In Praise of a Few Minor Improvements

In 2006, Yale's Brady-Johnson program on grand strategy included the likes of  David Brooks, Walter Russell Mead, John Negroponte, Peggy Noonan, Victoria Nuland, Paul Solman, and Evan Wolfson. Ugh. The most recent program includes Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer.

Legal immigration visas are on track to drop 12 percent during the first two years of the Trump presidency.

Facebook usage is down.

Far more Americans than ten years ago identify immigration as the most important issue, including 19 percent of Republicans.

On the negative side, the Federal Government plans to drop charges against 38 individuals accused of crimes during the Trump inauguration.

Ruling Groups Believe Much of What They Say They Believe About Multiculturalism

I sometimes read comments that our ruling classes' beliefs about ethnoracial issues aren't as willfully inaccurate as they appear to be, that elites can't be that ethically unaware.

Oh, but they are.

Otherwise, many idle rich individuals or powerful retirees, having little to lose from defecting, would defect. Instead, nonwealthy whites, individuals with much to lose from doxing and other totalitarian punishments, drive nonmulticultural thought. Elites are almost nowhere found. Nonmulticultural websites struggle for tiny sums of money while institutions do trillions of dollars worth of propagandizing on behalf of establishment views. Morrissey, James Woods, and a few other C-list celebrities have made a few politically incorrect comments, but their comments barely scratch the surface of nonmulticulturalism. Such celebrities have almost no political power. No nonmulticultural website ranks among the top 500 most popular websites. Despite its many agitations, Breitbart is mostly an assimilationist, neoconservative site on policy issues.

When someone wealthy or famous gets punished for saying something offensive to multiculturalists, the thought expressed is usually some knee-jerk intuition. Such individuals don't get punished for talking about behavioral genetics because they know next to nothing about such matters. Ideologies driven by egoism, including egalitarianism, are simple. Fact facing is complex. Most ethnoracial issues require careful study. If you asked random politicians and billionaires about behavioral genetics, you'll have a tougher time than asking them about the Phillips Curve. They have little idea. They have lived their lives in the fallacy dominated mass media universe, where whites are the overwhelming majority of those committing evils and knowledge of nonwhite evils is suppressed.

Philosophers, supposed experts in logic and thought leadership, nevertheless believe Richard Lewontin's preposterous corn analogy.

Notice how we seldom see elites secretly undermining cultural Marxism. Politicians pretend to be pro-worker on the campaign trail, then turn anti-worker in office. They pretend to support non-interventionalism, then switch to militarism in office. We see similar contradictions between campaign rhetoric and policy behavior on dozens of other issues. Yet multiculturalists remain steadfastly multicultural in both campaign rhetoric and policy actions. Yes, they aren't as multicultural as the likes of Robert Mugabe and Keith Ellison, but that's because elites are devoted to profiting from the decline of the West. If they blow the West up all at once, they lose, too.

Powerful individuals are spoiled rotten. They have dark triad tendencies. They don't care about ethical facts, except when they see some benefit to themselves and their close associates. They live culturally isolated lives. Their "war rooms" are groupthink rooms. Television tells them nonwealthy whites are "deplorables," and they believe it. The things they think privately about whites are worse than the things they say publicly. They live in a world of knee-jerk talking points. They do vile acts, then engage in tokenism and grandstanding to pretend they are ethically superior. Treating nonwealthy whites as worse than mere objects is their normalcy. Harms to whites outside their social milieu don't register to them. Forcing nonwealthy white children to attend diverse, hostile schools worse than many prisons seldom bothers them, but they become enraged when individuals having no business in the West are incarcerated for their crimes. Their ethnoracial ideas come though a mass media filter that constantly uses slurs, straw person attacks and other fallacies to demonize those who disagree with them, including those telling the truth. (They don't have to look far to find straw persons to ridicule since much of the Alt Right preoccupies itself with horrendous memes and other infotainment garbage.)

Most humans don't say to themselves: "Let me find the most well-reasoned conclusions wherever they may be." Instead, they at least unconsciously think: "I can't go down the ethical truth rabbit hole because the media says X is somehow associated with Y, and the media says Y is a Nazi." Carefully and accurately weighing the good points from various sides is simply not something they do. The more reality contradicts their ethnoracial views, the more they fanatically cling to their political teams. Confirmation biases become a lifestyle. They live their political lives in a mental fog of manipulations, cocksure that fallacies are truth.

It doesn't matter to them that 100 percent of Muslim run countries are totalitarian, that nonwhite rule over large groups of whites has been disastrous 100 percent of the time, that racial diversity makes most individuals behave worse than they otherwise would, that eugenics for IQ and character offers fantastic opportunities, that mass dysgenics almost guarantees horrors. Sticking to their self-interested narratives matters more to them, as does finding plenty of people they regard as inferior to mock.

The ability to experience cognitive dissonance (contradiction anxiety) rises with logical skills. Individuals practicing new age cultism--plus other aceticisms and aestheticisms experience little or no cognitive dissonance when spewing fallacies. Believing what they want to believe makes them feel good, even when cult leaders exploit them. If they quit and start reading with a more logical and open mind, their ability to experience cognitive dissonance increases. Feeling anxiety when telling untruths is an ethically beneficial mental price of being logical. Ethical persons feel anxiety when they say something fallacious. Unethical persons feel more anxiety when they violate their groups' norms. Our rulers are genetically and culturally ill-suited to experience cognitive dissonance. They have little psychological incentive to believe the truth when believing fallacies benefits them far more in the short term.

Fanaticism doesn't require secular or avuncular fundamentalism. Glib, quiet, casual dismissal of unwanted evidence does the job, often without a second thought.

Freedom of Association at Restaurants Helps Self-Determination on More Important Issues

Multiculturalists remain self-oblivious to billions of their self-contradictions. On the rare occasions they notice, they treat their self-contradictions as unimportant and resume the rhetorical offensive, considering such self-contradictions good for the cause, notably their support for self-determination in nonwhite lands and their opposition to such important rights for whites in white lands.

But Red Hen refusing to serve Sarah Sanders seems to have struck a strange nerve. Many multiculturalists claimed Red Hen went "too far." Other multiculturalists praised Red Hen, viewing it as a legitimate response to an "assault on democracy." Oddly, they didn't consider thousands of acts of terrorism by Antifa and other multiculturalists as going too far. (Luckily for them, they control nearly all the mass media and other institutions, making it easy for them to whitewash multicultural terrorism.) Nor do they consider importing millions of individuals devoted to aggression, free riding, and anti-white tyranny as an assault on democracy.

Several months ago a black man I know demanded that all white males be deported to Norway. But, he too, regards regards Sanders' expulsion as an act too far. (Try to twist yourself into that mindset.)

Trying to keep the freedom of association for whites genie in the bottle accounts for much of the multicultural response. Denial of service to customers is a easy to notice policy. If multiculturalists start using their freedom of association rights to rampantly deny white customers "for political reasons," it will become harder for them to keep denying self-determination rights to whites legitimately seeking political separation. It becomes more difficult for them to manipulate whites with spurious charges of "racism" when whites merely seek to avoid multicultural totalitarianism and extermination.

Future Constitutions

For generations, Western ruling groups avoided punishment for their crime sprees. Currently, punishment probability is inversely proportional to power. Worse, they treat citizens as merely a means to their legalized mass destructive ends.

In any ethical nation, punishment for evils should be highly probable, strong enough to deter others, and somewhat proportional to undeserved harms done or attempted. For deterrence, the punishment should sometimes greatly exceed undeserved harms done or attempted. Otherwise crime and other evils pay. X amount of punishment for X amount of undeserved harm done seldom deters if the probability of being punished is only two percent.

With their massive wealth and power, our rulers are able to buy distance from citizens. The greater the distance, the more they commit false cause and false denial of cause fallacies, blaming and despising citizens for the results of rulers' own evils. They are devoted to egoism, after all. And they all hold their positions by practicing Machiavellianism.

In a ethical, self-determining nation, individuals in power must be close to citizens. Punishments must be severe and highly probable for undeservedly harming citizens.

Therefore, in future, ethical constitutions:

1. politicians receiving gifts and other bribes must be severely punished, especially bribes from ethnoracial outgroups.
2. individuals in positions of power must be required to have middle class or below wealth, so they cannot afford to distance themselves in fortresses surrounded by armed guards. This applies to politicians and other political opinion makers.
3. when rulers commit evils and try to cover their evils by subjugating and indoctrinating citizens with bait-and-switch, divide-and-screw practices, citizens have an ethical duty to make huge efforts to regain self-determination. Eugenic policies should strive to produce ethical character above all else for a variety of reasons, including to prevent populations driven by egoism, groupthink, and loyalty to big men and women over fellow citizens. The best constitution is not worth much in the wrong hands. Nor will such a constitution last. Groups being undeservedly harmed should have self-determination.
4. duties should exist for schools, media and other institutions to promote character development and beneficial skills, not hedonism, parasitism, and destructive status competitions.
5. groups that attempt to unethically undermine and harm citizens should be forced to form or migrate to separate nations. 
6. all elements of constitutions and important laws should require popular vote renewal once every eight years. Additions to constitutions should also be voted on once every eight years, including former elements the constitutions that might have been erroneously removed.
7. citizens should have a right and duty to perform extrajudicial punishments on elites for evils committed when justice systems refuse to do so. Such extrajudicial punishments should focus on elites themselves, not their followers. Such a duty should not be implemented without careful thought about consequences.
8. judges should be banned from ruling on the constitutionality of laws.
9. provisions mostly similar to the American Bill of Rights should exist.
10. hundreds of other constitutional provisions should fit the genes and character of the people in a nation.

Satirical Headlines Unlikely to Appear in the Onion, Part Two

Holy Koran Originally Recorded on Bones, Stones, and Branches Because All-Knowing Allah Didn't Give His Chosen People Traits to Invent Better Materials

Study: Opposing Junk Science Undermines Faith in Science And Must Be Stopped

Nonprofit Officials Who Never Had a Real Job Defend Six Figure Salaries by Claiming Lower
Salaries Would Cause Them to Lose Too Much Talent to the Private Sector

Elderly Establishment Politician Says He Wishes He Could Change but Only Knows Bait-and-Switch Politics

Heiress Donates $85 Million to Local Multicultural Business School, "to Help Others Pull Themselves Up By Their Bootstraps"

Onion Jumps the Shark, Breaks Funny Bone

A Short Summary of Big Picture Alternatives for Whites:

seasteading
Pros: good for protecting children from destructive mass cultures. If done properly with difficult initiations and proper training, an esprit de corps develops. Cons: expensive, boring, crowded. Poor self-defense. Dependent on shore supplies. Some individuals will act stir crazy. Not a good idea.

separate lives or villages within present states
Pros: easier to adopt, less alienation. Cons: at the mercy of tyrannical political whims from  multicultural populations, forced to work for and pay taxes in support of people seeking your destruction, that is, supporting their evolutionary and unethical egoism.

unilateral secessions
Pros: many. Con: police states responding to unilateral secessions with sanctions and aggressive violence.

purchasing land from existing poor countries for settling
Pro: less expensive land. Cons: difficult to find sellers, nonwhites will eventually break deals. Terrible idea.

leaving Earth 
Pros: greater safety from multicultural aggression, greater freedom to implement preferred societies. Cons: currently too expensive and technologically unfeasible.

paying nonwhites to leave the West 
Pros: many. Cons: expensive and politically unfeasible for now.

negotiated single secession
Pros: larger population for defense, economics of scale. Cons: free rider problems in a large nation. It would probably be dominated by present powers. If Texas seceded, for example, multicultural neoconservatives like Ted Cruz and Rick Perry dominate in the short run. Marxism will dominate in the long run.

negotiated multiple secessions
Pros: multiple experiments in living, less ideological strife, less alienation as whites find groups that fit their views, ability to develop esprit de corps. Cons: worse economics of scale, fewer citizens for self-defense. Counter argument: nuclear weapons would lesson need for large militaries.

encourage extreme multiculturalism now while whites still have a large enough population, leading to a great awakening among whites (the worse now, the better in the long run)

Pros: many. Cons: difficult to pull off, might lead to fascism. Many whites are so fanatically committed to groupthink, hedonism, and individual self-interest they might never experience an ethical awakening.

convert to Islam 

Pro: reduces power of Marxian feminism. Cons: implements a vile form of patriarchy. Nonwhite self-aggrandizement and self-justification is based in large part on misguided hatred of whites. "Hello, fellow Islamic multiculturalists," will look like an obvious ruse and won't significantly reduce their hatred of whites. Islam destroys ethical character, including via gene and culture co-evolution.

continue slow death with the occasional destructive lashing out gesture until multiculturalists believe they have enough power to engage in massacres, as in Zimbabwe, South Africa, the Ottoman Empire, and elsewhere 
Pros: few. Cons: loss of self, progress, and posterity. The worst evil in human history.

combinations of the above

other
several more I can't think of at the moment.

Steven Pinker Peddles Rhetorical Bullcrap

I learned of Steven Pinker around the turn of the century after Pinker wrote The Blank Slate. He shot to pop culture fame. I took a look and thought: he's paraphrasing Judith Rich Harris among many others--fine if it were fascinating paraphrasing, but The Blank Slate was stupendously boring, at least it should be to the well-informed. Judith Rich Harris remained in comparative obscurity. In most bookstores, the mom and dad sections are riddled with the nurture assumptions of helicopter parenting while The Nurture Assumption remains difficult to find. Psychologists still publish multitudes of studies each year as if genes do not exist.

Imagine my surprise when I found out Pinker wrote, The Sense of Style, a writing guide--also stupendously soporific.

Pinker gained more fame with The Better Angels of Our Nature, based on a small sample fallacy of human history.

But those books had many good points.

Pinker's newest work, Enlightenment Now, is more poorly reasoned. It is filled with multitudes of slurs, straw person attacks, and false cause claims while plowing rhetorical ground Greg Easterbrook and many others previously covered. It contains few good points.

It promotes misleading, feel good buzzwords and catch phrases--"sympathy," "optimism," "cosmopolitanism," "classical liberalism," "liberal democracy"--that those who treat politics as infotainment relish. Cosmopolitanism is a euphemism for hedonism and totalitarian rule by remote billionaires, who despise us. Classical liberalism is a feel good phrase for a 19th Century egoism, also known as robber baronism or laissez faire economics. Today liberal democracy is a euphemism for ruling groups deciding among themselves what they will do to the rest of us, often Randian neoconservatism and third way militarism. Liberal democracy meant something different 70 years ago, but as Pinker knows, the meanings of words change with time. Upbeat rhetoric doesn't turn Randian neoconservatism beneficial. Sympathy is compassion minus the urge to help. Many times compassion is misplaced. Sometimes it is well-placed, but sympathy is a vapid substitute.

Pinker claims life is much better now than a few decades ago and provides statistics on that point, but provides no evidence that his ethical and political prescriptions were a cause of those improvements. Technology, high Chinese IQs, people who oppose Pinker's prescriptions, and other factors were far more important.

Pinker invokes "moral sense," which is about as accurate as saying chemistry sense. The field of ethics is not a sense. For many enlightenment figures, reason was mainly a buzzword. The same can be said for Pinker. The casual reader will likely come away from Enlightenment Now with little idea of what reason is. According to Pinker's acknowledgements, dozens of intellectuals helped Pinker with Enlightenment Now. I bet none of them said, "Hey, Professor Pinker. We have a problem here. Your slurs and irrelevancies aren't acts of reason." The individuals who benefit most from contemporary rule seem constitutionally incapable or unwilling to see and fix its flaws. So where is their "moral sense?"

Pinker warns us about numerous sorts of "extremists." But he doesn't warn us about his own glib fanaticism. Russia, China, and the West are all run by optimistic, cosmopolitan globalists despite the fact that elites like to call any globalism that conflicts with their own "nationalism," yet they are marching toward war. Studies have suggested that optimism and opportunism are two of the leading causes of unjust wars. Neoconservatism and classical liberalism are partly driven by optimism and opportunism. Books on wars are loaded with ridiculously optimistic military assessments of self and enemies, leading to disasters. Social scientists have also noticed the dangers of optimism. Pinker describes himself as "more libertarian than authoritarian," but that is a false dichotomy. Because in the long run, libertarianism leads to authoritarian rule by the likes of Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers despite libertarian writers sometimes emphasizing civil liberties.

Pinker claims to oppose tribalism, yet he politically allies himself with the most tribalistic force on contemporary Earth, that is, multiculturalism, including Islam. Pinker opposes the blank slate as a scientific matter but supports politics based in large part on egoism and blank slates. I doubt Pinker thinks he can browbeat nonwhites out of egoism and ethnocentrism. His book is for white individuals, who are already too xenocentric. Pinker claims "more people have been murdered to mete out justice than to satisfy greed." Well, then show us the evidence. The two run together. Greed is excessive self-interest. Humans think their murderous acts of excessive self-interest serve justice. Most humans have lived in tribes. As Napoleon Chagnon's research on tribes suggested, tribal humans fought for an excessive share of resources, especially access to fertile females: "Women! Women! Women! Women!"

More global individuals are more selfish, an apparently unpublished study for reasons I do not know. It appears to have flaws teasing out factors. But the study greatly understates the problem. Most ruling class individuals would not participate in such a study, But we don't have to look far. It is difficult to think of a single ruling class individual having good ethical character. They view others as sexual, financial, and ethnoracial prey. We see it constantly around us: Their idea of compassion is wrecking the jobs, lives, schools, families, and neighborhoods of nonwealthy whites while they benefit from cheaper labor and divide-and-screw politics. A paradigm case for the elite individual of generally horrendous character, who nevertheless thought himself ethically superior because he supported cultural Marxism, was Lyndon Johnson. Johnson stuffed ballots and rigged his way to a World War II medal. His presidency was a disaster of atrocious, Machievellian policies, the most notorious being the 1965 Immigration Act, which was opposed 58 percent to 24 percent by the people. In true low character, self-superior elite fashion Johnson not only signed the bill, but felt compelled to slur the American people as "cruel" for opposing it. Elites use the mass media to propagandize the people into supporting rotten policies and when that fails they do what they want despite democratic opposition.

Pinker criticizes "cynicism about the institutions of modernity." Let's see: Politics dominated by legalized bribery and mass deception. Ditto for national defense. Health care that costs roughly twice what health care costs in other comparatively advanced countries. Education systems devoted to propaganda and debt peonage. A financial, insurance, and real estate sector devoted to ever greater free riding. On the plus side, hard industries and cottage industries are more efficient than ever, but they make up a fraction of the economy.

When the subject is psychology, Pinker appears to somewhat weigh arguments. But as with most individuals, when it comes to ethics and politics, I never get the impression that Pinker sits down and carefully weighs the good points from various sides against each other, which is what we have an ethical duty to do.

Pinker doesn't spew hard demagoguery the way Hitler and Trotsky did. Pinker uses soft demagoguery reminiscent of motivational speakers--many emotively loaded generalities without specific arguments on specific issues. Like other motivators, Pinker's views are vague enough to not offend uninformed readers.

Steven Pinker also produced this essay:

Thomas Hobbes's pithy equation "Reasoning is but reckoning [false with reasoning defined as calculating]" is one of the great ideas in human history [false]. The notion that rationality can be accomplished by the physical process of calculation was vindicated in the 20th century by Turing's thesis that simple machines are capable of implementing any computable function and by models from D. O. Hebb, McCullough and Pitts, and their scientific heirs showing that networks of simplified neurons could achieve comparable feats [faulty measures]. The cognitive feats of the brain can be explained in physical terms: to put it crudely (and critics notwithstanding), we can say that beliefs are a kind of information, thinking a kind of computation [bad definition], and motivation a kind of feedback and control [bad definition].
This is a great idea for two reasons [false]. First, it completes a naturalistic understanding of the universe [false], exorcising occult souls, spirits, and ghosts in the machine [false and straw person]. Just as Darwin made it possible [irrelevant] for a thoughtful observer of the natural world to do without creationism [irrelevant], Turing and others made it possible [irrelevant] for a thoughtful observer of the cognitive world to do without spiritualism [straw person].

Nowhere in that essay does Pinker mention consciousness, that stunning state of being that somehow arises from brain meat. Whether empirically true or not, an overwhelmingly biomechanical explanation of human existence is profoundly dispiriting to most human beings, making it ethically problematic: rah, rah, sis boom bah--you're a bunch of matter-energy in an indifferent universe.

(Steve Sailer calls Pinker "perhaps the finest public intellectual of our time," which tells us something terrible about Sailer's own worldview. Sailer also dismisses The Nurture Assumption because it doesn't devote enough space to teaching how parents can teach vocational skills, pages 328 plus in The Nurture Assumption, though the book is about personality traits. A listing of vocational skills parents teach would be banal.)

Pinker's arguments don't pull us from unethical chasms, they push us closer to them.

Social Science Watch: Crime Sentencing Edition

A new study examines disparities in sentencing, finding that blacks receive three month longer sentences from Republican appointed judges than similar non blacks while women receive two month shorter sentences from these judges.

The authors write, "These differences cannot be explained by other judge characteristics." Cannot as in impossible? Social science authors who treat study results as certain have questionable expertise.

Then the authors seem to contradict that claim with, "racial disparities by political affiliation are largely driven by drug offenses.” So is the judicial characteristic of being tough on drug offenders an explanation?

Did the authors tease out other alternative causal factors for sentencing differences:

1. accurate accounting of criminal history.
2. miscounting nonwhites as white.
3. geographical differences. Republican appointed judges in white, close knit towns probably sentence softer than Republican appointed judges from neoconservative areas having more black crime.
4. differences in insolent behavior by defendants in court.
5. disparities in willingness to plea bargain. It seems likely that judges give harsher sentences when the evidence is closer to slam dunk. Maybe whites with more evidence against them have already plea bargained since whites are more likely to tell the truth on self-reports. It is well known in law enforcement that blacks serving long prison terms demand DNA tests even when guilty because admitting guilt would cause them to lose face and hamper their innocent victim narratives.
6. disparities in crime circumstances. It seems likely that a car jacker murdering a driver will receive a harsher sentence than someone murdering his brother in the midst of a family argument.
7. Democratic appointed judges giving softer sentences than sentencing guidelines recommend.

A probability also exists that the study results are accurate. That's another argument against races living together. Multicultural Republican judges feigning race blindness are still biased. Getting accepted into multicultural political establishments requires biases on thousands of issues. Truth telling gets ostracized.

(Not surprisingly, the authors did not investigate jury nullification, law enforcement nullification, and unjust civil trial awards by progressives and Democrats, so-called restorative justice. Such individuals barely give lip service to equal treatment before the law. The probability of being caught and punished for crimes in diverse neighborhoods is low. And the probability of hate crime reporting, investigation, and conviction for hate crimes against whites is minuscule, but good luck finding scientists to investigate anti-white tyranny. There should be a study on how many more times likely a social scientists are to look for racial biases in whites than nonwhites.)

Reason: Giving the Right Weights to Arguments

Reason, also known as logic, is the sufficient finding and creating of premises and conclusions on some specific issue, plus weighing of those premises with sufficient care and accuracy to figure out which conclusions are best supported by good premises, that is, most likely to be true. Both premises and conclusions are called claims. Anything that is logically insufficient, that should be ignored when weighing arguments, is called a fallacy. Combinations of premises and conclusions, the argument, in informal logic, most everyday reasoning, are degrees of strong or weak, depending on how well the premises support the conclusions.

Argument:
The moon no longer exists (conclusion). I looked outside the last three nights and it was gone (premise).

Counterargument:
The moon still exists (conclusion). It's been cloudy for over a week (premise). Only a dummy could think it's gone (premise). One hundred percent of astronomers believe the moon still exists (premise). Just because you watched the sky one night doesn't mean garbage (premise). The problem is the way your brain is wired (premise).

The conclusion in the second argument is better supported, that is, more well-reasoned despite the fact that it contains three glaring fallacies.

The cloudy and sufficient expertise of astronomers premises outweigh the premise in the first argument. The "dummy" abusive ad hominem premise, the straw person "one night" premise, and the circumstantial ad hominem "your brain is wired" premise should be ignored, treated as worthless. Those three fallacious premises are also irrelevant to the specific issue, so it doesn't matter to this issue whether they are true or not.

There are dozens of types of fallacies beyond false claims, ad hominems, and straw persons.

Individuals make fallacious claims because they want to persuade or because they're making a joke or because they don't know any better or because they know better but regard persuasion as more important than giving an audience logically sufficient claims. It is common for professional opinion makers to glibly reject arguments by saying, "I'm not persuaded." Being persuaded or not is irrelevant to the value of an argument.

It is also common in everyday life for an individual to reject or otherwise under weigh an argument because some claims offend them or some claims are fallacious. This is wrong. What matters is how good the conclusions are and how well the good premises support them. It is often ethically wrong to use abusive ad hominem attacks and carelessly use other fallacies, but that doesn't tell us how well-supported the conclusions are.

Reason is often dismissed as linear, uncreative thinking, but it requires a large amount of creativity and resourcefulness to find or brainstorm the best premises and conclusions. Most arguments omit the best premises and conclusions.

What Mr. Spock does often in Star Trek is not logic, as the show states. He spits out intuitive claims without arguments.

Reason is not the slave of passions, nor should it be. Differing cognitive states can help or harm our reasoning abilities, for example, our arguments might come out worse when we are bored, but our passions when creating arguments are irrelevant to their worth.

Science is one branch of reason. Ethics, technology, art criticism, and many other human endeavors also use reasoning.

Good reasoning is the only legitimate way to find out how likely claims are to be true. A true claim accurately describes something. Because many promoters of tyranny claim to be men or women of reason and science does not make reason to blame. Such individuals reek at reasoning and are throwing out reason and science as empty buzzwords to attach prestige to their horrendous plans. The ability and willingness of most human beings to reason well is extremely, extremely poor. Many individuals with prestigious degrees are abysmal at reasoning outside their areas of expertise. Some lawyers, physicians, professors, and other professionals are terrible at reasoning in every field. They managed to become professionals because they are smart, good memorizers, and hard working, not because of the quality of their their reasoning.

There is far more to the reason story, and those stories can be found is logic texts, ethics works, scientific reasoning writings, etc.