CJ

Individualist. Rational Egoist. Classical Liberal. Pronouns: He-man

[CJ @Ohgreatcj]

You don’t know a stranger until you meet him.

[The Atlas Society @TheAtlasSociety]

Attack property rights and every other right becomes conditional.

[Gain of Fauci @DschlopesIsBack]

Australians: “Losing to the US at the World Cup was our most embarrassing moment ever.”

Also Australia:

[Atlas Press @realAtlasPress]

G.K. Chesterton, what a line

[Global News 24 @GlobalNews_24]

Арнольд Шварценеггер: "Знаешь, почему большинство талантливых людей так и остаются никем? Они включают фальшивую скромность. Они говорят: «Я творец, я просто делаю свою работу. Пускай мир сам меня заметит».

Это чушь. Ты можешь быть гением, создавать лучшие продукты или писать шедевры. Но если люди об этом не знают, у тебя ничего нет. Абсолютный ноль. Твой талант просто умрёт вместе с тобой.

Умение продавать, продвигать себя. Доносить св��ю ценность до других и убеждать — это не грязное ремесло. Это величайшее искусство, без которого ты никто.

Чем больше людей узнают о том, на что ты способен, тем ближе ты к вершине. Перестань прятаться в тени. Выходи и учись заявлять о себе на весь мир. Твой успех зависит только от этого"

[Rob Abiera 🇹🇼 🇮🇱 🇺🇦 🦒 @Rob_Abiera]

Ayn Rand was writing about Marxism in universities decades ago. It's unfortunate that it's taken this long for the world to catch up. How much longer before they catch up to Rand's assessment that university philosophy departments are the ultimate source?

[Jason Reza Jorjani @Jason_Jorjani]

Pentagon admission that the US created Covid TOGETHER WITH CHINA, that the virus engineers knew masks don't work, and that the mRNA vaccines are basically poison. This is TREASON and one of many crimes that justify and necessitate an overthrow of the United States Government.

[Sheila of the Most High @sheilatebra]

I finally understand what Machiavelli meant when he said, “Never play fair in a game where others cheat.” It doesn’t mean become evil. It means stop being naive. Stop bringing honesty to people who study manipulation, stop giving access to people who weaponize closeness, and stop expecting clean hands from people who already showed you they’ll throw dirt. Sometimes wisdom is not revenge. Sometimes wisdom is learning the rules of the room before the room uses your goodness against you.

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

"You hate socialism because you want people to starve."

No. You support socialism because you mistake good intentions for good outcomes. History has been paying the price for that confusion for over a century.

[CJ @Ohgreatcj]

My 4 year old was climbing the jungle gym at the park today. He was scared. Instead of turning away he climbed and talked himself through it saying, “I can do this. I am strong.” .. when he got scared he called me over to watch and continued hyping himself up.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Russian psychologist spent 10 years proving that the act of talking to yourself out loud is one of the most powerful cognitive tools the human brain has, and almost nobody outside his field has read the work.

His name was Lev Vygotsky.

He worked in Moscow in the 1920s and died of tuberculosis in 1934 at the age of 37. He had no laboratory, no funding, almost no English readers, and a body of work that the Soviet government suppressed for two decades after he died.

He produced the foundational theory of how human cognition actually develops, and the central piece of that theory was a behavior almost every adult is faintly embarrassed about.

Vygotsky noticed that young children talk to themselves constantly. They narrate their own actions, they argue with imaginary opponents, they instruct themselves through tasks out loud.

The dominant theory at the time, from the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, said this was a sign of cognitive immaturity that children would eventually grow out of as they learned to think properly.

Vygotsky said the exact opposite.

He argued that this self-directed speech was the most important cognitive event in the entire developmental window, because it was the moment a child first started to use language as a tool to control their own mind. The child was not failing to think. The child was learning how to think by externalizing the process and listening to themselves do it.

He predicted that as children matured, this out-loud self-talk would not disappear. It would go underground. It would become silent inner speech, which is the running monologue every adult has inside their own head for the rest of their life.

The voice you hear when you read this sentence is the direct descendant of a four-year-old narrating their own block tower.

For 50 years almost nobody outside Russia had access to his work, and the few researchers who did pick it up could not get funding to test it. Then in the early 2000s the experiments finally started to pile up, and what they found was that Vygotsky had been right about something even more important than he knew.

The first major study came from Gary Lupyan at the University of Wisconsin and Daniel Swingley at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012. They ran a simple visual search experiment. Participants were shown 20 images at once and asked to find a specific object, like a banana or a chair. In one condition they searched silently. In the other condition they were told to say the name of the object out loud to themselves while looking for it.

The participants who spoke the target name out loud found the object significantly faster, with higher accuracy, than the participants who searched in silence. The effect was strongest when the spoken word matched a familiar object the brain already had a strong category for.

Saying the word out loud literally tuned the visual system to detect that thing better. The researchers called it the label feedback effect, and the implication was that the act of vocalizing a goal physically changes how the brain processes the world while pursuing it.

The second major study came out of the University of Michigan and Michigan State in 2017. The lead researchers were Ethan Kross and Jason Moser, and they used both EEG and fMRI to record what happens inside the brain when people talk to themselves while emotionally upset.

They asked participants to recall painful autobiographical memories and reflect on them in two different ways. Some used the first person, saying things like "why am I feeling this way." Others used the third person, referring to themselves by their own name, saying things like "why is John feeling this way."

The brain scans showed that the simple act of switching from first person to third person, even silently, decreased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for rumination and self-referential pain. Within a single second of using their own name instead of the word I, participants showed measurably lower emotional reactivity. The shift required no extra cognitive effort. It cost the brain nothing. And it worked.

Kross described the mechanism in his interviews. Talking to yourself by name creates a small amount of psychological distance from your own experience. Your brain processes the situation more like a problem belonging to someone else, which means it can analyze it instead of drowning in it.

What Vygotsky had intuited in 1934 turned out to be even more powerful than the developmental theory he built it into. The voice you use to talk to yourself is not background noise. It is one of the most precise cognitive tools the brain has, and you can change how it works just by changing the pronoun you use.

People who talk through problems out loud are not anxious or unstable. They are running an externalized version of a process the rest of us are running silently and worse. The kindergartener narrating their block tower, the surgeon muttering through a procedure, the engineer pacing a hallway describing a bug to nobody, the athlete repeating a cue to themselves before a free throw, they are all using the same ancient mechanism that builds and steers human thought.

You can run the experiment yourself the next time you are stuck on something hard. Stop trying to solve it silently in your head. Say it out loud. Describe what you are seeing. Walk yourself through the steps as if you were explaining it to a colleague who is not in the room.

And when something genuinely upsets you, switch to your own name. Ask why this person is feeling this way, instead of why I am feeling this way.

The voice you have been told to keep quiet your entire life is one of the oldest pieces of cognitive technology you own.

Most people are still embarrassed to use it.

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

The guy with the Nazi tattoo sounds like a Communist. Imagine that.

[theficouple @theficouple]

Reminder for all young parents:

You only get:
- 1 Summer with your baby
- 3 with your toddler
- 9 with your child
- 5 with your teenager

This time is precious. Don’t rush it.

[Cody Libolt @CodyLibolt]

Where Do Your “Christian” Slogans Come From?

Christians…

Please stop treating this line from Mahatma Gandhi (and Rick Warren) like it is a Bible verse…

Do you know where “Hate the sin, love the sinner” comes from?

“Hate the sin and not the sinner is a precept which, though easy enough to understand, is rarely practiced, and that is why the poison of hatred spreads in the world...

“It is quite proper to resist and attack a system, but to resist and attack its author is tantamount to resisting and attacking oneself…

“For we are all tarred with the same brush, and are children of one and the same Creator, and as such the divine powers within us are infinite.

“To slight a single human being is to slight those divine powers, and thus to harm not only that being but with him the whole world…”

~Mahatma Gandhi

Compare with Psalm 5:5-6:

The boastful shall not stand before your eyes;
you hate all evildoers.
You destroy those who speak lies;
the Lord abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man.

Or compare with Proverbs 6:16-19:

16 There are six things that the Lord hates,
seven that are an abomination to him:
17 haughty eyes, a lying tongue,
and hands that shed innocent blood,
18 a heart that devises wicked plans,
feet that make haste to run to evil,
19 a false witness who breathes out lies,
and one who sows discord among brothers.

[Camus @newstart_2024]

Roger Federer dropped some real wisdom in his Dartmouth commencement speech:

He won nearly 80% of his 1,526 professional matches, but only 54% of the points he played.

Even one of the greatest tennis players of all time lost almost half his points.

His lesson: Don’t dwell on every mistake. A double fault, a lost point, even a bad day, it’s just one point. The champions move on quickly with the same focus and fire for the next one.

This is one of the best mindset lessons I’ve heard in a long time. It applies way beyond tennis.

Life is full of losses and setbacks. The difference between average and exceptional is how quickly you reset and keep playing.

[RazörFist @RazorFist]

Reminder.

[RazörFist @RazorFist]

The scientist who isolated the AIDs virus doesn't get a single day.

But the people who knowingly spread the AIDS virus get an entire month.

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

The progressive idea of "Let's make everyone equal at math by just not making anyone learn math" is going just about as well as you'd expect

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

Lol amazing

[Students For Liberty @sfliberty]

Ayn Rand on the Moral Purpose of Capitalism.

[i/o @avidseries]

Trans activists: “Just call people what they want to be called. It’s basic decency.”

OK, maybe this is fine in personal interactions. But, at a policy level, the denial of biological reality becomes a civilizational threat because it obliterates one of the most fundamental realities of human existence and replaces it with a requirement that we affirm the disordered thinking of a small percentage of individuals.

[Tai Lopez @tailopez]

Marcus Aurelius was right when he said that you will be forgotten either way so live in a manner, that while you remain, you belong to yourself.