25 Saturday Jun 2016
Putin in his own feudal revanche has played extremes against the middle, backing both Far Left and Far Right movements, including “new nationalists” and related personalities. Dictatorships want for cause and revel in creating the instability against which they may make themselves look good. In the struggle between the medieval worldview and absolute power and the modern democratic distribution and “checking” of power, this unwitting vote plays to Moscow’s feudal intents.
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23 Thursday Jun 2016
Posted in 21st Century Feudal, Russia, Ukraine
Tags
On May 23, during a visit to Crimea, Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev made a fool of himself with a cynical and provocative phrase that quickly became one of the most popular hits on Russian Internet. Answering the question from an elderly lady about why pensions are not being raised, Medvedev, without so much as a thought, retorted: “There’s simply no money. If we find the money, we will raise pensions. You hold on here, I wish you all the best, good spirits and good health.” But the money is lacking not only for pensioners: all those who had for years depended on the needle of “Putinomics” are experiencing problems.
Source: Committee for Russian Economic Freedom » Putin’s Regime Thumbs its Nose – 6/16/2016.
22 Wednesday Jun 2016
Islamic State (IS) members “are following sharia, Quran, word by word,” stated Iraqi Catholic Chaldean priest Douglas Bazi at Washington, DC’s Catholic Information Center(CIC) during a May 10 presentation. His comments, part of an American speaking tourthat included a Heritage Foundation panel the next day, gave an unusually frank assessment of Islam’s inherently dangerous aspects born of bitter personal experience.
Bazi has previously been similarly politically incorrect, telling a 2015 conference in Italy that “there’s no such thing as moderate Islam.”
Source: Iraqi Priest Unveils Islamic Oppression – Religious Freedom Coalition, June 20, 2016.
BackChannels has consistently promoted the perception — and believes it valid and reliable — that the Ummah is broad and that modern Muslims have engaged in a great conversation as regards the character of Islam and their options within its framework and with the world beyond it. Nonetheless, how does one engage a partisan publication whose authors and subjects know firsthand the nature of Muslim-borne diminishment or marginalization, subjugation and greater persecution, and, in the end, nothing more or less than theft and murder in the name of Allah? One cannot argue with that experience, and the same repeats itself in history, lending veracity to Baghdadi’s efforts to emulate Muhammad’s existence and his politics. At the same time, who among Muslims living in the west would care to live today as Baghdadi maneuvers today on the proceeds of crime and general pillage? Pray God, everyone, we do not place the medieval world forward of the one in which you have accessed this blog.
22 Wednesday Jun 2016
Suggested: “Interest” x “Values” x “Value” | Rationale.
From a humanist’s standpoint, the Syrian Tragedy hasn’t looked at all rational, but viewed through a lens that takes in “absolute power”, “feudalism”, “malignant narcissism”, and the wholesale producing of a theater of war as a demonstration of power, well then it makes perfect sense, horrific though that may be.
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22 Wednesday Jun 2016
Yesterday, OilPro reported, “Putin Reportedly Considers Selling $11bn of Rosneft To China & India” (June 21, 2016), and I was asked for an opinion:
It could be a ruse or an easy play to encourage the feudalism he needs to keep his state where he has placed it as a new and kicking feudal homeland, but the ruling cultures — FSB and Big Oligarch Money — continue to confuse Russians and otherwise devour the state (that’s what kleptocracies do). I no longer know how true to form the “mafia state” and “Putin’s Kleptocracy” may be as Putin has for some years tried forcing the oligarchs to invest and spend within Russia. Now Russia has the “T-34 Tank Tomato” for export. What else is in the pipeline? And how “unreformed” may Russians and others, especially the open democracies, expect Russia to be, say, five years from now?
As regards Syria: it appears Putin, Assad, and Khamenei had expected to defend “feudal absolute power” with a great demonstration of barbarism plus the development of ISIS. The west’s refusal to intervene, which matter might and will be argued for a while, I’m sure, has left the problems created in the hands of those who fashioned them. Call it divine justice — or not — the three dictators have now to seriously diminish ISIS and reclaim Syrian space for the privileged of the state whose interests Assad represents. They were so smart in 2011 that here in 2016 they are draining their own pockets.
The Obama Administration’s apparent policy of “least (visible) war possible” has forestalled interventions certainly noted as possibilities deep down in the government’s soul while it forged ahead with strategic maneuvers ranging from the achievement of energy independence to the buttressing of NATO elements where needed to stave off Russia’s renewed but “neo-imperial” ambitions. Perhaps the point has been to strengthen the “western” (oh, come on: let’s call it the “human”) hand (naturally politically coherent, democratic, integrating, self-actualizing, self-organizing across broad polities) while receiving the survivor-refugees coming off the “Syrian Tragedy”, BackChannel’s term for what has been observed since 2011 in the Syrian theater of war.
BackChannels. “Cold War? –> Cold Struggle.” May 15, 2016.
BackChannels: “Syria — ‘Assad vs The Terrorists’ — How ISIS Defends Assad”, October 2, 2015.
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21 Tuesday Jun 2016
Re. Language — https://www.amazon.com/Language-Cultural-Daniel-L-Everett/dp/0307473805 The author, Daniel Everett, challenges a substantial basis or claim in Chomsky’s theorizing about language.
My kernel for how languages work would be metonymy with paired, primary, and secondary sound/other signal associations. N. may want to catch this because it’s one of the elements involved in conflict within Islam that make winnowing the issue down to the “God Mob” (such may not be restricted to Islam but may be archaic elsewhere) so difficult. If one asks, for example, what the term “homosexual” means in terms of its resonance — what else does it call to mind? — we have several approaches to analyzing that. The science community might want to know and then refer to the incidence in behavior in nature x species and fit that data and theorizing about it with similar data compiled for Homo Sapiens sapiens.
The bohemian-creative communities, long on hedonism, unconsciously selfish or deep down exploitive and willful, give it a glance, give it a go, paint, write, dance, sing (“Take a Walk on the Wild Side”) about it, include it, dismiss it as trivial, so many other things considered, and move right on to their next scene. Dig? 🙂
And the religious refer to holy scripture and the logic of edict that must follow, which mentality went hard on the witches of Salem, not too many hundreds of years ago, and has visited similar villainy to . . . gays in an Orlando nightclub.
Bored, confused, dead-ended, invisible, still energetic and searching for answers — and then comes imam or speaker Farrokh Sekaleshfar who explains that the Muslim response to homosexuality is death, and it would be merciful to get it over with.
Now we have an issue: how stable is that message in Islamic jurisprudence and scholarship?
That’s really asking a question about metonymy within Arabic and within Islamic thought.
Then: how authoritative and how deep goes the distribution of that thought through the Ummah?
The Dhimmi and infidel on the defensive before such a cultural and political program may approach the same thought with external ideas, and chief among alternatives authoritative secular governance founded on reason undergirded by science and research and wedded to compassion, humility, inclusion, and tolerance.
Counterterrorism is a complex field, but in the language part, many recognize aspects of the talk (e.g., invoking the term “crusader west”) that key into signature by way of talk x behavioral change x foreign travel / association with Muslim Brotherhood figures x media obsessions x planning x arming.
In the west, wild poets alter the meaning of elements in language on an experimental basis, at least, and the public picks up and sustains what it finds “cool” — and, for the most part, the culture, the whole shebang, recapitulates itself into the modern English world.
In the Ummah, one still meets Farrokh Sekaleshfar sincerely plying old and frankly monstrous thought with authority. He’s got his hands full today (as a person of interest to western authorities), but what he’s drawn from in language has “cultural metonymic stability” — i.e., he’s not the only one talking that talk and pushing it into everyone’s future.
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/06/12/omar-mir-seddique-mateen-known-to-the-fbi/ – 6/12/2016.
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15 Wednesday Jun 2016
Tags
21st Century Neo-Feudalism, agitation-propaganda, agitprop, anti-Semitism, BDS, Boycotts Divestitures Sanctions, contemporary feudalism, Moscow-Tehran, New Left, Old Left, post-Cold War, post-Soviet
One might agree with the sentiment in “BDS is mainly the invention of self-hating Israelis and Jews” but the truth is it’s mainly the invention of historic Russian anti-Semitism ported through the Soviet Union to the “comrade networks” that today have morphed into the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left.
Here’s one of their portals, and I think a glance at the names still on the marquis, as it were, tells of the “longer game” being played on the world stage.
http://www.blackforpalestine.com/
In the wings, imho, but not without cause: the Russo-Syrian effort to sustain their systems of feudal absolute power far into the 21st Century. As KSA realigns westward, or follows its massive investments in the west, Moscow and Tehran may remain committed to installing in the west greater chaos, dissension, and threat.
It’s a big picture view, but the connections between so-called “liberation movements” (add the Far Right New Nationalists like Viktor Orban to the mix) seem to me unmistakable. Possibly, Obama and his subaltern Shapiro are giving signal, whether lip service or sincere, back to Moscow, as the Palestinians remain incapable of challenging the PLO / PA (set up by the KGB way back when) and Hamas (whom Moscow today refuses to designate a terrorist organization).
Does the suggested political architecture work?
Test it.
Directly related on BackChannels, which is now well woven: Syndicate Red Brown Green.
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13 Monday Jun 2016
Moscow and Tehran have two interests served by facilitating and manipulating terrorists organizations: 1) sustaining the feudal worldview — including in the writing of political theater that is history itself — that in turn sustains each their own medieval leadership and systems of patronage; 2) weakening their enemies by infiltrating them with divisive political subcultures.
Notably, Moscow has refused to designate Hamas and Hezbollah and others as terrorist organizations. The probably reason for that is that the same are subject to “handling” in the interests of the now neo-feudal, neo-imperial Russian state.
Moscow has so far refused to designate Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations.
Tehran, of course, has a complicated but nonetheless a sponsoring relationship with Hamas and Hezbollah (the URL links to a 2014 U.S. State Department report: BackChannels believes the underlying politics have not changed radically in the two years that have passed).
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BackChannels 