Our pluralistic society allows far more freedom than societies that insisted on one religious “truth.” Of course, theocratic societies built strength by isolating themselves from other societies that had “truths” that conflicted with their own. If the one “true” religion of our society is challenged by another society’s “one true religion,” that other society must be teaching “lies” and so has to be evil since it’s going against the “truth.”
Once mankind got it into our collective heads that everyone doesn’t have to believe the same thing, religious wars went the way of the Dodo Bird. Today, we disagree about everything. We have a secular society but a sizeable minority resists secularism with everything they have.
Science (with a capital S) has a number of dogmas. Of course, before something can become an accepted dogma, it has to go through a rigorous process of truth testing including peer testing of theories. But there does seem to be an official set of “truths” which are opposed on scientific grounds. There is such a thing as pseudoscience. Fake science (no relation to fake news, Donald) hasn’t followed the proper procedures or hasn’t been peer tested.
Since epistemology is a great interest of mine, I am interested in separating the wheat from the chaff as it were. I’m not convinced all accepted science is really as pure and rigorous as it is supposed to be. Politics have a way of infiltrating pure science where desires and agendas are sometimes too keen on running things for my taste nor for the purity of science.
Case in Point — Transgenderism
A growing number of people, particularly children, are claiming to be a different gender from the gender of their bodies. There is such a thing as a female brain and a male brain they allege.
Gender Identity
For an elaborate surprise, this speech tells us there actually is a difference in male and female brains. But the speaker denies the claim that gender is a social construct. 
Personally, I have found it difficult to relate to those who say they are a certain gender born in the wrong body because I have never had a strong sense of being either gender. I knew I was a girl because I was told that people with my kind of bodies were girls. It’s hard to fathom how anyone can “feel” like a girl or boy aside from just the knowing what their bodies tell us. But apparently there are a number of people who really feel a gender identity independently of what they have been told or what their bodies look like. One example is the case of David Reimer, a boy whose circumcision was botched so badly that the doctors thought it would be better to remove all remaining male genitalia and raise the baby as a girl. In those days, they thought babies were blank slates to convincing this boy that he was a girl would be easy. Instead, he rebelled against this feminine identity from Day One.
“It was shortly after the Reimers’ return from Baltimore, and not long before the twins’ second birthday, when Janet first put Brenda (David) in a dress. It was a special dress that Janet had sewn herself, using the white satin from her own wedding gown. ‘It was pretty and lacy,’ Janet recalls. ‘She was ripping at it, trying to tear it off. I remember thinking, Oh my God, she knows she’s a boy and doesn’t want girls’ clothing.'”
Another example, Pidgeon (see above), was an intersex kid who felt the doctors who had routinely chosen a gender for him had made the wrong choice. And, lastly, Jazz Jennings who, of course, was a textbook case of gender dysphoria. This boy insisted from the age of two that he was a girl. (S)he eventually (with the help of doctors) persuaded the parents to raise hir as a girl. The doctors diagnosed Jazz as “transgender.” Jazz is the author of several books and has starred in a reality show on TLC documenting hir development living as a girl and getting puberty blockers and eventually hormones and surgery.
The striking thing about Jazz is her extraordinary social poise. She always says just the right thing and is so smooth, she is almost like a corporate creation. For example, the high rate of suicides among trannies is caused by they’re not getting love and acceptance. We see her at one of those instant dating things, she gets the boy she wanted, tells him she’s transsexual and he doesn’t bat an eyelash. Times change, for sure.
I’ve seen a lot of Jazz videos where she goes over her history, always starting with the fact that she declared herself a girl as soon as she knew there were genders. I guess we all organize our memories in ways that validate our identity.
While I marvel at those who had a strong attachment to a gender as children, another trend (which seems to contradict the above attachment) is emerging called gender fluidity. I would imagine a sense of gender fluidity would be closer to my way of just accepting a gender because it matches my body and everyone told me I’m a girl. I could just as easily “known” I was a boy if I had a penis and everyone said I was a boy. In other words, my knowledge of gender was entirely based on external clues, not internal signals or sense of identity. Isn’t that the same as “gender fluidity?” Maybe the new “gender fluidity” is as much an identity as the claim that one’s in the wrong body because it’s the wrong sex for hir real gender. Maybe a “gender fluid” kid would refuse both the “he” and the “she” pronoun. That is certainly not the indifference that is my experience. Perhaps they are just altering the meaning of the noun, gender. I do think the meaning of the word be kept fluid. If boys could accept the fact that the male experience can include things previously only consigned to the realm of female, perhaps fewer would feel the need to change to the other gender.
Cluster B
I belong to an impressive number of Facebook groups dealing with Cluster B Personality “Disorders.” Here are a few of them:
- The Psychopath Society
- DSM-5
- Cluster B: Introspection
- Cluster B: Shits ‘N Giggles
- NPD Cluster B + All (narcissistic personality disorder mixed group)
- Narcissistic Sociopaths – Secret Society.
- Cluster B Personality Disorders
- The Female Narcissist Chronicles
I’ll bet there aren’t a bunch of groups for people in Clusters A and C. We Bees are pretty 
big on identity, especially the narcs, of course. What does it mean to be a psychopath? For starters, the American Psychiatric Association made a huge assault on our identity by replacing psychopathy or psychopathic Personality Disorder with Antisocial Personality Disorder. There was more changed than the name. ASPD has a lot more to do with behavior than psychopathy which is really a way of seeing the world beyond any specific behavior. So what is a psychopath? The concept used to lurk in the Not Otherwise Specified label in DMV-4. NOS was eliminated in DMV-5. Psychopathy still exists in the prison system. Parole boards seem fond of Hare’s checklist and use it to make sure psychopaths don’t get paroled. To them, it’s a way to know someone is more likely to re-offend.
The PCL-R is still the state of the arts method of diagnosing a psychopath. But MRI brain scans have detected different wiring in the brains of psychopaths. Can someone be diagnosed as a psychopath by a brain scan? Chris Chambers says no. This is bad news for Tina Taylor, publisher of The Psychopathic Times. It’s her pet theory that society can remove psychopaths from politics by subjecting every would-be candidate to an MRI. Then there is the confusion about what is a psychopath and what is a sociopath. The popular answer is that psychopaths are born while sociopaths are made that way by their environment. I used to think I could tell if I was a psychopath or a sociopath by getting a brain scan. I guess it’s more complicated than than. And who’s to say a sociopath’s brain won’t develop the same appearance as that of a psychopath. Science doesn’t even have consensus on what the difference is, if any. Some use the two terms interchangeably.
We have a lot of self-identified psychopaths on Facebook, other forums, the blogosphere and Quora. Some are diagnosed. Many are not. The question of a psychopath’s identity being questioned has been covered in my blog post, FAKE. But people who claim an identity often are impervious to skepticism of others, just as impervious as the identity of transgender in their confidence that despite the shape of their bodies, they are what they “feel” they are inside. And so we have to accept the enormous extent with which identities are assigned and defined by society.
Ironically, these people call themselves “warriors.” So do psychopaths. They keep talking about how important it is not to be “one of the herd.” Psychopaths are certainly not part of the “herd.” He calls members of the “herd” “idiots.” So do we! He blames psychopaths for pedophilia without explaining how we are responsible for such a widespread phenomena as he says exists when we are in such small numbers. He also decries laws naming “hate crimes” because they make a state of mind illegal. But isn’t that exactly what he is doing to psychopaths? Isn’t it our state of mind specifically that he is damning? And then he has a go at the Me Too Movement. I have problems with this movement too and have suggested it might be a 
has written a number of books, among which are The Way of the Warrior and Art of Urban Survival. He promotes his book on his website, 
One of the most powerful tools by which humanity has sought knowledge is 
It isn’t surprising that religion has often conflicted with and done battle with science. One of the most notorious battlegrounds of science versus religion is evolution. Darwin, himself, was horrified when his explorations led him to the conclusion that our origins were not exactly what the Bible said they are. But, in the spirit of true science, he reluctantly went where 
The victories of Christian fundamentalists over pure (without an agenda) science are spotty at best. Science has managed to hold its own. But in areas involving ideas cherished by progressives (left-wing), science has lost a lot more ground. Where psychology is concerned, science is already more subjective and many don’t even accept psychology as real science. The rapidity with which “experts” change opinions in psychology already undermines its credibility. Of course, all scientific areas are subject to revision. It’s part of the scientific method itself to allow, in fact, to insist on change. Science isn’t allowed to cling to dogma. It must, by its very nature, be flexible and open to new and better ideas. However, psychology takes the prize when it comes to flexibility.
It seems as if psychologists were sometimes influenced by accepted dogmas of our very culture and political activists, forcing them to change, actually freed them from political dogma. The bible of psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, listed homosexuality as a disorder for years. Gay activists caused them to change their minds, not by scientific debate but by 
Although “homosexuality” is now officially normal, diehard Fundies still regard it as unnatural (contrary to God’s plan) and therefore a disease that needs to be cured. 
But a recent and highly controversial “disorder” is called gender dysphoria disorder and it involves people who think they are not the sex they were born as but the other one. People with this “disorder” have formed an enormously powerful lobby which not only hijacks scientific thinking but which has spawned an enormous network of scientific technology. 
Remember gay liberation? Lesbians didn’t want to be lumped in which gay men so the movement became gay and lesbian. But bisexuals also wanted to stand up and be counted so it became GLB but could trannies be far behind? Now it’s GLBT someones with Q and I tacked on. How did the T get added to a movement for liberation of people with different sexual orientations? Transgenderism isn’t a sexual orientation. A tranny can be gay, lesbian or bi. Well, these billionaires have made massive donations to the gay movement(s). They also donate to universities who then enforce their Orwellian rules about which gender pronoun one may use.
The most disturbing aspect of the takeover by the Transgender Lobby of science and society is the way they target children. It’s funny how the same society that condemns pedophilia allows children to be encouraged to enter a lifetime of dependency on high-tech medical intervention to support their fantasies. Pre-puberty kids are now being put on hormone blockers to keep them from entering puberty. Then they are given hormones of the desired sex and, finally, surgery. A book written for children called I Am Jazz, written by Jazz Jennings and Jessica Herthel, pushes a lot of factual falsehoods such as the notion that people can be born with girls’ brains in boys’ bodies.
known as homo sapiens, are a species. Wikipedia defines species as “the basic unit of classification and a taxonomic rank, as well as a unit of biodiversity, but it has proven difficult to find a satisfactory definition.” Every species breeds more of it’s kind with other members of the same species. While some experiments have succeeded in breeding an offspring from members of two different species, that offspring is infertile. It is incapable of breeding. Does this definition of a species fit the description of a psychopath? Hell, no!
Passio calls us “animals” as if animals are so inferior to human beings. Which species is destroying the earth? Is it dogs? Cats? Apes? Nah. Human beings are the only species destroying the planet. Furthermore, non-human animals are capable of empathy. Tests have demonstrated this. One study gave rats the chance to free other rats from cages and they jumped at that chance. As with humans, empathy is a natural quality of animal species. That can make us even more frightening. Even rats have empathy. But we do not. Woooooo!” SCARY! 
Passio correctly explains that there are two kinds of psychopathy: primary and secondary. A primary psychopath is born with a specific kind of brain wired differently than that of a “normal” or “neural typical” person. Secondary psychopaths become psychopathic (or sociopathic) as a result of their experiences in their environment. The primary psychopath is born a psychopath (although professionals have agreed not to name someone a psychopath until he or she has attained majority). Does this mean the psychopath’s parents must be psychopaths? If psychopathy were really the name of a separate species, the parents would have to be psychopaths. Without that, psychopaths cannot be a species. It’s as simple as that. Yet Passio attacks anyone who would raise this common-sense denial of his opinion as a specific kind of fool which he labels “new age.” The New Age Movement is a philosophical, spiritual current of thought that really has nothing to do with the definition of psychopathy.
damaged” and “broken.” Strange, how we can be born a certain way but are “brain damaged.” Yet he insists we are in control of every level of society. Primary psychopaths give orders to secondary psychopaths. So I guess this makes us 10% strong. Pretty good for such a small number of people. Sheridan is more realistic. He realizes that psychopaths can live on many different levels depending on the individual. We can be slackers, happy to just have an easy life without having to work. We can be small-time operators. Or we can be very ambitious, seeking the greatest amount of power. If we are so divided into different types of people, how did we get so much control? If we’re really running things, why don’t we shut Passio and Sheridan up? Maybe because they are so amusing.
It’s easy to blame psychopaths for the ills of the world. Harder but more accurate to admit that normal human beings are capable of every evil. Robert Hare, known as the godfather of psychopathy, acknowledges the neural difference between psychopaths and NTs (neural typicals). Yet he has said, “Psychopaths are not disordered. They don’t suffer from a deficit. They’re simply different.”
About halfway through his video, Passio makes an extraordinary claim. The people who founded the United States of America were fighting psychopathy by coming to this continent and destroying the indigenous population so they could have their “just” society which included slavery. But the “psychopaths” in the story were not the genocidal settlers. They were the soldiers in the British armed forces. These bold enemies of psychopathy, the Americans, fought the “psychopaths” by shooting them. Really? If you have the patience to wade through enough of Passio’s nonsense to get that far, you can hear it for yourself! So shooting the indigenous people who just wanted to live on their own land wasn’t “psychopathic” but fighting the settlers to keep them subject to the British crown was? Passio just lost credibility as a person with any true moral understanding. He has no right to condemn psychopaths. He has proven himself to be, in Nietzsche’s words, “Human. All too human.” Don’t blame me for your own moral failings, human!
When I was a child, I liked to play with “gangs.” By gangs, I’m talking about something pretty innocent and innocuous. We were just children. We didn’t fight with serious weapons. We collected buds from trees and threw them at each other. 
We, Americans once had a civil war. 
I understand many southerners are bitter to this day. They still call themselves “rebels” and deny in their hearts that the North ever really defeated them. The American government, officially representing the country as a whole enforced policies more popular in the north such as desegregation. Federal troops came into Little Rock to protect black children going to “white” schools for the first time.
The USA has become more divided in recent years. Obama’s presidency pushed a lot of racist buttons. Having an actual black man as president must have outraged them as much as the subsequent Trump presidency outrages the more liberal (which tends to coincide with the northern) side. After having witnessed eight years of bitter obstructionism from the GOP which by now represented the South (after having originally been the party of 
abolitionists), we have been shocked out of our socks by the victory of a man we never thought could win: Donald Trump. Liberals are just as horrified by Trump’s presidency as the conservative South was by Obama’s presidency. Liberal opponents of Trump call themselves The Resistance. Hillary Clinton won the majority of votes but, because of the electoral college, southern states got an unfair advantage. The electoral college was a sop given to the South as a consolation prize to make their defeat less bitter (not that it seems to have worked). If you ask me, the Union was far too soft on these defeated rebels. They never really submitted and have been a thorn in our sides for years.
Trump’s campaign made out that he was a populist. The sad truth is that the liberal politicians have been practicing an ideology called neoliberalism for years. This ideology claimed that an international economy was best. It was used as an excuse for corporations to outsource jobs to the Third World where they could use cheap labor and save money. “Liberal” presidents like Bill Clinton made trade deals which favored the corporations and hurt the workers. Parts of the country have become depressed areas where massive numbers of workers were chronically unemployed. Clinton also “reformed” Welfare by allowing recipients to only collect for two years in their 
entire lifetimes regardless of what their circumstances might have been. When Trump spoke out against the northern elite, his words reached many a receptive ear. He threatened to “kill the deep state” which he held responsible. The deep state was a concept that existed long before Trump. Also known as the shadow government, the deep state represented the fact that the richest people were really running the 
country regardless of who won the elections. These wealthy people had deep pockets from which they only had to dip in to pay for electioneering of whichever politician pleased them. The Supreme Court’s decision, Citizen’s United, made things even worse for democracy. Although the Democrats kept most of the New Deal legislation, which enabled many working class Americans to hold their heads above water, they supported neoliberalism which increased economic inequality every years. The Occupy Movement pointed out how most of us were being sold down the river by the 1% who owned most of the wealth.
Trump promised to give the 99% a fair deal when he became president. Instead, he has given the rich even more advantages than they already had and has been trying to complete the project Ronald Reagan started to demolish the New Deal. Since many Republicans are senior citizens who depend on Social Security and Medicare, it seems unlikely that he will really manage to complete his plan to pay for his obscene bonanza he has given the rich in tax breaks by 
privatizing those programs. But he uses distractions to keep his useful idiots in line while he picks their pockets clean. His nativism, blaming non-citizens for all of our hardships, his religiously based right-wing intolerance is using scapegoats as a buffer for his suckers’ frustrations have proven to be as successful as Hitler’s big lie technique was back in those days.
As you might have gathered, I don’t like Trump or right-wing politics in general. But I was once a 
Government only exists to protect our freedom to produce and enjoy the fruits of our productiveness. It is the mind that increases the value an hour’s worth of labor can create. Why should mere workers, just contributing their ability to do what they did in primitive times, get paid more than the value of that plain physical labor? It is the mind of the entrepreneur that enabled him to produce more due to machinery. Suddenly, I saw my 
government as horribly perverse. They gave subsidies to farmers for not producing! They tax the rich a higher percentage of their income which they had earned so they could give Welfare to those who hadn’t earned it. You get the idea. The usual argument for laissez-faire capitalism. It’s easy to believe in it as long as daddy’s paying the bills and you’re in a good college. You can read my rebuttal in 
I am certainly one of the many people who consider Trump a horrendous president and identify with The Resistance. If he were to actually accomplish what he is trying to accomplish, I would be without an income (Social Security). But then it occurs to me, what if Trump really knows what he’s doing and the news I get is all “fake?” Just imagining it makes me feel better. The little kid who switched gangs and pretended to be a spy just for the sake of variety is nodding vigorously. It’s strange that I can have such strong convictions and then realize they are expendable. Self-interest is the only absolute which must be supported by any system I embrace. Trump’s presidency hasn’t changed my life materially in any way so far. I have the same inadequate income. The cost of living has skyrocketed but that was already happening before Trump. The “giant sucking sound” of all our money being sucked into the realm of the 1% has been going on all my life.
The thing I like about Republicans (what I have always liked about them) is that they are not to “nice” to win. They will do the unscrupulous thing, the outrageous thing and the weak kneed Democrats often let them get away with it. Recent example: Republicans blocked Obama’s completely legitimate effort to appoint a justice to the Supreme Court. Now they are trying to appoint a far-rightist to the court. 
CLUSTER B 