Thursday, August 11, 2022
Alex Jones and the Lie Economy
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/08/10/alex-jones-and-the-lie-economy-00050731
To describe Jones as a Lie Economy worker is not to declare false everything he says and broadcasts. Not even his imagination veers to that polar extreme. But a review of his greatest hits attest to the low truth-value of many of his comments. He has broadcasted warnings about a government weapon being used against Americans. In addition to calling the Sandy Hook massacre a staged event that employed actors, he called Robert Mueller a demon and pedophile, said John McCain was the real leader of the Democratic Party, accused the government of the 9/11 attacks, spread the bogus “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, and claimed the Pentagon has devised perfumes that make men gay to prevent them from procreating.
An Informer Told the FBI What Docs Trump Was Hiding, and Where
https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-informer-told-fbi-what-docs-trump-was-hiding-where-1732283
Both senior government officials say the raid was scheduled with no political motive, the FBI solely intent on recovering highly classified documents that were illegally removed from the White House. Preparations to conduct such an operation began weeks ago, but in planning the date and time, the FBI Miami Field Office and Washington headquarters were focused on the former president's scheduled return to Florida from his residences in New York and New Jersey.
"They were seeking to avoid any media circus," says the second source, a senior intelligence official who was briefed on the investigation and the operation. "So even though everything made sense bureaucratically and the FBI feared that the documents might be destroyed, they also created the very firestorm they sought to avoid, in ignoring the fallout."
Team Trump says it’ll keep Mar-a-Lago search warrant under wraps
Remember, Republicans have spent the last couple of days working from a certain assumption: Federal law enforcement, they’ve claimed, “raided” the home of a former president as part of an outrageous abuse of power. Team Trump could theoretically bolster those assumptions by releasing the search warrant that was executed, shedding light on the investigation and its direction.
If the basis for the warrant were flimsy, disclosing it would prove Republicans right. If the rationale for the search lacked merit, releasing the warrant would help on this front, too.
It was against this backdrop that observers from the left and the right encouraged Team Trump to simply make the voluntary disclosure, bringing key facts into the light.
All of which led to, “No, we’re not releasing a copy of the warrant.”
It’s the sort of thing that should, at least in theory, give Republicans scrambling to defend the former president pause.
The Justice Department is in a no win situation as Trump's fury rages
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/08/11/politics/justice-department-trump-fury-analysis/index.html
And Trump, after all, could publish the search warrant himself if he wanted. The fact that he has failed to do so and the increasingly unhinged tone of his attacks on the Justice Department are only deepening the impression he has something to hide. As is the fact that he, and not the FBI or Justice Department, broke news of the search in a transparent attempt to set a media narrative that he had been unfairly treated.
Wednesday, August 10, 2022
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Determinism and Free Will - nonsense
https://www.cardozoacademy.org/thoughtstoponder/determinism-and-free-will-ttp-258/
Those who study these narratives very carefully will realize, however, that the midrash was not obliged to give this interpretation. It could have allowed for an explanation which would be much more in line with the idea of free will and would be easier on God. But it did not. It took the difficult road, to emphasize the paradox of free will versus determinism, and it dared to accuse God of a deliberate and false accusation against man.
Freewill vs Determinism
https://www.simplypsychology.org/freewill-determinism.html
Hard determinism sees free will as an illusion and believes that every event and action has a cause.
Behaviorists are strong believers in hard determinism. Their most forthright and articulate spokesman has been B. F. Skinner. Concepts like “free will” and “motivation” are dismissed as illusions that disguise the real causes of human behavior.
In Skinner’s scheme of things the person who commits a crime has no real choice. (S)he is propelled in this direction by environmental circumstances and a personal history, which makes breaking the law natural and inevitable.
Rav Wolbe: Religion has replaced sex as taboo
This is my translation of an excerpt (pp 72-73) from Rav Wolbe's essay on Religion and Psychiatry that I recently posted
========================================
Frankel quotes the Yale University psychiatrist, F. C.
Redlich, “Psychodynamic psychiatry threatens the strict religious dogmas. It
seems to do this by its implicit values rather than by explicit statement.”
Frankel added the following comment after attending a conference of
psychiatrists in New York. “It is almost impossible to find in New York
psycho-analysts who don’t have serious doubts about the mental health of their
clients - if after completing their psychoanalytic treatment they are still actively
religious.” If this observation is in fact accurate, perhaps it is truly time
to acknowledge that there is absolutely no necessary contradiction between the
Jewish conceptualization of man and that of psychiatry. Perhaps the two views even
complement each other. I am going to allow myself to be sarcastic for a moment
and to say, After seeing the elevated picture of man as the beloved friend –
how can one be satisfied with the picture of man as an intelligent monkey with
the addition of a subconscious mind and a bit of sublimation?” There is to this
matter an additional aspect. Psycho-analysis made a major contribution by
revealing the mechanism of repression i.e., repression of the libido. With the
passage of the years the analytic concepts such as libido and repression have
in my opinion – become very popular. While permissiveness is not implicit in
psycho-analysis, nevertheless the popularization of psycho-analysis has caused
it. That is because the masses have found justification in it for
permissiveness. Perhaps they have even found guidance to behavior which is very
free concerning sexual issues. Consequently – repression of the libido has
become uncommon. Today there is no
repression of sex – but there is repression of religious feelings. That is what
Frankel has written. He quotes Gordon Allport, “Perhaps there has been an
exchange - during the course of the last
50 years - between the nature of religion and sexuality: Today psychologists
write without any inhibition- such as
Freud or Kinsey – regarding the passions of man. However they blush and keep
quiet the moment the conversation comes to religious yearnings.
Psychiatry in Crisis! Mental Health Director Rejects Psychiatric “Bible” and Replaces With… Nothing
Scientific American What is mental illness? Schizophrenia? Autism? Bipolar disorder?
Depression? Since the 1950s, the profession of psychiatry has attempted
to provide definitive answers to these questions in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Often called The Bible of psychiatry, the DSM serves as the ultimate authority for diagnosis, treatment and insurance coverage of mental illness.
Now, in a move sure to rock psychiatry, psychology and other fields that
address mental illness, the director of the National Institutes of
Mental Health has announced that the federal agency–which provides
grants for research on mental illness–will be “re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.” Thomas Insel’s statement comes just weeks before the scheduled publication of the DSM-V, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Insel writes:
“While DSM has been described as a ‘Bible’ for the field, it
is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each.
The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been
‘reliability’–each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same
terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity. Unlike our
definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM
diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms,
not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this
would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature
of chest pain or the quality of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diagnosis,
once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the
past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely
indicate the best choice of treatment. Patients with mental disorders
deserve better.”[...]
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