Official Corruption, Obsession, Hidden Crimes
Links and recommendations
My latest for The Times:
Why every young man should fear Obsession’s message
The Psychology of Morality:
My new lecture series “The Psychology of Morality” is now available exclusively at Peterson Academy.
I delivered six lectures in front of a live studio audience that explore the origins of morality. The course examines the distinction between moral philosophy and moral psychology, showing how emotions and intuitions often guide our judgments more than rational principles. It also investigates frameworks such as Haidt’s moral foundations theory and Gray’s moral dyad theory. The series also covers dark personality traits and their relationship with moral behavior, and concludes by examining the relationship between morality and happiness, sex differences in moral judgment, and moral development across the lifespan.
Enroll here for immediate access.
Here’s the trailer:
Links and recommendations:
Era-Adjusted Morality by Josh Zlatkus
Intelligence, Large Language Models, and the Left Hemisphere by W. Keith Campbell
The Hidden Crimes of Parolees by Barry Latzer and Kristofer Bret Bucklen
Free to Choose by Theodore Dalrymple
“Rationalist” Dating Strategy by Ilya Somin
Extra Cash Can Alter Fertility Decisions by Roy Baumeister
Follow me on Instagram here. The platform is less volatile and more chill than Twitter/X, so I post some spicier excerpts from my readings on my IG stories
You can follow me on TikTok here
Three interesting findings:
1. A study of content from major American and British newspapers revealed that superlative adjectives like “extreme,” “far,” and “radical” were used far more often to describe the Right than the Left, with this lopsided rhetoric taking off in the mid-2010s. (source).
2. People rate fictitious studies showing that men draw better, lie less, or are more intelligent than women as lower in quality, more harmful, and more worthy of being censored than identical studies showing that women do better than men in these domains. (source: A Billion Years of Sex Differences by Steve Stewart-Williams).
3. India is one of several countries in which the government is incapable of getting more than a fraction of its employees to do the work that they are being paid to do. In the education system, on any given day, approximately 25% of teachers are absent. The health care system is worse. Despite an extensive network of public clinics, the average absenteeism rate among doctors is estimated to be 40 percent. These teachers and doctors are all still drawing their salaries. Through a combination of poor oversight, widespread collusion, and official corruption, this absenteeism goes unpunished. (source: Cooperation and Social Justice by Joseph Heath).
The paperback version of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class is now available.
If you have gained any value from this newsletter and want to support my work, please buy a copy today. For yourself. For a friend or a loved one. If you can’t afford it, please support your local library.
Order your copy now:
Audible (I narrated the audiobook myself)
"A study of content from major American and British newspapers revealed that superlative adjectives like 'extreme,' 'far,' and 'radical' were used far more often to describe the Right than the Left, with this lopsided rhetoric taking off in the mid-2010s."
And yet, despite this AND the abundant evidence of media bias AND the leftward drift of the Democratic Party, the culture is (in many ways) moving right. People on the FAR left have difficulty acknowledging or accounting for this... probably because it shakes their sense of innate moral superiority and historical inevitability.
According to them, it's all due to "far right" misinformation online, and Elon Musk. Right.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/radical-progressivism-outside-the