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 – On Turkish Courts Indicting Israeli Military in Relation to the Mavi Marmara Incident

03 Tuesday Jun 2014

Posted by in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Psychology

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The “Gaza Boat Show” and Mavi Marmara incident trace back to deeply anti-Semitic and terrorist enthusiasms, and not only should there not have been a “compensation package” — plain political extortion! — drawn from Israel, but this drift in Turkish politics should have been stopped cold by the Turks themselves exactly when and where it started.  God willing, most will understand the only true axis in conflict and conflicted Islamic-majority state politics has to do with the despotic vs the democratic.  What PM Erdogan’s government and courts have done: despotic.  Evil.  

Source of inspiration: Schanzer, Jonathan and Merve Tahiroglu.  “Schanzer and Tahiroglu: When Turkey has problems, Israel always gets the blame.”  National Post, June 3, 2014.

In politics, anti-Semitism has become the signal of the criminal and weak: it’s expressed through disingenuous speech enforced, when it can be, by the tactics of political mafia.  In Turkey, Prime Minister Erdogan has been tripped in his tracks a time or two by a passionate Kamalist and otherwise mixed opposition, but when the heat in the streets diminishes, he returns to the comfort of his script.

Much of what I would bring to bear in telegraphic thought has been stabilized on a few BackChannels pages: “Malignant Narcissism“, for example, and there’s another most relevant here: “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation“.

Appeasement fails to appease the needs of such a personality, and, in fact, encourages its development.

Speaking to the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations forum in Vienna on Wednesday, Erdoğan made the following remark: “Just as with Zionism, anti-Semitism and fascism, it has become impossible not to see Islamophobia as a crime against humanity.”

Shwayder, Maya.  “Erdogan’s Anti-Zionist Comments Draws Criticism From West, But Typical For Turkey These Days.”  International Business Times, March 1, 2013.

Whatever Prime Minister Erdogan may be thinking, and that may include possession of the favor of God as affirmed by Turkish realpolitik, his personality would seem to be asking a fair political question: why stop if not stopped?

Related Reference

In reverse chronological order —

Castillo, Mariano.  “Turkish cops harass CNN reporter on air.”  CNN, May 31, 2014.

Gezi, Kadri.  “Gezi resistance anniversary recalls impact on Turkey.”  Al Monitor, May 29, 2014.

Gursel, Kadri.  “Erdogan’s dictator defense.”  Al Monitor, May 25, 2014.

Watson, Ivan and Alan Duke.  “Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdogan declares victory after local elections.”  CNN, March 31, 2014.

Fisher, Max.  “Here’s the video of Turkey’s prime minister comparing Zionism to fascism.”  The Washington Post, May 19, 2013;

Ynet News.  “It’s all personal: Op-ed: PM Erdogan’s venomous verbal attacks on Israel do not reflect Turkish people’s opinion of Israel.”  March 3, 2013;

Ynet News.  “Erdogan’s long-term plan: Op-ed: Turkish PM systematically imposing Islamic law; sense of helplessness, rage spreads.”  September 12, 2012.

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FTAC – A Balanced Note on Religious Appropriation

22 Thursday May 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Politics, Religion

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The points of mutuality, as with the validation of the Torah, are also points of appropriation. The Jews, already hard forged in the crucible of history, rejected Muhammad in his day and Muhammad who had prayed toward Jerusalem turned about and prayed toward Mecca.

The central psychology, divinely blessed or crazed and gifted, places the “locus of control” in Muhammad, a presumptuous position from a Jewish perspective, an infallible stance from a Muslim point of view, for if Muhammad is the Prophet of God, then the defiant (rejectionist) Jews have erred. Pandered or true, the implicit political program — it hasn’t been much different with Christianity — places the Jews as backwards on the periphery of the Real Deal, and, whaddayaknow — the fighting begins.

I’d rather go back to being brothers, recast from Judaism after Hillel a neo-Judaism accessible to all (inclusive) and amenable to adaptation and favored labeling. Probably “ChriJewsLims” will not work but it would be good to get to about the same page without (!) getting to the apocalyptic end of each thread.

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It’s not hard living entirely offline.

It’s impossible.

We have to check our e-mail for business and domestic obligations, if nothing else.

Then we may check our blogs, Facebook presence, Twitter account.

We / I have followings.

We’re not going to disappear on our fans (if we can help it).

I thought yesterday’s observation up top worth repeating here.

It’s rich.

It certainly attacks the idea of one monotheist “true religion”, although it’s completely accurate and fair to note that without the Torah and the Jews, neither Christianity nor Islam have any other completely different and independent foundation.

As he did for Pharaoh, Moses proves unavoidable and powerful.

Today’s follow-up:

The power of poetry gives us our minds — many symbols, many arrangements, many perceptions, many interpretations x social grammar, normative language behavior . . . so ye poets 🙂 , let’s go and find the good together.

And with the help of God, nature, and the universe, build some things — a little at a time — for the mind more helpful, greater, wondrous.

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FTAC – On Ambivalence in Scripture and the ‘Humanity of Humanity’

14 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by in FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philology, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics

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I call that other force “the humanity of humanity” but while hoping the same aggregates toward the middle, mild, and moderate one also confronts immense cowardice and lethargy in the face of violent ambition. At one point, for example, an estimated 10,000 al-Shabaab fighters making a mess in Somalia had displaced, in effect, some 1.25 million Somalis to camps in Kenya and to make-do camps around Mogadishu. How is it the same were not organized — governed, self-governing — to stop “The Youth” in their tracks at first appearance? Of course, political anarchy and the individual interests of competing warlords and such then maintained conditions for an AQ-type landing or development.

Each of the societies hosting what I call the “Islamic Small Wars” exists with an incoherence sufficient to keep its destructive miscreants in business — and in business with money supply drawn from combinations of criminal activities (“narcoterrorism”) and rogue but princely largesse.

Ambivalent or difficult injunctive text may be neutral in the manner of a Rorschach — it maintains many things corresponding to the innate character of the reader, and it’s the reader that drives the character of the text into some kind of social reality.

I’m loath to reflect here on commands, demands, and judgments in scripture but may suggest for improved relations and peace that open and far ranging discussion — whatever it is, drag it out into the sun and let’s have a look at it together — may be the best aid in navigating OUR way toward something better.

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My old rabbi, a conservative with a lefty past, said he liked Reform Judaism because it “forces you to think”.

Perhaps some of us who read the Torah fresh find that it neither directs nor instructs but more often puzzles and thereby asks that we bring as much as we may to understanding something that we have just experienced through it.  In effect, and running on very little familiarity with the five books, my close reading of the Adam and Eve story would suggest it is not about the “loss of innocence” and very far from “original sin”: instead, it’s about the gift and onset of human consciousness, self-consciousness, and conscience.  God says to Eve that if she eats of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, she will die, and the snake tells her she won’t die — and they have both told the truth!

What Eve does with that bite of the apple is transform.

Not to go on with that exegesis here, the point is the story refuses to dictate its message.

Moreover, if one chooses to do a close-reading crawl through the two well-known sections (Genesis 2 and 3), one may discover many puzzles in the way of comprehension: why, for example, does the snake mention just one tree to Eve when there are two — the other is the Tree of Life — planted in same place?  The Church, for another example, may connect the fig leaves with shame, but why not mutual regard, for, when it comes to dressing for success, God sews for his two daring children — whom He is about to dispatch into human life — their first useful and protective clothing?

And so it goes.

The effect on the mind: deep aggravation and perturbation.

Should not God have told us about how we’re supposed to live?

Oh no — that would have been too easy and perhaps too cruel: we are forced instead to think through our way and the way ahead.

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FTAC – On Boko Haram and the Ghost Army

12 Monday May 2014

Posted by in Books, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology

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The assembly of “Islamic Jihad” beneath or sharing the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah banners effectively goad Islam to wake and stand from the center of its humanity and for the rest of the world with Islam to bond across the center.

It’s not going well in or around the hot conflict zones.

The center has not held.

The persistence, strength, and viability of dictatorship on general terms (e.g., “Putin-Assad-Khamenei”) has not waned; the want of Arab Muslim exclusivity in a war of all against all (possibly 90 percent of the schoolgirls kidnapped were Christian and “fight them . . . jizya . . . humbled” alone would have sufficed for license) has been powered up by energy earnings the west wants to recover in trade; and no bonded army of Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others has appeared in the field with the possible exceptions of U.S. / NATO intervention — post-Enlightenment secular states operating armies reflective of their national and international make-up — and an expansion of western buy-in creating or strengthening helpful alliance, e.g., Israel-India with moderation and modification in the Muslim-majority states, e.g., Pakistan and Turkey.

China’s not far outside of all of this either — it too has a vested interest in dictatorship while it’s issues with Islam on its flanks seems well managed enough for brushing aside. China’s role is “the money”, and it has been doing business with its eyes closed (e.g., as in Sudan) except where an absolute authoritarianism similar to its own has been challenged.

Perhaps as Uncle Sam has learned — and one way of the other, however’s he’s set up, whoever his handlers, if he has them, Obama knows — fighting Boko Haram isn’t about money alone: it’s about something in the concept of a “common humanity” that needs to surface, discover affinity and “common cause”, and then work to diminish the challenges and disruptions posed by so many “malignant narcissists” parading beneath so many banners — and with language fitted to the support of their too lofty contempt.

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I had really set out this morning to take a glance at political psychology, narcissism, and the role played by contempt in states of affairs (because to the criminally elevated, contempt both defends the damaged and feels good besides).  However, in the way of life online with Facebook, the deflections and distractions are the first things met.

On sorting the political psychology, I got as far as “discovering” Macalester Bell, who last year published the book title for the age: Hard Feelings: The Moral Psychology of Contempt (Oxford UP, 2013).  The Oxford price appears half that of the Amazon hardcover quote, so maybe, but not right now . . . what’s really needed here (in western Maryland) is a brick-and-mortar conflict and peace studies library with a wing devoted to political psychology (anyone want to talk?).

Be that as it may, other intelligent work showed up quick on the radar: from Canada, Nora Gold’s Fields of Exile, a novel developed around the experience of anti-Semitism on campus.

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Talmud teaches the need for many voices. The Gemara takes us on a journey of debates through the centuries, deconstructing the smallest detail-pilpul. In the Talmud we are given the majority as well as the minority view to examine. Some of the comments may cause discomfort-but so be it, as we are a people judged by our actions, not our feelings.

Bederman, Diane Weber.  “The Second Catastrophe”.  The Times of Israel, May 11, 2014.

“The Awesome Conversation”, which name I’ve given the Facebook chatyping but may well extend that idea to Google+ and every other platform for cultural and political salon, hosts all voices, some perhaps more predominantly loathed than others, but it’s important that they are heard as censorship knows only the ends, ultimately, of the censorious, whom, if self-appointed, may be themselves The Problem.

* * *

The “Ghost Army” — that’s the Russian Army that should have intervened in Syria to modify the Assad regime and bring Syria toward democracy without wildly altering its demographics.

Instead: “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” have risen to the defense of absolutism, well demonstrating that the dictator had an army and a mixed host of moderate revolutionary and Islamic extremist revolutionaries could raise armies but not sort their differences toward a robust common sense of cause.  A fair portion of the millions of Syrians stranded between hotheads have been made the casualties and refugees of general warfare, and while they may enjoy an army of NGOs and experienced refugee camp administrators, the same would seem still incoherent as to ends (including the want of destroying Israel, which anti-Semitic raving no longer suffices for social bonding) and unable to wrest back their lands from either the heartless dictator or the vacuous Islamist.

The ghost army in Nigeria has form — at least there is an army to deploy against Boko Haram — but it may not have yet the virtue of a passion for addressing so evil a devotion to brigandage as that displayed by Boko Loco’s criminal mentality as abetted by Qur’anic injunction: “Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the Scripture – [fight] until they give the jizyah willingly while they are humbled” (Surat 9:29).

In Loco’s upside-down world, the Loco are the righteous.

Elsewhere, from Afghanistan to Brandeis (I’m thinking about the still recent Ayaan Hirsi Ali brouhaha and the possible effects of Prince al-Waleed’s wealth) to Crimea / Ukraine, The Money would seem the morality, and armies, ghost or not, and their generals (and presidents) must be paid — or paid off — and left in power to rule as they may see fit.  That is their most personal contest (so Hitler asked famously, “Who says I am not under the special protection of God?”).   From Karzai to Yanukovych, the leaders are not all alike although the degree of their corruption may be a common issue: in real time, in “realpolitik”, what forms up in arms beneath their sway spells the future for constituents (x area-squared) affected by their ambitions, behavior, outlooks, and proclivities.

One day, perhaps, the Ghost Army will appear across the span of the Islamic Small Wars but what divisions and patrols there may be today would seem to be faltering before evil.

Reference Off to the Side

Miller, John J.  “Clash of Cultures: How donors can increase understanding of the Middle East.”  Philanthropy Roundtable, cover story republished from the July / August 2007 issue of Philanthropy Magazine.

Fox News: “New video appears to show kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls praying to Allah.”  May 12, 2014.

Spencer, Robert.  “90% of abducted Nigerian schoolgirls are Christians; jihadists released Muslim girls.”  Jihad Watch, May 11, 2014;

Fani-Kayode.  Vanguard. “Chibok Affairs: The Emerging and Uncomfortable Facts, By Fani-Kayode,” May 10, 2014:

The bitter truth is that regardless of wherever you come from, whatever your faith is and whichever side of the political divide you stand, we all have a duty to get to the bottom of this matter, join forces, close ranks, find out what is really going on and bring this nightmare to an end. We must join hands with all men and women of goodwill and, together, we must fight this insidious evil that seeks to envelop our land and overwhelm our people.

Toameh, Khaled Abu.  “Palestinian Authority: Combatants Against Peace.”  Gatestone Institute, May 12, 2014:

But the Palestinian Authority [PA] leadership and many Palestinians obviously don’t share this view. In fact, they see the participation of Palestinians in an event commemorating Israeli victims of violence as an act of treason.

The PA government in the West Bank — who do not miss any opportunity to tell Westerners that they remain committed to peace and coexistence with Israel — even went as far as disbanding the Palestinian branch of Combatants For Peace in June 2013.

Who has the real army?

National Post.  “‘They cut hands, cut heads, play with corpses’; Islamic extremists fighting brutal war against Kurds in Syria.”  May 11, 2013: “Residents of this new Islamist state are living in conditions of extraordinary brutality. Christians in Raqqa must pay a special tax — the jizya — in accordance with Shariah law. Anyone caught drinking alcohol is imprisoned and tortured.”

Halper, Daniel.  “#BringBackOurDignity.”  The Weekly Standard, May 12, 2014: “My editorial this week ended with a coda praising Ayaan Hirsi Ali and, in effect, daring Hillary Clinton to stand up for someone who, as the savagery of Boko Haram has reminded us, has been so right about Islamist terror.”

Hirsi Ali, Ayaan.  “Boko Haram and the Kidnapped Schoolgirls: the Nigerian terror groups reflects the general Islamist hatred of women’s rights.  When will the West wake up?”  The Wall Street Journal, May 8, 2014.

Johnson, Charles.  “Nigeria Accepts Israel’s Offer to Help Find Kidnapped Girls.”  Little Green Footballs, May 11, 2014.

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FTAC – On Comparisons Between Jewish Success and the Perception of Underachievement in Islam

07 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by in FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Politics, Religion

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For the record, Alfred Nobel was a Lutheran Christian and the prize he created from making a fortune on dynamite he ordered administered by a Norwegian Nobel Peace Price Committee. (See my point)?

I have always battled this analogy between the comparatively small global community of Jews, fewer than 14 million worldwide, and the astoundingly large and varied community of Muslims, the Ummah comprising a subscription of about 1.6 billion.

Although Moses flees Egypt with the Jews and a “mixed multitude” — a note given much consideration by those who study the Torah — the fact from the beginning is the doctrine is defensive, not expansive, the people gathered out of necessity (perhaps opposition to Pharaoh may be likened to opposition to Bashar al-Assad) and existing as a people together in common cause, together in history and scattered by history, cannot be compared to either the myriad societies courted or conquered by generals Constantine and Muhammad and their like through the generations (world Christian population: 2.18 billion according to the Pew Forum).

About 1.7 million Israelis live in poverty, which in turn lends Israel the distinction of sustaining one of the highest — if not the highest — poverty rate in the developed world.

So much for having produced great wealth and disproportionate numbers in Nobel laureates: imagine 1.3 billion Jews and extrapolate accordingly if other factors were not to be brought into play.

If one is to assess a “global state of affairs for Muslims” with contemporary Jewish achievement and fortitude in mind, one may be well advised to revisit the wellspring of Jewish thought plus the near 0 CE revolution in Jewish argument and law explored by Hillel the Elder. If Jewish energies seem both more confident in the world, more resilient in the shadows of immense disasters, more free to argue, discuss, research, and discern how things work in many fields, and less obsessed with other means to power and status, it may have to do not only with intellectual behavior traced from before Moses to Hillel to Maimonides but with the progressive temperament and smaller numbers to suit or facilitate that growth.

Oppression, ironically, also places a premium on what may be carried in the mind — knowledge and relationships — and what must be abandoned (in materials, workshops, and stores) from time to time and place to place.

The embrace of humanity and values that propel Jewish accomplishment, so I believe Hillel would be the first to note, are not exclusive.

Hillel the Elder has been noted as living between 35 BCE and 10 CE but precise dates vary.

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The premise for the response “from the awesome conversation” (FTAC) seems voiced regularly from within Islam as encouragement and goad supporting education and modernization within the Ummah.  While one may suppose jealousy and resentment powerful motivators of ambitions shaped to suit individual and national self-concepts, and those emotions fit the pattern of the statement that is essentially “Jews win more Nobel Prizes than Muslims”, the comparison itself bears examining, and so I whip something together like the above (pointing out the disparities in numbers and the character of the communities involved) and the rest adds its very small dot to contemporary cultural and political influence.

My conclusion echoes what I’ve invented — distilled, proposed — and written into the column to the left: the Jews are a global ethnic commune with its heart in Jerusalem and its soul invested in the body of the Land of Israel.

More or less.

Moreover, the Jewish People share a mythos that is ancient and not “overwritten” by whatever johnny-come-lately plus ambitious writer-leaders arrived to in essence scoop up more loose human energy from the sea of humanity surrounding them in their time.

The Romans were a mixed lot by the time Jesus-Paul-Constantine arrived (over time too, but not so much by millennial standards) to sweep through the continent and establish Rome as capital of a Christian civilization.

Perhaps centuries later, Muhammad conceived of a more difficult and sudden task, i.e., the imparting of some facets of Jewish spirit as if the Jews were decadent impious cheats and himself the voice of God on Earth, perhaps fair reason, fair license, to develop pretext to inveigle, murder, and plunder the Banu Qurayza for arms, women, and the pleasure of their silence.

Jewish rejection of the new monotheist religions, each in their time, sets the stage in each for enterprise-wide supersession to be leveraged by anti-Semitic libel and slander accompanied by discrimination in law and other persecutions aided by clever (like “dhimmi status”) devices.

For squabblers (and a few malevolent narcissistic sadists) beating each other’s brains out over the matter of God’s favor, the gentle Hillel the Elder — whose life overall precedes the Christian concept and rise of Christianity but also at 0 CE — at the end of his life — approximates its inception — effectively challenges rote observance within Judaism and expands the space in law and in social relationships given to good principle founded in knowledge of the Torah.

Perhaps all of the rest has been bloody commentary as well.

Reference

Wikipedia: Hillel the Elder.

Jewish Virtual Library.  “Hillel and Shammai”.

Jewish Encyclopedia.  “Hillel”.

Telushkin, Joseph.  If Not Now, When?  Schocken, 2010.

Possibly Hillel’s Four Most Telling Epigrammatic Statements

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

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

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

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“Be of the disciples of Aaron, loving peace and pursuing peace, loving your fellow creatures and drawing them near to the Law.”

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FTAC – Putin – Anti-Semitism – Jerusalem – Power – Grandeur

06 Tuesday May 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Eurasia, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Politics, Regions, Russia

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Yesterday’s New York Times featured an interview with the pro-Russian militia in Ukraine, and in the reporter’s straight estimation they were on their own, defending against threats to their ethnic status and cross-border relationships, and experienced in the Soviet and Russian armies — but they were not armed or paid by Russia.

This is not to say that “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” / Putin-Yanukovych” and the body of relationships developed around the “vertical of power”, a euphemism for the law under Putin’s leadership, should be given a light touch: Dictatorship / kleptocracy itself has stakes across the Russia’s (Putin’s) axis of power.

However, although some Russian nationalists may match their counterparts in Hungary as regards attitudes about Jews, in principle, Vladimir Putin has never been associated with other than a straight secularism deeply devoted to other aspects of Slavic culture and life. His visit to Israel and the Wailing Wall have been well regarded — there are some nifty YouTube videos available for that; his defense establishment’s procurement includes Israeli manufactured avionics, at least.

Is Putin playing for Jerusalem?

🙂

At the moment, he could steal some affection from the Obama Administration.

However, I think the foreign affairs layout more complex but partially distilled to the defense of the natural legitimacy of autocracy (corruption, manipulation, oligarchy, patronage) worldwide.

The basic background reading around here: https://conflict-backchannels.com/library/russian-section/ — I’d do more with funding supporting focus, but I’m not about to ascend to the heights of multilingual scholars: for who’s around, visit the Brookings Institute.

Putin, whom I have called “the best Bond villain ever — and he already has the nukes”, has a good deal of charisma, part of which involves what may be universal feelings about grandeur and its expression in great empire, great states, and great estates.

We have a long conversation ahead on how Versailles gets built, by whom, using what methods.

Obviously, the turns of Kasparov and Khodorkovsky have not yet come — and current FSB staffing exceeds in headcount per capita that of the old KGB (and the press is again “state managed”, heavily so).

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All that above is just my impression chatyped out in about seven minutes.

As mentioned but worth mentioning again, in my vast estate of 850-sq.ft., I much appreciate what I have come to call “19th Century modern” — and, believe me, this related to playing guitar and singing quite well, I am as a guest ever at home in the confines of mansions, sailboats, and big ol’ farmsteads.

Would the world rather not have its great castles, cathedrals, estates, mosques, and palaces?

Would it not wish to read in history and in real time the legends (and scandals) involving the powerful and wealthy?

Related: Brennan, Morgan.  “The Most Expensive Billionaires Homes in the World.”  Forbes, March 29, 2013.

I may achieve yet, so I do hope, but with a mind matched to a great library (850-sq.ft., 2,000 volumes), one may well travel into these atmosphere — and with a guitar visit now and then.

While Putin, for whom my space would be a broom closet, if that, has skewered Russia around the “vertical of power”, he has made it also glamorous (that $51 billion splurged on the winter Olympics at Sochi may have its positive resonance long after the Syrian Civil War has expired) while making himself legendary.

Post-Soviet resurgent 19th Century Imperial Russia will turn itself right-side-up with time, but Putin reminds that decision rests with himself and Russia, not with Russia as an expression or extension of western ethics and values.  While he has backed a despot in Syria, aligned himself with the kleptocrat in Iran, and may be tangled in his own mafia nets with Yanukovych’s route from Ukraine, he has nonetheless maintained the modernity and secularism of a modern state with its boisterous energies intact — and when the day comes that he’s gone, it will go on talking about him a long, long time.

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FTAC – On Blogging and Political Efficacy

25 Friday Apr 2014

Posted by in FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Politics

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Update: February 4, 2018

This piece published about four years ago appears to have inspired visitors with the “P” word, which had been used as below to describe direct awful conveyance in photographs and videos of conflict-related atrocities.  This is the second time the editor has had to revise a post to deflect traffic more genuinely interest in other matters — the first involved a “Live Leak” photo of children strung from rafters — no question about that — allegedly in a Burmese hut.  This one has had an image of a woman buried in hard earth up to her chin and being given a spoonful of water.  It was used by CAMERA, an organization dedicated to accurate reporting on the middle east conflict, and may have originated in film rather than some shared village atrocity, and it too appears to have drawn puerile curiosity — so I have removed it from this post and from the BackChannels archive in the interest of building and sustaining a community genuinely interested in political science and political psychology.

As search engines appear not to have developed judgment about true content, the editor has changed both the title and address of the post to fend of the results of misrepresentation.

 

War porn. Islamic government porn. (Very surreal listening to “Somebody to Love” by the Jefferson Airplane while typing this). I / we may be at a crossroads as regards the value of complaint, which is what we have all been doing with the mud slinging or witness depending on the conflict or natural disaster and our personal relationship with each related event or policy.

When I set out in 2006/7 to read foreign newspapers in English translation (because one Everyman with Broadband could suddenly do that with ease), I had no idea it would lead to this (add videos for beatings, beheading, bombing, chemical weapons attacks, hangings (in Burma, of children, no less), helicopter gunship combat, firing squads, mass graves, refugee camps.

I started in Somalia, which struck me first and foremost as an environmental disaster (I even sent a note to Greenpeace about getting that littoral cleaned up).

Why Somalia first?

Chance.

Nothing else.

Now I have that Back-Channels blog and it appears a sea of the world’s desperate — disenfranchised, impoverished, voiceless (almost) — are about to discover it, and as editor I am wondering if it’s possible to traverse the distance from “Isn’t that awful?!” to “I / we can do something about this.”

The world’s bad habits are stubborn . . . ask any diplomat about South Sudan this week . . . or the Central African Republic . . . or Syria.

* * *

This desktop scribe cannot authenticate photos (yet) and, of course, a lot of misdirecting imagery comes out of the “special interest” presses, not least the ones oriented to ethnicity or religion. One begs those also in the field to have integrity about material poured into news.

Beyond that, let’s find some answers for obscenities like stoning, the Iranian “justice” system, and Evin Prison (methods and operations): such as those need to be consigned to yesterday, long ago, and far away.

May the world sail on into improved global camaraderie.

For those new to this blog, and there are many today, “FTAC” stands for “From the Awesome Conversation” which in turn refers to the “chatyping” I and others have been doing on Facebook for some time.

Awful confession: with this “FTAC” method and section, I quote myself, essentially sharing thought prompted by the politics-oriented talk with which I’ve been involved within the social network.  To keep the process simple, I leave out the other half of the conversation, so I’m not copy-and-pasting other than my own thought.

🙂

As my own “style book” rule, I double-indent quoted material, my own and excerpts from other locations.

Unimaginable — but who has to imagine now? — cruelty. To my surprise, the late Peter Matthiessen, among the sturdiest of old literary hands, turned out a pretty good Holocaust novel in _In Paradise_. He walks through from today and into the cattle car and gas chamber of yesterday with both reassuring empathy and a chilling and ineffable distance as regards the complete heartbreak bound up with the apprehension of events and their unpredictability.

JR’s comment — “It makes a victim so helpless and debased… that even seeing it is physically difficult!” — suits, and no doubt the purpose of the malignant narcissism and sadism underlying the creation and maintaining of the barbarism is to dishearten, deaden, and enslave witness, a process if still near Nazism is signal, leads on to cataclysmic mass murder and, given how the better, more sane world responds, national mass suicide by way of war. “Diplomacy” fails: those 20th Century German engines did not stop until completely bankrupted and broken.

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Also, and back to integrity in reporting, this, I believe, is the story related to the rape victim:

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/iranian-rape-victim-faces-hanging-sex-assault-claims-article-1.1762712

Note that she is facing the gallows, that good old English method reserved for murderers (once upon a time), so the illustrating picture may be interpreted as agitprop (by way of CAMERA’s Facebook page) certain to get a reaction.

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Of course, the real story is worse than the one suggested!

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There is so much of horror and suffering in the world — where does one focus?

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FTAC – On Social Grammar and Social Reality

06 Sunday Apr 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation

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When?

Answer “why” first — and the answer may have to do with the roles played in language by loyalty and what might be called “secure feeling”. When people lie, which concept includes false accusations and omissions, it is to hide something or to get something.

Always.

Around the world, what competes with loyalty? Principle.

However, if dissimulation accedes to bullying (by the local god mob), if fibbing means being fed, if deflection of responsibility forestalls opprobrium and shame, if vicious slander summons murder and plunder to one’s greater glory, thuggish though it be, well, heck, lying works!

All of that is part of “social grammar”, which you are trying to change where it’s needed. Perhaps, unfortunately, social reality — with which language behaviors are integrated — trumps principle by maintaining and reinforcing the behaviors cited for scolding. To get to a better place, the reward system has to change in a pervasive way.

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Inspiration for the comment: Tezyapar, Sinem.  “When Will the Muslim World Take Responsibility and End Preaching Hatred?”  Sinem Tezyapar, October 24, 2013.

From the above, one may sense how and where propaganda fits in and why it’s so important for autocrats to manage their state’s media to whatever extent may be possible: the systems they create in their own piratical interests are made to depend on their patronage and protection without exception, and for that, their subjects, the subjugated, must be made and maintained as the most loyal of believers: our “malignant narcissists” cannot afford the freedom of free minds when it comes to maintaining their “vertical of power” and their vision of expanding and limitless “narcissistic supply”.

Related: “The Emperor’s New Clothes”.

Are “grandiose and messianic delusions” actually delusions if the person possessed of them makes them even somewhat real?

Be that as it may, the challenge and puzzle posed by Tezyapar’s jihad of the pen nonetheless involves the unraveling of complex and long-lived systems of pandering and patronage on the part of the powerful — who for their own aggrandizement lie to their people to keep them manipulated — and systems of subjugation within which the weak may grovel or play — and pray  — as required and reap the benefits of an imperious acknowledgment, one by whom that if defied would be just as pleased to “barrel bomb” the children of the loyal every bit as much as the disloyal.

That last behavior, the throwing of an ungodly tantrum, I would not call indicative of “social grammar” but rather “criminal infallibility”, a state of being and regard most appreciated by dictators.

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