Category Archives: Epistemology

Venezuela and the Liberal Progressive Stance

03 Wednesday Apr 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Caribbean Basin, Central America, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Cuba, El Salvador, Epistemology, Extreme Brown vs Red-Green, Guatemala, Honduras, International Development, Mexico, North America, Political Psychology, Politics, South America, United States of America, Venezuela

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Dickey, Christopher. “How Cuba Helped Make Venezuela a Mafia State.” Daily Beast, June 2, 2019.

InSight Crime. “Venezuela: A Mafia State?” Seven-part series, May 16, 2018 to May 25, 2018. Full report: InSight Crime. “Venezuela: A Mafia State?” Report (PDF): 1) “7 Reasons for Describing Venezuela as a ‘Mafia State'”, Mary 16, 2018; 2) “Drug Trafficking Within the Venezuelan Regime: The ‘Cartel of the Suns'”, May 17, 2018; 3) “The Devolution of State Power: The ‘Colectivos'”, May 18, 2018; 4) “The Devolution of State Power: ‘The Pranes’,” May 20, 2018; 5) “Colombia and Venezuela: Criminal Siamese Twins,” May 21, 2018; 6) “Honduras and Venezuela: Coup and Cocaine Air Bridge,” May 23, 2018; 7) “Dominican Republic and Venezuela: Cocaine Across the Caribbean,” May 24, 2018; 8) “Venezuela and El Salvador: Exporting Aid and Corruption,” May 25, 2018.

North American Continental Appetite for Narcotics
–> Cash –> Central / South America
–> Cartel –> Gangs –> Related Violence
–> Corruption of Authorities
–> General Insecurity
–> Displacement of Population | Northern Mass Migration

If you’re on the Soviet / post-Soviet flavored Left / Far Left Progressive Movement, the same that might obtain its image of the world from, say, 927+ or Mint Press, at least consider reading Christopher Dickey’s report on the Cuba-Venezuelan connection and the InSight Crime series on narcotics trafficking and the accumulation of wealth by nominally “communist” and “socialist” so-called “leaders” in captive Central and South American states.

Related Online: https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/news/369700/100million-diva-whitney-houston-blew-fortune-on-crack/
Related Online: https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/press/releases/2018/November/mexico-and-unodc-present-second-opium-poppy-cultivation-survey.html (November 2018). Other states have poppy fields, of course, but the expansion of cultivation in Mexico for the production of heroin in North America should be perhaps more widely acknowledged.

Breaking: Montoya-Galvez, Camilo. “Senators Introduce bill to send $400 million in aid to Venezuela, strengthen sanctions.” CBS News, April 3, 2019.

In familiar Orwellian fashion, the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left simply ignores the sustained Soviet / post-Soviet investment in the underworld and what it does to societies everywhere it travels.

For decades Venezuela treated its oil reserves — as has Russia — as plunder for The People, which it was, while all the while failing to diversify its internal and trade economies. Who cared? There was money for everything — until oil prices fell.

And then there was nothing.

Or what was left were the sideshows: the selling off of gold reserves; the cocaine trade; sex-related human trafficking; and, nearer to this miserable late date, displacement and the bartering of everything.

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FTAC: “The Media Went Easy on Obama”

01 Monday Apr 2019

Posted by in Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Journalism

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Inspiration: the idea that “the media” has a coordinated conscience.

The title of this post has been drawn from the familiar accusation that the media — the “Mainstream Media”, “MSM”, “Lamestream Media” — has been giving President Trump a bum rap.

From the Awesome Conversation

After so many years following other politics, I might be a little less surprised [by anything coming up in the daily news feed]. However, one may pull (and check) factual data from articles extant.

BC sees two worlds in the Open Source: the public’s window and perception and the journalist’s or researcher’s image of the world.

Generally speaking, the public obtains a narrowed, parochial, and under-informed worldview bounded by the constraints of interest, prior education, and time plus, and if engaged as a voter, near-term focus on candidates and issues. Journalists and researchers by profession dig into the history — events, personalities, organizations — contributing to their subject areas and related states of affairs.

When BackChannels reads — that’s what this “reading page” has been about — it accesses current and prior research effort repeatedly in a not too wide band of interests: conflict, foreign affairs, now some U.S. domestic politics.

For the record, BC believes that “the media” — mainstream and popular journals — e.g., Politico, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Diplomat, McClatchy, The Daily Caller, The Daily Beast, The Nation, The American Interest, etc. — don’t “go easy” on any politician of interest.

https://www.mcclatchydc.com/

The publishing industry engaged in U.S. domestic and international politics represents a competitive rather than consciously coordinated field, while the journalists also represent a similarly competitive and polyglot crowd but one generally possessed of integrity. It’s up to the reader, one at a time x millions, to evaluate the intents and veracity of articles, their authors, and their publications, as he reads through what is the mediated experience of the world.

The media could not have “gone easy on Obama”: it observed, reported, and opined with customary vigor in the familiar fashion. Obama’s parade through two terms simply gave up less daily fodder for humor and outrage than today’s incumbent.

Related on BackChannels

Fake News! Genuine Fake News! The Real Fake News! Get Your Fake News Here!

Related Online

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

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/03/richard-north-patterson-i-quit-novels-cover-trump/585901/ | Richard North Patterson. “I Used to Write Novels. Then Trump Rendered Fiction Redundant: The president is a fiction writer run amok, the hero of his own impermeable drama.” Mar 31, 2019.

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FTAC: Turn Around – Globally ReStanced Time

25 Monday Feb 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, A Little Wisdom, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Religion

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Inspiration for this little bit of wisdom: another set-to about the God of Judaism and the God of Islam — or depictions, expressions, instructions, etc. seemingly attached to the construction or perception (in mind, of course) of each.

Basically: “Your God is not my God — and my rightness must be therefore more right than your rightness.”

And God must have put us here to prove how right we are about God.

Something like all of that plus the bloody historical baggage that has been dragged through time with that kind of thinking.

About Joseph Campbell

Home

Ethnolinguistic cultures on earth: about 7,000 (fewer, actually).
There are many ways of looking up at the stars and experiencing or interpreting the divine.

In the Torah, God hears Ishmael’s cries too.

The more true challenge of the present lies in handling the habits attending medieval politics and worldviews that better account for turning something we cannot know — God, as we think of God, is greater than our observational capabilities — into something we think we know.
Judaism represents the Tribal Way of the Hebrews, an old People with a calendar to prove it and a distinct trail through time planted on or in the earth in built space or artifacts. Rather than mosey on to other civilizational uptake, adaptation, and competition, it might prove healthier to visit the present, take a deep breath, and have both a broad and long view backward, the better perhaps for considering and taking the next step forward.

Having given up the burning of witches and largely ejected “contra-lateral amputation” as inhumane (although there are some barbaric, malignant, primitive, and sadistic holdouts), we might do better than eternally trying to erase one another.

Call it a plea for peacefulness momentarily enshrined in a blog post . . . also a plea to perhaps stand together for a broad and great gaze backward from this extraordinary plateau in human communicating and social interaction — and then: think fresh; think forward; think next.

Commence.

The “New Nationalists” — there’s a term that’s getting around — are old feudal reactionaries. Each — start with Erdogan in his White Palace — means to live as if in a castle socially surrounded by nobility and attended by peons and slaves.

BackChannels hopes they will one day find themselves left floating in their own blood-dimmed and greed-soaked clouds and the better world, broadly inclusive, culturally self-sustaining (we should be concerned with keeping and growing our 7,000 or so living language cultures), earth conscious, still in awe of the universe, and beautifully interwoven will look back on them with a shudder.

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Shuafat: On the Edge Between Good and Evil

24 Sunday Feb 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, Gaza, International Development, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Regions

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Screen capture from David Bedein’s “UNRWA in Jerusalem: Anatomy of Chaos”, Vimeo, January 29, 2019.

Asked of a child: “Who controls the camp?” — “Young militants control the camp, and when the Israeli army comes we throw stones at them. the army doesn’t come here a lot, and there is no authority here. We have nothing.” (05:38).

Related on BackChannels: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2018/02/06/set-palestinian-kgb-and-other-backchannels-observations-related-to-the-middle-east-conflict/

Primary lie told to the Palestinians: “The Jews stole your land and God wants you to fight to seize it from them.”

Close enough for untruth.

Related: Badil Staff. “Land Ownership in Palestine / Israel (1920-2000)

Oh, Palestinians — yon Jews never stole your land and ye shall know the 1948 and post-1948 truth about that war, about the Arab apartheid camps of your world, and about the “leaders” delivering the drugs, failing to sweep the streets, failing to guarantee the safety of basic housing and water and electrical supply.

Think about those words out of a child’s mouth: “There is no authority here.“


Screen capture from David Bedein’s “UNRWA in Jerusalem: Anatomy of Chaos”, Vimeo, January 29, 2019.

BackChannels has news for you: wherever the Soviet has meddled and Russia to this day maintains old criminal and feudal relationships, “there is no authority” but over and around the inner circles of absolute and capricious power.

While Abu Mazen — Mahmoud Abbas — flies around on a $50 million private jet (paid for out of resources intended for Palestinians), it appears the criminal trades have never been more overlooked on the ground beneath his wings.

For the feudal lords of the Gaza and the West Bank — and the handlers and greater powers of Moscow and Tehran — the Palestinian main base doesn’t really matter.

Money in their own pockets matters much more.

The streets of Shuafat have been left to become garbage strewn and rat infested while the minds of Palestinian children, generation upon generation, are made to entertain lies about their historic and political origins, about the Jews, the west, capitalism, democracy, humanism . . . everything.

“There is no authority here.”

In place of authority, what is there in Shuafat?

Vanity – a malign, merciless, and unyielding vanity on the part of those who would live well off the dispensing of misery to their communities.

What is good?

For the purposes of governance, perhaps start with authentic culture, education, opportunity, service.

What is evil?

Absolute power, abuse, dirtiness, dishonesty, intimidation, malignant narcissism, involuntary servitude, theft.

The Palestinians have gotten the mind fuck of all times in the dishonest framing of their predicament — thank the KGB and some generations of middle east leaders and compliant local powers for that.

The Cold War, the Soviet Era, has been over for more than 27 years. In its place: a mash-up of Russian feudal and mafia-style power.

Perhaps in the Shuafat enclave in Jerusalem, some should demand of their “leadership”, UNRWA, of themselves — even so young as to be able to say, “There is no authority here” — and of Israel adequate basic services plus authentic education and information subject to each their own inquiry and independence of mind, i.e., the end of the political suppression of the lawful, moderate, and optimistic.

Screen capture, Shu’afat, February 24, 2019.

Also related on BackChannels: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2018/10/20/ftac-mec-palestinians-a-people-waiting-to-be-born-again-honestly/ – 10/20/2018.

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FTAC: Circa 2009: Obama Racist for Attempting to Freeze Israeli Settlement Activity?

19 Tuesday Feb 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza Suzerain, International Development, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Political Psychology, Russia

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I don’t think he was racist – just ambitious for that elusive Nobel that nobody really wants because the weaponizing of the Palestinian mind has been really about the feudal and totalitarian habits of a criminally political culture.
The American political construct has been essentially a humanist and reasoning mission at odds with the many civilizations and cultures that comprise the nation. We may have a Christian-majority nation, but we are not a Christian nation but something else, and some of that is nettlesome where the basis for policy has ethnic and tribal contributors. The feudal / medieval qualities of the past haunt all politics but especially so in “east-west” confrontation because the “east” remains mired in feudal worldviews.

FB – February 18, 2019

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Responding to Tulsi Gabbard’s Tweet ” . . . No to Nuclear War . . . No to Regime Change Wars”

07 Thursday Feb 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, Extreme Brown vs Red-Green, Russia, Venezuela

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“At Least the Dictatorship Provided Its People with Stability”

27 Thursday Dec 2018

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

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Contrary to the beliefs of nice people who believe The West, the United States, and Israel the chief repositories of evil in the world, dictatorship do not provide their people with stability: they provide themselves with the power to accumulate and indulge in excess and that especially of cruelty, power itself as the malignant embrace it becoming the power to visit suffering on others with impunity.

Note: the editor has added the URL to a BackChannels piece on ISIS as Assad’s preferred enemy or foil. 

I used to say the same thing, especially in relation to the invasion of Iraq: ” . . . at least Saddam Hussein kept the lid on the pot.”

In retrospect, Hussein did not keep things under control. He leapt into a ruinous war with Iran when presented with weakness in the shadow of the Islamic Revolution, and produced infamous sport like this:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/saddam-drains-the-life-of-the-marsh-arabs-the-arabs-of-southern-iraq-cannot-endure-their-villages-1463823.html

As regards Syria, I and my blog 🙂 have tried to float a too accurate message about barbarism, feudal and totalitarian politics, and their blending in KGB-style Political Theater.  Assad had really to produce conditions favorable to the assembling of the “AQ-types”, the “jihadists”, and their sorting out into the most vicious of fighting elements, and then with ISIL / ISIS make certain that he would have the foil best suited to driving off (to Europe) his most troublesome noncombatant population.

Mission accomplished.

Where westerners believe themselves culpable for such a disaster — “if we hadn’t done this or done that” — the truth slips away without pursuit _except_ by a seemingly small cadre of academics and journalists (and retirees) who drill down beneath the convenient cant to drown themselves in the details of history.

Russian political culture has long displayed itself as medieval, ruthless, and ever paternally authoritarian.

In the near span of 100 years, 1917 to 2017, the experience of two upheavals by revolution and the appearance of three forms in government has not changed its historic character. Russians less connected to Moscow and St. Petersburg are missing out on all the fun with cash while the oligarchy could care less — and thus as it has ever been.

While Moscow often admires Europe and the west and adopts related aesthetic and cultural practices, it seems to resist deep political change, not to beg the point. The Obama Administration had indeed hoped to encourage a little bit of western liberal values in what remained of the Soviet axis of power in the middle east, and at that junction in 2011 defined by Bashar al-Assad’s response to a mild challenge to his absolute power, he would go on to say that Putin had reverted to “the KGB playbook” — and that’s the truth long forgotten at this point in the Syrian Tragedy, so I call it, and the more general and frightening “east-west rivalry”, so others call it.

BackChannels has adopted the term “paternally authoritarian” from the work of the recently late Richard Pipes.  There are two volumes listed in “The Russian Section” of this blog’s library:

Pipes, Richard.  Russia Under the Old Regime: The History of Civilization.  New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974.

Pipes, Richard.  The Russian Revolution.  New York: Alfred A. Knop, 1990.

Blog editors may not have the collegial and financial defenses plus resources known to tenured scholars, so there may be other of Pipes’ works here, even bookmarked — there’s a box full of set-asides that has not been opened in ages — but the two mentioned by do for a start.  Note also: flood by web-info, the editor has developed a short memory for which countermeasures are being installed, specifically, limited time on the web to much less “Facebooking” and blog posting in order to return to that world in which the companionship of a book — any long read — might be appreciated for a day or two without deflection or distraction.

Also related to Russia’s New Nobility, the KGB-infused political methods of a revived aristocracy, and the global eruption of the Newest Nationalism: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/03/11/reflexive-control-process-allahu-akbar-terrorism-new-nationalism-neo-feudalism/

Posted to YouTube nine months ago:

&

And posted to YouTube September 2016:

Best ask of every dictatorship: “Stability for whom?”

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FTAC: ALW: Earth Consciousness; Human-Universal Inter-Consiousness

18 Tuesday Dec 2018

Posted by in A Little Wisdom, Asides, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Journal, Philology, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion

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When I started my journey around the world Online (In English), I had never even heard of “Partition”.

While I forget much or what I read, I’ve had the wisdom to keep my reading — my books — close by and may rapidly access what I’ve read.

I have 2,000+ close by reading options and could do my own in-house “Great Books” education, languages included, but I have to match age and mission sense with available resources. ??

As a species, our issues on Earth are profound, and that includes not only our search of political reconciliation and the diminishing of war, God willing, but the greater taking up of the stewardship of our planet, so that we may enjoy the image of our survival much farther into the future than the end of, say, Epoch of Oil.

We can and should open our eyes more widely than we do today:

http://thomasberry.org/

From another conversation this day:

Do you believe in the existence of conscience? Empathy?

God also may be described as an “inter-consciousness” between man and nature across the universe.

Thomas Berry has promoted “earth consciousness” with our species as stewards.

I’d go the extra light year and may — or not as Internet publishing appears to promoted promote abbreviation and compression of thought.

Many years ago, I played with Heinrich Böll’s “Murk’s Collected Silences“, a short story about revisionism involving a radio host and his indecision about the invocation of that singular and most Proper Noun, “God”. At the end of his career and interested in shaping the memory of himself, he decided to hedge, and instead of the recorded invocations of “God”, he had his technician cut out the world and replace it with “thou higher being whom we revere”. Murk, the technician, then cut even the resulting moments of silence for splicing together.

Here on BackChannels, this editor has been using as a trope, similarly hedging but advancing a concept at the same time, “God, Nature, and the Universe”.

It may be that we humans merely process chemicals faster than rocks, and that is all that differentiates our species and all else that lives from stardust.

Indeed, one may see pools of blood where spilled become flakes the color of rust (for the same reason) and drops of it diminish to powder dissolving in air.

That is all we are.

When dead.

When living . . . what a piece of work!

As a species, we needs must be or become the stewards of all that lives and all that in addition supports the beautiful and thriving mission of life.

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