Category Archives: Conflict – Culture – Language – Psychology

FTAC: On the Far Gone Right’s Medieval Rumor Mill

22 Tuesday Dec 2020

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, United States of America

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From the Awesome Conversation

How do you think you know what you think you know?

Where is the “Deep State”? What is “The Swamp”?

No medieval rumor mill in history competes with the accusations, innuendos, and wild conspiracy theories and faked-up notions promoted by the Far Gone Right.

To date, DT has lost numerous lawsuits for lack of evidence of fraud. AG Barr has rightly refused to walk with him over the cliff into anti-American authoritarian control of the nation by way of narcissistic paranoia and force.

Go back to the beginning and start with whom Trump chose to appoint as his first campaign manager: https://www.businessinsider.com/paul-manafort-russia-ties-2017-10

Learn about “Accusation in a Mirror”.

Apart from that, chill or wake up or calm down.

“Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down,” Trump told Jones, who for years had been pushing a message that “elites” and “globalists” are part of a secret conspiracy that controls the world. “You will be very — very impressed, I hope.”

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/alex-jones-and-donald-trump-how-the-candidate-echoed-the-conspiracy-theorist-on-the-campaign-trail/ – 7/28/2020.

QAnon[a] (/ˌkjuːəˈnɒn/) is a disproven and discredited far-rightconspiracy theory[b] alleging that a cabal of Satan-worshippingpedophiles is running a global child sex-trafficking ring and plotting against US presidentDonald Trump, who is fighting the cabal.[2] QAnon also commonly asserts that Trump is planning a day of reckoning known as the “Storm”, when thousands of members of the cabal will be arrested.[3][4] No part of the conspiracy claim is based in fact.[5][6][7][8]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-is-qanon-what-we-know-about-the-conspiracy-theory-11597694801 – 10/15/2020.

Posted to YouTube by FRONTLINE PBS July 28, 2020.

Also Related Online: Jon Ronson, The Elephant in The Room, THEM: Adventures with Extremists; Nancy L. Rosenblug and Russell Muirhead, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2019).

Wisdom: “He who points the finger has three pointing back at himself.”

“I just learned of absolute incontrovertible evidence of North Korean boats delivering ballots through a harbor in Maine, the state of Maine,” Stone said. “If this checks out, if law enforcement looked into that and it turned out to be true, it would be proof of foreign involvement in the election.”

Maine Secretary of State Matt Dunlap addressed Stone’s claims in a statement to NEWS CENTER Maine Thursday, saying the “vague rumor has absolutely no validity.”

https://www.wwltv.com/article/news/politics/roger-stone-claims-north-korea-delivered-ballots-through-maine-harbor/97-c47d00b8-4650-4c5d-8115-424f3106ab23 – 12/3/2020.

On Election Day 2016, I sat in the passenger seat of Alex Jones’s Dodge Hellcat as we swerved through traffic, making our way to a nearby polling place. As Jones punched the gas pedal to the floor, the smell of vodka, like paint thinner, wafted up from the white Dixie cup anchored in the console. My stomach churned as the phone I held streamed live video to Facebook: Jones rambling about voter fraud and rigged elections while I stared at the screen, holding the camera at an angle to hide his double chin. It rarely worked, but I didn’t want to be blamed when he watched the video later.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/magazine/alex-jones-infowars.html – cameraman Josh Owens on his Alex Jones experience – 12/5/2019.

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FTAC: Medieval v Modern: Three Comments

20 Sunday Dec 2020

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, North America, Political Psychology, United States of America

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What has the medieval world — its views of humanity and related political methods — been doing in our modern one?

Perhaps I’ve been naive about the evolution of the political management of power across time, for I have thought my modern American democracy and its many responsible and responsive institutions the most wonderful humanist and secular invention on earth and in history. However, some beg to disagree with the evolution of the optimal organization of open modern democratic communities, and here are we Americans saddled with surprisingly medieval mobs, an “authoritarian” president (on his way out) and, at least before the recent election, a senate full of head-bobbing lords before his questionable majesty.

Quite often on this theme, I’ve hauled in “Basic Training” — the pledge of America’s civilian and military officials and officers to the Constitution — or, as here, made mention of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, but as this morning’s start brought the following ‘graphs flying off my desktop, well, a copy-and-paste seemed fitting. The first comment addresses the basic issue of having the past dragging the world’s future backward toward what has been known not to work. 🙂 The second excerpt deals with Russia’s 19th Century political ambitions for what should be a thoroughly hopping 21st Century EU/NATO.

From the Awesome Conversation

I’ve come to see the great divide in the management of power as that between feudal-medieval political absolutism underpinned by desperation, dogma, and some propensities for evil and the MODERN open democratic distribution of the same by balanced and checked integrated systems and related processes. I think there’s difficulty in popular understanding of what has been deeply planted in the soul of medieval leadership where one inevitably finds the despotic and malignantly narcissistic among kings, essentially. In the milieu of despots and Presidents-for-Life remains the endowment we have inherited from the “Old World”, and while it is here in us, we are all together still part of an evolving New World. Putin and Xi see no necessity for it. Where one may place the present personalities may well have to do with that “Medieval v Modern” theme.

DJT chose this gentleman for his first campaign manager: https://www.businessinsider.com/paul-manafort-russia-ties-2017-10

From the Imperial Period to the Bolsheviks to Putin, Russia has not been able to escape feudal-medieval political absolutism. Worse, is has been able to encourage the same in EU/NATO with reversions in political modality standing out in Hungary, Italy, Poland, and Turkey. Great Britain has been a little mixed up in this too with its reaction to 9/11, post-9/11 attacks, and the Moscow-Damascus driven forced migration from Syria. It too chose to “swell” (as flesh does with stings and other assaults) against greater cooperation with Europe in the interest of sealing and securing its own culture and traditions via BREXIT.

Putin’s promotion of Russia as a pious White Russian Nationalist enterprise belies its own multicultural reality — and you have seen the Grand Mosque opening video from2015 — but for the time being in Russia and the European states mentioned, a resurgent past holds sway.

What we cling to for assurance and safety, no less than mother’s dress, is always somewhere back in time.

I’d say Moscow has had a good and medieval run against an unprepared West, but if the problem is the persistence of the Medieval world in our Modern one, then we may proceed with the greater development of a more modern and democratic world. It’s all a bump on time’s highway, not a permanent turnaround into a much, much less desirable past.

Our nation was born forward of the Age of Reason and designed to defy absolute power in favor of a checked and balanced distribution of power to be managed through democratic methods. The nation has (to this point) succeeded with that. In the regions of personal behaviors, ethics, and morals, it has been generous with tolerance but some part has migrated from raised eyebrows and winks (naughty!) into criminally dark enterprise plainly criminal incidents. Such matters require investigative and Justice Department solutions, not cultural overhauls.

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FTAC: On the Habit of Partisan Demonizations

15 Tuesday Dec 2020

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Egypt, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Iran, Israel, Middle East, Political Psychology, Political Spychology

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The Breitbart article featured up top on a Facebook page: “Joe Biden Delivered Egyptian Disinformation to Israel Ahead of Yom Kippur War and Later Lied About It” (Dec. 13, 2020). The slanted header, an appeal to emotion without examination, was in the same piece — and shortly — debunked: “However, Biden himself paints a very different picture of the meeting with Meir, one that puts into question the depiction of him as an unwitting tool who unknowingly passed on disinformation to Israel.”

Well, gosh golly — watch plumes of dust rising into the air over the neighboring state’s military exercises, report it, and make a decision about the enemies true near intentions.

Can’t do that?

Not enough to go on?

Intelligence people use terms like “estimate” and “mosaic” to describe both the uncertainty of perception and the many pieces needed to venture a guess — a good one, so one hopes — about what’s happening in the world as they see it displayed before their own eyes.

From the Awesome Conversation

This editor’s response to the continuing partisan presentation of political history and present states of affairs –>

Our politicians need to be working issues rather than demonizing one another.

The Brietbart piece makes clear that the conveyance of “intelligence” is often ambiguous and subject to broader analysis. Biden was apparently not happy with what he saw, and the Egyptian effort at deception would have in those years been taken as par for the Arab course in its enmity with Israel.

Times have changed. Moscow backing Tehran (and Damascus) has helped pushed the Sunni Arab world westward for modernization as well as security.

Americans and Israelis should know who their enemies are as well as persons or states neither positioned for nor temperamentally fit for enmity. Overall, Israel has some complicated trade relationships, including with China who purchases oil from Tehran in support of both its belligerence and existence (China has been notoriously insensitive to the character of many of its trading partners). Here’s a part of the deal going between China and Iran — https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/09/05/chinas-great-game-in-iran/ (9/5/2020).

President Trump, now in his lame duck phase, has most definitely lost his bid for a second term. More or less, he lost his race on character, essentially driving voters out of the Republican ranks to ensure his losing.

In the United States, we have experienced a period of brutal polarization driven by the absence of critical research and reasoning skills in much of the population, disinformation from foreign interlopers (look up “Internet Research Agency” as an example), and plain old hyped up Party-invented agitation and propaganda. With Trump’s now unquestionable loss of a second term, it may be time to pack away the kit of passionate but largely errant assumptions and beliefs about American and, in general, western conservatives and liberals and have a fresh look instead (and again together) at real issues stemming from the illiberal character and greed of the enemies of the west.

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My Tweet to Ted Cruz

11 Friday Dec 2020

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, North America, Politics, United States of America

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For many in the States, the American breakfast table with its coffee and morning news, the blessing or curse (both) of close family, the coffee and pancakes, and the “hey, Martha, listen to this” off the headlines has been replaced by the wake-up brew slurped by the nation’s (the world’s) keyboard warriors. So it goes, and what caught my eye on Twitter first thing was a tweet (long lost when I tried to find it again) on Cruz assenting to defend Trump’s mind-bending effort to run around the relationship between the state’s voters and Electoral College representatives.

Related and Recent Online — https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-joe-biden-donald-trump-pennsylvania-ken-paxton-b1451249400026effe93cf4e080a9d91 (12/9/2020).

With relation to all of the above, the Far Out Left’s historical power-seizing mantra “By any means necessary!” appears revived on the dark heights of the nation’s Far Wrong Right in its fraud-fishing efforts to have Biden win reversed.

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Potential Faked Up News: AOC and the Palestinian BDS Sign

10 Thursday Dec 2020

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, Also in Media, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, Journalism, North America, Political Psychology, United States of America

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Downloaded from FB thread December 10, 2020.
Screen capture from web search December 10, 2020.
Screen capture from web search, December 10, 2020.

Get the picture?

The portent is chilling.

Related online: Shafran, Rabbi Avi. “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn’t Ilhan Omar or Rashida Talib — especially on Israel and anti-Semitism.” JTA, March 14, 2019.

“AOC” — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — arrives online so filtered and slanted by a media process more abundant with opinion than primary data that I just don’t wish to take so many presentations at face value. Conservatives in general and self-branded conservative Jews tend to demonize her in ways long on accusation and short on substantial material.

With regard to the image at the top of this post, I would like to know exactly when and where AOC held that sign, IF she actually held that sign.

Notice, please, the QAnon promotion of the same AOC image but with different signs providing the message.

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Conscience

08 Tuesday Dec 2020

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Philosophy, Political Psychology

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I’ve thought here to mash up a post about conscience, which is to me a mysterious part of our universal human evolution: whether or not we like it, we’re more generally good — good hearted, good natured, helpful, kind by way of empathy and sympathy, lawful and respectful with a basis for both in simple transactional psychology.

Down the left side of this blog are epigrammatic statements that have most to do with the grooming of strongly good global cultural psychology. Authoritarianism, despotism, excessive egoism, and tyranny are on the outs while consideration, cooperation, and thoughtfulness are greatly — and universally — desired. Here are two quotations of quotations from the BackChannels sidebar —

Talmud 7:16 as Quoted by Rishon Rishon in 2004
Qohelet Raba, 7:16
אכזרי סוף שנעשה אכזרי במקום רחמן

Kol mi shena`asa rahaman bimqom akhzari Sof shena`asa akhzari bimqom rahaman

All who are made to be compassionate in the place of the cruel In the end are made to be cruel in the place of the compassionate.

More colloquially translated: “Those who are kind to the cruel, in the end will be cruel to the kind.”

Online Source: http://www.rishon-rishon.com/archives/044412.php

Hillel the Elder

“That which is distasteful to thee do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study.”

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?”

“Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.”

If you’re on this post, there’s a reason for it. Consider taking a moment to read what I’ve selected from Oriana Fallaci, Abraham Isaac Kook, Heinrich Heine, Simon Wiesenthal, Douglas Adams, Thucydides, Milan Kundera, Malala Yousafzai, and a briefly met online friend, Tanit Nima Tinat.

Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 2019.

Here is the lead from a review in Vox (July 8, 2019) by Sigal Samuel —

Patricia Churchland is a neurophilosopher. That’s a fancy way of saying she studies new brain science, old philosophical questions, and how they shed light on each other.

For years, she’s been bothered by one question in particular: How did humans come to feel empathy and other moral intuitions? What’s the origin of that nagging little voice that we call our conscience?

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/7/8/20681558/conscience-patricia-churchland-neuroscience-morality-empathy-philosophy

Patricia Churchland’s online presence lives here: https://patriciachurchland.com/ .

When we’re not so good — from naughty to sinful to heinous to unspeakable — we know why as greed, lust, and vanity account both for our indulgences and peccadilloes as well as many conflicts and crimes with the exception of earnest and necessary struggles against the despot and the totalitarian.

Why be good (for goodness sake)?

Conscience.

Why conscience?

I shall have to read Churchland’s book (which will be on my Kindle a minute after publishing this piece).

As small ideas and pieces come to me, I may add them to this post that drives to the core of differences between the worlds of medieval political absolutism and the far preferred modern experiences of human dignity and freedom — beyond those two may reside the Orwellian horrors of the bureaucratically and technologically capable totalitarian state headed up by thugs. For that, have a start-here look at China.

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A Moment for Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941

07 Monday Dec 2020

Posted by in 21st Century Modern, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, North America, United States of America

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Posted to YouTube by the USNA Music Department, December 5, 2016.
Tribute posted by John Dvorak and posted to YouTube December 4, 2009.
Posted to YouTube by NBC News, September 2, 2016.

The world that has become Internet-enabled now experienced the most efficient and private of computing experiences imaginable. Looking things up — and relaying some part through autonomous publishing — has become easy, and so here I will offer just one link to the history of the day: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/pearl-harbor-bombed.

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FTAC: Beijing, Moscow, Tehran & The Great Leap Into Stone

30 Monday Nov 2020

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, Asia, China, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Eurasia, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Iran, Political Psychology, Russia

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With two critical Iranian leaders assassinated — Qasem Soleimani and Mohsen Fakhrizadeh — and an American President determined to blunt the tip of the spear aimed against the west, the prospect for “fireworks” appears that much closer. Ever big on packing the Big Picture into a small space, I’ve done that here with ramble and signal but not chaos. Old Communist and Islamist politics persist in the latest states of affairs although the old Communists have produced breathtakingly wealthy elites and the chief among Islamists has been long known as a thief enriched by the plundering of ordinary Iranians.

From the Awesome Conversation

Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran represent an anti-western alliance committed to political absolutism by all and any means necessary. At least two of the three, Moscow and Tehran, represent also kleptocracy (see Reuters’ “Assets of the Ayatollah”) or mafia-type power (reference Ben Judah or Luke Harding), and together they keep the west bothered. Tehran, in malign narcissistic fashion, has covered its own crimes with deflections and dogma–it’s not strength that propels its fantasies of nuclear annihilation but regime weakness expressed through medieval fantasy. The clinical, dispassionate, and modern and prudent west may be building down Tehran’s capability, confidence, and coordination for aggression.

The old “Red-Green Alliance” is in the mix too with some persistent communist cant woven into the Houthi challenge in Yemen. The World Peace Council persists — as do graduates of Patrice Lamumba University — and the pack may view Tehran as an alley in thuggish political fashion. More important than political dogma: an heroic image to be created by marching forward into glorious past while holding each fantasy in place by main force.

Stated by Trita Parsi in 2017 (yes, just a quick look-see on my part): “Another emerging threat comes from Iran’s domestic politics. Presidential elections next month may put Iran’s foreign policy back into the hands of the country’s hard-liners, who, much like Mr. Trump, define their country in opposition to the world” (“The Coming Crisis With Iran”, The New York Times, April 20, 2017).

“Malignant Narcissism” begins with “Narcissistic Mortification”, i.e., the humiliation of the “Great Leader” (somewhere in childhood). Why everyone else has to be made a part of the compensation (measured by the Great One’s estimation of his own “Narcissistic Supply”), I’ve no idea but that the worst of the worst needs must have both an adoring audience and a horrified one.

Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran have bent themselves on feudal and medieval lusts for the conquest or control of their targets by any means necessary and all available, and then some, and each has demonstrated a remarkable political anomie in the handling of those affected by their strategies. Beijing has been making a name for itself as a culturally and politically predatory lender; Moscow: live fire “demonstrations” all over Syria to goose its defense industry sales; and Iran — just have a look at how it has treated the places in which it has chosen to facilitate aggression, especially in Yemen and Syria.

What to call the present Sino-Russo-Iranian cooperation against the west?

Tripartite Imperialism.

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