Chicago Activists Unchained, Destroy Black Leadership
From about ten years ago: Donald Trump saying it’s all a lie
Do your best. Speak the truth.
Chicago Activists Unchained, Destroy Black Leadership
From about ten years ago: Donald Trump saying it’s all a lie
We put our brains in a box when we adopt a limited view of any subject.
Once we adopt a limited view, it tends to self-propagate, to attract secondary and tertiary views as if the box were a magnet.
This is why so many subjects—both public and private–are polarized. You have this religion, therefore… You have this political belief or personality, therefore…
Rather than converse about the many nuances of any view or topic, most people tend strongly to categorize people, ideas, beliefs, emotions, and so on. That is, put them in a box.
We all do this, but like anything we all do, we are also capable of seeing through it.
An excellent large-scale example of this principle was reported today: Japan very nearly lost Tokyo.
The whole article, which is not long, is super worth reading because of what it says about the Fukushima disaster and also because of what it says about our tendency to put reality in boxes and talk about them rather than reality itself.
From the article:
Dramatic CCTV footage from the plant showed a skeleton staff – the Fukushima 50 – struggling to read emergency manuals by torchlight and battling with contradictory, confusing instructions from their superiors at Tepco. Total disaster was averted when seawater was pumped into the reactors, but the plant manager, Masao Yoshida, later said he considered committing hara-kiri, ritual suicide.
If readers recall, at the time the two main boxes in currency were:
Turns out the second box—the “alarmists”—were closer to the truth. And worse, the important information and discussion of what was in-between those boxes was largely neglected or kept out of sight.
Additionally, the linked article reveals that incompetent officials were in charge of the plant, and that as the disaster unfolded few had any idea what to do.
That’s another box or a symptom of boxes. You donated to me or supported me or are my friend, how about being Japan’s nuclear safety advisor? Sure why not?
This is why:
…”very shocked” by the performance of Nobuaki Terasaka, his government’s nuclear safety adviser.
“We asked him, ‘Do you know anything about nuclear issues?’
“And he said, ‘No, I majored in economics’.”
If you look around, you will see boxes everywhere. A box that was first applied to anyone who questioned the JFK assassination story—“conspiracy theorist”—is one of the most long-lived.
“Alarmist,” “tin-foil hat,” “nut-job,” “kook,” “anti-science,” “anti-religion,” “racist,” “anti-racist,” and so on are other examples.
We should have gotten all the facts about Fukushima at the time, just as we should have gotten all the facts about WMD in Iraq before that war, which may have been caused by acts of treason.
If you asked for the facts, though, you would have been put in a box, your voice silenced.
If you can see these kinds of boxes in large events, they should also be findable in the smaller boxes of your life.
The small boxes of interpersonal communication and individual psychology are things like set views on personalities (yours or theirs), using “signs” about what someone thinks or believes without actually asking them in-depth, being intolerant of nuanced views or not even being able to hear them, categorizing people based on generalities, having a complex view of yourself but simple ones of others, or the other way around, etc.
In many cases, we do need to use boxes. They allow us to function easily in many situations, but boxes only describe boxed reality and in that prevent complex communication and understanding.
When the signs and symbols of political discourse cannot even be questioned, they are totalitarian.
Totalitarianism and fascism are not supported only by guns and jackboots, but also by the manipulation of semiotics, the signs and symbols of political and social communication.
Many of these signs and symbols are inanimate, but some are real people who can talk back and explain how they are being manipulated.
The video below contains an analysis of semiotic manipulation by one of America’s most renowned political symbols. Well-worth viewing.
Edit 3/3/16: Excellent analysis of the same issue: Ann Coulter: Trump Wins “Disavowal” Game, Then Super Tuesday
The video below—White Girls Black Dolls: Destroying White Bias —is an analysis of the semiotics of dolls.
A doll can be a powerful cultural sign—a semiotic—that can be manipulated to achieve various effects.
Since semiotics (and dolls) can be manipulated and are manipulated by people, semiotic analyses of this kind should say who is doing the manipulating and why.
This video claims that a great deal of the manipulation of white/black cultural semiotics is and has been done by Jews. This is a reasonable claim supported by evidence, some of which is presented in the video.
Senator Joe McCarthy is mentioned in this film. His reputation as a maniac who wantonly destroyed the careers of innocent people is false. His reputation has been manipulated in ways not dissimilar to how dolls are manipulated.
There really were communist spies in the US government. They really were doing harm. You can check this claim by looking into documents released from the Venona project and the Soviet archives. It is most likely that McCarthy was being fed true information by J. Edgar Hoover.
There are a couple of books that exonerate most of what McCarthy said and did (he did go too far sometimes), but even with all this evidence it will be a long time before the semiotics of his reputation change. Most people will see him as an archetype of badness for long time to come.
Obviously, this prevents us from understanding who those communist spies were and what they were doing, but that is another story. Semiotic manipulation can hide things as well as direct our attention toward things.
You cannot possibly understand cultural life today without having a rich appreciation for how and why the signs and symbols—the semiotics—of culture are consciously manipulated by people, people who often have bad motives or at least motives that are not in your best interest.
NOTE: The video—taken down by YouTube, I presume, to protect the innocent—can be found here. Pretty sure that’s the same video. Obviously, removing a video like this is a form of semiotic manipulation, something you may agree or disagree with in this case as in all cases.
Short vid, well-worth viewing. He spoke the truth.
I have been seeing a lot of stuff about microaggression recently.
The term interests me because FIML is all about micro impressions.
When done with a caring partner, FIML is designed to correct mistaken impressions or interpretations that often derive from micro impressions and/or manifest as micro expressions.
Anyone who has done FIML for more than a few months surely must be aware that we create wrong impressions of even our most trusted partners frequently.
A wrong impression often snowballs, leading to a wrong interpretation that after festering can be much harder to correct than the original micro impression.
So between friends, and especially FIML partners, the perception of micro aggression can and should be noticed and dealt with immediately or as soon as possible. It is basic to FIML practice that even a single uncorrected wrong impression can lead to serious divisions between people.
In this sense, I heartily accept the idea of microaggression being a thing. In fact, I believe it is such a thing that it happens all the time, especially if you mean micro mis-impressions and not just microaggression.
But the term microaggression means something different from the above, though the central concepts are related. Wikipedia has this short definition of microaggression:
…the use of known social norms of behavior and/or expression that, while without conscious choice of the user, has the same effect as conscious, intended discrimination.
The main difference is “without conscious choice of the user.” FIML is all about being conscious. Both parties being conscious.
If I perceive something in your speech, demeanor, or behavior that makes me think that maybe you are disrespecting me or mad at me or or suspicious of me or something like that, then if you are my FIML partner I am basically required to ask you about it if there is time.
In FIML, the asking is done without prejudgement. I simply ask “what was in your mind when you made that expression or said those words or did that thing.” Your answer must be honest. If you don’t trust your partner to be honest, you can’t do FIML (though you can start trying and see if either or both of you changes).
If your partner answers honestly and you do not perceive an iota of what you thought was in their mind, that part of the event is finished. If when the person spoke or acted they had no nothing about doing what you thought they might be doing, you are done with it. You no longer have any right to further impute your thing onto them.
You can if you want, and this is encouraged, continue to discuss the matter. For example, you might say: “From your response, I can tell that you were not disrespecting me and I am delighted to find that out. That’s a huge relief for me because I have spent much of my life reacting to people who do that as if they were disrespecting me. It’s weird to hear that I am wrong in this case and it makes me wonder if I have been wrong in other cases.”
Then the two of you can discuss that. I know one person who frequently reacts to educated northeast American accents as being “imperious” or “arrogant” when they are not. (Don’t get me started on all the many phrases and attitudes in culture that wrongly limit speech and thus culture itself—“condescending,” “know-it-all,” “argumentative,” “imperious,” etc.)
So, if two friends are having problems between themselves with microaggression, they are prime candidates for FIML practice. Of course, any two friends who are having any problems with micro impressions (all friends all the time) are prime candidates for FIML. (You cannot but have these problems.)
But microaggression as the word is being used today is not something FIML can deal with directly because it is
…the use of known social norms of behavior and/or expression that, while without conscious choice of the user, has the same effect as conscious, intended discrimination.
The important words here are “known social norms,” “without conscious choice” leading to “discrimination.”
I don’t know how to unpack that. From a FIML point of view, my guess is behaviors that could potentially be identified as “microaggression” according to that definition would be in the range of dozens per day per every person in the world. Maybe more.
An example many readers will remember is Michelle Obama reacting to a customer in Target asking her to hand them something they could not reach.
I tell this story – I mean, even as the first lady – during that wonderfully publicized trip I took to Target, not highly disguised, the only person who came up to me in the store was a woman who asked me to help her take something off a shelf.
If even the president’s wife can get something so ordinary so wrong, you can see the scope of the problem. In the same interview, the president himself mentioned being “mistaken for a waiter.”
Both later downplayed their comments because they had to. Microaggression is an inherently super-ambiguous term open to a multitude of interpretations every time it is used.
In FIML, we find that micro-mistakes are real and dangerous. They are not ignored but addressed immediately because they can be so serious. Relevantly, in my experience with FIML a great many micro-impressions that I form are simply dead wrong. Most of them are wrong. I can’t enter that as evidence because the world does not have enough FIML practitioners for me to do a study on it. However, I do suspect that a great many micro-impressions of or impressions of microaggression are wrong.
Many of us laughed or thought it was ridiculous for Michelle Obama to bristle at having a short person ask her for help because we all have been on one side or the other of an exchange like that and thought nothing of it. I have been mistaken for a store employee or construction worker more than once and never thought anything of it, except maybe to feel slightly flattered that someone thought I looked like I knew what I was doing.
Another problem with the notion of politicizing microaggression (because that is what the term is about) is whose microaggression against whom?
I have strabismus, lazy eye. Even though the condition has been surgically corrected, I still cannot maintain a direct friendly gaze for long periods of time. This means that many people are led to misinterpreting my micro expressions (I start to look down) as me being bored, tired, or not friendly when all that is happening is my eye is so tired it starts to blur and needs to look away.
I know this from years of experience and because some people tell me what they are thinking. One in twenty or twenty-five people have strabismus. Add in other eye conditions with similar problems and you will get much higher percentages. Add hearing problems, attention-deficit problems, autism problems, and so on and you can include most people in the world having difficulties with micro-expressions and how they are being interpreted by others.
If someone from a different culture or race or neighborhood interprets my strabismus as microaggression (boredom with them or condescension toward them rather than simple fatigue), they will get it all wrong. And there is little or nothing I can do about it.
I even tell people about strabismus sometimes. I explain what it does. They say they understand, but very few of them really do. Only very close friends or people who have similar eye problems understand well enough that it stops being an issue with them.
Moreover, strabismus and other eye problems can lead to problems with facial recognition. So the person in the store that asked Michelle Obama for help may have also had facial recognition problems. I have that problem, too, and I seriously doubt that I would recognize Michelle Obama if I saw her in Target.
So, sorry, I don’t have any really good answer to how to understand microaggression or deal with it. On a personal level with friends or FIML partners, micro-impressions are what we want to work with as much as we can. On a societal level, you can hardly do anything about it. A super-smart person might be able to become aware of a good many of the difficulties faced by people in the world, but even that person will miss many of them or misinterpret what they perceive even if they “know” the right thing to do.
At the abstract heart of the problem there is probably a measurement or resolution problem. Simply stated, no person can ever possibly do perfect microanalyses all the time in all situations with all people. Far from it. Thus, it is a sort of “reverse microaggression” to demand or expect that they can or will or should.
I suppose we can and should become more aware of how complex people are and how difficult it is to know even one other person well, or even to know yourself well. But nothing that I can think of will ever relieve us of the difficulty of dealing with the immense number of micro-impressions we all give and receive every minute of every day.
Any politician who claims to care about the drug overdose deaths sweeping the nation, but does not demand that we build a wall, deport illegal aliens and end the anchor baby scam, is a liar.
In 2014, more people died from drug overdoses than any year in U.S. history: 47,055. That’s more than die in car accidents — and it’s not even close.
This is a huge, horrible problem — and it’s a problem caused entirely by the fact that Mexico is on our southern border.
Anissa Naouai interviews Iben Thranholm. 8:38
There has been a much stronger response to the migrants in Eastern Europe because the people there very clearly remember being invaded and dominated by alien races and ideologies during Soviet times.
If you cannot defend your culture, your culture will be destroyed. It can be destroyed physically in war, by demographic infiltration through mass immigration, or through ideas that undermine pride and cohesive social values.
Many years ago, I remember a Polish woman telling me, “You Americans want to get rid of all your strong men, but what you don’t understand is you may need those men one day to defend your society.”
She could have said the same about Western Europe.
Memories of war and domination by others fade quickly.
Much of what the Bolsheviks did in Russia and Eastern Europe was mental, psychological, intellectual. They also murdered many millions (the first mass murders in modern European history), but the intellectual groundwork came first and Eastern Europeans still remember.
Demography is destiny. Similarly, those who control the ideas of culture, control the culture. Those who control media, academia, and politics control the ideas.
“Masculinity” does not just mean having muscles and fighting. It also means, in the context of this video, being strong enough mentally to stand for your values, your people, your history, your culture.
This film uses strong imagery and language, but it is worth watching. It comes at a time when a strong pushback against decades of PC is needed.
I am not completely sure what the issues in Harney County are. But far as I know:
The precipitating issue is the Hammonds were sent back to prison for arson, which many find dubious and excessive.
The underlying issues are federal ownership and control of the land.
The argument for the feds is there is a lot of case law, bills from congress, and court rulings that show the feds do indeed own BLM land.
The argument against that position is 1) all of the above violates the Constitution, which it does appear to do, and 2) all the parties that claim the feds own the land are themselves federal—congress, courts, BLM, FBI, prosecutors, and probably more than that.
I really like the people in Harney County and tend to trust them. Seems to me the feds are pushing too hard, especially by sending the Hammonds back to jail for five years.
Also, I am strongly in favor of states’ rights because that is how our system is supposed to work.
That said, I also fear states’ right in land issues in the West because once states control that land it will be corrupt state officials selling the land to their friends, not necessarily being reasonable with ranchers.
It seems to me that the feds have overreached in this case and now can’t back down because they are a stupid bureaucracy. Would have been better to give the Hammonds a pass and let them continue ranching rather than send them back to jail.
Since they didn’t do that, it would still be better for the feds to back off, let the Hammonds out of jail, and let the County return to business as it was. Good law enforcement often calls for de-escalation and this case is an example of that, imo.
Today marks the 25th anniversary of a major turning point in modern Lithuanian history as well as the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union.
On January 13, 1991 tens of thousands of unarmed Lithuanian citizens confronted Soviet tanks and soldiers at the Parliament building in Vilnius and the Vilnius TV Tower.
Iceland was the first country to recognize Lithuanian independence on February 11, 1991.
More about the events of January can be found here.
Edit 01/27/16: Lithuania opens mass trial for 1991 Soviet crackdown
A transcript of this video can be found here.
This is a much more in-depth analysis of the recent impact of mass migration on Germany and Europe than I posted yesterday and the day before. Highly recommended. ABN
Yesterday I discussed the basic principle of consanguinity and how that affects societies that practice it.
To continue in this vein, today I want to describe how some very basic anthropological concepts apply to Europeans.
Yesterday we saw how large groups of clannish people from consanguineous cultures are all but guaranteed to cause problems in Europe, which historically eradicated consanguinity and most clans.
But that leaves open the question of why Europeans are blind to the inevitable problems that will arise when consanguineous clannish cultures migrate into Europe in large numbers.
In the news this morning, I found this article: ‘Cover-up’ over Cologne sex assaults blamed on migration sensitivities.
Here are some quotes from it:
Politicians and police were facing mounting questions on Wednesday over how a crowd of some 1,000 men “of North African or Arab appearance” was able to mass around the city’s main train station on New Year’s Eve, with roving gangs allegedly assaulting dozens of women with impunity.
and
There has been widespread condemnation of the city’s police force after an official press release on New Year’s Day described the celebrations as “peaceful”.
…questions are being asked over why it took five days for the media to report the incidents.
So why did that happen?
The basic anthropological reason is Europeans are extremely sensitive to feelings of shame.
This is so because European communal bonds are built on the ideas of fairness and universal morality that developed after clans were eradicated in Europe.
These ideas have existed in European populations for so long that those populations have evolved to rely on them for social cohesion. This is an example of the co-evolution of genes and culture.
Co-evolution of genes and culture is a feature of all societies. It almost certainly accelerated during the past 3,000 years since the advent of large-scale agriculture.
In European society, this sort of co-evolution encouraged the emergence of a strong sense of shame or guilt. These emotions emerged because shame, public shaming, and guilt are used to police European post-clannish, universal morality.
Now we can answer the questions posed above from the linked article.
Why did police allow the large crowd of rowdy men to gather? Because they were ashamed to do anything because if they had, they might have been criticized for being “racist.”
The police not only did not break up the crowd to protect German women, they further falsely described the celebrations as “peaceful” in a press release.
How could German police feel more ashamed of a word (racist) than of not protecting German women?
The answer is their natural tendencies and professional requirements to protect German women (or anyone) were overruled by the dictates of their consciences.
Their brains malfunctioned so much that the police protected themselves against false imaginary accusations instead of doing their jobs by protecting actual women.
I say malfunctioned because in a larger context that is surely a malfunction.
But within German or European culture, actions like theirs have not so far been seen as malfunctions, except sometimes after the fact.
The Rotherham sex scandal in England is another example of widespread fear among police and officials of being shamed. There are literally hundreds of other examples throughout Western Europe.
These examples show how a culture that evolved in response to the absence of clans developed a sense of moral shame that is poorly adapted to the present world.
The actions of European politicians who have allowed these problems to develop and of the press that consistently hides these same problems can be explained in the same way the actions of police in Cologne have been explained.
A well-known difference in world cultures is the degree to which members of a culture marry close relatives. This is called consanguinity. The map below shows rates of consanguinity across the world. Click on the image to expand the map and see the numbers better.
Cultures with high rates of consanguinity tend to be clannish. This means that a basic organizational unit of the society is a clan made up of closely related members. Clans are usually hierarchical and demand primary loyalty from their members. And this generally results in nations with weak state institutions, corruption, and lots of fighting among clans.
Young males in clans generally learn from an early age that violence is the best way to settle disputes because that is how it has been for centuries and because there are no alternatives like a fair and effective legal system.
Clannish societies also engage in crowd behaviors such as those that occurred in Cologne on New Years Eve. To an anthropologist, attacks of that nature should not be surprising. They are a fairly normal aspect of clan-based behavior and psychology. Germans, though…
…have been shocked by the scale of the attacks, involving many groups of drunk and aggressive young men.
Witnesses and police said the men were of Arab or North African appearance. (same link as above)
Being shocked by something so predictable says a good deal about German idealism. Do they really think that just breathing the air in Germany will change the psycho-sociologies of migrants that have developed over thousands of years?
Displaying amazing ignorance of the root cause of what is happening in Cologne and many other parts of Europe, the Mayor of Cologne herself actually said
…that [German] women should adopt a “code of conduct” to prevent future assault at a crisis meeting following the sexual attack of women by 1000 men on New Year’s eve. (link)
When your ideals stubbornly do not match reality, it’s time to change your ideals.
Europe used to be a clannish society. But the Catholic Church banned consanguinity during the Middle Ages. Banning consanguinity was a deliberate and premeditated way to destroy the clan structure of much of Europe.
After that ban, a different sort of society evolved in Europe, based on strong state laws and a universal morality that sees other people as being largely “the same as” oneself and thus deserving of fair treatment.
Some other really basic differences between societies are the way women are treated (see the above) and how the truth is treated.
In Europe and European-derived cultures, the truths people believe in are open and ideally should be shared with others without prejudice. The scientific method is a good example of this. Europe did not keep its science and technology secret.
This is not the case in many other cultures. In many parts of the world codes exist that define what can be said or not said to “outsiders.” And in many of those societies it is considered right and proper to lie to “outsiders” in order to gain an advantage over them. If you allow large numbers of people like that into your society, you are going to have problems.
The ideas expressed above are so basic to human social psychology, it’s long past time to stop being ignorant of them or pretending they are more malleable than they are.