09 Friday Jan 2015
Tags
disingenuous speech, idealism, integrity, lying, malignant narcissism, political exploitation, political theater, propaganda, theft
You may have your integrity before God; your adversary does not; he has loyalty leveraged by fear, greed, or need: the father can be a very bad father — and in that is the fighting.
10 Monday Nov 2014
The “Palestinian Cause” has left refugee residents stranded in Gaza and around Ramallah while failing to produce anything — anything — beyond “martyrs”, not that billionaires Mashaal and Haniyeh would wish to join them.
The failure over the summer of “Gaza Fortress” — credit Robert Satloff at TWI for that term — appears to have pushed Hamas to push itself where it has outside of (Judenrein) Gaza. Still, no matter what Hamas does, the cause is done, the encampments — as inholdings in Israel, as ghettos like Yarmouk in Syria — are maintained entirely not by disaffected Arab hands but by Arab kleptocrats hiding what they really do (how else become a billionaire on the backs of the impoverished?) behind cloaks, screens, and walls of disingenuous words.
Suzerainty might serve for Israel’s area of control to recognized international borders. The camps elsewhere want for a sea change in Arab heart and outlook. The twined ropes of national socialism and a strident Islamism have repeatedly served to aggrandize autocrats while failing, and in fact killing, their constituents.
It was never a real estate problem.
It isn’t one today.
It’s a problem about enmity founded in avarice and religious successionary ambition, old ropes tangled together by perhaps the Soviet encouragement of a thieving while patronizing “pan Arab nationalism” — of the sort pursued by Saddam Hussein (count the palaces built at the expense of the hunger of his constituents) — and a klepto-theocratic Islamism, the kind that sacrifices children to tunnel building and tells the mothers to regard their own innocent young as “martyrs”.
It should be over.
Someone needs to call it “over”.
No interest vested in sustaining the middle east conflict.
None, perhaps, hooked on one- and two-state real estate arguments care much for a responsible and, actually, liberating suzerainty with public courts and a press in which the tolerant among the curious are well defended and the reportage — clear, accurate, and complete — routinely notes not only the arrest but the cause of it as well.
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06 Monday Oct 2014
Empirical method vs magical thinking is part of contemporary conflict as are secret societies vs open ones (but none are completely open) and loyalty to power vs integrity and loyalty only to what is ideal, what is God, and what are nature and the universe. Which of the worlds should one wish to inhabit: the world of everything imaginable is possible? The world of knowing, not guessing, with high probability of accurate perception?
On the web, I’ve been swimming of late through the worlds of “preppers” and “truthers”, one community preparing three-day “bug out bags” for the short-term surviving of a disaster, which admittedly, is nowhere impossible, and the latter continuing to blame all large-force variables on the usual pack of suspects: the Jews, the United States, the CIA, Mossad, et al. If it’s hidden in their soul and projected into reality, the same in targets suits the ascription of responsibility: the hidden hands of hidden will have arranged their worlds, and they are hell bent on figuring things out by guessing wildly, seeing selectively, and proving their perceptions objective, however disingenuous or tortured their arguments may be.
Given the shakiness of such realities, I’m inclined myself to turn some attention to writing fictions.
🙂
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11 Thursday Sep 2014
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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10 Thursday Jul 2014
FTAC:
You know what, J. — I should not type with a glass or Rose next to me — I’ve become or am becoming more aware of the followers in these disasters than the leaders.
We know what Hamas is about.
The constituency of Gaza, whether endorsing or not, knows what Hamas is about.
But Hamas — not as an organization but as an event in the life of community — takes place anyway!
This is near to an historic day because out of the many hate-peace peace groups blathering all around the middle east conflict, we are all just one mouse-click away from chatyping with (what we may perceive as) enemy.
And I thought photography was an adventure . . . . 😀
And throw the calculus out the window because we know (from Vietnam we must know) that the numbers don’t mean nachas! What has meaning are basic principles and values _in the mutual defense of our own_).
What if “The Terrorists” had captured and murder three young men from Alexandria. Virginia. What if?
That’s the only question on the table.
Hamas has a big problem with Arabic. Hanniyah, in video, gets his pecker up exclaiming how “We believe in death as they believe in life!”
Well, bullshit.
http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Israeli-hospital-treats-Hamas-PM-Haniyehs-granddaughter-332193
Hamas believes in life!
Too.
Dictators, like the dictator “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” defend political absolutism in their own right (AKA “unlimited narcissistic supply”) — http://www.reuters.com/investigates/iran/#article/part1 (such a gentle looking soul . . .but don’t overlook Evin Prison or its population).
That’s where we are.
Wherever.
Now we can talk.
Who else is going to talk?
Talk with me.
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09 Wednesday Jul 2014
What does not bear its cross?
When God has mercy, it’s through human agency, except for that first instance: thanks for sewing the skins, also the gifts of consciousness, self-consciousness, and conscience, and we’ll make our way, getting a little better with practice; so maybe we’ll see you again in 7,000 years.
Sound good?
By then, we’ll be talking with the elephant, and the elephant will be teaching us, and, who knows but that the elephant will be different too.
We’d rather not have the suffering, but even more, we’d rather not have it go on if we can do something about it, even late but not too late.
One tries to be careful with anthropomorphism, keeping the elephant the elephant and the human the human, but as we grow our intellectual capacity and ability to comprehend others, including elephants and other members of the animal kingdom exhibiting highly developed sentience, it’s inevitable that we will find our intersections and mutual interests and perhaps another chamber in the world’s greater soul.
The prompt, rightly, had to do with the inerasable suffering already experienced by Raju.
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02 Wednesday Jul 2014
Excerpted from a gem of an essay —
Said rolled American racism and European colonialism into one mélange of white oppression of darker-skinned peoples. He was not the only thinker to have forged this amalgam, but his unique further contribution was to represent “Orientals” as the epitome of the dark-skinned; Muslims as the modal Orientals; Arabs as the essential Muslims; and, finally, Palestinians as the ultimate Arabs. Abracadabra—Israel was transformed from a redemptive refuge from two thousand years of persecution to the very embodiment of white supremacy.
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27 Friday Jun 2014
Tags
The difference in conflict axis discriminator may be found in the confusion between the worldview and intentions of personality (as with Ahmadinejad or Khamenei, also Assad, also Putin) and affinity or affiliation with nominal class (Shiite). While the American approach repeatedly tries to null discrimination by class (so our Protestants and Catholics now get along as regards the civil purpose that is governance), I don’t think that either the surface of the American leadership either pursues or promotes analysis in political psychology with an emphasis on our troubling “malignant narcissists” and, with ISIS, plain criminal sociopaths and psychopaths.
Whether Pope or Ayatollah, their respective adherents invest a great deal of faith in their perception and judgment, and sometimes to the extent of treating the same as infallible, at which point the same pick up the medieval chips, and unbridled, or nearly so, they can bring great damage to others.
To obtain freedom of worship within a secular system may mean addressing the despotic in persons — and specific organizational personalities — and channeling the same off to positions more safe for everyone else. In that regard, ISIS represents the criminal side of egotism unchecked and way beyond limits. That what they do works its way through an affiliate community, sufficient for the same to demur from battle with them, speaks to normative and social grammar. Barbarians and pirates may be criminals to all whose paths cross with theirs, but within their own enclaves, they are the normative reality. They think they’re just fine — and that God loves them most of all.
This is related to “civilizational narcissism”. Mobarak Haider has continued fighting the good fight against what I call the “God Mob” — the mafia that leverages religious faith into immense — and deadly and often soul deadening — power over others.
Mobarak Haider’s Diagnosis — Taliban: The Tip of a Holy Iceberg
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The chat had to do with Iraq, the Sunni-Shiite schism, and, loosely, the ISIS alignment with Sunni Islam. Be that as it may, the response corresponds with the interests of this blog, its notes in the area of “conflict, culture, language, and psychology”, and its cycling to and around “malignant narcissism” and the psychology of dictatorship and fascism.
Rodney King’s question, “Can’t we all just get along?” has been long answered in the main: not only “Yes, we can” but “yes, we do!”
Most of the time in America, it’s true: we are not at one another’s throats except all across the board and through the complex labyrinth’s of open civil and criminal courts.
We Americans have all the problems of the rest of the world but in much, much smaller measure, and for those smaller measures — whether having to do with blowing up abortion clinics or blowing up marathons at the finish line — we have our Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The lethal mix of external influence and incursion has also, alas, led to our supporting a massive domestic and foreign intelligence apparatus.
Still, that’s not because of us — it’s because of the world Out There!
Why can’t all the rest of you just get along?
🙂
The truth is most do but not on the basis of religious or other common affinity but rather according to moderate-middle sensibilities and temperaments that may be then free and secure to distill issues and promote policies and law that work for most on the basis of their shared general humanity.
Those that cannot do that deform into other and malignant souls.
Environments that encourage and sustain the latter, however, distress and mire themselves in conflict defined by dismal rounds of rule and subjugation.
Indeed, they are “dumb wars”.
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