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 – Syria and the Checking of Feudal Political Absolutism

07 Friday Apr 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Extreme Brown vs Red-Green, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology

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Leave the Left (and Far Right) alone!

Post-Soviet “Active Measures” and related infiltration into EU / NATO intellectual assets may account for the promotion of polarized “Brown v Red-Green” politics.

The post-Cold War narrative arc spans American Administrations, but the general public (I’ve become accidentally a little bit specialized) tends to see the moment, i.e., a span of months to years, when it should be seeing decades of process in removing the holdovers from the Soviet Era.  For good reasons, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi are gone, but it’s at Assad’s Syria, the gateway to Iran in the old politics coming apart, that Putin visibly returned to the old KGB walk and the reinforcement of old relationships. As no one in the west has wanted another “cold war” or a strong “Moscow” on the tracks that it’s on, the purchase of time combined with sanctions and deflated oil pricing has substantially weakened the Moscow-Damascus-Tehran (more truly, “Moscow-Tehran” axis).

Now: enter Trump.

Just so it’s known: Moscow’s cash reserves have been deeply drawn down not only by years of reduced oil revenues and political sanctions but by the regime’s own abuse of the nascent Russian business system and the flight of capital from it. Most of what isn’t at hand has been parked in the western (rule-of-law) banking system or similarly stable high-value assets (most obviously real estate), and that may add to the discouragement of Moscow’s propensity for armed aggression. However, Putin is a bit of a wildcard as regards his own behavior, and he knows that when faced with a nuclear gambit, the United States will stand firm but elide the issue, returning that aspect of war to equilibrium.

For the Cold War days, moving “Jupiter rockets” sufficed to fully resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis. http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/nsa/cuba_mis_cri/moment.htm

In this day, NATO may have forward dual use conventional-nuclear warheads, giving paranoid Moscow perhaps some legitimate fits as regards its own state of risk. Here is the kind of article one runs into when encountering the nuclear arms control field:

http://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2017/02/07/progress_on_strategic_arms_control_110760.html

To stay (in the old sense of that word) the course toward nuclear exchange, diplomacy and indirect confrontation have held off the contemplation of direct conflict engagement between Russian and NATO and western forces, but as history tells time and again with despots, that kind of leadership busts through its own boundaries, internal, psychological, external, political until firmly checked.

I think what you’re going to see in Syria will be the “checking” of Moscow’s revanchist (Soviet-style) ambitions and encouragement for it to engage the west in a once again responsible fashion.

It may help to keep in mind, whatever conclusions may be drawn here, that Russia has its own robust internal politics now forming up some challenge to the regime even though the regime holds the strong hand in its expression of absolute power.

The Obama Administration for both political and practical purposes put off confrontation in the field with the “phantoms of the Soviet” most likely to buy time, encourage change, and both financially and politically weaken the regimes that require politics in the feudal mode to sustain their own kleptocracies (“Different Talks — Same Walk!” is the BackChannels trope for how those relationships hold together).

Arguments about the legitimacy of political power are arguments about the future:

“What is to be done?”

“How are we to live?”

“Moscow”, the metonym for the Russian State as devised and held together by President Putin, knows how to make itself look good in superficial ways, but its less remarked positions have not been so wonderful.

Web search “Russia, Economy” brought up these three news pieces a few minutes ago:

http://money.cnn.com/2017/04/07/news/economy/russia-us-syria-economy-sanctions/

http://rbth.com/business/2017/04/05/poll-the-economy-is-now-more-important-to-russians-than-crimea_735282

http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/feb/21/anthony-tata/how-have-sanctions-impacted-russias-economy/

Related on BackChannels

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/08/12/also-in-media-an-economy-that-did-not-want-to-grow-the-russia-file-kennan-institute-blog/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/10/16/russias-nuclear-scarum/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/09/09/russias-pr-cocktail-new-nationalism-meets-falling-reserves-with-religion/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/08/21/russia-flexes-and-goes-hungry/

Related Opinion

http://www.russia-direct.org/opinion/why-does-russia-continue-protect-assad-syria 4/20/2016

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FTAC: Slammed: Disingenuous Speech and Political Confusion and Violence

25 Saturday Mar 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Extreme Brown vs Red-Green, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Philology, Politics, Religion, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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Premise: my conversational partner had shared with me a video: “2016 NPS Finals – San Diego – “Islamophobia” – and it was a perfect piece suited to interpretation as old Soviet “Active Measures”.

 

You should know this history.

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

The argument in the above video is disingenuous in many regards.

For starters, Dylan Roof has been condemned as a white supremacist nutcake whose targets also believed in Jesus.

Next: in conflict and military terms, absolutely yes, the White Supremacist movements are absolutely a threat to America’s “domestic tranquility” and the same are tracked by the FBI and followed by a number of anti-hate organizations, from the ADL to the SPLC.

Adam Lanza (I don’t wish to look up the spelling) was an autistic rule-based child whose mother had told him something that he had misconstrued in line with his disability or alternative way of formulating his social reality. The poets have in fact used a mildly afflicted child as an emblem for their political cause.

I find that execrable verbal behavior.

How about you?

Timothy McVeigh, if you do your homework, may have had through his partner a Philippine connection with Islamic Jihad and the building of fertilizer bombs. With a little imaginative sleuthing, you will find the data for that story online.

You know my theory: Moscow promotes chaos for various reasons, including that of making itself look strong against . . . Islamic Jihad. It would work if western analysts and perhaps an increasing number of journalist were not so aware of “Active Measures“, false-flag operations (“Moscow Apartment Bombings“), “Reflexive Control“, and other concepts associated with KGB and Russian State behavior.

Do you see democracy, freedom, peace, and prosperity in the above video?

I don’t.

I see vultures who have figured out how to make a lot of money for themselves by creating and exploiting conflict.

The KKK has been asked to remove their robes, and they have been deeply marginalized in America’s political culture to about this day. This day seems to be a little different as the New Nationalism appears to appeal to the white supremacist community (by the way, the KKK was no friendlier toward Jews than it was African Americans).

The three poets are lying by way of the misrepresentation of political history — and you’re helping them.

Regarding Islam and Islam in America, it really doesn’t take much energy to locate anti-American / anti-State rhetoric in the mosque and the conflation of submission to God with obedience to the guidance of the imam.

“Stop letting the fear . . . .”?

Again: Moscow, Moscow-Tehran. They have got a good thing going with Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIL, and so many others.

Political Absolutism and Totalitarianism vs Open Democracy and Checked Power

Which side are you on?

Peace be upon you, but please consider the role of disingenuous rhetoric in getting a British driver to plow into pedestrian innocents.

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FTAC: Worlds Closer Together

17 Friday Mar 2017

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

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Inspiration for the response came from the “blame America first” community intent on demonizing the same for past horrors, and in this instance the horror was the “Halabja chemical attack” ordered by Saddam Hussein against the Kurdish community at the end of the Iran-Iraq War.

In the second part, an accusing and conspiratorial view of the United Nations came through in a question about its origins.  It’s BackChannels’ opinion that by way of sufficient financial loss and immense suffering, that the UN has provided deflection from “Great War” — not “Low Intensity Conflict” — as so much talk seems to want to precede and inform the same with a significance that matches design.  Failing that achievement, we, for the most part, refuse once again to destroy the world despite the common abundance in arms capable of doing so.  Instead, at this time, we have one state being eaten alive, as it were, and that would be Syria by way of nefarious design, and then on the western plate is another free state, Ukraine, fending off an aggressor proud of its own criminal mischief in the world, which same has become the consistent cause of the suffering of the greater portion of its population.

— The know-how and material for developing chemical weapons were obtained by Saddam’s regime from foreign sources.[23] Most precursors for chemical weapons production came from Singapore (4,515 tons), the Netherlands (4,261 tons), Egypt (2,400 tons), India (2,343 tons), and West Germany (1,027 tons). One Indian company, Exomet Plastics, sent 2,292 tons of precursor chemicals to Iraq. Singapore-based firm Kim Al-Khaleej, affiliated to the United Arab Emirates, supplied more than 4,500 tons of VX, sarin and mustard gas precursors and production equipment to Iraq.[24] Dieter Backfisch, managing director of West German company Karl Kolb GmbH, was quoted by saying in 1989 that “for people in Germany poison gas is something quite terrible, but this does not worry customers abroad.”[23] —

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

The Wikipedia entry goes on to cite U.S. involvement, but the basic principle in both geopolitical evil and transnational crime would seem to have applied: people in one place would not care too much about people far removed from themselves x space x culture x time.

Conditions involving boundaries and separation have changed.

—
http://www.un.org/en/sections/history/history-united-nations/

Moscow continues to explore and exploit war evidently believing it pays off financially and redounds to its glory. Here’s a BBC radio piece about Soviet Era manipulation to that effect — http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03pk9c1 .

Today: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/04/syria-war-showroom-russian-arms-sales-160406135130398.html

A not too long ago yesterday for Ukraine: http://www.holodomorct.org/

Ukraine under assault today: http://uaposition.com/maps/russian-troops-attacked-ukrainian-position-donbas-197-times-past-48-hours-1-soldier-killed-10-wounded/

Greed expressed in lax regulation (first), then corruption outright followed by political or mercenary crime (“transnational crime” — all “black market” all of the time) may turn out the scourge of our own age. Boundaries and limits disintegrate before it where “actors” — engaged as here; powerful elsewhere — lose the internal brakes that involve conscience and empathy in relation to others.

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FTAC: A Comment on the Usefulness in Time of the United Nations

13 Monday Mar 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, International Development, Islamic Small Wars, Politics

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Inspiration: the common conservative American claim that the United Nations has proven consistently anti-Semitic and anti-Western: why fund it?

Think of the UN as having organized an institutionalized tug-of-war, i.e., a war between the medieval world and the modern one. It is the medieval world that culturally preserves and leverages anti-Semitism. It does so to deflect attention from power while it mightily exploits its deeply subjugated constituents. The situation is no different for the Arabs of the Kingdom who support the absolute power of the royals; the poor of Russia, a class once again growing by the day, whose wealth in the patrimony of the land has been swept into the hands of the patronized by the “Vertical of Power” (Putin) who are spending it elsewhere; the whites of South Africa, all of a sudden, but who have been the target of communist-aligned Jacob Zuma’s ire; and, though you may not believe me, the Palestinians whose KGB-trained Arafat and KGB-affiliated Mahmoud Abbas have kept most right where they are because for political leadership and powerful clans, the middle east conflict has turned out a spectacularly good business!

The modern world fights the medieval world at the UN.

It’s a long process, or one best approached a little bit at a time, for “the world left behind” may well swallow the one that has advanced with increments of violence from everywhere. It’s better to have one place where the truth can be dragged out into the light whether or not the representatives of so many nations wish to accept it.

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FTAC – “Lost for Representation” – A Comment on the Plight of America’s Moderate Political Rank

13 Monday Mar 2017

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

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Inspiration: the canard repeated by foreign politico that America’s Republican Party represents the white, wealthy, and racist of the nation.

Actually, Lincoln was the Republican way back and the southern states Democrat, and so bad as regards race that it led the front for racial politics for many decades.

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

Credit Texas school teacher, first, and American President, later, Lyndon Baines Johnson and the launching of the Great Society programs with stealing the Republican cause and transforming the Democratic Party into the party best redressing equality issues and fighting toward the modern popular democracy that has proven an inspiration elsewhere — and been surpassed elsewhere as well.

The employment of Islamic Terrorism to drive the New Nationalism — that’s just the way I see it from Moscow’s feudal enterprise — seems to indeed have taken root among America’s conservative Republicans (while the the “Red-Green” response has holed up with the Democrats). Such politics seem foreign to Americans of my advancing age — as a class, we may be appalled with the depth of polarization and viciousness displayed during the past election season, and having our two major parties pushed toward extremes, those of moderate temperament would seem at the moment lost for representation.

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Information Space in the Feudal Mode

01 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philology, Philosophy, Politics, Religion

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Posted by eOne Films, October 26, 2012.

Synopsis of a Different Kind of Script

Putin’s mission: sustain feudalism in service to political absolutism and reap the benefits of sustained conflicts and, eventually, subjugated and taxed populations.

KGB method: Reflexive Control via the indirect channeling of terrorism to promote the authoritarian nationalism certain to weaken EU / NATO cohesion and favor the development of political environments subject to the control by the wealthiest and most powerful of personalities.

Western Response Most Adverse to Democratic Modernity: in former Moscow-aligned organizations or personalities, adoption of “active measures” and forms of perceptual control, including the “false flag” painting of events, to channel popular perception in service to greater political power.

Western Response Most Favorable to Democratic Modernity: strongest possible emphasis on empiricism, integrity in investigation, and the promotion and retention of American and associated constitutional methods, principles, and values.

In the feudal mode, “the masses” — BackChannels finds the term itself degrading — may be controlled by disinformation, disingenuous information, framing, innuendo, rumor, and suspicion.

In the modern mode, the curious and the reasoning of the public may sift and evaluate for strong information — valid, reliable, significant, and straight.

North Americans and Europeans accustomed to political decency may wish to evaluate whether they really want to have the Feudal Mode installed in the future experience of their own presently democratic and modern rule-of-law states.

Whodunit?

The Fallen Headstones Mystery

Blake, Aaron.  “Trump is flirting with the idea that anti-Semitic incidents are false flags — yet again.”  The Washington Post, February 28, 2017.

BackChannel’s day began with related coverage in The Jerusalem Post “Trump reportedly questions authenticity of JCC bomb threats” (February 28, 2017)” and in the New York Daily News — “Trump suggests Jewish community is spreading anti-Semitic threats” (February 28, 2017).   This editor’s response:

I would question the authenticity of each posture or pretense presented, and I should think a good detective would start with the accuser. Again, we have been made to enter an era marked by the potential for KGB-style “false flag” and other manipulation. Where some people dare the improbable — do the unthinkable — the numbers (what are the odds?) may not help them.

I find the Linda Sarsour side of the story deeply suspect given her relationship with Hamas.

What if Jews and Muslims accomplished the vandalism together, and then made a show of amity in the wake of tragedy?

In the feudal mode — where power is concentrated by a force in personality that generates immense wealth and patronage without regard for common law — and in the mind supporting the feudal worldview (blessed with imagination but cursed by limited access to applicable data, critical research and reasoning skill, and relevant knowledge), what, however improbable, is not possible?

In this imbroglio, to accuse either Jews or Muslims — or representatives of either — of engaging in a “false flag” operations draws immediate condemnation as either anti-Semitic or Islamophobic — and therein lies the beauty of medieval manipulation and political theater and the greater horror of it as well.

What happens when power play magus?

Syria — and the incubating of ISIL as useful tool for Moscow and the depopulating of the state to present the west with a major headache.

Ukraine — and so-called “hybid warfare” to run Ukrainians off their land (a lesser known part of that conflict’s story) and regain a measure of control over the productive capacity of the state or state political criminals.

What will happen to the western public IF subjected to continued “reflexive control” and artifice in the presentation of political event?

Whatever the answer may be, it’s unknown to BackChannels.

However, BackChannels would attempt to armor the “American Mind” against so many feudal methods of perceptual control even though an obscure foreign policy / political science / political psychology blog cannot begin to do what perhaps the American Intelligence Community (IC) needs must do in defense of the Constitution and the related cohesion and integrity of the state itself: set the record straight.

Ellis, Ralph and Eric Levenson.  “FBI investigates Jewish cemetery vandalism in Philly.”  CNN, February 27, 2017.

How is it possible that an act of vandalism on the scale reported — in Philadelphia’s Mount Carmel Cemetery, some “75 to 100 headstones were topped” according to CNN — produced no claims (by person or organization), no witnesses — none that have been in any way publicized, at least — and to date no suspects.

What has been produced: innuendo, rumor, suspicion, each a part of the shifting — and at times easily manipulated — perceptions well known to feudal lords and their loyal subjects.

Addendum – March 4, 2017 and Forward

Greenfield, Daniel.  “Pro-Palestinian Black Muslim Leftist Arrested in Jewish Center Bomb Threats.”  FrontPage, March 3, 2017. The number of incidents associated with Juan M. Thompson: eight, a fraction of the total calls made to Jewish centers.

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FTAC: For Jews of Russian Descent and Middle East Scholars

27 Monday Feb 2017

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

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Context: the talk was of Meir Kahane and involved a friend who knew him.

One may respect your living it — and I would recommend Giulio Meotti’s (compassionate, complete, factual, pro-Israel) account of the Baruch Goldstein attack for how that really worked — but that the politicians chose to trim the tendency toward incitement may speak volumes about the image Kahane produced in his own day. Not only should Jews not explain away terrorism, the entire community should note Russia’s long relationship with political terror as an appropriate tool in its realpolitik for upwards of 100 years, and then denounce it and distance themselves from it.

I used this excerpt from Walter Laqueur’s scholarship with the hope that Jews of Russian descent and memory and others involved in the scholarship will deflect a little bit of attention from the Arab anti-Semitism and follow the modern narrative back to Imperial Russian anti-Semitism and its dissemination and amplification in other cultures, starting with the “informing” of the Nazi’s worldview and moving on to what the Soviet managed to do to the middle east — and what is sustained today in Moscow’s relationship with Tehran and Hamas, Hezbollah, and PFLP, if not others.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/27/excerpt-1920s-the-spread-of-hate-russia-germany-laqueur/

Moscow has gotten the free pass from emigre, perhaps, and scholars, certainly, on the engineering and sustaining of the “middle east conflict” as a productive money-making enterprise for those who operate it and, perhaps inadvertently, those who have built their businesses or institutions around the same.

So how long do you want to keep around one of the world most deceitful and ugly of sustained conflicts?

Hamas and the PLO will continue exploiting and suppressing their subjugated populations — these guys are not Freedom Watch and Human Rights Watch winners by a long stretch — and Israelis and the west will continue building and buying upgraded defense systems to handle the next generations of terrorist drones, rockets, and tunnels.

I’ll apologize for the coming cynicism right here, but it sometimes seems everyone making money on the conflict goes home happy compared to those made to believe that the Jews or the Arabs must be the cause of all their woes, and they must continue suffering until Hamas obliterates the Jews or the IDF “takes down” Hamas.

Left alone, the Middle East Conflict may be a politician’s best and most reliable evil system, efficient for generating income in some parts, pretty good for speechifying and promising the world to one constituency or another.

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FTAC: On the Edge of a Feudal American State

27 Monday Feb 2017

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

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Context: in light of dozens of bomb threats and two acts of vandalism against Jewish targets, the chatter turned to the JDL, which in the United States remains an FBI designated terrorist organization (the same has been left to operate in Canada and Great Britain).  The matter of reevaluating the too obvious public appearance of anti-Semitic acts in America came up between Jews and here fits with the notion that a part of the nation seems now driven toward the revival of feudalism.

The commission of political violence before the Larger Force of the State renders the same very small and degrades and tarnishes the nobility of the actor. Now we reached a super-generational changing of the political guards. Angela Davis is 73 years old; Noam Chomsky is 88 years old. The Baby Boomers are counting on their retirement funding or the state to east them into death, and the New Guards of the Culture are climbing into their positions and making their marks.

In the framework of time, that is where these attacks on Jewish targets are taking place.

I have on Back-Channels noted an increasingly stark choice for modern bodies politic: do ye wish to remain “Modern” — cooperating, multicultural, mutually respectful beneath the benevolent and firm umbrella of secular-humanist / Greco-Roman / Judeo-Christian law developed atop much bloody argument about political power, or may ye wish to slide back into the feudal slime hoping to come out on top with the authoritarian who says he really likes you?

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/02/27/ftac-reflexive-control-feudalism/

Conflict — equipment, manpower, research — is a money-maker for a lot of people employed and invested in related fields. Give it a thought: to really be kind to our neighbors, perhaps we should all just thin ourselves out. God only knows Americans have the firearms to do it to themselves.

Maybe Black Lives Matter would like to weigh in on this business about an America / EU / NATO that trends toward feudalism and the potential for the conflicts of all-against-all. The same would make the Arab, “I against my brother; my brother and I against my cousin . . . .” sound awfully quaint.

BackChannels reach on Facebook has been broad and not terribly shy; however, hateful events — bomb threats, the desecration of cemeteries — promote suspicions, and one may now wonder at the purposes of those who commit such acts, which appear to no longer involve one city or community center and at least one mysterious miscreant.

The bomb threats number in the dozens; the attacks on two Jewish cemeteries now involve two cities.

Has someone been going down a call list?

Has someone been driving from one place to the next?

Many who follow politics at many levels — diplomacy, foreign affairs, international relations, warfare and terrorism — have picked on some far ahead or far out concepts, e.g., that Obama made the United States “post-Constitutional” or that we are living in a modern “post-fact” world — or a world comfortably supporting “alt-facts”.  How is one to reject the arrival of so ambiguous and ambivalent a political philosophy?

For the time being, the United States of America remains a “constitutional democracy”, and perhaps one with a security community that has its own backbone when it comes to the defense of the nation against “all enemies foreign and domestic”.

BackChannels suggestion to those vulnerable to being goaded into violence against pet targets on the basis of assumptions based on the constructs of swirling conspiracies or shadow and uncertain empirical evidence: cool it.  Let’s not drag ourselves backward several hundred years in the way of the ill-educated, ill-informed, and paranoid.

Reject manipulation.

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