"...there is a strong social condemnation of men standing up for themselves, they're supposed to stand up for other people, but not for themselves..." "...there is no socially or instinctively ingrained taboo against attacking men, there never has been. In fact, the absorption of violence and hostility is a man's natural place in the scheme of things. These perceptions are what lead people to try to justify a woman beating a man in public by assuming he must have done something to deserve it. Men are dangerous, women are harmless. Men are the appropriate targets of violence and men act while women are acted upon. So when feminism fights for women – even when its representatives are actively attacking and doing harm to men in order to do that – most people see those attacks as harmless and reactive rather than active, attacks aimed at a group whose natural role is to absorb them. It's the desperate desires that exists in most of us [who were raised by abusive mothers, girls and boys both] to recharacterize all female action – especially hostility and violence – as reactive, that left society wide open to the snake oil of patriarchy theory..." -- Sugar and spice and all things nice!

"If you get rid of the government, then the costs of violence are imposed directly upon the person who wants to use the violence." - "Intellectualism is a defence against inflicted falsehoods as a child." - "People get that morality has been used to control them as children, and as soon as they try to treat morality as morality and make it universal to their society as a whole, they're attacked as immoral, as uncaring, as brutish and wrong... It's crazy. People's brains are fried... they have been crippled, mentally." -- How many fingers, Winston?

'"It's not that the upper classes are coldhearted," said UC Berkeley social psychologist Jennifer Stellar, lead author of the study published online on Dec. 12 in the journal, Emotion. "They may just not be as adept at recognizing the cues and signals of suffering because they haven't had to deal with as many obstacles in their lives." Stellar and her colleagues' findings challenge previous studies that have characterized lower-class people as being more prone to anxiety and hostility in the face of adversity. "These latest results indicate that there's a culture of compassion and cooperation among lower-class individuals that may be born out of threats to their wellbeing," Stellar said.'

How violence happens, using the hand model of the brain: http://youtu.be/DD-lfP1FBFk

'In the first functional MRI brain scan study to investigate the impact of physical abuse and domestic violence on children, scientists at UCL in collaboration with the Anna Freud Centre, found that exposure to family violence was associated with increased brain activity in two specific brain areas (the anterior insula and the amygdala) when children viewed pictures of angry faces. Previous fMRI studies that scanned the brains of soldiers exposed to violent combat situations have shown the same pattern of heightened activation in these two areas of the brain, which are associated with threat detection. The authors suggest that both maltreated children and soldiers may have adapted to be ‘hyper-aware’ of danger in their environment. Dr McCrory said: “Even though we know that maltreatment represents one of the most potent environmental risk factors associated with anxiety and depression, relatively little is known how such adversity ‘gets under the skin’ and increases a child’s later vulnerability.”' -- Repetition Compulsion

'A radical theory about the origins, power and popularity of Harry Potter versus Star Wars versus Lord of the Rings.' -- "If you cannot leave an abusive relationship – or you will not leave an abusive relationship – you will leave reality."

'The 1% do not generate any wealth of their own. Everything they have they get by taking from others under the cover of law. They live at our expense. Without us, the State as an institution would die. The State is the only institution in society that is permitted by law to use aggressive force against person and property. The State is the institution that essentially redefines criminal wrongdoing to make itself exempt from the law that governs everyone else. It is the same with every tax, every regulation, every mandate, and every single word of the federal code. It all represents coercion. The State is everybody's enemy. Why don't the protesters get this? Because they are victims of propaganda by the State, doled out in public school, that attempts to blame all human suffering on private parties and free enterprise. They do not comprehend that the real enemy is the institution that brainwashes them to think the way they do. They are right that society is rife with conflicts, and that the contest is wildly lopsided. It is indeed the 99% vs. the 1%. They're just wrong about the identity of the enemy.'

"Statism is going to become like racism: it will still be there but it will be underground because it's so socially disapproved of."

'The shocking science about the long-term effects of corporal punishment, essential viewing for every parent.' -- "Changing from how you were parented to how you are parenting is one of the most difficult – and essential – things in the world."

'The reciprocal relationship of pleasure and violence is highly significant because certain sensory experiences during the formative periods of development will create a neuropsychological predisposition for either violence-seeking or pleasure-seeking behaviors later in life. -- Physically affectionate human societies are highly unlikely to be physically violent. -- ...deprivation of body pleasure throughout life—but particularly during the formative periods of infancy, childhood, and adolescence—are very closely related to the amount of warfare and interpersonal violence. -- If violence is high, pleasure is low, and conversely, if pleasure is high, violence is low. -- If we accept the theory that the lack of sufficient somatosensory pleasure is a principal cause of violence, we can work toward promoting pleasure and encouraging affectionate interpersonal relationships as a means of combatting aggression.'

'...the human brain at birth is not fully developed. The abilities a person's brain develops depend on experiences in the first three years of life. Studies on abandoned and severely mistreated Romanian children revealed striking lesions in certain areas of the brain and marked emotional and cognitive insufficiencies in later life. According to very recent neurobiological findings, repeated traumatization leads to an increased release of stress hormones that attack the sensitive tissue of the brain and destroy existing neurons. Other studies of mistreated children have revealed that the areas of the brain responsible for the "management" of emotions are 20 to 30 percent smaller than in normal persons. In the absence of positive factors, affection and helping witnesses, the only course open to the mistreated individual is the disavowal of personal suffering and the idealization of cruelty with all its devastating after-effects.'

'One of the most difficult – and essential – challenges faced by libertarians is the constant need to point out “the gun in the room.” We hear nonstop nonsense about the “social good,” the “redistribution of income,” the “education of children” and so on – endless attempts to bury the naked barrel of the state in a mountain of syrupy metaphors. In more than 20 years of debating these issues, though, I’ve never met a single soul who wants to either shoot me himself or have someone else shoot me. I take enormous solace in this fact, because it explains exactly why these euphemisms are so essential to the maintenance and increase of state power. The reason that euphemisms are constantly used to obscure “the gun in the room” is the simple fact that people don’t like violence very much. Most people will do almost anything to avoid a violent situation. Just keep pointing out the gun in the room, over and over, until the world finally starts awake and drops it in horror and loathing.'

'The idea of "humanitarian intervention" which is behind the decision to attack in Libya is one of the central beliefs of our age. It divides people. Some see it as a noble, disinterested use of Western power. Others see it as a smokescreen for a latter-day liberal imperialism. I want to tell the story of how this idea originated and how it has grown up to possess the minds of a generation of liberal men and women in Europe and America. It is the story of a generation who became disenchanted with traditional power politics. They thought they could leap over the old corrupt structures of power and connect directly with the innocent victims of war around the world. -- Out of Srebrenica came a strange new hybrid – a humanitarian militarism. And in the 1990s it rose up to capture the imagination of a generation on the left in Europe. It even had French philosophers behind it. But ... they had no critical framework by which to judge the "victims" they were helping.'

'Most of us were mistreated as children and had to learn to deny this fact at a very early stage in order to survive. We were forced to believe that we were humiliated and tormented "for our own good," that the beatings we received did not hurt and were harmless, that such treatment served to protect the community (as otherwise we would have turned into dangerous monsters). ...most people are not prepared to question and abandon preconceptions of this kind. Instead they chant this perverse litany: "My parents did their best to bring me up properly, I was a difficult child, and I needed strict discipline." Obviously, people who have been brought up to believe this cannot conceivably feel indignation about cruelty to children. Since their own childhood, they have been dissociated from their true feelings, from the pain caused by humiliation and torment. To feel their indignation they would need to get back in touch with that childhood pain. And who will want to do that?'

'...a tyrant will abuse his power in a destructive way as long as he either encounters no resistance at all or is able to nip that resistance in the bud. ...the unconscious aim concealed behind all his conscious activities, remains the same: to use his power to blot out the humiliations inflicted on him in childhood and denied by him ever since. But this aim can never be achieved. The past cannot be expunged, nor can one come to terms with it as long as one denies the suffering it involved. As a rule, beaten, tormented, and humiliated children who have never received support from a helping witness later develop a high degree of tolerance for the cruelties inflicted by parent figures and a striking indifference to the sufferings borne by children exposed to cruel treatment. The last thing they wish to be told is that they themselves once belonged to the same group. Indifference is a way of preserving them from opening their eyes to reality. In this way they become advocates of evil...'

'We loved our parents, so we believed them when they told us it was for our own good. Most of us still believe it and go around asserting that one cannot bring up children without slaps and smacks - in other words, without resorting to humiliation. And then there is no way out of the vicious circle of violence and denial of the humiliation inflicted on them. The need for revenge, reprisal, punishment lives on within them. The rage suppressed in childhood is transformed into murderous hate. Religious and ethnic groups are only too willing to provide the ideologies justifying the cultivation and projection of that hate. Humiliation is a poison that is difficult to exterminate because it is used for extermination and the production of new humiliation that fuels the proliferation of violence and masks the underlying problems. To get out of this vicious circle we must face up to our own truth. We WERE humiliated children, we WERE the victims of our parents' ignorance, of their histories...'

'Children who are given love, respect, understanding, kindness, and warmth will naturally develop different characteristics from those who experience neglect, contempt, violence or abuse, and never have anyone they can turn to for kindness and affection. Such absence of trust and love is a common denominator in the formative years of all the dictators I have studied. The result is that these children will tend to glorify the violence inflicted upon them and later to take advantage of every possible opportunity to exercise such violence... Children learn by imitation. Their bodies do not learn what we try to instill in them by words but what they have experienced physically. Battered, injured children will learn to batter and injure others; sheltered, respected children will learn to respect and protect those weaker than themselves. Children have nothing else to go on but their own experiences. Evil exists. But it is not something that some people are born with.'

'The horrors of terrorist violence are something we can all watch on our television screens; the horrors in which children grow up are very rarely shown in the media. Thus, most people are not informed about the main source of hatred. They speculate about political, religious, economic or cultural reasons but the speculations are turning in darkness because the true reason must remain obscured: the suppression and subsequent denial of early rage that often ends up in hatred with an endless number of ideologies. Hatred is hatred and rage is rage, all over the world and at any time the same... They are always the fruits of very strong emotions, reactions to injuries to their dignity endured in childhood, normal reactions of the body that were not allowed to express themselves in a safe way. Nobody comes to the world with the wish to destroy. Every newborn, independently from the culture, religion or ethnic origins needs to love, be loved, protected, and respected.'

'...the only thing beaten children learn is to fear their parents, not to drive carefully or stay out of trouble. They will also feel guilty and learn to play down their own pain. Being subjected to physical attacks they are defenseless to fend off merely instills in children a "gut" conviction that they obviously merit neither protection nor respect. This false message is then stored in the children's bodies as information and will influence their view of the world and their later attitude toward their own children. Such children will be unable to defend their right to human dignity, unable to recognize physical pain as a danger signal and act accordingly. Even their immune system may be affected. In the absence of other persons to model their behavior on -- enlightened or knowing witnesses -- these children will see the language of violence and hypocrisy as the only really effective means of communication.'

"Once you've got enough cattle dependent on the farmer, you can't get rid of the farm. It is not the farmer who attacks me for talking about freedom, it's all my fellow livestock who attack me. Once you get enough people dependent on the government, anyone who starts talking about freedom gets set upon..."

"I refuse to create a set of standards for women that is less than would apply to men. Because that would be to say that men have the strength to achieve virtue but women do not. And women do. But the degree to which we excuse women's vices and violence and corruption and control and abuse and verbal attacks – the degree to which we excuse that is the degree to which we damn women; it is the degree to which we say: you are beyond help; you cannot be helped; you poor women, you don't know what you're doing, you're not strong enough to be moral so we have to make up all these excuses for you because we think you're just that pathetic. Well, I don't think women are pathetic. I think women are incredibly strong; I think men are incredibly strong. I think that when you lower standards for people, you debilitate them, you weaken them, you destroy their moral fibre, you undermine their upright natures. So I won't accept any lower standards for women because that is the worst cruelty of all."

"I think it is something so respectful of women to say that they are subject to the same moral laws as men. If we excuse women from the just and universal application of moral laws, are we not then saying that they are a different and weaker species, a different and weaker gender? If we excuse female violence by portraying them in the role of victims – then we insult ALL women; we insult all women who ARE moral. So we really do have to avoid this notion that women are the gentler sex, and the weaker sex, and they need to be protected, and they need to be saved from themselves, and they need to be excused, and they need to be managed. Women DO NOT need to be managed. Women are subject to all the same moral laws as men, and they are EQUALLY as powerful a moral agent as men. Whatever men are capable of morally, whatever men are responsible for morally – women are capable of morally and responsible for morally."

Gisted/Quoted -- The problem with the idea that men are defective and that women are just better is the basic issue that nobody talks about: that men are raised by women. Women give birth to men; women raise men; and then if men turn out bad, all you get from feminists as an explanation is propaganda about "the patriarchy". There is no greater power disparity – there is no greater victimization – than that which is possible between a mother and a child. Power disparities in society are no more prevalent than the relationship between the mother and the child. That is something which is absolutely unspoken of in society. There is no possibility for society as a whole to look at female violence directly and straight on in the face. Men are raised by women and it's not just women in the home, it's women in the daycares, women in the primary schools. If you want to get to the root of violence and corruption in society, you've got to look at the mothers.'

'It's hard to get upset with people who are so deluded...' -- "Politics is violence. Government is force. 'Laws' are violence. Prison is coercion. The police kidnap and imprison. National debts are theft from the unborn. Taxes are theft. Tariffs, regulations are all the initiation of force. The State is a monopoly agency for the initiation of force in a geographical area. The State is the very definition of violence. Government is exactly what people don't want to do because they have to be forced. Whatever someone is doing when they have a gun to their head, is exactly what they don't want to do."

'You think the moral nature of theft, murder, slavery, assault, and kidnapping change dependent upon the size of the group that authorizes these actions.'

'The act of having a child is, "the most forbidden act of self-realization, the ultimate and least pardonable offense," and brings with it inevitable fears of maternal retribution for one's success and individuation. Mothers in antiquity hallucinated female demons were actually grandmother alters in the mothers' heads, so jealous of their having babies that they sucked out their blood and otherwise murdered them. All early societies invented sacrificial rituals wherein babies were tortured and killed to honor maternal goddesses ... vowing that, "although Mommy wants to kill me for having sex and making a baby, if I kill the baby instead [usually the first-born was sacrificed], I can then go on having sex and other babies with less fear of retribution." Child sacrifice was the foundation of all great religions, depicted in myths as absolutely necessary to save the world from "chaos," that is, from terrible inner annihilation anxiety as punishment for success.'

'#Strong Phase: The leader is portrayed as grandiose, phallic and invincible, able to ... contain the unconscious anxieties of the nation; #Collapse Phase; #Upheaval Phase: The leader begins the upheaval phase pictured as a wimp, overwhelmed by poisonous forces, impotent to ward off disaster... Anti-children crusades multiply, attacking people's projected inner child for being spoiled, sinful, greedy and out of control. When the growth panic is at a peak, "poison alerts" are declared and fears of maternal abandonment and wishes for maternal engulfment and rebirth proliferate. Rational national progress seems to be unimportant, group-delusions and group-trance projects are at a peak, and action becomes irresistible as the nation searches for some magical restoration of potency. This restoration, rebirth or revitalization wish turns into a group ritual that at times can take one or more of three forms: (1) Regicidal Solution, (2) Martial Solution, (3) Internal Sacrifice Solution'

'...the leader is less a figure of authority than he is a delegate, someone who "takes the blame" for us. As poison container for our dissociated social alter, the leader is expected to absorb our violent feelings without collapsing. Many societies actually designate "filth men" to help the leader with this task, relatives who exchange blood with him so they can "intercept" the poisonous feelings of the people directed at him. In modern nations, cabinet members are our "filth men," and are sacrificed when the leader is under attack. This leadership task of being the delegate of irrational desires of the people makes leaders experts in masochism, rather than sadism, as traditional power theory requires. Only by carefully following our unconscious commands are leaders followed. We might follow them into war and lay down our lives to combat an enemy they alone designated, but the moment they try to ignore the group-fantasy and avoid our hidden commands, people simply do not hear them.'

'The central fantasy function of the leader of any group, small or large, is to defend against repetitions of early trauma and abandonment, along with handling wishes for merging with the terrifying mother. The group is a mouth ...essentially female and maternal... One of the most active, or rather paralyzing, unconscious group representations is that of a Hydra: the group is felt to be a single body with a dozen arms at the ends of which are heads and mouths... ready to devour one another if they are not satisfied. When the leader is imagined to be strong, he can successfully defend against the group's engulfment fears; when the leader appears to weaken, all growth is dangerous, and desires for merging and fears of maternal engulfment increase, so the leader must somehow act to defend against the growth panic. ...the group leader is imagined to have mastered the group-as-mother and thus to have gained some of her [power] for himself. This makes him a threat as well as a protector...'

'Our social alters contain early levels of our unbearable hurts ("Why didn't mommy want me?" "Why did daddy hit me?"), restaged as fairy tales ("Are there witches?" "Will the monster kill me?") and then as social questions ("Shall we take children away from teenage mothers?" "Is Saddam Hussein a new Hitler who will blow up the world?"). The adaptive function of social alters is that they allow people to go about their daily business without being overwhelmed by traumatic memories... By dissociating early persecutors into our social alters and then identifying with these persecutors in our social lives, human beings manage to live more sane daily lives, while warding off unseen but felt dangers by "feeding" victims of society to terrifying religious, political and economic divinities. So important to our sanity is the social alter that when a poison container for a group-fantasy is removed, tremendous anxiety is aroused that has to be defended against by creating a replacement.'

'It was useless to point out to people who are dissociated and in a social trance that children or other poison containers were helpless human beings who were the victims of their actions. The children were full of our projections; they weren't real to us. Ultimately our social alters merge with the perpetrator of early traumas. In group-fantasy, we merge with the aggressor in order to avoid feeling helpless and then inflict damage upon child-scapegoats under the guise of "saving children." We see this merging with the perpetrator in every scapegoating group-fantasy. When anti-Semites persecute Jews, they are merged with the abusing parent and punishing the abused child. Jews must be persecuted... Adult events, political and economic history, usually provide only proximate causes of scapegoating group-fantasies; their ultimate cause lies in earlier traumatic events.'

'If helpless children of the poor were seen as bad babies, then obviously they were all scapegoats who were "poison containers" needed by the nation to feel early memories of hunger and despair at being unloved and abused. Without poison containers, we would have to feel these feelings ourselves. The childhood sources for Gingrich's political program are so overt they should be obvious to all, yet because we are in a social trance when we hear him we collude to deny them. The media widely reported, for instance, that Gingrich was a child of a teenage mother, but carefully didn't connect it with his speeches on how teenage mothers should be punished... The traumatic events of his infancy had to be restaged and millions of children made to feel his despair because in his social alter the child feels responsible for his or her own abuse and neglect, and so a scapegoat for the child self must be punished. As always in politics, the social alter's primary identification is with the abuser.'

'Social scientists have been puzzled by Milgram's experiments, wondering why people were so easily talked into inflicting pain so gratuitously. The real explanation is that, by joining a group – the "university experiment" – they switched into their social alters and merged with their own sadistic internalized persecutor, which was quite willing to take responsibility for ordering pain inflicted upon others. Their "struggle with themselves" over whether to obey was really a struggle between their social alters and their main selves. The crucial element was the existence of the group-as-terrifying-parent, the all-powerful university. Those who continue to replicate Milgram's experiments and who are still puzzled as to why "the most banal and superficial of rationales is enough to produce destructive behavior in human beings" simply underestimate the amount of trauma most people have experienced and the effectiveness of the social trance in allowing them to restage these hurts.'

'To say a person is estopped from making certain claims means that ... he will not be heard to make a statement which is flatly inconsistent with his earlier behaviour (and which another relied upon). Principled application of the estoppel principle would result in a free society. For all coercive crimes could be: punished (if not by the state, then at least by victims or their agents or defenders); and all non-coercive "crimes" could not be enforced. Since an arguer is estopped from denying the validity of estoppel in general, he must accept its validity—and he must also accept the validity of the results of its application. [This] framework establishes the validity of the libertarian nonaggression principle, which has been shown by many others to justify a libertarian or at least a minimalist or night-watchman state. Thus, everyone "must" accept the validity of the free society; to urge otherwise is to argue for inconsistency, and to be inconsistent, and to necessarily be wrong.'

'A young person (boys mostly) playing these games regularly is going to have a hard (or harder) time in our view generating an internal critique of his country's use of violence. The individual may be entirely peaceable, but the part of his mind that might be receptive to alternative perspectives regarding the state's larger use of formalized violence has been "controlled" by his avid use of war gaming. -- It is an intensive culture, with its own lingo, superstars and strategies; it is a full culture built indisputably around daily electronic mayhem. It may not encourage violent thinking, but it certainly suggests that violence can provide solutions. -- The only solution to such mind control is a wider frame of reference, such as that which the Internet can provide. Since these young people are often playing these games online, one would hope that they might gradually acquire a wider frame of reference via the many alternative points of view that the Internet offers them...'

'Yeah, it might not actually be the fault of the kids...' -- How many fingers, Winston?

'Why would you vote for people who are selling your kids off limb by limb?'

Readings of the research: 'We now are beginning to understand the strong, sometimes long-lasting, effects siblings have one another's emotional development as adults.' -- "This is the level of violence children grow up with and to me it's not at all surprising then that when we grow up we think of using the state to solve problems, we think of violence to solve problems – because that's what we've lived, that's what we've experienced – and until we can start to solve this problem there's no point in trying to fix these social problems – because they arise from the experiences of our families. The state is an effect of the family. And that's why we have to fix our own personal relationships before we can even imagine fixing the state. Once we've fixed our own personal relationships, we won't need to fix the state because it will be gone."

"You can't have any more empathy and love for yourself than you can have for the weakest around you." -- "Everyone is always talking about their family when they're talking about politics." -- "The reason that you would need to be addicted to the pathetic and destructive rush that comes from literally stealing candy from the hands of babes is that you have learned from somewhere that power is composed of two things: #1. An ugly grab and #2. A triumphant moralizing." -- "Whenever you are cruel to those around you, you raise a need for a state in their mind especially when they're helpless." -- "The primary reason for sadism is that it is an attempt to overpower and master feelings of intense helplessness... If you will not accept those feelings of helplessness and agony of being brutalized by power, then you must normalize the brutalization of that power: you project your own helplessness onto other people and then you torture it because the only other possibility is that you feel it."

'"War is the mother of all things." – Heraclitus -- MP3 readings of 'The Origins of War in Child Abuse' and "If I Blow Myself Up and Become a Martyr, I'll Finally Be Loved" -- SM: 'Reading psychohistory can be harrowing, depressing and emotionally difficult to process. The case seems clear that children are the most abused, neglected, assaulted, raped and murdered 'minority' in history - and also that the progress of our species seems to be synonymous with progress in parenting. I strongly urge you to have a listen to these articles, and also to visit the psychohistory website to learn more about this radical and powerful approach to understanding history, and the current world.' -- The Institute for Psychohistory: http://psychohistory.com

'Those who are murdered in full view murder in full view.' -- "The evasion of these crimes against children is why people cannot see that taxation is force, why people cannot see that government is violence. What starts as the personal becomes the social."

'Why people become violent.' -- "We are not born violent; we are not born war-like; we are not born aggressive; the mind and the emotional content of the brain are *created*."

'An interview with Dr. Felitti, the director of the Adverse Childhood Experiences project. The ACE Study is an ongoing collaboration between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente.'

‘Here is how we heal the world. A brief introduction to the 5 part series “The Bomb in the Brain”' http://www.fdrurl.com/bib

'Clearly the fact that some people are sensitive to the suffering of others proves that the destructive urge is not a universal aspect of human nature. So why do some tend to solve their problems by violence while others don't? After studying the matter for years, it seems clear to me that information about abuse inflicted during childhood is recorded in our body cells as a sort of memory, linked to repressed anxiety. If, lacking the aid of an enlightened witness, these memories fail to break through to consciousness, they often compel the person to violent acts that reproduce the abuse suffered in childhood, which was repressed in order to survive. The aim is to avoid the fear of powerlessness before a cruel adult. This fear can be eluded momentarily by creating situations in which one plays the active role, the role of the powerful, towards a powerless person. ...the offense is ceaselessly repeated. A steady stream of new victims must be found...'

'The huge advantage of addressing human problems in the individual form is beyond comprehension. The most obvious boon of this altered way of coping with human suffering is the elimination of violence. It’s true even today that the extent to which people address their emotional experience internally, instead of inflicting it together, socially upon some issue or cause, measures the extent to which violence has already been partly defeated. Eventually we will realize that studying the self as an ecosystem, which contains both beneficial as well as contradictory parts, is the most important kind of education we will ever undertake or accomplish. This self-learning will no longer have the sting that “illness” attaches to it; thus it will no longer be called “psychotherapy”. Instead it will become the core of all education, funding every other kind of exploration with the wisdom of self-knowledge.'

'We humans are uniquely fortunate that ambivalence pervades everything we experience, think, feel and intuit, or we wouldn’t have gotten as far as we have. Within the scientific realm dealing with tangible objects, we have become very accustomed and skilled at managing and using contradictory possibilities and options. In fact that’s how science has progressed. It’s the art of putting things together that previously weren’t supposed to be married, and taking apart things that were supposed to remain together. But when it comes to dealing with ambiguity in the intangibles of human life—we suddenly lose it! We stumble into ambiguity-illiteracy. We try to make reality caveman-simple, of which good and evil is the best example; in making the most important decisions of life we have only two options instead of a thousand or more. Violence is one of the principle outcomes of simple-mindedness. Ambivalence is the key skill necessary for the creative management of multilayered comprehension.'

Gisted 2/2 -- It is the truth-telling slave who extends the universalization of ethics to the masters – and thus exposing them as morally evil – who is the greatest threat to every other slave because of their past horror and humiliation of having been enslaved to evil through their desire to be good, of having that which is the best of you turned into service of that which is the worst in humanity: lust for power, domination, theft, murder, war, debt. They react with the hair-trigger psychological defenses called slave-extending-morality-to-masters-will-get-us-all-killed! People can't easily process the universalization of morality, so all they can do is get mad at it. They have to create exceptions to universal morality because that's what we've all been programmed to do throughout the violence of history. So how do we change this? We have to reveal the negative consequences for immoral actions. We have to replace statism with voluntaryism. WE have to replace violence with ostracism.

Gisted -- "Culture is the exact opposite of what is real and what is true." Because of its desire for virtue, the true-self is corrupted into obedience by the miming of the eating of the invisible apple, and the reward that's given to this shattered true-self is a substitute false-self which is what we call culture. Culture is always a lie. And the big lie is always believed more than the little lie. Once you can get somebody to place their identity in a collective falsehood, you've got them for life. There's no way back to your true-self once your self-aggrandizing false-self is the substitute source of your self-esteem. There's a famous line from Hanns Johst's play Schlageter: ‘When I hear "culture,” I release the safety catch on my gun!’ That line resonates because it's true. When you can get people to believe false things and to obey bullies, then they are ready to participate in the brutality of the collective and to be a soldier of evil in the world.

'...how the myth of redemptive violence structures the standard comic or cartoon: An indestructible good guy is unalterably opposed to an irreformable and equally indestructible bad guy. Nothing can kill the good guy... Nothing finally destroys the bad guy or prevents his reappearance... Children identify with the good guy so that they can think of themselves as good. This enables them to project out onto the bad guy their own repressed anger, violence, rebelliousness or lust, and then vicariously enjoy their own evil by watching the bad guy initially prevail. (This segment of the show actually consumes all but the closing minutes, allowing ample time for indulging the shadow side of the self.) When the good guy finally wins, viewers are then able to reassert control over their own inner tendencies, repress them, and reestablish a sense of goodness. Salvation is guaranteed through identification with the hero ...[with whom] one's personal well-being is tied inextricably...'

'I argue that video games rob violence of its power by making it lightweight... The killing by the protagonist of those without identity devalues human life in the work, and thereby robs the violence of meaning... And so a metric for games comes to mind: violence performed by the player in a video game is only legitimate if the victim is a unique and specific individual. If every character the player interacts with is a unique and specific individual, then any act of violence committed by the player is invested with some amount of meaning: individuals have families, homes, jobs, friends, and most importantly, relationships with other characters in the game. The player's act spiders out from the individual to those that surround them, even if that social web is for the most part only implied. There are no more broad swaths of generic violence, then; there are only discrete acts of specific violence, each of which has the potential to matter.' -- A psychopath wants to extend his range

'If you’re One of Those SPECIAL People with BRAINS not just education who is not LIVING UP to your POTENTIAL through No Fault of Your Own, you can CHANGE YOUR LUCK. Send in this ad and receive a FREE GIFT for taking this FREE test' -- Test: http://youtu.be/WKwg5nZ5mu0

'What needs to change to save the world' -- "Don't hit. Don't hurt. Don't steal."

'The pathologies of late empires...' -- "There's a reason that you have to invent the government to make all this stuff work – you have to invent the government to make all this stuff work because people wouldn't buy it without the government! You have to invent God if you're a priest to tell people what to do because nobody's going to obey you, you're just some guy. You have to invent governments to justify theft because so very few people want to steal directly. The important question to ask is, what's going to happen when this ponzi scheme called government stops 'working'?" [Are people going to be able to admit that] what has failed is coercion, is government, is using violence to achieve your ends? The price we pay for fantasy is destruction. And we will continue to pay that price until we understand the mechanics of what governments do, which is rape and pillage the average person for the profit of the elite."

'Increasingly, we believe the high-water mark of the Anglo-American axis came in 2007. History will record, as with Rome, that this first decade of the 2000s marked a gradually shifting away from one of the bloodiest annals of human history. The Anglo-American axis in the 20th century helped sponsor two world wars, while its banking elite (initially anyway) supported three of the most bloodthirsty regimes this poor globe has ever seen: The Soviet Union, Hitler's Germany and Mao's China. Of course this is not the way well-intentioned Europeans – or Americans or Britains – see the 20th century, nonetheless it is unfortunately true in our view – and can be borne out with a brief Internet search of reputable documents. In the name of global governance, the Anglo-American power elite has wreaked much havoc on the world and continues to wreak it today. Violence is the melancholy currency of Western powers-that-be.'

'How false concepts obscure real violence.' -- "Like all [2+2=5], she wants to divide violence into 'good violence' and 'bad violence'."

'Testimony from media activist Lacy MacAuley after being snatched by an unmarked van at the Toronto G20.'

"Once you get that self-bullying doesn't work, you know that violence doesn't work, you know that to your very core." -- Stefan Molyneux

'...this public versus private purpose is a ruse. Virtually every benefit to be obtained by way of forking out our wealth is a private benefit, something that serves the interest of some human individual in a society – maybe many of them, sometimes many of them all at once, but all are private individuals and that includes Marx and Galbraith and all their pals who are so eager to confiscate everyone else's resources for purposes they deem to be important. If they think these are important purposes, they ought to get up a collection and convince their fellows to part with what is needed to obtain them. But it is so much simpler to send out the police to collect these funds rather than to raise them by means of convincing us of the worth of these projects. When this isn't accepted much by the citizenry, the statists are deeply miffed.' -- Now listen, Statie. Mommy and Daddy really don't need to take care of you now that you're all grown up, OK? *wipes the tears from Statie's eyes* :,-(

I think violence is bad.

'The long term effects of the First World War - the fall of the Free West, and the darkening skies of tyranny...' -- The Killbot Class

'What brought the guns to bear on millions of lost souls...' -- We don't need no education; We don’t need no thought control. Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!

'Why and when the free West died... The roots of the century of genocide.' -- Thesis: Gods and the priestly class were invented by the aging alpha male to maintain political power as his physical strength declined.

"Violence is like any drug." -- What's going to happen when it stops 'working'?

'In free and civilized societies self-regarding misconduct may not be made into crimes. The most famous political philosopher associated with America's political tradition, the English political economist John Stuart Mill, insisted that only when someone engages in conduct that's harmful to other people can he or she be interfered with by the police. That is indeed the original meaning of liberalism – people are to be treated as free individuals unless they aggress on other people. ...the likes of Charles Krauthammer are just as willing to take over people's lives and rule it for them regarding their use of drugs as the likes of Keynesian economist Paul Krugman do when it comes to people's economic activities. Which confirms just how widespread the impulse is to rule other people, both from the Right and the Left. Neither shows much confidence in human beings – what is odd is that they do show confidence in the most dangerous human beings, governments, who hold guns in their hands.'

"Do you support the use of violence against me? -- This is the true nature of heroism. This is the heroism that you can achieve now, today, this very moment. All moral souls oppose evil. And there is only one fundamental way to fight evil: expose it. -- Do you support the use of violence against me?"

'Does Taibbi really believe that the US government retains some sort of collective moral purity that is absent on Wall Street? Go on YouTube and watch videos of American civil and military authorities busting down doors and shooting family mutts while in search of dollar bags of marijuana. Read about additional taxes for Americans and how the IRS is going to be equipped with shotguns, apparently to help with collections. Read about how Homeland Security is targeting American military veterans as potential terrorists, and those who participate in Tea Party protests, too. Try to understand the ramifications and results of America's serial wars in the Mideast – the radiation poisoning from depleted-uranium weapons and the endless civilian killings. We understand that Goldman is a "great vampire squid" but what has the US government become? Taibbi defines civilization as "a collective decision by all of us not to screw each other over even when we can." What mirror is he looking in?'

'The key word here is mercantilism. More than almost any other firm, Goldman sits at the intersection between government and private industry in America. That's how it makes its money. By using and abusing the laws of the land to line its own pockets. Matt Taibbi, who is a very talented journalist and writer, seems only to understand that government should act as a "boot stamping on the face of Goldman Sachs – forever." (Apologies to George Orwell.) One of the problems from our point of view is that even if one grants that government can find the right face to stamp, there is no guarantee that ten years from now government will not be stamping on YOUR face. You may derive a great deal of satisfaction from using the regulatory levers of government to pry triumphant justice – dripping with gore – from the chest cavity of Goldman Sachs, but maybe (just maybe) you are fooling yourself or setting yourself, your family and your country up for an abusive situation.'

'The evolution toward a civilization increasingly dominated by technology and the power structure serving technology, the manifesto argues, cannot be reversed on its own, because "technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom," and because "while technological progress AS A WHOLE continually narrows our sphere of freedom, each new technical advance CONSIDERED BY ITSELF appears to be desirable." Because human beings must conform to the machine it has given rise to a social infrastructure dedicated to modifying behavior. -- From the humanists we learned that science threatens civilization. From the scientists we learned that science cannot be stopped. Taken together, they implied that there was no hope. Gen Ed had created at Harvard a culture of despair. This culture was not confined to Harvard—it was part of a more generalized phenomenon among intellectuals all over the Western world. [I]deologically inspired violence has become increasingly commonplace...'

'It's true. But it's not news. The government is a gang that murders. The government is the criminal gang that won. It launders money through central banking, extorts through taxation, and sells your children through debt. The use of violence to rule humans is immoral to the core. The initiation of force will never solve any social problems. You already know this.'

'In his book For a New Liberty, Rothbard says "if you wish to know how libertarians regard the State and any of its acts, simply think of the State as a criminal band, and all of the libertarian attitudes will logically fall into place" (p. 57). The reason Rothbard sees the state as a criminal band is simple: "[t]he right to self-ownership asserts the absolute right of each man, by virtue of his (or her) being a human being, to 'own' his or her own body; that is, to control that body free of coercive interference" (For a New Liberty pp. 33–4). Thus, for Rothbard, no one may claim the right to aggress against the property, especially the body, of another person. It is that simple. -- The Rothbardian perspective is distinctive because he refuses to interpret the actions of states as belonging to a special class of human action. Rothbard holds all people to the same standard of conduct, whereas others give the actions of states special moral considerations.'

'Searches have been directed against all kinds of people, including cheating spouses, corrupt government officials, amateur pornography makers, Chinese citizens who are perceived as unpatriotic, journalists who urge a moderate stance on Tibet and rich people who try to game the Chinese system. Human-flesh searches highlight what people are willing to fight for: the political issues, polarizing events and contested moral standards that are the fault lines of contemporary China.' -- InternetToughGuy: “Kill him." -- 'The human-flesh search engine can also serve as a safety valve in a society with ever mounting pressures on the government. “You can’t stop the anger, can’t make everyone shut up, can’t stop the Internet, so you try and channel it as best you can. You try and manage it, kind of like a waterworks hydroelectric project,” MacKinnon explained. “It’s a great way to divert the qi, the anger, to places where it’s the least damaging to the central government’s legitimacy.”'

But surely not! Surely no "law-abiding" member of the public would accept they are entitled to steal the property of others! Would they? -- 'Well, let's see: Suppose a person makes the judicious insight that some people don't have as much money as other people, and it would be nice if they had more money than they do. To remedy this problem they propose that a group of kind-hearted benefactors create an agency whose job is to forcibly take other people's money without their permission (i.e., steal it), and give some of it to those they deem to be "in need." The group would use the rest of the funds to stir up the recipients' sense of entitlement to this stolen money, fund propaganda that tells the world what a great job their agency is doing, and gradually build a nice, profitable little business empire for the staff in charge, who make out like bandits — earning far beyond what they could in other jobs, all the while being lauded for their "public service."'

'Too many people are tempted by the promise of effortless living, of getting all their problems solved at the point of a gun turned on others who will be coerced to come up with the solutions. This is such a sweet notion to those who are lazy, who feel left out, or who believe that they are entitled to everything all those who are better off already have going for them... I am not sure what kind of mental acrobatics manages to allow people to live with themselves in peace who perpetrate such fraud. I do know of one prominent one, namely, that those who want to wield control over others believe they are on the side of goodness, virtue and justice. Making people "good" is their goal, they proclaim. Yet this just cannot be since people are only good, morally and ethically, if they choose to be. Otherwise they at most simply behave well, like robots or puppets.'

'Even if you are anti-tax, Joe Stack was wrong in every conceivable way – here's why.' -- "There is this fundamental misconception of what a government is and what a government is for."

'Dr Hibbing feels it may help explain why it is so hard to change someone's mind in a political debate. Different people, he said, started from a different psychological point. "You have people who are experiencing the world, who are experiencing threat, differently. "It's just that we have these very different physiological orientations. We're not sure where they came from, they may be genetic, they may be something from ***childhood***; we do know, though, that they run deep because it's a reflex, it's not something you can change tomorrow, the depth of that may be something of an asset in figuring out why people are so stubborn in their political beliefs."'

'...the degree to which individuals are physiologically responsive to threat appears to indicate the degree to which they advocate policies that protect the existing social structure from both external (outgroup) and internal (norm-violator) threats.' -- (See tagged: 'nearfar' comment: "3 types of politics (conservatism [very near/reactionary], libertarianism [near/rational], socialism [far/blinkered/stockholm-syndromed/numb])")

'... what’s puzzling about Haneke’s popularity amongst those who take their films nearly as seriously as they take themselves is that his films are so desolating. Almost every review of Haneke’s work gushes with the same adjectives: disturbing, disquieting, discomfiting. Haneke’s films don’t please, they unsettle. In Haneke’s films, human society is sunken, rank, a place where mass culture is dumb, where people, turned on and tuned off by TV, are cruel and complacent, and where families will, for time immemorial, fuck you up. Socialisation here is virtually synonymous with corruption. His concern seems to be with a society that breeds cruelty.' -- Good concern.

'So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.' -- George Orwell