Liberal media has been uninterested in investigating the couple involved in shooting dead a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Coventry, Vermont near the Canadian border on inauguration day. Why? Both in the duo are leftist trans militants. One of the deceased armed militants is a German believed to be in the country on an H-1B visa. The duo is allegedly connected to a trans terror cell.
Federal law enforcement had been surveilling German man Felix “Ophelia” Baukholt and Seattle @UW student Teresa “Milo” Youngblut (xe/xem/xyrs) after staff at a Lyndonville, Vt. motel reported seeing them with black tactical clothing, weapons and protective militia-style equipment.
When the duo was pulled over on Jan. 20, Youngblut allegedly shot dead Officer David Maland in a surprise attack. In the returning fire, Baukholt, who was also armed, was killed. Youngblut was injured and survived.
I spoke with Jessica Taylor @jessi_cata, a Berkeley, Calif. woman who had met Baukholt over the years. She confirmed that Baulkholt is trans.
Tag: psychology
You can’t say what they don’t already know
The main problem with culture is, in virtually all cases, “you can’t say what they don’t already know.”
Some very small cultures of just a few people are exceptions to this rule, but no large culture with anonymous and/or not-well-known members is.
Cultures demand constant authorization and reauthorization from their members. To stray from established norms is to weaken group authorizations.
In the world today, you cannot escape the above truth about culture. You will find it prevails no matter where you go.
(In your private life you can escape the above truth by doing FIML practice. The whole point of FIML is to speak about things you don’t already know.)
UPDATE: The above also explains opposing multiple culture divides within USA.
Each strains to ‘authorize and reauthorize’ their ‘established norms’; thus exhausting cognitive space and energy.
This leads to KOBK reasoning, and with that all other forms of reasoning become subordinate. ABN
Micro-aggression or micro-aguessin’?
Do FIML practice successfully 25 times and you will understand how wrong the notion of micro-aggression is. Not only wrong but also destructive to self and other. Rather than have us probe own minds, micro-aggression asks us to assert a false interpretation of someone else’s mind. From a Buddhist point of view, micro-aggression turns us 180 degrees away from wisdom and enlightenment ABN.
Intrinsic motivation is important for sustained creative activity
A recent study shows that An insight-related neural reward signal exists and is more active in some people than in others.
This study also confirms the idea that “intrinsic motivation is important for sustained creative activity.”
Some other findings that may be of interest:
…our findings suggest that individuals who are high in reward sensitivity experience the sudden emergence of a solution into awareness as strongly rewarding whereas individuals who are low in reward sensitivity may still experience insight as sudden and attentionally salient but lacking in hedonic content.
As lifelong autodidact, I wonder if others with this marvelous “addiction” can relate to feeling almost not alive unless there is something to wonder about or figure out. I recently read a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein. One standout was his strong tendency to seek out simple or humble environments that stimulated his mind.
…Individuals high in reward sensitivity are more likely to take drugs, develop substance-abuse disorders or eating disorders, and engage in risky behaviors such as gambling. The fact that some people find insight experiences to be highly pleasurable reinforces the notion that insight can be an intrinsic reward for problem solving and comprehension that makes use of the same reward circuitry in the brain that processes rewards from addictive drugs, sugary foods, or love.
Getting lost in the woods or on a motorcycle ride, for me, is a highly enjoyable feeling. There have to be slight tremors of fear and agitation followed by finding my way again. I suppose others may experience similar feelings in social settings or as live performers.
…These findings shed light on people’s motivations for engaging in challenging, often time-consuming, activities that potentially yield insights, such as solving puzzles or mysteries, creating inventions, or doing research. It also reinforces the notion that intrinsic motivation is important for sustained creative activity. The expectation of intrinsic rewards from comprehending and creating, rather than from an extrinsic source such as payment, is thought to be the most effective type of workplace motivation…
A society with universal basic income in which no one has to work unless they want to might bring about the greatest flourishing of human talent ever. Then again, maybe not. Inspiration does need a stick on the back sometimes and “joy has no children,” meaning happiness produces few inventions.
Here’s an article about the study: Aha! + Aaaah: Creative Insight Triggers a Neural Reward Signal.
first posted April 10, 2020
Inside China‘s Torture Camps for Teens
8 behaviors of people who have no close family to rely on
by Lucas Graham | January 2, 2025, 6:56 pm
If you’re someone who has no close family to lean on, you may find yourself behaving differently than those around you.
This lack of familial support can manifest in various ways. You might be fiercely independent, highly self-reliant, or even struggle with forming close relationships.
This isn’t a lifestyle choice, but a circumstance that can shape your behavior in unique ways.
Psychology has identified certain common behaviors in individuals who don’t have a close family to rely on. Each person’s experience is different, but there are some general trends.
Understanding these behaviors could give you valuable insights into your own behavior or that of others.
1) Fierce independence
When you don’t have a close family to rely on, you learn to depend on yourself. This can result in a fierce independence, a trait that often becomes a defining part of your personality.
This independence might come across as impressive to some, but it can also lead to challenges.
For instance, you might find it hard to ask for help even when you need it, simply because you’re used to doing everything on your own.
This isn’t a conscious decision; it’s a behavior shaped by circumstances. You didn’t choose to be on your own, but you’ve adapted to make the most of it.
While this fierce independence can be empowering, it can also sometimes come with feelings of isolation and loneliness.
Balancing self-reliance with the ability to seek and accept help when needed is an ongoing journey for people without close family support.
Recognizing this behavior in yourself or others can lead to a greater understanding and empathy for those navigating life without a close family network.
Continue reading “8 behaviors of people who have no close family to rely on”
Narcissistic grandiosity predicts greater involvement in LGBTQ activism
The Archives of Sexual Behavior recently published research that examines the role of dark personality traits in activism. The findings indicate a pattern where narcissistic grandiosity is associated with higher participation in LGBTQ movements, demonstrating that motivations for activism can range widely from genuine altruism to personal image-building.
The researchers were driven to explore these motivations to better understand a concept they proposed: the dark-ego-vehicle principle, a theoretical framework suggesting that some individuals might exploit social activism for self-serving purposes. According to this principle, individuals with “dark” personality traits—such as narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, or sadism—may engage in activism not to advance its altruistic goals but to satisfy their own self-serving needs. These individuals exploit activism as a “vehicle” to fulfill desires for attention, status, or power.
“The DEVP assumes that individuals with high levels of dark traits may inauthentically and selfishly use prosocial activism to satisfy their own ego-focused dark needs (e.g., the need to signal one’s own moral virtue, a behavior that has been coined virtue signaling),” explained study authors Ann Krispenz, a postdoctoral associate, and Alex Bertrams, the head of the Educational Psychology Lab at the University of Bern.
“As narcissistic people are particularly keen to gain attention, fame, and prestige, certain forms of activism that are currently prominently covered by the media are likely to be particularly attractive to them. We consider LGBQ and gender-identity activism as forms of activism getting a high level of public attention.”
Psychological optimization
Why settle for not being crazy when you could be going for psychological optimization?
A mental disorder, also called a mental illness or psychiatric disorder, is a diagnosis of a behavioral or mental pattern that can cause suffering or a poor ability to function in ordinary life.
Why settle for being able to “function in ordinary life” when you could have an extraordinary life?
Why take pills to get by when you could be optimizing your brain?
Humans go for optimization whenever we can. We optimize technology, our diets, our medical treatments, our educations, even our friendships.
Optimization : an act, process, or methodology of making something (as a design, system, or decision) as fully perfect, functional, or effective as possible.
Hell yeah. That’s what you want for your mind, your life. Why settle for less?
OK, that does read like a sales spiel, but I will deliver.
All you have to do is put time and thought into the process of optimizing your psychology. An optimized psychology is an optimized brain and life.
First, you have to learn how to do FIML.
This requires about as much time and effort as learning to play a musical instrument at a beginner’s level. About as much time as it takes to learn to drive a car. Or to learn to play pool well enough to enjoy it.
FIML takes less time to learn than a semester at school, whatever grade. Less time than most job-training courses. Less time than becoming a decent amateur cook. Less time than buying a house or redoing your kitchen.
The hardest part about FIML is learning the technique through reading. Start here: How to do FIML.
The second hardest part is having a friend or mate who is willing and able to do it with you. Sadly, this is a deal-breaker for too many people.
I hate saying this, but it is fairly normal for people world-wide not to have a friend who is close enough to do FIML with. This is the result of so many non-optimized psychologies in this world!
Many people have five or more “good friends” and a loving spouse, but not even one of them willing or able to do FIML.
Their excuses will be they can’t understand it, don’t want to bother, don’t want to be that honest, don’t want that kind of relationship, don’t have the time, already are doing it (no, you are not), etc.
The result is they and you will continue to languish in less than optimal mental states. Moods, alcohol, pills, arguments over nothing, ridiculous misunderstandings, ominous silences, severance of ties, and worse will rule your world(s).
For most, the best relief they will find are self-help books based on generalities, career books about “getting ahead” as defined by more generalities, nonsense about “loving yourself,” low levels of religious belief and practice, exercise programs, etc.
You didn’t learn to drive a car that way. Driving a car requires interaction, observation, the help of another person.
Your psychology needs similar kinds of input.
Once you have learned to do FIML with a trustworthy partner, the practice will tend to self-generate because the insights gained will be real and have real and deeply felt benefits for both partners.
Besides the “how to” and FAQ links at the top of this page, most posts on this site describe some aspect of FIML practice.
For psychologists, I honestly do not see how you can claim to be able to treat other people if you have not done at least a few years of FIML practice. Human interactions without any technique for consistent meta-control and understanding (which FIML provides) are 100% guaranteed to be riddled with misunderstanding and wrong views.
Dark personality traits linked to ‘virtuous victim signaling’ and exploitation of accusations
Researchers have replicated and expanded a prior study to investigate the role of dark tetrad traits in “virtuous victim signaling.” Across three studies,, the findings confirmed that narcissism and Machiavellianism are linked to this signaling strategy. They also revealed that sadism, while unrelated to signaling itself, plays a role in exploiting accusations against others for personal satisfaction. The results were published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.
The dark tetrad refers to a group of personality traits that are socially aversive and often associated with manipulation, exploitation, and harm to others. These traits include narcissism (an inflated sense of self-importance and entitlement), Machiavellianism (a manipulative and cynical approach to relationships and social influence), psychopathy (a lack of empathy and impulsive antisocial behavior), and sadism (a tendency to derive pleasure from causing harm to others). Together, these traits can drive behaviors that exploit social and moral norms for personal gain, often at the expense of others.
Virtuous victim signaling combines the display of two types of signals—victimhood and virtue—to elicit sympathy, aid, or social advantages. A person engaging in this behavior publicly communicates their suffering, disadvantage, or oppression while also projecting an image of high moral character. This dual signaling has been shown to influence others, encouraging resource transfers or leniency while shielding the individual from moral scrutiny.
Virtuous victim signaling also describes one of the most common techniques used by parasitic groups. My somewhat frequent use of the word parasite on this site denotes destructive extractors of resources, control, opportunity, often coupled with sadism. A true human parasite deliberately causes harm, is abusive, sadistic, cruel while also extorting advantages from their hosts, who are decidedly victims of the parasite. I am not talking about interdependence, normal or justified dependence, being lazy, low ambition, eccentric, and so on. A parasite, and much more a parasitic group, is very seriously harmful. We see them proliferating all across the West. In nature broadly, we don’t think of parasites as having a psychology. In humans, parasitic strategies do entail conscious human psychological and physical abuse. ABN
Feminine advantage in harm perception obscures male victimization
A review published in Biology Letters highlights that harm toward women is perceived as more severe than similar harm toward men, a disparity rooted in evolutionary, cognitive, and cultural factors.
Maja Graso and Tania Reynolds explore this “feminine advantage” in harm perception, examining how societal responses prioritize harm against women while often minimizing harm against men.
The authors trace this bias to evolutionary pressures. Women’s reproductive roles historically made their survival critical for group continuity, fostering norms that prioritized their protection. These norms persist today, shaping moral judgments. For instance, experiments reveal that people are less willing to sacrifice women than men in hypothetical moral dilemmas, particularly when the women are of reproductive age. This tendency diminishes for older women, reinforcing its evolutionary roots.
Cognitive biases, such as moral typecasting, further reinforce the asymmetry. Typecasting associates women with victimhood and men with agency, making women more likely to be seen as vulnerable and men as perpetrators. This cognitive shortcut leads to systemic blind spots: male victimization is often ignored or trivialized, while female perpetration of harm remains under-recognized. For example, women’s use of indirect aggression, such as social exclusion, is perceived as less harmful, while male victims of intimate partner violence are frequently dismissed or ridiculed.
Sexual jealousy is the root and cause of more evil than money. ABN
Anhedonia for the masses now? — insights from schizoid personalities
I’ve been noticing something remarkable lately- everyone I interact with at work just is completely checked out. Used to be just me faking and masking, now it’s the most extroverted amongst us that I am clocking a seismic shift in.
Has the world finally caught up to my perpetual state of disconnection? Where I’ve long inhabited emotional neutrality, now everyone seems to drift—listless and anesthetized by invisible systemic pressures.
Is this mass schizoid experience a diagnostic canary in society’s collapsing coal mine? Economic precarity, technological alienation, and relentless performative expectations have seemingly drained collective vitality. What I’ve experienced as individual pathology now appears a widespread condition: a numbing adaptive response to late-stage capitalist entropy.
Are we all becoming involuntary ascetics with our affect flattened?….a synchronized emotional shutdown? And if so, what will remain special about how we see the world?
I found this post and replies to it interesting and related to Buddhist practice and thought. I personally learned in my childhood and youth, through unregulated experience, states like dissociation, depersonalization, or ‘checking out’. I do not believe that in moderation those are ‘disordered’ states. As a young adult, I did not ever think there was anything wrong with me for experiencing states like that. Augmented or probed deeply through meditation, dissociative-type states appear to me to be related to Buddhist samadhi states, probably even part of the same continuum. Western civilization is awesome in many ways, but generally lacks a deep appreciation of samadhi states as they are practiced and learned (and learned from) in Buddhism, Taoism, yoga, and similar traditions. Basically, the West lacks the vocabulary for the beauty and depth of samadhi states, which may appear to some, or be wrongly defined by some, as psychologically ‘disordered’, ‘depersonalized’, ‘dissociative’, ‘anhedonic’, or ‘checked out’. Taken too far samadhi could become an unwholesome trance state, but this is normally not a problem as proper Buddhist practice also includes rational thought, mindfulness, contemplations on others, compassionate activity. I believe I am not too far off in the gist of this comment simply because there is virtually no common vocabulary in the West known to many that describes deep meditative states or samadhi states; ergo, the West does not have a good understanding of them. The quoted post above and the comments under it at the link above comes from a subreddit on Schizoid Personality Disorder. I am not saying there is no such thing as SPD or anhedonia, but maybe some people who think those terms apply to them are only thinking that way because Western psychology does not have a deep enough vocabulary to couple with their experiences. I believe the insight that things have changed since covid is valid and maybe there is a lot of good in that. Taking no pleasure in a world of lies and bs can also be seen as awakening to the First Noble Truth of worldly suffering and delusion. ABN
I posted this as a multifaceted Buddhist contemplation on the First Noble Truth, a full understanding of which leads to enlightenment. ABN
UPDATE: Motive described as she cheated, felt guilty, confessed, then: ‘My brother wanted a divorce, and she didn’t take that lightly. And she decided to take her own life and somewhere along the line, she decided to take my brother’s life.’ ABN
How (intimate) interpersonal language functions
Parentheses around the word (intimate) indicate a spectrum from less to more intimate, less to more psychologically important.
1) If we study how (intimate) interpersonal language functions, we will discover that it is significantly both defined and impeded by errors in listening and speaking.
2) The more intimate interpersonal communication is the more idiosyncratic it is.
Since (intimate) interpersonal communication is psychologically more significant the more intimate it is, it follows that it is very important to analyze and understand this kind of communication. It also follows that (intimate) interpersonal communication is harder to analyze from the outside the more intimate it is.
It is essentially impossible for an expert to tell two lovers what their words mean or how to understand their acts of communication.
Therefore, the lovers must do it themselves. The expert can only show them how to do it themselves.
3) This is a fundamental truth that rests in the nexus between language and psychology: the more intimate the communication the more important it is psychologically and also the more important it is that the communicators be able to analyze their communication satisfactorily and correct errors that inevitably occur.
4) How to do that can be taught. This is a good job for psychologists. Doing the analyzing and correcting is the job of the intimate communicators.
5) If (intimate) interpersonal communications are not analyzed and corrected; if errors are not discovered and removed from the system, the psychologies of both communicators will be harmed.
6) Conversely, if (intimate) interpersonal communications are analyzed and corrected; if errors are discovered and removed from the system, the psychologies of both communicators will be benefited.
7) Indeed, removing error from an (intimate) interpersonal communication system will result in gradual optimization of both the system and the psychologies of the analyzers.
8) In sum:
- communication error is inevitable in (intimate) interpersonal communication systems
- it is very important to correct these errors
- and to analyze them and the communication system itself in the light of these corrections
- this optimizes both the communication system and the psychologies of both communicators
There is no other way to accomplish such sweeping improvement in both communication and individual psychology. There is no outside way for intimate communications to be analyzed and no one else to do it but the intimate communicators themselves.
This fundamental truth applies both to intimate communication and psychology. Psychology is determined by intimate communication and vice versa.
FIML practice is specifically designed to correct (intimate) interpersonal communication errors and is best used for this purpose.
first posted JANUARY 6, 2019
American Buddhist Net 