Category Archives: Epistemology

FTAC – On Empiricism and Power

15 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation

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There may be subjective experiences, but there’s is no “whose truth” in empiricism, and especially as regards forensic investigations and the courts (open, of record) and processes the support them. The feudal lords of any era would, of course, control the courts and influence or control the clergy, dealing themselves the power to rule capriciously. As regards the leverage provided by metaphysical beliefs to provoke mobs, there is no end or settlement: what human would presume to know the nature of God? 🙂 The structures built atop such assertions lend themselves to arguments that cannot be resolved — in Obama’s term pluralized, “dumb wars”.

Among observers — detectives, journalists, lawyers, scientists — one viewer always views only a portion of the crime, parade, or war, so there’s room for “whose report” but as data developed with integrity compiles into contribution to case, hypotheses, and theories, that subjective character becomes increasingly objective plus + “valid and reliable” — and the same remains challengeable forever although challenges may stop as they drift into absurdity.

Perhaps loyalty to one point of view or another proves power because someone (by way of intimidation or reward) has developed the ability to get others to see as might be wished.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/quote-manipulation…/

The blog represents only a developing perspective, of course, but the reference points and their sources may all be examined. We do not have to live in a world “framed” by the caprice and foibles of the powerful. The public has tools more powerful than the same and can in good conditions hold the same to account.

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FTAC – Margins and Shadows

06 Thursday Aug 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Journalism, Political Spychology, Politics, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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The Machiavellian “behind the curtains” has been supplanted by “in the shadows” and into the shadows may be where mainstream media fears to tread.

Both the Bond movies and Le Carre novels, and I’ve enjoyed both in series, have reflected in fiction the issues (as well as atmosphere) of their day, each work of art in essence packaging up the look and spirit of a part of a decade using the secret world as its window. For the writers, intuitive exploration may turn out more secure than looking into essentially powerful secret societies.  In fact, the possession of private power and wealth may be inseparable today from the control of political influence and movement in the mirrors of criminal and lawful worlds and the feudal and democratic ones in which the bad guys work in secrecy and the good guys do as well but, perhaps, differently.

http://www.madmagazine.com/blog/2013/04/23/mad-spy-vs-spy-prints-for-sale

In real life, someone leads an organization that kidnaps an Israeli Olympic team at the event — and someone else leads another organization that quietly hunts down the miscreants.

Must the journalists know all? And when?  As history?  As now?

Many stories emerge over time.

I haven’t yet watched _Kill the Messenger_ but from description it appears that it will fit with a stack of nonfiction histories about the security services of states. Whatever happened may be done, but the processes may not be done, and that’s where the public becomes curious in its own interest. However, journalism has also a politics of discretion belied by the terms of art “on the record” and “off the record” and the public may never know what has been imparted “off the record”, much less what has been sealed in the minds of agents and the vaults of the KGB/FSB and others.

I’m more inclined to trust The Washington Post than, say, Alex Jones 🙂 , but one may suspect that the Post must also keeps secrets.

With conventional warfare somewhat nulled by the immense firepower developed by would-be adversaries, the twists that are “low-intensity conflict”, “hybrid warfare”, “war by proxy” and so on depend on mafia-type arrangements and relationships to produce activity (or perhaps as much has been always the way of the street in which conflicts are conceived and worked into reality).

Posted to YouTube 12/1/2014.

In books available through Amazon and in videos on YouTube, there’s a surfeit of material covering the history of spying, from The Bible, no less, and forward.  One has only to look.  Of historic interest and, perhaps, contemporary curiosity, may be the depth of control and integration a state has with its people along this axis.  From the 20th Century experience, the mere mention of “Gestapo”, “STASI”, and “KGB” summon the vision of totalitarian police states operated by political elites with security forces sufficiently populated to reach down through their societies to the extent that even children are made into informants.

The prompt for this post was Diane Weber Bederman’s recent piece in the Canadian Press, “Media dereliction of duty to the citizenry” (August 6, 2015) about the film Kill The Messenger (which I have not yet seen, but I like IMDB’s quotation of the tag line: “Can you keep a national secret?”).

When Mr. Putin and company set out to preserve the privileges of the Soviet without the Soviet (reference: Karen Dawisha’s book, Putin’s Kleptocracy), the drive appears to have been developed precisely for interest already established within the KGB and Party to preserve power and wealth and the ability to distribute the same to similar favored elites.  As a king to knights and lords, so has Putin been to his “new nobility” (another title in the Russian Section of this blog’s library).

Do the services of western powers mirror the security systems that maintain Russia’s neo-feudal governance (yes/no?) and, if so, democracy by democracy, how?  What’s similar? What’s different?

I’d rather imagine the answers and work in fiction — and may, for this lonesome blogger is not The Washington Post or The New York Times, and even the “best and brightest” in those companies may choose — or have long chosen — to exercise discretion.

Who’s to know?

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Link – MEF – Summer – ” . . . that death is not death . . . .”

18 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, Iran, Islamic Small Wars, Links, Political Psychology, Psychology, Religion

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Suicide terrorism has become so commonplace that it is easy to overlook how relatively new and suddenly popular the phenomenon is. Between the end of World War II and the Iranian revolution, there were no suicide attacks in the world. Yet only months after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini solidified power and formed the Pasdaran and Basij, suicide attacks began to appear in conflicts involving Shiites (Lebanon, the Iran-Iraq war) and then took root among Palestinian Sunni groups.[3] It eventually became the preferred tactic of Islamist terror organizations.

Khomeini selected specific passages from the Qur’an and hadith (canonical collections of Muhammad’s alleged sayings and actions) to craft his suicidal version of radical Islam. His two-part rhetorical plan necessitated convincing Muslims that suicide is not suicide and that death is not death.

Caschetta, A. J.  “Does Islam Have a Role in Suicide Bombings?” Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2015.

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FTAC – “Trusted Others” – Online

18 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, A Little Wisdom, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philology, Politics

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“Trusted others” has been an issue here, and I haven’t found a way to handle it except by being circumspect, diplomatic, and in line with the run of the western opposition. The beauty of “open source intelligence (OSI)”, a very fancy way of saying one reads the news and socializes online and draws on that for commentary (it’s a hobby), is that it is open: the world that can access the Internet in English is reading off the same pages. Those of us in the “social network” here and elsewhere are pioneering together in time.

The only thing available to adverse parties in these online news and social zones is their own reflection: they are left reading about their image from multiple perspectives and sources, not that they don’t try to inform that image creation themselves.  However, for political narrative, truth and its stability are easier to work with than the anarchy that comes of clumsy, doubtful, and self-serving fictions.

So pithy, I’ve assigned it to the “A Little Wisdom” section of this blog.

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Link – Hungarian Anti-Semite – Jewish! After All.

08 Monday Jun 2015

Posted by in Anti-Semitism, Epistemology, Religion

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“There was just this ever growing spiral of hatred, I worked hard to be a real racist. I read about it, studied it, and became one,” he says.

In 2001, when Szegedi embarked on a degree in history at Budapest University, he began to formalise his association with the nationalist cause through activism on the Far Right.

But had he ever actually met a Jew?

“Actually, there were a couple of Jewish students on my course and they were OK. We went to parties together,” he says. “But anti-Semitism isn’t about the Jewish people, it’s about the anti-Semite. The anti-Semite is projecting his own fears.”

Epstein, Angela.  “This politician hates Jews.  Then found out he was one.”  The Telegraph, June 8, 2015.

Relevant on BackChannels: “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation“.

Add a little more data about an unbridle, perhaps juvenile, narcissism: “Syriamania – Rock and Roll!”

As comprehension of the anti-Semite improves worldwide — anti-Semitic activity and expression has never appeared from “out of the blue”: it has been formulated, driven and promoted, and used to abet theft by despots through the ages — our awareness of another facet in the life of our gregarious species may become more cogent: we humans get around (and it’s healthy that we do so).  Csanad Szegedi, however dramatic his story, joins many others (Christopher Hitchens and Madeleine Albright come most readily to mind) who discovered their Jewish heritage while far along in their adult lives.

Related Reference

Carey, Roane.  “A ‘Non-Jewish Jew,’ Hitchens Welcomed Finding He Was Jewish–But Not Zionism.”  Forward, December 21, 2011:

In 1987, when Christopher Hitchens discovered at age 38 that he was Jewish, he was, as he later wrote “pleased to find that I was pleased.” The discovery moved the atheist to contact the only rabbi he knew personally to explore what he might be missing. His meetings with Rabbi Robert Goldburg didn’t shake Hitchens from his unbelief. But, as he wrote in a 1998 essay, it did prompt him to think that Judaism “might turn out to be the most ethically sophisticated tributary of humanism.”

Kaleem, Jaweed.  “Madeleine Albright Discusses Her Jewish Background And Her New Book, ‘Prague Winter'”.  Huffington Post, April 28, 2012:

I’m very proud of my Czechoslovak background, but my identity the way I describe it now: I am an American, I am a mother, I am a grandmother, I am a Democrat, I came from Jewish heritage, I was a Roman Catholic, I am a practicing Episcopalian, I am somebody who is devoted to human rights, I am somebody who believes in an international community and I can’t separate those things. … I can trace these various parts as having a profound influence on me in one form or another.

Kessel, Barbara.  Suddenly Jewish: Jews Raised as Gentiles Discover Their Jewish Roots.  Waltham, Massachusetts: Brandeis University Press, 2000.  Aish has a review by Rabbi Berel Wein (October 19, 2002).  From the Google Books page:

One woman learned on the eve of her Roman Catholic wedding. One man as he was studying for the priesthood. Madeleine Albright famously learned from the Washington Post when she was named Secretary of State.

“What is it like to find out you are not who you thought you were?” asks Barbara Kessel in this compelling volume, based on interviews with over 160 people who were raised as non-Jews only to learn at some point in their lives that they are of Jewish descent. With humor, candor, and deep emotion, Kessel’s subjects discuss the emotional upheaval of refashioning their self-image and, for many, coming to terms with deliberate deception on the part of parents and family. Responses to the discovery of a Jewish heritage ranged from outright rejection to wholehearted embrace.

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FTAC – Intuitive Statement on Cultural Transmission

03 Wednesday Jun 2015

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philology, Political Psychology, Politics, Psychology

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Our cultural and language differences have a breadth to them defined by the wild nature of nature. From my intuitive perspective, our cultural programming begins when the ears are turned on, if not before, and that’s in the womb. We hear — and we start “taking statistics” on sound. Correlation — with our own chemistry and mood; with the timbre and meaning of noise, so that we may discern what is important in listening and set aside similar data to focus on it — would seem a part of that process. By the time we get around to speaking ourselves or, later, reading, we have learned — or come to believe — an awful lot about cultural and physical aspects of our environment. Most fascinating, albeit again intuited: without language, we cannot suspend our cultures in time by transmitting the same through the tongue.

What’s up there is not such a bold new thought.  Linguists have been long submerged beneath the surface of it and “taking statistics” themselves from observations of behavior in relation to language uptake in infancy.

What may be new given our access here to the Awesome Worldwide Conversation may be our adult ability to become both introspective and observing across language cultures faced with or hosting significant conflict-related violence and querying the sources of development of related psychological contributors.  “Cognitive style”; “listening style”; “manners in speech”; “attitude-behavior correspondence” and its ancillaries in the individual’s interior development of beliefs and their emotional and logical primacy and weight.

Across cultures, do we hear and listen, read, and speak as if the same — or are we differentially programmed?

Down to households and up to high office, cultures support and perpetuate intellectual ecologies familiar to their residents but perhaps alien beyond themselves.  That’s something to think about when launching an app, choosing movie or television program to watch in the “home theater”, or when opening a book or game with which one covertly, privately, interacts, mind-to-mind or mind-to-minds.

Mommy sends – baby receives: what do mothers send?  What do babies get?   Examine x dyad x household x community x region x state?  Are things we may suppose universal actually so?

In the middle east conflict, there seem always to be things “everybody knows” that turn out not in the least true.

Better ask the flat earth believers: what are the effects of social conformance, fear, or anti-authority protest on what may be observed, argued, and measured (and re-observed, measured, and tested) as true?

Is there a difference between “political cant, propaganda, and rhetoric” and plain honest, valid, reliable, and responsible speech?

Addendum – FTAC – June 4, 2015

What’s relevant could be described as global ethnolinguistic survival and self-determination. Baloch, Kurds, Hebrews, Pashtun, and others (the earth’s inventory of living languages stands at around 7,000 speech communities, albeit with far fewer major language groups) share this interest in common. If you’re going to go after the Hebrew soul — as long as we’re confessing: I don’t speak Hebrew: I am solely an English-speaking American, and I am still Jewish — whose soul in being is to be dispensed with next? Arab heritage? Persian?

For various reasons, beginning with the discussion-inducing qualities of the Torah — whatever its injunctions, it sets out the broadest range of ethical and moral dilemmas and puzzles (what if Eve hadn’t eaten the “fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?) — and moving on to figures like Maimonides and Hillel the Elder, the latter deliberately setting out to make Judaism more accessible to converts, what “Jewish” is remains ever arguable (except with simpletons like Hitler who thought it had to do with blood and measured that for murder — and theft — by distance from the legacy of Jewish family). Moreover, the same allows Jewish culture and life to grow and adapt to times over time without losing its essence, despite the occasional complaint from the presumptuously and magically more “authentic, pure, or real” Jew. In place of “Jew” place “Christian” for “Muslim” or “Buddhist” or “Hindu” and the same effects may apply: identity becomes more important than character; ritual supplants principle.

Language cultures may be a little different on the global landscape. Each is a part of our human library and inventory in manners, speech, and thought corresponding to the experience of life in some unique cultural space. While “updating” to access a modern (vs feudal / medieval) worldview and enjoy the benefits of that, we may also appreciate one another’s very different cultural adventure and experience to date — and be careful not to lose any.

Shall the earth’s dominant politics pit all against all?

Or shall we instead drift toward “harmonious relations” and see what might be achieved with “all for all” ascending and predominating?

The remark was prompted by listening to a colloquy on the heritage acquired by (imparted to; experienced by) the Jewish People as a people — but with reference to, I suppose, one might say, less authentic Jews.

Are Jews who don’t speak Hebrew still Jews?

Reference on YouTube (posted May 31, 2015): “BEIT MIDRASH LAVI – What is Israel’s Oral Law?”

Out of our abundant human adaptive and intellectual abilities, metaphysical thought puts up an astounding construction, if you will, in language: beliefs, miracles, legends, myths, fables, homilies, epigram, witticisms . . . all of those words — words, words! — shaping our outlook on existence itself.

Of late, I’ve been asking myself what it means to be an American these days, that as opposed to a hyphenated-American, an American modified by race, color, creed, religion, income, fitness level (“healthy American”), gender, sexual habits and preferences, preferences in housing style (are there “Cape Cod Americans”, “Rancher Americans”?), or location-based Americans (“urban Americans” vs “rural Americans”), not to mention Americans modified by political identity — “Red State Americans” vs “Blue State Americans”.

American.

That’s it.

But put the ring on her finger and make the baby, and no matter what, and one is smothered back in the folds of priestly robes: baptism? Or bris? What church?  Which synagogue?

And oh yeah — “Where did your people come from?”

Best answer to that: passion.

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Hillel — in Balochi

24 Sunday May 2015

Posted by in A Little Wisdom, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philology, Philosophy, Religion

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Agha ma wati jinday wastha naya Goda degay khe b mani wastha.

Agha ma degrani wastha naya goda ma cheyan?

Agha ani na, goda kadi?

In the first century BCE, Babylonian born Hillel (later known as Hillel the Elder) migrated to the Land of Israel to study and worked as a woodcutter, eventually becoming the most influential force in Jewish life. Hillel is said to have lived in such great poverty that he was sometimes unable to pay the admission fee to study Torah, and because of him that fee was abolished. He was known for his kindness, gentleness, concern for humanity. One of his most famous sayings, recorded in Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers, a tractate of the Mishnah), is “If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?” The Hillel organization, a network of Jewish college student organizations, is named for him. Hillel and his descendants established academies of learning and were the leaders of the Jewish community in the Land of Israel for several centuries. The Hillel dynasty ended with the death of Hillel II in 365 CE.

Web Page: “Rabbi Hillel”.  Bold added.

Without prompting, a Facebook friend, a teacher, translated Hillel into Baloch.

At the end of a note to the same, I’ve stated a perhaps uniquely modern stance:

Our world offers an abundance of timeless knowledge and wisdom from myriad sources, a vast reach across cultures through the great libraries and their scholars, and one may be gifted with opportunity and time to do some soul searching about the meaning of life and living in the place that one inhabits. Toward that end, while I do my part 🙂 , I generally promote ethnolinguistic cultural survival and self-determination, not only for the Hebrews but for Baloch, Kurds, Pashtun, and every other unique living language community on the planet.

In fewer words, plainly promoted: geospatial coexistence with ethnic centers, margins, and mixers; global cultural co-evolution with updating toward what is authentic in belief, kind in social manner, and respectful in its humanity; and continuously improving “qualities in living” with economic, psychological, physical, and spiritual dimensions.

Additional Reference

Wikipedia.  “Hillel the Elder”

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Excerpts – Two Journeys Across New Worlds

24 Sunday May 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Religion, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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As a soldier, I felt like a real master. I drove tanks in the desert and I carried a big assault rifle when in the city. One day, as I walked the streets of Jerusalem, believing myself to be the biblical King David, my eyes met those of a young Arab lady in a long white dress standing on the rooftop of her house. There she stood, erect and proud. She stared at me, and then sang lovely Arabic tunes that captured my mind and heart. I stared back at her, a gorgeous beauty with the voice of an angel, and fell in love on the spot. Her song, I promptly concluded, was far more piercing than any of my bullets.

Tenenbom, Tuvia.  “Why European NGO’s and the Red Cross Are Real Enemies in Israel.”  Forward, May 24, 2015.

At this point Captain Swan stunned his men with his own innovative plan.  He argued that their voyaging along the Mexican coast had brought nothing but disappointment and it was pointless continuing.  Instead, they would cross the Pacific and “go into the East-Indies.”  He conjured the glory days of Drake and Cavendish, who successfully passed that way, but even so he had a struggle.  Two-thirds of his men did not believe it possible.  “Such was their ignorance,” wrote Dampier, that they were convinced “he would carry them out of the world.”

Preston, Diana and Michael.  A Pirate of Exquisite Mind: Explorer, Naturalist, and Buccaneer: The Life of William Dampier.  New York: Walker & Company, 2004.

These two wildly different accounts of voyages through time have between them one theme in common: the temporary ascent of assumptions and guesses over real knowledge.

William Dampier, who set out in life a sailor, precedes James Cook, Charles Darwin, and others in his gourmandizing, navigating, observing, suffering, swashbuckling, writing triple circumnavigation of the earth under 17th Century sail.

In the life movie, as it were, Tuvia Tenenbom appears to have embarked upon his life’s journey as one who might have believed a superstitious misstep would have carried him out of the world:

But then, on one wintry cold day, I got my hands on all kinds of books and pictures and found out that I’ve been lied to. Our “Jewish” black clothes made me look frighteningly similar to the non-Jewish Polish nobles and Austrian bourgeois of a century or two ago; our community’s glorification of virgins was more in line with the thinking in Islamic societies; and the way my rabbis prevented me from engaging with sexuality in any capacity — “Thou shalt never look at females,” they always reminded me — seemed more rooted in Catholicism than in Judaism.

True to my nature as a representative of God, I consulted with heaven and left the ultra-Orthodox fold.

By the time Tenenbom publishes in today’s Forward, he has become a much more cognizant and sophisticated navigator, rather like Dampier in his day, but in this age, he has stumbled across a similar ignorance and misguidance.  However, where Dampier’s men could be called “out of the loop” and innocent of emerging knowledge about the world and the mapping of continents, islands, currents, and winds, Tenenbom’s anti-Semitic and Israel-hating acquaintance appear to have been corralled, lied to, programmed, and seduced: they have lost their clues to what is real and what is not and would appear today to be made to live in Orwell’s worst nightmare: intellectually poisoned and too easily maneuvered, they have been “carried out of the world” — the world that includes worlds with authentic histories, including their own ethnolinguistic legacies — as cognizant and knowledgeable free agents in their own right.

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