Independent, Musician, Atty. in PA, Interested in Contrasting Perspectives. “Being evil is not a skill set.”
Pennsylvania
Joined October 2019
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Running Up That Hill (Kate Bush)
Animated Piano Cover
I played it in the spring and animated it in the summer. There is an aurora maker in the studio now too. I think I like it.
Wish everyone a good day, -Brian
He’s getting spoiled w. all of these trips to the dog park. That will raise his expectations this fall. Sometimes he experiences mild entitlement. 😀
A great interview. The Historian speaks on transition, religion, activism, and the history of trans typology. He’s an excellent educator with firsthand experience and a smart professional communication style. Highly recommended.
This was a great interview thank you for having me on and I hope it helps your audience reality check radio. @RCR_NZ ❤️❤️ rcr.media/episodes/apostate-…
Brian from Pennsylvania retweeted
I had the honor to review “No Contact” by @noellem for @realDailyWire. It was very well written, informative and inspirational. This book has been added to my list of recommendations. dailywire.com/news/the-ugly-…
I love Egg Nog and have to add…
They had Christmas coffee creamers at my local grocery store this year on August 7th. One of them admittedly is delicious but still. First week of August?
Brian from Pennsylvania retweeted
Evil is usually comically small. Good is large, not through its own nature but because it is empowered by the infinite.
Brian from Pennsylvania retweeted
Thank you to all my X followers!!
Especially for those of you who already use Substack, one of the best things you can do to support my work is to become a FREE or paid Substack subscriber. This is the best way to keep up to date with all of my essays, podcasts, long-form videos, and community event offerings.
Whether you become a FREE subscriber or a paid subscriber, BOTH really help!
Please consider following me there: theknownheretic.com
Dark Triad Is Not a Flex
I recently saw a mini-essay glamorizing narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy as empowering on account of indifference to dislike, winning the long game, and fearlessness respectively.
It’s false and celebrates pathology. We’ll break it down a bit because it warrants a response.
First, being evil is not a skill set. High IQ, good looks, patience, discipline, creativity, and a good start in life are far better predictors of success than parasitic unscrupulousness.
Narcissism is not indifference to outside opinion. Narcissists are enslaved to a curated illusion kept alive by third-party interactions to which they are addicted. They’re easily manipulable and make the dumbest mistakes when acutely grandiose. Any successes mustered come on account of intelligence, attractiveness, or status by birth that aren’t enhanced by the weakness. Their undying vendettas over ego injuries are master classes in cost-benefit train wrecks.
Machiavellianism is a wash. Winning a long game is a product of patience, discernment, and restraint that doesn’t require the joyless baggage of experiencing life as a nihilistic ascent over human-shaped objects.
Psychopathy involves structural and functional deficits in brain systems essential to human flourishing. Poor impulse control overrides any advantages of a handicapped fear response. A beautiful genius psychopath is not living a better life than a beautiful genius who is anything else. Their overrepresentation is far greater in prisons than in C-suites.
Adoration of pathology and indifference to virtue are characteristics of failing civilizations. Even allowing for a wide range of belief systems including atheism, the spiritual & moral void in the West correlates with decline. Resignation to this may disguise itself as a clear-eyed insight into how the “real world” operates. No. That is patently a ‘worldview,’ not an objective truth, and one associated with the worst among us.
As always, good will prevail. 💪
-Brian from Pennsylvania
Eliot (right) won his race and made a new friend at the dog park today. His friend’s parents are a wonderful lesbian couple. Eliot’s other dad went birdwatching recently and registered 1,200+ broad-wing hawks.
Pennsylvania is beautiful.
A rage-baiting transactivist social media influencer confessed to autogynephilia then admitted he found The Transphobic Historian “attractive” and “twinkish” which produced “mixed feelings.” He described Ari as the most combative person he’s met in 6 months, which was intended as a compliment.
I credit his honesty.
A lot of AGPs and some gay males have a strong complicated reaction to the Historian due to his rare combination of aplomb, intellect, charisma, irreverence, and attitude. Instead of managing this constructively, they attack and demean which frustrates healthier objectives.
Although Pheobe did have a trite meltdown about pronouns at one point, he was more emotionally honest about the effect the Historian had on him and perhaps some could learn from that example.
This is ridiculous.
The woman was asked to confirm a prior name as part of a ROUTINE background check, nothing related to embarrassment over gender identity. Instead of “sure, I understand,” she manifested indignation and sued with expert testimony about the significant “distress” of hearing a previous legal name.
This kind of precedent opens the door to mass exploitation by anyone illicitly motivated to conceal a history of bad behavior. It’s plainly terrible.
This quoted post is unavailable.
A lot of people are so low on the totem pole that “at least I’m not THAT” is a direly needed relief.
Concept creep strikes again.
Supervising a therapist who describes a client in their caseload can produce “tertiary trauma.”
Imagine hearing secondhand customer complaints at a Best Buy or McDonald’s and deciding it’s a specialized form of “trauma” that warrants its own dissertation. 🤦♂️
Beyond parody.
Trauma is apparently contagious.
In my first piece for @CityJournal's Substack, I look at the growing popularity of “secondary traumatic stress,” the idea that hearing about someone else’s trauma can itself be traumatizing.
The concept originated among therapists but is increasingly showing up in other female-dominated professions, including teaching. If trauma can be transmitted from person to person, where does it end?
It sounds silly, but it can have serious consequences. Working with traumatized patients has always been stressful. Calling that stress “trauma” gives it a different meaning, especially when trauma is now commonly understood as a kind of bodily injury with lasting health effects.
The piece is a companion to my forthcoming @CityJournal Magazine article on the exodus of mental-health workers from public settings treating patients with the most severe problems to private practice serving patients with much milder issues.
cityjournal.substack.com/p/t…
Brian from Pennsylvania retweeted
grateful for this generous reading of the my new book from journalist @benryanwriter
I cannot recommend more highly the UCLA sociologist Rogers Brubaker’s new book, Gender Identity. It is a dispassionate tour de force assessing where this category of personhood came from, how it came to be formalized and institutionalized, and how it possesses a perhaps irreconcilable tension between granting rights and validating individuals’ selfhood on one hand and alienating people and and causing backlash on the other.
From the final page of @wrbucla’s book:
“Yet even in the hyperpolarized US, where gender identity has been drawn into the vortex of the culture wars, the controversy over the category ‘gender identity’ cannot be plotted solely on a left-right axis. The recent years of intensifying attacks from the culturally conservative right have also seen the emergence of critiques of gender identity from the culturally liberal center and center-left and from some feminists, gay men and lesbians, and transgender people themselves. The emergence of these critiques - which are compatible with an insistence on the dignity, safety, and rights of transgender people - is a reminder that the controversy over gender identity cannot be reduced to a struggle between progressive defenders of the ‘civil rights issue of our time,’ as President Biden put it, and reactionaries who think transgender people have ‘no right to exist.’ It is a more complex struggle over how to think about sex and gender as principles of vision and division of the world: a struggle over the relation between the sexed body and gendered feelings, between what is given and what can be chosen, between nature and culture. It is ultimately a struggle over the nature and limits of self-determination in an interdependent world.”
J.K. Rowling has taken another member of the strange & inimitable GC/trans/sexology Spaces community and singled them out for examination. My experience there can be summarized as “Hi, nice to meet you” to “Zero fucks left” in less than 2 years.
Plastic is one the least genuinely malignant contributors though his arguments leave much to be desired.
I don’t know if I’ve ever seen such an unhealthy ecosystem that was also bizarre enough to warrant intermittent sustained observation.
It has social media influencers that absolutely hate each other, tribes, and an implausible pretense of intellectualism that shapes the now dying scene.
Every main contributor seems to have at least one parody of them and operate at least two sockpuppet/alt accounts. A Space with 4 speakers might have 9 spies with some of them recording like they’re archiving state secrets. It’s exactly as cacophonous as one would expect from a trans, detrans, gender critical, LGB, debate zone. There is no soap opera on earth that compares.
Obligatory acknowledgment of some cool people I like that I did meet there:
@RiverrrSongs
@Elil2002
@PrestonFayee
@wickedtraveller
@BeGreaterBullet
@LJDetrans
@is_starts
Brian from Pennsylvania retweeted
I will not be kidnapped and abandoned in the three lower counties of Pennsylvania that ideate as “Delaware.”
Whoa.
Is this true?
The reason why ppl initially gravitate to you and then switch up on you when they get too close is bc you inspire them so much that you give them imposture syndrome. They think that they’re getting close to you to study you, run game on you or even “prove” to themselves that you aren’t who you portray yourself to be and then get humbled when they realize that not only are you who you say you are… but you’re even better up close. They’re looking for the gimmick, the catch, or a chance to rip your mask off and get humbled when they realize THEY are the only one wearing a mask.
An excellent message. The Historian is inspiring in many ways and this short clip is a standout. I loved it.
A good conversation starter on gender as a belief system rather than a natural property.
I detransitioned because I lost my belief in gender. When that happened I knew I was heading towards detransitioning, though I did not want to because there was this intense feeling of betrayal. By that point continuing to be trans felt like practicing a religion I don’t believe in, and I just couldn’t do that anymore. Did any one else feel something similar?