Do Free Societies Ever Start Wars With Tyrannies?

Dennis said that if Israel is a greater obstacle to peace than Hamas, it would be the first time in history that a free society wanted war.

In Athens vs Sparta, wasn’t Athens relatively free compared to Sparta and didn’t Athens launch the final war in that conflict?

The United States invaded Iraq in 2003. Iraq was a tyranny. America was a free country. And America started that war while Iraq posed zero threat to America.

The United States invaded Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989. Wasn’t this a free country invading tyrannies?

The United States intervened countless times in Latin America. Aren’t these more examples disproving Prager’s claim?

England and other European powers invaded countless poorer, less free, countries during the age of colonialism.

Here is Prager’s quote from the video above: “In modern history, every war has been between a free state and a police state or two police states. I can’t think of a 20th Century example of any other. Where in the world other than Israel does anyone ever argue that the free state doesn’t want peace and the police state wants peace? This would be the first free state in history to prefer war to peace.”

The United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Wasn’t that a free state going to war with a police state?

In the 1990s, the United States went to war with Serbia. Wasn’t that a free state going to war with a police state?

In the 1960s, the United States went to war against North Vietnam. Wasn’t that a free state going to war with a police state?

Posted in Dennis Prager | Comments Off on Do Free Societies Ever Start Wars With Tyrannies?

Are You Holding Out For A Hero? (6-4-23)

01:00 Filling the hole in your soul with heroes and gurus
06:00 Breaking erotic taboos
11:00 Decoding the Gurus: Elon Musk, https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurus/
15:00 Bill Maher, Richard Dawkins grievance mongering
18:00 RFK as an idiot detector, https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1665489483024719872
19:00 Elliott Blatt joins
26:00 Academic Agent
28:45 The Bone (SF radio station that plays hard rock), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KSAN_(FM)
43:00 Gurus and parasocial relations, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction
48:00 Scholars vs gurus, Letters from The Rav (Part 12) || Dr. Marc Shapiro, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcZ-1e-pDhg
50:00 Car salesmen quote different prices based on race and sex, https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/car_salesmen_different_people_different_prices/
57:20 NYT: She Said Her Professor Sexually Harassed Her. His Wife Won Damages., https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/29/world/asia/japan-sexual-harassment-women.html

Posted in Guru | Comments Off on Are You Holding Out For A Hero? (6-4-23)

NPR: YouTube will no longer take down false claims about U.S. elections

Report:

YouTube will no longer remove videos falsely claiming the 2020 U.S. presidential election was stolen, reversing a policy put in place in the contentious weeks following the 2020 vote.

The Google-owned video platform said in a blog post that it has taken down “tens of thousands” of videos questioning the integrity of past U.S. presidential elections since it created the policy in December 2020.

But two and a half years later, the company said it “will stop removing content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past U.S. Presidential elections” because things have changed. It said the decision was “carefully deliberated.”

“In the current environment, we find that while removing this content does curb some misinformation, it could also have the unintended effect of curtailing political speech without meaningfully reducing the risk of violence or other real-world harm,” YouTube said.

Since the 2020 election, I’ve made numerous posts and videos debunking voter fraud claims, but I’ve not left these videos up on Youtube because of the clumsy way it enforced its standard. It just wasn’t worth the aggravation.

Now that Youtube has changed its stance, and I’ve found the site has become steadily less censorious over the past 18 months, I just hung up a bunch of voter fraud videos that were previously on Rumble. Youtube has also relaxed its stands on “Covid misinformation.”

Posted in Voter Fraud, Youtube | Comments Off on NPR: YouTube will no longer take down false claims about U.S. elections

Post: Car Salesmen, Different Races, Different Prices

James Joyner writes:

Malcolm Gladwell highlights a long-running dispute (of which I had been previously unaware) between himself and Steve Sailer over what it means that car dealers quote higher prices to black (and women) customers than to comparable white (and male) customers.

Gladwell believes it is obviously evidence of “unconscious racism” whereas Sailer argues that it is much more likely that car salesmen have learned over time that they can get more money on average out of blacks and women and therefore are discriminating against them as suckers, not out of bias.

While it’s not inconceivable that some combination of both explanations are true (or that one is true for some salesmen and the other true for other salesmen) the Sailer explanation strikes me as more plausible. He cites economist Robert Stonebraker, who notes:

Ayres and Siegelman [the authors of the study Gladwell relies on] conclude that statistical discrimination is the real culprit. Blatant bigotry is not the cause. Rather, dealers and salespeople use race and gender to make statistical inferences about the consumer’s sensitivity to price — what economists term price elasticity.

[…]

While dealers and/or salespeople may know little or nothing about a particular customer, they know quite a bit about statistical differences among races and genders. They know that women and African-Americans typically enter the showroom with less information and less proclivity to bargain. Although white males often salivate at the chance to lock horns with car dealers in a bargaining struggle, females and African-Americans may be unaware that bargaining is even possible. Ayres and Siegelman cite a Consumer Federation of America survey that discovered that many female respondents, and more than one-half of African-American respondents, believed that sticker prices were non-negotiable.

Richard Posner adds,

It would not occur to Gladwell, a good liberal, that an auto salesman’s discriminating on the basis of race or sex might be a rational form of the “rapid cognition” that he admires… [It] may be sensible to ascribe the group’s average characteristics to each member of the group, even though one knows that many members deviate from the average. An individual’s characteristics may be difficult to determine in a brief encounter, and a salesman cannot afford to waste his time in a protracted one, and so he may quote a high price to every black shopper even though he knows that some blacks are just as shrewd and experienced car shoppers as the average white, or more so. Economists use the term ‘statistical discrimination’ to describe this behavior.

At the larger level, Sailer contends,

Some of these guys have been selling cars for as long as you have been alive. And, believe it or not, they pay close attention not just to what makes the most money for themselves but to what works for other salesmen as well.

Further, if the salesman’s unconscious prejudice is costing the dealership money, his manager will make him highly conscious of it quickly, or the salesman will be out on the street.

One would think.

Aside from my agreement with Sailer about how markets work, I also find this bit of information from Stonebraker rather telling:

African-American buyers were charged the same price differentials by African-American dealers as they were by white dealers. Female customers were treated just as poorly by female salespeople as they were by male salespeople. Neither the race nor the gender of dealers and/or salespeople seemed to matter.

If black men are treating other black men worse than they are treating whites because of racial animus, it must be “unconscious,” indeed.

Posted in America, Blacks | Comments Off on Post: Car Salesmen, Different Races, Different Prices

Politico: The Media Has Got Ron DeSantis Nailed (6-4-23)

01:00 Love makes you vulnerable
12:10 Rabbi Shlomo Einhorn’s New Learning Systems For Torah, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=145658
26:00 Richard Spencer update
32:00 The Coercive World of No Jumper’s Adam22: ‘He Exploited Me From Day One’, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/no-jumper-adam22-1234743860/
37:30 Stephen J. James on Luke’s magnum opus, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvYr_ZIDwtA&ab_channel=StephenJJames
57:00 When Dennis Prager realized his instincts were identical to the Torah, https://youtu.be/aZmAu8Rem3I?t=2764
1:02:00 What type of people become followers of gurus and cults? https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurus/
1:06:20 Andrew Tate v Jordan Peterson
1:07:15 Scott Adams
1:08:30 Jordan Peterson and Dennis Prager at the 2019 PragerU summit, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L47oJxwp6yg
1:16:00 Why do gurus never repent for their bad epistemics? https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurus/
1:17:50 Oprah profited from being a guru
1:25:00 Ron DeSantis, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/05/24/the-ron-desantis-straitjacket-00098556
1:46:50 Strain/Counter-Strain Technique
1:49:10 Strain counterstrain neck and shoulders. Massage techniques, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nImd89p87pI
1:52:00 Counterstrain – Hamstrings, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpFeJ17O6ek
2:01:20 Step 6, Part 7, with Allen Berger and Michael McGee, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u34NHCZ3big
2:04:00 Janan Ganesh: Why DeSantis is losing Republicans to Trump, https://www.ft.com/content/f0cf9c81-a9df-44c6-b702-1b13120d5a05
2:08:00 FT: The vibes theory of politics, Our ‘beliefs’ are often just unexamined tribal loyalties, https://www.ft.com/content/0ca72be9-18c8-4b9f-9dbe-27d97b9e63e6
2:40:50 The Hill: TUCKER SPEAKS OUT? Carlson Hints THE REAL REASON He Was Ousted From Fox, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYEbYEjOQHs
2:46:00 Video: Would Trump really pull out of Ukraine? With John Mearsheimer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7EOKBF1nbQ
2:57:00 Daily Wire v Twitter over Matt Walsh documentary What is a Woman?

Posted in Alt Lite, Alt Right, America, Dennis Prager | Comments Off on Politico: The Media Has Got Ron DeSantis Nailed (6-4-23)