I've Been Close to Someone Who's Threatened Violence Publicly; Dangerous to Network With This Friend If Friend Isn't Getting Needed Help

Trigger warning:  This blog post discusses issues pertaining to child abuse, violent threats, rape, incest, suicidal gestures, and mental illness.


Stuart K. Hayashi




It was not easy for me to put this information right here. My concern about the danger -- including physical dangers -- outweighs such fears.  Some years ago I became very close to someone who, sadly, is dangerously mentally ill.  My friend has accused other people of being violent toward her, only later to act as if she does not remember the accusations she leveled. Moreover, in the years subsequent to placing a death threat against her mother on the World Wide Web for everyone to read, the archiving and documenting of this death threat remains.  Copies of the evidence are available.

I have contacted police about this on two continents.  On one continent, the police were unresponsive.  On the other, the police were responsive but said that jurisdictional issues prevent them from taking action.  Because my friend has given no indication that she has truly gotten past the obsession with violence, death, and child molesters, I judge that it is best for me to speak out here. What I know is that if I don't speak out about this, the danger is guaranteed to continue.  By contrast, if I speak out about this, there is at least a slim chance that someone might recognise my friend and give her the compassionate intervention she needs.




My Friend Publicly Threatened to Kill Her Mother -- The Evidence Is Archived, Documented, and Copied 
In 2004, in her home country of Norway, my friend put up this threat to kill her mother.  It is in English and it has been publicly available on the World Wide Web this entire time.  It is not one of those dumb, terse threats that people write on Twitter or YouTube, along the lines of, 'You disagree with me? Then I hope you die!'  Though the threat is grammatically inept in composition, it is nonetheless serious in tone and intent.  My friend does not say that she has some long-term plan to kill.  Rather, she envisions that one day she will become so incensed by her mother's nagging that she will take a knife and thrust the knife into her mother.  This is described vividly, as so:

Click on this to enlarge it and make it easier to read

The threat is documented and archived.  There are copies of it available.  This information is now irrepressible and un-erasable.

The very blog entry following it also has homicidal fantasies.  My friend and her on-again/off-again boyfriend at the time, whom she here calls “N,” were apparently on a break, and her boyfriend was pursuing someone else.  This is what my friend wrote about the other girl:

Click on this to enlarge and make it easier to read.

Direct Link | Archived Link

Some people in our respective circles have rationalised that these death threats are 'long past'.  After all, they say, these blog entries are more than ten years old.  Moreover, four months after my friend wrote her death threat about her mother, she wrote a follow-up post on that same thread where she claims to be all better:  '...im happy that i allowed myself to hate her [the mother]. otherwise nothing would have changed. I now love my mom to death like many other precious people in my surroundings'.

But it wasn't all better.  My friend made it all too obvious she is not recovered.




Years After Threatening Her Mother Publicly, My Friend Continues Exhibiting Publicly the Fixation on Violence and Death
When my friend was on Oahu from 2008 to 2012, she continued displaying morbid and even violent gestures, particularly in a public fashion.  Many of these morbid gestures remain on the Web, and have been documented and archived. There are also copies of this evidence available as well.

For example, in late 2010, my friend had another 'friend' (enabler, really) upload onto YouTube a video where she 'jokes' about being a neo-fascist 'of the Fourth Reich'.  My friend said privately it was a joke, but that is not obvious from the very strange video itself, which was listed as 'News and Politics'.  That my friend calling herself a neo-fascist 'of the Fourth Reich' is some joke is especially unclear for another reason: the enabler who uploaded the video is connected to an anti-immigration political group that advocates government force to curb Muslim immigration.  If you don't want people thinking you are a neo-Nazi, it's not wise to associate with that sort of group.  (Sadly, my friend actually first heard of that group from me, before it took on such a strident anti-immigration position.)

Around 2014, the enabler 'privated' the horrible video.  

Since you're probably not my friend's mother, you are probably wondering, 'Why the hell should I care?'  Until my friend confirms that she has returned to psychiatric care on a regular basis, I have strong evidence that she continues to pose a danger to colleagues with whom she networks. That could be you. Explaining this requires more context.




The Beginning of the Story Behind This
Before my friend showed me the murder threat and the disturbing 'Fourth Reich' video, she very slowly gave me clues indicating the danger.  First, she explained why she was born with her mother's last name instead of her father's, her father being an expatriate from the United States.  It was because her father himself had recently changed his last name.  The story behind that is itself bizarre and sad, and seems to have been because he felt betrayed by his own father back in the United States (we will call my friend's paternal grandfather WH here).  My friend laughed and said, 'My mum said to my father, "If we give our baby your last name, how do I know you won't change it again? We'll give her my last name; it's simpler." '  This father is a well-known photographer; his pictures have appeared frequently in the local newspaper and the website of his municipality/kommune, and his photos of the aurora borealis are celebrated throughout the world.

Then, for the first time, my friend sounded vulnerable. She said that she put on a front of bravado to hide her insecurities.  She admitted that she tries to make herself appear to other people that she is in a position of authority and responsibility, because she believes if people see her in such positions and seeming very confident and professional, they will not question her judgment or sanity.  No red flags went off for me; I reassured her that there was nothing unusual about nursing self-doubts.




The Accusation Against the Classmate 
In the weeks that followed, my friend increasingly showed an obsession with child molesters.  The first joke she ever told me happened to be what she identified as her favorite signature on online postings:  'The internet is where men are men, women are men, and small children are undercover FBI agents', alluding to online sting operations against child predators.  Then my friend would reminisce about an ex-boyfriend back in Norway.  She said that he was a deep, caring person who empathised with everyone, a man of upstanding good taste.  Then she stared at the ground and giggled, 'He always joked that he was a pedophile trying to lure kids into sex with him'.

Then in February of 2010, my friend came to a professor and me, and told us a troubling story.  She said that a classmate of hers in that professor's class had sexually propositioned her and, when she rejected him, he grew angry.  Based on his boasting about killing people in war and about his womanising, she was afraid he wanted to rape her.  They got into an argument and my friend had grown direly afraid of him.  A week later, my friend came to the professor and me and said that she was proven right to fear the classmate as violent, because he threatened her, 'If you tell anyone what happened that night, I kill you!'

My friend insisted that we not go to the police (in retrospect, I should have reported this to the police against her wishes) but that she wanted the professor to keep the classmate and her separate from one another.  She did not file any formal complaints with Hawaii Pacific University, but she did go around informally circulating this accusation among several other schoolmates.  I completely believed the accusation at the time.  Then my friend told the professor, several other schoolmates, and me a troubling story where she accused her writing instructor of invading her personal space as he flirted with her.  Again, she did not file a formal complaint and sternly insisted that none of us confidantes do so, either.  I completely believed this accusation as well.




The Obsession With Child Molesters
One night in April of 2010, when my friend and I were going out for an evening stroll, she said, out of nowhere, 'Why are people so bigoted when a convicted child molester moves into the neighborhood?'

My eyes shot wide open and I sputtered, 'Whah? . . . Wh-wh-wh-what do you mean?'

She explained, 'Whenever someone who, as an adult, had sex with a small child moves into the neighborhood, people immediately want to run him out.  They should consider that the child consented to the sex.'  She argued that a prepubescent child should be recognised as contractually competent to consent to sex with an adult caregiver.  She would not be swayed from this opinion, at least not this night.

Later, she also told me that when she was thirteen, she was groped by her then-best-friend, also thirteen years of age at the time.  She attributed her fear of men to the incidents of her friend groping her, though those incidents did not explain her obsession with child molesters in particular, nor her apparently fearing American-born men more than Norwegian-born men.




The Danger Posed to Colleagues (The Latest News Indicates This Danger Is Ongoing As This Is Posted)
Another night that same month, my friend was telling me about her day and then she said, very casually, that she bumped into the classmate.  I mean the same classmate she previously accused of threatening to kill her.  I was alarmed.  As calmly as I could, I asked her to go on.  What happened?  My friend said that she and the classmate had a nice talk, and he was just a nice, fun, friendly flirt.  Then she started into space, giggled, and said, 'Hee-hee! I . . . like [Classmate's name]'!

I was stunned.  I couldn't say anything in response.  My friend only responded to the awkward silence by changing the subject.

She also frequently talked about how she has had a long history of wanting to die.  At school, she threatened to kill herself several times.  Moreover, she mentioned hating her body and that this hatred for her body goes back to her early childhood, long before the boy groped her when they were both thirteen.  She mentioned that ever since she was little, she thought that female anatomy is disgusting because it makes her vulnerable to predatory males.  She did not elaborate on whether she felt threatened by one or two predatory males in particular.

The next day, I went to the professor to talk about her talking up that classmate as if she did not remember her allegation about him.  The professor brushed off my concerns.  Even as my friend made increasingly obvious and public morbid gestures, which he saw up close, the professor acted as if it was safe and acceptable.  For those reasons, I have lost a lot of respect for this man.

Throughout May of 2010, my friend switched back and forth in her memory of the classmate. First she switched back to saying he violently threatened her, and she went around telling other schoolmates about this.  The next day, she again talked about the classmate being just a nice, fun flirt. Two days later, she switched back to saying he was violent and dangerous.  Every time my friend changed her story, she sounded as if she did not remember what said the previous time, even if that previous time was no more than the day before.

By the autumn of 2010, my friend became very insistent on wearing the same garment to university class almost every day.  She took me to her apartment and she showed me all her clothes. It was not that she had lots of garments that looked alike.  This was the same black garment every day.  Then -- encouraged by the same enabler in Norway who uploaded the horrid 'Fourth Reich' video -- my friend uploaded photos of herself photoshopped to have a chalky white face like a corpse.  Two of the corpse photos even went on my friend's LinkedIn account, next to her résumé.  I think some people tried to assume my friend was 'just being a Goth or a Black Metal fan'.  However, my friend has a history of wanting to be dead literally.  For that reason, I could not dismiss this as my friend 'just being a Goth'; I had to take this seriously.

'A Lot of Abuse in My Family's Past[,] Including Sexual Abuse' 
By this time, I already didn't trust the judgment of my friend's American-born father. I did notice, though, that on Twitter he was following an eccentric woman from the same home state in the USA that he was from.  What got my attention was that the woman's website purported to be for a charity she set up, one for helping at-risk teens and twentysomethings (my friend's age range at the time).  All of the mental illness symptoms the woman's website described were the same as what my friend had either admitted to having or had exhibited to me directly. I thought, 'Who is this strange woman? Is she perhaps a psychologist with whom my friend's father consulted about my friend's problems in Norway?  About symptoms that are now becoming strong and publicly visible once again?'

I contacted this strange woman. I told her I was interested in her website, because I had a friend in her twenties who was exhibiting the symptoms the website described.  I mentioned to this strange woman, though, that I am worried that if she is a psychologist, she might consider it a conflict of interest for me to describe my friend's situation, as I think this strange woman knows my friend somehow.  The strange woman replied she is not a psychologist and it is OK for me to tell her what concerns me.   I told the woman about the morbid gestures but had not yet mentioned anything about the accusations about the classmate, the fear of men in general, or the obsession with child molesters.

It turned out that this strange woman is the paternal aunt to my friend.  The aunt remarked that my friend's situation was both familiar and unfamiliar.  The situation was unfamiliar in that, this entire time, the aunt was unaware that her Norwegian niece was going through all this. Yet, the aunt continued, what I described was indeed familiar in one respect:  when the aunt described mental illness symptoms on her own website, she was describing her own symptoms, and she was startled by how my friend's symptoms were similar to her own.  (I will not link to the woman's website, but rest assured that the website's URL is archived, its contents documented.)

Before I could say anything about the child-molester fixation or the accusation about the classmate, the aunt asked me whether my friend exhibited a prominent hang-up about sex.  I asked her what she meant.  The aunt replied, 'There is a lot of abuse in my family's past[,] including sexual abuse'.  Throughout the months, the aunt revealed that both a cousin and uncle of hers killed themselves, though in different ways. The cousin very deliberately committed suicide by throwing himself off a bridge. The uncle, named Delbert, sexually assaulted the aunt and later killed himself.  Later, the aunt mentioned that the father of both herself and my friend's father -- WH -- sexually abused the aunt and her sister.  As far as what the aunt said, though, my friend's father getting mad at WH and changing his own last name in protest -- to that of his mother's maiden name -- was unrelated to the sexual abuse.  Indeed, the aunt added that when she tried to talk to my friend's father about their own father sexually abusing her, my friend's father replied -- rather unconvincingly -- that he knew nothing of this when it was going on.

Later, it turned out that yet another brother, both to WH and that uncle Delbert, was also credibly accused of molesting a girl over whom he had authority.  The aunt said that this third brother 'drank himself to death'. That means there are credible accusations against three brothers on the paternal side of my friend's family.

The aunt went through the following pattern.  Every few weeks, she told me she would have a compassionate conversation with my friend about the public morbid gestures, and about their having so many symptoms and traumas in common.  But, last minute, the aunt would delay this.  Then she would start talking to me about something else, such as her co-workers irritating her.  Eventually she told me that she would have the compassionate conversation after she had her own confrontation with WH and her mother -- WH for sexually abusing her and with her mother for being an enabler who "looked the other way."  The aunt planned on confronting her parents with this through a snail mail.  She typed up a draft and e-mailed it to me.  I still have the entire draft in my possession.  It, too, is documented and archived, and copies of it have been made.

At the last minute, though, the aunt decided against mailing the letter. She rationalised that her mother was in poor health and the confrontation would worsen it.  Then she became uncommunicative and rude, and I do not think the compassionate conversation with my friend ever happened.  I suspect, at this point, it finally dawned on the aunt that if she looked further into the matter with my friend, she might uncover something incriminating not merely about WH, but about my friend's father himself, and that would undermine any remaining 'plausible deniability'.




Having to Go It Alone
It was up to me to have a compassionate conversation with my friend.  Most other people in our circles noticed the public morbid gestures but were too intimidated to say anything; they became perfect sycophants who helped my friend pretend that all of her public morbid gestures were safe and acceptable.

When I tried to talk to my friend about this, she feigned memory loss, pretending not to remember what she had told me about her obsession with child molesters and death and fear of men.  Then she added that by raising the topic, I had shown myself to be more evil and frightening than the classmate who threatened to kill her.  She added that my confronting her about this was more evil and hurtful than all of the misogynistic epithets her ex-boyfriends hurled toward her.  Soon after saying all this, she again feigned memory loss, this time pretending not to remember being angry just minutes earlier.  As if she didn't know how the conversation started, she began talking casually about her day and then put on a smile and asked me how my day was.  I reminded her of what our conversation was about -- her violent and morbid gestures.  She then grew enraged again and intoned ominously, 'This is not over!'

For the sake of my physical safety, I had to cut off ties to my friend. But I never stopped caring.




BiggerPockets.Com:  Where the Danger of Continued Violence Remains
Some months ago, when I looked at a real-estate investing website, my friend -- of all people -- popped up.  She talked about how she is a big shot real-estate investor who owns a parking garage in Norway and who is interested in New York.  She finally stopped using the horrid corpse pictures for her avatar.

However, she changed her name; she now goes by her father's last name.  To someone unaware of the context, that must seem a touching tribute to a man of obviously large meaning in my friend's life. But based on what my friend kept saying, and also based on what her aunt said, I am afraid that the name change appears to be yet another morbid gesture.  :'-(
 

If you network with her as a colleague, it would be prudent to remember her behaviour with respect to her classmate and the writing instructor.  As long as my friend refuses to take responsibility publicly for her public morbid gestures -- including, but far from exclusively, the still-online murder threats and photoshop-corpse photos -- there is probable cause in concluding that the danger remains. Indeed, if you work at a particular IKEA Service and Pick-Up Point, you should be very concerned.

I have to bring this up publicly.

First off, falsely accusing someone of a violent crime is itself an initiation of the use of force.  The reason is this.  If X goes to Z and accuses Y of having committed violence against X, then Z may easily respond with violence toward Y, either doing the violence himself as retribution or going to the police (remember that government action is backed by the threat of violence).

Furthermore, every impassioned public threat of violence -- such as the one my friend put on the Web publicly for her mother -- must be taken seriously.  Serious public threats of violence count as an initiation of the use of force.  The reason is that, although not all violent threats are acted upon, there is probable cause to judge that the person who issued the threat might still act upon it one day.

Even if my friend never does violence to her mother, she has given enough reason for people to suspect she might do something equally dangerous or retributive to someone else to whom she feels emotionally attached. You cannot justly hide behind the phrase 'This is my privacy and none of your business!' when the matter involves violent threats you have issued publicly against your own mother. That is particularly when you have continued, throughout the years, issuing public gestures indicating a continued obsession with death and violence.

If you have come into contact with my friend and truly care about her well-being and the safety of those around her, please, please, please confront her compassionately and firmly -- pardon that redundancy -- about how her happiness, her being able to accept herself and her past, without all these evasions, is most important, and that the courage to return to regular psychiatric care is worth it.  It is the part of me that retains confidence in my friend -- that part of me that holds onto the hope that she finds inner peace, authentic happiness, and the hope that she is capable of gaining it -- that asks this both of her and of you.




On May 17, 2020, I added the paragraph about that other brother to WH also being credibly accused of child sexual abuse. On August 15, 2020, I added the information about my friend posting her violent fantasies about her romantic rival.

Unfortunate Titles

In retrospect, the titles of Bill Cosby's children's books raise unfortunate imagery. O_O

Immigrants and Terrorists in Ancient Athens

Stuart K. Hayashi

In her book Darwin's Ghosts, Rebecca Stott pointed out something I had not previously considered. Back in the days of ancient Athens, anyone from outside of your city was a foreigner. Someone who came to your city and was not originally from there, was an immigrant -- what was then called a metic. Aristotle was born near Macedonia, and he came to Athens. He was an immigrant.

The Athenians did not understand freedom the same way we laissez-faire liberals do: to Athenians, to be "free" mostly meant "not being a debt slave," and the Athenians were quite comfortable with the institution of debt slavery. Aristotle himself had debt slaves. But I think it is fair to say that the Athenians were generally more freedom-loving than were the Macedonians. To put it in our sort of modern terminology, the Macedonians were of a culture that did not respect freedom as much as the Athenians did. Aristotle came from a comparatively primitive, illiberal culture.

Eventually, Philip of Macedon began conquering neighboring city-states, and the Athenians reasonably feared that they would be next. They began to regard all Macedonians within Athens -- including Aristotle -- with suspicion. They feared these Macedonians might be subversives and spies secretly loyal to Philip -- the terrorists of their day.

Not wanting their freedom destroyed by outsiders, the Athenians began to presume Macedonians within Athens to be guilty of treason and they violently persecuted them. They harassed Aristotle and destroyed his property, driving him to flee from Athens. Thus, Aristotle fled to Lesbos, becoming a refugee, ironically, from one of the freest societies of Europe at the time.

At the lagoon at Lesbos, Aristotle made new and important discoveries, and therefore we might rationalize that we ultimately benefited from Aristotle leaving Athens. But we could also consider how, in their own time, the Athenians might have benefited from Aristotle's wisdom more immediately had they not driven him out.

There is a lesson in this. As the movie Ratatouille observed, "Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere."

It is sheer folly to dismiss someone as a burden, or, worse, violent, based on that person coming from what we judge to be a primitive or illiberal culture. In an underwater robotics competition, a team of brilliant engineers beat MIT's team, doing what MIT's robot could not. Every member of this team was an undocumented immigrant from Mexico. One of the world's foremost brain surgeons first came to the United States illegally, working as a migrant farm laborer. When we shut out people, we might be condemning the next Aristotle to death before he makes his big breakthrough. When we close ourselves off from refugees, we imperil not only them, but ourselves as well.

Chris McKenzie Turns Zeno's Paradox Against Itself

The first sections of this post were written by Chris McKenzie and Robert Nasir respectively. I published those sections on March 15, 2016. Below those sections, over time, I added my own thoughts. On Tuesday, May 6, 2025, I added an essay of my own authorship to put everything together.
—Stuart K. Hayashi 

This is Bartolomeo Carduci's fresco of Zeno of Elea (he is the old man leading the young men).

Chris McKenzie explains:

Zeno's Paradox is as follows.  The ancient Greek philosopher Zeno stated that in order to cross a room, one must first cross half the room. In order to cross the remaining half, one must cross half the remaining distance, and so on -- infinitely. Zeno concluded that one can therefore never cross the room.

Let's change Zeno's numbers but keep his intent: In order to cross a room, one must be first cross 99% of the room. In order to cross the remaining 1%, one must cross 99% of the remaining 1%, infinitely.

Zeno has a problem though, and it's one he's smuggled in. Why does Zeno think you can cross 99% of the room? After all, if you treat 99% as a whole, you must first cross 99% of the new whole. The end result is that you can't move at all because in order to move you must first move through 99% of whatever infinitesimally small space you've chosen to move through -- say the first 1% of the distance.

Now to the claim that "nothing is certain" or we can only be 99% certain. It's easy to explode this claim with a single question: Are you sure? However, we can see that the 99% certainty claim suffers from the same problem as Zeno's room: In order to be 99% certain, you must first be 99% of 99% certain. Which is to say, you must be wholly certain of a certain whole (the first 99%).

Or, you could just walk across the room and proudly claim, with 100% certainty, "I did it." 

_______________

Stuart K. Hayashi adds:

As Chris said, we can turn this around on Zeno.

Every fraction is, in another context, one whole. That is, Y may be a fraction of X, but Y is still one whole of Y. If the room is 30 feet across, and I only walk "half that distance," that is 15 feet. But that "half distance" is actually "the entire distance" of another measurement: 15 feet. Therefore, every time you travel a distance, you travel the entirety of that distance. Every measurement is, in at least one context, "100 percent."

_______________


UPDATE  from the Same Day:

Robert Nasir wrote the following comments to me.  I am quoting them here with his permission.

Similarly, if you can travel half the length of a given room, then you can travel what is half of twice the length of the room.

The real issue is the integration of the discrete and the continuous. Everything is discrete. Entities are discrete. The distances they travel (to the extent they're measurable) are discrete.

Mathematics treats space (and time) as continuous. That's fine, it's useful (and arguably necessary) to do so.

But to understand why apparent paradoxes arise, one must never lose sight that math is method, not metaphysics.

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UPDATE: Additional comment from Stuart on January 26, 2018:

I think I have a new way of phrasing this matter:

Zeno's Paradox is based on the false presumption that no measurement can ever be 100 percent.  But the exact opposite is true: every measurement is 100 percent, at least in terms of each measurement being 100 percent of itself.

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UPDATE: Addendum from Stuart on February 9, 2020:

Only today did it occur to me that pointing out that every measurement is “100 percent of itself” is a restatement of “A is A” (here, “1 = 1”).

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UPDATE from Stuart on May 6, 2025 (much longer than the other updates):

After I first published this blog post, I learned that in his Physics, Aristotle himself provided a refutation of Zeno Paradox’s similar to the one I provided above. In fact, the explanation of Zeno’s Paradox in Physics has been, throughout the modern age, an important document through which archaeologists and historians have been aware of this idea having been circulated in ancient Greece.

I will say more explicitly why, years ago, Chris McKenzie started discussing this matter with me over Facebook. The reason is a bromide commonly repeated in the culture, even by scientists and science journalists influenced by Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn in the philosophy of science.

The bromide starts by pointing out that when it comes to forming conclusions, we can err. A big reason for this is often that, in forming the conclusion, we had yet to come across a piece of information that would have provided a more-complete understanding. And because we are not omniscient and cannot know everything that can ever be known, it follows there will always be more learn. It then follows that will always be a risk of error in our conclusions. Therefore, concludes the bromide: no principle should be deemed to be absolute, and we can never be a certain of any conclusion. And if we can never be certain of any conclusion, any and every claim to any knowledge is subject to existential doubt, no better than tenuous.

That is what Karl Popper meant in saying, “...we never know what we are talking about.” In Forbes magazine, physics professor and science writer Ethan Siegel insists, “In fact, when it comes to science, proving anything is an impossibility.”

An interpretation such as Siegel’s concedes that scientists do gather evidence, and that, as evidence accumulates for a particular conclusion, we can legitimately grow more confident of that conclusion. However, goes that interpretation, as no one can gain all data ever to exist, complete confidence can never be achieved. In other words, we can never have 100-percent of all information, which means we can never have 100-percent confidence. Ergo, says the argument, even as we can cite additional evidence to become justly more confident in a proposition, actual complete proof of the conclusion will forever elude us.

Being influenced by Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, the argument above is often provided in introductory science courses in university. The Forbes writer is far from alone, even among science instructors. I know my introductory biology professor gave lip service to it before moving on to aspects of the lecture — about cells and respiration — that he found more interesting. But when people say, “We can never achieve certainty in the end,” the phrasing is terribly misleading.

When I wrote about this on Facebook in 2016, Chris McKenzie replied to me in a comment post that “We can get more confident, but can never achieve complete confidence” is a variant on Zeno’s Paradox. The same applies to “Something can improve but never reach perfection.” These are variation’s on Zeno’s Paradox because the main message of Zeno’s Paradox is, You can gain increments bringing you closer to 100 percent, but no form of 100 percent shall ever be reached.

Here is how “We can’t be certain” is a variation on Zeno’s Paradox. Isaac Asimov, the famed science-fiction author who was also a trained biochemist, told PBS talk-show host Bill Moyers, “...we can’t be absolutely certain. Science doesn’t purvey absolute truth. Science is a mechanism. It’s a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature.”

Note how Asimov concedes that through science we keep getting closer to the absolute truth. But he warns us that absolute truth itself cannot be reached. Asimov’s statement is a rephrasing of Zeno’s idea that we can get closer to 100 percent but not 100 percent itself. One is “A principle might apply much of the time, but it will never absolute.” Another is “Something can improve, but it will never be perfect.”

Zeno’s Paradox is a fallacy because it is inverse to the truth. The argument is sloppy in terms of how it defines 100 percent, largely conflating 100 percent and completion with infinity. This Paradox is also sloppy in how it treats the meaning of the concept of context.

In reality: in at least one context, every increment is 100 percent. This is because, in at least one context, every quantity is 100 percent. It is 100 percent in that it is 100 percent of itself. That is, “1 = 1.” Phrased differently, “A is A.” That is, every distance traveled is 100 percent of itself. By that same token, a fraction of a Particular Distance C is itself 100 percent of yet another distance, Distance D.

Let us say we are in a room that is 18 feet long (5.4864 meters). And let us revisit Zeno’s Paradox. We want to cross the room from one end to the other. We travel half the distance (9 feet; 2.7432 meters). We then travel half the remaining distance: 4 feet and 6 inches, or 1.3716 meters. Then we travel half the remaining distance again, and again, and so on. We keep inching closer to the desired destination, and yet if in every interval we travel half the remaining distance, we will never reach the desired destination. How, Zeno asked, can we possibly reach the desired end of the room? Again, the point is that we can never reach 100 percent; every distance traveled is a fraction of a distance and not a complete distance. This means we can never attain something that is one whole; we can never attain something that is a single unit; we can only obtain a fraction of that unit.

By now, we see the fallacy. Half the distance of an 18-foot-long room is itself a distance. The nine feet in our first increment (2.7432 meters) may be a mere fraction of the length of the room, but, in another context, it is indeed 100 percent, one whole, and a complete distance — as is any and every quantity. That is why, as quoted above, Robert Nasir cheekily said that if we are allowed only to walk “half a distance,” then he can offer a work-around. It is that we say we will travel half of twice the length of the room. By walking half that distance, we end up walking the entire length of the room.

In Physics, Book 6, Aristotle already spotted this. As he said it, there is no distance traveled “less than itself for it to traverse first...” Hence, any time we travel a distance that is a fraction of another, the distance we have traveled is already a “distance equal to itself.” Yes, “everything that is in motion ... traverses a distance as great as itself.” Hence, every fractional distance we have traveled is, in at least one context, already one “whole.”

The same principle applies to the concepts of certainty, perfection, and absolute. All of those are contextual. By that, I mean that any time we talk rationally of certainty, perfection, and absolute, those are parameters set by a pertinent context. And, within that pertinent context, every one of those can indeed be achieved.

It is a false philosophic presumption that any claim to true knowledge requires infallibility and omniscience. It is the same false philosophic presumption that perfection and absolute are achieved only when not limited to any parameters, so much so that they transcend context. That false presumption can largely be attributed to Plato, who propounded that certainty, perfection, and absolutes could exist only as ideals beyond human capability, with everything observable in human experience necessarily being of inferior stature. In the modern age, Immanuel Kant popularized the presumption that human fallibility precludes certainty and perfection.

Once you toss away the Platonic misconceptions about them, it happens that certainty, absoluteness, and perfection all exist. They exist within their respective proper contexts, and each are defined by that context.

Whether you reach “100 percent” — whether you have a complete unit, as opposed to a fraction of that unit — is determined by the quantity you defined, in the first place, as 100 percent and a complete unit. In his Paradox, Zeno was equivocal about how he defined 100 percent of a particular length. The Paradox’s upshot is that you can never reach 100 percent of any important quantity, but, as we have identified, the half-the-room’s-length you have walked is itself 100 percent of an important quantity.

Zeno’s sloppiness when it comes to his parameters on exactly what quantity is needed to achieve a goal, is mirrored in platitudes about the impossibility of perfection, absoluteness, and certainty. When people say perfection is unachievable, I reply that their interpretation of it is unachievable for the reason that they are talking of a perfection that can be called such only if it transcends all context. Hence, I call this invalid idea one of Platonic perfection, in contrast to what is actually legitimate: contextual perfection. By that, I mean “perfection within a particular practical context” — which is indubitably achievable.

The same applies to absolutes. People say that a principle cannot be absolute because, for it to be absolute, it must apply in any and every context uniformly. That would mean that the principle applies in such a manner that it transcends all context. I call that sort of unachievable absolute the fallacious idea of Platonic absolute. An actual absolute principle is a contextual absolute. It recognizes that a principle applies consistently within its own pertinent context.

Within a particular purview with clearly-defined goals, perfection is attainable. If “perfectly beautiful” and “perfect morally” are defined no more than nebulously, of course those misconceptions of Platonic perfection cannot manifest. As so many people are vague, at best, on what they interpret perfection to be, it is wholly unsurprising that they repeat clichés about how nothing and no one but Jesus is perfect. But suppose your child in school is given an examination of ten math problems. And suppose your child has gotten the correct answer on all ten problems. In that purview, it is entirely legitimate to say that on that exam your child has gotten a score that is perfect.

That every quantity is 100-percent, by the way, is also why people contradict themselves in their proclamation, with implicit certainty — and with the subtext of that this applies as an absolute — that no proclamation should ever be taken as absolutely certain. (Any science-fiction character who shouts, “Only a Sith deals in absolutes!” must, by his own definition, be a Sith.)

The fallacious idea that we have certainty only through infallibility and omniscience, I identify as the fallacious idea of a Platonic certainty. The foil to that is actual certainty, which is contextual certainty. To achieve a particular life-affirming goal — the pertinent context — we need to have a quantity of knowledge that is sufficient to achieve it. Insofar as applying the pertinent knowledge is consistent in achieving the goal satisfactorily, we are indeed rationally certain of that knowledge. Attaining such rational certainty does not require knowing everything there is to know. It requires only knowing enough that is pertinent to the context and scope in question.

Isaac Asimov elsewhere tells Bill Moyers, “That is really the glory of science. That science is tentative, that it is not certain, that it is subject to change.” Note the conflation of science being “subject to change” with science being uncertain. In light of new information, aspects of scientists’ interpretations are properly subject to change and revision. But that does not preclude contextual certainty. The aspects of conclusions which we gained through rational observation, minding pertinent context — and which continue to withstand challenge repeatedly — are indeed certain.

In the future, we may gain some additional knowledge that provides insight into additional facets of, and nuances regarding, whatever it is we are studying and doing. This new knowledge adds to the knowledge we had already acted upon successfully in the past, and it may give us a new perspective whereby we revise aspects of our prior interpretation. But it does not render, as uncertain, the aspects of our old ideas that we had acted upon successfully in the past and which continue to produce the same results.

Every fraction of Quantity C, is itself one-whole of itself, Quantity D. Perhaps we can imagine a quantity of knowledge that consists of All-Knowledge-That-Can-Be-Had-and-Ever-Can-Be-Had — omniscience — and call that Quantity-of-Knowledge C. And the quantity of knowledge we will accumulate in our lifetimes is only a fraction of that. Ours is Quantity-of-Knowledge D. That Quantity-of-Knowledge D is less than C is not sufficient to render Quantity-of-Knowledge D uncertain. That consideration is the same, in principle, as the fact that our indoor stroll measuring 9 feet, though less than 100 percent of the length of our 18-foot-long room, does not mean that our 9-foot stroll is not 100 percent of any quantity.  

Even if, when it comes to what we think we know at present, in the future we will find aspects mistaken or at least in need of further clarification, that consideration still is not enough to render our Quantity-of-Knowledge D uncertain. The aspects of our Quantity-of-Knowledge D that hold up today, and which continue to hold up in the future, are rationally certain. And insofar as the principles within that knowledge apply consistently within the purview and scope of what we are studying and doing, those principles are absolute.

Thus, the fact that every quantity is 100 percent is something that can be applied to our philosophic guidance over everyday life. For a principle to be absolute in any manner is not contingent upon it applying in every context. It need only be consistent in its own proper context, in its own proper scope. The more dissimilar a new context is from the original, the more it may be that the original principle does not apply to the new context. That does not change the absoluteness of the principle to the original context. Likewise, for you to be legitimately certain in an instance is not contingent upon infallibility of thought and reasoning. Nor is it dependent upon having all knowledge of every pedantic nuance, including knowledge of everything that ever can be discovered. You can legitimately call yourself certain in an instance insofar as your proposition of thought reliably demonstrates itself satisfactorily within, once again, the pertinent context and scope.

Know What's Worse Than Insulting Someone in a Political Argument? Government Force Itself

Stuart K. Hayashi

I sent a pro-immigration tweet to the actor Mark R. Pellegrino, who plays Lucifer on the CW Network's Supernatural.

I typed, "When people whine about Mexicans coming to US w/ gov permission slips, plz show them this doctor:" I meant to type: "When people whine about Mexicans coming to US w/o gov permission slips, plz show them this doctor:" (emphasis added).  I was referring to undocumented immigrants coming to the USA without "government permission slips."  My tweet links to this video about Dr. Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa, who came to the USA from Mexico illegally as a migrant farm laborer and eventually became a life-saving, world-renowned brain surgeon.

Pellegrino was generous enough to retweet my tweet, and he added his own caption:  "Hey [Donald] Trump. Suck it."

In reply, someone on Twitter lectured Pellegrino to "grow up" based on his "immature comments" concerning Mr. Trump.

Everything else being equal, I would not mind it if, in general, people switched to political rhetoric that was overall less charged, less accusatory, and less altogether insulting. Nonetheless, I think some perspective is in order.

Many impoverished people come to the United States without visas, escaping from drug cartels and kleptocratic governments, and their sole "crime" is the absence of a visa.  And forcibly deporting those people means sending armed men after them.  In comparison, I think Pellegrino telling Trump to "suck it" is quite minor.

Therefore, here is my response:

Humans Stealing Jobs from Robots

Stuart K. Hayashi

In an article titled "Mercedes Boots Robots from the Production Line," Bloomberg Business reports,

Mercedes-Benz offers the S-Class sedan with a growing array of options such as carbon-fiber trim, heated and cooled cupholders and four types of caps for the tire valves, and the carmaker’s robots can’t keep up. 

With customization key to wooing modern consumers, the flexibility and dexterity of human workers is reclaiming space on Mercedes’s assembly lines. . . . 

“Robots can’t deal with the degree of individualization and the many variants that we have today,” Markus Schaefer, the German automaker’s head of production, said at its factory in Sindelfingen, the anchor of the Daimler AG unit’s global manufacturing network. “We’re saving money and safeguarding our future by employing more people.” . . . 

With manufacturing focused around a skilled crew of workers, Mercedes can shift a production line in a weekend instead of the weeks needed in the past to reprogram robots and shift assembly patterns, Schaefer said. During that downtime, production would be at a standstill.

The robots' union is not pleased.

A Right to Privacy Doesn't Extend to Violent Acts, Including Threats of Violence

Any act of violence -- even in self-defense -- has ramifications for everyone in the community. If X threatens violence against Y, there is probable cause to believe X might also be a violent threat to Z as well -- a violent threat to everyone else.   Violence is inherently a public matter, inherently an externality; it cannot properly be privatized and, to use an economics term, the costs of it cannot be fully "internalized."  By that I mean that if X hits Y,and then Y hits X back, it doesn't mean that Y's retaliation has made them both even.  Y's "private" retaliation does not render this a private matter that can be dropped.  No, this remains a public matter because the violence can still escalate.

Anyone who uses violence -- even in self-defense -- is a possible threat to everyone else, and that is why, even when someone uses violence in self-defense, it is right for police and courts to look into the matter and ascertain whether it was indeed self-defense.

And serious threats of violence -- even if not yet acted upon -- are worthy of police attention, as they create probable cause for members of the community to ascertain that the violent threat might be acted upon.  Moreover, if Q goes around falsely accusing R of making a violent threat toward Q, that counts as an initiation of the use of force, as third parties, mistakenly believing they are exercising retaliatory force in defense of Q, may end up being violent toward R, and this would end up being an initiation of the use of force.

Violence and the threat of it are the greatest threat to anyone's liberty; violent threats are what deny someone the freedom of peaceful action.  Moreover, a right to privacy does not extend to someone threatening violence.  That is, if L seriously threatens violence against her own mother, that is something the public has a right to know about, even if L's mother herself tries to dismiss that as something not to be taken seriously.  Even if L's mother dismisses it, other people around L remain potential victims of L if L does not receive proper treatment from mental health professionals or the law.

If you have been threatened with violence, or if it has already been inflicted upon you, you may be justified in fearing that if you come forward to authorities with this information, that it may put you at risk of being subjected to violent reprisals from the assailant.  For that reason, in the short term it may be rational that you tell but a few people about this circumstance and ask them to keep it secret in the foreseeable future.  However, that can only go so far. There is probable cause for the law to inquire as to whether this alleged assailant may pose a violent threat to parties besides you and therefore, in the long run, the protection of every peaceful person's rights requires that this information ultimately be publicly available.  On that basis, a right to privacy does not extend to any credible accusation that you can level about someone either threatening violence or having committed it.

Employee of Anti-GMO Group Writes Article for 'Time'; Doesn't Disclose Affiliation, Doesn't Want to Be Labeled?

Stuart K. Hayashi

As The Corporate Crime Reporter reports rather approvingly, Carey Gillam -- formerly a writer for Reuters -- is presently the research director of the advocacy group U.S. Right to Know.  U.S. Right to Know (USRTK) presses lawmakers to impose GMO labeling laws.  The idea is that if a food product contains ingredients from cultivars that resulted from transgenics (more conventionally known as genetic modification), the food product must be labeled as such.  At present, the absence of such laws has not prevented consumers from finding non-GMO foods; there are food producers who take the initiative to label their own products, voluntarily, "non-GMO" or "organic."

In any case, Time magazine has republished an article by Carey Gillam that repeats a favorite talking point of anti-GMO groups:  that regulatory agencies like the FDA have been too lax on account of their not finding the chemical herbicide glyphosate to be significantly dangerous.  Glyphosate -- better known by Monsanto Corporation's brand name, RoundUp -- is of special interest to anti-GMO groups because of it being used in conjunction with GMO crops:  corn and soybeans that are engineered to be resistant to this herbicide.  These glyphosate-resistant crops are known as RoundUp Ready crops.

RoundUp Ready crops and RoundUp are intended to be a method of addressing the problem of soil erosion.  A major problem farmers face is that of weeds competing against the crops for survival.  Often, weeds take the nutrients in the soil that were intended for the crops.  The result is that the weeds thrive while the crops die.  For much of the twentieth century, farmers fought the weeds through a method called tillage -- they would run tilling machines through the fields that would root out and destroy the weeds as the crops remain firmly planted in the field.  A major drawback to this is that the tilling machines inadvertently erode the soil of much-needed components, making it more difficult to re-use the fields for future planting.

RoundUp (glyphosate) was invented in the late 1900s as an effort at no-till (or less-tilling) agriculture.  If RoundUp is sprayed on weeds, then the weeds can be killed without as much of a need to till the soil, thereby reducing soil erosion.  The drawback of this method is that the glyphosate was not discriminating:  it would often kill both the weeds and crops.  The solution came when genetic engineers invented glyphosate-resistant corn and soy.  If you grow RoundUp Ready corn or soy and spray your fields with glyphosate, you can kill the weeds and reduce soil erosion simultaneously as the crops remain unharmed.

Anti-GMO activists often allege that glyphosate is a toxic carcinogen.  It is true that glyphosate can cause cancer if one is exposed to an inordinately high dosage of it --say,drinking literally a ton of it in one day.  Microscopic doses of it, though, have not been shown to be dangerous.  Even if, over the past 30 years, there has been an increase in the spraying of glyphosate, it happens that, overall, the present standard spraying of chemicals by farmers has been less toxic and less environmentally hazardous than the methods of the early 1900s that the present spraying has replaced.  The older methods consisted of applying much more toxic substances.  Anti-GMO activists wish to convince the public that glyphosate is significantly more toxic and dangerous than the FDA and most crop specialists have let on, which would mean that consumers and farmers should give preference to non-GMO and organic produce.

In any case, Time published an article by an employee of USRTK implying that the FDA has been too laissez-faire toward glyphosate use.  As I type this, there is no disclosure in the article itself about the author's affiliation to an anti-GMO pressure group.

When weed management specialist Andrew Kniss pointed this out, Carey Gillam replied to him over Twitter, "too tough to follow the link to original article and my bio?"

The scientist Karl Haro von Mogel responded to her, "Most people will not click the link to search for that. Advice: Put your industry funded affiliation at bottom"

This is what I have to say about it.

First, how difficult would it be for Time to put one sentence on the bottom disclosing that the article's author is the research director of the group US Right to Know?

Ah, but if the article had a disclaimer mentioning that its author worked for a group demanding GMO labeling, wouldn't that be . . . labeling?  An anti-GMO writer doesn't want to be labeled?

To throw their own rhetoric back at them: "We have a Right to Know™ when an ostensibly objective news article on GMOs is authored by an employee of an anti-GMO group."

It's about ethics in journalism. -_-  . . . Yes, really. :@

New Hampshire Lawmaker Cites 'Onion'-Style Satire Site for GMO Labeling Bill

Stuart K. Hayashi

In the Newbury Port News, New Hampshire lawmaker Max Abramson has a letter to the editor stating,

A 31-year-old Spanish man, Juan Pedro Ramos, died at Madrid hospital from anaphylaxis after eating some recently developed tomatoes containing fish genes, which provoked a violent and lethal allergic reaction in January of last year. Because these genetically engineered foods are not labeled in the U.S., there is no way of knowing why so many Americans suddenly become sick, end up paralyzed, or even die without any known cause. . . . 

In Concord, I have sponsored House Bill 1674 that would require that these products be labeled in order to guarantee that consumers are able to avoid products that have been genetically altered to produce proteins that are not part of the normal human diet. Readers in New Hampshire are asked to email their legislators and ask them to support this important bill.

That sounds serious.  But as Joanna Lidback and the scientist mem_somerville informed me on Twitter (here and here), the story is fake.  It is from a satirical "fake news" website similar to The Onion and Weekly World News, called World News Daily Report.  It has a disclaimer saying,

All characters appearing in the articles in this website – even those based on real people –  are entirely fictional and any resemblance between them and any persons, living, dead, or undead is purely a miracle.

You can see the fake article here.   It begins, "Doctors of the Carlos III hospital confirmed this morning in a press conference, the first case of human death caused by the ingestion of genetically modified food. Juan Pedro Ramos died from anaphylaxis after eating some recently developed tomatoes containing fish genes, which provoked a violent and lethal allergic reaction."

Snopes confirms the story is fake over here (I learned about that from "intrepid wanders.")

That same World News Daily Report  published "David Rockefeller's Sixth Heart Transplant Successful at Age 99," complete with a spooky/goofy picture of the actually-deceased billionaire. Maybe that can be the inspiration for a health care-related bill?


UPDATE from February 15, 2016.  On State Rep. Max Abramson's Facebook page, the scientist Karl J. Haro von Mogel informed the state representative of his error: "So you are saying that the justification for this bill is 1) A fake news story about fishy tomatoes, and 2) an online forum posting that you cannot find?"

State Rep. Abramson replied directly to Haro von Mogel's comment, but did not directly address the erroneous citation of the fake news story: "No. A lot of people have contacted us personally or by email saying that their health--or their patients' health--has been adversely affected by GMO's."

As I type this update, this is the closest that State Rep. Abramson has come to acknowledging the error: "Correction: The initial story was supposed to be about the woman who was hospitalized for three weeks because of exposure to GMO corn."

WHAT?!!!!!  That's it???????

Then State Rep. Abramson's Facebook page started deriding Rick Berman, a lobbyist for the fast-food and beverage industries and someone involved with the Center for the Consumer Freedom, implying that Rick Berman's circle is trying to discredit him.  To my knowledge, Rick Berman's organizations are not related to State Rep. Abramson's letter to the editor citing a satirical, fake news story.

By the way, State Rep. Abramson's official Facebook page says the man is a "libertarian" for "smaller government" and "local control." How "small government" is it to force vendors that sell GMO foods to have labels? If there is such high demand for foods that are non-GMO that people are willing to choose non-GMO foods over GMO foods, then food vendors can voluntarily choose to label their own products as "non-GMO" or "organic."


UPDATE from February 17, 2016 (since this particular post is generating much more traffic than what this blog usually gets):  This particular blog post relates to biology; another important science is abnormal psychology.  If you are interested in the latter, you can read a spine-chilling memoir relating to abnormal psychology, "Photoshopped to Resemble a Corpse" (the true story comes with a "trigger warning":  it makes reference to childhood abuse and other harrowing, traumatic phenomena).


LATER UPDATE from February 17, 2016 (10:17 p.m. Hawaii Time):  Time magazine published an article on a GMO-related technology, the chemical herbicide glyphosate, without disclosing that the article's author is the research director of the anti-GMO pressure group U.S. Right to Know.  When the weed management specialist Andrew Kniss pointed out that this potential conflict of interest was not disclosed by Time, the author gave a reply conveying that she did not think this was such a big deal.  Does this mean an employee of a group that demands that GMOs be labeled does not want her potential conflict of interest to be . . . labeled?  Readers have a right to know!  I have a separate blog post about that here.

A Critical Eye on the Threat Narrative Claiming Brown-Skinned Immigrant Men Just Want to Rape White Women

Stuart K. Hayashi

...they're not sending you their best. ... They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems [to] us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

Those are Donald Trump's words from June 2015 about Mexican immigrants.  But the same accusations were applied to Chinese immigrants in the late 1800s.  They were accused of being criminals. They were accused of bringing in drugs -- specifically, opium. And they were called rapists.

Many right-wingers who agitate for the curtailing of immigration repeat a threat narrative.  They claim that brown-skinned immigrant men have caused an epidemic of raping (white) women in northern Europe and that, if immigration is not curbed, this trend will manifest in Canada and the United States as well.

That was actually a common accusation leveled against Chinese men in the 1800s. You can find many racist newspaper cartoons online from the period that say that the sinister Chinaman just wants to lure white women into his opium den. Then, supposedly, he will get her doped up on opium and ravish her against her will. Then, as they do presently, immigration's critics implied that that's what immigration was for. 

From Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper 12 May 1883

I suppose the common rejoinder would be:

OK, maybe it was true, back then, that people were wrong to say Chinese men wanted to enter the USA just to rape white women. But, in our day and age, there are brown-skinned men from a genuinely misogynistic rape culture coming into Western Europe, Canada, and the United States. Why, everyone knows that mass migration from north Africa has made Sweden into the rape capital of the world!

I think that when people say Sweden is the rape capital, that is misleading, because Sweden records rape differently than other countries (even other First-World countries) do. In most countries, if a man kidnapped a woman and raped her every day of the year, crime statistics would list that as a single record of rape. By contrast, Sweden would make 365 separate records of rape for that. That's the reason why Sweden counts more rapes than other countries; it's not necessarily because foreign-born men in Sweden have gone on a raping spree. Comparisons of the rape rate in Sweden versus other countries are not very reliable because they are applying different standards.

The New Year's incidents in Germany and Sweden definitely have to be taken seriously and the perpetrators must be punished. I do think people should be cautioned against the assumption that foreigners all just want to go around raping white women, or that the rape rate would necessarily drop if immigration were curtailed.

Here is a thought experiment: Illiberal, misogynistic Islamists commit both rape and murder. Therefore, if rapacious, murderous Islamists coming to Western Europe increases the rape rate, it would follow that they would increase the murder rate as well (committing honor killings, etc.). The murder rate is a reliable proxy for the rape rate in this context. Even if they are not as stigmatized today as they were in the 1960s, to a large extent rape victims are still stigmatized and are therefore reluctant to come forward. This is why rape victims often tacitly participate in covering up that they were raped (I even know personally of instances of this, including possible instances in northern Europe). But murder is not so easily covered up. Were it the case that Muslims coming into Sweden were significantly increasing the rape rate, it would follow that they would significantly increase the murder rate as well, and we have yet to see that.


As he has in other matters, Frederick Douglass provides wise words here:

There are such things in the world as human rights. They rest upon no conventional foundation, but are external, universal, and indestructible. Among these, is the right of locomotion; the right of migration; the right which belongs to no particular race, but belongs alike to all and to all alike. It is the right you assert by staying here, and your fathers asserted by coming here. It is this great right that I assert for the Chinese and Japanese, and for all other varieties of men equally with yourselves, now and forever. I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity, and when there is a supposed conflict between human and national rights, it is safe to go to the side of humanity….

Not the least among the arguments whose consideration should dispose to welcome among us the peoples of all countries, nationalities and color, is the fact that all races and varieties of men are improvable.

He was right then as he is now.

The Free-Market Position Is to Support Open Immigration Even If There's a Welfare State

Stuart K. Hayashi

It's February 2, 2016 -- the 111-year anniversary of the birth of Ayn Rand.

And remember that we have a tradition in the United States.  Today, if a politician crawls out of his hole and sees his shadow, we will have 60 more years of federal farm subsidies.

Anyhow, I defend open immigration.

Many people who claim to support the free market proclaim the following, "If there were no welfare state, I would be on board with open immigration. But the fact is, we do have a welfare state, and therefore there must be immigration controls. If not for those controls, immigrants will come to our country and drain government coffers."

In the videos below, I explain why a principled adherence to free enterprise leads to supporting a policy of open immigration even when the welfare state remains in place.

The first video is only 2 hours and 22 minutes long.



I forgot to include an important point in the first video, and therefore I did this 7-minute follow-up:

Clarifying Jeff Jacoby's Misrepresentation of Ayn Rand's Position on Charity

Stuart K. Hayashi

I have long admired Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe as a scrupulous columnist; I have often recommended his columns, particularly his standing up for open immigration against the rest of the political Right.

Unfortunately, he has come out with a column on voluntary charity and philanthropy which grossly misrepresents Ayn Rand's view on this topic.  While many of the figures on American generosity are interesting, the inaccurate impression given of Rand taints this work.

For those raised to regard charitable giving as indispensable to meaningful lives and healthy societies, it can come as a jolt to discover not just that some people give little or nothing to charity, but that there are those who actually disparage charitable giving itself. In a 1964 interview, Ayn Rand said that her views on charity were “very simple: I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty.” John Steinbeck, whose political views were as far to the left as Rand’s were to the right, also disdained philanthropy. “Giving is a selfish pleasure, and in many cases is a downright destructive and evil thing,” he railed.

Rationalizations for not donating certainly aren’t hard to find.

One would glean from those paragraphs that Rand was one to "disparage charitable giving itself."

The quotation of Rand omitted additional sentences clarifying Rand's position.  Here is a more complete version of the exchange between Ayn Rand and the author Alvin Toffler (who would later go on to write many bestsellers of his own, such as Future Shock) for Playboy magazine:

Toffler: "Do you consider wealthy businessmen like the Fords and the Rockefellers immoral because they use their wealth to support charity?" 

Rand: "No. That is their privilege, if they want to. My views on charity are very simple. I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty. There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them. I regard charity as a marginal issue. What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue." 

Toffler: "What is the place of compassion in your philosophical system?" 

 Rand: "I regard compassion as proper only toward those who are innocent victims, but not toward those who are morally guilty. If one feels compassion for the victims of a concentration camp, one cannot feel it for the torturers. If one does feel compassion for the torturers, it is an act of moral treason toward the victims."

Free-marketers often talk about how, prior to the New Deal, voluntary charity proliferated in the United States in the form of mutual-aid societies.  The idea was that many poor people (usually immigrants) would form organizations together. If one member of the mutual aid society fell on especially hard times, other members would help out that person.  You might be interested to learn that when she lived in California in her twenties, Ayn Rand was a member of a mutual aid society:  the Hollywood Studio Club, which was started by the YWCA.

People with only a straw-man understanding of Rand's philosophy might assume that the young Rand joining a mutual aid society was hypocrisy on her part. For those who recognize that Rand had no quibble with voluntary charity -- which she regarded not as a duty, but as benevolent generosity -- there is no conflict in the young Rand's actions on this matter with respect to her later writings.

Charles Murray's Disingenuous Denial About Advocating Restriction of Immigration Based on IQ or Race

Stuart K. Hayashi


With the late Richard J. Herrnstein, Charles Murray co-authored The Bell Curve.  To my astonishment, some of my fellow Objectivists have arbitrarily denied to me that the book provides a racist and eugenicist argument.  It takes some mental contortions for someone who has read the book to deny its eugenicism, but I can understand how such a rationalization can be made.  The book does not say outright, "Blacks and Hispanics are inferior."  However, the book offers several premises that it purports to prove through rather turgid figures and terminology.  Then, based on those premises, the reader is intended to deduce specific conclusions.  One who follows the deductive chain of reasoning can discern that the book's conclusion does advocate what is, in practice, governmental discrimination against specific people based on their race.  The deductive chain of reasoning is as follows.

1. IQ is genetically inheritable -- between 40 percent and 80 percent.
2. IQ is fixed and congenital -- environmental conditioning and choices cannot reliably change it over time.  [A pedantic reply is offered to the Flynn Effect.]
3. IQ is the main predictor of competency -- that is, people's successes or failures in life.  High IQ directly correlates with high economic productivity.  IQ is inversely proportional to criminality -- lower-IQ people are prone to violent criminality.
4. IQ tests show disparities in races.  Jews and Asians receive the highest IQ scores.  In the middle are most whites.  Lowest IQ scorers are, respectively, Hispanics and then Africans. [This is Stuart's paraphrasing of the book's arguments.]

If you follow the deductive chain of reasoning, what conclusion do the authors expect you, as the reader, to deduce?  The authors expect you to deduce that if blacks and Hispanics have low IQs, and if IQs are fixed over time, and if IQ numbers are congenital determinants of economic productivity or violent criminality, then:

5. The implicit, deductive conclusion of the book: blacks and Hispanics, in aggregate, are doomed to be less economically productive and more criminally violent than other ethnic groups. [This is Stuart's paraphrasing of the book's arguments.]

Then the book puts forth [my phrasing, not the book's]:

6. Immigration policy should be determined by IQ.  The authors recommend that the system of family visas be replaced with a system where those with higher IQs get into the USA more easily and those with lower IQs face more hurdles.  This is not a complete replacement, though, merely a re-orienting, orienting away from the family-visa system and orienting toward an IQ-number-based system. [This is Stuart's paraphrasing of the book's arguments.]

What is the deductive conclusion to draw from this?

7. If points 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6 are true -- if the authors recommend that lower-IQ people be impeded by Government Force from entering the USA, and blacks and Hispanics have lower IQs than other groups, then, in practice, implementation of the policy will necessarily result in an immigration system that becomes more implicitly discriminatory against black immigrants and Hispanic immigrants.  [This is Stuart's paraphrasing of the book's arguments.]

Concerning his protege Jason Richwine -- who makes similar rationalizations about IQ/Race Eugenics -- Charles Murray writes in National Review,

On Wednesday, the Washington Post revealed that Richwine’s 2009 Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard’s Kennedy School had said that, on average, Latinos have lower IQs than do non-Latino white Americans and the nation should consider incorporating IQ into immigration decisions. . . I had disagreements then and now about his policy recommendations, but not about the empirical accuracy of his research or the scholarly integrity of the interpretations with which I disagreed [emphasis added].

Really?  Richwine's policy recommendation, in Charles Murray's phrasing, is that "nations should consider incorporating IQ into immigration decisions."  If they incorporate IQ into those decisions, and if they believe "Latinos have lower IQs than do non-native Latino white Americans," the result will be an immigration policy that does even more to exclude Latino immigration.    Then Murray says, "I had disagreements then and now about his policy recommendations..." meaning Murray is saying he does not agree with an immigration policy that would block immigrants with supposedly lower IQs, which would, in practice, result in immigration policy being even more stubborn in blocking Latino immigration.


What do Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein themselves say on this in The Bell Curve?  This is from page 549:

...we believe the main purpose of immigration law is to serve America's interests [America meaning Americans already in the USA; not those trying to get in --S.H.].  It should be among the goals of public policy to shift the flow of immigrants away from those admitted under the nepotistic rules (which broadly encourages the reunification of relatives) [these are family visas --S.H.]and toward those admitted under competency rules [meaning higher-IQ groups are favored and lower-IQ groups are disfavored; one who agrees with The Bell Curve about specific races being associated with low IQs would deduce that competency rules would, in practice, result in fewer members of specific races entering the USA --S.H.] -- not to the total exclusion of nepotistic and humanitarian criteria but a shift. [Emphasis added.]

The Bell Curve argues that IQ is what determines competency, and some races outrank others in terms of IQ -- meaning some races outrank others in terms of competency.  Insofar as Jason Richwine's Ph.D. dissertation concludes that IQ should be incorporated into the federal government's decisions on who enters the USA and who does not, The Bell Curve is making essentially the same policy recommendation.  Charles Murray's denial does not make sense.

Thomas Sowell's Double Standard Regarding Mexican Workers and the 'Race to the Bottom' Argument

Stuart K. Hayashi


This is a re-post of a section a much longer post found here.


There is an argument against open immigration that doubles as an argument against free international trade.  First we hear that if we allow open immigration, that is bad because big companies will choose to hire Mexicans within U.S. borders; they will hire the Mexicans for low wages and leave native-born Americans without work.  Secondly, we hear that if we allow free international trade, that is bad because big companies will choose to hire Mexicans still in Mexico; they will hire the Mexicans for low wages and leave native-born Americans without work.  Both accusations stress that big companies will choose to hire Mexicans for low wages and leave native-born Americans without work; the only difference between the two allegations is that in one, the Mexicans are still in Mexico whereas, in the other, the Mexicans are in the USA.

Thomas Sowell shows a double standard here.  He says that in the case of free international trade, there is nothing to fear when it comes to the idea that big companies will hire Mexicans in Mexico for low wages.  In his book Basic Economics (see page 218 here), Sowell correctly states,

As for jobs, before the free-trade agreement was passed, there were dire predictions of a "giant sucking sound" as jobs would be sucked out of the United States to Mexico and other countries with lower wage rates after the free-trade agreement went into effect.  In reality, the number of [native-born] American jobs increased after the agreement and the unemployment rate in the United States fell over the next seven years from more than seven percent down to four percent, the lowest level seen in decades.  . . . What happens when a given country, in isolation, becomes more prosperous?  It tends to buy more because it has more to buy with.  And what happens when it buys more?  There are more jobs created for workers producing the additional goods and services.

That argument is correct.  But, bizarrely, Sowell seems not to notice that it is applicable when native-born Americans reduce their own costs by hiring Mexican immigrants (presently inside the USA!) for low wages.  He makes a frighteningly protectionist argument against allowing U.S. firms to hire Mexican immigrants for low wages:

How often have we heard that illegal immigrants "take jobs that Americans will not do"? What is missing in this argument is what is crucial in any economic argument: price.

Americans will not take many jobs at their current pay levels -- and those pay levels will not rise so long as poverty-stricken immigrants are willing to take those jobs.

If Mexican journalists were flooding into the United States and taking jobs as reporters and editors at half the pay being earned by American reporters and editors, maybe people in the media would understand why the argument about "taking jobs that Americans don't want" is such nonsense.

This is odd, because the same "cost savings" argument that Sowell used to defend the hiring of low-wage Mexicans in Mexico equally applies to the hiring of low-wage Mexicans in the USA.

First, let's observe how Sowell's own retort against hiring low-wage Mexicans in the USA can also be used against his defense of hiring low-wage Mexicans in Mexico.

How often have we heard that, thanks to the free-agreements that Sowell supports, Mexicans in Mexico and Indians in India "take jobs from Americans"?  What is missing from Sowell's argument is what is crucial in any economic argument: price.

Americans will not take many jobs at their current price levels -- and those pay levels will not rise as long as poverty-stricken Mexicans in Mexico are willing to take those jobs.

If U.S. firms were outsourcing information-technology jobs to Mexico and India, and those Mexicans and Indians were earning half the pay that would be expected by American information-technology workers, maybe economists would understand why it's nonsense to let U.S. firms outsource information-technology jobs abroad.

The same defense that Sowell provides to hiring low-wage Mexicans in Mexico applies to hiring low-wage Mexicans in the USA.

Sowell says this is the reason why it's OK if U.S. firms can hire Mexicans in Mexico for low wages, rather than giving those jobs to native-born Americans:  when those U.S. firms save money by hiring Mexicans in Mexico for low wages, they benefit from cost savings. It's not as if the U.S. firms will just sit on that money.  All money is spent in the long run:  either it is spent for immediate needs or it is saved for a future expenditure.  Those U.S. firms then use that cost savings to invest in new economic activities, or they spend it for immediate use.  Either form of expenditure produces demand for more goods and services.  The increase in demand for more goods and services sends a signal to would-be entrepreneurs that they will profit by supplying such goods and services.  These would-be entrepreneurs then hire native-born Americans.  True, when the USA and Mexico trade freely, this expands the market so that there is an increased supply of would-be employees.  But this is balanced out by a commensurate increase in demand for would-be employees.  That is why, everything else being equal, there is not an increase in unemployment.

Now observe how this argument applies to the labor market within U.S. borders.  When immigrants come to the USA and work for low wages, they increase the supply of available would-be employees.  However, these same immigrants must also consume goods and services.  Thus, the presence of these immigrants also increases consumer demand for goods and services.  And this increase in consumer demand signals to would-be entrepreneurs (native-born and immigrant alike) that they can profit by supplying such goods and services.  These would-be entrepreneurs then hire native-born Americans to assist them in that enterprise.

This is the reason why I say it's OK if U.S. firms can hire Mexicans in the USA for low wages, rather than giving those jobs to native-born Americans:  when those U.S. firms save money by hiring Mexicans in Mexico for low wages, they realize cost savings. It's not as if the U.S. firms will just sit on that money.

All money is spent in the long run:  either it is spent for immediate needs or it is saved for a future expenditure.  Those U.S. firms then use that cost savings to invest in new economic activities, or they spend it for immediate use.  Either form of expenditure produces demand for more goods and services.   The immigrant population earning the low wages also produce consumer demand for such goods and services. The increase in demand for more goods and services sends a signal to would-be entrepreneurs that they will profit by supplying such goods and services. These would-be entrepreneurs then hire native-born Americans.

True, when native-born Americans and illegal aliens trade freely, this expands the market so that there is an increased supply of would-be employees.  But this is balanced out by a commensurate increase in demand for would-be employees.  That is why, everything else being equal, there is not an increase in unemployment.

The same principle also applies to wages.  It explains why, when U.S. firms save money by hiring people for allegedly low wages, that does not necessarily bid down the average wage in the long run.

On September 4, 2017, I changed the word "incur" to "benefit from," and I replaced the old infographic about Say's Law with an updated one citing Orn B. Bodvarsson's team of economists.

Ayn Rand Got Social Security? Welfare State As a Prison Manipulating You to Accept It

A common rationalization for the welfare state is that even Ayn Rand had to accept Social Security payments. This is intended to discredit her and all other critics of the welfare state. Indeed, I regularly attend a taxpayer-funded city library. I drive on government roads that taxes pay for. Upon retirement, I intend to collect Social(ist In)Security money. We are then told that if not for the welfare state, we critics of the welfare state would be starving, homeless, and naked. I am told that if we had a liberal republican Night Watchman State without taxpayer funding for social services, I would have no public library for reading and no roads to drive on.   Therefore, it is said, we free-marketers are ingrates.

That entire argument is based on a fallacy. The reason why we free-marketers use taxpayer-funded government services is that the welfare state has manipulated the system in such a way that privately funded alternatives (including private charity) become less readily available -- so much so that, to survive, we free-marketers resort to using the government monopolies.  It does not follow that if the welfare state were replaced with a liberal republican Night Watchman State, there would be no consensually-funded public library for me to attend.

Here I am in a YouTube video explaining this.




And by the way, Happy Stu Year! ^_^
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Clarification of what I said about Noam Chomsky's "libertarian socialism":  It is claimed that what Chomsky wants, in the long run, is a system of limited government, wherein people live on collectivist communes voluntarily, not forced to do so by the State.  In the present, though, Chomsky does advocate expansions of government power, including his praise for the graduated income tax.  I think Chomsky reconciles the two positions as Karl Marx did:  Like Marx, Chomsky would prefer that the State forcibly establish a collectivist lifestyle in which people selflessly toil for the collective community.  As Marx said, it is only after people become accustomed to this collectivist lifestyle that the State can be allowed to wither away.

Also, when I referred to the politician who was the godfather of William Ewart Gladstone, I mistakenly referred to the man as "Thomas Ewart."  The man's name was William Ewart -- William Ewart Gladstone was named after him.

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UPDATE from Tuesday, February 2, 2016: I am told that when people throw around that accusation about Ayn Rand, I should give them this link.

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UPDATE from Friday, February 6, 2016:

I have seen this cartoon circulating on Facebook.

That is intended to ridicule critics of socialism.  Let us examine its points.

Roads. Back in the early 1800s, the USA had an impressive system of roads whose construction and maintenance relied on consensual funding. These consensually funded tunrpikes extended thousands of miles and connected entire cities to one another, such as from Lancaster to Philadelphia and back. These roads were owned and constructed by merchants who wished to make their wares more accessible to customers from outside their neighborhoods. When you look at the books of the road companies alone, it appears the return on investment was only 2 percent. But when you look at the revenues and profits of the other businesses owned by the road companies' owners -- when you look at how much money they were making both before and after the roads were completed and in operation -- the return on investment is greater. What happened, though, is that these merchants wanted to rent-seek: if they could persuade the government to tax everyone to finance roads, that would reduce the costs of the merchants relying on roads. When taxes funded the construction and maintenance of roads, that disincentvized parties to build and maintain roads through consensual funding, as they would "pay double." That is the reason why roads were socialized in the USA.  It is not because there would be no roads if not for the State taxing people to finance their construction and maintenance.

Social(ist In)Security. If not for this system taking money out of our paychecks, we millennials could keep our own money to save for our own retirements.

Veterans' Administration (VA). Have the news headlines over the past three years shown you that the VA has made health care readily accessible for veterans?

GI Bill. That was one of the first programs where the government provided prospective students with capital for funding their higher education. And that's what actually created the present mess with higher education. The more the State helps pay for people's university educations, the more that drives up demand for higher education. That's why tuitions have gone up and millennials are burdened with student debt. And making university education "free" will not reduce those costs. The only way for tuition to go down in the long run is for demand to go down.

40-Hour Workweek. The reason why people enjoy a higher living standard today even as they have shorter working hours is that every input of one hour's worth of human labor has gained in productivity. That actually has to do with machinery and technology making economic production more efficient. For that, we have profit-driven inventors and profit-driven engineers to thank, not labor unions attempting to restrict the output of laborers.


UPDATE from Sunday, March 13, 2016:

Scott Hampton made this meme:

Anarchist Stefan Molyneux and His 'Freedomain Radio' Program Going in a Disturbing Eugenicist/Racial Separatist Direction

There is a rather popular, Murray Rothbard-influenced, Canada-based anarchist podcaster named Stefan Molyneux. This man -- the founder of a series of podcasts called Freedomain Radio (FDR) -- was popular enough to have been interviewed twice on The Joe Rogan Experience. The second time around, though, Rogan caught Molyneux telling several lies, and, since then, Rogan has expressed strong reservations about Mr. Molyneux's ideology and persuasion techniques. Still, Molyneux remains quite influential.

I had already been troubled by Molyneux since 2007. In many of his podcasts, he would be quick to manipulate his callers, attempting to get them to re-interpret relatively minor slights on the parts of their parents as abuse. He would then urge, with the utmost seriousness, that they disown their parents and siblings.

That remains a concern for me, but I want to address something else. Molyneux increasingly calls for separation among races and promotes the eugenicist ideas of Richard Herrnstein's (1) that IQ is the main determinant of people's productivity or violent tendencies, (2) that genetics, including racial background, is a significant factor influencing IQ, and therefore (3) one's race-related genetic background influences the degree to which someone is economically productive or has violent criminal tendencies. This argument is used by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in The Bell Curve to rationalize new restrictions on immigration. It is the old, early-twentieth-century eugenics in a new guise. And Molyneux is advancing this.

At the 0:01:26 mark of his YouTube video "The Death of Europe | European Migrant Crisis," Molyneux asserts,

Looking at human beings as one species is not biologically valid. We are a variety of subspecies -- politically, definitely ethnically, sometimes gender, in terms of IQ, in terms of culture. These produce differences that are physical but hard to remediate [remedy?] as you get older. So we are a cluster of genetics getting ready to reproduce their own particular genetics.

Throughout this blog post, the boldface is emphases I have added.

At the 0:22:47 mark of the same video, he says,

And all of this [saving Europe from destruction] requires that the IQ can be raised. The [average] IQ of a lot of these countries [that Muslim immigrants are from] is 85. That is a full standard deviation below the [average] IQ of Europe. Now, if there's any genetic component to that, and I believe that there is -- nobody knows for sure; it's just a belief, but it's a belief with quite a bit of data and we're just about to put out an interview with Dr. Jason Richwine about this -- but if there's any genetic components, or if the culture is so insular that it's equivalent to genetics in the transmission of low intelligence, then you cannot run a high-IQ society with low-IQ people. [ . . . ]

Now, if there are genetic components to the low IQ of the people coming in [to the West, from non-Western countries], I will tell you exactly what's going to happen, and it's really obvious.  And if it is genetic or equivalent to genetic -- their low IQ -- I can tell you exactly what's going to happen:  they're gonna fail.  These immigrants are going to fail, and they're not gonna just fail a little bit; they're gonna fail hard.  You are importing a radicalized, low-IQ population into a high-IQ society, and capitalism pays for intelligence. That's what it does; you get paid for your intelligence. And so you are importing a huge bunch of people into Europe, who are going to fail. They're not staying on welfare because they're lazy; they're not. That's like saying somebody with an IQ of 80 hasn't applied to graduate school because they're [sic] lazy.  No!  They're doing what is economically the best option for them. . . . But you are importing a gene set that is incompatible with success in a free-market economy. Now, because no one can talk about IQ and no one can talk about any potential genetic relationship between ethnic communities and IQ, what that means is that the only way that anyone will ever explain the failures of these Africans in European society -- you know as well as I do -- how is anyone going to explain that? . . . [Mockingly, here:]  White racism.

Near the end of his video, "The Impending Collapse of Western Civilization," Molyneux touts racial separatism as a solution to what he judges to be the self-destruction of the welfare state.

From the 0:32:45 mark:

When you have a largely homogeneous society -- right, let's say Haiti; Haiti has a lot of blacks and so on, right? -- if there's a big change in society, say, Haiti runs out of money, or, as you said, right, New Zealand ran out of money [some joke about The Hobbit and 'Peter Jackson money bombs'] -- if you have a largely ethnically homogeneous society, when the shit hits the wall an people gotta change, there isn't really that much in-fighting. There's a sense of, 'OK, we've all got to pull together. We all kind of have the same color eyes and there's no point turning on each other, because we all kind of got into this together, and so we've got to pull together to get out of it together.'; When you have an ethnically homogeneous society, when the shit hits the wall, you don't dissolve into massive race-baiting wars, which is a problem that happens because skills and abilities have not been distributed evenly by Mother Nature among various ethnicities, and what that means is that when the shit hits the wall, it hits some ethnicities a lot harder than others, you get endless screams of 'racism!';. This is one fundamental reason why America is having a hard time solving these problems. If you cut spending, which [racial] community is it going to hit the hardest? Hint: it's not Korean. If you cut spending in America, it's the black community it will hit the hardest.

The 0:35:05 mark:

This is another reason why multi-ethnic societies is a problem. It wouldn't be as much of a problem if all ethnicities acted the same, roughly. . . . The Germans came over, the Irish came over, and they kind of ended up acting pretty much the same after a certain amount of time -- a generation or two. But the problem is that among the blacks and the Hispanics, they don't end up acting the same as the white population or the Asian population, and the white population doesn't even act as well as the Asian population in terms of murder rates and income and unemployment and so on and single motherhood and family stability and so on. So we all need to turn Japanese; that's my first point. [Joke.] My second point is that when the shit hits the wall and the government runs out of money, it doesn't end up affecting ethnicites in the same way.

The 0:37:17 mark:

Because you've got the Racist-in-Chief [President Obama] currently manning the helm, and the media, of course, compliant, and willing to scream 'racist' at anyone who points out basic fact-based differences between ethnicities, you've got a problem. You can't deal with the situation until Obama's out, or until people understand ethnicities in America and all around the world tend to act differently collectively -- individuals are always different -- but collectively ethnicities around the world tend to act differently. They tend to have different incomes, they have different rates of marital stability, they have different rates of criminality, they tend to have different rates of accumulations of assets, they have different levels of education. Go on and on and on. Until people accept that and say, "OK, if we cut spending, government spending, it's going to affect the black community the worst, it's going to affect the Hispanic community the second worst, it's going to affect the white community the third worst, and I think Asians will heave up a giant sigh of relief at not being taxed with a giant suction hole through the butt'; Until these facts are either dealt with, or until people give up race-baiting -- I'm not sure which one I consider more likely -- trying to deal with these problems is a real challenge. And because you have a Race-Baiter-in-Chief in charge of the White House, the Republicans, I think, have been very loathe to cut spending, because it will hit the black community and you've got this giant klaxon who will amplify it through the mainstream media to the point where society will probably hit a revolution.

I am familiar with the argument that people have an easier time getting along when they're all the same ethnicity; I think there might be an empirical basis for that descriptive evaluation. What worries me, though, is Molyneux repeatedly conveying that as long as there's a welfare state, different ethnicities pretty much should just give up trying to live together. And when he says human beings are not all one species, that isn't him being facetious; that part is intended to be taken seriously.

There is no delicate way to put this: the degree to which people follow and transmit Molyneux's race rhetoric is the degree to which they imperil Western society.



UPDATE from April 21, 2017:  Upon further gathering of data, I retract part of the above sentence, the part following the semicolon: "I am familiar with the argument that people have an easier time getting along when they're all the same ethnicity; I think there might be an empirical basis for that descriptive evaluation" (emphasis added).  As I have written in the newer post over here, Patrick Sturgis and his team have found that, adjusting for financial deprivation and everything else being equal, an increase in ethnic diversity in a neighborhood does not contribute to a loss of trust among that neighborhood's denizens. This whole time, Robert D. Putnam and Frank Salter were wrong to proclaim that ethnic diversity causes social turmoil -- and so was Molyneux in citing them to advance his agenda.