Sarah Westall, Trafficking/Blackmail Cycle of Evil |410|

Alex,
If I understand what the Skinnerians believed at the time, the concept was that the psychedelic would get the subject past all of his prior social programming. Essentially leaving him a blank slate. Then he could be re-programmed in what ever way Skinnerians wished. Yes, that is definitely a materialist view of things.

However, what psychedelics actually often did [do] was/is get the subject past prior social programming and ego limitations such that he becomes open to a spiritual perspective. The spiritual awareness seems as though it always existed, waiting to be accessed, and is the natural state, but for social programming and ego limitations. It's like the default position once the ego has been reduced.

The psychedelic aspect of MK Ultra failed for this reason. Subjects opened to the spiritual are not predisposed to become programmable drones.

This one of the main reasons I have such a beef with Forte's conspiracy theories. By the 1960s it was known what psychedelics actually tend to do. Huxley knew. Leary most certainly knew. We don't have to guess. His research is available and we can read it. Leary's psilocybin experiments with prisoners (an approach to reducing recidivism rates) wasn't based on classical conditioning; nor even operant conditioning. It was based on using the drug to get past the prisoners' ego tape loops so they could see new spiritual potentials. And then talking about it with the therapist; as in sit on the couch Freudian or Jungian methods.

On a side note, when I say 'spiritual" I don't necessarily mean "The Light", peace, love and rainbows. A skilled shaman of the dark side could use psychedelics to get himself and his people to attune to lower earth bound vibrations or even evil itself. Fortunately, most people know better than to go there - just saying that it could, and certainly does, happen.

Hi Eric
I think the whole thing with the CIA research at the time was based on trying to understand how the North Koreans and Chinese managed to turn
UN "Allied"POW's in the Korean conflict so well into Commies. Psychedelics were a small part of the mix with the CIA , to me the scary CIA tests were the isolation ones which were very effective. Most of these experiments were tied into Pavlov's studies (he was big buddies with Stalin). An interesting sidebar is what happened to Pavlov's dogs when his lab was flooded and his dogs were forced to swim around in the cold and dark for quite some time (large trauma)....their conditioning (read habits) disappeared, I guess you could juxtapose psychedelics in there as they have a similar outcome with respect to habit. As I understand things this was one of the scary anomalies the CIA was looking into.
 
LOL!

The trouble is they'll take it anyway..your vote, your time and money, and sheer stress of disgust and frustration. Here in NZ we are a mere, tho worrying, small offshoot of America. UK and Australia are bigger (in different ways) and give them a lot.

Hi Aliceinwonderland
What I mean is your Mental/psycological/Spiritial power, and find ways to circumvent the other stuff as much as possible.
Ignore them like the school bullies they are and crap on their sandwiches the first chance you get.
 
Hi Eric
I think the whole thing with the CIA research at the time was based on trying to understand how the North Koreans and Chinese managed to turn
UN "Allied"POW's in the Korean conflict so well into Commies. Psychedelics were a small part of the mix with the CIA , to me the scary CIA tests were the isolation ones which were very effective. Most of these experiments were tied into Pavlov's studies (he was big buddies with Stalin). An interesting sidebar is what happened to Pavlov's dogs when his lab was flooded and his dogs were forced to swim around in the cold and dark for quite some time (large trauma)....their conditioning (read habits) disappeared, I guess you could juxtapose psychedelics in there as they have a similar outcome with respect to habit. As I understand things this was one of the scary anomalies the CIA was looking into.
what about:
Robert Forte, The Softer Side of CIA Psychedelic Mind ... - Skeptiko
 
Hi Aliceinwonderland
What I mean is your Mental/psycological/Spiritial power, and find ways to circumvent the other stuff as much as possible.
Ignore them like the school bullies they are and crap on their sandwiches the first chance you get.
Hi Blaise
Yes, you're right. I almost didn't listen to the podcast for fear of what I'd hear. I get physical symptoms like nausea and clenched jaw when I think about this subject, the perpetrators and political fuckwits they are covered by. I swear...and I know it's having to repress my energy that longs to act, speak out, and think if I got near any one of them I'd have to be forcibly withheld. Not good.

Thanks for the laugh, what a sad bunch, the Hillaryites.
Alice

ps I like writing to political leaders on a very personal level, tho Trump's sleaziness has always repelled me, so I struggle to find a weakness without gratuitous manipulation of his sucker-for-women stance, and I'm no goddess, but perhaps this is a subject I can appeal to him on... Don't anyone say 'he'll never get it' I believe in the power of thought.
 
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I strongly disagree, except the bit about me being last decade. Cool, mathematical symbols like graphs, lines and numbers is more neutral and precise. Artistic visuals are childish and open to diverse interpretation.

T'was in jest! I was about to agree until I saw the pale emojis. Perhaps it was a poor jest?
 
I am familiar with FMS, I meant that because it is fake, nothing we were discussing had anything to do with it.
That’s not true - the story of FMS is very much interwoven with the topic of child abuse/exploitation, ritual abuse, and the myth of the Satanic panic. FMS is used by ritual abuse deniers/debunkers regularly.
 
And IMO, those that seek to parse his writings in order to redeem the despicable life he lived wind up cherry picking. so, allow me to pick as well:

That's the trouble with Crowley, he allegedly wrote rubbish quite deliberately, he is very hard to understand - which is not to say that he also held some deeply problematic views. I am aware that there are fans and haters who claim to have researched his life and work - and not all are as good as they claim to be. Crowley is, for me, like exploring a conspiracy theory in that you have to dedicate a great deal of time and effort to check the sources. I read Crowley extensively in the 1970s and 1980s and rejected him along with other writers on Magic - because I thought their thought was out dated and misleading - and hence not useful.

This was before he became an industry and the subject of a lot of pointless and 'salacious' commentary. For instance the author of the writing you quoted did not seem to know that "Frater Perdurabo", which meant, If I recall correctly, Brother 'I will endure'. In that tradition we all had such names (I won't tell you mine, but it was abbreviated to FF). That suggests to me that this author does not know anything about the tradition or Crowley's place in it - so I wouldn't give a fig for any opinion he offers. Yes Crowley wrote things about human sacrifice, but you have to remember he also set out to offend and outrage people of his time, But did he actually literally mean the reader to take seriously? My take on Crowley is that he did not. None of the readers of, and writers on, Crowley back when I was deeply involved gave any credence to what we regarded as intentional, and irritating misdirections. In the end I just didn't like him as a personality or a character.
 
That's the trouble with Crowley, he allegedly wrote rubbish quite deliberately, he is very hard to understand - which is not to say that he also held some deeply problematic views. I am aware that there are fans and haters who claim to have researched his life and work - and not all are as good as they claim to be. Crowley is, for me, like exploring a conspiracy theory in that you have to dedicate a great deal of time and effort to check the sources. I read Crowley extensively in the 1970s and 1980s and rejected him along with other writers on Magic - because I thought their thought was out dated and misleading - and hence not useful.

This was before he became an industry and the subject of a lot of pointless and 'salacious' commentary. For instance the author of the writing you quoted did not seem to know that "Frater Perdurabo", which meant, If I recall correctly, Brother 'I will endure'. In that tradition we all had such names (I won't tell you mine, but it was abbreviated to FF). That suggests to me that this author does not know anything about the tradition or Crowley's place in it - so I wouldn't give a fig for any opinion he offers. Yes Crowley wrote things about human sacrifice, but you have to remember he also set out to offend and outrage people of his time, But did he actually literally mean the reader to take seriously? My take on Crowley is that he did not. None of the readers of, and writers on, Crowley back when I was deeply involved gave any credence to what we regarded as intentional, and irritating misdirections. In the end I just didn't like him as a personality or a character.

Crowley at best was a hedonist bully and a horrible human being. Crowley at worst was a horrible human being that committed the most high crimes.

He also may or may have not been a spy.

Granted Alan Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard (an Antichrist) were worse than Crowley.
 
I habe to quote from Wikipedia here (because its quick an easy and, in this case, accurate):
The fundamental axiom, tenet, or boilerplate underlying Thelema—known as the "Law of Thelema"—is "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law". The traditional corresponding phrase is "Love is the law, love under will." Other common phrases, coined by Aleister Crowley, which are associated with Thelema are, "It is the mark of the mind untrained to take its own processes as valid for all men, and its own judgments for absolute truth“, and "For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect.“ These expressions can be characterized as having moral, mystical, and socio-political implications. In the Thelemic worldview or model, each person has a "True Will" and (insofar as each person acts in accordance with his or her Will) the nature of a person's interactions with the world (or universe) is a form of "love" or harmony. This is expressed further by a third metaphor, "every man and every woman is a star," which portrays the distinct nature of every individual as residing in a non-overlapping point of space and time; collisions between different persons being infrequent if each is aware of—and acting in accordance with—their true purpose in life.

The trouble with what Crowley formatted lies not in what he meant, but how it has been interpreted - by fans and enemies alike. It is a stupid idea as you have characterised it, but not as Crowley intended it. I suspect that Crowley borrowed from Mills' 'On Liberty', rather like then formulators of the Wiccan rede - if it harm none, do what you will.

But it takes degree of philosophical, moral and psychological maturity that is beyond a lot of folk who style themselves as Wiccan to know what constitutes harm. In a similar manner fans and devotees of Crowley often lack the means to interpret the depth and complexity of his meaning of the Thelemite creed - but that was not atypical of Crowley's works. He was, and is, frequently misunderstood. And, I have to say, he was also wrong about a lot of things too.

A case in point is the Thelemite creed. We are not non-overlapping points in space and time. We 'overlap' through relationships and psychological influences. We exist through relationships - human to human and human to other-than-human. We do not have defined orbits or pathways - but huddles and muddles.

I am not going to write an essay on this theme - suffice to say that, when we get down to the details, it is a 'stupid idea'.

I am aware of the entire Law of Thelema, however, the only thing Crowley ever loved was himself. "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law"."Love is the law, love under will." Love of thyself, not humanity or God.
 
That's the trouble with Crowley, he allegedly wrote rubbish quite deliberately, he is very hard to understand - which is not to say that he also held some deeply problematic views. I am aware that there are fans and haters who claim to have researched his life and work - and not all are as good as they claim to be. Crowley is, for me, like exploring a conspiracy theory in that you have to dedicate a great deal of time and effort to check the sources. I read Crowley extensively in the 1970s and 1980s and rejected him along with other writers on Magic - because I thought their thought was out dated and misleading - and hence not useful.

This was before he became an industry and the subject of a lot of pointless and 'salacious' commentary. For instance the author of the writing you quoted did not seem to know that "Frater Perdurabo", which meant, If I recall correctly, Brother 'I will endure'. In that tradition we all had such names (I won't tell you mine, but it was abbreviated to FF). That suggests to me that this author does not know anything about the tradition or Crowley's place in it - so I wouldn't give a fig for any opinion he offers. Yes Crowley wrote things about human sacrifice, but you have to remember he also set out to offend and outrage people of his time, But did he actually literally mean the reader to take seriously? My take on Crowley is that he did not. None of the readers of, and writers on, Crowley back when I was deeply involved gave any credence to what we regarded as intentional, and irritating misdirections. In the end I just didn't like him as a personality or a character.

The claims of his most vicious detractors aren't particularly wild and do not take much of a stretch of the imagination, from my perspective. Members of the Thelemic and wider Occult community who are "in the know" are simply afraid of discussing the topic of human sacrifice and child abuse openly, but not without reason... If one were to openly discuss one of the more potent transgressions of taboo in which they partake - the power gained from it would be diminished if not lost altogether. Needn't I mention the legality of the matter? Like you, Michael I have been embedded in occult communities for a good period of my life. I've been close with people who performed quite horrific blood magic, illegally kept trays of human skin to bind books with, and worse - I shudder to think of what acts they could have done which they did not inform me of. You needn't look further than the recommendations of taboo transgression in some of the manuals of the Order of Nine Angles to see what people are up to and are being influenced to do. I too have met large swaths of the occult community that think about Crowley in the way you and those you ran with did. I don't claim to know what he really thought or how he acted, but I don't think it is too outrageous to entertain the possibility that he was up to the most heinous things we can imagine.

It is clear that at the very least, from his own writings, that Crowley had pederastic desires if not tendencies. For many that is not problematic in and of itself; while it may be illegal, depending on what it involved - it may not be immoral in the eyes of many.

Separately, what is less clear is if Crowley acted on the distinctly paedophilic desires (or is it an actual description of an event?) he expressed in this diary entry:

"And I the Worm have trailed my Slug-Slow across Her Breasts; so that Her mother-mood is turned and Her breasts itch with lust of Incest. She hath given Her two-year bastard boy to Her lewd lover’s whim of sodomy, hath taught him speech and act, things infinitely abhorred, with Her own beastly carcass. She hath tongued Her five-month girl, and asked its father to deflower it. She hath wished Her Beast to rape Her rotten old mother – so far is woman clean of Her! Then Her blood’s grown icy hard and cold with hate; and Her eyes gleam as Her ears ring with a chime of wedding bells, dirty words, or vibrate, cat-gut fashion, to the thin shrieks of a young child that Her Beast-God-Slave-Mate is torturing for Her pleasure – ay! and his own, since of Her Cup he drank, and of Her soul he breathed.

He loved it all. He rolled each drop of filth around His tongue.” – The Magical Record of The Beast 666 – The Diaries of Aleister Crowley, 1914-1920 (Duckworth)"
 
That’s not true - the story of FMS is very much interwoven with the topic of child abuse/exploitation, ritual abuse, and the myth of the Satanic panic. FMS is used by ritual abuse deniers/debunkers regularly.

You miss my point. If its not real - i.e. there is no actual FMS - why bring it up unless they do? If there is no actual evidence such a syndrome actually exists why give it credence in any discussion? Why even introduce it as a topic?

But we have to be careful here and not conflate FMS with false memories generally. I hadn't read on FMS for quite some time, so I paused to have a quick look at Google. There seem to be 2 issues - repressed memory and recovered memory - and then problem of whether the recovery of a memory is equal to the repressed memory.

As a victim of childhood sexual abuse myself I recovered the memory of what I experienced not through any therapy but through my own struggle to comprehend things I sensed in myself but could not put words to. What I call a memory is a series of coherent images and emotions. My abuse came about when I fled the home as a 4 year old to escape domestic violence, and was comforted by a 12 year old I had seen earlier having sex with a farm hand. For a long time her abuse was conflated with comfort and safety. I had repressed that memory because it had no context. I did not understand the trauma it generated. I do now.

I also know about false memories. I have shared childhood stories with siblings and we have been surprised, sometimes shocked, about the degree of divergence between our recalled experiences. One of my sisters once said that she had to doubt whether we had grown up in the same home. Two sisters had a flat out disagreement about an event. One said her father had thrown her through a pane of glass. The other said she slipped and fell as she struggled with her father who was trying to stop her from leaving the house. Yes, crazy Christian madness - very abusive and traumatic. Push or fall makes all the difference to the emotions 'memories' evoke.

FMS is really about whether some or all 'recovered' memories under therapy are real - and there seems to be evidence that not all 'recovered' memories are genuine. That's what abusers cling to in order to weaken the accusations against them and deny they have validity. We give them then right to cling to 'reasonable doubt', regardless of the magnitude of their crimes.

As a person who accepts reincarnation I find myself asking whether all 'memories' are necessarily in this life, and whether a 'repressed' memory of sexual abuse may not belong to a previous life - but, in asserting the validity of the memory, and in the absence of any theory of a past life, current life perpetrators are necessary. It could be that a current life accused was a past life perpetrator.

We need to make a choice about how we think the world works. If we bring memories, and the trauma they induce, into this life we cannot agree that any memory that is induced is necessarily one seeded in this life - that's the materialist's assumption - and one that dominates psychology and law.

From what I could find there's no widely agreed position on FMS. The more thoughtful comments such as below seem to me to well balanced:
"Most therapists use techniques such as trauma-focused cognitive behavioural therapy, which aren’t aimed exclusively at recovering memories of abuse. The royal commission has heard evidence of the serious impact of being dismissed or not believed when making disclosures of abuse and seeking protection. The therapist should be respectful and guided by the needs of the survivor."

You can read more at http://theconversation.com/do-traum...s-and-can-therapy-induce-false-memories-84998

When I was writing my thesis I had to deal with memory in then context of auto ethnographic writing. How could I be sure what I was writing was so? I came to understand that memory is not about 'the facts' so much as the 'moral issue', which is 'clothed' in a contemporary drama to give it meaning and substance. That is to say that a memory can be factually wrong in an objective sense, but morally right. This is, after all, what matters. We have memories so we can preserve a moral truth. We have cameras to record objective truths.

I was abused and I was injured by that abuse. That fact remains even if my telling of the story fails to mesh exactly with the objective reality of the time. That objective reality is fleeting. It is the experience and the memory of it that endures - as does all that flows from it.

I don't know what to think about FMS now. I am inclined to think it is uncommon, and now that it exists as a meme it will be invoked to derail genuine testimony.
 
why bring it up unless they do?
It is important to understand all the different threads around this issue. It does come up a lot in regards to these topics, and it is better to be informed and able to dissect and discuss this aspect of the counter-narrative when need be. Why bring up anything unless someone else does? In a sense I agree - we should all just shut up about everything and be... but this damn chatter won't stop! :D

I don't know what to think about FMS now. I am inclined to think it is uncommon, and now that it exists as a meme it will be invoked to derail genuine testimony.
Couldn't agree more.
 
I don't claim to know what he really thought or how he acted, but I don't think it is too outrageous to entertain the possibility that he was up to the most heinous things we can imagine.

No argument there. But there's a difference between entertaining 'the possibility' and asserting that which is imagined is fact. I do not defend him. I was grateful, for the sake of the forum readers, that you quoted the milder forms of his prose and poetry.

My early interest in Crowley was intellectual, but I finally figured you had to enter his moral world to find the meaning in his work - and that was not a price I wanted to pay. I have avoided dealing with Crowlian fans, partially because I thought them fools, but mostly because they either cherry picked bits and pieces to add to their sweeter alignments (and you do not develop a system by picking the nice bits) or they were morally repellant to me - and generally ignorant of philosophical and spiritual thought.

I just don't know how much of Crowley was just repellant BS and how much was really very nasty. But it didn't finally matter - either way I didn't want his influences in my magic or my life.
 
It does come up a lot in regards to these topics, and it is better to be informed and able to dissect and discuss this aspect of the counter-narrative when need be

That's interesting because I missed the references to FMS until Alex raised the subject. I agree that knowing about FMS is useful, but let's make that actually knowing about it, rather than jumping on a moral bandwagon. Otherwise its like the anti anti-vac bandwagon that jumps on any assertion that vaccines cause injury when there is so much evidence of vaccine injury.

If we genuinely know about FMS it doesn't mean we should raise the subject until it is used in defence of accused abusers. Why raise the defence argument? Why muddy the case?

My point is that FMS is not a clear cut as folk like to think, so unless an abuser comes on to the forum and brings the subject up in defence of their cause why are we even talking about it? Subtle arguments do not do as well as simple and stupid ones in a public forum, as a rule. Anything to do with memory is fraught. There are enough validated claims of abuse that do not need to rely on recovered memory arguments, so let focus on what we can know without ambiguity and excessive doubt.
 
Hi Eric
I think the whole thing with the CIA research at the time was based on trying to understand how the North Koreans and Chinese managed to turn
UN "Allied"POW's in the Korean conflict so well into Commies. Psychedelics were a small part of the mix with the CIA , to me the scary CIA tests were the isolation ones which were very effective. Most of these experiments were tied into Pavlov's studies (he was big buddies with Stalin). An interesting sidebar is what happened to Pavlov's dogs when his lab was flooded and his dogs were forced to swim around in the cold and dark for quite some time (large trauma)....their conditioning (read habits) disappeared, I guess you could juxtapose psychedelics in there as they have a similar outcome with respect to habit. As I understand things this was one of the scary anomalies the CIA was looking into.

Hi Blaise,
MK Ultra was about a number of mind control approaches (we don't need to speculate - declassified docs are available). It was based on exploring potentials around what you say, but also a host of more or less related topics; truth serums (for interrogations), Manchurian candidate type scenarios, etc. There was also a mind control via mass propaganda aspect. That is the area where the greatest real world potential was realized and operationalized (per a proven authoritative personal contact that had the access to know and was in the business). Now that aspect was supposed to be applied to foreign populations; and was. However, it seems that some of it has come home to roost in recent years. Then there were "expanded human potentials" spin-off programs, like Stargate.

Adding in via edit: MK Ultra was also generally about scientifically studying other information gathering (i.e. espionage) techniques. It was just mind control. Unfortunately some of it went it ethically dark places. For that reason it got exposed and stopped.
 
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let's give Ed Opperman some credit... he has some pretty powerful interviews with real police detectives who have worked these cases. ritual satanic abuse is real. we can debate numbers, and we can debate the nature of the evil, but I don't think we can debate the reality of it.

it also seemed to make most sense to me that the "satanic panic" stuff is largely a head fake by those who do not want the reality of the phenomenon to be exposed. this is another pizzagate thing... where pizzagate has been turned into a story about a guy shooting up a pizza restaurant because he read too many internet conspiracy theories.

Alex,
A few points of caution here:
1. When people devote their lives to a profession, and constantly see a certain slice of life, like law enforcement does, they begin to believe that everyone is like the people they interact with. For cops, this perspective is that everyone is filthy corrupt and criminal. For liberal elites, it is that everyone shares their values. People who live in isolated bubbles begin to think that their bubble is the world.
2. People who dedicate their lives to a profession tend to overestimate the importance of their profession and its features to the overall picture. At least that has been a life long observation of mine.
3. Cops, soldiers (and cabbies) are inveterate story tellers. They love to shock, entertain, pass the time and inflate their own importance with tales of their highly specialized insider only experience. They know they can always hook outsiders and instantly be the life of the party by letting people in on their cloistered lives. Look how popular cop shows are on TV.

A grain of salt is always required, IMO, when listening to the tales. Maybe there was a fish, but it might not have been as big as you're being told.
 
Hi Alex
Yes I listened to that episode, i really think Robert Forte is genuine in his belief, if he is correct we might never know.
Big organisations seem to run on the whims of whoever is pulling the strings at the time, that rarely is those in power
then as far as I can tell, there is a bureaucratic time lag.The fault we all make most of the time is to think an organisation can see into
the future as a single unit or to even make judgement as a single person would, there is a collective consciousness but its pretty stupid
compared to a cunning individual,mostly just concerned with "holding the line".
 
You miss my point. If its not real - i.e. there is no actual FMS - why bring it up unless they do? If there is no actual evidence such a syndrome actually exists why give it credence in any discussion? Why even introduce it as a topic?

But we have to be careful here and not conflate FMS with false memories generally. I hadn't read on FMS for quite some time, so I paused to have a quick look at Google. There seem to be 2 issues - repressed memory and recovered memory - and then problem of whether the recovery of a memory is equal to the repressed memory.

As a victim of childhood sexual abuse myself I recovered the memory of what I experienced not through any therapy but through my own struggle to comprehend things I sensed in myself but could not put words to. What I call a memory is a series of coherent images and emotions. My abuse came about when I fled the home as a 4 year old to escape domestic violence, and was comforted by a 12 year old I had seen earlier having sex with a farm hand. For a long time her abuse was conflated with comfort and safety. I had repressed that memory because it had no context. I did not understand the trauma it generated. I do now.

I also know about false memories. I have shared childhood stories with siblings and we have been surprised, sometimes shocked, about the degree of divergence between our recalled experiences. One of my sisters once said that she had to doubt whether we had grown up in the same home. Two sisters had a flat out disagreement about an event. One said her father had thrown her through a pane of glass. The other said she slipped and fell as she struggled with her father who was trying to stop her from leaving the house. Yes, crazy Christian madness - very abusive and traumatic. Push or fall makes all the difference to the emotions 'memories' evoke.

FMS is really about whether some or all 'recovered' memories under therapy are real - and there seems to be evidence that not all 'recovered' memories are genuine. That's what abusers cling to in order to weaken the accusations against them and deny they have validity. We give them then right to cling to 'reasonable doubt', regardless of the magnitude of their crimes.

As a person who accepts reincarnation I find myself asking whether all 'memories' are necessarily in this life, and whether a 'repressed' memory of sexual abuse may not belong to a previous life - but, in asserting the validity of the memory, and in the absence of any theory of a past life, current life perpetrators are necessary. It could be that a current life accused was a past life perpetrator.

We need to make a choice about how we think the world works. If we bring memories, and the trauma they induce, into this life we cannot agree that any memory that is induced is necessarily one seeded in this life - that's the materialist's assumption - and one that dominates psychology and law.

From what I could find there's no widely agreed position on FMS. The more thoughtful comments such as below seem to me to well balanced:
"Most therapists use techniques such as trauma-focused cognitive behavioural therapy, which aren’t aimed exclusively at recovering memories of abuse. The royal commission has heard evidence of the serious impact of being dismissed or not believed when making disclosures of abuse and seeking protection. The therapist should be respectful and guided by the needs of the survivor."

You can read more at http://theconversation.com/do-traum...s-and-can-therapy-induce-false-memories-84998

When I was writing my thesis I had to deal with memory in then context of auto ethnographic writing. How could I be sure what I was writing was so? I came to understand that memory is not about 'the facts' so much as the 'moral issue', which is 'clothed' in a contemporary drama to give it meaning and substance. That is to say that a memory can be factually wrong in an objective sense, but morally right. This is, after all, what matters. We have memories so we can preserve a moral truth. We have cameras to record objective truths.

I was abused and I was injured by that abuse. That fact remains even if my telling of the story fails to mesh exactly with the objective reality of the time. That objective reality is fleeting. It is the experience and the memory of it that endures - as does all that flows from it.

I don't know what to think about FMS now. I am inclined to think it is uncommon, and now that it exists as a meme it will be invoked to derail genuine testimony.

Michael
Could I have your opinion on hypnotic regression in all its forms?
Blaise
 
Alex,
A few points of caution here:
1. When people devote their lives to a profession, and constantly see a certain slice of life, like law enforcement does, they begin to believe that everyone is like the people they interact with. For cops, this perspective is that everyone is filthy corrupt and criminal. For liberal elites, it is that everyone shares their values. People who live in isolated bubbles begin to think that their bubble is the world.
2. People who dedicate their lives to a profession tend to overestimate the importance of their profession and its features to the overall picture. At least that has been a life long observation of mine.
3. Cops, soldiers (and cabbies) are inveterate story tellers. They love to shock, entertain, pass the time and inflate their own importance with tales of their highly specialized insider only experience. They know they can always hook outsiders and instantly be the life of the party by letting people in on their cloistered lives. Look how popular cop shows are on TV.

A grain of salt is always required, IMO, when listening to the tales. Maybe there was a fish, but it might not have been as big as you're being told.
I get your point, but in this case I think the most difficult part is fully accepting the reality of this reality / horror rather than splitting hairs on the number of occurrences or whether the satanic cult Ted Bundy joined was fully sanctioned :)

because to fully accepted means also fully accepting the complicity of our media / political / legal system... one that is happy to relegate these discussions to a "Skeptiko forum" level of public awareness.
 
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