Category Archives: Philosophical and speculative

The Dunning–Kruger effect meets the Kates effect

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Honestly, what can one do with a story like this: Obama: World Leaders ‘Rattled’ by Trump’s ‘Ignorance’ and ‘Cavalier Attitude’. The following, please note, is in quotation marks and the person quoted is Obama!

“They’re rattled by him — and for good reason — because a lot of the proposals that he’s made display either ignorance of world affairs, or a cavalier attitude, or an interest in getting tweets and headlines instead of actually thinking through what it is that is required to keep America safe and secure and prosperous, and what’s required to keep the world on an even keel.”

I found this quote at Instaundit where I also discovered the “Dunning–Kruger effect” which is new to me as a named psychological syndrome but very straightforward as a frequent picture of reality.

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which relatively unskilled persons suffer illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than it really is. Dunning and Kruger attributed this bias to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their own ineptitude and evaluate their own ability accurately.”

Someone must also make a study of the related effect – call it the Kates effect – which I describe as follows. We are here discussing a syndrome that often affects the media and academics studying in the social sciences and humanities:

The Kates effect is cognitive bias in which relatively unskilled persons are believed to have superiority abilities, where the minimal abilities they do have are mistakenly assessed to be much higher than they really are. Kates attributes this bias to a metacognitive inability of the similarly unskilled to recognize ineptitude in others because of a deep desire to escape reality and live in a fantasy world of their own construction.

Obama is delusional but he really is the president. The more remarkable form of insanity – the Kates effect discussed above – is found among those who feed these delusions with affirmations that permit those delusions to persist, sometimes for as long as eight years.

Do Donald Trump and Andrew Bolt not have exactly the same position on migration?

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My wife and I have just watched the segment on Bolt with Niall Ferguson and then Rowan Dean where the issue of multiculturalism and immigration was at the centre of the conversation. The way I would construct what was said is this:

  • there is this problem associated with migration where some people are entering the country who do not wish to become part of the majority culture
  • this has now created social tensions causing people to look for political solutions
  • the result has been this terrible situation where “populists” like Donald Trump are now able to get political traction.

My question then is this: In what way is Donald Trump not attempting to solve the very problem Andrew Bolt and the others have raised? They can give it any name they please, but when you get right down to it, the issue is how do we ensure that those allowed to migrate into Australia will become Australians, or in the US case, Americans.

So I will repeat what I have said before, following Kant: if you would will the end, you must will the means. Commentators, historians and magazine editors are not political leaders, and their skills are not in devising political programs. Are not Trump’s ends their ends? If not, what is it exactly that they do want? And if they more or less do share Trump’s ends, do they not see that he is onto something in the approach he is taking? Or if they support the ends but not the means, how would they go about achieving these ends?

It just does seem to me that they do support the ends that Trump is promoting, but for some reason find themselves unwilling to endorse either the means or the man.

Life’s essential skills

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A list of 25 Essential Skills I Wish Somebody Taught Me When I Was Younger. I will give you the last one, but if this is 25th, and it rightly belongs at the end, think of how useful the previous 24 might be:

25. How To Manage Your Personal Finances

Rule #1: Spend less than you earn.

Rule #2: Get another source of income (possibly a passive one)

Rule #3: Invest in assets (opportunities that have Return on Investment)

“Some of these,” as he writes, “can be learned within several hours while some require more than that. But, you have to know that learning even one of these skills can help you grow exponentially and give you incredible results in every area of your life.”

An even more than usually repulsive and disgusting anti-Trump “conservative”

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This time it is Bill Kristol who has a strategy of his own to stop Trump, explained here.

Their plan is to run a candidate who could win three states and enough votes in the electoral college to deny both parties the needed majority. This would throw the election into the House of Representatives, which would then elect a candidate the Kristol group found acceptable. The fact that this would nullify the largest vote ever registered for a Republican primary candidate, the fact that it would jeopardize the Republican majorities in both the House and Senate, and more than likely make Hillary Clinton president, apparently doesn’t faze Kristol and company at all.

And why should Trump be stopped. These are hardly the kind of specifics that amount to any kind of charge at all:

Their chief justification for opposing Trump is that he is not a “constitutional conservative” and in fact is “without principles” and therefore dangerous. The evidence offered is that he has supported Democrats in the past and changed his positions on important issues.

A second charge against Trump is that his character is so bad (worse than Hillary’s or Bill’s?) that no right-thinking Republican could regard him as White House worthy.

In addition to alleging that Trump is lacking in principles and character, Kristol claims that the Republican candidate is a crackpot conspiracy theorist, a disqualifying trait. Kristol’s evidence is a remark Trump made on the eve of the Indiana primary suggesting that Ted Cruz’s father might have something to hide about his alleged acquaintance with Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

The article is by David Horowitz and the title is “Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew”. I might have had some qualms about the title, but Horowitz explains himself in a way I am completely sympathetic with.

All these dishonesties and flim-flam excuses pale by comparison with the consequences Kristol and his “Never Trump” cohorts are willing to risk by splitting the Republican vote. Obama has provided America’s mortal enemy, Iran, with a path to nuclear weapons, $150 billion dollars, and the freedom to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles to deliver the lethal payloads. Trump has promised to abandon the Iran deal, while Hillary Clinton and all but a handful of Democrats have supported this treachery from start to finish. Kristol is now one of their allies.

I am a Jew who has never been to Israel and has never been a Zionist in the sense of believing that Jews can rid themselves of Jew hatred by having their own nation state. But half of world Jewry now lives in Israel, and the enemies whom Obama and Hillary have empowered — Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, ISIS, and Hamas — have openly sworn to exterminate the Jews. I am also an American (and an American first), whose country is threatened with destruction by the same enemies. To weaken the only party that stands between the Jews and their annihilation, and between America and the forces intent on destroying her, is a political miscalculation so great and a betrayal so profound as to not be easily forgiven.

Utterly beyond the pale and all comprehension. Kristol is siding with the greatest carriers of evil in our time, and a bleak centuries-long future for the entire human race will be the result of their success. The arrogant, smug brainlessness of those who would risk the election of Hillary where there is no other viable candidate beyond Donald Trump makes these people vile and despicable. And that goes for Commentary who has published this article by Jonathan Tobin criticising Horowitz titled, Breitbart’s ‘Renegade Jew’ Disgrace. And beyond that, it extends to Powerline, who has made Tobin’s article one of its “picks”. Unforgivable and worthless.

REACTIONS TO THE HOROWITZ ARTICLE: Just because they state the obvious does not make it nonetheless true: Renegade Conservative Site BREITBART’s Sin–Not Anti-Semitism, But Pro-Trumpism.

AND NOW TO ADD TO THE REST: Found here:

David Horowitz incidentally has been a great friend to me over the years. I have known him since I was 15 years old when I once worked for Alan Dershowitz. He is now a Trump delegate and I know he will have Trump’s ear on the issues that matter regarding world peace.

Wow. If ever there were a killer argument to vote for The Donald, that is it.

One more “conservative” to scratch off my list

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There are so many people who have discredited themselves in my eyes as representatives of the right, and conservatism in particular, that by the time this election season is over, there will be virtually no one left I trust.

Now it is Daniel Hannan who has entered the fray. He takes the pose of an above-it-all intellectual, too pure to endorse the far from perfect Donald Trump. He has published a brief note on The real reason Donald Trump is unfit to be president. And here is the reason:

The real disqualification, from a conservative point of view, is Trump’s refusal to recognize that he is aspiring to an office bigger than he is.

Well la dee dah. Now aren’t we being precious. In fact, it is worse than that. He is off with the pixies in thinking that there is some kind of fastidious approach in which politics ends can be accomplished without strength of character and a hardline approach to getting one’s own way rather than another being allowed to get their way. If Hannan weren’t so famous as a torch bearer for the right, you could ignore him. In fact, from now on I will feel he can be safely ignored.

In the meantime let me repeat his various arguments, which amount to absolutely nothing at all. I might add, that I also don’t think he is right about a single thing he says. And for such a short article the number of false analogies is astonishing. A comparison of any of these with the likes of Hillary shows a blindness that is quite remarkable.

“He is a narcissistic, thin-skinned bully, a serial liar, a man who shows not the slightest respect for the office to which he aspires.”

“Next to his moral unsuitability, the fact that he is bad news for conservatives seems almost trivial. It’s not his big-government protectionism that ought to bar him from high office. It’s not even the way in which he will undo decades of progress and taint the Republicans once again with xenophobia.”

“This isn’t about Hillary. It’s about defending the republic from a candidate who is hostile to its foundational values.”

“Donald Trump is inimical to the core Republican values of personal freedom, limited government, enterprise and a patriotic foreign policy.”

“I say only one thing with absolute certainty: Don’t vote for an unfit candidate simply because you dislike another unfit candidate. Doing so makes you complicit. It means endorsing one of two amoral, power-hungry people who would very probably ignore their oath of office.”

“As Vaclav Havel used to say in Czechoslovakia, living under a Communist regime doesn’t mean that you have to legitimize it. A citizen can still retain his or her integrity by refusing to vote for the approved list, refusing to display party posters, refusing to repeat official slogans. And integrity matters. Indeed, at present, it’s pretty much all that American conservatives have left. For the love of God, cousins, don’t throw it away.”

Conservatives understand that perfection is not found in human affairs and one must work with the tools one has at hand. Hannan is one more pompous fool whose lack of judgement explains why he has failed to rise among the British Conservative Party. How is this for a rounded full-on idiocy?

“Is Trump any worse than Hillary?” isn’t just setting the bar absurdly low; it’s also the wrong question. The right question is, “Is Donald Trump fit to be president?” And the answer must surely be, “No.”

Look, stupid. The only question is which one of these two you prefer to the other. It is infuriating to read such stuff. I guess I will have to wait another 25 years for Trump to have become the perfect representation of conservative thought, which will finally occur, as it has with Reagan today, when there is someone else trying to disturb the establishment of the time that is yet to be, and the usual suspects are lamenting there is no one like Donald Trump around any more.

Waiting for a miracle is not a plan

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My obscure and personal blog is in the midst of experiencing the largest number of hits in its history. My post on Ayaan Hirsi Ali has made its way out beyond these precincts so we will have our fifteen minutes of notoriety and then fade back into the pack. It did even occur to me as I wrote that earlier post that this was something I should leave alone since Hirsi Ali is a brave woman with a crucially important message. I remain disappointed that she cannot see in Donald Trump a vehicle for some kind of reversal if it is not entirely too late. And that is why I ended up writing what I did.

There is no one else anywhere to be found who might be able to take a stand and reverse this tide. There are a thousand things wrong with Trump but whatever they are, they are mere flea bites compared with the things that are wrong with Hillary and Obama. I therefore remain astounded at the way so many of the people I know dismiss Trump because of various personal characteristics of his, and ignore, or set to the side, his potential to do a quite large amount of good in spite of all the negatives he may come with.

If you are the sort of person who thinks the nation states of the West need to be preserved, there is no one else who is anywhere near being in a position to achieve this end than Trump. I am therefore not for the first time reminded of this very old story which seems to get to the heart of the issue.

There once was a flood and everyone had reached safety except for one man.

He climbed to the top of his house where the water was getting dangerously deep when a rescue helicopter came by and hovered above him and let down a rope, but the man waved it away shouting, “I don’t need saving! My Lord will come”

Reluctantly, the helicopter left.

The water continued to rise and a boat came to him but, once again, the man shouted, “No! Go away! the Lord will come and save me!” and so the boat, too, went off.

Finally, a raft came by and invited him to climb aboard, but the man was deeply religious and said, “It’s all right! The Lord will save me!”

The rain continued to pour, the water continued to rise and the man drowned.

At the gates of heaven, the man met St. Peter. Confused, he asked, “Peter, I have lived the life of a faithful man – why did you not rescue me?”

“For pity sake!” St. Peter replied. “We sent you a helicopter, a boat and finally a raft! What else did you expect us to do?”

Donald Trump, it seems to me, is that raft.

Orwellian inversions

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David Solway has a typically sombre and unfortunately all too realistic look at our declining and likely dying civilisation in an article titled: A melancholy calculation. Melancholy it certainly is. You have to wonder whether the successor generations to ours will even be capable of understanding what has been lost.

The West is now busy at work across the entire field of social, cultural and political life promoting its own version of Lysenkoism, a misconceived exercise of supposedly vernalizing reality by transforming fact into fantasy and truth into lie for the purpose of creating the perfect society and the redeemed human being, transferable across the generations. Its assumptions about the world are guided not by common sense or genuine science but by the precepts of ideology and political desire.

Examples abound of the ubiquitous tendency to replace ontology with myth, the determinate with the fluid and the objective with the delusionary. A modest inventory of such noxious miscontruals would include:

  • Biological sexual differentiation must yield to voluntary gender identity.
  • A cooling climate is obviously warming.
  • The demonstrable failure of socialism wherever it has been tried is proof that it has not been properly implemented.
  • Democratic Israel is an apartheid state.
  • Islam with its record of unstinting bloodshed is a religion of peace.
  • Illegal immigrants are undocumented workers.
  • Terrorism is workplace violence.
  • A child in the womb is a mass of insensible protoplasm.
  • The killing of the old and the ill is merciful, even when the recipient of such tender concern is not consulted.
  • There is no such thing as truth, an axiom regarded as true.
  • Green energy is a social and economic good irrespective of crony profiteering, exorbitant cost, wildlife devastation, and unworkability in its present state.
  • Storms, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, tsunamis and mortality itself are natural phenomena, but Nature, which cares nothing for human life, is nonetheless sacred, vulnerable and at the mercy of human indifference.
  • Women are disadvantaged in the workforce, academia and society at large despite the fact that high-end hiring practices, legal judgments, custody protocols and university appointments, as well as student enrollment, wholly favor women to the detriment of men.
  • An enemy is a friend.
  • Criminality is innocence.
  • Losing is winning.
  • Prosperity is avarice.
  • Redistributing wealth, i.e., robbing the affluent and productive, is a form of compassion and basic justice.
  • Those who claim victim status are always credible.
  • Accumulating debt is an economic stimulus.
  • Big government is a boon to mankind.
  • War is passé (so 19th century).
  • Diplomacy and talk—the higher Twitter—will prevail over barbarism.
  • The most gynocentric society ever created is a rape culture.
  • Palestine is a historically legitimate nation.
  • Uniformity of thought and action equals cultural diversity.
  • An exploded lie merely confirms what it lies about (e.g., Rigoberta Menchu).
  • Morality is relative.
  • Merit is an unearned distinction.

Or in other words, what is, is not, and what is not, is.

As he writes, “this species of Orwellian inversion, supplanting the real by the imaginary, is now an intrinsic component of the Western psyche”. Will the concept that lies behind the word “Orwellian” even make sense to those who come after?

And there are still people who prefer her to Trump

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You know where Hillary Clinton’s real expertise lies: in UFOs, and this is according to her biggest fans at The New York Times. If you don’t think she’s a nutter, then you should read the full article at the link, but this will give you a taste.

Known for her grasp of policy, Mrs. Clinton has spoken at length in her presidential campaign on topics ranging from Alzheimer’s research to military tensions in the South China Sea. But it is her unusual knowledge about extraterrestrials that has struck a small but committed cohort of voters.

Mrs. Clinton has vowed that barring any threats to national security, she would open up government files on the subject, a shift from President Obama, who typically dismisses the topic as a joke. Her position has elated U.F.O. enthusiasts, who have declared Mrs. Clinton the first “E.T. candidate.” . . .

In a radio interview last month, she said, “I want to open the files as much as we can.” Asked if she believed in U.F.O.s, Mrs. Clinton said, “I don’t know. I want to see what the information shows.” But, she added, “There’s enough stories out there that I don’t think everybody is just sitting in their kitchen making them up.”

This woman is a moonbat, fully disassociated from reality. Is it possible that there is intelligent life in the universe? Sure. Is it possible that we have been visited by creatures from outer space? Maybe but very very unlikely. Is this the sort of thing that should preoccupy the mind of a president? Even crazier than her are the people who would make her president.