Prestige media, including the New York Times in America and the ABC public broadcaster in Australia have done devastating work about the murder committed by out-of-control soldiers abroad.
Despite this, most people don’t care about war crimes committed overseas against out-groups. Why not? Because caring about strangers conveys no reproductive advantage. Elites pretend to care about these things because they are playing a status game.
David Pinsof writes: “We’re tribal, factional, nepotistic, moralistic, short-sighted, close-minded, superstitious, self-deluded, and surreptitiously selfish. We aren’t naturally motivated to make the world a better place, nor are we naturally motivated to see ourselves as mediocre humans, saddled with the same flaws as every other human. We consume “interesting” information—not useful or true information—which prevents us from understanding our predicament. We defend the status games we’re winning—not the ones that improve the world—which worsens the world. We’re in thrall to bullshit political beliefs, including the belief that we’re morally and intellectually superior to our outgroup, which is exactly what our outgroup thinks of us, and what every ingroup has wrongly believed about their outgroup since the dawn of humanity. We should be troubled about this, but we’re not. We’d rather point the finger at the baddies, and cast ourselves as the heroes, than fix our broken incentives. You might have expected psychologists to help us out here, but they’re too busy doing the same bullshit.”
On May 21, 2025, David Pinsof wrote: “A lot of people ask me how I write blog posts—where I get my ideas from. They’re often surprised when I give them a precise, step-by-step answer. Here’s my patented ® formula for writing Everything Is Bullshit content:
I look at a story we tell ourselves. Maybe it’s the pursuit of happiness or the meaning of life. Maybe it’s our desire to change people’s minds or make the world a better place. Maybe it’s the idea that we don’t care what others think.
I ask myself if the story makes any evolutionary sense.
If the answer is no, I think about what might be going on beneath the surface—something that would make evolutionary sense.
I call the story we tell ourselves “bullshit.”
I write about what’s likely going on beneath the surface.
I link to a lot of technical papers in evolutionary psychology that nobody clicks on.
The most important part of this formula is step 3—the part about what does or doesn’t “make evolutionary sense.” This step is rarely taken by anyone who thinks about humans. It’s as if the human psyche emerged from a bolt of lightning and not from millions of years of natural selection. When people talk about why Bob voted for Trump or Jane can’t find a date or Otto is depressed, they rarely reflect on the fact that Bob, Jane, and Otto are animals, and so are they.”
It seems like we had a bunch of Muslim terror attacks in the USA prior to the rise of Trump and after he was elected in 2016, it ended.
ChatGPT says: “There were Islamist-motivated or jihadist attacks in the U.S. after 2016, though fewer in number and often less lethal.
Here are some relevant points and examples:
CSIS notes that between January 2020 and January 2025, there were 8 jihadist attacks and 10 disrupted plots in the U.S. The 2025 New Orleans truck attack, carried out by Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar and motivated by Islamic extremism, killed 14 people.
In 2021–2022, four Muslim men were ambushed and killed in New Mexico in what has been treated as a hate crime with sectarian motivations.
The largest jihadist attack since 2016 remains the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, claimed by ISIS.”
There are vicious things you can do to stop terror.
