By David Futrelle
Blabby racist YouTube “philosopher” Stefan Molyneux is brain geniusing again, and it’s not pretty. Though he’s not a doctor, or a psychologist, or really qualified to offer opinions on any subject at all, Mr. M has discovered the cause of ADHD — and conveniently enough it’s a group of people he hates: immigrants!
I guess the scare quotes around “ADHD” also indicate that the disorder he has just solved isn’t really a disorder in the first place.
But wait, I’m hearing that there’s another cause of this imaginary thing called ADHD, also according to Mr. Molyneux. It’s single moms!
But wait, you may say, if the problem is absent dads, aren’t the absent dads themselves kind of to blame?
No, because in Molyneux World, absent dads are caused by bad moms.
Heads, it’s bad moms; tails, it’s bad moms.
In conclusion, everything is always the fault of someone who isn’t a white dude.
Always good to check in with dear old Stefan and his little nuggets of wisdom.
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OT: From the Onion. The last bit is great: https://entertainment.theonion.com/the-matrix-turns-20-1833664939?utm_medium=SocialMarketing&utm_source=Facebook&utm_content=Main&utm_campaign=SF&fbclid=IwAR3o6sLGvTj1Aul5y-qu-OSNt8suGLfMYNCBAtJUvcFv9A0EsZ_zrP0z_14
@Katamount:
Hey, that’s my alma mater you’re dissing. Got into Computer Engineering back before the program had actually been accredited because the first class hadn’t finished yet.
The Past Contests page doesn’t go back far enough to find me, but I did get awards a couple of times. Fourth on the Euclid, 23rd on the Descartes, fourth on the Sir Isaac Newton as well. Not as well on the Chem 13 NEWS, though.
In many ways, being good enough to get into the national levels where I could run into people better than me helped keep me humble. I keep getting the impression that folks like Molyneaux grew up never running into people smarter than them, and kept the impression that they were the smartest guy in the room for long enough that it’s hard to disabuse them of that now even when they demonstrably aren’t.
I don’t know if I’d want to send those to Molyneaux to see how his ‘genius brain’ handles them, though. I’ve personally met too many self-important asshole Mensa members to be certain he’d do badly.
I know what it is… I KNOW WHAT THE PROBLEM IS WITH RELEASING THE MUELLER REPORT.
The dompster-fire-in-chief doesn’t trust Barr, or anyone else to tell him the report doesn’t put him in legal jeopardy. He has to read it himself, and he can only read 1 to 1-1/2 pages a day… and he has to look up the definition of half the words.
It’ll be a year at least before he can get through it.
So, I’m typing this and thinking… that’s really quite likely.
Molyneux is a vile human being and saying it’s women’s job to keep men in their place and their responsibility not to encourage or enable bad men is pretty rich considering he’s also advocating for male supremacy.
I also ask, based on all his statements removing all agency from men, if men truly are animals who can’t control themselves and have no choice but to turn violent and destructive if they aren’t properly cared for, why not take this line of thought to it’s logical endpoint? When male animals are unruly and disruptive, what do people do to them? Geldings, oxes etcetera, because that’s what people do to ensure that animals that can’t control themselves can do their job without starting fights.
So why aren’t any modern governments doing that to humans? Because men doesn’t work that way and it’d just be a barbaric punishment, because human actions are the results of conscious choices and all the talk treating male crimes or bad behavior as some natural and inevitable biological outcome in men is just BS thrown together so the guys saying it don’t have to take responsibility of their own actions.
Y’know, besides the fact that I’m a girl, and there’s been relatively few divorce/single-mother situations in my family, we can pinpoint exactly which relative the ADHD that’s rampant in his family comes from — his maternal grandfather. From the genealogy we’ve been able to do, my great-grandfather was basically an Anglo-Nordic, or just about as white as it it gets. (Also somewhere back up there is a shared grandparent with Isaac Newton, which I think is kinda cool…)
I did well at school because I was smart and creative, which was just enough to get around the fact that I couldn’t keep myself organized if my life depended on it. Looking back on it, it’s clear I had the distracted type from when I was young, but a ferocious intelligence masked it and girls didn’t *have* ADD/ADHD at the time, just boys. I don’t think the bipolar diagnosis in college was a mistake, but I do think it let the ADHD get ignored because the symptomology I was reporting (inability to concentrate/focus, distractability) were comorbid and we couldn’t get the bipolar meds to work.
Which is just a really long way of saying, “You are so wrong you’re always driving around the block, Molyneux.”
[Hi, long time reader, first time commenter…Co-mama to two beautiful kitties, our big boy (15 lbs and still growing) Winter, and our princess, Tabitha (or Tabby), exist in a Heisenbergian state somewhere in Northern California…anything else?]
I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: Stefan Molyneux is the worst thing to happen to Canada since the October Crisis.
That’s a bit of a stretch, given the existence of Stephen Harper.
Unless the worst from Molyneux is yet to come, of course …
@Weird Eddie: There has to be time for Sean Hannity to read the Mueller report and tell Trump what it says. (Remember the Mattis resignation letter?)
@Surplus: Well, we certainly can’t rule out that possibility.
@katster
Nice to meet you! Your cats sound lovely (I mean, they’re cats, so of course they’re lovely). Here’s my youngest one out for walkies:
http://i63.tinypic.com/2upzqti_th.jpg
He really is a genius! That explains why my brother and I have A.D.D. (decidedly no “H”) and not A.D.H.D.) – our parents were together! Our father kept the hyperactivity away! (Actually, my father kept all the hyperactivity to himself. Even at 80 he’d walk up to the corner store 2 or 3 times a day .) But it doesn’t explain why only one brother and I caught A.D.D., while my other brother and my sister escaped with manageable concentration skills. Was our bad mother not a bad mother to all four of us? Could she have actually been a good mother to the two “normal” children and we were too distracted to notice the difference? Did our father’s influence depend on who sat closest to him at mealtime? Wait, I sat closest to him…
Stevie? I need answers! You’ve g… Look! A Blue Jay!
Please tell me someone called this idiot out on the logic fail of “Women have greater choice for having to wait to be chosen”
Also, if the blame is on the woman when a bad man leaves her, shouldn’t the blame in the case of a good man being “driven away” to leave his child(ren) be on him for having gotten with a “bad” woman?
My cousin (AMAB) has ADHD. His parents are still married, we live in a very white area, which was even whiter in th 1980s when we were kids and he was diagnosed, and his mother, and other maternal influences, were very caring and warm. Also, I think at least one of his daughters has ADHD, but he and his wife are too lax to have then assessed and supported, poor kids. Yes, girls with married parents in a very white shire have (probably) ADHD.
So how does ‘Mummy-issues’ Molyneux explain this, considering he thinks single mothers and immigration ’cause’ ADHD, as opposed to genetics and brain wiring?
Valkyrine says:
It makes a little more sense when you remember Stefan is a white supremacist and assume he’s really talking to white women. By white supremacist logic, a white man starting a family is limited to choosing white women. However, because a woman waits to be approached and the men approaching her do not filter themselves by race, the woman is offered a greater assortment of choices.
Also, according to white supremacists, if a white woman chooses a brown or black man, it increases her chances of being left as a single mother. White supremacists believe it’s a universal truth that men of color are inherently more prone to ditching their relationships and all white women should already know this.
Anyway, if you make the rest of Stefan’s assumptions explicit, you can see he’s not so much making wild leaps in logic as he is supporting himself with horrible, unstated premises.
@JRichard @Robert @occasionalreader
Bruno Bettelheim is, AFAIK, responsible for the “refrigerator mother” theory of autism (so not Lacanians but yes psychoanalysts). As @weirwoodtreehugger says, that was already outdated in the 1980s, and now quite a bit more so.
Oh, I see @PodkayneLives mentioned Bettelheim already, sorry.
I did want to add that many autistic folks have expressed serious criticisms of the behaviorist approach too. I don’t want to post such a lengthy quote (and anyway you folks may already be au courant), but anybody who wants to read it and is on Facebook can check out the post from today or yesterday by Insufferably Intolerant Science Nerd.
@katster Hello! I am not sufficiently part of this community to offer a proper welcome, but my cats and I are pleased to meet you.
(I don’t know how to add a pic of Big Beautiful Cat and me; would somebody kindly help me?)
Oh, and as a therapist, may I note that AD/HD and PTSD have substantial co-morbidity, and PTSD symptoms are sometimes mis-diagnosed as AD/HD (which we know because they are somewhat discrete issues, but in the case of mis-diagnosis, when the PTSD is thoroughly treated the AD/HD symptoms decrease or vanish).
Much sympathy to the person (I’m sorry, I lost your name while commenting) who is experiencing both, and congratulations on being in recovery if that’s OK.
@NatashaWhilk
You need to have it stored somewhere online already, then just put the image address (ending in and image file extension, like .jpg, .gif. etc) into its own line in your comment.
For example, this:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/555921869333856279/561687511613833217/20190330_160513.jpg
Results in this:
(This is Pepper, she says, “hello!”)
@Kupo
Pepper is beautiful
Pepper sure is gorgeous 🙂
I see kupo beat me to it with the uploading advice – I’d just mention that if you don’t typically store or post photos online, using a site like TinyPic is great. It converts any photo you upload from your computer or phone into a jpg format, and you can just post the link here.
@Lainy & Mish
Thanks! She’s a pretty weird cat, I love her. ?