Tag: morality ethics

Problems with FIML and how they can work to our advantage

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

FIML is not perfect. Here are some of the problems or difficulties with it:

  • It takes at least two people to do it
  • These two people must care about each other deeply
  • It takes a good deal of time
  • It requires the formation of new mental skills
  • It is hard to learn without instruction
  • It requires that partners have at least some interest in language and how they communicate
  • It goes against much or most cultural conditioning
  • It requires high ethical standards

One or more of these difficulties will stop some people from doing FIML. There is not much we can do about that.

At the same time, these same difficulties can be an advantage. As is said in Buddhism, they may constitute “negative conditions that lead to progress.”

For example, FIML practice not only requires high ethical standards, it also shows us how to get those standards and why they work.

If you have at least some interest in language and communication, FIML practice will hone and increase it.

FIML does take time, but it is time well spent. You will enjoy many intriguing conversations with your partner that would not have been possible without FIML.

While FIML does require that we form some new mental skills, those skills are very beneficial and will work in many other situations.

FIML practice does pull partners away from subconscious cultural conditioning, but in doing that it also liberates them to form a subculture of their own, based on conscious choice.

Since it employs mindfulness, self-control, and rational analysis of thought and feeling, FIML practice greatly supports Buddhist practice and mental clarity in general.

Israeli Settler Council Issues Unprecedented Admission of Ritualistic Child Sexual Abuse After Broadcaster Exposes Cover-Up

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The Gush Etzion Regional Council in the Israeli-occupied West Bank has publicly admitted that ritualistic sexual abuse of children occurred within its communities, a confession that marks the first time a governing body in Israel’s religious-Zionist settler sector has broken ranks with years of denial.

The extraordinary statement came on 27 May 2026 in direct response to a broadcast by Israeli public broadcaster Kan 11, whose investigative programme ‘Zman Emet’ aired accounts from five women, most of whom did not know each other, who described virtually identical patterns of multi-perpetrator ritualistic sexual abuse in the same geographic areas.

The admission did not materialise in isolation. It is the culmination of more than a year of survivor testimony, Knesset hearings, rabbinical warnings, and police investigations that have shaken Israeli society to its core, forcing a reckoning within the country’s religious communities over decades of alleged institutional silence.

Yael Shitrit, another survivor, described abuse that began when she was three years old:

‘You have no idea what ritual abuse is,’ Shitrit told committee members. ‘The human brain cannot comprehend it. You can’t imagine what it means to program a three-year-old girl through rape and sadism so they can do whatever they want without anyone knowing.’ Shitrit described being trafficked across Israel from ceremony to ceremony. ‘Naked men stood in a circle. My therapist, her husband, and her son harmed me, and there were dozens of other girls and boys who harmed me.’ She said police had known of the cases for a year but lacked the tools to act: ‘The people who will fall are very, very senior figures. These people run communities and government agencies.’

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The day Jewish Supremacists repent and reform will be a beautiful day for all the earth. ABN

‘Cat Bin Lady’ Mary Bale was reviled around the globe when she threw Lola the moggie in a wheelie bin

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In the dawning days of social media it was one of the first clips of its kind to go globally viral – and has since been viewed many millions of times.

A very ordinary woman is seen walking down a very ordinary street when she comes upon a cat. The cat, apparently friendly and seeking attention, jumps up from the pavement to a garden wall to get closer.

The woman strokes the cat a couple of times while glancing around then suddenly grabs it by the scruff of the neck and then, with surprising dexterity, flips open the lid of an adjacent wheelie bin, throws the cat inside, shuts the bin, and continues walking as if nothing has happened….Initially, she was unrepentant, saying she did ‘not deserve to be hated’ for her moment of madness and claimed people were overreacting.

‘I really don’t see what everyone is getting so excited about. It’s just a cat,’ she said. ‘I was walking home from work and saw this cat wander out in front of me. I was playing with it, stroking it and listening to it purr as it stood on a garden wall. It was very friendly.

‘I don’t know what came over me, but I suddenly thought it would be funny to put it in the wheelie bin, which was right beside me. I did it as a joke because I thought it would be funny. I never thought it would be trapped. I expected it to wriggle out of the bin.’

Bale added: ‘People are reading too much into things. I’ve no feelings about cats one way or the other. I don’t keep pets myself, but I have no problem with people who do.

‘To think this video is being seen around the world is unbelievable. I’m a very private person and don’t want to upset any members of my family. I don’t know what my relatives will think, but to be honest I think everyone’s overreacting a bit.

‘OK, I shouldn’t have done it, but it’s just a cat at the end of the day. I don’t think I deserve to be hated by people all over the world, it was just a split second of madness.’

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When life turns on a dime and the punishment don’t fit the crime. Compare to Epstein files ABN

Predation Wearing the Mask of Civilization

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Institutions reveal their true character in two places: in the gray zones where rules are incomplete, ambiguous, or unenforceable, and even more nakedly in broad daylight when those in authority openly violate the clearest rules without shame. In a living civilization, power is restrained by the office it occupies. In a hollowed-out order, the office becomes a license to violate. Authority exists not to uphold rules but to prove exemption from them. That is why law, bureaucracy, and policing expose the moral substrate of a society with merciless clarity.

India is the textbook case.

Even in the most civilized nations, courts decide only the tiniest sliver of human reality. The vast majority of civilization—trust, restraint, honesty, the silent agreements that make daily life possible—exists below the threshold of formal law. Verbal promises and everyday decency were never meant for judges. They rest on an internalized moral order.

In India, that moral order does not exist.

Indian bureaucracy does not administer rules. It prices access, punishes resistance, and extracts submission. Reformers claimed bureaucrats were corrupt only because their salaries were too low. This was a rationalization. When government salaries rose dramatically, the scale of bribes increased accordingly. The higher they climbed, the more entitled they became. Honesty is not a compensation problem. It is a value. A society either supplies that value to its institutions or it does not.

I cannot remember a single visit to an Indian government office that did not entail a demand for a bribe. Citizens grovel, prostrate, genuflect, and abase themselves for the most basic services. The bureaucrat does not merely want money. He wants submission. He wants to feel superior. The bribe is only part of the transaction; humiliation is the rest.

…Societies do not wake up one morning and choose virtue. They reach it—if they ever do—through centuries of accumulated wisdom and painful internalization of restraint. Or they never reach it at all.

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Important to understand that India is not the world’s only society like this. ABN

Tragedy as man, 75, dies after being sucker-punched by DoorDash driver he asked to drive more slowly through his leafy neighborhood

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…What happened was captured on a neighbor’s security camera.

Shaw said her father stepped from his porch in an attempt to get the vehicle’s license plate number when Turner suddenly stopped his car and got out.

The two men exchanged words for several moments before the driver is alleged to have suddenly attacked.

‘Then out of nowhere, the guy punches my father on the side of the head,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t even try to defend himself. I don’t think he saw it coming.’

Poole crashed to the pavement after being hit, suffering a devastating head injury.

‘He fell, and the guy got back in his car and drove away,’ Shaw said. ‘He just left him lying in the road.’

Police later said Turner admitted to striking Poole and leaving the scene.

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Not long ago, a sucker-punch was the sign of a coward and a knave, a worthless POS. A 40 year-old man sucker punching a 74 year-old man (he died aged 75), by standards some of us still hold, is a savage crime, as bad as it gets. That’s murder with a deadly weapon. Seems the interwebs have accustomed people to seeing sucker punches, and hearing some fool go oooh, oooh in approval off camera. There may be no way to go back to the old days when men valued honor, but that single punch given without warning and killing the victim is the fundamental reason sucker-punches have traditionally always been anathema among civilized men. Same goes for men hitting women. I saw a vid just last night of some woman slapping and punching her husband in the head many times. At some point, he belted her hard several times in the head, knocking her senseless to the ground. Guys, it’s a rare woman who can throw a punch that even hurts, and this woman was not that type. She was angry, she was being stupid, but all she did was land a flurry of very weak blows on her much stronger husband. A strong man can kill a woman, or an elderly man, with one punch. That’s why men hitting women—or old men without warning—has also always been looked down on in Western societies. Yes, there are times when a woman can and should be hit by a man, but they are rare and almost never warrant a deadly punch, full-force to her head. The dude in the video landed several hard punches to her head before she crashed into the pavement. Most of the comments on his behavior were approving, a sad sign of our times. ABN

Camp Mystic top medical officer ABANDONED young campers before 25 were killed in devastating Texas flood, new documents show

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Texas officials have faulted Camp Mystic’s top medical officer for abandoning campers in the hours before 25 young girls and two camp counselors were killed in a devastating flood.

The Texas Board of Nursing announced the finding on Tuesday in an order temporarily suspending Mary Liz Eastland’s nursing license. 

…the nursing board ruled that Mary Liz, who also served as the camp’s medical officer, ‘abandoned’ the campers and staff when the camp site began to flood … by evacuating herself and her children to higher ground without providing any assistance or direction to all of the other campers and staff.’

The order also faults Mary Liz for failing to develop and maintain adequate emergency plans and training protocols before the deadly July 4 floods, and failing to keep adequate shelter and evacuation protocols.

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This is a complex case and there is more to it than just the flooding, but ‘abandoning’ campers to the flooding is the main reason her license has been suspended, and that we are hearing about this tragedy at all. That said, this case is analogous to the FDA and CDC combined abandonment of the American public to the unsafe and ineffective covid vaxxes, which have brought great harm to millions. I am sure many doctors and health officials did not take the vaxxes themselves, while abandoning their patients and the public, even openly coercing others to take the vaxxes. ABN

NYC woman declined to press charges against subway shover ‘because she didn’t want to put another black man in jail’… weeks later he allegedly killed retired teacher, 76, at station

~ ABN ~ 2 Comments

A young woman in New York City said she declined pressing charges against a violent suspect because she didn’t want to put ‘another black man in jail,’ weeks before he allegedly killed a 76-year-old retired teacher. 

The 23-year-old woman anonymously detailed how she and a friend narrowly escaped Rhamell Burke, 32, after he allegedly attacked them while riding the subway on April 2.

The straphanger told the New York Post she now completely regrets her decision not to work with prosecutors after Burke was charged with murder on Friday for allegedly shoving 76-year-old Ross Falzone down a flight of stairs to his death at a subway station Thursday night.

‘Maybe a part of me was just like, I don’t want to put another black man in jail, but, you know, at some point, if you are a criminal, you’re a criminal, and he was scary, he was a scary guy,’ the unidentified woman told the outlet.

Police say Rhamell Burke was released from Bellevue Hospital roughly five hours before the deadly subway attack on Ross Falzone (Pictured) on Thursday

Falzone suffered catastrophic injuries, including a traumatic brain injury, fractured spine, and broken rib. He died shortly before 3am Friday

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Unwise compassion — Buddhism warns against this. The highest virtue in Buddhism is wisdom, not unwise anything. ABN

A subtle danger helping personalities face

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Generally, helping personalities enjoy seeing others do well.

They have an active desire to help others.

A subtle problem with this desire is if the helper is dealing with a narcissist (or worse), fulfilling the desire to help will also involve fulfilling the narcissist’s dark need for people to attend to them.

This is an example of why we must be careful about positive moral feelings in ourselves.

Such feelings probably will not be filed in the mind as “positive moral feelings.” Rather, they might be filed simply as “good feelings” or “relationship satisfaction” or “the right thing to do.”

The narcissist (or worse) feeds off the helper’s good moral instincts to maintain a dead-end desire, a low desire.

You can see this in subcultures as well. Like malignant narcissists, some subcultures will destroy, even seek to destroy, the larger culture that hosts them. They do this for pleasure and/or because it seems to them to be to their advantage.

Buddhist morality is always based on wisdom, on conducting a wise analysis of yourself and any situation.

It is good to be a helping type. But you have to be careful who you help. You really need to analyze it.

If you help a malignant narcissist because it feels right and because you are blinded to their condition by your moral feelings, you are not doing any good. You are probably causing harm.

At the very least, your positive moral feelings are being wasted. Beyond that, a more deserving person is not receiving your help. And beyond that, the narcissist is being strengthened and confirmed in their ways while a ripple effect from all of this goes outward.

Pyrrho’s thought and practice was a form of Early Buddhism which he learned during his years in Bactria and Gandhāra

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The conclusion to be drawn from the evidence about Pyrrho’s thought and practice is that he adopted a form of Early Buddhism during his years in Bactria and Gandhāra, including its philosophical-religious and pragmatic elements, but he stripped it of its alien garb and reconstituted it as a new ‘Greek Buddhism’ for the Hellenistic world, which he presented in his own words to Timon and his other students.

Beckwith, Christopher I.. Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia (pp. 54-55). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

The earliest attested philosophical-religious system that is both historically datable and clearly recognizable as a form of Buddhism is Early Pyrrhonism, the teachings and practices of Pyrrho of Elis and Timon of Phlius, as shown in Chapter One. Its central features correspond exactly to some of the central features of the traditional putatively “early” form of Buddhism presented in Pali canonical texts.

However, the latter tradition of Buddhism also contains many elements—beliefs, institutions, devotional practices, and so on—which developed at the earliest in the Saka-Kushan period, three centuries after Pyrrho. They spread throughout the ancestors of the attested forms of Buddhism, creating Normative Buddhism. The elements that are attested only from approximately the Saka-Kushan period on—the exact time remains to be established—are far from trivial. They include the Saṃgha, the community of monks; the idea of the bhikṣu ‘monk’ per se, as well as of the bhikṣunī ‘nun’; the vihāra or monastery; the Vinaya, or Buddhist monastic code; worship of the Buddha;4 development of the idea of reincarnations of the Buddha, both human and godlike; abhidharma or “Buddhist scholasticism”; and many others. They are now considered to be essential elements of traditional Buddhism, yet there is no historically sound evidence that they existed at all5 (and some evidence that they did not yet exist) until long after the visit of Pyrrho in 330–325 BC and that of Megasthenes in 305–304 BC. The lateness of the development of devotion for the Buddha and Buddha incarnations, as well as reverence for the Buddha’s teachings (the Dharma) and the community of monks (the Saṃgha), means that the invention of the Triratna (‘Three Jewels’) formula is even later (perhaps as a “popular” substitute for the difficult Trilakṣaṇa1 ‘Three Characteristics’ formula, which is phonetically similar.

Beckwith, Christopher I.. Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia (pp. 61-62). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

  1. The Buddha says, “All dharmas are anitya ‘impermanent’…. All dharmas are duḥkha ‘unsatisfactory, imperfect, unstable’…. All dharmas are anātman ‘without an innate self-identity’.”
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