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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Moved here from Vietnam, got ADHD and was raised by a single mother. He can go fuck himself with a soda can.
As a woman who’s been diagnosed with ADHD from the age of five, this dude can go jump in a hole and go straight to hell.
Also, considering how much they opine about how the education system now is too restrictive and requiring of silence and stillness for boys, it would be interesting to see how they would react to the CENTURIES of boys education wherein they were required to sit quietly for hours at desks and memorize books and dates and quietly read.
@S.P.
Akchually…. About 20% of people with ADHD are non-responders when it comes to Adderal. You said it doesn’t work for you – if that means you get no effect at all it’s not a sign you don’t have ADHD, just that maybe it’s not the right med or the right dosage. If you have the reaction a Non-ADHD person has (mostly hyperfocus and dulling) then it’s more likely you don’t have ADHD.
That being said, boy am I glad that I now know that a) I can’t have ADHD even though I’m a textbook case since I’m a woman, b) my mum is at fault if I had ADHD seeing as she was a single mom. I’m not sure what she’s done to cause my father to die in an accident before my birth, but hey, a woman is always to blame.
When will these assholes grasp that correlation (if there is one and he doesn’t pull this shit out of his ass anyway) is not causation.
Maybe we’re getting more diagnoses because we understand the workings of the human mind better. But no, must be the immigrants!
Quite apart from everything else, even if there IS some IQ difference between racial groups, to mean anything it must also be true that:
1). IQ score = intelligence (almost certainly false)
2). *Average group IQ* magically determines what a *particular individual*’s IQ is (false by definition)
3). Even if some individual is less intelligent than another, this somehow means they should have *less legal rights* (nonsense).
So what the racists are going on about is beyond me. Oh wait, I know. They think those they consoder less intelligent than themselves should have less rights… but ONLY if they’re also black or brown. Not if they’re idiot rednecks, for example. White skin = you continue to have all your rights, in their however srupid you are.
Gee, it’s almost as if the IQ thing is just an excuse for racism…
@zaunfink
Yeah, it had no effect whatsoever, not even a negative one.
—
Also, you gotta love how Molyneux just assumes that education is getting worse because of the presence of immigrants, as if they exude some kind of Ignorance Field that saps the very content from schoolbooks and causes conversation to wither and die. Not that immigrants have, I don’t know, infiltrated the PTA or something. They’re just…present.
Oh, and the women driving away good men – that’s only when the missing father is white, you know. If he’s black, it’s because of the darkies’ inability to commit or have self control.
Does this dumbing down of education affect all US schools, or just those with largely non-white studentship? (I’m wildly guessing that the proposed mechanism somehow relates to the non-white racial origin of “mass immigrants”) It’d be quite a revelation if most of the adolescent ADHD cases were actually found in the rather limited demographic of “white boys going to largely non-white schools”.
And BTW, how does adult ADHD relate to smart kids being bored in school? Maybe it doesn’t actually relate to whether you had adolescent ADHD but how boring your current job is? It’s not like many people historically had drudging repetitive jobs… Or maybe adults don’t actually suffer from ADHD, just like girls or non-white boys or dumb white boys.
> JRichard
Ah, indeed. Maybe we have read the same article in Le Monde. It says that there are two major ways of diagnosting autism here : the freudian one which put the guiltiness of children having autism on their mother (which implies cure attempts or accompaniments with an heavy load of psychoanalysis), and the non-freudian one (which accompaniments use mainly behavioral reeducation).
To note, the article was the presentation of “Asperger’s Children. The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna“, a book from Edith Sheffer, which remind people that Asperger was a nazi, that he had practiced eugenism on autist children (the book says he killed personally 44 children) because he was considering some more valuable than the others. After the war, he pushed this consideration in a nazi themes expurged version, which bring the vision that there are “good autists” – their syndrom taking his name – and the “bad autists” – which include all the other autism forms -, by opposition to Leo Kanner who had presented autism as a trouble with a vast specter of behaviors but without any “good” or “bad” weighting.
(The book is not against persons having autism, just against Hans Asperger, if it was not clear)
*Skims Molyneux’s nuggets of wisdom
“All right, which of you sods forgot to flush.”
I know this is hardly scientific (but that shouldn’t bother SM) but I brought up 2 boys without a father, by choice, and neither have ADD, and actually I am the one who has many of the symptoms.
Yes! Girls have it too, and actual scientific data has shown that it emerges later and that is why it is missed much more often, as it tends to get lost in the turmoil of adolescence.
I have come to realise that I probably would have had a very different life if it had been recognised.
I am calling it ADD as that is the more common term as H is not necessarily part of it.
@S.P. – I’ve got a diagnosis of ADHD and PTSD *and* I’m in recovery (not really a surprise, given the first two issues) and so things like Adderall weren’t even an option for me (also unsurprisingly: the ADHD and PTSD weren’t diagnosed until after I quit drinking for one damn minute and could take a rational look at my life – yay for sobriety!).
Long story short: an SNRI (atomoxetine) has done me an amazing amount of good. I don’t know what your options are, but if you haven’t tried that option yet, maybe bring it up with your MDs?
Meanwhile, I’d like to give Molyneux a swift kick in the pants on behalf of all us women with ADHD…
@Ariblester
I mean, it’s gotten to the point where if I see someone online with an ancient Greek/Roman avi, I immediately think “ew”.
It’s the reason they hate people like Mike Stuchbery so much – he deals in actual history, with details and nuance and stuff. Remember how enraged Paul Joseph Watson was about the BBC saying there were black people in Ancient Rome?
@Vaiyt
“Mommy Issues” Molyneux. I like that. All in favour of making that his new nickname?
I did just want to drill down into this “dumbing down education” thing. Given that “conservative thought” is less a coherent ethos and more a collection of random grievances expressed in bumper-sticker form, I think these guys tend to conflate their “everyone gets a trophy” talking point with “higher education are just expensive day-care centres for indoctrinated gender studies grads” and think that every class is just about getting in touch with your feelings and then they just give As and Bs to all the kids based on gender or skin colour or something. But at the same time, high failure rates are a sign that teachers just need to be kicked a little harder, so who knows?
Just thinking back to my schooling in general from my mid 30s, it actually moved at a pretty swift clip. The distance between Bond films was what separated basic reading from analyzing current events in social studies class or basic arithmetic and algebra. It’s a lot to take in and while most of us did internalize it at one point, a lot of it gets lost along the way. With practice, I could probably get back into differentiating derivatives (high school math) or computing integrals (first year university), but I haven’t done it in years and have forgotten most of the rules… and I have an engineering degree.
Hell, there was one episode of Star Trek: TNG called “When The Bough Breaks” where an eight-year-old is upset with his dad for making him do calculus. At eight! Education’s come a long way, so let’s cut the kids a little slack and maybe fund their schooling properly.
Back when I was in Junior High and High School, our class always participated in the yearly University of Waterloo Math Contests. I remember doing alright, but never won anything. Somebody should send them to ol’ Mommy Issues and see how well his genius brain does:
https://www.cemc.uwaterloo.ca/contests/contests.html
https://www.cemc.uwaterloo.ca/contests/past_contests.html
Stupid Waterloo… both my parents were alumni and they didn’t accept me into their stupid mechatronics program. Had to settle for the top school in Ontario instead. Jerks. (Incidentally, my parents stopped donating to them after that. Mwahahaha!)
I really hate this recent conflation of increased diagnosis ofa disorder with increased occurrence of a disorder. They’re not the same thing and anyone who’s taken a basic statistics course can tell you that you can’t automatically assume a causation from simply observing a trend.
@ Katamount:
the closest I ever got to calculus was listening to my granddaughter sing “quadratic formula” and other math ditties in the car….
Napoleon said that, too!
You can add one more link in the chain – he was endorsing forced monogamy. So unless he is contradicting himself (!!) he is saying that somehow the would-be violent incels are going to be good dads that the women can pick out.
Adderall has always helped me and had some very undesirable effects on me since I’ve been taking it. It has helped me to be able to turn off the different paths in my brain and be able to concentrate on the one that I need to, whether it be for school, work, anything. That being says it takes away my feeling of hunger and makes it really hard to sleep at night. If I accidently take it later in the afternoon like at 1 or 2 instead of 8 am in the morning I will not be falling asleep till 6 am in the morning.
It’s like he’s incentivizing those of us who are “ladies” to turn men down flat every time.
Somehow, I doubt if he’s be happy with a critical mass of WGTOW.
Jesus Christ. Still? That’s Bettelheimer’s crap, the ‘refrigerator mother’ business. Someone get French doctors some up to date research.
To be fair, Molyneux isn’t a fan of MGTOW, either.
And widows never, ever existed in the entire history of the world, huh?
To be (ugh) fair, there is an argument to be made that the “disorder” of ADHD is only disordered in the sense that society refuses to accommodate for it. Otherwise it’s just a perfectly legitimate way to exist that only causes stress when the social environment is inflexible. ADHD kids *do* suffer academically because of the rigidity of the school environment.
Now, that doesn’t have anything to do with EVIL WIMMUNZ or THE MULTICULTURAL MARXISMS, but depathologizing ADHD is a worthy goal independent of… y’know, all of THAT
Does anyone else here of the gothling persuasion think the Photoshopping on that header image makes Molyneux look like a crap Anna-Varney Cantodea from Sopor Æternus cosplay?
The theory that cold and distant mothers cause autism was already outdated back in the late 80s when my brother was diagnosed and I first started learning about autism.