We’re talking about thousands of hours of media TV pundits, thousands more columns written, and almost every scintilla of it based on originating intelligence sources -from the larger intelligence system- that are now being exposed as duplicitous and conspiratorial in the scale of their malicious intent.
This larger story-line has traveled in one direction. The narrative has only traveled in one direction. Each thread converging on codependent trails for collective stories all going in one direction. One big engineered narrative endlessly pushed. Think about how far the collective media have traveled with this story over the past eighteen months.
Now, in a period of a few weeks, it has become increasingly obvious the collective journey, using all that expended effort, was going in the wrong direction.
The media have fully invested themselves in eighteen months of narrative distribution in only one direction. Not a single MSM entity has questioned their travel as a result of false leaks and false sources in the totality of time they have covered the DOJ and FBI story. (Source)
Tag: cultural norms
Jordan Peterson on the gender pay gap, campus protests and the patriarchy
On hierarchies, which Peterson addresses, the “third way” is to get away from them, stay away from them. Ignore them reasonably and live by your own lights. This is a basic urge in many of us. In a very similar manner, many of us refrain from anger and hatred and enjoy following moral precepts and find freedom in them.
I make this point because Buddhist practice is based on freedom through ethics and because many social psychologists today are saying what Peterson says about hierarchies. Sometimes we do have to stand up for ourselves, but I do not believe most of us need to do this often or should do it often.
Furthermore, I do not believe that social status is any more fundamental to human nature than murder is. Humans also possess reason and spiritual inclinations both of which can guide us away from status competition if we decide to do that and/or our conditions allow. ABN
Arm’s length communication can be dangerous
By arm’s length communication I mean “our deepest levels of meaning, emotion, and intention are either implied or more often concealed from the person(s) we are speaking with.” (see: Communication at arm’s length)
When we do arm’s length communication too much, we retard both psychological and sociological growth. We harm both ourselves and others.
Arm’s length communication is often a type of “sociological communication.” That is, communication that holds cultural, sociological or historical assertions above individual psychological experience. This can be a good thing and it can be a bad thing.
It’s good when it helps us see and bad when it blinds us. Bolsheviks were blinded by sociological fantasies that led them to murder tens of millions. It is good for us to understand that today, especially as our society is being torn apart by arm’s length fallacies.
I will now present an example of this tragedy as it is playing out this morning. What happened is Trump allegedly asked an intelligence analyst of Korean extraction, “Where are you from?”
As someone who has extensive experience with East Asia and Asian-Americans, I am aware that this question drives many of them up the wall. One example:
This makes my blood boil. It must have been so awful to be standing there having her expertise invalidated and trivialized. (Source: asianamerican)
As an ordinary American, I am also aware that this question with precisely that wording was extremely normal well into the 1980s and beyond. A younger friend I discussed this with this morning said she still considers it to be a normal question.
“Where are you from?” means what is your ancestry. When most Americans ask this of each other it means what is your ethnic background, what ethnicity or mix of ethnicities do you identify with or feel close to. It does not mean I think you are a bad person or are not an American. In a nation of many immigrant groups, it is a normal thing to ask. Indeed, it is the quintessential American question. Or used to be before SJWs came along.
Information about your ancestry or ethnicity says something (arm’s length) about your psychology and some levels of your “identity.” Isn’t it ironic that a commenter on an Asian-American site would be incensed that the president asked someone about their identity and then proposed that that identity might well-serve US national interests?
Here is another comment from a South Asian that says the opposite:
Being a Chinese speaking South Asian that type of response isn’t surprising. (Source: AZNIDENTITY)
Having lived in East Asia for a long time, I am well-aware that “Where are you from?” is almost always the first question anyone asks me in that part of the world. Chinese, Japanese, Australians, Europeans, other Americans all ask it. It can become boring to answer when the query is rote arm’s length stuff coming from someone who obviously does not care, but that is nothing to be offended by.
We are in a semiotic pickle and I don’t know what to do about it either. There are many other examples of the above, most of them stemming from identity politics in one way or another.
What is happening is that arm’s length identity concepts are being idiosyncratically defined by identity groups and then the demand is made that those definitions be known and accepted by everyone else or “blood will boil.”
Sexual misconduct and American culture
As a Buddhist, I am in favor of good sexual conduct, which in Buddhism means not harming anyone by your conduct.
As an American, I am frankly delighted to witness some of our most hallowed cultural hierarchies being undermined by recent sexual misconduct charges. Hollywood, mainstream media, and Congress are all experiencing major damage to their very highly undeserved reputations as “cultural leaders.” Yuck, I have learned more from cats.
As an individual, I also have to say that at least some of these misconduct charges are surely bogus, some are so minor and happened so long ago they mean nothing today, and some of them were surely enticed, if not by conscious design then at least by the way our culture operates. Just compare how men and women dress. And consider that women (I have been told) also lose their shit when around male dancers.
Cultural revolutions need to happen from time to time and often yield good results if they are nonviolent. The Czarist regime in Russia was too slow to change nonviolently and thus was overthrown violently. The KMT in China was similar.
I hope we are now living through a nonviolent cultural revolution that overthrows undeserving cultural hierarchies and the celebrities who represent them. I also hope that though the battering ram today is sexual conduct, tomorrow it will be intellectual honesty across the board.
In that vein, I hope academia falls next. No major public institution in America could possibly be 85+% liberal without also being totalitarian, excluding those with different views.
A word to whoever controls the Deep State or oligarchy, accept deep change now or be like the Romanovs.
Lindsay Shepherd vs Wilfrid Laurier U on Jordan Peterson
American semiotic circus
American semiotics are delightfully absurd today from a semiotician’s point of view.
Step back and appreciate the humor of the whole picture: Moralist are trapped in mono-dimensional positions.
Our post-PC culture still strictly does not permit nuance.
Even though our airwaves are filled with mega-babes dressed—or half-dressed—to the nines, you are not allowed to look down if you happen to have the good fortune of working with them.
No, I am not laughing at the victims. I am laughing at the absurdity of a culture that cannot untangle the many inevitable ramifications of human sexuality.
This is truly theater of the absurd, a semiotic circus that evokes sadness as well as laughter. The joke’s on us, after all!
A murky accusation that reaches across forty years of cultural change to discredit a politician on the eve of an election brings out establishment moralists who simply must weigh in. But then, almost on cue, the photo of a now-former-moralist senator groping a former playmate through her flak-jacket effectively parries the charge!
If Hillary or Demi Moore does it, it’s OK. And that is how it should be, to be honest.
My sense is deep down we are witnessing a massive cultural change taking place in part due to (and despite) the semiotic shallowness of PC and post-PC public life in America.
My partner this morning said with real feeling, “Don’t people realize these sex stories are [evolutionarily] a million years old and our continuing to discuss them like middle- schoolers is actually hiding much worse stuff beneath them?”
I bet most don’t.
My hope is that these semiotic weapons (the accusations) are the start of a real battle against The Swamp alluded to by my partner. All cultures need deep change from time to time. Usually that change is violent. I hope this one will continue to be (mostly) nonviolent and absurd, a mixture of sadness and humor, profundity and nonsense.
Corey Feldman’s truth campaign
I support this. Not to diminish it, but even worse things happen to children and young adults in the USA. See this for more: Mountebank’s Monster and His Mom: a peculiar resurrection. ABN
Hollywood: Two more shoes waiting to drop
Beyond the casting couch for adult actors, two more shoes are waiting to drop—organized pedophilic abuse and sex-trafficking and Jewish supremacy, both of which extend far beyond Hollywood.
In spiritual terms, these are demonic forces that defile our society as well as our individual minds. They seduce us with pleasure and then frighten us when we try to break free.
Pope Francis said something about this on Friday:
The demons… start being part of the man’s life. With their ideas and inspirations, they help the man to live better and entering his life and heart and start changing him from within, but quietly without making any noise. (Source)
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10/16/17 related: What #HarveyWeinstein Needs to Say to Bring Down the #Hollyweird Hypocrites Who’ve Disowned Him
10/17/17 related: An undercover reporter secretly records how the Israeli Embassy directs local groups
10/17/17: Former Miramax Screenwriter Posts Harvey Weinstein Mea Culpa: “Everybody Fu*king Knew” BTW guys, everybody also knows about the Jewish supremacy. Here’s a view of how deep that goes: Mountebank’s Monster and His Mom: a peculiar resurrection. Jodie Foster needs to read this book.
10/22/17: The third shoe dropping: 38 women have come forward to accuse director James Toback of sexual harassment
Poor precision in communication distorts motives
And distorted motives warp human interactions, which in turn degrade individual psychology.
There is no way around it—the ways almost all people communicate are much cruder than their brains are capable of.
And that is the cause of most of what we now call (non-biological) “mental health” problems.
Here is an example: I want to say something very complex to my primary care doctor. I can give her the gist in a minute or two but I do not want to have that go on my medical record.
So I ask her if I can start a discussion that she will promise to keep off my record.
She says, “I’ll think about it.”
A week later I get a letter from her nurse saying she is not willing to do what I asked.
No reason why was given. Do rules prevent her from doing that? I have heard of doctors allowing patients to keep some concerns off the record, but who knows what the reality is? Do you?
If I insist, will that go on my record? Did what I asked in the first place go on my record? My doctor is trapped within or is voluntarily following some guideline that is most decidedly not in my best interests.
This same sort of thing can happen interpersonally. If I raise a topic that is psychologically important to me with even a close friend, I have to wonder will they understand? Will they allow me to expand the subject over a few weeks or months or longer? Will my initial statements change our friendship?
The basic problem is how do you discuss complex psychological subjects with others?
One of my friends works in alternative health care. She knows what I want to bring up with my doctor and admits that even in her professional setting where patients have an hour to open up, there is not enough time.
Back to my primary care doctor. I saw her again a year later and she asked if I remembered her. I said, “Of course I remember you.” She said no more and neither of us raised the off-the-record topic. An intern was with her.
I wonder what she thinks of me. Did she interpret my slightly nervous behavior when I first asked as a “sign” of something? Does she think I am volatile or bipolar or just nuts? (I am not.)
I am 100% sure that she cannot possibly know what I wanted to bring up with her. In this case, I have all of the information and I want to give it to her but she cannot or will not allow that unless my initial fumblings toward a complex subject are made public.
Even a close friend could find themselves in a similar position. And I wonder if I have done that myself to someone. Most people most of the time are not able to scale those walls that divide us.
On either side of the wall is a complex person capable of complex understanding, but one or both persons cannot scale the wall. My doctor is smart enough to have become an MD and yet I cannot tell her about a complex medical condition that is of great importance to me.
I know that I do not want to open the subject and risk a shallow public label (a common hindrance to many potential communications). I honestly do not know what my doctor is thinking. Maybe I will try again the next time I see her.
EDIT 12/16/2020: I didn’t try again. After much thought, I decided to switch doctors. And I will not bring this subject up with my new doctor. It’s a sad reality that trying at all ruined (in my mind) my relationship with my first doctor and convinced me that the topic is not one I can discuss with any medical professional in a professional setting and maybe in any setting.
Something most white people don’t understand
From a recent email:
Like the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans, Vietnamese consider their compatriots as not just belonging to the same race, but family, and in the most literal sense, too, for they call other Vietnamese, “đồng bào” [“same womb”], which is derived from the Chinese, 同胞. This notion is obviously more myth than science, for the Vietnamese nation has absorbed plenty of foreign blood through the millennia, via the usual channels of conquest and immigration. Without the bonding concept of đồng bào, however, Vietnam would have disappeared eons ago.
Vietnamese citizenship, then, is much more than a legality, but established through the age-old recognition that people who appear similar and, even more importantly, speak the same language naturally belong together. Often, they must also fight together to resist being swallowed up or destroyed by another race. Race consciousness is at the heart of racial survival. (Source)
Bad communication leads to ulterior motives and pointless suffering
I believe most people in the world are all but forced to resort to ulterior motives when dealing with others or being dealt with by them.
Furthermore, I believe most people are in this position so often they don’t just resort to hidden motivations, they expect them, are habituated to them, rely on them, and even enjoy them even though they cause immense suffering.
This situation arises due to fundamentally bad communication and the mistrust and uncertainty that devolve from it.
If communication is fundamentally bad (ambiguous, misleading, can’t be cleared up), there is no one you can trust but yourself. No one else you can rely on.
You are all but forced to conceal what your really think, feel, or want because you probably won’t be understood if you try to explain yourself honestly. Worse, you may get played.
Your interlocutor may genuinely misunderstand and cause you harm by that or they may feign interest and honesty when they are just gathering dirt to use against you.
Can anyone deny this happens very often? And that normal people have no recourse but to play that game?
An ulterior motive is one that is concealed. A motive that is different from what is being communicated. We all know what that means and how destructive it can be.
Ulterior motives arise because we do not use our communication systems (mainly speech and listening) at all well. Instead of communicating honestly, we try to “read” the other person while at the same time calculating to what extent or how they are “reading” us.
This is a disgusting situation for people to have put themselves in.
This problem can be fixed with one other person, so you can have at least one friend who does not do this to you and to whom you do not do it either. That makes two people who can escape the deadening, anti-life maze of ulterior motivation madness.
The way to do it is through FIML. I do not believe there is any other way.
If many people do FIML, eventually many of us will see the problems of bad communication clearly. Many of us will realize that virtually all people are trapped in a system that all but forces them to lie to others while suffocating themselves.
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Edit 10/07/17: Here is a pop culture analysis of how to tell if someone is lying: 9 WAYS TO SPOT A LIAR. Scroll down to the list and notice how crude and dubious these tells are, but this is what many people work with. It’s all we have. With a good partner, FIML can lead you to levels of truth far higher and deeper than this. In this world, we really have to develop FIML relationships to fully explore our own psychology and human psychology in general. Without FIML, you are permanently locked out of your own depths by being trapped in ordinary communication which is accurately characterized by the shallowness of the linked article.
Disgust and sex
Disgust is a primary emotion.
The others are anger, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise. There is some controversy about how to group these basic emotions, but generally, expressions associated with primary emotions are recognizable across all cultures and are experienced by all functional human beings.
A new study has found that stress, which is probably interpretable as disgust in this case, was experienced by all of the (heterosexual) men being studied when viewing male-on-male kissing.
From the study’s abstract:
The results of the current study suggest that all individuals, not just highly sexually prejudiced individuals, may experience a physiological response indicative of stress when witnessing a male same-sex couple kissing.
The study is here: What do two men kissing and a bucket of maggots have in common? Heterosexual men’s indistinguishable salivary a-amylase responses to photos of two men kissing and disgusting images.
Co-author of the study, Karen L. Blair, says:
It is difficult to specifically state what this means. It could mean that participants found the images of male same-sex couples kissing to be equally disgusting as the disgusting images. It could mean that they had an anxiety response to the male couples kissing and a disgust response to the disgusting images, but that physiologically, we could not tell the difference between these two emotions. (Straight men’s physiological stress response to seeing two men kissing is the same as seeing maggots)
Make of this data what you like.
Just two months ago another study found that disgust plays a significant role in how people respond to people from other cultures or who look different.
An article about that can be found here: Multiculturalism fails due to “behavioral immune system”.
In my view, it is hard to argue with primary emotions. Our neocortexes may want us to be perfectly tolerant and judiciously blind to all human differences, but maybe that’s not actually possible?
Edit 07/22/17: “Yuck, you disgust me!” Affective bias against interracial couples
A Jewish perspective you may never have thought about
I post a fair amount of Jewish related material because I grew up in a large Jewish community and see them in a much more complex way than most non-Jews do and because they are very interesting people.
One thing I can tell you for sure is if you only read Jews about Jews, you will be missing pretty much the entire story of Jewishness.
That said, this article by a Jewish author—“Then they came for … me?” The SJW Frankenstein monster turns against its creator at Evergreen State—describes what I believe may be the beginning of a sea change in Jewish attitudes towards the Western nations they live in (not including Israel).
From the article by Marcus Alethia:
Like Weinstein I am also a Jewish, White-looking college professor. But unlike him I am not a leftist or a progressive. When or if The Mob comes for me, my Jewishness, such as it is, will be even less protection than his was. And his was no protection at all.
I think of events such as this as an ideological sorting opportunity. Weinstein thought he was a reasonable leftist, and possibly does to this day. But as The Mob turned on him, Weinstein must have noticed that suddenly he was on the same page as people on the opposite side of the political spectrum. This wasn’t a deliberate choice, but a side effect of his willingness to stand up for his White students.
Whatever Weinstein concludes from his experiences, Alethia’s position is one that many formerly liberal whites were forced into years ago.
“The Mob” Alethia refers to doesn’t care what you think or what you have done for them. It only cares that you are not them and therefore fair game.
I might add that this line of self-centered reasoning was and is common among a certain fairly common type of Jew toward whites. You think it’s bad when “The Mob” sees you as fair game? Try having The Tribe see you that way.
I hope that Alethia’s “ideological sorting opportunity” is happening right now within world Jewry.
There are very few Jewish authors like Alethia who are willing to deviate from the false Jewish narrative of victimhood and consider the very significant violent and negative influences Jews have had and still have on the West.
By the way, that’s also why you need to read books by non-Jews like The Culture of Critique and Mountebank’s Monster and His Mom.
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
Semiotics in one image
American Buddhist Net 