Sunday, October 16, 2022



Narcissism and Sam Vaknin

Vaknin is an Israeli with a considerable record of dishonesty and dubious scientific qualifications. He describes himself as a narcissist and purports to offer an understanding of that syndrome.

His descriptions of what narcissism is and the explanations he offers for its emergence in people are recognized as authentic and helpful by many who view his various videos

So what is the scientific status of his theories? From my viewpoint as a psychometrician, his theories have no standing at all. There is no objective measure of narcissism as he describes it nor is there any way of measuring degrees of it. So his generalizations are untestable. It is essentially waffle -- a theory so broadly specified that most people probably see something of themselves it, rather like horoscopes

My initial suspicion on reading Vaknin was that he was probably talking about a number of traits rather than a single trait. And the available scientific literature on narcissism bears that out. Sigmumd Freud was the effective originator of the idea of a narcissistic personality in 1914 so Vaknin comes rather late to the game. There are in fact a number of indexes of narcissism in existence so if there is a unidimdensional trait there, we should know of it.

And a 1991 study by Paul Wink was very informative about that. He combined three existing measures of narcissism, including the MMPI and CPI, and factor analysed the responses of a heterogeneous sample to them.

The sample responses showed no such thing as as unitary trait of narcissism. Varimax rotated eigenvectors revealed two distinct traits underlying the "narcissism" questions: Vulnerabiliy and grandiosity.

The statements surveyed would seem to be at least as comprehensive as the symptoms described by Vaknin but in the absence of a measuring instrument produced by him, we have no alternative source to analyse. So it seems likely that Vaknin's picture of the narcissist is fiction. The traits he describes do exist but they do not form the coherent syndrome described by him.

So Vaknin would seem to be a popular guru like Krishnamurti, Gurdjieff, Madam Blavatski etc. His pontifications make some sense to some people but he is essentially describing something that does not exist. Gurus have their place in helping people makes some sense of their world but their claims should not be regarded as scientific or reliable in any way.

Summary: Delusions of grandeur exist in both clinical and sub-clinical forms. What goes with such delusions is the issue. Vaknin is not alone in seeing many other traits associated with it but Wink's finding of strong separability between Grandiosity and Vulnerability has become widely accepted. Characteristics that co-occur in Vaknin himself may not co-occur in others.

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The Stagflation President

Another month, another bad report. On October 13 the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that consumer price inflation, at an 8.2 percent annualized rate, was higher than expected through September. Americans continue to endure the worst inflation in four decades. They continue to experience a decline in real average hourly earnings. They continue to tell pollsters that the economic recession has arrived. Blerina Uruci, an economist at T. Rowe Price, does not like what she sees. “This is very troubling,” Uruci told the New York Times. “The trend is very troubling.”

Not at the White House. It doesn’t see any troubles. According to President Biden, the most recent BLS data are superfluous. After all, everybody already knows that “Americans are squeezed by the cost of living: that’s been true for years, and they didn’t need today’s report to tell them that.” As a matter of fact, Biden said in a statement, rising costs are “a key reason I ran for President.” And anyway, the situation is under control. “My policies — that Democrats delivered — directly tackles [sic] price pressures we saw in today’s report.”

End of story, thank you all very much, nothing to see here, move along, move along.

Just a minute. Biden’s reading of recent economic history is filled with evasions, half-truths, and “yarns.” They deserve comment and rebuttal. I don’t remember Biden staking his 2020 candidacy on inflation. He couldn’t have. The inflation hadn’t happened. It didn’t arrive until the spring of 2021. By which time Biden was living — during weekdays, at least — at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Nor do I recall Biden warning the country about the coming threat of rising prices. To the contrary: Varsity Joe was captain of “Team Transitory.” The “temporary” inflation would subside, he and his teammates argued, as kinks in the supply chain got worked out and the Federal Reserve tightened the money supply.

They were wrong, of course. Inflation persisted. By the winter of 2022, Biden was blaming high prices on corporate greed and “Putin’s price hike.” Now he says inflation is the fault of the opposition party. No reason is provided; this president isn’t into causality. “If Republicans take control of Congress,” Biden warns, “everyday costs will go up — not down.”

It’s unlikely that voters see things the same way. At the least, a Republican Congress will check Biden’s big-spending instincts for the next two years. And most people draw a straight line between Biden’s policies and the parlous state of the economy. Indeed, one eminent Democrat, former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, drew such a line before Biden’s policies ever became law.

The American Rescue Plan Act, Summers famously observed in February 2021, was much larger than it needed to be. If combined with the trillions in pandemic-related emergency spending from 2020, Summers said, the plan would result in inflation. The White House dismissed him. The act passed Congress on a party-line vote. Biden signed it into law on March 11, 2021. Inflation spiked that April.

Biden was just getting started. On top of the $5 trillion regular budget, new spending included the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act ($550 billion) and the CHIPS and Science Act ($250 billion). Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) whittled the ambitious and partisan Build Back Better plan down to the ridiculously named — but just as partisan — Inflation Reduction Act ($740 billion). Economists at the Penn Wharton School estimated the Inflation Reduction Act’s effect. “The impact on inflation,” they concluded, “is statistically indistinguishable from zero.”

Not long after Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, he issued a constitutionally dubious executive order forgiving college debt. It will increase the government’s cost of student loans by an estimated $400 billion. Meanwhile, to lower gasoline prices ahead of the midterm election, he drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to its lowest level in 40 years. Now the returns on that strategy are diminishing. The cost of gasoline is rising once again. Is this a chance to deregulate domestic energy production and build more refineries? That would be a serious response. Instead, Biden threatens reprisals against OPEC+ and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The economy shrank during the first half of 2022. In March, the Federal Reserve began ratcheting up interest rates to squash inflation. The hikes haven’t resulted in price stability. But they have led to the highest mortgage rates in 20 years, growing volatility in debt markets, and the increasing likelihood of a prolonged recession and financial crisis. National Economic Council director Brian Deese likes to say that the U.S. economy is “in a period of transition.” The transition is from bad to worse.

By subsidizing demand while restricting supply, President Biden has revived the economic maladies that afflicted the American economy when he entered public life a half century ago. Biden has turned gold into dross and, amazingly, expects to be rewarded for it. “The president and I were talking at lunch today about this,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in a recent interview with the Nation magazine. “We are so proud — and I hope I don’t give off any bravado in saying this — but we are so proud that we will end up being the most pro-labor administration probably ever.”

Sorry, madame vice president, but your bravado is showing. The unions might be happy. The other 90 percent of the workforce is not. Expect to hear from them in November.

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Elites suddenly realize they need blue-collar workers they derided

“The problem with living under postmodernism,” Dean Hunter Baker commented, “is that everyone is constantly tending the narrative instead of doing something useful.”

It does seem that way, especially if you run in my circles.

But of course, plenty of people are doing something useful. The world is full of those whose diligent and largely unsung work makes the lights stay on, the grocery shelves fill with food, the toilets flush and even the Internet run. They have been ignored, denigrated and even subjected to a species of economic warfare for the last several decades, but suddenly people are starting to notice that they matter.

It’s what Joel Kotkin calls “the revenge of the material economy.”

The material economy stopped being cool sometime in the 1990s. Blue-collar workers were being laid off, but economic pundits like Clinton Commerce Secretary (now Berkeley professor) Robert Reich were describing them as obsolete. Instead, the future was going to belong to “knowledge workers” — Reich called them “symbolic analysts” — who dealt in abstract concepts, not in concrete doings.

This idea seemed very satisfying to people who sat in front of computers for a living, manipulating symbols, like most journalists, academics and bureaucrats. It wasn’t so great for other people.

As manufacturing shifted offshore or to automation, the breezy advice given to the displaced blue-collar workers was “Learn to code.” That is, forget about the grubby real-world stuff you do for a living, and be more like us, the winners!

And for a while that advice seemed to make sense. As the tech bubbles inflated, people who produced nothing tangible made massive fortunes. The 19th-century robber barons gave us railroads, steel mills and ocean liners. The 21st-century equivalents gave us Facebook and Netflix. Blue-collar workers, farmers and small-business owners — people who operate in the material world — didn’t prosper nearly so much, if they prospered at all.

This peaked during the COVID lockdowns, when the laptop classes worked comfortably from home while small businesses shut down under government mandates.

Now the shoe is on the other foot. Ironically, the likes of Reich were able to take the material economy for granted because it was so productive. When energy, goods and food are cheap and plentiful, they seem like part of the background, barely worthy of note.

But that’s changing. Thanks in large part to lousy policies symbolic analysts produced, the material economy can’t be taken for granted anymore.

“The conflict between the material economy and the economy based in ephemera — such as the creative industries, tech and financial services — is likely to define the coming political conflicts both within countries and between them,” as Kotkin writes. “The laptop elites, led by Silicon Valley, the City of London and Wall Street, generally favor constraining producers of fuel, food and manufactured goods. In contrast, the masses, who produce and transport those goods, are now starting to realize that they still have the power to demand better futures for themselves and their families. Like railway workers, they can threaten to shut things down and win much higher pay.”

Yes. Just as the Internet’s communications layer sits on top of a physical layer of wires, routers and servers, so society’s laptop layer sits on top of a physical layer of material goods and the people who transport and maintain them. No electricity, no Internet. No drivers, no DoorDash. All that stuff people were taking for granted turns out to be essential.

The political classes are still mostly in denial. In fact, there’s a strong flavor of “Scarcity is good” coming from elite quarters. The United Nations’ Chronicle website published — and later deleted — an article saying, “Hungry people are the most productive people.”

This week, UN meteorological agency chief Petteri Taalas opined that the war in Ukraine may be a “blessing” for climate-change efforts — because the resulting shortages are blacking out much of Europe.

But most people don’t want to be poor, hungry and sitting in the dark, even if the leadership feels otherwise. (The old joke: “What did socialists use before candles? Electricity!”) And, of course, we all know that the leadership won’t be missing any meals or living by candlelight. Just as the elites cheerfully evaded COVID rules when it suited them, they’ll continue to live large while the little people are asked to sacrifice.

The question is: What if the little people refuse to go along?

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Australia: The modern-day Fascists are on the Left

In his essay, Politics and the English Language, George Orwell wrote, ‘The word fascism has now no meaning.’

Last weekend, I experienced this firsthand. I was attending my first CPAC Conference. After lunch, I stepped outside to get some fresh air. When I heard chanting and screeching, curiosity got the better of me and I went to investigate.

I saw a small group of pale people shouting about ‘fighting the right’ and ‘smashing fascism’. I quickly determined that these skinny, carefully masked-up youngsters posed no danger. They weren’t going to be fighting anyone, not without eating some red meat at least.

But their words struck me as odd, particularly since I was attending CPAC as part of a delegation from the Australian Jewish Association. As the grandson of Holocaust survivors, who experienced first-hand what fascism is, I am hyper-vigilant about its dangers.

It got me thinking, where was this fascism they were protesting so vigorously?

I thought back to the talks I had just listened to that morning. Surely, they didn’t take issue with the all-Indigenous panel talking about why so many Indigenous people oppose the divisive Aboriginal ‘Voice’.

Did these activists think that Zion Lights, the climate advocate of Indian origin, was a fascist? Was it Michael Shellenberger, who ran as a Democrat candidate for California Governor that was getting them so worked up?

As I was thinking back to the diverse group of speakers I had listened to earlier that morning, something dawned on me. The protesters chanting about racism, while attempting to smash the windows and storm the convention centre, were almost exclusively white. While inside we listened to Nigerian and Japanese people share their points of view, outside, the gathered crowd was monolithic. The most diversity I saw was a girl with purple hair.

Ironically, it was on the t-shirts of the rent-a-crowd that one could find support for another historical injustice. Many of them unashamedly wore Marxism shirts. Perhaps they were unaware that the movement they were promoting has caused more deaths than even the Nazis.

It’s easy to laugh them off, but these far-left radicals represent something sinister. Whilst inside the conference, I hadn’t witnessed anything even close to fascism. These protesters, in trying to shut down free speech, were exhibiting aspects of it.

These zealots are just emulating their leaders on the left who call anything they don’t like, ‘fascist’. If you’ve read the news recently, you may have noticed, that instead of celebrating the election of Italy’s first-ever female Prime Minister, mainstream media labelled her a ‘fascist’. They do this because she refuses to bow down to Woke norms and proudly supports traditional values. Giorgia Meloni is in good company. Donald Trump, the most pro-Jewish president in US history, was also wrongly labelled a fascist and an antisemite.

As a rule of thumb, it’s likely that those being slandered with terms like racist or fascist provide a much better example than those doing the labelling, who are often themselves spewing hatred.

Much like the word racism, fascism has lost all meaning. Far-leftists have even attempted to label the Australian Jewish Association as fascist for representing common-sense values shared by the majority of Australia’s Jewish community.

By labelling everything they disagree with as fascist and racist, leftists devalue truly horrific historical events. This is part of a wider trend of misappropriation. In recent years, the word ‘apartheid’ has been co-opted by extremists to slander the Jewish state. In the process, they diminish the horrors experienced in South Africa.

Dialogue and the exchange of ideas are hallmarks of Australia’s open society. In order to preserve what our ancestors so successfully built here, we must learn to disagree with others without labelling everything and everyone as fascist, racist, or Nazi.

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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