Tag: cultural norms

I respect his honesty but not his logic

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Convicted spy [Jonathan Pollard] laments US Jews see themselves as more American than Jewish, suggests he’d counsel Jew working in American security apparatus to spy for Israel even now

Pollard claims Jews ‘will always have dual loyalty,’ whether they know it or not

What Pollard expresses are normal sensibilities for people with strong lineage ties. But most of us do not have strong lineage ties. Instead, we have the weaker ties of tradition, law, right vs wrong, abstract ideals, freedom, the American Constitution. Jews are not the only people with strong lineage ties. Today we are seeing USA break into segments of those who have strong ties and those who don’t; those who want to strengthen their own ties and weaken others’. I hate the terms “proposition nation” or “the American experiment” when applied to USA. But I have to admit that it does look more like an experiment today than a real nation. When the breakup happens it will be strong lineages against weak ones, weak ideals against strong ones in those orders matched respectively.

James Lindsay on pseudo-reality & totalitarianism

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If you can understand what Lindsay is saying you will be able to understand what FIML practice is an why it is that way. What it does and roughly how it works.

Lindsay is basically describing the meso and macro levels of FIML practice. Basic FIML is the micro level of what he is saying. Core FIML practice informs and clarifies the meso and macro levels Lindsay refers to. (See Micro, meso, and macro levels of human understanding for more on this.)

At the level of the individual, Lindsay's term paralogic is analogous to idiolect mixed with idiosyncratic psychology. These are general concepts that apply to individuals. Lindsay's paramorality is analogous to idiosyncratic semiotics and idiosyncratic perception and the reasoning that arises therefrom.

(Malignant) narcissism is the individual level of totalitarianism; it and all other non-biological "personality disorders" spring from incommunicable idiosyncratic sensibilities in one way or another. FIML fixes the incommunicable part of that, thereby also fixing the disorder.

FIML is difficult because most people are deeply rooted in meso and macro "realities" at the expense of very legitimate and very real idiosyncratic sensibilities. The idiosyncratic individual is bound to or trapped within unsatisfying meso and macro "realities" (or worse, a Lindsayan pseudo-reality) because no one has shown them a better way and that causes suffering.

A lot of the "intellectual dark web" hovers at meso and macro levels around the individual, micro core that they do not know how to access.

Jordan Peterson does a lot of that. James Lindsay states it very clearly for meso and macro levels of totalitarianism.

How scientific journals make money while also impeding science

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It is an industry like no other, with profit margins to rival Google – and it was created by one of Britain’s most notorious tycoons: Robert Maxwell

…The way to make money from a scientific article [is]…to duck most of the actual costs. Scientists create work under their own direction – funded largely by governments – and give it to publishers for free; the publisher pays scientific editors who judge whether the work is worth publishing and check its grammar, but the bulk of the editorial burden – checking the scientific validity and evaluating the experiments, a process known as peer review – is done by working scientists on a volunteer basis. The publishers then sell the product back to government-funded institutional and university libraries, to be read by scientists – who, in a collective sense, created the product in the first place.

Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?

DHS officials told “not to speak on immigration issues at the border”

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The official with knowledge of the restrictions spoke under the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak on the matter. “The situation with media relations now is night and day compared to the last administration, The official said. “We have been advised not to speak on immigration issues at the border and to rely on DHS’s Office of Public Affairs and the Whitehouse Press Office to handle messaging.”

The verbal order applies to senior law enforcement leaders within DHS and has no formal expiration date. It comes as the administration is struggling to manage the growing crisis caused by changes in border security and immigration policies leading to a spike in illegal crossings at the border.

Exclusive: Biden Admin Restricts Senior DHS Officials from Sharing Border Crisis Info with Reporters

The left is sufficiently bad enough for this one reason alone that it should be wholly rejected

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Democrats almost always vote party-line as a block. Our 95% leftist MSM almost always “reports” and opines in lock-step with the Dem party-line. Ninety percent of academia similarly follows (or in their opinion leads because they are so smart) the same Dem party-line.

For nuance, you can add the vast majority of Republican politicians, who constitute the other wing of the Uniparty. They very often go almost all the way with the Dem party-line. “Independent” politicians are also typically obedient members of the herd.

Party-line, block vote, lock-step conformity, no deviance, we are always right and everyone else is always wrong: This alone is sufficient reason to reject all Dems, almost all GOPs, 95% of journalists, 90% of academics, and most corporate “leadership,” which has now almost fully bowed to the yoke of leftist group-think.

Fortunately, the American public, who are supposed to be served and represented by the above malign actors, are much more various and open in their views with a strong majority still supporting fair elections, our beautiful Constitution, and our rights as individuals to say, think, and do what we want without cowering before the leftist herd.

Incidentally, this basic theme of overweening conformity is similar in kind to the theme of psychological abstractions standing in for the actual realities of dynamic real-world psychology. Abstractions of this type often act like ideologies in that they narrow research and restrict inquiry into areas alive with multitudinous possibilities. Some aspects of this are explored here: Science discovers we don’t know how to end conversations well as well as in many other posts on this site.

Also, Buddhism itself is extremely anti-conformist, anti-group-think, anti-ideological and very pro-individual. The Buddha clearly emphasized the importance of individual responsibility, choice, and freedom leading to liberation. Liberation from? The confines of a false self, ego, identity, group, religion, or ideology. Why? Because those confines are illusory; they are the stuff of delusion. They are the very stuff from which we seek to liberate ourselves.

Science discovers we don’t know how to end conversations well

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…When participants guessed at when their partner had wanted to stop talking, they were off by about 64 percent of the total conversation length.

That people fail so completely in judging when a conversation partner wishes to wrap things up “is an astounding and important finding,” says Thalia Wheatley, a social psychologist at Dartmouth College.

People Literally Don’t Know When to Shut Up—or Keep Talking, Science Confirms

I don’t mind saying that for FIML partners, this sort of thing is child’s play. Not only that, the self-reported accounts of when people wanted to end a conversation, are weak data points similar to self-reported food consumption.

In FIML, conversations rarely “end.” Like all topics, they remain open because conversations are themselves important topics of conversation. FIML partners are rarely stuck with wondering if they said too much or didn’t say enough or understood correctly or missed making a significant point because they can easily revisit any conversation and clear up any and all lingering thoughts about anything.

FIML proves to partners that the real meat of their interactions is the interactions themselves at whatever level is important to them; be that micro, meso, or macro levels.

Besides myself, few if any psychologists have studied live, dynamic interactive interpersonal material because like all people psychologists themselves have been trapped at an abstract level of understanding human psychology.

Most past research about conversations has been conducted by linguists or sociologists. Psychologists who have studied conversations, on the other hand, have mostly used the research as a means of addressing other things, such as how people use words to persuade. A few studies have explored what phrases individuals say at the ends of conversations, but the focus has not been on when people choose to say them. “Psychology is just now waking up to the fact that this is a really interesting and fundamental social behavior,” Mastroianni says.

Lemme tell you guys, there is way more material in this area than when or how to stop talking. In fact, there is so much material, in many ways doing studies on isolated aspects of how people talk actually obscures the subject. This can happen because studies are conducted at a level of abstraction that is different from and much more simplistic than the real-world, real-time reality of dynamic interactions themselves.

We see this kind of mistake again and again in psychology: grand theories of the mind, taxonomies of personality disorders, cognitive reframing, and so forth. Experts peering at human psychology from above or through the abstract lens of scientific studies; when actual human psychology itself can best—and really only—be accessed by individual persons themselves working with a willing and similarly self-aware partner during real-world situations.

I am very much in favor of studies like the one above because they do provide general markers that most people can learn from. That said, the people who really must own the subject of psychology are people themselves. You do not need to wait for more studies to do FIML. You can start today and be well on your way in a few weeks. Plus it’s free and you don’t need a therapist.

Here’s an idea for Mastroianni or any other academic in a position to conduct psychological studies. Study FIML. Contact me for help or figure out how to do FIML on your own. Then teach it to, say, 20 couples and assess their progress over a year or more. Use whatever you like as a control group.

Years ago, I remember getting into lucid dreaming and lucid sleep well before these practices were widely known. I thought it was marvelous to be able to become lucid during sleep. I still do think that and also I am delighted that at some point lucidity became so common teenagers were doing it. I hope something similar will happen with FIML.

The basic FIML technique will become much easier when more people do it and understand how fundamental it is to good speaking and actualizing human potential. Once you understand what FIML is, you will see that you can’t really have a really good relationship with your SO without it.

As for ending conversations: from a FIML point of view it’s a little messy and rarely clearly determinable because all real exchanges are happening live and we almost never know exactly where we are, where we are going, or when our talk is over. From a FIML point of view, this is subject matter for active speech. Easy to handle and fun to play with a few times. There are thousands of reason one may want to end a conversation or take it up again. Or start a new one. A large benefit of FIML is far fewer afterthoughts and almost no feeling of being “stuck in some endless conversation that [you do] not want with no way to politely extricate [yourself].”

Notice how being “polite” is used in that phrase. Consider how much profound psychology lies just beneath that word.

Right-left comparison of top concerns

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Here is a direct link where you can see results for GOPs.

There’s the “great divide” in USA if you believe the polls.

Trump policies were typical American conservative: economy, trade, borders, deregulation, energy independence, no wars, taxes, Bill of Rights. MSM grossly mischaracterized his policies in a way that can only be described as propaganda. For proof of this assertion, look at the results above; fear-based caricatures, personifications of primal fears.

Modern psychology is almost entirely the theory and treatment of the “self of the gaps”

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The “self of the gaps” is the self that fills in the many gaps of understanding that occur during interpersonal communication.

These gaps can be small or large, but they are always there and there are many of them. Almost all people everywhere build their personalities on their need to fill these gaps.

They have been with you since you became conscious, You were raised on them. You can will yourself through them. Or theorize yourself over them. You can be confused by them or you can use them to confuse and control others. Malignant egos and narcissists thrive on gaps of understanding. Kinder people can be and often are devastated by them.

No one is free of them. Gaps arise frequently and can perdure for decades, whole lifetimes.

Communication gaps are filled with assumptions, illusions, wishful thinking, paranoia, emotionality, habit. When people visit a psychologist, a root cause is always going to be many painful gaps that have been internalized, reified, filled with wrong assumptions, make-believe.

The only way to correct a “self of the gaps” is FIML practice. Only FIML focuses precisely on real-time, real-world communication gaps and fixes them several orders of magnitude better than what they were.

I am in the weird position of knowing something really wonderful while also lacking a large enough public voice to share it widely. I do my best with this blog and hope more than a few people have learned and benefit from FIML, but it would be good if more would understand.

FIML or something similar has never been discovered before because it comes very close to violating a fundamental language instinct; the instinct to recoil at being questioned personally and quickly. Almost all people feel threatened, insulted, attacked when questioned quickly, especially if the question involves something we just said. More precisely: especially if the question involves “personal” contents of the working memory, out of which we just spoke. Doesn’t have to be anything bad in the working memory; it’s just that that information is close to home and almost never shared for itself.

FIML “comes close to violating” this instinct but it most assuredly does not actually do that. Instead, it assuages our tendency to fear being questioned. FIML is never a gotcha question. It is always a question that arises out of an explicit previously made agreement. Any FIML question can be truthfully answered, “I would rather not say.”

By doing FIML, malignant old gaps are gradually filled with truthful data while new gaps are much less likely to form or grow. FIML can be difficult to understand because it entails an entirely new way of looking at human psychology. By focusing on small segments of conversation (psychological morphemes) FIML enables partners to see and understand how their minds are actually working in real time.

This replaces the need to rely on external theories of psychology by just examining what is actually there.

PS: My SO and FIML partner came up with the term “self of the gaps” this morning.

Talking back to Smith College about race: “The consequences for not following the script are so severe…”

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Good video. Sad she needs to make it.

Our present fixation on race is an “upgrade” of the communist theory of “class struggle.” Since class struggle does not work in wealthy nations, replacing class with race was an easy fix. This is the “intellectual” origin of “Cultural Marxism.” Since the subject is race, Jews should be mentioned as having been among the most avid communists as well as primary architects of “critical race theory” and “systemic racism.” Herbert Marcuse was a major figure in the cheap “upgrade” to race.

As for “whiteness.” Whites are a large group of people with very different histories and genes. The modern world, like it or not, was invented and first built by Northwestern European men. Others contributed, but Northwestern European men should definitely get the vast lion’s share of credit for having created the greatest civilization the world has ever seen.

In contrast, while Northwestern Europe was doing that, most Eastern Europeans were slaves. Eastern European slavery did not end until 1861 when it was only partly ended. Legal obligations continued until 1910 which explains the large influx of Eastern Europeans after that date into USA.

As someone of Eastern European descent, I can relate to the problems facing black Americans today. A big one is under slavery, men are utterly humiliated and destroyed. This destroys fatherhood and sonship for many generations. My own father passed on many of those difficulties to me. They are very real.

Are the descendants of Eastern European so-called “nobility” obligated to pay me reparations? Or the Jews who for centuries became wealthy running “noble” estates as slave-drivers over my ancestors? If they offered, I would be tempted. But I don’t believe I should have to pay the descendants of black slaves; and neither should I have to be especially solicitous of their problems when no one, including them, is solicitous of mine.

Add to that that almost all Europeans come from common stock; not just serfs, but also peasants, laborers, bonded laborers, cannon-fodder, servants, maids, underlings, etc. And when “corrections” to systemic racism are made today, it is invariably the underling descendants of historical white underlings who pay the price.

And none of that is hard to see. Race theory that replaces class theory only to completely ignore class is pretty stupid if you think about it. I might also mention that Shaw is part of a very welcome new wave of white women who for the first time in fifty years are feeling the heat of Cultural Marxism burning their feet and not just their brothers’, sons’, and fathers’ feet. I doubt the recent appearance of “Karen-hate” is not a factor in this.

Interestingly, the only physical description we have of the Buddha mentions his beautiful blue eyes. He is also very commonly referred to as Aryan in the traditional literature. The word Aryan has been deconstructed so many times, it’s hard to say simply what it originally meant. Make of it what you like.

A final point on race is all races and cultures and people and institutions can be “deconstructed.” It’s good to do that sometimes, but doing it almost exclusively to whites has led to situations like the one in the video above. This has been a very wrong turn in American history and the more of us who say something about it, the sooner it will change, possibly for the better.

More on Shaw and a copy of her letter to Smith can be found here: Whistleblower at Smith College Resigns Over Racism