Good morning. I feel very proud of myself that I have been up for an hour doing productive things before going online. My relationship with social media is so much better than it was.

By this, I mean that Twitter & I are no longer locked in an unhealthy codependent & abusive relationship. We've broken up but maintain a civil & practical working relationship that enables healthy contact with the kids.
Kids= the majority of you who are not abusive arseholes.

My mental & physical health are both in a very strong place right now & this is largely because I have managed to find myself both a clinical psychologist & a personal trainer who are both perfect for me.

They are perfect because they have both realised that I am a very strong-willed & independent person with combative tendencies that are great for my work but often undermine my own interests in relation to improving my physical & mental health.

Having realised this, they have also recognised that rather than trying to change me from being a very strong-willed & independent person with combative tendencies, it is better to make these character traits work for me rather than against me in terms of my health.

These improvements I have been able to make & hope to continue making are almost entirely dependent on me being economically privileged, btw.

In Human Diversity, Charles Murray makes a strong case that personality traits are so fixed (and heritable) that social programmes that aim to help people change their lives & have better outcomes can only work if they already have the will & ability to do so.

I concede that this is probably true, but the reality remains that people who have the will & ability to break themselves out of bad habits & make improvements to their lives are way less likely to be able to succeed unless expert support is available to help them do this.

It seems I have the will & ability to improve my productivity, working relationships & mental & physical health, but I was trying repeatedly to do this & failing until I started paying £150 a week to a psychologist & personal trainer who could work with my strengths & weaknesses.

The reason I am able to pay this large monthly sum of money is because my father was a successful businessman who recently died & I was his only child. This gives me a definite unfair advantage over people who can't spend this amount of money on overcoming similar problems.

Therefore, I will continue to reject the kind of blank slatism that manifests on the left - all disparities are due to social inequality & prejudice - & the kind of blank slatism that manifests on the right - all disparities are due to individuals not trying hard enough but...

...remain an economic leftist with a strong belief in liberal individualism. That is, disparities are caused by a mixture of individual abilities & personality traits (that are distributed differently on average between the sexes) & economic advantages & disadvantages.

This means, in practice, that the way forward for genuine social justice is to accept that there will always be differences in outcomes & there are innate biological reasons for some of these - eg, fewer women wanting to be petroleum engineers...

...and benign cultural explanations for some of these - eg, Indian Brits being four times more likely to go into medicine going than the average population is likely to be a product of Indian British cultural values rather than wider societal expectations imposed on Indian Brits.

But there are also wider social causes for inequalities & these come down much more to economic status than anything else & should be addressed as such to provide everybody with a good start in life & give them the same access to good education & support with problems that I had.

This doesn't mean believing that class & economic issues are the only problem holding some people back in life. Marxists who think this (many don't and allow for more complexity) are being too reductionist. Racism, homophobia, ableism etc do still exist & have impact.

But I think it is clear that social class & economic status are the primary issues. You are likely to have better life outcomes if you are a black, disabled lesbian with a private education & trust fund than a poor, straight white man with shit education & no financial buffer.