Bill Adams

Police Lieutenant Sheboygan, WI; Critical Rationalist / Fallibilist doing what I can to advance values of an Open Society

[Bill Adams @adams292]

@Jerry_Ratcliffe If you can’t be useful, at least be complimentary.

[Bill Adams @adams292]

@ToKTeacher If genes have a “massive” effect on propensity for violence for other mammals, why so diminished in humans? Are our ideas, which dictate “almost all to absolutely all behavior in people” not influenced by genes? To any significant degree?

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

Yes.

[Bill Adams @adams292]

@Jerry_Ratcliffe @PeterMoskos Just listened to it, lots of good stuff. Interesting question about what response might be to the next bad use of force. Now we’re sadly in it. Do either of you have material on the interplay between local and federal law enforcement? Topic for future podcast?

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

"If you brand yourself as a mouthpiece of some political ideology, and for academic, scientific, and journalistic outlets, it's primarily been on the left, then people on the right and center will blow you off. And in some ways, they might be right to blow you off, because if there is repression of controversy or dissenting opinions, if there is a rush to judgment, if there are premature claims to certainty, people will sniff that out and just consider so-called experts to be just another self-interested priesthood."

Full episode of the The Academic Issue here (episode #4): https://t.co/ub72UmiWCn
@UA_magazine

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

The Enlightenment’s Gravediggers: When Westerners, knowing they have Western freedoms, hate the West. Another brilliant essay by Maarten Boudry @mboudry https://t.co/aafaOSH0H1

[Greg Lukianoff @glukianoff]

I think this may be the funniest video we've ever done.

[Bill Adams @adams292]

@DavidDeutschOxf @ToKTeacher @JonathanWaxman1 @MrWinMarshall It’s still amazing to me how poorly understood Popper is. But that’s also cause for optimism. If his actual ideas can be spread more accurately, imagine the impact!

[Bill Adams @adams292]

@ToKTeacher Exactly! The principles represented by the acronym DEI are in complete harmony with liberalism. The weaponization of those ideas to silence people is its antithesis. We have to take care not to sacrifice the idea while attacking the ideology.

[David Deutsch @DavidDeutschOxf]

Nazism is: racial purity, blood-and-soil nationalism; eliminationist antisemitism; violent intimidation and murder; glorification of war; ordinary morality displaced by absolute loyalty to the party and leader.

A Nazi is someone who advocates, works towards, or enacts all those.

[CALL TO ACTIVISM @CalltoActivism]

This is Marco Rubio explaining how the USA promised to defend Ukraine forever if they got rid of their nuclear arsenal left after the Soviet Union fell.

This is why lil marco was sinking into the couch. He was hoping we wouldn’t find it…so don’t RT right now this very second.

[Anthony Scaramucci @Scaramucci]

Here is a recap of the Ukraine situation, for those choosing to reject propaganda and continue seeking truth:

December 1994, Ukraine agrees to give up its nuclear arsenal in return for security guarantees from the US, UK, France, China and Russia.

February 2014, Russia invades and subsequently annexes Crimea, President Obama does next to nothing. War through weakness.

July 2019, Trump admin withholds $250 million in military aid to Ukraine to apply pressure to investigate alleged corruption by Hunter and Joe Biden.

February 2022, Russia invades a weakened Ukraine, world expects Zelenskyy to flee and Kyiv to fall within days. Ukrainians fight bravely for 3+ years, inflict hundreds of thousands of casualties on Russian army, weaken Putin politically.

U.S. has sent ~$70 billion in outdated military equipment to Ukraine since start of war, providing opportunity for U.S. military to modernize its weaponry. We’ve sent an additional $30+ billion in budget support, $75 billion in ancillary appropriations related to war.

~50,000 Ukrainians have died defending their homeland, protecting U.S. and Western interests in the process. Meanwhile, the U.S. President and V.P. are calling democratically-elected Zelenskyy a dictator and berating him in Oval Office in pursuit of a financial payoff.

The U.S. should be thanking Ukrainians, who have fought for our common interests with only modest financial support from a country with a ~$30 trillion GDP.

America can and will reclaim its backbone again soon, with better policy and messaging from common sense moderates.

Slava Ukraina.

[Bill Adams @adams292]

@DanCrenshawTX You now fully support authoritarianism?

[Douglas Murray @DouglasKMurray]

‘Putin is THE dictator and 10 Ukraine-Russia war truths we ignore at our peril.’ My column in today’s ⁦@nypost⁩ https://t.co/DTgRuRcpnF

[Daniel Hannan @DanielJHannan]

Ukraine did not provoke the war – except in the sense that the US provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor by refusing to sell arms to Japan, or Poland provoked Hitler by failing to surrender the land around Danzig.

[Logan @ChipkinLogan]

Individualism & Egalitarianism:

It is the individual—not the tribe, not the family, not the society—who has the capacity to explain the world, to understand it, to suffer, to be happy, to make choices, to create explanatory knowledge. This kind of individualism is a devastating criticism of every collectivistic idea past and present—collective justice, guilt by blood, racism, classism, and policies intended to help a ‘community’ as defined by the set of all individuals with a particular characteristic.

Moreover, there is only one kind of individual—any person is as capable of making progress, experiencing any physically possible qualia, and generating knowledge as any other. It is in this sense that egalitarianism is true. People are not equal in terms of skill, interest, genes, phenotype, wealth, opportunity, nor life experience. But people are equal with respect to their ability to generate new knowledge and continuously solve the endless stream of problems that defines their lives. Indeed, knowledge creation is the most egalitarian enterprise in existence.

[Brett Hall @ToKTeacher]

https://t.co/Co5MD6P1nD

[David Deutsch @DavidDeutschOxf]

https://t.co/b3Y5SYqluP

[Bill Adams @adams292]

@DavidDeutschOxf Completely agree. He resolved some of the greatest challenges and apparent paradoxes of enlightenment philosophy.