Triggers and microaggression
I greatly dislike the way these two words—trigger and microaggression—are currently being used.
Trigger implies that something inevitable will follow while microaggression outright claims that the other person is at fault.
I much prefer my own neutral term for those small stimuli that might cause emotional discomfort.
My term is psychological morpheme, which is defined as:
The smallest meaningful unit of a psychological response. It is the smallest unit of communication that can give rise to an emotional, psychological, or cognitive reaction.
I strongly believe psychological morphemes exist and that they arise at distinct moments and that these moments can be perceived by the owner of them and that that owner of these moments can and must learn to control them, analyze them, learn from them.
It is a huge mistake to automatically blame another person for our own psychological morphemes. From a FIML point of view, there is almost nothing worse.
The reason this is a really bad thing to do is you are very likely wrong.
Even if you are wrong only one out of twenty times, the consequences of your mistake can be very large. I guarantee you are wrong much more often than that.
I say this after doing years of FIML practice during which I have discovered in myself and my partner hundreds of wrong psychological morphemes, most of which were connected to subjective networks that had grown large over many years.
Most psychological morphemes arise due to habits of subjective interpretation.
Rather than let these subjective interpretations have their way, a far more profitable and much wiser course of action is to stop that process at the initiating morpheme. Stop it before it gets going and fills your mind.
If you can stop it at the psychological morpheme and analyze it with the help of your FIML partner, those morphemes will not become mindless triggers that you wrongly interpret as microaggression, but rather opportunities to see and understand how your brain is actually functioning in real-time.
Psychological morphemes are also commonly misinterpreted as signs that reside in the other person of boredom, anger, contempt, arrogance, insecurity, optimism, happiness, pleasure, and so on including as many states as you can imagine.
Pavel Durov | Communication Technology and the Struggle for Freedom
Russian artist who regularly mocked Putin is shot dead in Poland in ‘execution’
A Russian artist who regularly mocked Vladimir Putin and his cronies has been shot dead in Poland in what is believed to have been an execution.
Exiled Semyon Skrepetsky, 44, real name Robert Kuzovkov, was known for portraying the Kremlin leader as an absurd, bloodthirsty dictator.
The anti-Putin activist was gunned down in the eastern Polish city of Biała Podlaska, near the border with Belarus, soon after receiving a warning from ‘Russian patriots’.
Local media reported that the alleged gunman approached Kuzovkov and shot him at close range.
Medics were unable to save his life despite ‘immediate resuscitation efforts’.
Polish police have since launched a manhunt for the killer amid suspicions he was killed for daring to lampoon Putin and his supporters.
Trump reprimands Israel’s bombing of Lebanon at G7
…’You don’t have to knock down an apartment house every time you’re looking for somebody. There are a lot of people in those apartment houses and they’re not all Hezbollah.’
Israel has killed at least 3,783 people and wounded 11,699 others in Lebanon between March 2 and June 14, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. The agency does not distinguish between civilians and military combatants.
Trump also aired his anger with Bibi over the Israeli PM’s decision to bomb Beirut just two hours before the memorandum of understanding was to be signed by the US and Iran on Sunday.
‘Bibi has to be more responsible with respect to Lebanon,’ Trump said. ‘I’m not happy with the way Israel has handled themselves with Lebanon, and with Hezbollah.’
Trump also noted that he has told Israeli officials that Syria should ‘take care’ of the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah.
The President also doubled down on his recent claim that Israel would have been destroyed by Iran.
‘Without the US, there would be no Israel. Without me, there would be no Israel because no other President was willing to do what I did.’
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More data for the extremely important question — Who rules whom? Israel or USA, in what order and to what degree? Israel and Jewish Supremacists inside USA appear to have strong control of our Deep State. Trump appears to have meaningful control of much of our foreign policy and appears to be wrestling with the Deep State, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. It looks like he is building a peaceful Middle East economic confederacy which includes Israel as an equal partner to the other states in the region. This may result in ending the Israeli fantasy of becoming the region’s hegemon. The ongoing battle for Greater Israel is a supremacy battle which unquestionably is being waged inside USA as well as in the ME. Right now, our totally cucked Congress is actually trying being bribed & blackmailed to to marry USA’s military to Israel’s military, while also repeatedly deliberately failing to pass basic voter ID laws, which are overwhelmingly supported by the public. How will this all shake out? Your guess is as good as mine. ABN
Beyond the War Budget? Trump Is Bringing Back the American System
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In this effort, USA has the ironic advantage of coming from behind in many areas. This both forces and allows us to build with the newest and best. ABN
Barron Trump, 20, at UFC Freedom 250
The entire Western world is ruled by a self-centered elite numbering but a few thousand
The entire Western world is ruled by a self-centered elite numbering but a few thousand. No one who is not either onboard with them or accepts being a servile toady to them (most politicians) ever gets anywhere near real political power, or honest social influence.
Historically, elites have always manufactured social and political ‘reality’. In today’s world many of their traditional tricks are not working as well as they did only ten years ago.
What’s changed today is social media, especially X, allows the honest voices of ordinary people to be heard.
Moreover, it is obvious to anyone paying attention that more voices and more information about anything actually results in better and truer information.
Crowds crowd-sourcing themselves have proved to be much more savvy than a few thousand elites, who all bow to a small handful of super-elites.
It is simply a fact that more information seen by more people who add yet more information yields better information. Bad info is quickly sifted out.
Elites fear open-ended information more than anything because it reveals how selfish, wrong, small-minded and crazy they are.
That said, not all elites are always bad.
The best of them understand what is happening with human information and information-sharing and what is feasible.
It seems clear to me right now that more than one battle is going on among them. ABN
Russian serfs
REVEALED: How shadowy unit of government ‘thought police’ set up by ex-MI6 agent is trying to keep a lid on Britain’s simmering racial tensions
While the streets of Belfast were ablaze with anti-immigration protests last week, behind the scenes a group of spies, spinners and soldiers were deploying the ‘dark arts’ to try to defuse tensions.
The name of the secretive Government propaganda unit trying to manipulate events makes it sound like an innocuous back-office operation – the Research, Information and Communications Unit, or RICU.
But the dull moniker is part of the deliberate camouflage of an outfit which uses deception and skulduggery to try to manage the ‘challenges’ of multiculturalism.
Its techniques range from planting stories in the media, using undercover operatives to lay flowers at the scene of terrorist attacks and even, in one case, sending a pop group to sing anti-extremist songs in Muslim schools.
Import the third world become the third world
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Eva is among a group of popular influencers who claim not to understand why the invasion is happening or who is behind it. Tucker, Promethean and others speak in the same way. These are all good people who feel forced to evade censorship and a loss of followers, probably reasoning that a 90% complete voice that is heard by many is better than a 100% complete voice that is heard by only a few. I agree with their analysis. I am a 100% voice by choice. Throughout history empires (and we are living in the Western empire today) have always forced dissidents to use euphemisms or claim ignorance to avoid dangerous consequences. The more thing change the more they stay the same. It is important to understand that not all speakers can speak the whole truth in all situations. Similarly not all politicians (I mean the rare good ones) can do everything they want to do because the consequences will be counterproductive. I believe RFK is in this sort of a bind right now. Going forward, this feature of world history is unlikely to change. ABN
Trump says Iran peace deal will be signed in next several hours — after criticizing Israel for strikes: ‘What the f–k are you doing?’
President Trump said that the US and Iran were still on track to sign a peace deal Sunday that will reopen the Strait of Hormuz — his 80th birthday — despite Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon that apparently infuriated Tehran.
Trump told Fox News’ Chief Foreign Correspondent Trey Yingst that he asked Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu, “What the f— are you doing?” in response to the strikes.
Following the blunt call with the prime minister, Trump revealed that he planned to speak with Iranian officials and press them not to strike Israel in retaliation. He also predicted that the memorandum of understanding with Iran will get signed within the next two to three hours — or sometime late afternoon Sunday.
Hierarchies evolve to reduce connections (and confusion)
Large social systems, especially those with many members who do not know each other, tend to evolve into hierarchies because this reduces the number of connections required to establish communication.
When the number of connections which hold a group together is reduced, it is less costly to maintain the group and thus such groups are more likely to survive.
Military organizations, companies, religious organizations and schools are usually organized into hierarchical structures. Creative, independent modules can relieve some of the formalism of hierarchy but these modules will still fit into the hierarchical structure somewhere.
Hierarchies are (always?) organized around a purpose—money for corporations, winning for militaries, belief and organizational systems for religions, food for animals and so on.
A research project on this topic as it applies to artificial intelligence demonstrates that biological networks evolve into hierarchies:
…because hierarchically wired networks have fewer connections. (Research showing why hierarchy exists will aid the development of artificial intelligence)
If we accept this principle behind the development of hierarchies, I would submit that we can also apply it to how language has developed as a hierarchy in and of itself and also as a support system for the social hierarchy within which it is used.
Language and culture are held together by a system of hierarchical categories.
These categories are what we think of as beliefs, values, codes, stories, political systems, who’s who in the group, and so on.
Hierarchical systems based on general categories typically also exist between individuals within any society. Indeed, we can find the same sort of hierarchical system within the individual.
This is an efficient and very reasonable way to maintain a society and a language.
Problems arise in this system, however, when the individuals do not know any other way of organizing themselves or of communicating with others.
Individual who exist and communicates only within a hierarchical structure will be alienated from the great mass of idiosyncratic perceptions, responses, thoughts, and emotions which exist within them and others. I think this causes a great deal of psychological suffering and is a major part of what the Buddha meant by delusion.
FIML fixes this problem between individuals.
Morality
Morality is a quality of consciousness.
It is the basis of enlightenment and the nexus of ultimate and relative realities.
The Buddha spoke of enlightenment only by saying what it is not.
Even when we consider moral acts with great care, we can never be entirely certain of our judgement because there is always more that we do not and cannot understand or know.
We can be cautiously certain only that we have tried or are trying to act morally.
Do we act as if in a role? Or do we act as if in a mind stream, a stream of karma?
God’s Will implies we have a role to play. What does a karmic mind stream imply? Are we attracted to the Tathāgata or not?
I think it’s best to consider all points of view.
American Buddhist Net 