Transcription
Okay. So, today I wanted to continue with my discussion of, um, you know, the the big outrage that has ensued subsequent to Donald Trump saying that Ilhan Omar is a garbage person. Uh, that would be a compliment to garbage because she, she is an execable creation with zero gratitude. There are Arabic words that capture how she is, which they aren't quite exactly the same translations in in English.
Uh, so referring to a single individual as a garbage person, while yes, it's, you know, it's nice for us to always speak diplomatically and be kind and so on, as I explained in "The Parasitic Mind," to judge someone is an inherent part of to be human, right? Even as I explained in "The Parasitic Mind," the art, the the the the injunctions against, you know, judging ing others, right? "Don't cast the first stone." "You know, your house may be made of stone as well," and so on. Those sort of New Testament injunctions are not saying that it's a deontological statement. Don't cast judgment on anyone under any circumstances. "Who am I to judge?" "Who are we to judge?" Uh, "I haven't lived it." No, no, no. Judge, right? I belong to a scientific society called Judgment and Decision-Making. Right? To judge and evaluate something, whether it be another person, as [snorts] a potential friend, as a potential partner for marriage. By the way, I'm sitting here doing this today. Today, December 5th, is my is the 26th anniversary, and I'm sitting here. Why? Because my commitment to truth doesn't take a break. And so, went out earlier this morning with my beautiful wife. Had a great brunch, and then tonight, going out with the entire family with the kids to to a new restaurant that we've never been to. So, but hey, truth is constantly attacked. So, let's let's get to it.
So, to judge someone is perfectly normal. I judge John Wayne Gacy, the serial pedophile killer, serial killer, uh, as a garbage person, to use Trump's term. That doesn't make me a mean person who is marginalizing all clowns. For those of you who don't understand the reference, he, he famously used to go to children's parties wearing a very eerie clown costume. Right? I judge Adolf Hitler as being a genocidal maniac. He's a garbage person. Ilhan Omar exhibits all of the traits that you would exactly wish to avoid in any prospective immigrant. We would certainly want to see, take for example, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is also from Somalia. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is Somali. Ilhan Omar is Somali. Ilhan Omar is less than garbage. She's the mold that grows on garbage. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a distinguished, dignified, beautiful, freethinking individual. So, it's not all Somalis are evil. What we're saying about Ilhan Omar is that she exemplifies certain traits that we find to be terribly distasteful. So, there is absolutely nothing wrong in saying Ilhan Omar is a [snorts] vile human being, and she truly is.
Okay, number one. But now we come to, let's talk about, can we say Somalia is a garbage country? And I already explained to you, and actually, it's gone unbelievably viral. The the one that I did a couple of days ago, completely impromptu, 1.5 million views on X, quickly approaching 100,000 views on my YouTube channel. Uh, and in that clip, that X Spaces, I simply went to the Corruption Perceptions Index, which is an index that has existed since 1995, for 30 years, and I looked at the average ranking that Somalia has received since it first entered the ranking, which was in 2005, so 20 years, and its average ranking is 180.8, 8, 180.8 out of, on average, 180 countries being ranked. So, it is the most drastically corrupt, degenerate society that exists. But that's that's using very clear metrics. There are a set of metrics that you can use to establish the extent to which a society is corrupt. But that's only one metric, right? There are many other metrics that we could judge the health of a society.
So, I did that analysis and showed, well, certainly based on its endemic corruption, you couldn't have, again, to use Donald Trump's terms, you couldn't have a more garbage society than, uh, Somalia. But, but I could now go off and get you 75 different metrics capturing all sorts of things: health, equality, equality of women, journalistic freedom, individual freedoms, freedom of inquiry, uh, endless. But I'm just going to focus on two that I posted the day after my last clip. So, this would be yesterday. So, let's start with the Human Freedom Index, which comes out of the Cato Institute and the Fraser Institute. So, in the 20, I'm reading this, this is, uh, so I asked, I mean, I'm I'm familiar with all of these indices, but I asked Grok to generate, you know, the latest rankings. And so, I'm I'm reading here what Grok generated. So, you ready? So, the Human Freedom Index, in the 2024 Human Freedom Index, covering data up to 2022, the latest available, Somalia scores 4.67, 67 out of 10, ranking as the 164th out of 165 jurisdictions. So, oh, I guess that's not garbage. There is one single country in the world that scores less. I mean, you know, worse than Somalia. This places it near the absolute bottom, tied with countries like Iran, Egypt, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia, in the lowest quartile. The index measures 86 different indicators across personal, civil, and economic freedom. So, this is a very, very big composite aggregate measure of freedom, with Somalia's low score driven by issues in security, rule of law, freedom of expression, and economic liberty. It's also not particularly, uh, uh, dispensing free love to religious minorities. Oh, oops. Wait a second. There are no religious minorities in Somalia. They've all magically disappeared.
So, let's summarize so far. Last clip that I did for you, Somalia ranked dead last in the world in corruption. That's just one measure of how garbage the society is. Now I brought you another measure, the Human Freedom Index measure, which is a very, very well-accepted, um, uh, composite metric that comes, as I said, that comes out of two very, uh, well-established institutes, think tanks. And Saudi Arabia, I mean, uh, Somalia ranks 164th out of 165. Let's do another one. The World Press Freedom Index, okay? Ranks Somalia ranks 175th out of 180 countries in the 2025 World Press Freedom Index with a score of 73.59 out of 100. Higher scores indicate more freedoms. This is in the very serious category, meaning very serious in having no freedoms. It dropped 11 places from the previous year, highlighting extreme risks to journalists from violence, armed groups, and government restrictions in a conflict zone. So, again, let's summarize so far. When it comes to corruption, it is the garbage nation of the world. When it comes to Human Freedom Index, it is the second worst garbage nation of the world. When it comes to World Press Freedom Index, it is, oh, it's doing much better. It's only 175th worse out of 180.
But now let's come up to another one. You ready? Oh, this is a good one. Hold on a second. I asked it because I know that, uh, in many of these countries, there is this beautiful practice of female genital mutilation, which comes in various forms, but the most severe one is where you cut off the clitorises of little girls, right? You know, that pleasure center, so that, you know, in a sexually reproducing species involving two phenotypes called male and female, that are going to have heavy parental investment, you'd like both sexes to find pleasure in the act of mating. Well, Somalia, I'll let you decide where they got their ideology from. What might be some religious ideology that might be behind it? Practices a beautiful form of female genital mutilation, off with the clitoris. So, let's read here. Now, this is coming from the Somali Health and Demographic Survey, in case you're thinking, oh, this is this is Zionist propaganda. So, according to the 2020 Somali Health and Demographic Survey, the most recent comprehensive national data available, do you want to know what is the percentage of women from age 15 to 49 that have undergone female genital mutilation? Also known as female genital cutting, or in Arabic, "you are rending her pure" because you're cutting off that clitoris. That way she doesn't have those sexual desires. You need to be able to rape her without the possibility of, you know, being concerned whether you should be an attentive lover or not. So, 99% of women in Somalia have undergone female genital mutilation. The majority of cases involve type three FGM, infibulation, the most severe form, often performed on girls between the ages of five and nine. I'll skip the rest of it, but hey, you have a certain number of people that live in Somalia. 99% of people called women in Somalia have had female genital mutilation done on them. So, if you are someone who's liberal, if you are someone who's progressive, if you are someone who's a feminist, if you are someone who says, "The future is female," hearing this beautiful data, 99%. Do you say, "Oh boy, this seems to support Donald Trump's statement that Somalia is a garbage nation"? Or do you go, "Hey, who are you to judge whether other cultures choose to engage in the noble practice of cutting off clitorises and engaging in infibulation? Who are you to judge, you disgusting racist?" Okay, think. Grow up.
So now I want to turn to, because I promised you that today's show is called "Somalia and Richard Gere's Rectal Lobotomy." Now, let me explain to you why the the show is called that. Well, because you may or may not know. Now, of course, this could be strictly an urban legend. So, but but let's let's play along. Many of you have heard about Richard Gere and the gerbil story that he had been found with a gerbil in his rectal area. I don't know for what, maybe some, uh, sexual fetish. Now, of course, my feeling is that this is completely an urban legend, you know, meme that has gone, uh, haywire. Uh, I have a hard time understanding the physiology of how that could happen. But I use that meme to then argue that it might actually, there might be some veracity to the story, because if the gerbil got up his rectal area and then burrowed its way all the way up to it his brain so that then it could provide him a gerbil lobotomy. Hence, rectal lobotomy. We start off in the ass, we burrow all the way up his body, and then we gnaw away at his brain. It ends up with the clip that I reposted yesterday, 19 hours ago, where I wrote, so this is a one-minute clip where Richard Gere, I mean, literally, who's got less intelligence, less cognitive equity than the gerbil that may or may not have visited his ass. He, and he says, and so this is what I'm going to summarize for you. Richard Gere knows that people are driven by quote, "profound kindness." Ooh, who's coming out with a book called "Suicidal Empathy" soon? He knows that it's mean guys like Trump and Netanyahu and Putin that teach us that Somali values might be different from American values. The reality is that we are all the same. According to Richard Gere, bathing in a beautiful warm pool of utopian suicidal empathy, our pathological compassion coupled with our maladaptively irrational altruism liberates us from reality. You see it? So, he's speaking to, I don't know, some podcasters where he, yeah, because don't forget, he's met the Dalai Lama, and you know, he's a Buddhist, plus he's an actor, so he's obviously smarter than the rest of us. And so he says this: people only think that there might be differences between people because of monsters like Donald Trump and Putin. So, for example, when the Rwanda genocide happened, where the Hutu and Tutsi and Hutu, I can't remember the names, were, you know, uh, uh, you know, mash cutting off each other with machetes, and almost, I think it was 800,000 that were killed. The reason why those two tribes, both of which are obviously Rwandan and black, the reason why they killed each other and hated each other and had antipathy towards each other in the '90s, was probably because Donald Trump taught them that. Because there is no thing called coalitional psychology, us versus them, where people create delineation between the in-group and out-group. This is only mean guys like Netanyahu that teach you that. For example, Islam certainly has absolutely no injunctions or no historical record of it ever doing something to to the other group that is non-Muslim, to the Kufar, okay, who are enemies, who are dirty. There's no proof of that. None whatsoever. Okay. But we don't need to to prove the point that people don't look at each other as equal beings. We, by by the way, when we're talking about equality, it means very different things. Equality under the law does not mean that we are indistinguishable. Okay. So that's what this idiot, gerbil-brained Richard Gere doesn't understand. If you go to Google Scholar right now and do a search on cross-cultural differences, you will probably get, I mean, literally 10,000 articles, probably more. There, there's a journal called Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, right? That's there's a, there's cultural anthropology. What do these journals do? They catalog cross-cultural differences. What is inherent epistemologically to that scientific exercise is is the recognition that groups exhibit differences. Now, sometimes these differences are morphological. Yes. So, for example, would it be wrong and evil? And is it only Netanyahu that taught me that on average, someone from South Sudan has darker skin than someone from Sweden? Indigenous Swedes, not Muhammad Ahmed Omar from Sweden, right? I'm talking indigenous Swedes. Would it be racist to say that on average, the skin hue of Swedes is less dark than that of South Sudanese? No. Would it be racist to say that the Dutch on average are taller than Indonesians? No. Now, does that mean that there isn't a single Indonesian person who is taller than a single Dutch person? Of course not. That's why there is this thing called, get ready. You ready for this? It's called statistical distributions, right? Men are taller than women. Even though your Aunt Jenny is married to your Uncle Rosco, and she's taller than him. The fact that Aunt Jenny is taller than Uncle Rosco doesn't negate the fact that at the population level, men are taller than women. So, because I saw an endless number of idiots on social media saying the following: "Here is a beautiful Somali woman who just became a lieutenant police officer. Is she garbage?" I mean, what kind of [ __ ] must you be to not understand that when Donald Trump says Somalia is garbage, he is referring to the set of internalized realities that constitutes Somali society. That doesn't mean that there aren't a million stunningly lovely Somali people. I mean, right? Only, only either someone is willfully being political and partisan, or they are genuinely [ __ ] in the true clinical sense. They have the IQ of my shoe size. Maybe that, maybe not. Maybe they have the IQ of my discarded socks. Right? So, when you are making judgments about Ilhan Omar, she has a personhood. That personhood might have some nice qualities, and she might also have some bad qualities. When we put it all into the accounting of her personhood, we can decide she's the loveliest person in the world, or she's the, she's a garbage person. Again, I'm using Trump's vernacular. So, therefore, there is absolutely nothing. It's the most fundamentally human thing to judge others, right? My wife and I, when we got together 26 years ago today, remember, today is our 26th anniversary, we decided, we judged each other in our totality. And we each said, "Yeah, this person that I'm sitting across from seems like the right kind of person I might want to settle down with and have a family." We engaged in a judgmental process, right? Other women I sat across, I arrived to a different judgment. I thought they were garbage. They were narcissistic. They were idiotic. They were vain. They were self-absorbed. They didn't agree with me that I was the sexiest man alive. All of those reasons negate the fact that they should be my prospective wife. Okay? So, judging someone doesn't make you racist or bigoted. Judge people. That's okay. It's fine. What you don't want to do is hyperactivate your judgmental mechanism in wrong situations. Life is about deploying the right strategy at the right time and the right amount. Hence my book, "Suicidal Empathy."
So, when, uh, when, uh, rectally lobotomized Richard Gere says, "We have profound kindness. How can you? We're not a kind of society that would judge others." What are you talking about, [ __ ]? What do you mean? The United States is a society that has internalized a set of foundational principles on which the entire society has been erected on over the past 250 years. Many of these values couldn't be any more different than Somali society. That's why hundreds of thousands of Somalis try to get into the US. That's why no Americans try to move to to Somalia. That is a measure of how garbage your society is. How many people who are not Somali are rushing to the Somali embassies to receive permanent residency in Somalia? Could that be a measure of how garbage your society is? And that doesn't take away from the fact that I could play soccer with Somalis, and I love every single one of them, and they might jump into the river to save my life. So, again, making a statement about a religious ideology or a set of cultural values says nothing about individuals from that society.
Now, let me just very quickly here explain. I was, I, I mentioned, you know, height difference between the Dutch and Indonesians. How about cuisine? Cross-cultural cuisine. Wouldn't we say, "Oh, Mexican food is spicier than Swedish food"? Right? Are we saying that one is superior than the other? No. We're recognizing that they are different. Right? So, don't mistake equality under the law from indistinguishability. Somalis are very distinguishable in the values that animate their daily lives from those of Americans. Nothing could be clearer than that. So, it is literally the case that Richard Gere is, if not rectally lobotomized by a gerbil, he is lobotomized by his stupidity, his imbecility, his lack of knowledge. He, he just uses a shortcut to always demonstrate that he doesn't cast judgment on anybody else, hence rendering him suicidally empathetic. It's too bad that I've already sent off my book to the publisher because I would have a whole section called "The Rectal Lobotomy of Richard Gere." That would be a beautiful reading.
Okay. Cultures vary on, for example, how much they adhere to punctuality. Different cultures have internalized different time norms. So, in one society, when I say I'm going to meet you at 2:00, it means between 2:00 and 2:30. In another culture, if you don't, if you show up at 2:01, then you have committed a serious social faux pas. Cultures are different. That's why we map cultures. Okay. How direct you are in a society varies. In some societies, let's say Japanese society, there's a whole protocol of how you engage someone else because you don't want to appear abrasive. You want to appear proper. It's a collectivist society. When you go to Israel, people will, you know, beat up the pregnant woman to sit first in a bus. They're combative. They're cantankerous. Now, watch. I'm going to receive now a bunch of emails from Israelis. "Hey, why do you hate the Jews?" "God forbid." "Why did you insult the Israelis?" Right? It is a fact that the way that Israelis speak and interact, perhaps because they live in a very tough neighborhood, is a very aggressive and hostile way. That doesn't mean that there aren't millions of polite and lovely Israelis. But we can safely say that the communication style of Israelis is different than that of the Japanese, beyond the language difference. Right? How direct they are. How easily offended you might be varies across cultures. Your handshake varies across cultures. I remember when my wife was working as an HR head of human resources at a media, you know, telemarketing company, she would often interview men from, uh, Africa, and she would tell me that the way they would shake her hand, even though they, you know, they had nice voices, you know, because you want, certainly in telemarketing, someone that that has a nice voice, uh, their their handshake was very limp. So, it's not as though these guys were not masculine, but they had a diff whereas in the, you know, Western thing, you know, it's an erect handshake, it's a firm handshake, it demonstrates, you know, self-assuredness. So, something as simple as a handshake is is, you know, in is deployed differently depending on the culture I mean that you come from. If you teach a course in international advertising or in international marketing or international business, you can spend your entire course, uh, cataloging all of the cross-cultural differences that can result in huge, uh, misunderstandings, you know, international business mishaps. What is at the root of that is that you're recognizing that cross-cultural differences exist.
So, again, when all the progressives and all the Democrats and the Richard Geres and all the other idiots say things like, "Well, why are you castigating a whole group?" Well, because what Trump is saying is that again, not to be repetitive, Somalia does not exhibit the types of traits that permit a society to flourish. And I only shared a few, right? I, I shared with you the Corruption Perception Index. I shared with you the World, you know, Press Freedom Index. I shared with you the Human Freedom Index. I shared with you female genital mutilation. 99% of women in Somalia have had female genital mutilation. I mean, it's mind-blowing. Like, what could be more garbage data? It's a, it's a country that's failed. It's a country that has tribal warlords killing each other since forever. Does that mean that every Somali is a bad person? Of course not. Is Somali, as Somalia, a a failed society? I mean, what, what would you need to establish that it's failed if you don't already have all those metrics? I'll just mention one or two things. I'll leave it at that.
Geert Hofstede, some of you may know him. He was a Dutch psychologist who famously in the early, I think it was 1980, did a study to map out key cross-cultural differences in values. And in the same way that in in individual psychology, in personality psychology, you talk about the Big Five, right? There's the, what I call the OCEAN, right? Uh, you know, openness to experience, uh, how neurotic you are, how agreeable you are, and so on and so forth. Those five, the Big Five traits. Well, he developed something akin to those called, they're the Big Five, but at the cultural level. The idea being that you can, you can map different societies on these five cultural traits to establish, if you'd like, the cultural personality profile of a society. Well, what does this whole exercise imply? It implies that cultures are different, right? If, if we wouldn't have to do that if we didn't know that cultures are different. They're not indistinguishable. Let me just mention what those traits are. And I've actually published scientific papers on some of these, some of this stuff. So, power distance index, how hierarchical a society is. In some societies, you have very clearly established and delineated hierarchies. In others, lesser. So, now I know this, for example, in the way that people will address me professionally. So, if you go to Germany, it's Professor Dr. Got, right? Because I mean, the the official full way to to address a professor who also is a holder of a PhD, right? It's Professor Dr. So-and-so. Whenever I receive an email from someone and I'm addressed as Professor Dr. So-and-so, I usually know they're from Austria, they're from Germany, very hierarchical societies. Therefore, your titles matter in delineating yourself from others. If you go to Israel, a three-year-old will call me God, because there it's supposed to be, we all live communally in the kibbutz. We're all equal. So, it's a very non-hierarchical society. In Japan, it's a hierarchical society. How you bow and the extent to which you bow and the whole ritual of bowing completely recognizes all of the intricate rules of the nonverbal cues of the bowing ritual. That's hierarchical.
Individualism versus collectivism is another trait. And that one, I've actually published a paper, uh, looking at individualism versus collectivism and the likelihood of people that come from those two societies of doing well on a brainstorming session. Very, very cool scientific paper that I published a few years ago. Well, of course, Western societies tend to score high on individualism. The Middle East, uh, the Far East scores much higher on collectivism. In one society, I'm an individual first, then I'm a member of a group. In other societies, I'm a member of a group first, then I'm an individual. Right? My personal identity is superseded by the group that I belong to. Okay? That's, by the way, exactly what happens with Somali societies in terms of how they delineate which group they have allegiance to. Well, Somali society, I'm first belong to the Somali community. I first belong to the Islamic community. [ __ ] off, United States. You, you score much lesser in how I define my identity. Okay? That's not a good thing because what made the United States great is you could come from Italy, and you could come from Lebanon, and you could come from Venezuela, but and you could maintain elements of that, but then you all band together around the American ideals. You all band together. Yes, you might have come from Venezuela or Lebanon, but now your allegiance is to the United States. I can assure you, you can actually go and watch video clips of of interviewing Somali communities, and most of them will tell you, no, I'm Somali first. I'm Muslim first. Okay? In Islam, you have the Ummah, the Islamic nation. So, I could be from Indonesia, or I could be from Iraq, or I can be from Somalia, okay, or from Mali. Those are very different races, very different ethnicities, but if we're all Muslims, that means we are part of the Ummah that supersedes all that matters. Rectally lobotomized Richard Gere. That means that we are different. That means the likelihood of being able to assimilate is varied depending on how I internalize my identity.
Let me just mention the other traits, uh, that Hofstede had talked about: masculinity versus femininity. It's basically how much there is an internalized strict code of, you know, uh, for example, gender roles, or, you know, is it, is there a preference for achievement versus cooperation? Achievement is typically viewed as more masculine. Cooperation is viewed as more feminine. So, for example, when we now talk about the feminization of the university, well, come to some of the departmental meetings that I was at that were led by women. It's as if you're in a kindergarten class. "How is everybody doing? You're all looking so nice. It's so nice to see all of you." Right? It's all done with a lot of empathy, with a lot of cooperation. "How are your feelings doing?" Now, that doesn't mean that every man is of one type and every woman is of the other type. But it means that there are statistically, uh, predictable distributional patterns. Okay. Uncertainty avoidance is another one of those cultural traits. How much does a society tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty? Right? Try to go in some of the countries in the Middle East having a mohawk with plenty of tattoos. That's probably going to be less acceptable than in other societies where there's a lot more, you know, uh, tolerance towards uncertainty avoidance. And then there is what's called long-term versus short-term orientation. This is how a society kind of contextualizes itself vis-à-vis, you know, does it focus more on future-oriented, long-term virtues, or, you know, immediate virtues? So, it, it's, it's how you view time. So, you could imagine the earlier example that I mentioned with punctuality might be subsumed within that trait. And now, more recently, there's been a fifth trait added called indulgence versus restraint. Uh, you know, some societies are more about, you know, being indulgent and, you know, more immediate gratifications. Others are more about, you know, there's a stricter code that you have to follow, say, for a rainy day. So, again, those, some of those traits could be internalized at the individual level, or they could manifest themselves at the cultural level, and when they do so, they result in very predictable cultural differences that have very clear downstream effects. Okay.
So, let's conclude, and then I'll head back to spending time with my wife and kids who are coming home soon for our 26th anniversary. Cultures are different in a myriad of ways. They're different in their behavioral patterns. They're different in their cultural traditions, in their attire, and their languages, and their customs, and their religions, and in every conceivable way. And of course, that's what makes the world a beautiful place. That's what makes us want to visit the world and and immerse ourselves in the rich tapestry of, you know, cultures. Of course, there are human universals, right? As an evolutionary psychologist, I fully understand and appreciate that there are, underneath all these cross-cultural differences, certain fundamental common universal traits that precisely speak to the fact that we share a biological heritage. But again, when we are here pointing to the fact that Somali society might be lesser than American society, there's nothing racist about that. There's nothing bigoted about that. Every eve, every single person who feigns that they are offended by it, absolutely knows in the privacy of their thoughts that they're full of [ __ ]. But they have to say that because they've been inculcated with the reflex that it is go to point to another culture and argue that they might do things less well than you do. Especially if that culture is Islamic. [gasps] Allah. No. No. Okay. We wouldn't want to ever criticize an Islamic society. We don't want to criticize an Islamic society where the people from that society have darker skin than us. Then we are doubly racist and bigoted. Okay. So, Richard Gere, why don't you spend the weekend going to a pet store, finding, you know, more gerbils to have fun with? Leave the heavy thinking for those that are well-trained to do the heavy thinking, and you could [ __ ] off back to your [ __ ] movies and maybe grow a spine. Maybe have some testicular fortitude and stop gaslighting the idiots who actually turn to you, uh, for their opinions. Shabbat Shalom, everybody. Have a great weekend. Don't forget, "Suicidal Empathy" will soon be ready for pre-order. Every single one of you better pre-order it. Take care, everybody.