“It's much easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”
North Carolina
Joined July 2010
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Sir Stromming retweeted
You've probably seen the video. A young Frenchwoman in Paris, in tears, begging looters to stop. "Why are you doing this? That's not what we stand for."
Some accounts are mocking her. "She voted for it."
I won't. Because what you see on her face is not stupidity. It's a disease that has infected the entire West, and it has a name: suicidal empathy.
The term comes from Gad Saad, an evolutionary behavioral scientist at Concordia University in Montreal. A man who fled the Lebanese civil war as a child, and who knows what it looks like when a society falls apart. His new book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, is the follow-up to The Parasitic Mind. Here is the thesis, and why it concerns every one of us.
Empathy is one of the best things about us. It evolved for a reason: to care for our children, our kin, our tribe. It was calibrated for a world where the people you felt for were the people around you, and where empathy always came paired with its counterweight: the instinct to protect your own and to recognize a threat.
Suicidal empathy is what happens when that mechanism misfires. When it fires at the wrong targets, in the wrong amounts, with no brake. When we feel more for the criminal than for his victim. More for the stranger who breaks the rules than for the citizen who follows them. More for how compassionate we look than for what our compassion actually produces.
Where does it come from? Four layers.
First, biology. Empathy is a spotlight, as the psychologist Paul Bloom put it. It lights up the one face in front of you and leaves everything else in the dark. The crying migrant on the boat is visible. The thousands of future victims of a broken system are statistics. A spotlight is a terrible tool for running a country.
Second, our own civilization. The West is the civilization that put the victim at the center of its morality. Christianity taught us to care for the stranger, the poor, the weak. It was one of the greatest moral revolutions in history. But cut off from its other half, justice, responsibility, the duty to protect your own, it turns into something else.
Third, ideology. In The Parasitic Mind, Saad described idea pathogens, ideas that hijack our reasoning. Suicidal empathy is the emotional counterpart: an ideology that hijacks our compassion. It sorts the world into oppressors and victims, then demands unlimited empathy for whoever ranks as the victim, whatever they do.
Fourth, status. In the age of social media, empathy has become a display. Posting "refugees welcome" costs nothing and earns applause. The bill goes to someone else: the working class, the suburbs, the women walking home at night.
The results are everywhere. Criminals treated as victims of society. Sexual assaults by migrants met with lenient sentences. Self-defense branded as aggression. Borders treated as cruelty. Saad's conclusion is simple: a society dies when it would rather display infinite tolerance than use its survival instinct.
Now the part I'll add myself, and that few people dare to say.
On average, women score higher than men on measures of empathy. It's one of the most consistent findings in psychology, across cultures, and it makes perfect evolutionary sense: for most of human history, the survival of children depended on it. It's a strength.
But it means an ideology that weaponizes empathy will hit women harder. And the data shows it: in country after country, young women have moved sharply to the left of young men, especially on immigration.
This is where men have a responsibility.
Not to mock. Not to lecture. Not to say "she deserved it." Empathy has always needed a counterweight, and that counterweight was the protective instinct: the one that draws lines, says no, and stands between the threat and the people it loves.
Men abandoned that role. They were told it was toxic, and many believed it. So they stayed silent at the dinner table, at work, with their partners, sisters, daughters and friends.
That has to end. Men have to have this conversation, honestly and with respect: compassion that cannot say no is not compassion. It's surrender. And the first to pay for it are women.
Many women already understand this better than anyone. Some of the bravest voices in this fight are women, precisely because they are the first to feel the danger in the street.
A civilization rests on a balance: compassion and strength, openness and borders, mercy and justice. When one side swallows the other, the foundations crack. What we are watching in Europe is what happens when empathy has no counterweight left.
Look at that young woman again. She isn't the enemy. She's what this ideology made of a generation that was told kindness would be enough.
Our job is to make sure she's the last generation that has to learn it this way.
She voted for it.
She welcomed them.
Faced with the encore, she begs them to stop. In her heart she knows they will not.
Everything she believed. That they were French like her, fighting for the same cause. That the ones who warned her were full of hate. That she would be safe.
It all falls apart in this moment. She is terrified of what comes next. In her heart she knows.
Only remigration can save her.
Sir Stromming retweeted
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
-John Adams 1798
Sir Stromming retweeted
Muslim co-pilot stabs pilot and tries to take down plane with 180 passengers
Media:
Sir Stromming retweeted
Sharing some OG wisdom before I forget it ... An effective way to avoid the some of the hardships of old age these days: For those of you who spend a lot of time typing or doom scrolling on your phone, or both ... You are going to steadily distort your back and neck posture. That is going to mess with you a lot as time goes on. Much better to do that at horizon level so you can keep your neck and back upright and balanced. In a car you can rest your phone on your steering wheel so you look straight ahead, but you can't type that way. So it is best to do as much typing work as possible at a desk with adjustable height. Be able to push a button to smoothly adjust the height for sitting or standing (most of the time you will be sitting). Stack milk crates if you can't afford a mechanical desk ($113 -- mine came from Wayfair). If you raise the desk surface up to chest height while sitting, you can lean on the desk so it carries the weight of your arms while you type for hours. Do whatever it takes such that the screen you stare at for hours is not something for which you have to look downward for extended periods. You do not have to cut yourself off from the world, you just have adapt to it better.
Sir Stromming retweeted
Personally? Oh man.
This is just a tweak on Peter’s question which most of you know:
“What is something you feel is good and needs to be done, but on which almost no institution agrees with you and will fight to destroy you with their full force at a deeply personal level?”
Where to begin??
Undermining faith in Anthony Fauci’s and Francis Collins’ scientific behavior during a pandemic.
Calling attention to the fact that the president of the United States with launch code responsibility was obviously demented during his presidency.
Opposing high levels of immigration for completley non-xenophobic reasons.
Openly discussing asymmetries in patterns of religious martyrdom attacks.
Fighting the loss of the word “Genocide” via coordinated social campaigns.
Pointing out that the history of Peer Review is retconned and fictitious and obviously false.
Fighting irreversible surgeries pushed on children leading to a reproductive holocaust.
Calling for an end to Diverisity-Equity-Inclusion and opposing “Black Lives Matter”, despite their branding genius, even during the Summer of Floyd.
Pointing out that conspiracies are well documented and ubiquitous and fighting for responsible conspiracy theorizing.
Promoting my own technical work and insisting that scientists get paid handsomely.
Etc. Etc.
You’re asking the wrong person. It seems I stand up for what I believe is deeply good and what is misperceived as evil all day, every day. This has stupidly become close to my whole life at times. I’m so bored by how silent everyone is. I can’t fathom it. “Managed Reality” has turned evil.
Something is pushing pure evil, disguised as “good” down our throats 24/7 via the institutions. And almost everyone puts up with it. I do not.
But: Thanks for the question.
A great one!
Sir Stromming retweeted
Fred Kummerow told America in 1957 that the fat in margarine was turning up in the arteries of the dead. The government acted on it in 2015. He was 100.
He was a biochemist at the University of Illinois, and what he had done was simple and slightly grim. He got hold of tissue from people who had died of heart disease and looked at what their arteries were made of. They were full of trans fats, a kind of fat that barely exists in nature and came, in 1957, from one place: the hydrogenated vegetable shortening and margarine the country had just been told to eat in place of butter.
He published it in Science. He was 43.
What followed was a career spent being ignored by experts. The oil industry had friends on every committee. His funding grew thin. In 1968 he talked a panel of the American Heart Association into warning about trans fats, and the warning was pulped and reprinted without it after the shortening makers saw a draft.
Kummerow kept working. He kept his laboratory into his nineties. And he kept eating, quite deliberately and in front of journalists, the diet he had been told would kill him. Eggs cooked in butter. Whole milk. Red meat. He had looked inside the arteries himself and he had not found breakfast in there.
In 2009, aged 94, he filed a formal petition asking the Food and Drug Administration to ban artificial trans fats. The law gave the agency 180 days to answer. Four years later it had not, so in 2013, at 98, he sued the United States government.
Three months after that the FDA announced it agreed with him. The ban was confirmed in 2015. The gap between his paper and the decision was 58 years, which is longer than most of the people who ate the margarine got.
He died in 2017, at 102.
And he spent those last years on a second warning, which has been received exactly as the first one was. The problem, he said, was never the cholesterol in the egg. It is the vegetable oil in the fryer, heated and reheated until it oxidises, and then eaten.
On the record so far, that one is due to be acted upon in about 2070.
Sir Stromming retweeted
Raising rates will make this worse, & will lead to the election of more extremists in the US.
Cutting rates will also make this worse, & will lead to the election of more extremists.
Recognize where we are & buckle up - the true cost of all those bailouts are coming due.
Via @Peter_Atwater
Sir Stromming retweeted
Interest & Interest-like obligations (Entitlements + VA) are 105% of receipts thru F3q26, & growing nearly 2x receipts, & will rise with higher growth (interest rates) or inflation (Entitlements, which are essentially denominated in a hard currency the US can’t print - hips, Rx.)
Sir Stromming retweeted
The rise of white supremacy was a media generated narrative.
This fact is observable:
Sir Stromming retweeted
Riddle me this, @RoKhanna. If closing USAID could cause so many child deaths in Africa, why would the African Union's top diplomat in DC celebrate USAID's shutdown? Does she like dead babies? Is she ignorant? How else do you explain her arriving at the same conclusion as DOGE?
Sir Stromming retweeted
From the Gabbard files: "Just saw this video online. It’s from a 2016 NY Academy of Medicine meeting where Daszak (@PeterDaszak) talks about his colleagues in China manipulating the spike protein on coronavirus to make them more virulent."
Gabbard Drops Fauci Covid-19 Receipts On Last Day: He Funded The Research, Cooked The Cover Story, Then Lied To Congress zerohedge.com/covid-19/gabba…
Sir Stromming retweeted
Ice cream is actually one of the healthiest foods in existence, judging by a multitude of recent research articles.
There was a very highly publicized article that came out in 2018 out of Harvard.
It was for a student's dissertation, he found that ice cream was inversely associated with heart disease.
The nutrition department and the student himself tried repeatedly to "make the association go away" with different analysis, and checking his work.
But it didn't.
Not only was ice cream reported as beneficial,
it was actually one of the most beneficial dairy products analyzed.
With up to a 12% reduction in heart disease risk for having >2 servings of ice cream per week.
This wasn't the first study to find benefits of ice cream, and it also wasn't the last.
In a 2013 meta analysis of studies, they also found a protective effect of ice cream on diabetes.
You can see the bias against ice cream, as they don't even mention it in the main page.
That's despite ice cream showing one of the BEST results of any food studied for diabetes risk.
Another study from 2014 showed the same thing.
Again, this is a meta analysis, not just one study. They are pooling together all of the studies on ice cream and diabetes and still finding this.
The best result of any dairy food studied - here with a 32% reduction in diabetes risk.
The bias against ice cream is very strong in these studies.
A 2016 study once again showing the same benefit of ice cream for diabetes risk.
They say that the study above (Chen et al) showed "attenuated association" once diet collection information was stopped after hypertension or high cholesterol diagnosis.
They argue that this means that the association is invalid.
But not only did they not try to dismiss any other food studied like this, but this is just objectively not true (see above - there still was an association).
They also buried their results on ice cream in the supplementary tables so it didn't even make the paper.
That's probably because they didn't like the fact that once again, ice cream intake was inversely and strongly associated with diabetes risk.
So you really can't argue that there was some kind of agenda in favor of ice cream here.
More recent studies show the same thing.
A 2019 paper again showed a lower risk of diabetes with increased ice cream consumption.
And again, they put this information at the very end in the supplementary tables to try to hide it.
Finally, the most recent study in 2024 showed the STRONGEST association for ice cream's protective effect on diabetes.
There was a linear dose response.
That means more ice cream = less diabetes, straight up.
In fact, there was a 50% reduction in risk for having one serving per day.
Which, as you could guess by this point, was the greatest risk reduction of any dairy food studied.
Why would ice cream actually be good for you?
My main guess is the unique protective fats in dairy, that are abundant in ice cream.
◇ C15
◇ C17
◇ CLA
◇ TVA
◇ TPA
are fats almost exclusively in dairy fat, and all have unique effects.
◇ Mitochondrial enhancing
◇ Anti-inflammatory
◇ Anti-thrombotic
◇ Lipid lowering
◇ Fat burning
◇ Cancer preventing
I've covered these all at length in other content.
Of course, this is all observational.
This is simply seeing what people eat and then seeing what happens to them. It's not an experiment. That is definitely a limitation.
However, when you see the same association, consistently, across decades, regardless of analysis and confounding adjustment, you probably have something real.
This is not to say everyone should go and immediately pound gallons of ice cream for invincibility.
But... it does mean having reasonable amounts of ice cream is likely good for you.
Sir Stromming retweeted
Why things will eventually fall apart:
1. Everybody, even Google, seems to be treating AI as if it were some kind of winner take all competition like web search was, in which Google taking over 95%
2. But everybody is building essentially the same technical solution with essentially the same data, so there is no moat.
3. If there is no moat, nobody is going to take 90% of the market.
4. With no clear winners, nobody can charge monopoly prices; instead, you get price wars and commodity pricing.
5. Which means everybody will wind up overpaying compared to the modest profits they will be able to make in an intensely competitive regime.
Am I missing something?
Sir Stromming retweeted
The only thing that stops violent men from raping you and your society are other men who are equally willing to be violent in stopping the rapists. The West has decided that the highest virtue is to quietly comply with the destruction of your civilization because to do otherwise is bigoted toward the rapists. It really is that simple.
Sir Stromming retweeted
Major study finds voters have statistically zero influence on Congress.
In case you’re curious why the 80% issues don’t pass, from crime to open borders to secure elections.
Sir Stromming retweeted
$32 million dollars and an entire administration mobilized to destroy one congressman.
His crime?
Demanding answers about Epstein class abuse networks, and refusing to let child predators hide behind political cover.
If that level of firepower doesn't tell you who's being protected, nothing will.
Go Massie!
Sir Stromming retweeted
There seems to be some confusion between insults/ridicule and incitement of violence. Here's a little rhetorical quiz for those who are confused. Perhaps it will help.
Trump posts that Rob Reiner was crazy and had TDS after Reiner's death. Who did that incite violence towards?
Gavin Newsom claims that Trump is disappearing American citizens never to be seen again and that Black and Brown people are specifically being targeted and should be afraid. Newsom repeatedly claims that America will not have an election in 2028 and that Trump will use the National Guard to arrest people who try to vote. Who might that incite violence towards?
Trump posts a warning to Iran that an entire civilization may die. Which person did that incite violence towards?
Ted Lieu, without evidence, claims that Trump is guilty of raping and killing children. The entire Democrat party spends a year claiming without evidence that Trump is a pedophile. Who does that incite violence towards?
Trump posts a meme of Adam Schiff with a long neck and calls him a watermelon head. Does that incite violence towards someone?
Adam Schiff spends three years falsely accusing the President of being a traitor and working for Russia. He claims that the President is illegitimate and should not be in office. Does that incite violence towards anyone? What happens if someone believes Schiff's lies?
Tim Walz claims that Trump is disappearing people, having American citizens grabbed and sent to torture dungeons, never to be seen again. He warns people that anybody could be next and urges people to fight. Who does that incite violence towards?
Trump posts a meme with a clip of Obama as a gorilla. Who does that incite violence towards? Were people angry at Obama for being portrayed as a gorilla or were they angry at Trump for posting it?
Biden spends five years calling Trump an existential threat to the world and says that democracy can never survive if Trump gets back in office. He gives multiple prime time speeches as President calling Trump and his supporters a threat to democracy. Does that incite violence towards someone or some group?
Trump calls someone garbage. Biden says that Trump supporters are garbage almost immediately after an attempt on Trump's life. Do either of those incite violence?
Chris Murphy says that we are at war (with MAGA and the right) and that people need to do whatever it takes to win the war. Who might that incite violence towards?
Trump posts that he's glad that Robert Mueller died. Who does that incite violence towards? Do people want to kill Mueller's dead body after reading that?
James Comey posts "8647." Might that incite violence towards someone?
Trump posts a meme of Hakeem Jeffries in a sombrero. Who does that incite violence towards? Do the people who are angry about that meme want to hurt Jeffries?
Hakeem Jeffries repeatedly says that the biggest threat America faces is MAGA Republicans. Who does that incite violence towards?
Trump says "there are very fine people on both sides, but I'm not talking about the neo-nazis and white supremacists, they should be condemned totally." Who does that incite violence towards?
The entire Democrat party and virtually the entire MSM spend years claiming that Trump said that nazis and white supremacists are very fine people. Who does that incite violence towards?
Trump ridicules Rosie O'Donnell. Did that incite violence towards O'Donnell?
A journalist reads on national TV from a manifesto of a deranged would be assassin who wrote that he was angry with pedophiles and then asks the same President who was the target of said assassin if the manifesto was about him? Who would that, if anyone, incite violence towards?
Trump tells the journalist who just read the manifesto accusing him of being a pedophile that she should be ashamed of herself. Who does that incite violence towards?
AOC says that the country has become nazi Germany, compares Trump to Hitler, and claims that Trump is putting people in concentration camps. Who would that incite violence towards?
I could go on and on. Maybe these questions will clear things up a bit for those who do not understand the difference between insults and incitement of violence.