There was a hearing in the UK parliament where the Netflix TV show “Adolescence” was used as evidence. A badly written, cheap fictional series is treated as evidence of an actual problem in real life that needs to be solved legislatively.

The MPs talked about the characters of the show as if they were actual existing individuals. An equivalent form of insanity would be the US holding congessional hearings using the series “You” as evidence that Jewish boys who love books turn into serial killers en masse.

I previously posted a clip of a journalist who was convinced “Adolescence” is a documentary. Now there are MPs who seem to confuse it with something akin to a scholarly study.

This show is a trial balloon. If we collectively consent that it’s OK to legislate on a fictional issue, tomorrow we’ll see laws addressing any kind of invented problem. You won’t need to wait around for another COVID to get locked up. You won’t have any parliament to speak of because MPs will move to the world of the imagination and legislate life in it.

On the subject of Shiloh Hendrix, I want to say this. I read a few years ago in one of Charles Murray’s books, I think, that the racial policies of liberal America were inexorably leading to the stigma of identifying as white disappearing.

As a result of Hitlerism, white people no longer thought of themselves as white. They wouldn’t say things like “as a white person, I…”

But then it became fashionable to force people into seeing themselves as white. Seeing their whiteness as the most important thing about themselves. Saying it aloud again and again. Thinking about what it is and what it means. The liberal overlords thought that this was necessary to achieve greater victories over racism.

As a diversity facilitator once brayed, “the white people in this room aren’t being self-accusatory enough! Tell me about your racism!”

This genie once summoned won’t crawl back into a bottle. If you tell people that their race is the most important thing about them, if you repeat it enough, if you make sure they hear it their whole lives, they’ll believe you.

I’ve been insulted and humiliated over my race many times. I’ve been led to understand that my existence is a blight. Only last week I was at a large meeting that concluded with a wish that white people disappear. And next week I will once again write paperwork justifying the hire of a white person like it’s some dirty act for which I need to apologize.

Somebody says something you don’t like on the playground, you can leave. I can’t not write this paperwork because then I can’t hire. That’s the real insult.

It is my strong opinion that the absolute best thing to do is for everybody in America immediately to lay off the race issue and not come back to it under any pretext for the next 50 years. Anybody who brings it up at all should be immediately ostracized. We’ve prattled about race incessantly for decades. And the results are abysmal.

The reader who is suggesting a Substack for me to read, please drop the link in the comments here. Something about Shiloh Hendrix, it seems?

I can’t extract links from anonymous questions.

My very religious and conservative Ukrainian Fulbrighter went to a concert of a retired military band on campus. Her main takeaway on the concert was that there were too many white people and the concert was not diverse.

This is what being in America did to her in only a few months.

I love you, Americans, but you spoiled my Ukrainian Fulbrighter with your race obsession. Please stop already because it’s getting beyond boring.

The preceding post also illustrates why AI will never be able to offer psychological help. It will simply mirror people’s inflamed egos back at them, “validating their choices” and confirming how right they are in everything. The users will feel reassured in their extreme rightfulness, and grow lonelier, angrier, sadder, and more confused.

I put the question – what makes a good mother? – to a clinical psychologist.

“Well, you can only really answer that in the context of whether there’s a good father present.”

Would she have said the same if I’d asked what makes a good father?

➡️ https://t.co/MANeiZ4H9I pic.twitter.com/xYYtaaKypC

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) May 3, 2025

No, she wouldn’t because if the mother is alive, she’s almost invariably present. The phenomenon of mothers abandoning their children is extremely rare. Male and female bonding is very different, and we create many broken families by denying this.

But the psychologist’s words offer an important insight. A mother who speaks badly of the father is a bad mother by definition. A mother who disrespects the father is a bad mother by definition. And so on.

Does anybody else find it as funny as I do that real democracy always and only means having one-party rule?

Even Orthodox Americans are Protestants at heart.

Two examples.

Our parish elders extended an invitation to a new priest. We’ve been without a priest since January 1st, and it’s hard. Finally, the elders found a priest who is eager to relocate and take on our parish. But a bunch of parishioners are unhappy because the process was undemocratic. We didn’t get to vote on the new priest. The idea that an Orthodox church should be a democratic institution is ludicrous to me. What’s next, we’ll vote on which parts of the service we want to eliminate because they are not inclusive enough? The whole point of being Orthodox is that you want a hierarchy, an unchanged millennial tradition, a break from the consumerist model of endlessly choosing and deciding everything. The idea that people who converted fifteen minutes ago should get a vote on par with the members of the parish council who were born and grew up and grew old in this parish is nuts.

“How are these elders better than me?” asks a young dude who got baptized last year. That the elders have been here forever and consequently understand the parish much better never occurs to him. Equality! One person, one vote! Roots and history are nothing! That the elders have been mowing the lawn, cleaning the grounds, and running the food pantry for decades while you showed up yesterday with opinions and a sense of self-importance doesn’t occur either.

Another objection to the new priest is that he does parts of the service in Old Slavonic. “We don’t understand what he’s saying!” the refuseniks exclaim. It’s unclear what it is they need to understand. The service hasn’t changed in a thousand years. We’ve all heard it in English many, many times. There are booklets in every seat where you can read the whole text in English. And that’s not what an Orthodox service is for anyway. You don’t come to engage with the text of the service on an intellectual level. That’s Protestantism. Orthodoxy doesn’t claim that every individual is his own priest. It claims the exact opposite. It invites you to be part of something that’s bigger than yourself. You are subsumed into the tradition. Your personal whims are unimportant. You accept, obey, and defer, and in the world of ceaseless choices and decisions it’s extremely restful and peace-inducing.

We had one dude a while ago who would actually interrupt the sermon with his corrections and observations. He ended up having to leave when he realized that an Orthodox sermon is not a debate club.

There are opportunities for an enormous amount of personal growth in learning to bow your head and accept. For three hours a week you can experience a bit of humility and put away your hubris. You can feel instead of think. You can find joy in the realization that many generations of people heard the exact same service and sang the exact same hymns in the exact same order, and it’s all already done. It’s completed. It’s decided and finished. It’s there for you and you needn’t work on improving the process. Your ego can take a rest. It’s not about feeding it and making it feel important. It’s about doing the exact opposite.

The way to get good at sex is the same as the way to get good at any other process: Once you're done, roll out the whiteboard and together do a no-fault analysis of what went wrong, what went right, and what could've been done differently.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky ⏹️ (@ESYudkowsky) May 1, 2025

I also suggest inviting your mother to go over the breakdown and give helpful suggestions.