Category Archives: Philology

Link: Margulies on Judaism, Language, and Conscience

21 Friday Nov 2014

Posted by in Philology, Religion

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 . . . the social gospel of judaism, as preached by the prophets of israel and taught by generations of rabbis and religious scholars, is explicitly and unambiguously a teaching of democratic socialism . . . the talmud explains: “according to that which is lacking for the poor person, you are commanded to give him… if it is appropriate to give him bread, they give him bread; if dough, they give him dough, if to feed him, they feed him. if he is not married and wants to take a wife, they enable him to marry; they rent a house for him, and provide a bed and furnishings…” the rambam (maimonides) explains: “according to that which is lacking for the poor person, you are commanded to give him …you are commanded to fill in for his lack, but you are not commanded to enrich him…”

http://dialogicalecology.blogspot.com/2014/11/a-few-points-on-judaism-and-social.html – 11/15/2014.

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FTAC – Totalitarian Propaganda Environment – A Note

07 Friday Nov 2014

Posted by in Philology, Political Psychology, Politics

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The refugee residents are boxed in primarily by their information environments that are deeply cordoned, enforced, and sustained by a smorgasbord of powerful handlers — family and state enterprises — whose intentions and power are enforced by violence.

Khaled Mashaal and Ismail Haniyeh are reported to be billionaires today (Mashaal’s wealth specifically estimated to range between $2.5 and $5 billion). Khamenei’s “Setad” conglomerate, built partially on the theft of Iranian private property belonging to persons that could be targeted by the theokleptocracy, has today an estimated valuation of about $90 billion. The KSA and Qatar elements appear also to have within their range elements resistant to regulation when it comes to “donations” to Hamas or ISIS (reference: http://www.acc-co.com/content.asp?ContentId=598).

So there’s loose money, and most likely, some of that finds its way into “solidarity” type agitprop and anti-Semitic libel.

The head of the “Neturei Karta”, often trotted out by the regime in Iran, was noted to have been paid $50,000 annually by Tehran to have his group do their thing, i.e., Tehran pays to put on an evil show, and the extent to which it maintains or pays agents, whether through Hezbollah or in other organizations, isn’t something I’ve yet found on the web.

Adding post-Soviet totalitarian flavor to this may be Putin’s reversion to a feudal governing model for Russia. The FSB today employs more staff per capita than the old KGB, and following from its KGB roots also promotes state-controlled media and state-based lying. Frankly. Iran’s VEVAK has been also off the radar of the western press, but it too may be overwhelming in scale, at minimum internally to enforce the will of the regime as it exploits the state.

As the alternative histories of Gaza and Ramallah, if not other geopolitical space, fractures against histories carefully culled with integrity, the information operations of autocratic states should become more transparent and widely known.  As lies are told to hide things and get things, things that have been hidden nonetheless surface with time and things that have been stolen — including life itself — also come to light in the responsible historian’s accounting.

Reference by Title

“Doha Bank’s branch in New York is fined $5m for AML Non-Compliance” – 4/23/2009

“Report: UK fraud office to probe Barclays, Qatar Holding dealings” – 7/23/2013.

“Neturei Karta, Paid Agent of Israel’s Enemies” – 9/25/2004

“Khamenei controls massive financial empire built on property seizures” – 11/11/2013

Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (Wikipedia)

Addendum

Also as regards beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors, much in the middle east and elsewhere may be complicated by the separation of loyalty (as to a crime family) and integrity (as to mom, apple pie, and the American way). Nothing’s perfect. However, where the Islamic Small Wars are concerned, whether ‘the masses” or the element in power, many prove that they would rather embrace a loyal lie than attempt to live with an uncomfortable truth. The distillation for this predicament may be “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. The want of survival, literally, life, may make fear of a capricious power a better choice than courage before the same.

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FTAC – Take Down that Wall – Comment on Intellectual Poisoning

27 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC, Philology, Political Psychology, Politics

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Here’s a suggested schematic for the big story behind so much indoctrination. Billionaires –> nationalist / religious state dictators –> control, enforcement, and expansion organizations that include elements that attend to intellectual development and resources, internal and external.

Out of that model and through separable national socialist and Islamist pipelines come old Fatah and Hamas and emerging Jobbik (Hungary) and obvious ISIS. At the evident top: Putin-Khamenei. Behind the scenes: extraordinarily wealth personalities much enriched by criminality in state politics.

The commandeering of intellectual resources, whether targeting the kindergarten or college campus, is a part of sustaining criminal power. Where audience is captive or deeply susceptible, indoctrination and training go deep, so much so that the poison turns the world upside down. Where less area (geopolitical space) is captive, then intellectual skirmishing takes place with perhaps discouraging results.

I think a part of the answer to kind of bigotry and conflict addressed here may be to drive highest-integrity information — most open, tested, reviewed, criticized, most probable, etc. — into otherwise closed societies and the minds that have been kept closed by them. “B” may be living in a world of lies and mirrors that she cannot see for having been deeply manipulated within it. Those who wish for peace, who want an honest future (and it may be different than immediately contemplated) may have to disassemble that intellectual wall.

A racket’s a racket.

Ali Khamenei

Mojtaba Khamenei

Putin’s Kleptocracy

Gold-flecked ice cream wasn’t part of the picture that Shiite Muslim clerics painted during the Iranian Revolution, when they promised to lift the poor by distributing the country’s vast oil income equally across society.

But more than three decades later, record oil profits have brought in billions of dollars, and some people here are enjoying that decadent dessert. The trouble is, it’s just a small group of wealthy Iranians. Despite the promises of the revolution, many here say the gap between rich and poor has never seemed wider.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle-east/irans-rich-eat-ice-cream-covered-in-gold-as-poor-struggle-to-survive/2011/07/20/gIQAYKUmwI_story.html – 8/6/2011.

The economy bears more than a little resemblance to the crony capitalism that sprouted from the wreck of the Soviet Union. The 1979 revolution expropriated the assets of foreign investors and the nation’s wealthiest families; oil had long been nationalized, but the mullahs seized virtually everything else of value–banks, hotels, car and chemical companies, makers of drugs and consumer goods. What distinguishes Iran is that many of these assets were given to Islamic charitable foundations, controlled by the clerics. According to businessmen and former foundation executives, the charities now serve as slush funds for the mullahs and their supporters.

Iran has other lethal secrets besides its nuclear program, now the subject of prying international eyes. Dozens of interviews with businessmen, merchants, economists and former ministers and other top government officials reveal a picture of a dictatorship run by a shadow government that–the U.S. State Department suspects–finances terrorist groups abroad through a shadow foreign policy. Its economy is dominated by shadow business empires and its power is protected by a shadow army of enforcers.

http://www.forbes.com/global/2003/0721/024.html – 7/21/2003.

More than political criminality and cronyism are at play here.

The intellectual subjugation of entire constituencies is thematic throughout the range of the Islamic Small Wars and now in the development of a post-Hitlerian nationalism and national socialism in relation to the Russian nationalist stance on which Putin has relied for popular legitimacy.  Axes of power Khamenie-Putin and Putin-Orban (the same as would have been Putin-Yanukovych had there not been the revolution in Ukraine) and Putin-Assad represent the development and expansion of immense piratical wealth and power far at the expense of ordinary people.

So far, neither the European Union nor the United States nor anyone or anything else has gone so far as to explicate these drifts and relationships for popular overview although with Russia, the articles and books by academics and journalists have produced a handy few volumes for anyone’s home library (more on that later).

Related:

http://news.yahoo.com/bianna-golodryga-interviews-garry-kasparov-093317385.html – 9/30/2014.

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FTAC – A Note on Approaching Fascist Movements Across Four Dimensions

21 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy, Philology, Political Psychology

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Let me suggest four parts or elements that get the machinery working:

1. “Malignant Narcissism” / “Civilizational Narcissism” / relatives of “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” / “Bipolar Disorders” (“grandiose, messianic delusion”) –> each of the labels may represent a straying of innate human energy plus some craziness. The application to conflicts within the “Islamic Small Wars” context should be apparent with some meditation but outside of that, the same applies to variants of “National Socialist” presence, e.g., Putin in Russia, Jobbik in Hungary.

2. “Cultural Poetics and Social Grammar” — words do have a power and poison put in the ears or set before the eyes gets into children very early in the development of language plus self-concept. Good adults are careful with what they impart to their children, and, perhaps, good politicians must be careful with their words, but bad parents and bad politicians — there are lots of “BadDaddy’s” — may have cause to hide something shameful in themselves, to deflect attention away from themselves, to keep on stage a glorious image of themselves in the eyes of others, starting with their children.

3. Ideological Political Programming — the conservative’s abhorrence of dhimmi status, poll taxes, state discrimination speaks to that and may make something of a match between old Stalinist Soviet practices and some notes in Islam that seek the transformation of whole populations using central absolute authority and political torque to do it.

4. Cultural linguistics or language behavior –and as behavior, this may differ from “poetics” (the arrangements of symbols that make language possible). When we listen, when we read: how much do we memorize, parrot, ingest and sustain as stable? How much do we create, invent, question?

When Jews greet “The Binding of Isaac” (“The Akedah”, and bear with me on Isaac), a minority opinion notes that perhaps Abraham should have talked back to God (!) instead of setting off to carry out His instructions without hesitation.

Listen and obey? Listen and question?

Narcissism, cultural programming, political programming, and language behavior as behavior (we’re part of as wild a species as any) would be the four anchors of any approach or analysis of ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hezbollah.

Notably, both Putin and Khamenei operate deeply piratical regimes beneath the cloaks of nationalism and religiosity. They have different trajectories as persons and as representatives of very different states, but they are similar in the pursuit and maintenance of absolute power — absolute control, as if from God — and they apply the same sets of tools for doing that.

I fear overdoing the knowledge part of this kind of view for the fascism it might inspire, if as much has not happened already in the intellectual warrens of governments invested in part in social control.  However, considering the Loud Fascism evident in the wild and the necessity of reducing the same in number and force, the above suggests four useful ways of approaching rogue leaders, their psychology, and their movements.

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FTAC – Comment on Alliance, Belief, and Language

12 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Philology, Political Psychology, Politics

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Tarek Fatah, a founder of the Canadian Muslim Congress, thought the Banu Qurayza legend so egregious ethically and juvenile politically that he sought to dismiss its validity and credit jealousy — “We put one over on the Jews for once” — for the popularity of its defense otherwise but perhaps in relation to the Asian quarter that he has spent his life studying.

This comes from a critique site:

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Muhammad and his band of immigrants arrived in Medina in 622 completely dependent on the hospitality of the three Jewish tribes that lived there alongside the Arabs. In less than two years, two of the tribes that had welcomed him, the Banu Qaynuqa and the Banu Nadir would be evicted, losing their land and their wealth to the Muslims as soon as their guests gained the power to conquer and confiscate. Muhammad accomplished this by deftly exploiting his opponents divisions.

The prophet of Islam chose the order of the doomed tribes carefully. He knew that the other two tribes would not come to the assistance of the first, for example, since they had been aligned against one another in a recent war. He also knew that the third would not assist the second – due to a dispute over “blood money.”

The last tribe to remain was the Banu Qurayza.
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http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/muhammad/myths-mu-qurayza.htm

However, on the web there are many pages devoted to the Banu Qurayza story.

In my linguistic morphology, what is of interest is the virulence of “Islamist” and ambition and violence associated with it. For such as Pamela Geller (no introduction needed), it’s pervasive, an integrated part of the religion, and the religion would not be itself without it. For Qanta Ahmed — most here I believe would know her or know of her — the state of affairs is opposite: BadDaddy and his Islamic Hate are an anomaly — along with the entire Muslim Brotherhood — destroying her beautiful Islam.

With regard to what I’ve called “Shimmer” (it’s huge! It’s small. It’s gone. It’s back), we’re starting to see some geopolitical polling indicative of the shift from feudal to modern across the Ummah.

Down in our own engine rooms, we are still wired together by language and its epistemologic influence plus, here, the programming that is “social grammar”. One cannot solve much in a Facebook post, but one may lay out a lot for consideration.

There’s a lot in a comparatively small package.

How do we wind up killing one another?

Somebody tells a lie and some dumb soul either believes it or goes along with it.

The rest is elaboration.

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FTAC – Multiculturalism – Comment – Age of Dissent

07 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by in A Little Wisdom, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, International Development, Philology

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Modern standards may link to a better informed perception of demarcations between childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. It hasn’t anything to do with affluence: we just know better. Cultures that maintain an earliest onset standard (or worse) may well be regarded as backwards and, frankly, stupid (uninformed) or stubborn or both. As with “honor killing”, we may recognize the anthropological and cultural evolution of the social behavior (we’re a wild species, after all, and we invent ourselves and pass on our invention through generations), but we don’t have to validate it or otherwise fit it into modern terms.

The topic was childhood marriages and related abuses, and the above paragraph was my thread-killer response.

While worldviews needs must shift with boundary changes and knowledge in the world, evolving cultural self-concept may involve selective discarding of no longer useful assumptions or habits of mind.  Why hold on to what is not true?  Or to what failed to work?  Or what is not working?  Or what is needlessly, uselessly dangerous or painful to another?

None sail without casting off lines and leaving old ports of call.

From another thread in response to not being dictated to by the U.S.:

Independence in curiosity and thought may not be dictated. Those attributes would seem within the province of the adventurous and bright across cultures and across time. However, exploration, illumination, insight, surprise, and vision may may be bound together in the complete intellectual tour.

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FTAC – Note – Media Audience and Moral Entrepreneurship

11 Thursday Sep 2014

Posted by in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Philology, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics

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One may differentiate between casual audience comfortable with the world it knows and humanist-intellectual audience with amateur or professional background and buy-in with regard to shaping the next world.

If you are here, you are either between those broad classes or in the latter, and if there’s even just a tiny bit of appropriate education or training back there, then you may be trusted to read critically, to both demand and sift data, to argue about dimensions and variables with a subject of interest, to engage in introspection and reflection as well as judgment, and to think broadly about what would be helpful — anthropologically, ethnographically, evolutionary — in the creation of a greater, more peaceful, more progressive global commune.

The prompt was a piece in Honest Reporting about pandering.

Pandering is a form in lying predicated on the enforcement of loyalty by the panderer.  The seminal fairy tale that is “The Emperor’s New Clothes” applies; it really is not a favor to be told how brave, glorious, and self-sacrificing one is by a personality inclined to sacrifice you in the interest of their own aggrandizement and unbridled glorification.

With the review of media coverage of the latest war in Gaza, the political skewing of the news devolves both to overt Hamas intimidation of the press and the reluctance of the same to either give up a story or taint the same with an acknowledgment of the compromise of their integrity.

Compromised journalism comprises its casual audience.

As suggested at the top of this post, not all audience is casual.  In fact, while a vast global intelligentsia has come into being with the development of the World Wide Web — the numbers may be low but the distribution must certainly be global — a large analytical class has also been present in the world either with partisan loyalties or greater humanist and spiritual motives.  From the “desk analysts” of national security bureaus to the latest in NGO do-gooders, there are plenty of readers who read for data and the arguably most accurate picture they may obtain from the same.  While some things lend themselves to a technocratic objectivity, from conventional defense arrangements to road building coupled with economic development, other themes require a broadened vision of humanity — that “anthropolitical psychology” I’ve mentioned on this blog — and also a world of poetry and consideration for the remaining 7,000 or so living languages in the contemporary human inventory and the cultures and individuals suspended in them in time.

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FTAC – Distilled Thought – Control, Language, Power

04 Thursday Sep 2014

Posted by in A Little Wisdom, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Journalism, Philology, Political Psychology

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“It isn’t healthy to get so sensitive over words.” Actually: opposite, Hatem Ade, because language is what has brought us (from secret group to global society in perhaps concentric circles) to this pass. There are so many directions to go as regards “words have a power”, but let me suggest this distillation: language is a natural human behavior; it is a cultural invention that abets survival within the bounds of each language society; and the cultural invention becomes a cultural suspension.

We literally live in language.

Every autocrat — malignant narcissist, political cabal — understands the primacy that language has in their ascent to power and their remaining in power, and not one of the type fails to overlook the information atmosphere in which their people — their subjects or subjugated people (eventually, it’s up to the people to decide which they are) — exist.

The above premise is never far from thought in every piece on this blog.

It’s there in the mention that the Islamic Small Wars are chiefly about integrity (and it is not okay to lie either to Muslims through patronizing speech or non-Muslims in deceitful speech).

It’s there in the idea that political reports from despotic regime (and their state-controlled media) must be greeted with deep skepticism because the political purposes of powerful controllers and influencing agents naturally corrupt the gathering and expression of observation sensitive to such interests.

It’s there in the notion that the generational transmission of language includes a “social grammar”, i.e., quietly discerned and internalized social rules about speech and what works in relation to needs and what might be met with cuffing.

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