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.”
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
Signaling Virtuous Victimhood as Indicators of Dark Triad Personalities
Conclusion
The obligation to alleviate others’ pain can be found in most of the world’s moral systems. It also appears to be built into the structure of the mind by evolution, as evidenced by the human tendency to feel distress at signs of suffering. It is therefore not surprising that many people are motivated to help perceived victims of misfortune or disadvantage. But the downside of this proclivity is that it can also lead people to be easily persuaded that all victim signals are accurate signals, particularly when they perceive the alleged victim as being a “good person.” When this occurs, well-meaning people might allocate their material and social resources to those who are neither victims nor virtuous, which necessarily diverts resources from those who are legitimately in need. Effective altruism requires the ability to differentiate between false and true victims. Credulous acceptance of all virtuous victim signals as genuine can also enable and reward fraudulent claims, particularly by those with antisocial personality traits. Our work raises this possibility and by doing so it advances our understanding of how the moral goals of those who seek to minimize human suffering can be most effectively pursued.
This study and this one—Virtuous victimhood as a Dark Triad resource transfer strategy—both detail the psychological mechanisms that underly successful strategies of group parasitism. Understanding the semi-complex nature of this strategy is important because USA and the West are today infested with a proliferation of parasitic groups working precisely this strategy. From BLM, to Soros et al funded DAs, to Jewish supremacists, to beta cuck feminists who have overrun academia and state governments, parasitism that feeds on public kindness and government boondoggle money (see also Catholic and Hebrew ‘virtuous’ illegal immigration orgs and the scams they work) has never been more serious or widespread. In Buddhist terms, each one of us is a ‘locus of imagination’ wandering in a realm of delusion. And each one of us chooses between living authentically by our own lights or by those of others. This paradoxical condition does not seem to have changed throughout all of human history, and history itself is also subject to this paradox, as is religion. ABN
American Buddhist Net 