Sepehr has produced many interesting videos, some of which I post. They can be controversial, but that is a plus in my view. Our ancient past needs to be rethought and reimagined. We all come from somewhere, all of us are mixtures, but human groups did and still do differ enormously. These differences are very often reflected in cultural norms across the world. The more realistic we are about the past and the present, the better. Today’s cascade of genetic information seems to be getting reasonably sifted through to yield solid new insights. My main friendly criticism of Sepehr’s work is he puts himself in his videos so often, some of them are unwatchable (for me) even though the content is otherwise worthy. He has risen to prominence quickly, so maybe putting himself in there has been a good PR idea. I really mean this as friendly, respectful criticism only. ABN
The advantage of seeing humans as networks is we can say interesting things about them parsimoniously.
A network is an organization of parts that are all connected.
Humans are networks of language. It is quite easy to see that language is a kind of network. Words connect in many ways and any word can be added to an existing network without difficulty. One word is defined by other words and we understand how it is used by how it functions among other words.
Humans are networks of semiotics. Semiotics function and are networked much like words, though a single semiotic may require many words to describe.
Meaning or what things mean is another network that is a fundamental part of being human. Meaning can be expressed in words, it can be apprehended through semiotic analyses, and it very often has a strong emotional component.
Emotions are another network that is fundamental to humanness. Emotions are often not as easily analyzed as the other networks since they can be vague, changeable, and based on complexities that are difficult to see while the emotion is happening. I am pretty sure that most, if not all, complex emotions are socially determined. Since semiotics are by definition communicative, the emotional aspect of all semiotics is a major aspect of both the semiotic and emotional networks. For this reason, emotions are often best analyzed through their accompanying semiotics.
Humans also have biological networks, perceptual networks, chemical and electrical networks.
All of these networks are hooked up with each other and all of them send signals internally and to the other networks.
If we conceive of a single human being as being a vast network that includes all of the above mentioned networks and others that have not been mentioned (aesthetic, gustatory, sexual, etc.), we can see that that vast network that is all of the other networks must have a basic need to be unified.
The biology must cohere and be healthy and the mind and feelings that exist together with that biology must be unconfused enough to guide the biology toward what it needs to maintain itself.
The cognitive networks (language, semiotics, feeling, reason, etc.) must have a strong tendency to forming basic conclusions about the world around them.
For example, all humans live in fundamentally uncertain circumstances. We don’t know when we will die, what happens after we die, how stable our social lives are, our economics, our biology, and so forth. To function, our cognitive network(s) must have a basic answer to the question of uncertainty. Here are some ways that people answer or respond to the fundamentally uncertain nature of human existence:
Many just declare that this is how it is. People like this might say, “Life is tough and you gotta do what you gotta do ’cause that’s how it is.” Or, “I growed up poor so I gots to be rich now and that just how it is.”Answers of this sort, while not complex, can be very motivating. I am sure that many conventionally “successful” people deal with uncertainty on terms like these.
For many, religion, science, or philosophy answers this question. “God said so.” “Science has shown that.” “Do as thou wilt.”
Another common response is “No one has ever been able to answer that question, so I am going to ignore it and get all I can because you only live once.”
In my limited experience (wish it were more limited), a good many alcoholics love the feeling of being sure or of knowing how things are. Booze activates an easy confidence of this sort and can even be charming in an occasional drunk. By the time booze is an addiction, though, this form of confidence becomes a bad habit, declining in charm as the cognitive functions are eroded by the alcohol.
In cultures that have a belief in rebirth, the question of uncertainty is often answered by what happened in the past or resolved by what might happen in the next life.
Some people deal with this question by focusing entirely on one thing—their career, their children, their nation, their business, etc.
Some deal with it by facing it and finding that nearly everything produces a sense of wonder because hardly anything is known for sure. Others feel anxiety by facing it. Others anger or frustration.
I am sure that readers can add many more examples of how humans deal with fundamental existential uncertainty. What I find most interesting in thinking in this way is you don’t need to imagine a person’s ego or wonder too much about how or why their emotions developed as they did. You really just need to ask them how they deal with uncertainty and they will tell you.
The vast cognitive and biological networks of individual humans often can be understood as being based on a simple answer to a simple question like that.
Since psychological explanations are the coin of the realm today, many people will confuse themselves and others by further adding long stories about the development of their personality or how their parents treated them. These factors can be interesting and are real, to a point, but it is much simpler and more profitable to focus directly at the answer/response to the basic question of life’s uncertainty. A major bias or unifying principle of the human network can be found in a straightforward answer to that question.
Beyond this basic question discussed above, there are many other questions we can ask about a particular human network. Is the network closed or is it open? Is it complex or simple? Is it independent of social definitions/constraints or dependent on them? How well does it see itself, understand itself? Does it perceive other networks or does it see other people as two-dimensional aspects of its own network? Is it willing to interface with other human networks in complex ways or only in simple conventional or established ways? Is it secretive? Does it see the vastness of the networks outside and beyond itself? Does it see how it is connected to them?
The advantage of analyzing humans as networks is it avoids many of the ambiguities of psychological analysis. Rather than focus on such dubious concepts as personality, ego, the subconscious, or self, a network analysis simply asks how is the network functioning. From a network point of view, a personality or self is little more than a focal point, a unifying principle that provides an illusion of certainty where there need not be one and cannot really be one. A human can function perfectly well without an ego, self, or well-defined personality. Indeed, there is greater stability in seeing yourself as a complex network that is always open to analysis and always willing to add or remove parts as they show themselves to be either good or bad.
After basic network questions have been asked and answered, I think the best starting point for a more detailed analysis is an examination of semiotics and how they are functioning in the individual’s life, and especially in their communications with others. This is best done through FIML practice.
In this context, as in so many, it is important to remember that humans are entry-level conscious semiotic animals. As such, we are prone to processing semiotics with the abrupt and often violent instincts of animals. A network approach provides specificity (what semiotic are we talking about), malleability (oh, I didn’t mean that), an appreciation for the functionality of network nodes, what they are doing and how or why. Since FIML partners have a prior agreement to do analyses of this sort, it is fairly easy for them to segue from ordinary conversation to analysis of that conversation and then back to the ordinary conversation.
I’m a chinese from a rural village in Southern China. I stumbled upon this Sub and found that lot of people here never actual been to China, less likely they have been to rural China, which still take up most part of china. so I want to share what I’ve seen and heard over the last thirty years to show you a slice of the rural China—in real life. Not very good in English, please excuse the grammar mistakes.
I grew up in a small village in Southern China. a bit isolated. The population merely past 1,000. Everyone in the village have the same surname. As a kid, I thought the whole world had the same surname until like 7 or 8 years old, when a girl with a different surname move to our village, this thing reshaped my worldview, like, “there is actual other people outside our village?”
Beside being isolated, the village was dirt-Poor.
How poor? We had no Flush Toilet, no, no Flush Toilet, no underground pipe system. Every household had two big buckets. one for the liquid human waste, one for the solid waste, Aka fecal. when the liquid waste bucket was full, we took it out to the fields to water the crops. When the poop bucket was full, well, some with morality will carry it to a public pit. some would just dump it onto the street. one thing I learn about poverty, if you can’t afford food, you can’t afford morality. so, most go to the street.
so as a school child, commuting to school took extreme caution, you never knew what you may step on. the worse thing is, when it rain, the alley would became a small river of fecal and piss, you had to walk like a ballet dancer to avoid them.
The hygiene was bad, the education was worse. We had one class, one teacher. The teacher was short, we nickname him Mr shorttie, Mr shorttie only finished middle school, that already crown him the most educated person in the village. He taught writing, Math, and sport, basically everything. Mr shorttie had like six daughters, he beated his wife a lot because she can’t gave him a son to carry his blood line.
When I was in 6th grade, the government said we had to learn English. But Mr shorttie only knew the 26 letters of the alphabet. So, He only teach the alphabet.
Mr shorttie had three teaching skills: the Belt whip, the Face slap, and the knee Kick. personally, I think the last one hurt the most.
Our school was just a brick house with a tile roof. When it rained, it leaked. Once, a typhoon took down a tree onto the roof, tiles rained down and smashed two kids. the school had no money to hire cleaners, so they hire us intead, zero pay, of course. We spent like a week to clean up the rubble.
Cultures demand constant authorization and reauthorization from their members. To stray from established norms is to weaken group authorizations.
That’s how it works for all cultures with more than a few members. Cultural bonding and affirmation involves nothing more than authorizing and reauthorizing the basics of the culture.
It even works that way in groups as small as two people. This is because two people speaking together typically do so in a larger cultural context that is defined and accepted by both of them.
Just as most people do not make up their own words or jokes, most people do not make up the bases of their culture(s).
Even committed couples speaking in private typically do not leave their shared cultural script(s). This happens because they do not know any other way to speak to each other.
A profound and rich world of subjective insight and perception eludes them because they are afraid they might stray too far from the established script.
Culture becomes deeply illusory at this point. Its tenets are held not due to thought and insight but only to stabilize or maintain a rote communication pattern.
You can change this by using a functional communication pattern instead of rote cultural grammar that has been imported into your mind from outside.
As an experiment, try not feeling anything about the basics of your culture. Do FIMLfrom this point of view and see what happens.
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Edit: BTW, the above roughly explains how mass mind-control works.
The controllers insert material into the public’s metacognitive vocabulary/ semiology, and sure enough, their minds shift.
There are so many examples of this, I trust readers can discover their own.
The thing to see is how easily something new can be inserted and become ‘reality’ for many because it’s the latest way to talk and think.
The other thing to see is the old and ancient metacognitive vocabularies/semiotics/ memes which have been in whatever culture for decades or centuries.
Seeing what those are and where they came from and what they do is a fundamental part of Buddhist practice, which sees all of them as empty, impermanent, delusive.
Hence the notion of ‘Buddhism without beliefs’.
Cling to none of them, including Buddhism.
The Buddha was the world’s first, still famous skeptic. ABN
By averaging individual EEG responses to 500 images, researchers were later able to identify individual people with 100% accuracy. The main expected use for this research is biometric identification of people wanting to enter secure spaces.
That this research also has implications for social-psychology is what I am interested in today.
If each of us is unique with unique responses to pretty much everything, how are we able to communicate?
We communicate with each other in cultural terms. That is, we use unifying cultural concepts to provide a sense of agreement. Some might say to manufacture an illusion of agreement.
Culture is a hierarchical group of unifying principles that organizes the minds of its members.
Similarly, what we call the “self” or the “ego” is nothing more than a unifying principle that organizes the mind of the individual.
It should not take too much effort to see that what people think of as their “self” is usually an imported hierarchy that comes from the individual’s understanding of the culture to which they belong.
Individuals tailor their imported “selves” in much the same ways that we decorate our rooms or choose our clothes. There is a good deal of leeway in how you construct yourself, but there are also serious limitations.
This why individuals in one culture differ from individuals in another. If they have commonalities, those are often shared cultural roots or instinctive human behaviors that find expression in all societies.
I believe the above view of culture and the individual’s role in it describes a dangerous trap.
This is so because the resonance between “self” and “culture” is a powerful tautology, based on illusions.
No matter how you change culture, the trap remains the same.
Change in culture means little more than a rearrangement of limited parts that will never come together as an enlightened whole because cultures are always lowest common denominators.
Make culture more “tolerant” and it will gradually be undermined and replaced by those who come into the tent under the new rules.
We see exactly this happening with SJWs whose demands for tolerance have morphed into totalitarian demands for tolerance as they define it.
Do as we say or be fired, ostracized, demonstrated against, beaten-up.
I do not see any way to get out of this problem except the Buddhist way. Renounce culture in most of its guises and as an individual withdraw from its worst bs as much as possible.
Culture, as much as the ego or self, is a fundamental delusion. It is the stuff of the first noble truth and it causes suffering.
As a Buddhist, I understand that culture is necessary for our educations up to a point. And I understand that the self is necessary for healthy individual development up to a point.
But once that point has been reached, I renounce the totalitarianism of culture, the totalitarianism of the self, the totalitarianism of any lowest common denominator anything.
Notice I said totalitarianism of.
I can accept and function in a culture that allows great freedom of thought with few rules. I always gladly obey all the rules in national parks and adore the Bill of Rights, though sadly it is slipping away.
Similarly, I am good with a healthy persona restrained by the five precepts and used as a basis for social intercourse and freedom of thought.
You can substitute Somali with many other clannish and tribal societies; they would say the same thing.
This explains why clans are so good at fraud and parasitism; they have no loyalty except to their clans.
The Catholic Church ended European clans by banning marriage to anyone closely and even distantly related.
This led to the famous ‘high-trust’ society the West formed after that.
For centuries this Western high-trust society, with no clans, (and low mental retardation) allowed the West to become the most creative and innovative society on earth.
Nowadays, Western blindness to our own zero-clan history is causing us to be overrun with parasitic clans and tribes that see us as easy prey, which we are because we do not understand what they are doing.
Jewish Supremist comprise a clan and act like one. This is why everyone in Congress is terrified of them and swears fealty to them at every opportunity.
It appears Somali clans in Minnesota and Maine have been paying off politicians in a fashion similar to JS payoffs and threats to Congress.
For clans and tribes, that’s how you do life. There is no other way. There is no other moral consideration.
Notice the dude in the video says Somalis ‘don’t do one-on-one, they gonna jump you… You are f*cked’.
This is another very important point Westerners have not recognized.
If anyone in a clan gets mad at you, you are f*cked.
And this explains the covert widespread attacks on young people in the West I have detailed in many posts.
But they were innocent, never did anything, you say.
You are perceived as being in a clan or different tribe, so you are f*cked for that reason, and that reason alone.
To them, taking out the young, raping and humiliating them, demoralizes your clan.
The clan mentality will destroy your entire society to preserve and further their clan.
It’s how they think.
Notice how Israel is behaving in Gaza and all along.
At the inception of the plan it was genocide and still is. When Musk and Trump call this out and act on their calls, they deserve the support of all Western peoples, and all others who support the West. ABN
In addition to setting the priorities for the United States focus, the report details the Trump administration perspective on the world as broken down into specific regions. The report is a brutally honest review of the current state of geopolitical benefits, risks and threats as they pertain to vital U.S. interests.
In addition to outlining a critically renewed focus on the Western Hemisphere, the Trump administration also notes the practical position of Europe, as it pertains to NATO and dependency on the U.S.A.
In a brutally honest review of the situation, the Trump administration notes Europe is increasingly losing their own identity. The fear the Europeans express about being vulnerable to Russian strength is hypocritical, in the sense that in practical outcomes the EU is purposefully weakening itself and simultaneously demanding assistance against their own weakness.
[PAGE 25] – American officials have become used to thinking about European problems in terms of insufficient military spending and economic stagnation. There is truth to this, but Europe’s real problems are even deeper.
Continental Europe has been losing share of global GDP—down from 25 percent in 1990 to 14 percent today—partly owing to national and transnational regulations that undermine creativity and industriousness. But this economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure.
The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.
Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less. As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies. Many of these nations are currently doubling down on their present path. We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.
This lack of self-confidence is most evident in Europe’s relationship with Russia.
European allies enjoy a significant hard power advantage over Russia by almost every measure, save nuclear weapons. As a result of Russia’s war in Ukraine, European relations with Russia are now deeply attenuated, and many Europeans regard Russia as an existential threat.
Managing European relations with Russia will require significant U.S. diplomatic engagement, both to reestablish conditions of strategic stability across the Eurasian landmass, and to mitigate the risk of conflict between Russia and European states.
It is a core interest of the United States to negotiate an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine, in order to stabilize European economies, prevent unintended escalation or expansion of the war, and reestablish strategic stability with Russia, as well as to enable the post-hostilities reconstruction of Ukraine to enable its survival as a viable state.
The Ukraine War has had the perverse effect of increasing Europe’s, especially Germany’s, external dependencies. Today, German chemical companies are building some of the world’s largest processing plants in China, using Russian gas that they cannot obtain at home.
The Trump Administration finds itself at odds with European officials who hold unrealistic expectations for the war perched in unstable minority governments, many of which trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition. A large European majority wants peace, yet that desire is not translated into policy, in large measure because of those governments’ subversion of democratic processes. This is strategically important to the United States precisely because European states cannot reform themselves if they are trapped in political crisis.
This video is a 2-minute excerpt from the 2014 documentary Pakistan’s Hidden Shame, directed by Mohammed Ali Naqvi and aired on Channel 4 in the UK. It focuses on child sexual abuse among street children in Peshawar, Pakistan’s northwestern city.
__________
When you bring in migrants, especially in large numbers, they will continue cultural practices from wherever they came from.
It is asinine to ignore this massive reality, which Britain and the West has done for far too long.
The naive tautology that ‘everyone is equal because we are all human’ is the stupid soft part of Western demise.
Criminal, violent tribal, and violent clan infiltrations are the hardcore results, abetted by corrupt politicians and and the wealthy infiltrators who pay them off.
After many decades of reckless migration, including murderers, spies, smugglers and sophisticated infiltrators, the West has all but destroyed itself.
Linda Sun, 42, had convinced Hochul — who served as Cuomo’s lieutenant governor at the time — to film a Lunar New Year video touting China’s New York consulate when she made the shocking comment, according to evidence presented at the ex-Albany aide’s corruption trial.
“She is much more obedient than the governor,” the accused Beijing mole wrote to China consular official Lihua Li in a Jan. 25, 2021, message shown to jurors in Brooklyn federal court.
Linda Sun, who allegedly served as a Chinese agent, once bragged that Kathy Hochul was “much more obedient” than Andrew Cuomo.
“The deputy governor listens to me more than the governor does,” Sun wrote in another text minutes later — punctuated with a sheepish grin emoji — sent to Huang Ping, who headed the consulate office at the time.
UPDATE: In common with almost all Westerners, including many who have spent years in China, Hochul has zero understanding of China and Chinese civilization.
You can see it in her eyes and in Sun’s description of her.
In the 19th and 20th Centuries, China was forced to come to terms with the West. It took them a long time.
In a very similar manner, the West in recent decades is being forced to come to terms with China.
We are doing no better with that than China did 150 years ago.
Like them, we are reacting to a fantasy of China, an enormous illusion.
I highly recommend that Westerners understand that all cultures are susceptible to decades, if not centuries, of confusion and disorientation when dealing with foreign powers they do not understand.
All cultures, including the West.
The West is also doing a terrible job of managing our relations with Russia, Israel, India, the Muslim world and Africa.
For China, it might be a good idea to consult more closely with very intelligent and knowledgeable Japanese.
They have been dealing with China for well over 1,000 years and even still made a major blunder by invading China in 1931.
That was a disaster they are still reeling from today.
Nonetheless, Japanese know more about China than Westerners do, and they know enough about about us to be good informants, while also benefitting from a more secure USA .
For Russia, I like what Trump appears to be doing. He seems to want an alliance with Russia based on real-world economic and political ties.
For China and other regions, I highly recommend not listening too much to academics, foreign policy experts, run-of-the-mill historians or anyone who has a dog in the fight or money on the table.
Trump is much better than most at this game, and this is a major reason I support his presidency.
I doubt Vance, or anyone else in the presidential bullpen right now, has the chops to replace Trump.
I hope there is someone somewhere in power in USA who has the street-smarts to contact and learn from people who genuinely understand the civilizations around the world that we must come to grips with and relate to for our own benefit and theirs.
Fake news, fake history, fake anthropology and fake foreign policy — all have a stupid and deeply naive side as well as a nefarious one.
People like Sun exploit the nefarious side. And she is just one of millions from across the world, Somalis included.
People like Hochul are on the naive side, deer in the headlights.
She is a poster fawn for virtually all Western politicians today. ABN
This is an inevitable response. Basic anthropology. ABN
UPDATE: Ofc, this video could be fake or a psyop, but something like this is inevitable and Ireland is a prime candidate as they had a very active IRA for decades. ABN
American Buddhist Net 