Saturday, October 17, 2015

Mental Firewalls

Much of your worldview is shaped not by reason or experience on the subject, but by the inculcation of fear through the application of systematic messages and subtle abuse such as humiliation.  Unfortunately many of our beliefs regarding religion and politics are formed this way.  This is a misuse of this function of your mind which is designed to protect you from traumatic events.  In fact the symptoms of post traumatic stress are caused by this same mechanism in your mind.  When a stimuli similar to the trauma is encountered, the mind starts to attempt to protect itself from the trauma by triggering the neural pathways created from the original trauma.

This technique actually creates biological neural pathways in your brain, actual physical alignments of your neurons that "fire" a certain way upon encountering the stimuli a they were formed around.  I call them mental firewalls.  So your response is more like a mechanical movement than it is a rational reflection.  Like Pavlov's dog who could be stimulated to drool upon the ringing of a bell, it was a biological mechanical reaction, not the response to a rational conclusion.

So it shouldn't be surprising that if you disrupt the ability for these established neural pathways to fire in response to stimuli, that you'd free the person's mind to consider what they actually THINK about the stimuli.  The physical nature of these pathways is such that they can be disrupted with electromagnets, it can also be done with drugs.

Here is an example of scientist using electromagnets to accomplish bypassing the minds mental firewalls: https://www.rt.com/uk/318881-magnets-brain-immigration-religion/ 

If you don't have an electromagnet or drugs you can also use words.  If you can begin a thought process in the person's mind using words that do NOT trigger the "firewall" of preconditioned neural pathways, and then suddenly link by analogy or metaphor that idea to an idea that does trigger the stimuli, then you create a kind of conflict or paradox, a cognitive dissonance that the mind will work to resolve ultimately "rewiring" the neural pathway that make up the firewall.

For instance, if I show you a suffering child, and then I show you the child healed and happy, I've safely entered your mind without triggering your firewalls (or at least without triggering the firewalls I'm attacking).  Then I tell you that the child was healed with marijuana.  Since marijuana is a word that triggers an inculcated fear response (a firewall word), the thought of the healed child conflicts with the irrational fear of marijuana, and eventually weakens or rewrites the neural pathways associated with that irrational fear.

If you consider that in our culture religion, education, and politics are highly standardized and interrelated you can see that there are many people operating almost exclusively out of paradigms built upon these firewalls.  Almost like zombies in that they are not living a life based on beliefs they have reasoned through and come to own, but are simply responding to stimuli that either trigger a pre-programmed mental firewall or not.  This creates a pseudo objective reality that can be controlled through propaganda.  With this in mind you also see the importance of spreading ideas that tear down these firewalls and force people to consider reality with their own minds.

Wednesday, October 7, 2015

RISE UP AMERICA KILL ISLAM

Today I was stopped at a railway crossing waiting on a train.  I'm looking at all the cars on the train and trying to guess what's in them, reading the graffiti, etc. Then I saw something that shocked me, and upon reflection, greatly concerned me.  Some very crude graffiti (not like the stuff that is actually very artistic) ignorantly screamed in big red letters: "RISE UP AMERICA KILL ISLAM".  I was too slow with my camera to take a picture, for a few seconds I just sat and stared as it went by.  It was shocking because of what it said and the grotesque and uncreative way in which it was presented but also because of how it stood out, like a sore, from the other messages and art painted on the train's cars.  Then I began reflecting on it. 





The other graffiti on the train was colorful and bold, artistically done and although I don't know what it communicated, it intrigued me, it even captured my imagination a bit to ponder its meaning.  It was the art of a sub-culture that I'm not familiar with, that seems to have its own stories and even language.  Where did it come from?  Who wrote it? How far away is it from the person who painted it?  What were they like?  What was their purpose in painting it?  Maybe it's gang signs, or simply eccentric street artists, or an expressive teenager in love.  It was definitely, and almost comfortingly different.  It wasn't a corporate brand, or a cliche phrase, it was its own thing.  To me, that's kind of cool.

Yes, it was vandalism, and it seemed irrational, but it was nearly, if not completely harmless,  and maybe even the contributor of some beauty into the otherwise dull view of a passing train.  If there is to be crime, it seems to me, then this is what we want:  Artistically gifted vandals expressing their irrationality in ugly places and making those places a little prettier as a result of their crime.

But the other, it was just more of the parroted drivel of the demagogues on television.  I knew exactly where it came from.  It was born of ignorance and bigotry, there was no need to be curious as to the personal insight of the author.  It was just copy and paint hate.  What personal connection or interaction could the vandal who painted that obscene challenge to America have with Islam?  How many Muslims do they know?  I can almost guarantee none, and if any, it's on the basis of a peaceful coexistence in their community. The unique and colorful language and art of the train graffiti that caused me to imagine a culture of its own expressing itself was suddenly sullied with the bland and obtuse propaganda of the network news.  It concerns me, and it should concern all of us that the hateful rhetoric of the Islamophobes and war mongers can penetrate this far.

Yes, it was also vandalism, and it also seemed irrational, but this time it wasn’t harmless.  It was exposing the symptoms of the sickness of our society.  Of a society that can nurture and transmit hatred to the depths of our most independent sub-cultures and fester even there an unwarranted hatred of people they don’t know.  “RISE UP AMERICA KILL ISLAM”: words that have little meaning to the vandal who scrawled it barely legibly across the train, except for what he was told by the television, and through those peddlers of hatred that seem to permeate all of our media. 

Sit down America.  Love your neighbor.  

Maybe I should grab a can of paint and catch that train!

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Real Solutions for Gun Violence

I can see from most of my left leaning friends that you have lapped up the anti-gun agenda.  I believe you've done this with good intentions, however you've also perched yourself on a moral pedestal and are using that position to berate peaceful gun owners and attacking and insulting an important part of their culture and heritage with a very disrespectful and pompous tone.  It is a losing battle as guns will not be going anywhere in America anytime soon, so all you are achieving is to further divide the country against each other.  There are actual solutions to the problem of gun violence that don't require us to pin the blame on responsible gun owners.

If you look at the numbers, mass shootings are not the incidents by which to deal with gun deaths.  Accidents and assaults are by far the real problem, and I'll agree, they are a problem.  Way too many people are killed or injured by accidents and assaults involving firearms in our county.  However the way to address this isn't to attack the American culture and encroach upon people's liberties.

Let's look at accidents.  The way to prevent firearm accidents is the same way you prevent accidents with any other piece of equipment:  training and education.  The NRA and organizations like it used to provide excellent firearms training and education, they even did it in public schools.  However, the left has purposefully been demonizing weapons and has been increasingly attempting to prohibit them by law.  Not to mention making it difficult to even teach a firearms safety class in school.  This forces organizations like the NRA to focus their resources on lobbying against these measures (measures the American system of government has no authority to dabble in in the first place), instead of on training and education to promote responsibility in our culture.  

Firearms are a reality in our culture, as are cars, which is why they should both have a place in our educational environment to so prepare children to live in our culture.  The current educational propaganda is focused making children terrified of guns, going so far as to discipline them for playing cops and robbers, or for making a gun out of a pastry.  This is an irrational approach that only serves to demonized firearms and doing so only makes them more desirable to someone nurturing a homicidal ideation.  Education should focus on normalization and familiarity, which removes the mystical allure of the weapon and allows children to view it as the common tool that it is.

Training would go far to prevent firearm accidents, it would likely also have an affect on assaults, however ending the drug war would likely reduce firearm assaults more than any other measure.  The illegal drug trade is more common in areas and among the demographic where firearm assaults are higher.  This is because black markets such as the drug trade do not provide access to the courts for dispute resolution, so people tend to resort to violence.  This simply doesn't happen on anywhere near the same scale with legal transactions.  The black market also provides the money for the guns to facilitate the assaults.  By legalizing the drug trade the black market margins will be dried up, there will be less money to purchase black market arms, and disputes would have access to the courts for resolution, instead of solving them on the streets. 

We live in a gun culture, and a frontal attack on that culture is only good for creating animosity and division.  The responsible and sane solution to the problem of gun violence is to accept the reality of our culture and create policies that make it safer.  Education will absolutely reduce firearm accidents.  Getting rid of black markets through legalization will  absolutely reduce firearm assaults on our streets.  These are two real solutions that don't require the government to encroach upon the rights of anyone, and will have a profound effect on the safety of our communities.  Why wouldn't we try this first?  The only reason I can think of is that we are more interested in disarming the people than we actually are in facilitating their safety.