Author: HP McLovincraft

Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.

Possible Biden Pick for NEC Scrubs Twitter Feed

A New York Times contributing writer who is reportedly the Biden administration’s top candidate for a seat on the National Economic Council recently purged his Twitter feed of thousands of Twitter posts, many of which mocked conservatives and Republican leaders.

Tim Wu, who is also a Columbia Law School professor, recently deleted nearly 11,000 tweets that he sent prior to Dec. 2, 2020, Fox News reported on Thursday.

Wu also appeared to scrub several highly charged partisan messages he posted on Twitter after Dec. 2, 2020, according to archived copies reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. In one dating from Dec. 12, Wu wrote that a Wall Street Journal op-ed that criticized Jill Biden was “a reminder that the old-fashioned pre-Trump conservatives were pretty wretched too.”

The news comes as President Joe Biden’s nominee for Office of Management and Budget director, Neera Tanden, faces bipartisan opposition in the Senate for her own tweets attacking conservatives and Bernie Sanders supporters.

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The National Guard Has Been In DC For 50 Days, And It’s Still Unclear When Troops Can Return Home

Fifty days later, officials have offered mixed responses to questions about whether there remains a security threat warranting the current number of troops in the Capitol. It’s also unclear how long troops will be required to stay at their posts.

Republican Florida Sen. Rick Scott asked officials during a Feb. 23 hearing why the National Guard was still in D.C., and if there was still a security threat.

“Do you have any threat assessment you’ve seen that there’s a reason we have the National Guard here today?” Scott asked. After receiving no response, he asked “Is that a no from everybody? No one has any reason, any idea why we have the National Guard here?” 

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Smith College fails to defend their own employees after false accusations of racism

Smith College, an elite college in Northampton, Massachusetts, failed to defend its working-class employees against false and damaging accusations of racism levelled by a teaching assistant, The New York Times reports.

The story began when Oumou Kanoute, a black teaching assistant at the college, was found eating in the Tyler house dormitory cafeteria, which during that summer was off-limits to students as it was being used for a children’s summer camp.

Kanoute was approached by a cafeteria employee named Jackie Blair, who informed her that the cafeteria was off-limits to students at the time. This caused Kanoute to go to the dormitory lounge, which was also closed to students for the summer, where she was noticed by a janitor.

The janitor, who has been advised to call campus security if he sees someone trespassing, decided to give them a call. “We have a person sitting there laying down in the living room,” he said to dispatchers. He did not mention her race.

When security arrived, the officer recognized Kanoute as a student and had a brief conversation with her. Kanoute expressed her discomfort with the situation, saying she felt threatened, and the security guard apologized for bothering her.

That evening, Kanoute took to Facebook to lambast a number of college employees as racists. “It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith, and my existence overall as a woman of color,” she wrote.

Smith College president Kathleen McCartney immediately apologized for the incident without conducting an investigation or contacting the accused employees, and put the janitor who called security on leave.

The actions of both Kanoute and McCartney stunned the employees. Ms. Blair, who did not call security, had her name, picture, and email included in the post. “This is the racist person,” Kanoute wrote.

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The Evolutionary Advantages of Playing Victim

Victimhood is defined in negative terms: “the condition of having been hurt, damaged, or made to suffer.” Yet humans have evolved to empathize with the suffering of others, and to provide assistance so as to eliminate or compensate for that suffering. Consequently, signaling suffering to others can be an effective strategy for attaining resources. Victims may receive attention, sympathy, and social status, as well as financial support and other benefits. And being a victim can generate certain kinds of power: It can justify the seeking of retribution, provide a sense of legitimacy or psychological standing to speak on certain issues, and may even confer moral impunity by minimizing blame for victims’ own wrongdoings.

Presumably, most victims would eagerly forego such benefits if they were able to free themselves of their plight. But when victimhood yields benefits, it incentivizes people to signal their victimhood to others or to exaggerate or even fake victimhood entirely. This is especially true in contexts that involve alleged psychic harms, and where appeals are made to third-parties, with the claimed damage often being invisible, unverifiable, and based exclusively on self-reports. Such circumstances allow unscrupulous people to take advantage of the kindness and sympathy of others by co-opting victim status for personal gain. And so, people do.

Newly published research indicates that people who more frequently signal their victimhood (whether real, exaggerated, or false) are more likely to lie and cheat for material gain and denigrate others as a means to get ahead. Victimhood signaling is associated with numerous morally undesirable personality traits, such as narcissism, Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and exploit others for self-benefit), a sense of entitlement, and lower honesty and humility.

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