Plutarch's Parallel Lives open.substack.com/pub/nocapa…

Fred Rogers met with a child psychologist every week for 22 years to build his show. She shaped everything: every script, prop, and song. The whole point was to give a child's nervous system time to slow down. In 1984, a single regulatory decision ended all of it. The psychologist was Dr. Margaret McFarland, who co-founded the Arsenal Family and Children's Center alongside Benjamin Spock and Erik Erikson. She and Rogers understood that the prefrontal cortex in children, the part of the brain that controls impulse, emotion, and attention, takes decades to fully develop. At the start of every episode, Rogers tied his sneakers and changed his sweater while children settled in. Those pauses were intentional, designed to help a child's nervous system shift into a calmer, more focused state. What ended it had nothing to do with child development science. In 1984, Reagan's FCC chairman Mark Fowler abolished the advertising limits that had protected children's programming from commercial pressure. Toy companies moved within months. Between 1984 and 1985, cartoons tied to toy lines increased by 300%, from a handful of shows to more than 40 animated series. In almost every case, the toy was designed first. The cartoon was built to sell it. Researchers later put numbers to what parents were already noticing. A 2011 study in Pediatrics from the University of Virginia tested 60 four-year-olds across three groups: one watching SpongeBob, which cuts scene every 11 seconds; one watching a slow PBS show, which cuts scene every 34 seconds; and one drawing. Nine minutes later, all three took tests on attention, impulse control, short-term memory, and problem-solving. The SpongeBob group scored significantly worse across every measure. In the 1970s, children began watching television around age 4. Research from pediatrician Dimitri Christakis found that by 2009, the average age of first screen exposure had dropped to 4 months, as the content got faster and the audience got younger. Researchers separately found that each additional hour of daily screen time at ages 1 or 3 raised the risk of attention problems at age 7 by 9%.

It’s wild that people sincerely believe “there are more important things than whether there are two genders” when the male and female sex are at the ground floor of every human endeavor ever to have occurred.

The right refuses to take a win even when it’s handed to them lol

"We have a separation of church and state. Now we need a separation of woke and state and especially at colleges and universities, which need to be free from quasi-religious woke orthodoxy to pursue their stated mission." - A friend in academia

An ideology is a system of abstract ideas in which theory determines evidence rather than vice-versa. It always involves a pseudo-religious adherence to some secular dogma. It is prevalent on both the political left (e.g. Marxism, the French Revolution and modern Woke ideology, in which gender and race are considered culturally constructed and therefore changeable) as well as the right (e.g. Randian Objectivism, where everything is interpreted according to rationalist capitalist ideology). One of the places in which it is particularly prevalent is in university education departments where constructivism is the dominant ideology and results in the rejection of the idea that students can learn passively under systems like Direct Instruction and in the dogma that a teacher shouldn't be in front of the classroom directing the learning. The ideology is so strong that they actively reject the findings of Project Follow Through, the largest study ever done on education, which supports directive teaching. This and others studies and meta-studies are irrelevant to progressives because they conflict with the inviolate dogmas of their ideology.

NEW: The Mellon Foundation gave $1.5 million to establish a "center for the defense of academic freedom." In audio I've obtained, the group's leader says his goal is to undermine the newly launched classical civics centers: "map who these f---ers are... and knock them out." 🧵

The goal of leftist theory is to reframe Western civilization as an illegitimate, dominating system, to raise consciousness against it, justify its negation, and recenter the “marginalized” to reach a “higher” social wholeness. x.com/Ne_pas_couvrir/status/… x.com/Ne_pas_couvrir/status/…

Well he blocked me, so I guess I'm never getting an answer to that question. x.com/NoCaparison/status/206…

This post got my account locked for a bit. We have to consider a harsh reality: 1. Violence, unfortunately, is the only solution to the globalist assault of the past two decades. 2. That violence can be controlled and formal, such as government remigration, or it can be uncontrolled outbursts from the people, like this. 3. The globalists have been imposing violence onto the people of Europe, Japan, the U.S., Canada, Australia, and so on, for decades in an indirect manner via immigration. 4. The metaphor of a war is appropriate here, and I have argued before that this is what modern warfare really looks like. Governments importing a favored category of people and using the force of government to protect them and even enable their aggression against the undesirable population. It just so happens that the "undesirables" are the native people. 5. The great lie of today is governments trying to pretend that no war is being waged. It is, by them against their people. They're just trying to prevent said people from fighting back. 6. This is not a "good" outcome. It is a tragedy brought on by misplaced compassion, disastrous social engineering, and outright hatred of the European people and culture. But it is either this... or surrender into death. Both are violent. There is no "non-violent" answer.

I doubt many squishier rightists are following me but this is a good time to explain how racial wars and such work. Every population has a proportion of people who are “outgroup-aggressive”. That means they’ll actively prey on members of the outgroup for personal gain or fun.

Our demands are simple: From now on no one comes in, and millions must go.

Very excited to have this essay on the Declaration published at The Vital Center today!

Auburn controversy explainer: AL passed two anti-Woke laws affecting universities: 1. 2024 SB129 banning DEI policies 2. 2026 HB540 transferring authority from the Faculty Senate to the Board of Trustees The goal of HB540 is to purge courses such as ENGL 3130 Survey of Critical Methods (Introduction to critical methods and theoretical approaches to the study of literature) and faculty who promote the ideology. Woke = "woke up" to Critical Consciousness Critical Consciousness (CC) = - perceive social, political, and economic "reality" as "oppressive" - eternal grievance: frame conflict as between invulnerable oppressors vs vulnerable victims - "nothing is truth, everything is power" => deplete oppressor power, accumulate victim power Taken to its conclusion, the captured institutions would extract from the "oppressors" until there's nothing left, and then continue to punish them in the name of revenge until none are left. (Look at South Africa and Critical Race Theory). It would not simply extend benefits to all. It's parasitism / communism. Philosophy = seeks truth Ideology = seeks power CC is a totalizing ideology. The goal is to capture education, art, politics, family, everything. ENGL 3130 trains students to do CC Ideology praxis (theory practice), rather than studying literature on its own terms or in the pursuit of philosophy. Inverts the purpose of education from philosophy to ideology. @zenahitz : > I am not in the least scandalized that the course exist. Moreover, the course should exist. > I taught at Auburn. > and your ideology isn't [totalizing]? Why are you trying to keep books from being taught? x.com/zenahitz/status/206469… This is why universities are being purged of Wokeness. Faculty are either: 1. useful idiots, or 2. communists.

On the hollowing out of Western civilization. Good, short essay on one important-to-know thread. "The hostility toward Western civilization is as old as the concept it attacks, and it arises from the same soil. To understand how the Western Canon was dismantled it is necessary to trace a counter-tradition that begins not in the postcolonial writings of the 1970s but in the salons and lecture halls of late eighteenth-century Germany, where the very word civilisation first acquired the pejorative charge it has carried, in one form or another, ever since. ..." critiqueanddigest.substack.c…

The role of rationality in figuring out what is true is absolutely central, and it is something the Founders and Enlightenment thinkers understood well. One of the ingenious compromises they came up with for dealing with beliefs that exist outside rational examination appears in two of the most brilliant parts of the First Amendment: the Free Exercise Clause, which says you can believe whatever non-falsifiable doctrine you wish, paired with the Establishment Clause, which says you may not mandate belief in your non-falsifiable system for everyone else. But what do we do in a situation where so much of what we call ideology has essentially taken the place of religion, and too many of us—especially in academia, but also outside it—hold non-falsifiable beliefs and wish to impose them on reality? There is no clear way to distinguish those rigid beliefs from any others, because they do not call themselves religion or faith. I know people have proposed something like an Establishment Clause for ideology, but I don’t see how that could possibly work in practice. All future debates would just turn into each side trying to prove that the other guy’s belief system, but not their own, is religion-like ideology. Naturally, their own view would simply be “truth.” I’ve been puzzling over this a lot lately. Truth-seeking simply cannot work in an environment where too many people are afraid to play devil’s advocate, engage in thought experimentation, and take seriously the possibility that they might be wrong on the most important issues. Such an environment simply becomes a dogma factory, where people are motivated to rationalize whatever their tribe wishes to be true.

The cliffhanger at the end of this episode is killing me. x.com/TheNorthWayPod/status/…

It is the pre-condition of violence against them, and they know it intuitively. It require courage to resist. Most take the illusion of the easier softer way---the middle ground---or abandon principles and profess--Live let live---millions will die b/c of it if we don't change.

Food culture wars are coming. Lots of people are focused on the identity and partisan dimension of this story, but another important angle is being missed: Net Zero. The Climate Change Committee’s pathway to Carbon Budget 7 assumes large reductions in meat and dairy consumption, alongside substantial falls in cattle and sheep numbers by 2040. Ed Miliband has yet to set out how he plans to meet the CB7 emissions reduction target. But work is already underway through changes to land use, farming subsidies, carbon levies, inheritance tax and proposals to create new environmental permits for UK farmers in the name of protecting rivers. All are designed to alter the structure of the meat and dairy sector and change its upstream economics for the 2030s. The CCC claims that agriculture is the fourth largest emitting sector. Its Balanced Pathway to 2050 includes livestock numbers falling 27% below 2023 levels. Keep in mind that herds have already been shrinking by about 3% a year for the last decade. ONS data shows that beef, milk and butter are among the main drivers of UK food price inflation. Progressives and Net Zero advocates understand that diet is not just about nutrition. They know that health and well-being campaigns are not enough. At root, food is about culture, identity and tradition. In 2023, the Behavioural Insights Team openly acknowledged that “cultural norms” are a major barrier to dietary change and that most “traditional” British dishes are centred around meat. A 2019 Imperial College London study for the CCC made a similar point, noting that “reinforcing traditional diets” prevents behavioural change. Viewed in that context, stories that portray meat eating and heritage European diets as backward, exclusionary or morally suspect serve a wider policy purpose: reducing demand and “nudging” people to change their behaviour. Banquets become symbols of reaction. Meat becomes a proxy for intolerance and animal cruelty. Heritage diets become embarrassing things to overcome rather than traditions to celebrate and value. If you want people to eat less meat and dairy, it helps if you first convince them that the culture surrounding it deserves less respect. x.com/Sol_Invicte/status/206…