Kanye West and the Rise of Christian Nationalism (10-20-22)

Posted on October 20, 2022 by Luke Ford

00:45 The rise of Kari Lake
15:00 Elliott Blatt joins
17:00 Kino Casino in shambles
18:30 Is Ethan Ralph self-harming?
20:00 Ex-cons turning their lives around
21:00 Prisons are racist
26:00 Dopamine Nation
41:00 Richard Spencer’s strange new respectability
52:00 PPP turns on Andy Warski for abusing cocaine
58:00 43 anti-white commercials
1:04:00 Dr Merve Emre – The Impersonal Essay
1:10:00 Merve Emre: The Illusion of the First Person
1:41:00 NYT: Burned Out on Your Personal Brand

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Kanye West is not a Political Philosopher (10-19-22)

Posted on October 19, 2022 by Luke Ford

00:00 Tucker Carlson warns about a Hutus vs Tutsis scenario in America where all ills are blamed on one racial group
02:00 MSNBC hates white people
08:00 Is the NFL racist?
11:00 Is the NHL too white?
13:00 Why is Comcast ok with hatred of whites?
20:00 Richard Spencer critiques Kanye
26:00 Reb Dooovid joins
51:00 Gatekeeper archetypes
56:40 Mafia expert Scott Burnstein
57:30 Joining Orthodox Judaism is like joining the mob
1:12:00 Dooovid’s 13 books that changed his life
1:29:00 Jim Goad says Tucker Carlson like Richard Spencer except for Richard being an atheist
1:31:30 David Frum talks to Richard Spencer
1:51:00 Should Russia keep Crimea?
1:52:00 Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group

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HATE: Why We Should Resist it With Free Speech, Not Censorship

Posted on October 18, 2022 by Luke Ford

Nadine Strossen writes in this 2018 book:

* Despite the varying definitions that have been adopted and proposed in “hate speech” laws, they all share two fundamental First Amendment flaws: they violate the cardinal viewpoint neutrality and emergency principles by permitting government to suppress speech solely because its message is disfavored, disturbing, or feared, and not because it directly causes imminent serious harm. Empowering government to choose the words and ideas we may not utter or listen to for these reasons stifles our freedom of thought, which is the essence of individual autonomy, and also an essential building block for democratic self-government.
Moreover, “hate speech” laws also share a third basic First Amendment flaw, which flows from the first two: they are unduly vague and impermissibly overbroad, thus necessitating enforcement according to the subjective standards of complainants and enforcing authorities. While “hate speech” laws can be drafted with differing degrees of precision and breadth, they all center on concepts that call for subjective judgments, starting with the very concept of “hate” itself. Because these laws do not comply with the emergency or viewpoint neutrality principles, they lack the constraints that those principles impose on government discretion. Once government is authorized to suppress speech because of a feared harmful tendency or because of its disfavored, disturbing viewpoint, government has largely unfettered censorial power. In the United States, virtually all campus “hate speech” codes that courts have reviewed have been struck down on grounds of undue vagueness and overbreadth. Likewise, the language that has been used in other countries’ “hate speech” laws demonstrates that, despite their many differences in detail, they all license government to make discretionary, subjective judgments targeting an expansive range of speech.

* the Supreme Court steadily has reduced government’s power to punish speech solely because its message is disfavored, disturbing, or feared. Instead, government may punish speech that relates to public issues, including “hate speech,” only when it directly causes a specific, imminent, serious harm, such as inciting imminent violent or illegal conduct. These requirements curb government’s censorial power, reducing the risk that it will be wielded only or primarily to suppress unpopular ideas.
Unleashing government’s power to silence ideas that are disfavored, disturbing, or feared not only undermines liberty and democracy; it also subverts the equality goals that animate “hate speech” laws. Such laws are predictably enforced to suppress unpopular speakers and ideas, and too often they even are enforced to stifle speech of the vulnerable, marginalized minority groups they are designed to protect.
These problems follow from the premises of “hate speech” law proponents themselves. They contend that our societal institutions, including the criminal and civil justice systems, reflect entrenched racism and other types of discrimination. They also point to the implicit or unconscious biases that our culture has engrained in us. Given these realities, it is predictable that the institutions and individuals enforcing “hate speech” laws will not do so in a way that is helpful to minorities. The actual enforcement record of “hate speech” laws around the world, discussed throughout this book, demonstrates that this predictable pattern in fact has materialized, including in developed democracies.

* The leading pro-slavery advocate, Senator John C. Calhoun, argued that abolitionists who criticized slavery “libeled the South and inflicted emotional injury.” During the 1830s, many Southern states enacted laws suppressing abolitionist speech, which was feared to spur violence—in particular, slave rebellions—and indeed to threaten the nation’s very survival. Legal historian Michael Kent Curtis has observed that even many Northerners shared the widespread “assumption that abolitionist publications would lead to slave rebellions.” Likewise, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s historic letter came from a Birmingham jail because he had sought to condemn racial segregation and discrimination to audiences who hated and feared those messages.

* • In 2017, two British street preachers were convicted for preaching from the Bible, including statements that were deemed insulting to LGBT persons and Muslims. The prosecutor told the Court: “[A]‌lthough the words preached are included in a version of the Bible in 1611, this does not mean that they are not capable of amounting to a [criminal] offense in 2016.”
• In 2016, a Danish appellate court affirmed a lower court’s conviction of a man who had posted Facebook comments criticizing “[t]‌he ideology of Islam,” charging that “Islam wants to abuse democracy in order to get rid of democracy.”
• In 2016, Laure Pora, who headed the Paris chapter of the LGBT rights organization ACT-UP, was fined €2,300 for applying the term “homophobe” to Ludovine de La Rochère, the president of an organization that defends “traditional family values” and opposes same-sex marriage; ACT-UP activists had posted flyers featuring de La Rochère with the word “homophobe” over her face.
• In 2015, France’s highest court upheld criminal convictions and fines totaling $14,500 for twelve pro-Palestinian activists who went to supermarkets wearing T-shirts with the message “Long live Palestine, boycott Israel,” and handed out flyers that said “buying Israeli products means legitimizing crimes in Gaza.”
• In 2014, a British church was sanctioned for displaying a sign on its property showing burning flames and stating, “If you think there is no God you better be right!!”
• In 2013, a Catholic bishop in Switzerland was subject to a criminal complaint and investigation for quoting Old Testament passages about homosexuality during a debate on marriage and the family.
• In 2011, an Australian journalist and his newspaper employer were convicted because of his columns complaining that “there are fair-skinned people in Australia with essentially European ancestry . . . who, motivated by career opportunities available to Aboriginal people or by political activism, have chosen to falsely identify as Aboriginal.”
• In 2010, a Danish historian and journalist was convicted for saying during an interview that there was a high crime rate in areas with high Muslim populations.
• In 2010, Polish police criminally charged two singers because of critical statements they made about the Bible and the Catholic Church. One had said that the Bible was “unbelievable” and had been written by people “drunk on wine and smoking some kind of herbs.” The other allegedly said, during a performance, that the Catholic Church was “the most murderous cult on the planet,” and he tore up a copy of the Bible.
• In 2009, an Austrian Member of Parliament was convicted, sentenced to a prison term (which was suspended), and fined €24,000 because she said that “in today’s system” Muhammad would be considered a child molester, since his wife Aisha was believed to be around 6 or 7 years old when they were married and 9 years old when they consummated the marriage.
• In 2008, a 15-year-old British boy was charged by police and investigated by prosecutors because he displayed a sign during a peaceful demonstration reading: “Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult.”
• In 2008, the Canadian weekly magazine Maclean’s was subjected to proceedings before multiple enforcement bodies because articles it had published were allegedly Islamophobic.
• In 2008, Brigitte Bardot, French former film star and longtime animal rights activist, was convicted and fined €15,000 for writing a letter to then–Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy complaining about Muslims’ ritual slaughter of sheep and stating that Muslims are “destroying our country by imposing their ways.”
• In 2005, the French newspaper Le Monde was found guilty of inciting hatred against Jews because of a 2002 editorial that criticized certain Israeli policies while referring to Israel as “a nation of refugees.”
• In 2001, a Dutch imam was prosecuted because he said during a national TV interview that homosexual behavior was “detrimental to Dutch society” and an “infectious disease,” citing the Qu’ran and other Muslim texts.
• In 1999, Britain’s then–Home Secretary Jack Straw was subjected to a formal investigation for inciting racial hatred against the Roma because he had said that some criminal activity was carried out by people who posed as “gypsies” or “travelers.”
PRIVATE-SECTOR INSTITUTIONS SHOULD PROTECT FREE SPEECH
“[Social media] platforms—although not formally bound by the First Amendment—have a democratic obligation to embrace something close to the constitutional standard. . . . Like universities and media outlets, online speech platforms should not be safe spaces. They should be democratic spaces, with the ultimate victors in the clash of ideas determined by reason and deliberation . . .”
—George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen
“I woke up in a bad mood and decided [the Daily Stormer ] shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power. [A Cloudflare employee] asked after I told him [about this decision]: ‘Is this the day the Internet dies?’ ”
—Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare
I concur with Jeffrey Rosen and Matthew Prince that certain powerful private-sector actors, which are not directly subject to constitutional constraints because they are not part of the government, should nonetheless respect the free speech rights of others over whom they exercise power.

* online intermediaries that operate internationally must comply with laws in other countries that are less speech-protective than the United States, including “hate speech” laws. Even so, the online companies can opt for “geo-blocking,” confining the restrictive measures to the pertinent geographical territory. In short, to the maximum extent feasible, these important institutions should wield their vast power consistent with the core speech-protective viewpoint neutrality and emergency principles.

* 1. There is insufficient evidence that constitutionally protected “hate speech” (as distinguished from “hate speech” that is already punishable) materially contributes to the harms that are said to warrant its suppression.
2. Even if there were sufficient evidence that constitutionally protected “hate speech” did materially contribute to these feared harms, “hate speech” laws would not effectively reduce the feared harms.
3. Even if there were sufficient evidence that constitutionally protected “hate speech” did materially contribute to the feared harms, and even if “hate speech” laws would meaningfully reduce these feared harms, these laws should still be rejected because of the damage they would do to freedom of speech and democratic legitimacy, as well as to equality and societal harmony.

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When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm

Posted on October 18, 2022 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this 2022 book:

* Central to the goal of reducing payouts was preventing policyholders from hiring lawyers, she said, because “represented” clients on average got payouts multiple times bigger than claimants who didn’t hire legal help.
“We were told that Allstate was going to change the way claims were handled so that claimants could not get lawyers,” Reed said. In other words, beat down the opposing counsel by fighting every motion in court, making it so time-consuming and expensive that lawyers would reconsider filing suit against Allstate. This was the “boxing gloves” part of the strategy.
“More people without representation would mean larger profits for the company,” she said. McKinsey was telling Allstate to turn its claims center into a profit center.
The words merit italics because what McKinsey did at Allstate fundamentally altered America’s insurance industry.

* Americans have had a love-hate relationship with insurance companies for decades. They love their local insurance agent, typically a pillar of the community, a coach for Little League baseball or Pop Warner football. But they hate dealing with insurance companies that bombard them with paperwork requests and sometimes deny what they see as legitimate claims. Until McKinsey appeared on the scene, the profession was dominated by experienced claims adjusters bound by law to offer fair claims. The “claims man” was an honorable and coveted profession in postwar America.

* McKinsey was focused on its traditional role of making businesses more efficient—cutting costs. For the claims department, that meant controlling the expense of handling claims, known in the industry as loss adjustment expense, or LAE. This could be anything from culling excess employees, cutting down mailing expenses, negotiating better prices for copier paper, or reducing overtime costs.
But tinkering around the edges, streamlining offices, and cutting expenses could get the company only so far. What insurance companies spend on claims processing is a small fraction of what they pay out in claims themselves. In 2018 the property and casualty industry paid out $365.9 billion in claims, spending $64.6 billion in processing fees, meaning insurers on average spent about 17 percent of what they paid out for administration expenses.
By the 1990s, with McKinsey-led financialization sweeping the economy and ever-increasing pressure from activist shareholders for companies to boost profits, the firm pushed a big new idea to its clients: reducing the amount paid out in claims. In McKinsey-speak: “ After years of squeezing the cost side, management recognized huge opportunities to rebalance and invested cautiously in LAE to capture indemnity savings.” The new approach to boosting profit was to curtail what insurance companies saw as unjustifiably high amounts paid out to some claimants. To control what it called “leakage.”
McKinsey was telling Allstate to essentially declare war on a sizable proportion of its policyholders. One slide proclaimed, “Winning will be a zero sum game.” In other words, Allstate’s gains come at the expense of its policyholders. Another featured an image of an alligator. Why? Because, like an alligator, Allstate would just “sit and wait” for its victim—the claimant—to give up. “The money came from the only place it could come from—the pockets of Allstate policyholders and claimants,” Berardinelli wrote.
Before McKinsey, there were still angry policyholders. Before McKinsey, insurance companies lowballed claims. But McKinsey systematized it.

* Following Allstate’s adoption of the McKinsey system, State Farm, the biggest property and casualty insurer, signed up for the same magic elixir. Its McKinsey-designed “Accelerating Claims Excellence” system was first introduced to its field offices in mid-1995. AAA followed a few years later. Liberty Mutual also became a McKinsey client.
“ It has been common knowledge within the casualty insurance industry since at least 1995 that McKinsey was openly selling the same redesign methodologies and claim handling processes it developed in the early 1990’s for State Farm and Allstate to their competitors,” Stephen Strzelec, a former manager for State Farm, said in a 2008 affidavit.
“They set a trend,” one former McKinsey partner said of the firm’s work with Allstate. “ The claims process was just evil, and I think what’s happened now is that more insurance companies have followed that.”
At Allstate, profit soared more than sixfold in the decade after McKinsey’s program was put in place. Its share price more than quadrupled, handily beating out the broader markets. The pay of Allstate’s top five executives, tied to the share price just as the McKinsey partner Arch Patton had envisioned half a century earlier, shot up. In 1994 their combined compensation amounted to $2.95 million. A decade later it had reached $19.3 million. In 2020 the top five executives made a combined $38.2 million, led by the CEO, Thomas Wilson. By 2021 the average salary of an Allstate worker was about $62,000, barely keeping up with inflation over twenty-five years.
Meanwhile, the percentage of premiums paid out on claims declined. Allstate executives and shareholders were becoming fabulously rich by reducing payouts, preventing many policyholders from getting all the money to which they were entitled. It was, said Russell Roberts, a former management consultant who is spending his retirement studying how McKinsey has altered the insurance industry, “reverse Robin Hood.”

* In 1987, Allstate paid out 70.9 cents in claims for every dollar it took in. By 1997, two full years into the McKinsey makeover, the ratio had fallen to 58.2. By 2006, after spiking a year earlier amid huge claims resulting from Hurricane Katrina, it was 47.6.

* …the McKinsey system resulted in the transfer of $94 billion from policyholders policyholders to Allstate coffers from 1995 to 2018. Add in State Farm and other companies that adopted the McKinsey system, and the total approaches $374 billion

* In 2007, Bloomberg Markets magazine published a searing investigation into how Allstate, State Farm, and other insurers, using the McKinsey method, were routinely lowballing offers to homeowners whose homes had been damaged or destroyed by natural disasters. The most famous irate claimant: the Mississippi Republican senator Trent Lott, who sued State Farm when the company wouldn’t pay for damage to his home from Hurricane Katrina. State Farm said the damage was from water (not covered), rather than wind (covered).
A 2003 fire in the San Diego area destroyed more than two thousand houses, but insurers, including Allstate and State Farm, refused to reimburse policyholders for the amount needed to replace their homes, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars below replacement value, Bloomberg reported. They were not being made whole.
Under state laws across the country, insurance companies are obligated to pay the fair value of whatever benefits their policyholders are entitled to. An insurance policy is, after all, a contract. But what makes the duty of insurance companies even more pressing is the fact that many kinds of insurance aren’t optional. Every driver is required by law to have auto insurance. Mortgage companies require people to buy homeowners insurance. An industry where the government compels people to buy their product is especially obligated to carry out its fiduciary duty.

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Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

Posted on October 18, 2022 by Luke Ford

Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke writes in this 2021 book:

* We’re all running from pain. Some of us take pills. Some of us couch surf while binge-watching Netflix. Some of us read romance novels. We’ll do almost anything to distract ourselves from ourselves. Yet all this trying to insulate ourselves from pain seems only to have made our pain worse.

* Science teaches us that every pleasure exacts a price, and the pain that follows is longer lasting and more intense than the pleasure that gave rise to it.
With prolonged and repeated exposure to pleasurable stimuli, our capacity to tolerate pain decreases, and our threshold for experiencing pleasure increases.

* Mindfulness is simply the ability to observe what our brain is doing while it’s doing it, without judgment.

* Self-binding is the term to describe Jacob’s act of throwing out his machine. It is the way we intentionally and willingly create barriers between ourselves and our drug of choice in order to mitigate compulsive overconsumption. Self-binding is not primarily a matter of will, although personal agency plays some part. Rather, self-binding openly recognizes the limitations of will.
The key to creating effective self-binding is first to acknowledge the loss of voluntariness we experience when under the spell of a powerful compulsion, and to bind ourselves while we still possess the capacity for voluntary choice.
If we wait until we feel the compulsion to use, the reflexive pull of seeking pleasure and/or avoiding pain is nearly impossible to resist. In the throes of desire, there’s no deciding.
But by creating tangible barriers between ourselves and our drug of choice, we press the pause button between desire and action.

* My patient Mitch was addicted to sports betting. He had lost a million dollars gambling by the time he was forty. Participating in Gamblers Anonymous was an important part of his recovery. Through his involvement in Gamblers Anonymous, he learned that it wasn’t just betting on sports he had to avoid. He also had to abstain from watching sports on TV, reading the sports page in the newspaper, surfing sports-related Internet sites, and listening to sports radio. He called all the casinos in his area and had himself put on the “no-admit” list. By avoiding substances and behaviors beyond his drug of choice, Mitch was able to use categorical binding to mitigate the risk of relapse to sports betting.

* What if taking psychotropic drugs is causing us to lose some essential aspect of our humanity?
In 1993, the psychiatrist Dr. Peter Kramer published his groundbreaking book Listening to Prozac , in which he argued that antidepressants make people “better than well.” But what if Kramer got it wrong? What if instead of making us better than well, psychotropic drugs make us other than well ?
I’ve had many patients over the years who have told me that their psychiatric medications, while offering short-term relief from painful emotions, also limit their ability to experience the full range of emotions, especially powerful emotions like grief and awe.

* Hormesis is a branch of science that studies the beneficial effects of administering small to moderate doses of noxious and/or painful stimuli, such as cold, heat, gravitational changes, radiation, food restriction, and exercise.

* Radical honesty—telling the truth about things large and small, especially when doing so exposes our foibles and entails consequences—is essential not just to recovery from addiction but for all of us trying to live a more balanced life in our reward-saturated ecosystem. It works on many levels.
First, radical honesty promotes awareness of our actions. Second, it fosters intimate human connections. Third, it leads to a truthful autobiography, which holds us accountable not just to our present but also to our future selves. Further, telling the truth is contagious, and might even prevent the development of future addiction.

* Telling the truth draws people in, especially when we’re willing to expose our own vulnerabilities. This is counterintuitive because we assume that unmasking the less desirable aspects of ourselves will drive people away. It logically makes sense that people would distance themselves when they learn about our character flaws and transgressions.
In fact, the opposite happens. People come closer. They see in our brokenness their own vulnerability and humanity. They are reassured that they are not alone in their doubts, fears, and weaknesses.

* Any behavior that leads to an increase in dopamine has the potential to be exploited. What I’m referring to is a kind of “disclosure porn” that has become prevalent in modern culture, where revealing intimate aspects of our lives becomes a way to manipulate others for a certain type of selfish gratification rather than to foster intimacy through a moment of shared humanity.
At a medical conference on addiction in 2018, I sat next to a man who said he was in long-term recovery from addiction. He was there to tell his recovery story to the audience. Just before he went up on stage, he turned to me and said, “Get ready to cry.” I was put off by the comment. It bothered me that he anticipated how I would react to his story.
He indeed told a harrowing story of addiction and recovery, but I was not moved to tears, which surprised me because I am usually deeply affected by stories of suffering and redemption. In this case, his story seemed untrue for all that it may have been factually correct. The words he spoke didn’t match the emotions behind them. Instead of feeling that he was granting us privileged access to a painful time in his life, it felt like he was grandstanding and manipulating. Maybe it was just a matter of his having told it so many times before. In repetition, it may have grown stale. Whatever the reason, it didn’t lift me.
There is a well-known phenomenon in AA called “drunkalogues,” referring to tales of intoxicated exploits that are shared to entertain and show off rather than teach and learn. Drunkalogues tend to trigger craving rather than promote recovery. The line between honest self-disclosure and a manipulative drunkalogue is a fine one, including subtle differences in content, tone, cadence, and affect, but you know it when you see it.

* Patients who tell stories in which they are frequently the victim, seldom bearing responsibility for bad outcomes, are often unwell and remain unwell. They are too busy blaming others to get down to the business of their own recovery. By contrast, when my patients start telling stories that accurately portray their responsibility, I know they’re getting better.

* When our lived experience diverges from our projected image, we are prone to feel detached and unreal, as fake as the false images we’ve created. Psychiatrists call this feeling derealization and depersonalization. It’s a terrifying feeling, which commonly contributes to thoughts of suicide. After all, if we don’t feel real, ending our lives feels inconsequential.
The antidote to the false self is the authentic self. Radical honesty is a way to get there. It tethers us to our existence and makes us feel real in the world. It also lessens the cognitive load required to maintain all those lies, freeing up mental energy to live more spontaneously in the moment.
When we’re no longer working to present a false self, we’re more open to ourselves and others. As the psychiatrist Mark Epstein wrote in his book Going on Being about his own journey toward authenticity, “No longer endeavoring to manage my environment, I began to feel invigorated, to find a balance, to permit a feeling of connection with the spontaneity spontaneity of the natural world and with my own inner nature.”

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