non compos mentis

We Effing Love Science

By in extraordinary popular delusions, non compos mentis, science, the geist of the zeit, the great awokening No Comments

Jerry Coyne:

In the end, we have still more evidence that Scientific American is no longer circling the drain, but is now in the drain, headed for, well, the sewers. It used to have scientists writing about their field, with no ideological bias, but now has ideologues (these authors happen to be scientist-ideologues) writing about science in a biased and misleading way.

Apparently this trend will continue, and apparently the publishers won’t do anything about it. So it goes. But those of you who want your science untainted by “progressive” ideology had best look elsewhere.

Those who advocated for Lysenkoism at least had the excuse of fearing that they and their families would be imprisoned, or worse, for dissenting. We should always remember with disgust how little it took for our modern ideologues to submit to this insanity. Peer pressure? Loss of status? Maybe having to look for a new job? Cowardly whores, all of them.

What Acts of Cowardice Have Been Committed

By in extraordinary popular delusions, gender, non compos mentis No Comments

Ed West:

My optimistic hope is that we will reach some sort of settlement where transgenderism is treated with compassion and, in the relatively small number of cases where people would be genuinely happier living as the opposite sex, tolerated and accepted. I don’t think we will return to a situation where, for example, it’s acceptable for trans people to be abused on the street, or callously mocked. But the excesses of the 2010s and 2020s will prove to be on the wrong side of history — and I think much of what happened will stun people reading about it in decades to come.

Not that it will be remembered, since failed progressive movements tend to disappear in the public memory.

“It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been committed for fear of not looking sufficiently progressive.” I don’t think people are overall any crazier now than they’ve ever been at any point in history, but I do think the whole transgender thing will be the characteristic craziness of the past decade. Why did we suddenly decide that biology itself was oppressive and conformity to gender stereotypes was liberating? Who knows. Why did we become enthusiastic for giving children hormones and surgery to help them conform to said stereotypes? For fear of not looking sufficiently progressive. Will today’s cowards learn any chastening lessons from their enthusiasm for such a deranged trend, or will they quietly slink away and hope no one ever decides to scrutinize their old social media? I think you already know the answer to that one.

Who Will Save the Sane?

By in non compos mentis 2 Comments

“The thing with Brandon, you know, he’s a good guy, but he needs to stay away from those drugs. He’s seeing things that aren’t there.”

Jeff and I were talking about one of the guys who works for another business in the building. Last week, one of the contractors called me over to let me know that Brandon has been having visual and auditory hallucinations. He wanted me to know about it so that I wouldn’t be shocked by any unexpected bizarre behavior. The consensus is that he’s back on drugs, but maybe it’s some kind of preexisting paranoid schizoid tendencies too. He thinks there are people on the roof talking to him. He waves at nonexistent people across the room. He stares unsettlingly at people “with a Joker smile,” as one woman put it. He talks about being stalked and chased by shadowy figures whom he can’t describe or name. Oh, and he apparently thinks the Lady and I are undercover cops. Or FBI agents. I’m not clear which, and I’m not about to ask for clarification.

I admit this gives me pause. Many things, presumably, are different in Cloud Cuckoo Land, but I imagine undercover cops are not considered benevolent figures there either, especially to drug addicts with guilty consciences. But aside from the pressing self-preservation angle, I’m curious about how, exactly, this all works. How does his brain function well enough to allow him to get up at the right time each morning, operate a motor vehicle, and perform his job (which he reportedly can still do with no problems), but fail him in other ways? What keeps him from hallucinating a Deep State hitman or a shapeshifting alien in the passenger seat of his car, causing him to freak out and lose control of the steering wheel? When he asks someone in the office about an activity last week, an activity that never happened, and they tell him so, how does he process that? Does he think, “Why is she lying to me? I know that happened!” Or does a glimmer of self-awareness appear, causing him to think, “Wow, maybe I should stop snorting elephant tranquilizers”? Or when the owners of the building tell him he’s not allowed to be there after a certain time because he’s making people uncomfortable when they’re alone with him in the building — why isn’t he confused, wondering what he’s done wrong? How does his internal narrator fill in the increasingly-large gaps in the plot?

Yesterday, we were talking with the Lady’s cousin via Zoom. Among other topics, we talked about Covid denialism, anti-vax fanaticism (a fanatic being one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject, as the old quip goes), and epistemological relativism in general, i.e. why do so many people seem to believe so much crazy shit? I mentioned Brandon’s story, and compared it with the social-media derived lunacy of some of our common relatives. Brandon’s problem, I suggested, was perceptual. He’s literally failing to perceive reality accurately, even before he starts theorizing about it. Jim’s problem, on the other hand, is more conceptual. He perceives events accurately enough, but he builds logical chains of reasoning that arc out into the void, and before you know it, he thinks that there are child sex-slavery rings being run out of Walmart, and there’s going to be a civil war soon because Trump is about to be reinstalled as president, and in Australia, the police are literally tackling people in the streets…yes, but wait for it…and injecting them with the vaccine. Also, everyone who got the vaccine is going to die. (Fact check: missing crucial context in the form of a clear timescale, but technically true.) These beliefs are slightly more abstract, and therefore more expendable. Brandon gets irritated when people suggest that he’s deluded, so they’ve stopped arguing and started humoring him. If we survive several more years despite being death-injected, Jim won’t have an epistemological crisis. He’ll probably improvise an excuse on the spot, shrug, and move on. Likewise, when someone pointed out to him that the picture he saw of Justin Trudeau handing an oversized novelty check, Ed McMahon style, to a terrorist, was just a Photoshop job, he waved it away with a “Bah!” It didn’t sway his opinion that Trudeau was still the sort of knave who would have done that, even if he technically didn’t. The perceptual infrastructure in his mind is sound enough, even if the maintenance man is taking psychedelics. However, if he informed us that the cows had told him that he shouldn’t get vaccinated, it would be time to worry. As long as it’s just Facebook telling him that, eh, whaddayagunnado.

Then again, I know a woman who thinks she communicates telepathically with her cow. I started this post to flesh out my thoughts on the difference between ordinary-crazy and crazy-crazy, but the more I ramble, the less sure I am that I know anything at all.

The writer Bruno Maçães talks sometimes about what he calls the “metaverse.” As far as I know, he hasn’t fleshed it out into a full concept or anything, but in context, you understand that he means the shared fictions, especially those which are media-derived and disseminated, that increasingly crowd out the real world. In the metaverse, we just barely escaped a fascist tyranny, or maybe it was a patriarchal theocracy. In the metaverse, the Associated Press complains that the Taliban “failed” to appoint any female ministers, as if they ever intended to do so. In the metaverse, the “mostly peaceful” riots of last summer were both righteous uprisings of the oppressed and false-flag operations of the radical right, depending on the day of the week; the horrific shambles of the Afghanistan evacuation was a glorious success; and the mass hallucination of Border Patrol agents wielding nonexistent whips against Haitian migrants spreads all the way to the White House itself. Truly, we’ve come a long way from those superstitious, irrational days when Goody Proctor could be denounced for cavorting with the devil in the churchyard at midnight.

So, yes, Brandon, poor guy, is “seeing things that aren’t there.” Immediately afterwards, Jeff told me what he thought was really happening. “He’s seeing our ghosts.” It turns out, he honestly believes there are ghosts in the building. The contractor who originally warned me about Brandon’s erratic behavior backed him up on this. “Oh, yeah. I’ve been working here late at night, and you’ll see something out of the corner of your eye, or it’ll get real chilly all of a sudden…”

“Or your dog will start barking at nothing you can see!” Jeff piped up. “Then there was that time when this guy had this big old flag that started moving by itself, with no fans being turned on…I thought he was gonna piss himself!” Because the building was built prior to the Civil War, he speculates that it may have been used as a hospital during one of the nearby battles, so, Q.E.D, really. Civil War ghosts. It’s the only plausible explanation.

I have no grand conclusions. All I know is that my operating assumption is that everyone is a delusional nutjob once you scratch the surface, and this is why all conversations should be superficial and brief.

And This Gives You Power Over Me?

By in non compos mentis, waiting for the barbarians 4 Comments

If you spend any time sloshing around in the giant colostomy bag for thoughts known as Twitter, you’ll sometimes encounter a phrase, “tweeting through it.” It refers to amusing instances in which an individual, having beclowned hizzorherself, studiously ignores all the mockery and continues tweeting about other topics, hoping for the jeering crowd to lose interest and go away. This seems like a real-world equivalent. Do Western governments seriously believe they can just keep repeating the same mindless bromides about diversity and inclusion to avoid facing up to their humiliating defeat, as if these stupid notions have any purchase outside of the affluent bubble they’ve created for themselves, as if they have any leverage to dictate terms to anyone here? Yes, I’m sure the Taliban’s HR department will get right on that. They certainly wouldn’t want us to invade them again!

What genuinely puzzles me is this: who is the audience for these performative statements? Surely the State Department can’t believe the Taliban cares about Western obsessions with inclusivity and gender-equity. But then, who is supposed to be impressed by this? American citizens? After the sublime display of incompetence, ineptitude, and wishful thinking over the last few weeks, what sort of simpleton listens to this feeble rhetoric issuing forth from an administration with a desiccated, dementia-addled figurehead and feels anything other than mortification? Why do they even bother saying this? Could they actually…believe their own bullshit?

Hell Arrives Step By Step

By in non compos mentis, notorious jbp, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Unfortunately, people often act in spite of their conscience—even if they know it— and hell tends to arrive step by step, one betrayal after another. And it should be remembered that it is rare for people to stand up against what they know to be wrong even when the consequences for doing so are comparatively slight. And this is something to deeply consider, if you are concerned with leading a moral and careful life: if you do not object when the transgressions against your conscience are minor, why presume that you will not willfully participate when the transgressions get truly out of hand?

— Jordan Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

The Lady of the House was recently stunned when a longtime friend of hers, whom I will call Rubashov, talked about a recent incident in which his favorite podcaster from Slate was “indefinitely suspended” over a Slack conversation in which he used that word, the N-word, the Slur Which Shall Not be Named, in the context of a quotation, while debating what he naïvely thought to be the open question of whether or not there were any contexts in which it was appropriate. She wasn’t stunned by the incident, which is all too typical of the infantile moral panic possessing the media-academia complex these days; it was the fact that Rubashov, rather than offer some mild dissent in defense of his favorite podcaster, was supportive of his canceling. He didn’t actually quote the old line about breaking eggs to make an omelette, but he might as well have.

What appalled her the most was how quickly Rubashov had internalized the Orwellian imperative to judge even the recent past by the shifting political standards of the present. When did this rule about not being allowed to speak or write certain words, regardless of context, come into effect? Five minutes ago? Isn’t it a bit harsh to ruin someone’s career over that? Doesn’t matter. The Committee of Public Safety has decreed it to be an offense at this moment, so it is. (Until ten minutes from now, when the new head of the CPS, having taken power in a coup, reverses the directive and orders everyone fired for supporting the former head, who stands revealed as a sexist saboteur, racist wrecker, transphobic Trumpskyist, and on and on.) Many people, forgivably or not, might be cowards in public, or in their place of employment. But it takes a special level of invertebracy to echo the party line even among friends, even when there is no risk. One wonders whether our Rubashov will go willingly to his own cancellation, secure in the knowledge that it’s all for the best that he become one more egg in the Social Justice Omelette.

You Say What You Want But Filth Is All That They Hear

By in books, non compos mentis, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Kyle Smith:

I’m old enough to remember when liberals saw looming Christian theocracy as the most pernicious threat to liberal values, and when banning books was the single most horrible manifestation of that tendency that they could imagine. Now that we’re in the early days of the establishment of a woke theocracy, they’re eagerly looking for more books to throw on the cultural bonfire. Look out, The Cat in the Hat. There’s a fable promoting Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax that’s eager to take your place.

Out of curiosity, I went around some of the big book sites, most of which I quit reading in disgust years ago, to see if they had any comments about recent developments in the world of book-banning, namely, Ryan Anderson’s book When Harry Became Sally being removed from Amazon, and of course, the controversy over six of Dr. Seuss’s books no longer being published due to “offensive” imagery (and furthermore, no longer allowed for sale on eBay). Surely, the woke MFA grads who pollute these sites aren’t naïve enough to imagine that this kind of monopoly power will always be in their hands, do they? Surely, even they can see how shortsighted it is to celebrate the disappearance of books for violating ideological etiquette? Surely, they won’t pass up a golden opportunity to attack Amazon again? Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case. ArtsJournal? Nothing. The Rumpus? Nada. The Millions? Nope. I only found one brief reference to the Seuss case at LitHub, which might as well have been a shrug. Who cares if some “problematic” or “hurtful” books disappear? Well, pace Charles Péguy, we know full well what acts of cowardice are being committed for fear of looking insufficiently progressive. We’re looking at them right now.

The Unreasonable Man

By in books, extraordinary popular delusions, non compos mentis No Comments

George Bernard Shaw famously said, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” Yeah, well, most of the catastrophic fuck-ups depend on him too, as a crank like Shaw could well attest, had he been possessed of honesty and integrity instead of poisonous ideology. But speaking of unreasonable men trying to adapt the world to themselves, Freddie deBoer, squarer of circles, prophet of Procrusteanism, and virtual Renaissance Man of romantic incoherence, a man who can take a premise like, “I believe in human failure above all else. We will not build utopia with formal logic because the world is broken and we are broken within it” and somehow work his way to the conclusion that what we need is another Marxist revolution, recently published a book. Scott Alexander satisfyingly reviews it:

So maybe equality of opportunity is a stupid goal. DeBoer argues for equality of results. This is a pretty extreme demand, but he’s a Marxist and he means what he says. He wants a world where smart people and dull people have equally comfortable lives, and where intelligence can take its rightful place as one of many virtues which are nice to have but not the sole measure of your worth.

…But I understand why some reviewers aren’t convinced. This book can’t stop tripping over itself when it tries to discuss these topics. DeBoer grants X, he grants X -> Y, then goes on ten-page rants about how absolutely loathsome and abominable anyone who believes Y is.

…But this is exactly the worldview he is, at this very moment, trying to write a book arguing against! His thesis is that mainstream voices say there can’t be genetic differences in intelligence among individuals, because that would make some people fundamentally inferior to others, which is morally repugnant – but those voices are wrong, because differences in intelligence don’t affect moral equality. Then he adds that mainstream voices say there can’t be genetic differences in intelligence among ethnic groups, because that would make some groups fundamentally inferior to others, which is morally repugnant – and those voices are right; we must deny the differences lest we accept the morally repugnant thing.

Normally I would cut DeBoer some slack and assume this was some kind of Straussian manuever he needed to do to get the book published, or to prevent giving ammunition to bad people. But no, he has definitely believed this for years, consistently, even while being willing to offend basically anybody about basically anything else at any time. So I’m convinced this is his true belief. I’m just not sure how he squares it with the rest of his book.

…When I try to keep a cooler head about all of this, I understand that Freddie DeBoer doesn’t want this. He is not a fan of freezing-cold classrooms or sleep deprivation or bullying or bathroom passes. In fact, he will probably blame all of these on the “neoliberal reformers” (although I went to school before most of the neoliberal reforms started, and I saw it all). He will say that his own utopian schooling system has none of this stuff. In fact, he does say that. He sketches what a future Marxist school system might look like, and it looks pretty much like a Montessori school looks now. That just makes it really weird that he wants to shut down all the schools that resemble his ideal today (or make them only available to the wealthy) in favor of forcing kids into schools about as different from it as it’s possible for anything to be.

I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it. Who promise that once the last alternative is closed off, once the last nice green place where a few people manage to hold off the miseries of the world is crushed, why then the helltopian torturescape will become a lovely utopia full of rainbows and unicorns. If you can make your system less miserable, make your system less miserable! Do it before forcing everyone else to participate in it under pain of imprisonment if they refuse!

The Deformation Age

By in non compos mentis, the geist of the zeit, the madness of crowds No Comments

Bruno Maçães:

This was not theater, because a play is a safe and riskless activity, but it was roleplaying, which can be decidedly more dangerous for the participants—five people have died in these events. The “coup” ended, appropriately, when the main plotter was banned temporarily from social media. It was not a coup in the real world, but it was experienced as one by those taking part. More interestingly, those shocked by the events in the Senate were no less captured by the fantasy and might still believe that a real coup was attempted and defeated. In Washington, you can apparently now have the full “coup” experience in just a few hours. The action takes place in a kind of virtual reality, where terrible accidents can and do happen, but more tragic consequences to the political regime and the viewers at home are somehow prevented.

Does this mean that the Capitol extravaganza was trivial or unimportant? Not at all. In some strange way it was more significant than a real coup. A coup would at least make sense, while the almost complete replacement of serious politics by subterranean fantasy and roleplaying induces a sense of vertigo. Our traditional way of relating to the world has increasingly collapsed. Nothing seems real, and doubts persist about what to think or say in the face of this new situation.

Well, we’ve been LARPing revolutionary anarchism and fascism for a while now; why wouldn’t we try LARPing a coup as well? I can’t wait for the new “civil war” as performed by tinfoil hatters and spoiled rich kids. Simulacra, simulation, society of the spectacle — maybe the worst consequence of all of this is that postmodern theorists like Debord and Baudrillard look prescient now.

Masks Are Slipping

By in non compos mentis, race, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Do I contradict myself? Well, to offer a counterpoint to yesterday’s theme, sometimes it might be important to keep within touching distance of current events, in order to keep an eye on what the bastards are up to:


As David Harsanyi observes, “This is what happens when “science” and the racial identitarianism of the modern intellectual Left collide.” Though I would suggest it’s not so much a “collision” as a passionate embrace with tongue kissing and heavy petting.

I’ve been reading several collections of rare and unusual words recently, and it’s a good thing, because I really need a term that captures all the nuances I’ve felt this year while watching the credentialed expert class sacrifice all their professional credibility and intellectual integrity on the altar of fashionable racial madness. “Astonished” and “shocked” just don’t seem strong enough. Blutterbunged? Stamagastered? Forglopned?

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