Tag: semiotics
WikiLeaks Editorial: Reporters should not let themselves be gamed by the Clinton campaign.
There is no denial and we have a 100% record for accuracy. (Source)
Scott Adams Interview: Trump’s Tactics and Hillary’s Persuasion Game
Adams sees Trump as fundamentally a skilled persuader. In this interview, he explains this concept well. Adams also sees the New Yorker in Trump and mentions how this affects the way he speaks.
What Adams says about persuasion is probably largely true. But it is a truth that belongs in a world characterized by bad communication.
In the public sphere, there are no options to the world Adams describes.
In the private sphere of interpersonal communication, there are.
Unfortunately, most people use only the techniques of the public sphere in the private sphere.
They do this because they do not know any other techniques. FIML is a technique that allows for much better communication in the private sphere.
Using special techniques to persuade is the opposite of what FIML does.
FIML seeks to remove all artifice and assumption from close interpersonal communication. By doing this, FIML also removes them from the individual psychologies of FIML partners.
After doing FIML for some time, I no longer see individual psychology as a sum of traits and signs that can be studied or understood as if they were actual entities, actual ghosts or ghost-like sub-beings that have minds of their own and perdure over time. I don’t use signs to tell what my partner thinks or feels, or not very many save the straightforward ones.
Individuals are semiotic beings that respond deeply to communication signals, especially signals coming from people. In the public sphere, in the world Adams describes, we never know what anything means unless we have successfully persuaded someone. But then what does that mean?
And even if we have persuaded them, maybe they have really persuaded us but we don’t know it.
You don’t want to live like that with your best friend. With FIML you can put it all out there and figure it all out and all of that can be done at your own pace.
If you are using public-sphere communication techniques on your best friend (you are), you are actually allowing yourselves to be pulled apart by the public sphere. You are allowing yourselves to be absorbed by the public sphere, dissolved by it, destroyed by it.
FIML is a method that helps partners gain enormous control of their communication. Perfectly open, honest, and with no tricks.
Judge Jeanine Pirro on Hillary Clinton
Thanks, famous actors!
This is a well done take-down of a Clinton ad using pro actors. I am posting it because it essentially reverses the shallow semiotics of the Clinton original to produce a deeper effect.
Decent read on American Jewish accent(s)
Some good info in this piece: Why Linguists are Fascinated by the American Jewish Accent.
The title is overblown, but that is common in journalism these days.
All accents are interesting once you pay attention. I am fairly good at telling the region of the US someone grew up in by their accent. When wrong, I often find that one or both of their parents grew up in the region I identified.
Many regional accents are suppressed at home, often by parents who are better educated or who have moved from elsewhere. And this leads to further degrading the regional norm. You can find a lot of this in New England, which has several very beautiful regional accents. Rural Mainers speak in ways that sometimes remind me of a Texas drawl.
One paragraph in the linked article got me:
Another element that isn’t dying is the particular conversational style of Jews. When linguist Deborah Tannen taped dinner conversations between Jews and non-Jews (her work was published in 1981), she found that arguing and interrupting (or “cooperative overlapping”) occurred at higher rates among Jews. Pauses were also different: Jews tended to use both shorter pauses and fewer pauses between clauses and sentences. Like intonation, this isn’t really “accent,” in a strict linguistic sense, but as a broad answer to “how do Jews speak differently from non-Jews,” it’s a significant element.
I grew up in a community with many Jews and learned a lot of speech habits from them. “Cooperative overlapping” was one of them. To this day it is very hard for me not to do this. When you have this style ingrained in you it feels very warm and friendly, though many other American English speakers find it disrespectful, even rude.
When I speak with people who don’t do “cooperative overlapping,” conversations can seem slow-paced, even boring.
More information can be exchanged with “cooperative overlapping” as well as more quick shifting of topic and nuance. Also, more options for situational humor.
If there is one thing other regions could beneficially learn from Jewish speech habits, this is the one I would choose. It’s not hard to do and it adds several dimensions to speaking and listening.
Kellyanne Conway on tonight’s debate
Most of the MSM is barely covering pay-to-play between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation
But the info is out there.
Despite their repeated claims of transparency, it turns out that both Hillary Clinton and current Secretary of State John Kerry used their positions to enrich members of their own families — at taxpayer expense. (Scandals At State: How Clinton, Kerry Used Office To Enrich Their Families)
See also: WikiLeaks’ Guccifer 2.0: Obama Sold Off Public Offices to Donors
Rep. Jason Chaffetz Responds to Shady Clinton IT Workers Pleading the Fifth
Semiotic manipulation: the making of a symbol
Note that Clinton has worked hard to turn the green frog into a Green Frog That Symbolizes the Worst of the Basket of Deplorables. Making people and symbols seem deplorable is what the left does best and is one of the reasons I can no longer support them.
Here’s another version of the frog: Pepe the Frog – The Farm Song for Kids, Children’s Music
Trump: Clinton Revelation Is Threat to America
Triggers and microaggression
I greatly dislike the way these two words—trigger and microaggression—are currently being used.
Trigger implies that something inevitable will follow while microaggression outright claims that the other person is at fault.
I much prefer my own neutral term for those small stimuli that might cause emotional discomfort.
My term is psychological morpheme, which is defined as:
The smallest meaningful unit of a psychological response. It is the smallest unit of communication that can give rise to an emotional, psychological, or cognitive reaction.
I strongly believe psychological morphemes exist and that they arise at distinct moments and that these moments can be perceived by the owner of them and that that owner of these moments can and must learn to control them, analyze them, learn from them.
It is a huge mistake to automatically blame another person for our own psychological morphemes. From a FIML point of view, there is almost nothing worse.
The reason this is a really bad thing to do is you are very likely wrong.
Even if you are wrong only one out of twenty times, the consequences of your mistake can be very large. I guarantee you are wrong much more often than that.
I say this after doing years of FIML practice during which I have discovered in myself and my partner hundreds of wrong psychological morphemes, most of which were connected to subjective networks that had grown large over many years.
Most psychological morphemes arise due to habits of subjective interpretation.
Rather than let these subjective interpretations have their way, a far more profitable and much wiser course of action is to stop that process at the initiating morpheme. Stop it before it gets going and fills your mind.
If you can stop it at the psychological morpheme and analyze it with the help of your FIML partner, those morphemes will not become mindless triggers that you wrongly interpret as microaggression, but rather opportunities to see and understand how your brain is actually functioning in real-time.
Psychological morphemes are also commonly misinterpreted as signs that reside in the other person of boredom, anger, contempt, arrogance, insecurity, optimism, happiness, pleasure, and so on including as many states as you can imagine.
man and TV
When a sign becomes a (wrong) symbol
Signs become symbols all the time. What you want to be careful about is wrongly making signs into symbols.
A sign is a simple element of thought or communication. Symbols are signs with extra meaning.
Here’s an example. My partner spends a lot of time at her job working outside. She works hard and sometimes it bothers me. This morning I noticed that a sign in my mind had become a symbol.
The symbol was an imaginary image of her at her job with rain falling, wind blowing, and her in a panic to finish. It was one of several images I have of her at work.
As it floated into the foreground of my mind, I simply asked her, “Tell me this image is not true.”
I described it and she said, “No, that’s not true. Sometimes it happens, but generally I enjoy what I am doing.”
My imaginary sign (her in the rain) became a symbol (her being worked too hard) that she corrected with a few words (“no that’s not true”).
Our years of FIML practice allowed me to allow the symbol to lose all meaning and the simple sign to become a sign again. My bad feeling about her going to work and the conditions of her work changed immediately.
To become symbols, signs must be invested with meaning and feeling. Sometimes signs are symbols and sometimes not.
We all turn signs into wrong symbols all the time. Observing how that happens in you with the help of a trusted partner will do more to clear your head than anything else I can think of.
In this respect, FIML is a form of analytical psychotherapy that removes wrong symbols from the brain’s semiotic networks.
Since humans are fundamentally semiotic animals who react instinctively to symbols, it is essential that we have a way to clear out wrong ones. FIML, or something similar, is an absolute must for clear thinking and rational psychology.
You cannot clean up most wrong symbols (or signs) by yourself. You absolutely must have a trusted partner to help you because signs and symbols function as tools of communication.
Since they are also the building blocks of human psychology, clearing up wrong signs and symbols also clears up human psychology.
The persistence of nonrational social norms
Very concrete examples of persistent nonrational social norms can be found in consumer science.
For years, we received medical advice on fats and salt that had little scientific backing. Yesterday, an article appeared showing Medical benefits of dental floss unproven.
I had had my suspicions about the fat and salt though I did lean toward reducing intake, but the lack of evidence for dental floss surprised me.
Imagine tens of thousands of hygienists and dentists repeating the advice to floss over all those years. Dental floss is a multi-billion dollar industry.
I don’t blame hygienists or dentists. They were faithfully doing what they were taught—transmitting a social norm that seemed to be science-based (but was not).
That’s how societies hold together. Common beliefs and norms are typically transmitted by authority figures at the top. After the authority figures, come parents, news media, teachers, etc. in a long chain of transmission. Each in turn repeats what they have learned.
Could be about dental floss or it could be about keeping the sun in the sky by cutting out people’s hearts.
You can see something similar at an individual level. Much of human psychology is based on habits transmitted internally from one day to the next in long chains that sometimes can be traced back to infancy.
Much of what we think and feel is nothing more than habit transmitted faithfully from one moment to the next.
Psychological habits, like social conformity, work according to rules that we can understand in terms of reason but that often are not themselves reasonable.
The Orlando transcripts are still being spun
As a professional translator, I can say unequivocally that the Orlando 911 transcripts are still being spun by translating the word Allah to “God.”
There is no need to do this except to spin the story. I will leave concluding how and why it is being spun to you, the reader.
Unredacted 911 transcript from Orlando shooting.
Additionally, why are the Arabic sections of the transcript not being translated?
American Buddhist Net 