You've probably seen the video. A young Frenchwoman in Paris, in tears, begging looters to stop. "Why are you doing this? That's not what we stand for." Some accounts are mocking her. "She voted for it." I won't. Because what you see on her face is not stupidity. It's a disease that has infected the entire West, and it has a name: suicidal empathy. The term comes from Gad Saad, an evolutionary behavioral scientist at Concordia University in Montreal. A man who fled the Lebanese civil war as a child, and who knows what it looks like when a society falls apart. His new book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, is the follow-up to The Parasitic Mind. Here is the thesis, and why it concerns every one of us. Empathy is one of the best things about us. It evolved for a reason: to care for our children, our kin, our tribe. It was calibrated for a world where the people you felt for were the people around you, and where empathy always came paired with its counterweight: the instinct to protect your own and to recognize a threat. Suicidal empathy is what happens when that mechanism misfires. When it fires at the wrong targets, in the wrong amounts, with no brake. When we feel more for the criminal than for his victim. More for the stranger who breaks the rules than for the citizen who follows them. More for how compassionate we look than for what our compassion actually produces. Where does it come from? Four layers. First, biology. Empathy is a spotlight, as the psychologist Paul Bloom put it. It lights up the one face in front of you and leaves everything else in the dark. The crying migrant on the boat is visible. The thousands of future victims of a broken system are statistics. A spotlight is a terrible tool for running a country. Second, our own civilization. The West is the civilization that put the victim at the center of its morality. Christianity taught us to care for the stranger, the poor, the weak. It was one of the greatest moral revolutions in history. But cut off from its other half, justice, responsibility, the duty to protect your own, it turns into something else. Third, ideology. In The Parasitic Mind, Saad described idea pathogens, ideas that hijack our reasoning. Suicidal empathy is the emotional counterpart: an ideology that hijacks our compassion. It sorts the world into oppressors and victims, then demands unlimited empathy for whoever ranks as the victim, whatever they do. Fourth, status. In the age of social media, empathy has become a display. Posting "refugees welcome" costs nothing and earns applause. The bill goes to someone else: the working class, the suburbs, the women walking home at night. The results are everywhere. Criminals treated as victims of society. Sexual assaults by migrants met with lenient sentences. Self-defense branded as aggression. Borders treated as cruelty. Saad's conclusion is simple: a society dies when it would rather display infinite tolerance than use its survival instinct. Now the part I'll add myself, and that few people dare to say. On average, women score higher than men on measures of empathy. It's one of the most consistent findings in psychology, across cultures, and it makes perfect evolutionary sense: for most of human history, the survival of children depended on it. It's a strength. But it means an ideology that weaponizes empathy will hit women harder. And the data shows it: in country after country, young women have moved sharply to the left of young men, especially on immigration. This is where men have a responsibility. Not to mock. Not to lecture. Not to say "she deserved it." Empathy has always needed a counterweight, and that counterweight was the protective instinct: the one that draws lines, says no, and stands between the threat and the people it loves. Men abandoned that role. They were told it was toxic, and many believed it. So they stayed silent at the dinner table, at work, with their partners, sisters, daughters and friends. That has to end. Men have to have this conversation, honestly and with respect: compassion that cannot say no is not compassion. It's surrender. And the first to pay for it are women. Many women already understand this better than anyone. Some of the bravest voices in this fight are women, precisely because they are the first to feel the danger in the street. A civilization rests on a balance: compassion and strength, openness and borders, mercy and justice. When one side swallows the other, the foundations crack. What we are watching in Europe is what happens when empathy has no counterweight left. Look at that young woman again. She isn't the enemy. She's what this ideology made of a generation that was told kindness would be enough. Our job is to make sure she's the last generation that has to learn it this way.

Last year Ukraine officially lost ~800,000 people. Population has collapsed from 52M in 1991 to barely 20M today. If this is “protecting” Ukraine, the strategy has failed.

Grok is based.

“The wicked grow bold as they are tolerated.” Tolstoy

I avoided commenting on the Lindsay Clancy trial because its nuanced and emotional but the implications are enormous so I am going to say something now. A lot of people are calling that one juror who wouldn't join the other eleven irrational. But, that juror is probably the only one asking the right questions imo: where is the evidence that she lacked the capacity to know it was wrong or to stop herself? And, maybe, where do we draw the line on what an ostensibly insane person is allowed to do when the doubt the defense manufactured rests on nothing in the record before the killings? It seems that the entirety of the defense position rests on improbable probabilities and that's a low bar for such a heinous act. 1. Postpartum psychosis is rare, and almost always happens in the first 4 weeks. The idea that some psychiatrists extend the postpartum window to a year is true, but for depression and anxiety. The evidence isn't strong for psychosis, and its latching on to improbability 2. The strongest risk factor for postpartum psychosis is preexisting bipolar disorder or a prior psychotic episode. She had neither before her third child. The real time evidence from her doctors/providers indicate this. The bipolar label that showed up was after significant polypharmacy, and any good psychiatrist will tell you that you cannot diagnose primary disease when multiple drugs could be offending agents. Drug-induced psychosis would show better temporal correlations with her medications and should be a mitigation argument at sentencing. Again, very improbable alignment 3. The proxy for intent is planning, and she clearly planned... she sent her husband to some restaurant they don't normally go to, checked the drive time, texted a specific order at 5:07 pm... she killed her children in sequence. That's demonstrating real time decision making. I don't understand how they circumvented this. Again, very improbable that she was able to make decisions up until it becomes a liability 4. This idea of a "voice" that commanded her is so post-hoc as a defense. The ltierature on command hallucinations show most people don't obey them and the compliance occurs when the voice is familiar. This was a first time voice she only ever reported 2 weeks after killing her kids. And this first time voice asked her to... kill all her children AND she listened to this unfamiliar voice? Again... very improbable The improbability is so stark that it's almost undeniably a sympathy verdict from the jurors conflated with a misunderstanding of postpartum disease. The easiest way to demonstrate this is to take a father with the same chart, months of documented depression, insomnia, suicidal ideation but no psychosis then strangles his kids after arranging for his wife to be away from the house. 100% guilty. Everyone knows postpartum disease is real and important. Everyone knows she's sick and needed help, possibly much better management. You can even argue she is insane. What I see to be the most important is where we draw the line of what we allow under the "insanity" rule. Massachusetts forces a binary verdict of guilty or not criminally responsible but this is a case for the third that other states have and which is guilty but mentally ill. We have a responsibility to speak for the unheard voices of these children and future children and say we draw the line at murdering children.

This was a masterclass. Absolutely destroyed him.

All you dick heads with Ukraine flags in your bio. This is what youre supporting. You fucking gremlins. Why dont you go and fight instead of these kids?

It's fine for the US to close Cuba's and Venezuela's waters, and it's fine for Israel to close Gaza's waters, but if Iran blocks the countries that waged war against it from the Strait of Hormuz, that's unacceptable?

"Man in military fatigues" is a new one.

Can Christian’s in Britain set up their own police and patrol certain neighbourhoods?

So far, over 20 countries have reached out to Iran to align with its new framework for managing the Strait of Hormuz. If, as previously reported, Iran moves to make the yuan the basis for its transactions, something important is unfolding - a new global equation is taking shape.

Iran has made it clear that there is no going back to the way things were—crippling sanctions and constant threats from US military bases in the Gulf states. Given that political agreements are seen as meaningless and diplomacy as deceptive, Iran has decided that the US must be expelled from the region. The Gulf states cannot survive without access to the Strait of Hormuz; their access may therefore be conditioned on paying taxes as reparations and selling their oil in other currencies to end the petrodollar system that ties the US to the region. This war will prove to have been a historic mistake— as the effort to restore global primacy only intensified its demise. Yet in our local media, the propaganda is still organised around the saviour narrative of “liberating women” and “helping protesters”. This is similar to the absurd narrative of the Ukraine War, where the effort of using Ukrainians to impose a strategic defeat on Russia is sold to the public as NATO "helping" Ukraine defend its sovereignty. If the West wants to maximise its security and end these conflicts on favourable terms, it must break free from the narratives it has created.

Day 1: it's going to take a couple of days Day 20: ok we need 200 billion dollars

The Iran war is looking so bad for Trump and Israel right now. They may need to release the Epstein files as a distraction.

For the record, the president of the United States is now simultaneously claiming that he has won the war, is currently winning the war, needs help to win the war, and needs no help to win the war. All to destroy the nuclear program he claims to have already destroyed last year.

Imagine sexual perverts being allowed to vote on whether or not their sexual perversion is made public while they use your money to quiet the victims. Welcome to the Congress of the United States.

“Operation Epic Fail” going smoothly 🤦‍♂️ There will be regime change in DC after this

It’s amazing how all of the biggest supporters of mass murder campaigns all become humanitarians, when it’s time to sell another mass murder campaign.

Make them pay for this. It was done with the backing of Trump, the EU leaders and the entire rules based order. Make them pay for this. There is no excuse, no justification.