They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.
From Knots, by R.D.Laing (1970)
Compare to the term "kayfabe."
Three quotes for Today. Twain and Sagan quotes are quite similar, worth mentioning them both in this day and age. These are three of my favorite quotes:
“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled” – Mark Twain
“If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” ― Carl Sagan
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair
Josh Slouch lost a job he loved. In his current essay, he indicates that a Woke Mob came after him. He writes:
What was my sin? Had I hung a noose from the rearview mirror of my Prius? Did I assault a trans person? Did I don blackface and drop the n-bomb? No. It was more sinister than that. They discovered that I, a gay man, host a conservative podcast.I'll be on the lookout for that forthcoming article. In the meantime, Josh has contemplated the types of people who joined the Woke Mob that cost him his job. Here's how he diagnoses them:If you're wondering how a progressive gay liberal became a libertarian conservative, the story of that political transformation will be told on my Substack soon.
I believe part of the answer to this complicated question lies in the normalization of a type of psychology that drives domestic abuse known as Cluster B personality disorders. These include narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder, and anti-social personality disorder. The symptoms of these disorders are diverse and overlapping, and people with them engage in conflict, deception, abuse and mistreatment of others (almost always while claiming they themselves are victims).These are more than “difficult people.” They are impossible, and often dangerous, people. A quick glossary of the Cluster B disorders. There is a lot of overlap in symptoms among them:
Narcissistic Personality Disorder—self-centered, vain, may be a braggart or may be the type that acts like a very special put-upon victim. The world revolves around them, and others are objects to be used, not people to love or respect.
Borderline Personality Disorder—extreme emotional instability, laughing one minute, crying or screaming the next. Borderlines fear abandonment but engineer conflicts with everyone around them until they fulfill their own fear of being rejected. Think “I hate you/don't leave me.”
Histrionic Personality Disorder—Big emotions about everything all the time. Life events are over-dramatized. Minor disagreements become relationship-shattering cataclysms. Histrionics are often sexually seductive and go beyond flirtation in acting out for attention.
Anti-social Personality Disorder—also known as “sociopathy” or “psychopathy.” An absence of conscience or empathy. Antisocials lead a parasitic life draining money and time from others. Many are criminals. Others stay within the law but torment their families and colleagues to get what they want.
Is the nearly vertical upward spike in reported cases of gender transition due, in part, to the placebo effect? Leor Sapir Reports at City Journal, "The Placebo Is the Point: A new paper highlights the fundamental bias in the world of “gender-affirming” research."
A paper published last month in the Archives of Sexual Behavior makes an important point about the environment in which “gender-affirming” drugs and surgeries are offered to minors. Positive outcomes from hormonal interventions, argues psychiatrist Alison Clayton, the article’s author, may be attributable to placebo effects generated by clinical encounters and the social context in which they take place, rather than to the underlying psychotropic effects of the drugs themselves.
Clayton’s basic intuition makes sense. If you take a teenager in emotional distress and tell her that drug X will solve her problems, while treatment Y will make them worse, and then bring her to a clinical setting where medical professionals repeat that message, it should come as no surprise that the teenager experiences emotional relief when you give her X, or distress when you give her Y—regardless of the psychotropic effects of X. The patient may regard the giving of X symbolically as adults listening to her and empathizing with her inner turmoil. “The ‘Hawthorne effect,’” writes Clayton, “describes the phenomenon where clinical trial patients’ improvements may occur because they are being observed and given special attention. A patient who is part of a study, receiving special attention, and with motivated clinicians, who are invested in the benefits of the treatment under study, is likely to have higher expectations of therapeutic benefits.”
It is indeed the case that promoters of “gender-affirming care” have created what Clayton calls “a perfect storm for the placebo effect.” In the left-of-center media, puberty-blockers, cross-sex hormones and (less frequently) surgeries are hailed as “medically necessary” and suicide-preventing measures for teens in distress, supposedly over having been wrongly “assigned” their sex at birth. Skeptics of these interventions are denounced as cruel deniers of life-saving medicine to youth at high risk of suicide. Meantime, alternatives to drugs and surgeries (e.g., psychotherapy) are denigrated as harmful “conversion therapy,” setting the stage for a nocebo (harmful) effect on those who receive psychotherapy but not drugs.
From the viewpoint of those who have become intensely interested in treating dysphoria medically (rather than the "watch and see" method), many have uttered the phrase "Munchausen syndrome by proxy," which is "a mental illness and a form of child abuse. The caretaker of a child, most often a mother, either makes up fake symptoms or causes real symptoms to make it look like the child is sick."
Biologist Colin Wright has been observing various parent groups. His observations give credence to that concern.
Stealth editing is happening on a regular basis. It should NEVER happen. Further, anyone who examines Matt Taibbi's positions on major political issues should immediately notice that he leans to the "Left," lining up well with the positions taken by most "Left" leaning people three years ago. But that is not good enough in this era of required genuflection to the dominant tribe and anal retentive moral purity. We can't have people who fail to line up perfectly with our tribe on ALL issues. If you are not perfectly with us, you are perfectly against us!