Category Archives: FTAC – From The Awesome Conversation

If — in my own head — I hit a universal note just about right in Facebook or other conversation, I may simply wrench it from context and publish it here in this category as a mix of observation and, I hope, a writer’s wisdom.

FTAC: Judge Kavanaugh and Red-Blue Self-Righteous Loyalty

08 Monday Oct 2018

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

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The article touted in “conservative” circles: http://thefederalist.com/2018/10/04/left-will-never-apologize-brutalizing-brett-kavanaugh-family/  In Federalist writer Nathaniel Blake’s own words:

This ugly truth about us explains what has happened to Brett Kavanaugh. Initially he was hated for being a Republican nominee for the Supreme Court, but it is still not universally acceptable to abominate someone only for being an originalist judge.

“Originalist judge” may not well explain what the nation saw transpire last week.

Here is this blog’s editor’s take on that.

BackChannels believed Ford, and that he (Kavanaugh) lied because he had the power to deny everything negative about himself. As much may be part of an “ambitious” or malign narcissism, and as much fits with the personality and associates of the man who nominated him.

With Red or Blue Right / Left Flag navigation, political identity may force arguments rather than reason, and that emotion drives the demonizing of the other camp as well as the concept familiar to conflicts worldwide: “accusation in a mirror”. “Witch hunt!

The Left has no need to apologize for defending Blase Ford.

The Right has no need to wonder why professional advisement — all those lawyers! — against the confirmation were ignored and the process will be remembers as forced by the Republicans or blocked by the Democrats: for an answer, the power of identity and loyalty will do.

Related on BackChannels

https://conflict-backchannels.com/coins-and-other-terms/anthropolitical-psychology/

Related on the Web

https://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/rwanda/Geno1-3-10.htm (cited here for “Accusation in a Mirror”, a political science concept well known to scholars — and here in association with genocide — but also fit with what may be observed in relation to “malignant narcissism”: the malignant narcissist is never wrong.  BackChannels offers this post from 2013 as an example of the type: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2013/06/11/remember-its-never-the-narcissist-erdogan-blames-woes-on-vandals-and-terrorist-elements/).

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FTAC: Kavanaugh and President Trump’s Power — The Equivalent of Two Senate Votes

07 Sunday Oct 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Politics

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KavConf-181006-1602

I would say about half the country — and the country’s political power — mistrust the President, 50:48.

Democracy is being treated as a religion — a belief we promote perhaps more than the way of life we live — and we are being “feudalized”, driven backward toward a way of life in which more may transpire out of party, personal, and political loyalties than out of the kind of admiration of virtue and reason with which our nation was born.

On the healthy side, President Trump’s presidential victory and subsequent political “wins” have been similarly controversial and marginal. He may be winning as an authoritarian president, but as much seems persistently by the equivalent of two Senate votes.

BackChannels may let the above live as rhetoric rather than get into the around-the-world and the through-the-nation report card.  He has so far been the President that lies to his base — “Fake News!” should be enough for a start — and keeps over his head a cloud of dark associates (e.g., Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort) and near-but-not-quite relationships (as with Felix Sater), with much having to do with the laundering of dirty money through real estate investments.

As the related mistrusting of power deepens — “50:48” — one may expect the street to become more restive and state power brought to bear on the political sidewalk.  We seem to be far from that today, but the divisive politics would seem to move the nation toward further rancor and shouting. Yesterday’s arrested deserved the privilege, no doubt, but that as much took place speaks ill of the health of the nation.

Also Related on BackChannels

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/02/02/united-states-of-america-basic-training/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2018/09/12/ftac-forked-loyalty-to-a-united-states-president-v-obligation-to-the-constitution-of-the-nation/

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FTAC: MEC: A Possible Beginning to the End of the End

07 Sunday Oct 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza, Gaza Suzerain, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Political Psychology, Politics

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While powerful mercenary, political, and religious forces sustain the Middle East Conflict (MEC), one may hope that nothing evil lasts forever.  That is the one hope that should bridge what most divides Israelis and Palestinians ready to move on with their lives as well as the great wall that exists in time between the region of feudal absolute power and that of the modern democratic distribution of power, rule of law, and responsible and responsive governance.

In the course of a day — and just about every day — the editor of this blog visits the “camps” in which complaint and demonizations prompted by attacks, injuries, and deaths are par for conversation.  Few, however, either side, take in the scope of the conflict in its post-WWII East v West / Moscow v Washington / Feudal v Modern aspect, so BackChannels tries (and tries and tries) to get to thought that is both short but broadening.

Palestinian Incitement –> “Actions” –> IDF Response –> Bereavement, Complaint, Further Incitement –> -/-

For the most part, the angered narrow their vision, speak their own truth, and summon their own choruses when it might prove more helpful to grasp the greater politics and the historic manipulation attending the same.

There are angels and devils in the details.

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

International Trade Administration. “Qualifying Industrial Zone (QIZ).” Office of Textiles and Apparel (OTEXA).   http://web.ita.doc.gov/tacgi/fta.nsf/7a9d3143265673ee85257a0700667a6f/196ed79f4f79ac0085257a070066961d

Related (from the other side): https://www.merip.org/mero/mero111910 (Bahour, Sam. “Economic Prison Zones”. Middle East Research and Information Program, November 19, 2010).

The end of the Cold War should have produced a Moscow different from the one that groomed Arafat, established the PLO, and introduced the world to airline hijacking (in association with the “Palestinian cause”).

It didn’t.

While the Communist Party Soviet Union (CPSU) found itself diminished and disfavored, the methods, relationships, and rhetoric survived the transition, and I think it’s those phantoms that continue cycling the Palestinians through the same old same old and go nowhere / get nowhere political habits supporting incitement. There’s dirty arms and narcotics money in the conflict also (Barack Obama’s $1 billion cocaine “grant” to Hezbollah — https://www.politico.com/interactives/2017/obama-hezbollah-drug-trafficking-investigation/ . It has paid “the other side”, which is larger than it first looks, to keep the Palestinians boiling with the Big Lie — “Israel stole your land” .

I don’t know if there’s too much money in war.

What happens beneath the table produces a lot of heat — defense R&D, manufacturing, trade — on the surface. I believe — or would like to believe — that Moscow benefits more from the sustained conflict than Washington. Be the truth as it may be, the “Phantoms of the Soviet” have rather cooked down their own interests: Assad has pretty much destroyed his own state; irksome Hamas appears not to want another war; Abbas with his KGB record has turned into an old man rattling on about “resistance” without any place to take it.

Should the Middle East Conflict remain a reliable focal point for “east-west competition” with feudal structures and criminality on one side and constructive democratic features and the semblance of order on the other?

After 70+ years — and 26 years past the end of the Cold War — the MEC has to come down, but Palestinian political “cadre” and the main base susceptible to last century’s messaging and propaganda need help figuring out how they’ve been used — and they need to wake to the idea that peace would serve them (and everyone else) much, much better than a continued and mindless “resistance” based on the myth of their own myth founded on simple face-saving misdirection.

Related on BackChannels

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/07/29/ftac-antidote-to-what-poisoned-the-palestinians/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/09/23/ftac-these-too-are-palestinians/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/library/russian-section/

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

Funny thing about “the truth”: all the small parts fit — the contributions of events and personalities add up — and the whole right image of the past grows stronger with time.

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ALW: Historical Necessities – Humor and Soul

03 Wednesday Oct 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, A Little Wisdom, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Philosophy

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Recommended to this editor: David Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace (Anniversary Edition, 2009).

Now wish-listed in my Amazon account, it would be a good book to own; however, the bookcases have been filled, and there’s even now a box full of books with bookmarks in them, the desktop having become more my platform than the sofa.

Darn.

The forum for the comment was one of Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi‘s pages on Facebook.  Daoudi, who once took a class of Palestinian students to Auschwitz and had his car torched for the effort, has been a strong advocate for a moderate Islam (Wasatia Movement (Facebook page]) and Israeli-Palestinian co-existence.  As suggested by the lost getabout, such efforts would seem tempered by the politics of the East Jerusalem space from which he prefers to work.

Fromkin’s book would be a good thing to own and read.  However —

I’m overstocked here with books, but if I had house and space, I’d go ahead and expand my library to 4,000 volumes, maybe more.

One thing about the truth in history: when something is true, all the small parts really do fit together.

In that fitting together, however, one may wish to have two essential elements for company: 1) a great sense of humor and 2) a lot of soul.

Previously recommended by yours truly to forum readers: Efraim Karsh’s 2011 volume, Palestine Betrayed.

Purpose: replace strident untrue (Soviet Era malarkey) narratives 🙂 with a broad, common, empathetic, high-integrity telling of history — because history may not be “written by the victors” but in the greater course of time by the decent and earnest among the world’s scholars — that might then provide a firm base of knowledge for all.

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FTAC: Middle East Conflict: Harmonizing on One Page

02 Tuesday Oct 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Books, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Philology, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics

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The issue: the symmetrical treatment of history such that Israelis and Palestinians should teach both “The Holocaust” and “The Nakba”.

Rubbish.

Israelis and Palestinians would do well to research and teach history in the direction of nonpartisan and well substantiated truth.

The idea that “history is written by the victors” should be today an artifact of the medieval world, i.e., the world of “absolute power” and thuggish personalities.

In the modern world — and should it wish to be a good one — scholarly integrity should matter most of all (and Muhammad himself is reputed to have said, “One scholar is worth more against the devil than one thousands worshippers”).

The barbarism known to history — medieval rape and rapine, ethnic cleansing, genocide — need not be known to the future, but as much becomes the province of those alive today. If Muslim Fulani gangs and war parties wish to continue their program of razing Christian farming villages — and kidnapping, raping, and slaughtering the residents — that is really up to them, there being no sufficient power (yet) to stop them where they roam, plan, and execute foul deeds.

Integrity, rightness, and righteousness should have qualities that transcend small interests. As often as we may find that not true, we may hope that one day as much will be true.

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300172348/palestine-betrayed

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FTAC: Mahmoud Abbas: The Last of the Soviet Era Fixtures in the Middle East Conflict

25 Tuesday Sep 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Politics

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

In the Soviet Era, the KGB groomed Arafat and installed the PLO as a block and goad holding the then communist and Russian line against the expansion of western liberalism. Mahmoud Abbas has also his KGB record, and he too has sustained the Palestinian “People’s Liberation” mythology in service to an Orwellian model of political power, and combination of feudal power as guided by “secret” police (to get back to the promotion of Russian anti-Semitic political mechanics, go back to the Okhrana at the end of the Russian Imperial period).

Abbas essentially serves Moscow while trying to sustain a patronage system funded by obligations diplomatic and practice met by the west. Neither Abbas nor the Soviet / post-Soviet political “vision” he represents have any place to go. He’s an old man; the old Soviet bloc has been largely ruined in the middle east. However, Putin has chosen to support the older politics and related alignment to either the point of war, which I feel is near, or some bitter end afterward. I suspect Israel, the United States, and NATO and others would have preferred a diplomatic transition to archaic medieval destruction (as witnessed in Syria), but here we are with another Soviet-type dinosaur in power in the opposition and we’re dealing with primitive but effective fire-bearing kites and balloons from Gaza, which seems a sight both ridiculous and surreal.

Related in the News

Zieve, Tamara. “Incendiary Balloons Cause More Than A Dozen Fires Over Sukkot.” The Jerusalem Post, September 24, 2018.

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FTAC: Toward Dignity and Freedom: Qualities of Living and the Defense of the Radical Moderate

24 Monday Sep 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, International Development, Philosophy, Political Psychology

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We had been talking about South America, the promotion by the Left of anti-western and frequently anti-Semitic ideas.

The only defense against indoctrination: critical independent reasoning and research.

The Left leverages the sense of hardship and resentment known to “the masses” — or just plain too many people. To undermine that leverage, the responsible wealthy have indeed to program some to produce a less discomfited but more positively motivated general population.

QUALITIES OF LIVING

Physical Comfort and Security

–basic reliable clothing, food, housing

Psychological Comfort and Security

–basic responsible autonomous personal decision making: aesthetics; ethical, moral, social: dignity and freedom.

Political and Social Comfort and Security

–basic human rights and defense / freedom from criminal enterprise and intent

For the most part, those who are affluent or reliably employed enjoy the positive attributes of the above dimensions, and so much so that we don’t even think about them. We have our “basics” covered and our public security institutions and systems, so we believe, “have our backs”: we are free to be ourselves, to work as we may or must, and in a manner of our choosing.

Where the above are lacking is where the Left / Far Left finds leverage: injustice, insecurity, insolvency (III).

The three “I’s” involve always degraded personal security and the extension of that out to related family and community.

Well recognized universally: many forms of crime committed against persons may be also crimes committed against the state. In the case of murder, for example, whether or not anyone else cares about the deceased, the good state cares.

Where the state cannot defend the natural and right interests of The People — the dignity and freedom of the lawful — the Left / Far Left finds purchase in the interests of the same.

Conservatives, of course, may know abuses too but when empowered without restraint are the more likely to abuse their dependents and labor because . . . they can — too much money, narcissism, and will may produce a ferocious power giving way to the worst expression. Then “absolute power” becomes the power to visit suffering on others with impunity. In that regard, Far Left and Far Right authoritarianism bleeding into fascism may produce similar conditions, and those who would be free and possessed of dignity would from the moderate ranks rise and separate themselves from either extreme to battle back excessive political and social control and exploitation.

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FTAC: “An Unbounded Narcissism . . . .” A Comment on Absolute Power

23 Sunday Sep 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Religion

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It’s a bit preachy keen, but someone “Liked” it, and so I’ve elected to share it.

In the faith communities referencing Moses, competition for power and wealth through subscription and the many demonstrations of devotion and loyalty have produced some bloody “competitions” across time and space. The pious have long fought among themselves — schisms will do that — as well as taken aim at external enemies.

Has as much not been the way of the world?

This day is a little different: we may see one another through what we have to say, and hearing and seeing more, we may think a little more as well.

Moses challenged politically absolute power and with the guidance and power of God removed from it the Jews and the “mixed multitude” that would join them. Not much has changed. No one likes to be tyrannized.

The Jewish liberation story and much else about Judaism proved potently attractive enough to inspire uptake — give Hillel the Elder some credit — by the “restive of Rome”, i.e., those tiring of the brutality and excesses of the powerful. Even with eased conversions, the tribal ethnolinguistic culture (perhaps) could not begin to absorb the numbers, and the Romans looking for a new answer may have had other cultural needs better addressed by Jesus / Paul.

With Christianity in place, General Constantine finds his mission, and about 300 years later, General Muhammad develops his.

The Jews: they appear to worry much less about subscription, power, and wealth, and it’s pretty clear where and how the Hebrews have settled.

Aside: in 12th Century Hungary, laws designed by a Christian government to discriminate against Jews were upon activation applied equally to Muslims (ref. Raphael Patai’s _The Jews of Hungary).

This may be the best time to get off the medieval merry-go-round by looking forward while leaving some attitudes and beliefs plus archaic doctrines and methods far in the past where they belong.

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