002, Osama Bin Laden, the very same Bin Laden that ran the terror network Al Qaeda, had issued a letter titled, A Letter to America, wherein he laid out his rationale for the 9/11 terror attacks.

I, for one, am skeptical that Bin Laden actually authored the letter, as he had initially steadfastly denied being involved in the attacks, and each of the hijackers actually attended the Al Quds mosque in Hamburg, Germany, which was never shut down, as far as I could tell.

In the letter, Bin Laden pointed out that there was no such thing as innocent civilians in the U.S.’s democracy, pointing out that his violent actions were a reaction to the policy positions of representatives that civilians voted into office. He voiced such an opposition to U.S. policy that it sounded suspiciously like it was intended to feed into a casus belli for further American intervention. Hopefully it’s understandable why I’m skeptical.

The letter had been published by British news outlet The Guardian, who took it down when a recent spate of TikTok videos appeared expressing surprise at the contents of the letter, with some expressing agreement with Bin Laden’s sentiments, saying that they’ve had their preconceived notions challenged, and encouraging their viewers to also read the letter.

Normally, I’d embed at least one example of such a video here, but I’m not doing that this time, for a reason that I’ll get into later on in this post.

When it comes to a letter from Osama Bin Laden, I’m curious what people were expecting. Did they expect something like five paragraphs of hand-wringing and mustache-twirling, proceeded by cartoon-villain cackling? The guy had a following, and he had a following for a reason: he was able to justify his positions, even if through faulty reasoning, and he did so in such a way that would have been considered convincing to those who lacked the ability to comprehend true evil, or at least those who would be dumb enough to fall for his arguments.

People with bad positions are usually able to justify their positions. Take the flat-earthers, for example. People know that flat-earthers are wrong. However, they take for granted that flat-earthers are wrong. So when they get into a debate with one, they imagine that it will be a piece-of-cake slam dunk victory. But then the debate begins, and the flat-earther runs circles around them, because they know how the game is played, they have rhetorical deceit down to a science, they came prepared with arguments that most people are not prepared for, and they themselves came prepared for the arguments and rebuttals that they could reasonably expect. The result is that a typical, middle-of-the-road thinker is left to kick dust on the way home, knowing that he lost a debate to a flat-earther.

While we’re at it, I’m curious as to what people think is in Hitler’s Mein Kampf. While it’s true that much of it is a hateful tirade made to appeal to one with an external locus of control, it’s also a political manifesto that would have been considered encouraging to a German who would have felt downtrodden in Hitler’s time.

Evil people are able to justify their wickedness, even if their reasoning is deeply flawed. To them, what most would see as wicked may be what they see as justifiable, or even banal.

By way of another example, there’s also the manifesto of Ted Kazynski, the person who is popularly known as the Unabomber. When his manifesto was published, the expectation would have understandably been the ramblings of a deluded psychopath who believed that the moon followed him as he walked around. As it turns out, he made some points about society that many people considered valid.

Returning to Bin Laden, I wonder how many people out there have forgotten that he was a religious zealot, whose own religion is pretty-much everything that a stereotypical leftist pretends that Christianity is. Bin Laden was an Islamist, who wanted to implement Sharia in the west.

The following is a few of Bin Laden’s policy positions:

  • Executing gays,
  • Normalizing slavery (and no, I’m not kidding),
  • Outlawing bacon,
  • Outlawing grown-up beverages,
  • Outlawing non-religious music,
  • A functionally-retarded banking system that’s somehow supposed to run without interest,
  • Normalizing pederasty, which has been legal in Afghanistan for decades,
  • State-sponsorship of a cult that discourages the pursuit of anything outside of itself,
  • That science is not allowed to question, among other things, that the earth is flat,
  • A judicial system that’s so capricious that tyrants are needed to maintain order,
  • That the testimony of a woman is either 1/2 or 1/4 that of a man in courts of law.

There’s a lot more. And a bunch of simpletons are impressed with this guy?

Now, let’s get into the reason why I’m not leaving a video embed in this post. Personally, I doubt that these people actually believe what they’re saying. The fact is, the TikTok algorithm boosts what gets plenty of engagement, and what’s rage-inducing (such as police-brutality videos) tend to get more attention. I suspect that these are just people who know how the game is played, and are attempting to farm the algorithm for views. I don’t want to give them a signal boost, because I don’t want them to have more attention.

But even if they don’t believe it, they still have followings that may take their words for it. And that’s how attempts to game an algorithm can have potentially harmful outcomes. We’ve already seen how videos of police brutality have inspired looting and rioting. Now, there are social media influencers out to make a quick buck who don’t care about the long-term social damage that can occur as a result of algorithmic manipulation.

But if the social media influencers were sincere, then there’s no telling how they’ll react when they get around to reading something that’s actually reasonable, such as the basic philosophical underpinnings of Libertarianism, or that of Austrian economics.

To get to the heart of the matter, however eloquent that his justifications could have possibly been, it still remains that Osama Bin Laden was a murderous nutjob who hid behind his religion, which played a significant role in motivating him to become the killer he ended up becoming.

Now, the indoctrinators of the political left are looking on in horror as the very children that they indoctrinated went on to side with terrorists like Al Qaeda and Hamas, simply because those terrorist organizations have been using similar rhetoric to justify themselves. And now said indoctrinators are losing control of the very generation with which they had hoped to usher in a revolution, and are losing control of them to a bunch of religious fanatics who are far more hateful than even themselves.

I can think of no better way to fight back than to make it known why their new ideology is not worth fighting for. Just because it’s obvious to me why this is the case doesn’t mean that everyone can be reasoned with.

If it turns out that the letter actually was a U.S. psy-op, the consequences might almost be funny. Except not quite.

The Left and Dialectical Thinking

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A normal, healthy mind supposes that if there are two mutually-exclusive viewpoints, then they cannot both be correct.

For example, if a normal thinker were to be presented with the two statements, “racism is wrong” and “discrimination against whites is okay”, they would perceive an irreconcilable contradiction, and understand that both statements cannot be true.

The use of “if-therefore” statements to determine what follows with axioms as the basis is logical thinking.

You might have noticed that many leftists hold the statements “racism is wrong” and “discrimination against whites is okay” to be simultaneously true. In the mind of a logical thinker, this is vexing, because to them, both statements cannot simultaneously be true.

So, why? Why do so many leftists hold to such a blatant and irreconcilable ideological contradiction? How can such a thing possibly make sense?

And the answer is, it doesn’t. Yet, leftists still hold such contradictory viewpoints due to what’s called dialectical thinking.

So, what is dialectical thinking? As relates to leftism and the related Marxist philosophies surrounding it, dialectical thinking involves the synthesis of conflicting ideas to form a new idea.

Consider how the typical leftist handles the two contradictory statements in the example above. They are told that “racism is wrong”, and “discrimination against whites is okay”, and they are told that, in order to be a good leftist, they need to hold both statements as simultaneously true.

A healthy mind would consider such a political ideology to be complete mushuganah, reject it out of hand, and perhaps even treat it to the sound ridicule it richly merits. However, people who are in cults are seldom of sound mind. They want to fit in, and they’re determined to do so, no matter how hard they have to force the square peg through the round hole.

So, to the end of winning headpats from their ideological superiors, leftists must somehow reconcile the statements, “racism is wrong”, and “discrimination against whites is okay”. But how?

As most of us know, to exercise discrimination on the basis of one’s race, such as in cases where a person is white, is racism per se. Considering this, to the end of reconciling the two contradictory statements, it’s plain to see that the leftist’s main obstacle would be the definition of racism.

So, what is the intellectually-confused leftist to do? That’s easy: just change the definition of racism to exclude discrimination against whites.

Obviously, a sound mind would not make such an exception. But, again, we’re talking about cultists. So, not only will they make the exception, they’ll attempt to justify it in an attempt to silence their conscience, which is probably screaming in agony. Knowing this, it’s easy to see why they continually point to the past crime of slavery as justification for their own Halal form of discrimination, while ignoring the fact that slavery was also practiced by nearly every culture to ever exist.

When you understand dialectical thinking, you understand why leftists are as prone as they are to simultaneously holding contradictory viewpoints.

The example above was not arbitrary, by the way. It was selected to help you understand why the word “racism” has gone from a word with a definition to a leftist snarl word that is used to describe people that disagree with them. Leftists use the word “fascist” in the same sense, while simultaneously engaging in collective action to the end of furthering Marxist economics. Unironically.

As I’ve pointed out before, if language is being used that evokes an emotional reaction, while bypassing your better judgement, you might be in a cult.

Dialectical thinking itself is a memetic holdover of Gnosticism, which had a particular influence on Marxism (remember that many Marxist cults were at one point religious in nature). Early in its history, Christianity recognized Gnosticism as a heresy, and dealt with it accordingly, before Christianity went on to become the world’s most popular religion. When you understand this, it’s easy to see why many Gnostics have a problem with Christianity, and that the dialectical thinkers on the left are fighting someone else’s battles for them.

As much as I’d like to ask whether I helped you to make sense of leftist thinking, we must admit that it still doesn’t make sense. Even so, it can be said that when you know about dialectical thinking, you’re in a better position to comprehend the senselessness of leftist thinking, including why they are in a constant state of redefining themselves, and why they embrace contradictions that more reasonable people would not.

The Trannifesto Has Leaked. Here’s What It Says.

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The Trannifesto, the final writings of Audrey Hale, the Covenant school shooter, has just been leaked through Steven Crowder’s website, louderwithcrowder.com. The guy is a true patriot, please pay his site a visit.

The shooting, committed by a transgender person (who was in reality a woman), occurred over 8 months ago. Though law enforcement had obtained the shooter’s final writings, its release to the public has been repeatedly delayed, with perhaps no plans to release it, at all.

As has been stated previously, the Trannifesto is not so much a manifesto as it is a set of journal entries.

If you’re as skeptical as me, you might wonder whether the pages were a scam made by someone abusing AI. I ran the images through an AI detector, and the likelihood of the images being AI generated was 2.1%, 3.8%, and 34.2%, according to Illuminarty.ai. So by the looks of it, these are legit.

Now, let’s give these a look, and I’ll give my opinion.

I’ll say first of all that Audrey Hale sucked fuck at handwriting. Also, nothing conveys a psycho middle-school mindset quite like doodles of guns shooting at targets in a margin of a page. And then there’s scrawling out “DARK ABYSS DEATH DAY” as the title of the entry, as if to drive home the teen angst that she was way too old for.

I’m absolutely not surprised that Audrey’s broken, defective mind could not perceive that there is such a thing as an innocent person, which was evidenced by her choice of targets. What does surprise me is how far back that Audrey contemplated the crimes that she ended up committing, which goes at least as far back as the summer of 2021, when her plotting was nearly discovered.

Audrey Hale’s crimes were not a crime of passion, they were deliberate.

Audrey planned out her final crimes meticulously, planning out her last day alive down to the minute. One might wonder what was covered by the sticky note, and based on the marks that are showing, it looks like part of the sentence, “Spend time w/ stuffed animals and possessions” was obscured. So yeah, in her last day alive, right before committing mass murder, a psychopath prioritized spending time with her toys.

This entry, dated the previous month, gives a window into the mind of the killer, and tells us what motivated her. It was basically a racist and classist tirade packed with expletives and ranting about what she perceived as indications of wealth and status.

It pretty much comes down to Hale hating a bunch of children whose parents worked hard to ensure that their children had a brighter future, and hating their parents for having things that they either worked or taken on debt for. Like many of Hale’s ilk, hers was a highly superficial perspective that assumed that disparity in outcome must necessarily be a product of factors that she felt she could rightly resent another for.

It’s obvious why there was such hesitation to release this to the public, because it’s an indictment against the political ideology which, when taken to its extreme, would motivate a sick individual to lash out in the way that Audrey did.

I’ve often heard it asked what it is that motivates mass killers. After all, the targets are seldom someone that the killers knew personally. The reason why mass killers try to end as many lives as possible is because their target is society. They want to cause as much damage to society as possible. Oftentimes, it’s because the killer supposed that society has failed them.

By reason of Hale’s transgender identity, it’s reasonable to infer that she wasn’t in touch with reality. Such a person would certainly be considered a vulnerable individual, prone to manipulation. Thus, when Hale was presented with the idea that a difference in outcome is intrinsically related one’s immutable characteristics, combined with Hale’s lack of empathy, and her belief that children are valid targets, together with the ease with which Hale could be manipulated, it becomes easier to see why she could be influenced to commit murder.

As disturbing as all this is, what’s particularly disturbing is that much of her hatred was directed towards children. She hated them for their race, and she hated them because the decisions that their parents made were to the end of ensuring that those children would have a bright future ahead of them. This is no reason to hate anyone, for one thing, because a person’s race is something that they cannot control, but also because to ensure a brighter future for one’s own children is one of the strongest driving motivations for one to work hard in today’s world. That Hale could bring herself to hate someone for these reasons goes to show just how damaged her mind was.

Because Audrey Hale was once a student at the same school where she would eventually die a murderer, it’s hard to say that she was motivated by envy of what other children had. But it seems apparent that she was motivated by racism, and I think it would be interesting to find out from whom her racist ideas came from.

As disturbing as all this is, it gets worse in context. While Audrey Hale’s thinking is aberrant, it’s far more common than it should be, to the point that it’s all but guaranteed that the tragedy that it resulted in will happen again.

And with her thinking being fed into by academia, the pharmaceutical industry, banking cartels, the Biden administration, and more, it’s not so much a question of whether it will happen again, but when and where.