Nietzsche asking the hard questions

You've probably seen the video. A young Frenchwoman in Paris, in tears, begging looters to stop. "Why are you doing this? That's not what we stand for." Some accounts are mocking her. "She voted for it." I won't. Because what you see on her face is not stupidity. It's a disease that has infected the entire West, and it has a name: suicidal empathy. The term comes from Gad Saad, an evolutionary behavioral scientist at Concordia University in Montreal. A man who fled the Lebanese civil war as a child, and who knows what it looks like when a society falls apart. His new book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, is the follow-up to The Parasitic Mind. Here is the thesis, and why it concerns every one of us. Empathy is one of the best things about us. It evolved for a reason: to care for our children, our kin, our tribe. It was calibrated for a world where the people you felt for were the people around you, and where empathy always came paired with its counterweight: the instinct to protect your own and to recognize a threat. Suicidal empathy is what happens when that mechanism misfires. When it fires at the wrong targets, in the wrong amounts, with no brake. When we feel more for the criminal than for his victim. More for the stranger who breaks the rules than for the citizen who follows them. More for how compassionate we look than for what our compassion actually produces. Where does it come from? Four layers. First, biology. Empathy is a spotlight, as the psychologist Paul Bloom put it. It lights up the one face in front of you and leaves everything else in the dark. The crying migrant on the boat is visible. The thousands of future victims of a broken system are statistics. A spotlight is a terrible tool for running a country. Second, our own civilization. The West is the civilization that put the victim at the center of its morality. Christianity taught us to care for the stranger, the poor, the weak. It was one of the greatest moral revolutions in history. But cut off from its other half, justice, responsibility, the duty to protect your own, it turns into something else. Third, ideology. In The Parasitic Mind, Saad described idea pathogens, ideas that hijack our reasoning. Suicidal empathy is the emotional counterpart: an ideology that hijacks our compassion. It sorts the world into oppressors and victims, then demands unlimited empathy for whoever ranks as the victim, whatever they do. Fourth, status. In the age of social media, empathy has become a display. Posting "refugees welcome" costs nothing and earns applause. The bill goes to someone else: the working class, the suburbs, the women walking home at night. The results are everywhere. Criminals treated as victims of society. Sexual assaults by migrants met with lenient sentences. Self-defense branded as aggression. Borders treated as cruelty. Saad's conclusion is simple: a society dies when it would rather display infinite tolerance than use its survival instinct. Now the part I'll add myself, and that few people dare to say. On average, women score higher than men on measures of empathy. It's one of the most consistent findings in psychology, across cultures, and it makes perfect evolutionary sense: for most of human history, the survival of children depended on it. It's a strength. But it means an ideology that weaponizes empathy will hit women harder. And the data shows it: in country after country, young women have moved sharply to the left of young men, especially on immigration. This is where men have a responsibility. Not to mock. Not to lecture. Not to say "she deserved it." Empathy has always needed a counterweight, and that counterweight was the protective instinct: the one that draws lines, says no, and stands between the threat and the people it loves. Men abandoned that role. They were told it was toxic, and many believed it. So they stayed silent at the dinner table, at work, with their partners, sisters, daughters and friends. That has to end. Men have to have this conversation, honestly and with respect: compassion that cannot say no is not compassion. It's surrender. And the first to pay for it are women. Many women already understand this better than anyone. Some of the bravest voices in this fight are women, precisely because they are the first to feel the danger in the street. A civilization rests on a balance: compassion and strength, openness and borders, mercy and justice. When one side swallows the other, the foundations crack. What we are watching in Europe is what happens when empathy has no counterweight left. Look at that young woman again. She isn't the enemy. She's what this ideology made of a generation that was told kindness would be enough. Our job is to make sure she's the last generation that has to learn it this way.

Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America. This will be the first of many.

The most horrifying image of this October 17th. An elderly couple stripped of everything, right in the middle of the street, left half-naked. As if the pillaged Rolexes, Vuitton, Hermès, Dior, Sephora weren't enough for resale. The image that should be a wake-up call for the entire West. The image of a so-called president who has lost control. Who has utterly failed his people.

Do you now see what I have been posting about this afternoon? The riots in France are almost certainly backed by the hard right in France and personified by the harridan that is Marine Le Pen. As soon as @elonmusk jumps in in support you know that to be the case. This has all been orchestrated her adherents and agitators. I wonder how much money Elon had given Marine? Not an insubstantial amount I might hazard a guess.

الست الفرنسية المزهولة دي .. عضوة في حزب اليسار الفرنسي وناشطة من اكبر دعاة فتح الهجرة لشعوب شمال افريقيا وبتدافع عنهم كل مايعملوا مصيبة وكارثة وتتهم الأخرين اللي عايزين يوقفوا طوفان الهمج دول بالعنصرية ... هي عندها محل شيك صغير في مكان راقي وقفت في محلها تحاول تنقذه من النهب والسرقة وعشان هي ناشطة مشهورة بتقولهم انا فلانة الناشطة بتاعة اللجوء انا معاكوا انا دافعت عنكم وعن دخولكم و بقائكم في فرنسا زقوها وقعوها وداسوا عليها بأقدامهم كويس انها لسه حية ونهبوا المحل كله الست بقت علي الحديدة خسرت كل كفاح وشغل عمرها في لحظة .. واقفة مذهولة مش مصدقة ان اللصوص الغوغاء المجرمين البرابرة دول هما اللي طول عمرها بتدافع عنهم وعن انهم يغزوا بلدها ويخربوه عشان شهرتها في الدفاع عن لاجئين شمال افريقيا كل الميديا الفرنسية امبارح جايبة قصتها وصورتها قدام محلها المنهوب شقي عمرها كله وهي مش مصدقة مدي غبائها اللي وصل فرنسا للخراب والدمار ده كله 😢

Fun fact. I went to Nice as part of a TY school trip in 1998. We went to an ice skating rink. All around the edges were "students protesting school conditions" who leered at the girls in our group, pulled some to the ground and eventually started a skirmish with the boys. They wanted an all-in brawl but we were outnumbered and made it out in one piece. It was clear this was a regular night out for them. It's been this way for a long time in France and anyone denying the racial overtones is an idiot who should be laughed at.

So schlimm sah es in Paris nicht aus, als 1940 Deutschland einmarschiert ist.

Diese Studenten der Pariser Elite-Ingenieurhochschule École Polytechnique protestieren friedlich gegen Lehrermangel und marode Schulen. Die affenartigen Laute, die sie zu affenartigen Bewegungen ausstoßen, sollen auf die Missstände im französischen Bildungssystem hinweisen. 🤡

As usual, people are looking for deep reasons, but I think there isn't any for the most part and the real explanation is much more boring. There is a very high level of general dissatisfaction in France at the moment, mostly due to anemic economic growth and inflation, especially with the price of gas. In addition, Macron has been in power for almost 10 years and is very unpopular, which only adds to general dissatisfaction. The high school protests, although they were already fizzling out, have provided motivation for the left by fueling the hope that it could ride out that wave to energize its own protests. So there was a fertile ground for protests, which are pretty common in France after summer. Still, while the protests were large, they were hardly impressive by French standards. What set them apart from traditional French social movements is how violent they were. Contrary to popular mythology, French protests are not generally violent. France has a very strong protest and strike culture, but the meme about how we riots all the time is overdone. Traditionally, protests are traditionally organized by unions, which coordinate with the authorities beforehand and have a security service that takes care of troublemakers during the protest. This is why the violence always starts toward the end of the protests, after the official demonstration has disbanded and people begin to scatter, because that's when it's harder for the police to control the situation. Protests have increasingly led to violence in recent years because they have become more spontaneous and are more often organized by people on social media, but also and relatedly because increasingly far-left groups and children of immigrants opportunistically join them to cause mayhem and loot. I keep seeing a lot of people who are depicting those kids as "Islamists" and ideologically motivated actors, but I think it's a complete misreading of the situation in my opinion. This isn't an "Islamist uprising" or whatever nonsense people are talking about. Their actions are opportunistic and driven by a nihilistic culture that is very similar to what you see in Black ghettos in the US, where anti-social behavior is totally normalized, with an added Islamic veneer due to their family background. This nihilism and their family background makes them susceptible to Islamist indoctrination, which is why terrorists were almost always delinquent before they turned to religion, but most of them aren't ideologues and those who are don't loot stores. As I explained before, the police often don't intervene because they are overwhelmed and they have instructions from the government not to, because politicians are terrified that if they do a kid will be killed and they will have full-blown race riots on their hands. So what they do instead is contain the violence geographically and arrest the most violent participants later at home, when the risk that the cops will kill one of them is low, using video/photo evidence. Eventually things will fizzle out, in part because the violence will discredit the movement and actually make it easier for the government to deal with it, but this tactic is very costly since we are effectively accepting that every now and then far-left activists and immigrant thugs will just burn and loot while the police watch. The problem from the government's point of view is that, if they use repression by telling the cops to break skulls, they will kill some of the kids and this will result in a massive backlash, leading to more protests and probably even more violence. I think we need to hand out serious prison time to protesters who are caught engaging in violence to deter this kind of shit, but the government has a very limited ability to do so, because justice is independent, courts are full of left-wing judges who refuse to do that, they are already overwhelmed with cases, prisons are full and we are broke. So there isn't one single explanation, it's just a combination of factors, including random stuff that nobody could predict. The context explains why something like that *can* happen, but it doesn't explain why it happens when it does. Again it's probably random for the most part. It would take years to solve the problem even if we started now, which we won't because our politics is completely broken, because it would require getting our budget in order, implementing reasonable economic policies, fixing our immigration and justice system, etc. We are cooked to be honest.

One minute you’re voting for your own conquering and the next minute you’re experiencing it. Islam comes at you fast.

🔴ALERTE INFO | 🇫🇷 Un manifestant a eu la main arra** chée après avoir ramassé une grenade de dispersion lancée par les forces de l’ordre.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey encourages residents to stop by the local "Somali Malls" to show support for Somalian immigration: "Our Somali community is under attack. Go shop local. Make sure you're shopping in some of these Somali malls."