13 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2024
    1. Crazy how open everybody is. In my country, if people spoke this freely about drugs use, the police would raid their homes and put them in jail.

      actually that is what is called a sane country

      "sane countries" would ban only the actual bad drugs: alcohol, tobacco, fentanyl, methadone, oxycodone, krokodil, all chemotherapy drugs for cancer, all vaccines, pasteurized milk, ... also, all legal drugs would have zero taxes for the next 1 million years to say "sorry for our war on drugs".

      but well, "sane" is a very subjective thing: my paradise is your hell. thats why we need tribalism: every tribe has his own rules, and if i dont like my tribe, i can move to a different tribe. tribalism aka "small countries"

    1. utopia. tribalism. such pacifist utopias only work in limited small spaces = islands.<br /> but in unlimited large spaces = continents, permanent tribal warfare is required to keep tribes small.<br /> so paradise on earth fails because people want "peace" and "order"<br /> while subconsciously, everything goes to shit, and the warfare moves to psychological warfare

  2. Feb 2024
    1. Before the Islamic prophet Muhammad, the term originally applied to any form of tribal association.[2]
  3. Oct 2023
    1. Thank you. Steve, for raising the alarm on this catastrophe! One minor comment. It should be QC'ed, not QA'ed. Quality control is done first. Quality Assurance (QA) comes after QC. QA is basically checking the calculations and the test results in the batch records. I worked in QC and QA for big pharma for decades. I tried to warn people in early 2021 that there's no way the quality control testing could be done at warp speed. Nobody listened to me despite my decades of experience in big pharma!

      "warp speed" sounds fancy, plus "its an emergency, we have no time"...

      it really was just an intelligence test, a global-scale exploit of trust in authorities. (and lets be honest, stupid people deserve to die.)

      problem is, they (elites, military, industry) seem to go for actual forced vaccinations, which would be an escalation from psychological warfare to actual warfare against the 95% "useless eaters".

      personally, i would prefer if they would globally legalize serial murder and assault rifles, then "we the people" would solve the overpopulation. (because: serial murder is the only alternative to mass murder.) but they are scared that we would also kill the wrong people (their servants because they are evil or stupid). (anyone crying about depopulation should suggest better solutions. denying overpopulation is just another failed intelligence test.)

  4. Feb 2022
    1. Our brains work not that differently in terms of interconnectedness.Psychologists used to think of the brain as a limited storage spacethat slowly fills up and makes it more difficult to learn late in life. Butwe know today that the more connected information we alreadyhave, the easier it is to learn, because new information can dock tothat information. Yes, our ability to learn isolated facts is indeedlimited and probably decreases with age. But if facts are not kept

      isolated nor learned in an isolated fashion, but hang together in a network of ideas, or “latticework of mental models” (Munger, 1994), it becomes easier to make sense of new information. That makes it easier not only to learn and remember, but also to retrieve the information later in the moment and context it is needed.

      Our natural memories are limited in their capacities, but it becomes easier to remember facts when they've got an association to other things in our minds. The building of mental models makes it easier to acquire and remember new information. The down side is that it may make it harder to dramatically change those mental models and re-associate knowledge to them without additional amounts of work.


      The mental work involved here may be one of the reasons for some cognitive biases and the reason why people are more apt to stay stuck in their mental ruts. An example would be not changing their minds about ideas of racism and inequality, both because it's easier to keep their pre-existing ideas and biases than to do the necessary work to change their minds. Similar things come into play with respect to tribalism and political party identifications as well.

      This could be an interesting area to explore more deeply. Connect with George Lakoff.

  5. Sep 2021
    1. Africa had a kind of feudalism, like Europe based on agriculture, and withhierarchies of lords and vassals. But African feudalism did not come, as didEurope’s, out of the slave societies of Greece and Rome, which had destroyedancient tribal life. In Africa, tribal life was still powerful, and some of itsbetter features—a communal spirit, more kindness in law and punishment—still existed.

      Francis Fukuyama is still fermenting in my reading pile, but I wonder how he covers these political transitions?

      I'm curious about descriptions of the law and punishment practiced in these societies. Was there more sense of restorative justice?

  6. Oct 2020
    1. Concerning the discipline of sociology, he described the dichotomy of sedentary life versus nomadic life as well as the inevitable loss of power that occurs when warriors conquer a city. According to the Arab scholar Sati' al-Husri, the Muqaddimah may be read as a sociological work. The work is based around Ibn Khaldun's central concept of 'aṣabiyyah, which has been translated as "social cohesion", "group solidarity", or "tribalism". This social cohesion arises spontaneously in tribes and other small kinship groups; it can be intensified and enlarged by a religious ideology. Ibn Khaldun's analysis looks at how this cohesion carries groups to power but contains within itself the seeds – psychological, sociological, economic, political – of the group's downfall, to be replaced by a new group, dynasty or empire bound by a stronger (or at least younger and more vigorous) cohesion. Some of Ibn Khaldun's views, particularly those concerning the Zanj people of sub-Saharan Africa,[27] have been cited as a racist,[28] though they were not uncommon for their time. According to the scholar Abdelmajid Hannoum, Ibn Khaldun's description of the distinctions between Berbers and Arabs were misinterpreted by the translator William McGuckin de Slane, who wrongly inserted a "racial ideology that sets Arabs and Berbers apart and in opposition" into his translation of the Muqaddimah.
  7. Sep 2020
    1. But what’s different in this case is that Trump, because of the corruption that seems to pervade every area of his life and his damaged psychological and emotional state, has shown us just how much people will accept in their leaders as a result of “negative partisanship,” the force that binds parties together less in common purpose than in opposition to a shared opponent.
    2. A powerful tribal identity bonds the president to his supporters. As Amy Chua, the author of Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations, has argued, the tribal instinct is not just to belong, but also to exclude and to attack. “When groups feel threatened,” Chua writes, “they retreat into tribalism. They close ranks and become more insular, more defensive, more punitive, more us-versus-them.”
  8. Jul 2020
  9. Aug 2018
    1. Fukuyama’s argument was that, with the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union, the last ideological alternative to liberalism had been eliminated.

      "Last" in the sense of a big, modern threat. We're still facing the threats of tribalism, which apparently have a strong pull.

  10. Jul 2018
    1. I am generous with what I have—I choose to be generous with what I have—precisely because we are no longer committed to one another as members of a shared social structure. Instead, the shift of responsibility for the public welfare toward private entities displaces our obligations to one another in favor of individual liberties and, I think, leaves us queasy about the notion of obligation altogether.

      The game theory of things tends to pull the society apart, particularly when it is easier to see who is paying what. If the richer end feels they're paying more than their fair share, this can tend to break things down.

      I suspect that Francis Fukuyama has a bit to say about this in how democratic societies built themselves up over time. Similarly one of his adherents Jonah Goldberg provides some related arguments about tribalism tending to tear democracies down when we revert back to a more primitive viewpoint instead of being able to trust the larger governmental structures of a democracy.

  11. Apr 2017