Tag: cultural norms

American Pravda: The ADL in American Society

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

In our modern era, there are surely few organizations that so terrify powerful Americans as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith, a central organ of the organized Jewish community.

Mel Gibson had long been one of the most popular stars in Hollywood and his 2004 film The Passion of the Christ became among the most profitable in world history, yet the ADL and its allies destroyed his career, and he eventually donated millions of dollars to Jewish groups in desperate hopes of regaining some of his public standing. When the ADL criticized a cartoon that had appeared in one of his newspapers, media titan Rupert Murdoch provided his personal apology to that organization, and the editors of The Economist quickly retracted a different cartoon once it came under ADL fire. Billionaire Tom Perkins, a famed Silicon Valley venture capitalist, was forced to issue a heartfelt apology after coming under ADL criticism for his choice of words in a Wall Street Journal column. These were all proud, powerful individuals, and they must have deeply resented being forced to seek such abject public forgiveness, but they did so nonetheless. The total list of ADL supplicants over the years is a very long one. (Source)

Ron Unz’s American Pravda series is essential reading. His choice of subjects is fascinating, his tone measured and personable, and his arguments devastating. Buddhist readers in particular will benefit from Ron’s work because he clearly shows that public “reality” has many faces and that the most prominent one is often false.

Toilet Wars

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

Israel Shamir

Boys and girls are different. Once, this difference had been celebrated. Vive la petit difference, exclaimed the French, and other nations also enjoyed it. Now it has lead to multiple troubles, on the seas, in the cities and even in outer space, as you will learn now.

Men and women pee in a dissimilar way, to start with. It was not a problem for last six thousand years of recorded history, but now, for the enlightened West, it has become a real worry. This difference is upsetting for feminists, who want to do everything men do. In 1970s, the first Women Lib posters proudly presented a badass of a girl peeing in a urinal, to great amazement and envy of a few properly diversified onlookers. But that was then. Since then, the feminists decided it will be more fun to force men to use female facilities and to destroy facilities for men. (Source)

American Pravda: Holocaust Denial

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

…The obvious reason for this glaring omission is that the authors are constructing a morality-play in which the Jews must be portrayed as absolutely blameless victims, and even hinting at their role in the numerous Communist atrocities that long preceded the rise of the Third Reich might cause readers to consider both sides of the issue. When purported historians go to absurd lengths to hide such glaring facts, they unmask themselves as propagandists, and we must be very cautious about trusting their reliability and candor in all other matters, whether great or small. (Source)

Bishop Robert C. Morlino’s letter to the faithful regarding the ongoing sexual abuse crisis in the Church

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

August 18, 2018

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ of the Diocese of Madison,

The past weeks have brought a great deal of scandal, justified anger, and a call for answers and action by many faithful Catholics here in the U.S. and overseas, directed at the Church hierarchy regarding sexual sins by bishops, priests, and even cardinals. Still more anger is rightly directed at those who have been complicit in keeping some of these serious sins from coming to light.

For my part — and I know I am not alone — I am tired of this. I am tired of people being hurt, gravely hurt! I am tired of the obfuscation of truth. I am tired of sin. And, as one who has tried — despite my many imperfections — to lay down my life for Christ and His Church, I am tired of the regular violation of sacred duties by those entrusted with immense responsibility from the Lord for the care of His people.

The stories being brought into light and displayed in gruesome detail with regard to some priests, religious, and now even those in places of highest leadership, are sickening. Hearing even one of these stories is, quite literally, enough to make someone sick. (Source)

A Reply to Jordan Peterson

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

…I conclude that Peterson’s analysis is inadequate to account for important aspects of Jewish achievement and involvement in the cultures of the West. I have often said that it would not matter that Jews are an elite if they had the same interests as the traditional peoples and cultures of the societies they live in. Given their high IQ and other traits and proclivities (including ethnic networking), they are bound to be successful in Western-type societies. The problem is that the Jewish elite have not adopted positions that are in the interest of the traditional European-derived peoples of the West and their cultures, particularly with respect to immigration and multiculturalism — an effort that continues into the present and characterizes the entire organized Jewish community. Peterson’s analysis is inadequate fundamentally because it ignores Jewish perceptions of their identity and how these perceptions intersect with Jewish involvement with the left in diaspora societies. (Source)

Peterson surely know that MacDonald is right. But he also knows he will lose fame and fortune and probably his job if he tells the full truth. He’s a half-way speaker of truth likely justifying himself by reasoning that if he tells the whole truth, he will immediately begin telling it to a vastly smaller audience, proving through his life that MacDonald is right. ABN

Recommended further reading: The Throne and the Altar and almost anything else by Israel Shamir.

American Pravda: Jews and Nazis

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

Around 35 years ago, I was sitting in my college dorm-room closely reading the New York Times as I did each and every morning when I noticed an astonishing article about the controversial new Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir.

Back in those long-gone days, the Gray Lady was strictly a black-and-white print publication, lacking the large color photographs of rap stars and long stories about dieting techniques that fill so much of today’s news coverage, and it also seemed to have a far harder edge in its Middle East reporting. A year or so earlier, Shamir’s predecessor Menacham Begin had allowed his Defense Minister Ariel Sharon to talk him into invading Lebanon and besieging Beirut, and the subsequent massacre of Palestinian women and children in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps had outraged the world and angered America’s government. This eventually led to Begin’s resignation, with Shamir, his Foreign Minister, taking his place.

Continue reading…

I highly recommend Ron Unz’s American Pravda series of essays, the latest installment of which is linked above. They don’t need to be read in any special order. In today’s world when so much news media has been exposed as the partisan drivel it is, wise readers understand that history as told by “the academy” is also filled with drivel and misdirection. Unz’s voice is honest and straightforward. In clear language he takes us through his own awakening to the depths of American propaganda and the distortions it has created in American society. I have no doubt that Ron is doing his level best to speak the truth about difficult subjects. I respect him greatly for that. ABN

Ron Unz: The Nature of Anti-Semitism

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

I recently published a couple of long essays, and although they primarily focused on other matters, the subject of anti-Semitism was a strong secondary theme. In that regard, I mentioned my shock at discovering a dozen or more years ago that several of the most self-evidently absurd elements of anti-Semitic lunacy, which I had always dismissed without consideration, were probably correct. It does seem likely that a significant number of traditionally-religious Jews did indeed occasionally commit the ritual murder of Christian children in order to use their blood in certain religious ceremonies, and also that powerful Jewish international bankers did play a large role in financing the establishment of Bolshevik Russia.

When one discovers that matters of such enormous moment not only apparently occurred but that they had been successfully excluded from nearly all of our histories and media coverage for most of the last one hundred years, the implications take some time to properly digest. If the most extreme “anti-Semitic canards” were probably true, then surely the whole notion of anti-Semitism warrants a careful reexamination. (Source)

Ron Unz’s American Pravda series of essays highlights information that has been consciously hidden from mainstream American books, news, and media. The information provided in this series is essential for fully understanding American history and culture. His recent essays on Jews, including the one linked above, go a long way toward correcting a typically skewed understanding of Jewish history and Jewish impact on the modern world. I deeply hope that Unz will cover Jewish vigilantism and terror in the United States and elsewhere soon. ABN

General analyses of signaling systems illuminate fundamentals of psychology

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

Individual psychology is a locus or node within a larger social system.

More precisely, individual psychologies are particular signaling systems within larger social signaling systems.

It is valuable to see this because general analyses of signaling systems—even those having nothing to do with human psychology—can shed light on human signaling systems, including both individual psychology and many aspects of sociology.

When human psychology is viewed as a signaling system, we can readily see that narcissism is bound to occur because narcissism is fundamentally a simplistic signal system.  (See Narcissism redefined (yet again) for more.)

When human sociology is viewed as a signaling system, we can similarly see that parasitism is bound to occur because the exploitation of one system by another is a fairly simple matter.  (See Social parasitism in ants and humans for more.)

In like manner, we can see that social hierarchies importantly have evolved because they are simple and decently efficient signal (communication) systems.

We can also see why hierarchical system often are overthrown and why they often do not arise in systems where they are not needed.  For example, no hierarchy is needed for a language system once the basics have been established.  A parasitic or authoritarian group might impose a hierarchy on a language system, but that’s a different animal.

When individual psychology is viewed as a signaling system, we can see that a great deal of what we consider “disordered” or “ill” within that system is fundamentally a problem of the signal system itself and not the “personality” we have mistakenly abstracted out of that system.

Indeed, most of what we think of as personality is nothing more than an individual signal system attempting to conform to its understanding of the larger social system within which it exists.  When science is applied to “personality” erroneously conceived, we arrive at the many psychometric tautologies on personality traits we now have.  Psychometrics have limited value for describing societies, but are frequently misleading, even damaging, when applied to individuals.  In this, they resemble BMI data which originally was used as a marker for the health of whole populations, not individuals, and which can be misleading when applied to individuals.

When we view individuals as signaling systems rather than personalities, we can immediately see that these systems can and should be optimized for better communication.  Indeed, this is the real job of psychology—optimizing individual signaling systems. Not just treating “personality” disorders.

Social parasitism in ants and humans

~ ABN ~ 1 Comment

Parasitic ants parasitize other ants using aggression and deception. (Source)

Ant parasitism is an evolved social behavior, a “game” that has arisen within large social communities. We have a great deal of evidence that human communities can also be parasitic or harbor parasitic human subgroups.

It makes sense that social parasitism as a “game” of signal exchanging would evolve in large social groups. Social signal system have an inherent capacity to diverge; and from there to fight, compete, exploit.

There are many large examples of human social parasitism, the Manchurian elite of the Qing Dynasty being one. Social parasitism can also be seen among humans in small groups of gaslighters, gangs, or cults.

Every summer, blood-red ants of the species Formica sanguinea go on a mission to capture slaves. They infiltrate the nest of another ant species, like the peaceful F. fusca, assassinate the queen, and kidnap the pupae to raise as the next generation of slaves. Once the slaves hatch in their new nest, they appear none the wiser to their abduction, dutifully gathering food and defending the colony as if it were their own. (How blood-red ants became slave snatchers)

Status and hierarchy are as fundamental to human life as murder

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

All three are middling instincts that are easily controlled or not even thought about by most people.

I mention this because several social-psychologists I like and respect have come down hard on the fundamental importance of the human instinct for status and advancement within human hierarchies.

I discussed this topic in January regarding Jordan Peterson. Yesterday, I noticed the video below where Peterson seems to be conflating status, hierarchy, and self-improvement. To me, it sounds like he is backing away from his views on the fundamental importance of status within a human hierarchy. This is good because the only evidence anyone can offer for that claim will be based on psychometric tautologies or, more vaguely, cultural inertia.

BTW, I like Peterson and wish him the best. His is a valuable and necessary voice. I hope he keeps talking and eventually becomes prime minister of Canada.

 

Personality disorders and signaling

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

In my opinion, “personality disorders” are more easily understood as signaling problems.

All types of personality disorder involve dysfunctional signaling with other people. Signals are both sent and received in ways that result in suffering.

As currently defined, personality disorders “develop early, are inflexible, and are associated with significant distress or disability.”

Thus, if there are no significant brain injuries or other biological problems, all personality disorders (PD) develop through experience.

This means that during childhood the PD sufferer has received many bad signals (and/or interpreted many signals badly) resulting in their failing to form a coherent well-functioning internal signaling system.

The way to fix this is work with the signals. And the best way to do this is FIML practice. A professional psychotherapist cannot possibly provide this level of treatment.

This brings me to a second point: is there anyone who would not benefit from improving their signaling?

Why do we view psychotherapy as treatment designed merely to make us look and feel “average”? Why don’t we instead work to optimize our psychologies every day?

The Buddha said we are all crazy. We are. We all need to work on our signaling—our personality disorders—all the time.

The distinctions between one PD and another and those who have PDs and those who don’t are vague. This is because all PD problems (absent significant biological deficits, which may include intelligence) are idiosyncratic varieties of signaling malfunctions.

If signaling is the core problem, it should follow that all acquired PD will be classifiable as some kind of signaling malfunction. And that is precisely what we see.

Narcissism is a too simple signaling system. Borderline is an unstable signaling system. Compulsive, passive aggressive, histrionic, avoidant, and so on all are variations of a poorly formed internal signaling system.

The way to study this is through interpersonal semiotics; that is interpersonal semiotic analysis of real-time, real-world communicative signs and symbols.

All people need to do this to optimize their psychologies (their internal signaling systems). Why would anyone not want to do this? Maybe not wanting to do this is the surest sign of PD there is.

The hardest part about doing FIML is finding a willing and able partner. To me, this shows how pervasive bad signaling is. Most people will do almost anything but examine their own signaling with the help of another person.

Why narcissism works

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

Narcissism works because its victims don’t see it.

Victims don’t see it because they are children being raised by narcissistic parent(s) or very commonly adults who were raised by narcissists. There is even a term for the latter: ACoN, Adult Children of Narcissists.

Other kinds of people also fall for narcissists, but having been raised by narcissistic parent(s) is probably the most common.

Narcissists often appear normal to others due to narcissism being a fairly common disorder and also due to the narcissist’s deep-seated need to appear normal to others. They are experts at “impression management.” That’s a big part of what narcissism is.

For many ACoNs, narcissistic traits look perfectly normal because that is what they experienced at home. Narcissistic smiles, glares, malice, selfishness, ostracism, false concern, abuse, and more all seem normal because they were imprinted on the primary instincts of the child to need and trust their parents and siblings.

In truth, entire cultures can be narcissistic, abusive, hierarchical. To break these habits in interpersonal relationships, you have to do FIML practice or something very similar.

“Russian collusion” by Trump – ‘Game Over’

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

It’s been obvious for a long time to anyone paying attention that the “Russian collusion” story aimed at Donald Trump is a lie; and known to be a lie by those directing it within the Democrat Party, the FBI, and MSM.

One of the best researchers in this line of thought posted a terrific article last night: Game Over – Judge Jeanine Interview With HPSCI Rep. Chris Stewart…

I highly recommend reading that piece and perusing others on that site.

Just as tool awareness is nascent in animals so deep semiotic awareness is
nascent in humans.

The Russian collusion story is a story of semiotic manipulation that was too hard for most humans to figure out.

Much of our world—both public and interpersonal—is characterized by semiotic manipulation, often malicious. You cannot understand most of what happens around you (and in you) if you do not understand that.

A maverick Jewish voice on how to treat Europeans is good for all of us to hear

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

I am not Jewish but I am from a very small European minority and I have been thinking like this for as long as I was conscious of these issues. Why would any small group want to undermine the larger group that surrounds it? Why not be helpful, friendly, and gracious? Without harmful hidden motives.

It’s the same for all other groups. You can support aggressive resource grabbing (which benefits greedy people at the top) or you can do your best to get along. It’s hard to get along. Believe me, I know all about that from all the angles, including trying to get along with Jews. In the end, it’s best to get along.

Here is the maverick voice with a link:

In my view, in 2018 what’s good for the Jews is for us to stop thinking about what’s good for the Jews and start thinking about the right to self-determination and survival for the people we live amongst: the people who have facilitated the most stunning successes of our tribe’s history in diaspora to date, Americans, Europeans, and people of European descent. (Source)

The same reasoning applies to all groups everywhere for both practical and spiritual reasons. I follow Asian American news fairly closely. So many complaints about YT (whitey). Why teach yourselves to be like that? It makes you blind to the many people who care about you.

Provocative analysis of cultural identity

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

A comment I read this morning has an insightful summary of what cultural identity is. And how it self-generates and self-perpetuates “…well beyond the control or foresight of anyone,.” (Source)

This complex of [cultural] ideas generates intense psychological pressures and allegiances and mobilizes some of the most primitive energies of the human psyche – safety, danger, clan, tribe, blood, status, power, domination – and leads to a clear pattern of behavior that is decentralized and not under anyone’s control but is still a very clear system that can be analyzed and identified. (Ibid.)

The entire string of comments is well-worth reading and can be found at the link above. [No permalink, so Ctrl F a snippet of the quote above to find the starting point.]

These comments are on Jewish culture and history but they apply just as well to any cultural “construct,” all of which are the stronger precisely because they are social constructs.

The commenter quoted above leans toward a negative appraisal of Jewish culture and history, which I largely agree with, but if it’s up to me I would say that virtually all successful cultures (“successful” being ones that perpetuate) have analogous negative features.

Incidentally, I believe a great deal of Buddhist practice and the practices of other religions are based on disentangling practitioners from cultural constructs to discover their authentic beings, souls, or the will of God.

Religions do this because in many ways cultures are toxic to the higher mind, the metacognitions of thusness and individual authenticity.

That said, cultures do teach us and raise us and we cannot develop without them. Religions are also cultures. And that said, we are capable as individuals of both learning from our cultures and growing well beyond them.

In this respect and in light of Buddhist practice, I am very leery of any and all kinds of cultural identities or individual identities fashioned as allegiance to a culture, especially an aggressive one. Sadly, it is also true that if you have no identity your culture will be lost or destroyed, so we all really do need some sort of “defensive identity.” In this respect, I can happily identify with most of the world Buddhist community and most of the traditional American Constitutional system interpreted conservatively. I also have a mild-but-strong-enough defensive white identity because that group is fast approaching eight percent of world population and I want it to survive.