Old Post: My Personality Type - INTJ

The Brutally Honest Personality Test . ..> ..> ..>..>

.. ........END FORMAT SETUP & MAIN IMAGE --> [ENFP] [INFP] [ENFJ] [INFJ] [ESTJ] [ISTJ] [ESFJ] [ISFJ] [ENTP] [INTP] [ENTJ] [INTJ] [ESTP] [ISTP] [ESFP] [ISFP] Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Judging by Marina Margaret Heiss Profile: INTJ Revision: 3.0 Date of Revision: 27 Feb 2005 To outsiders, INTJs may appear to project an aura of "definiteness", of self-confidence. This self-confidence, sometimes mistaken for simple arrogance by the less decisive, is actually of a very specific rather than a general nature; its source lies in the specialized knowledge systems that most INTJs start building at an early age. When it comes to their own areas of expertise -- and INTJs can have several -- they will be able to tell you almost immediately whether or not they can help you, and if so, how. INTJs know what they know, and perhaps still more importantly, they know what they don't know. INTJs are perfectionists, with a seemingly endless capacity for improving upon anything that takes their interest. What prevents them from becoming chronically bogged down in this pursuit of perfection is the pragmatism so characteristic of the type: INTJs apply (often ruthlessly) the criterion "Does it work?" to everything from their own research efforts to the prevailing social norms. This in turn produces an unusual independence of mind, freeing the INTJ from the constraints of authority, convention, or sentiment for its own sake. INTJs are known as the "Systems Builders" of the types, perhaps in part because they possess the unusual trait combination of imagination and reliability. Whatever system an INTJ happens to be working on is for them the equivalent of a moral cause to an INFJ; both perfectionism and disregard for authority may comeinto play, as INTJs can be unsparing of both themselves and the others on the project. Anyone considered to be "slacking," including superiors, will lose their respect -- and will generally be made aware of this; INTJs have also been known to take it upon themselves to implement critical decisions withoutconsulting their supervisors or co-workers. On the other hand, they do tend to be scrupulous and even-handed about recognizing the individual contributions that have gone into a project, and have a gift for seizing opportunities which others might not even notice. In the broadest terms, what INTJs "do" tends to be what they "know". Typical INTJ career choices are in the sciences and engineering, but they can be found wherever a combination of intellect and incisiveness are required (e.g., law, some areas of academia). INTJs can rise to management positions when they are willing to invest time in marketing their abilities as well as enhancing them, and (whether for the sake of ambition or the desire for privacy) many also find it useful to learn to simulate some degree of surface conformism in order to mask their inherent unconventionality. Personal relationships, particularly romantic ones, can be the INTJ's Achilles heel. While they are capable of caring deeply for others (usually a select few), and are willing to spend a great deal of time and effort on a relationship, the knowledge and self-confidence that make them so successful in other areas can suddenly abandon or mislead them in interpersonal situations. This happens in part because many INTJs do not readily grasp the social rituals; for instance, they tend to have little patience and less understanding of such things as small talk and flirtation (which most types consider half the fun of arelationship). To complicate matters, INTJs are usually extremely private people, and can often be naturally impassive as well, which makes them easy to misread and misunderstand. Perhaps the most fundamental problem, however, is that INTJs really want people to make sense. :-) This sometimes resultsin a peculiar naivete', paralleling that of many Fs -- only instead of expecting inexhaustible affection and empathy from a romantic relationship, the INTJ will expect inexhaustible reasonability and directness. Probably the strongest INTJ assets in the interpersonal area are their intuitive abilities and their willingness to "work at" a relationship. Although as Ts they do not always have the kind of natural empathy that many Fs do, the Intuitive function can often act as a good substitute by synthesizing the probable meanings behind such things as tone of voice, turn of phrase, and facial expression. This ability can then be honed and directed by consistent, repeated efforts to understand and support those they care about, and those relationships which ultimately do become established with an INTJ tend to be characterized by their robustness, stability, and good communications. Functional Analysis by Joe Butt Introverted iNtuition INTJs are idea people. Anything is possible; everything is negotiable.Whatever the outer circumstances, INTJs are ever perceiving innerpattern-forms and using real-world materials to operationalize them. Others may see what is and wonder why; INTJs see what might be and say "Why not?!" Paradoxes, antinomies, and other contradictory phenomenaaptly express these intuitors' amusement at those whom they feel may betaking a particular view of reality too seriously. INTJs enjoy developing unique solutions to complex problems. Extraverted Thinking Thinking in this auxiliary role is a workhorse. Closure is the payoff for efforts expended. Evaluation begs diagnosis; product drives process.As they come to light, Thinking tends, protects, affirms and directs iNtuition's offspring, fully equipping them for fulfilling and useful lives.A faithful pedagogue, Thinking argues not so much on its own behalf, but in defense of its charges. And through this process these impressionable ideas take on the likeness of their master. Introverted Feeling Feeling has a modest inner room, two doors down from the Most ImminentiNtuition. It doesn't get out much, but lends its influence on behalf ofcauses which are Good and Worthy and Humane. We may catch a glimpse of itin the unspoken attitude of good will, or the gracious smile or nod. Somequestion the existence of Feeling in this type, yet its unseen balance toThinking is a cardinal dimension in the full measure of the INTJ's soul. Extraverted Sensing Sensing serves with a good will, or not at all. As other inferiorfunctions, it has only a rudimentary awareness of context, amount ordegree. Thus INTJs sweat the details or, at times, omit them. "I've madeup my mind, don't confuse me with the facts" could well have been said byan INTJ on a mission. Sensing's extraverted attitude is evident in thistype's bent to savor sensations rather than to merely categorize them. Indiscretions of indulgence are likely an expression of the unconsciousvengeance of the inferior. Famous INTJs: Dan Aykroyd (The Blues Brothers) Susan B. Anthony Arthur Ashe, tennis champion Augustus Caesar (Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus) Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice) William J. Bennett, "drug czar" William F. Buckley, Jr. Raymond Burr (Perry Mason, Ironsides) Chevy Chase (Cornelius Crane) (Fletch) Phil Donahue Michael Dukakis, governor of Mass., 1988 U.S. Dem. pres. candidate Greg Gumbel, television sportscaster Hannibal, Carthaginian military leader Veronica Hamel (Hill Street Blues) Angela Lansbury (Murder, She Wrote) Orel Leonard Hershiser, IV Peter Jennings Charles Everett Koop Ivan Lendl C. S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia) Joan Lunden Edwin Moses, U.S. olympian (hurdles) Martina Navratilova Charles Rangel, U. S. Representative, D-N.Y. Pernell Roberts (Bonanza) Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California Josephine Tey (Elizabeth Mackintosh), mystery writer (Brat Farrar) Rudy Giuliani, former New York City mayor Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defense General Colin Powell, US Secretary of State Lance Armstrong Richard Gere (Pretty Woman) Katie Couric U.S. Presidents: Chester A. Arthur Calvin Coolidge Thomas Jefferson John F. Kennedy James K. Polk Woodrow Wilson Fictional: Cassius (Julius Caesar) Mr. Darcy (Pride and Prejudice) Gandalf the Grey (J. R. R. Tolkein's Middle Earth books) Hannibal Lecter (Silence of the Lambs) Professor Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes' nemesis Ensign Ro (Star Trek--the Next Generation) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Hamlet) George Smiley, John le Carre's master spy Clarice Starling (Silence of the Lambs) Copyright © 1996-2007 by Marina Margaret Heiss and Joe Butt Type Relationships for INTJs: ..>..>..>..> ..> ..> ..>..> Identity Pal Complement Contrast Supplement Anima Suitemate Cohort Companion Tribesman Advisor Pedagogue Enigma Novelty Neighbor Counterpart More information about Type Relationships [ENFP] [INFP] [ENFJ] [INFJ] [ESTJ] [ISTJ] [ESFJ] [ISFJ] [ENTP] [INTP] [ENTJ] [intj]=""> [ESTP] [ISTP] [ESFP] [ISFP] Home This page has been accessed .. times since 17 Jan 1996.      .. ........START WRAP UP -->

Old Post: July 24th, 2007 Interesting Read: Hatred of Western Civilization: Why Terrorists Attacked America

Hatred of Western Civilization: Why 

Terrorists Attacked America

by John Lewis  




(September 11, 2006)

Originally published on Septmeber 20th, 2001--To the students of Ashland University: university teachers have wide latitude in their choice and presentation of subjects. In America university courses have been presented about Black Hair, Oprah Winfrey, and the Social Life of Snails. I see no reason why I should not offer a statement in this class, followed by discussion, about the momentous events of yesterday.

On September 11, 2001 America was attacked. What happened in New York was not a criminal act. It was an act of war. It is wrong to call it criminal activity, or to treat it as a criminal matter. It is wrong to consider it as a matter in which the people responsible must be arrested, brought before a judge and tried. This is war. The attackers must be destroyed.

Why is it not a criminal act? First, the scale of the slaughter is far beyond criminal activity. The number of people killed may rise to 5 or 10 times the number killed at Pearl Harbor. Second, it had no "criminal" motive: i.e., robbery, or passion against an individual. But most important, the resources required to carry out the attack, especially training given the pilots, were on the scale of that available only to governments.

The moral, political, economic, and religious support necessary for these attacks have been provided over the past 25 years by specific governments in the Middle East. Those governments wish to destroy the Great Satan: America, freedom, achievement, trade, values, reason. This is a war against America, her core values, and the prosperity that has followed from our pursuit of those values. The enemy is first and foremost any government who supports the active opponents of those values. This is the material fact that we must face.

The particular people involved in the particular acts of war of Sep 11 are not the reason for retaliation. The purpose is not to "punish" those who have started this war. Punishment is not a concept that applies here. We did not punish the pilots who attacked Pearl Harbor-we destroyed the government of Japan, and imposed a constitutional government that has benefited everyone (most of all the Japanese) ever since.

We must not fall into agnosticism over this issue. The governments and leaders who have supported terrorism for years are well-known. The precision with which they are known is more than sufficient to place blame. We know who they are, and no further research is needed. Every such government must be removed from power, now, as a matter of our own personal, and immediate, physical safety. This should be the purpose, and the only purpose, of our response to this attack.

So the first question is, how do we seize the initiative in this war, to make us, and freedom, safe again? Note that the question is not how to bring "disenfranchised peoples" back into the world community, and neither is it to correct the alleged cultural deformities that are supposed to have lead terrorists to kill us. The issue is not how to resolve the Middle East problem, or to find a homeland for one group or another. We hold no such responsibilities to our enemies or their children.

I repeat. The first question is how to protect ourselves, and, coincidently, others who value freedom, from such attacks. Our self-protection must be our first, and only, motive. It is an end in itself.

I will be specific here. What is needed is an all-out immediate attack, nuclear if necessary, on targets chosen by the US. 24 hours notice should then be given to the governments of Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Libya, that they are to resign their political positions now or face more of the same tomorrow. Arafat must be told that the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Jihad are to be turned over to us now, or he faces annihilation, in the form decided on by us.

If destruction follows it is their fault, not ours. They started it. They evidently wish it. If babies are killed it is because they hide behind them. We didn't start this war-they did, by arming, training, protecting and sanctioning the attackers who killed innocent Americans.

Further, the US should not ask permission of anyone about this. In my opinion it is actually vital that such permissions not be asked. Our actions must be unilateral. EVERY government, friend and foe, must know that an attack on America will be followed by retaliation: inevitably, always, everywhere, regardless of what they think.

Our retaliation must take on the status of natural justice, as a law of nature, inescapable across time and space. Throw a stone into the air and it falls. A flash of lightning is followed by thunder. Touch a hot stove and you get burned. Touch an American, and fire falls out of the sky onto you and anyone who breathes the same air as you. It must become political suicide for any government to offer aid to an open enemy of the US. It is time for them to become afraid.

After we are safe from state-sponsored terrorism, and after the world understands that American soil cannot be violated without massive destruction of anyone even remotely connected with it, then the exact investigations can be made of who in particular manned this particular attack. But the agnosticism involved in the idea that we must study the wreckage for months to determine who is responsible is mind-crippling. It is also a massive evasion. International terrorism has been supported for years by a series of governments. It is long past the time that they be made to pay for their actions.

Now, given these material requirements for our survival, we must face the intellectual nature of this war. The fact is that the Islamic Jihad is only one part of a concerted attack on western values, principally our capacity for reason and our desire to live. Our enemies are not only foreign-they live amongst us. To understand this we must understand what our attackers actually want, and who they are.

The attackers hate the West because the West brings prosperity.

Make no mistake, it is not that they want the prosperity that has been supposedly denied to them. This argument is a Marxist construct, designed to support the view that the economic oppression of the Middle East caused the present crisis. This argument is itself an attack on the US. In fact the Arab states are swimming in oil revenues, produced by the western oil industry, and their leaders are among the richest people on earth. Let them work to establish a pro-achievement business climate, and start businesses to employ their people. Let them give their own wealth away, if they think that is the answer. But they do not value prosperity.

They have the same attitude towards freedom. There has never been a revolution in a Middle-Eastern country in favor of a constitutional republic that protects the rights of its citizens. If the people lack freedom it is because their government recognizes no individual rights. Let their governments establish these principles rather than military coups. And, I'll add, if many people there do want freedom, what better can we do for them than to remove the source of their slavery? Their interests are identical with ours: the destruction of their governments, and the establishment of rights-protecting constitutional republics.

But the killers are not of this mind. What they rather want is for the West to lose its freedoms, and its values. They want Israel to be driven into the sea in order to allow warring tribes to return to what was, before Israel, a desert wasteland. They want the towers of New York to fall, to be replaced by muck and Dark Ages incantations. They destroyed 2000 year-old statues in Afghanistan in order to destroy the value that is art. Nihilism, the desire to destroy, is why the enemies of freedom fly planes into buildings and blow themselves up with dynamite.

At root, their desire for religious rapture in a paradise attained by mass destruction is a desire to lose the most important value of all, their own lives. Their hatred of the West is not based on jealousy but on hatred of the good because it is good. Their claim that Western culture is evil is based on their view that freedom, productiveness, achievement, reason and happiness are evil. What they want instead is the nothing, das Nichts, that is death. This is why they fly with gay abandon into the inferno-to attain a zero, for their victims and themselves.

Of course they recognize, on some level, that the material products of the West are good, since they use the products of freedom in order to destroy the products of freedom. But this shows only that they use these products-they do not value them, and they do not value those who produce them. They much prefer nothing.

They are not alone in this preference.

Their use of values to destroy values is a method that has been accepted by a series of anti-capitalists, anti-reason thugs across the globe. The Unabomber used transcontinental industries, computerized delivery services, and communication systems to build and deliver his bombs, and to publish his anti-industrial manifesto. An anti-industrial environmental protester used a mobile phone while sitting in a Redwood tree in California. An anti-capitalist protester in England co-ordinated his troops with digital text pagers. The Arab countries nationalized American and English oil industries after they had been produced, and use the money to destroy the values that made the revenues possible. And now hijackers steal transcontinental jets and turn them into missiles, in order to destroy the values and the people that produced the jet.

These people use the same method because they have the same goal: to reduce our present civilization to the level of pre-civilization, as an end in itself.

Observe how they agree. The present life expectancy in Afghanistan is 42-almost to the prehistoric ideal of the anti-technology "deep ecologists." A motto of one environmentalist group, I remind you, is "Back to the Pleistocene." Afghanistan has no technology-the ideal of the Unabomber. It has no businesses-the ideal of the anti-capitalists. It has rejected reason-the ideal of anti-reason professors. In these terms Afghanistan is not lacking in development-it is at the pinnacle of human aspirations.

Morally there is no difference between an environmentalist who bans DDT at the price of millions of malaria deaths, the Unabomber who selects his victims personally, the anarchist who smashes store windows and dreams of smashing structural steel, and a terrorist who rides a passenger plane into the World Trade Center. Each glories in destruction for its own sake, and each advocates death as the epitome of that destruction. It is no accident that they are all defined in terms of "anti-something." Nothing is the aim, and the goal, of all of them. They are brothers-in-arms. Now you see the scope of the battle that America faces.

So what do we do about this? Intellectually what we must do is state an idea: that western civilization is moral because it is good. We have a right to exist, and a right to defend ourselves. The purpose and motive of western civilization is life, the exact opposite of the death-worship seen in nihilists of all stripes. Ours is the morality of life and theirs the morality of death.

Once this statement is made, and the basic rights of each person to engage in such work and to trade with others is made clear, then the way will be cleared to respond to the killers of Sep 11. The essence here is to protect those of us who value life, by granting their own wish to those who do not.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century American stands at a cross-roads. The choice we have was created, in part, by our past errors. If, when the Lockerbie airline bomber killed so many in the early 1980's, America had presented an ultimatum to Libya backed by force, instead of begging for co-operation, it is doubtful that any government would have allowed itself to be associated with training the Sep 11 killers. The attack, and the present war, might have been avoided.

If, when a professor maintained that reason was a mere western prejudice, his students had dropped his classes and demanded his resignation, then the very idea that life, reason and freedom should negotiate with death, mysticism and slavery would be exposed and rejected.

If, when you are offered so-called "music" by anti-capitalist, anti-reason bums who chant of killing cops and blowing up buildings, you refuse to buy those albums, and you speak out against them, the so-called "artists" will receive neither stardom nor fortune. They will slither back under the rocks they crawled out of, and music companies will change their programming.

To straighten out the political and intellectual mess we face today we must re-affirm our commitment to reason and freedom, and their purpose, life, by protecting ourselves from killers, foreign and domestic, physical and intellectual. And we must do it because we are good.

First published in Capitalism Magazine on September 20, 2001.

Random Old thoughts - 4 years ago Views (154)·May 23, 2007 The Trappings of Earthly Existence - A rough prelude to 'the book'

Most will never see the true reality that exists beneath their own perceptions. To know and to be appear as dissimilar and noncohesive as oil and vinegar. If one could look beyond the obvious differences in all things, the universe itself unfolds and is quite simple to understand, to grasp, to comprehend; as well as manipulate.


Truth be told, there exists a synergistic commonality to all things real, whether known or not. Humanity only suffers of itself and its inherent myopia of its perceptual ineptitude. Destiny is also an illusion of perception, much as a generalization or stereotype perpetuates itself to become accepted truth. To truly exert a free will, one must learn to step outside the construct of fate in order to see the infinitely larger picture. The truth of Destiny is that everything is intricately woven together but is also a part of the same 'one' that is all things, henceforth belying the perceptual illusion of its true nature. This simple truth only further serves to confound the casual onlooker, the unenlightened (for lack of a better term.)