I’ve thought here to mash up a post about conscience, which is to me a mysterious part of our universal human evolution: whether or not we like it, we’re more generally good — good hearted, good natured, helpful, kind by way of empathy and sympathy, lawful and respectful with a basis for both in simple transactional psychology.
Down the left side of this blog are epigrammatic statements that have most to do with the grooming of strongly good global cultural psychology. Authoritarianism, despotism, excessive egoism, and tyranny are on the outs while consideration, cooperation, and thoughtfulness are greatly — and universally — desired. Here are two quotations of quotations from the BackChannels sidebar —
Talmud 7:16 as Quoted by Rishon Rishon in 2004 Qohelet Raba, 7:16 אכזרי סוף שנעשה אכזרי במקום רחמן
Kol mi shena`asa rahaman bimqom akhzari Sof shena`asa akhzari bimqom rahaman
All who are made to be compassionate in the place of the cruel In the end are made to be cruel in the place of the compassionate.
More colloquially translated: “Those who are kind to the cruel, in the end will be cruel to the kind.”
“That which is distasteful to thee do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study.”
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?”
“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.”
If you’re on this post, there’s a reason for it. Consider taking a moment to read what I’ve selected from Oriana Fallaci, Abraham Isaac Kook, Heinrich Heine, Simon Wiesenthal, Douglas Adams, Thucydides, Milan Kundera, Malala Yousafzai, and a briefly met online friend, Tanit Nima Tinat.
Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 2019.
Here is the lead from a review in Vox (July 8, 2019) by Sigal Samuel —
Patricia Churchland is a neurophilosopher. That’s a fancy way of saying she studies new brain science, old philosophical questions, and how they shed light on each other.
For years, she’s been bothered by one question in particular: How did humans come to feel empathy and other moral intuitions? What’s the origin of that nagging little voice that we call our conscience?
When we’re not so good — from naughty to sinful to heinous to unspeakable — we know why as greed, lust, and vanity account both for our indulgences and peccadilloes as well as many conflicts and crimes with the exception of earnest and necessary struggles against the despot and the totalitarian.
Why be good (for goodness sake)?
Conscience.
Why conscience?
I shall have to read Churchland’s book (which will be on my Kindle a minute after publishing this piece).
As small ideas and pieces come to me, I may add them to this post that drives to the core of differences between the worlds of medieval political absolutism and the far preferred modern experiences of human dignity and freedom — beyond those two may reside the Orwellian horrors of the bureaucratically and technologically capable totalitarian state headed up by thugs. For that, have a start-here look at China.
Posted to YouTube by the USNA Music Department, December 5, 2016.
Tribute posted by John Dvorak and posted to YouTube December 4, 2009.
Posted to YouTube by NBC News, September 2, 2016.
The world that has become Internet-enabled now experienced the most efficient and private of computing experiences imaginable. Looking things up — and relaying some part through autonomous publishing — has become easy, and so here I will offer just one link to the history of the day: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/pearl-harbor-bombed.
With two critical Iranian leaders assassinated — Qasem Soleimani and Mohsen Fakhrizadeh — and an American President determined to blunt the tip of the spear aimed against the west, the prospect for “fireworks” appears that much closer. Ever big on packing the Big Picture into a small space, I’ve done that here with ramble and signal but not chaos. Old Communist and Islamist politics persist in the latest states of affairs although the old Communists have produced breathtakingly wealthy elites and the chief among Islamists has been long known as a thief enriched by the plundering of ordinary Iranians.
From the Awesome Conversation
Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran represent an anti-western alliance committed to political absolutism by all and any means necessary. At least two of the three, Moscow and Tehran, represent also kleptocracy (see Reuters’ “Assets of the Ayatollah”) or mafia-type power (reference Ben Judah or Luke Harding), and together they keep the west bothered. Tehran, in malign narcissistic fashion, has covered its own crimes with deflections and dogma–it’s not strength that propels its fantasies of nuclear annihilation but regime weakness expressed through medieval fantasy. The clinical, dispassionate, and modern and prudent west may be building down Tehran’s capability, confidence, and coordination for aggression.
The old “Red-Green Alliance” is in the mix too with some persistent communist cant woven into the Houthi challenge in Yemen. The World Peace Council persists — as do graduates of Patrice Lamumba University — and the pack may view Tehran as an alley in thuggish political fashion. More important than political dogma: an heroic image to be created by marching forward into glorious past while holding each fantasy in place by main force.
Stated by Trita Parsi in 2017 (yes, just a quick look-see on my part): “Another emerging threat comes from Iran’s domestic politics. Presidential elections next month may put Iran’s foreign policy back into the hands of the country’s hard-liners, who, much like Mr. Trump, define their country in opposition to the world” (“The Coming Crisis With Iran”, The New York Times, April 20, 2017).
“Malignant Narcissism” begins with “Narcissistic Mortification”, i.e., the humiliation of the “Great Leader” (somewhere in childhood). Why everyone else has to be made a part of the compensation (measured by the Great One’s estimation of his own “Narcissistic Supply”), I’ve no idea but that the worst of the worst needs must have both an adoring audience and a horrified one.
Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran have bent themselves on feudal and medieval lusts for the conquest or control of their targets by any means necessary and all available, and then some, and each has demonstrated a remarkable political anomie in the handling of those affected by their strategies. Beijing has been making a name for itself as a culturally and politically predatory lender; Moscow: live fire “demonstrations” all over Syria to goose its defense industry sales; and Iran — just have a look at how it has treated the places in which it has chosen to facilitate aggression, especially in Yemen and Syria.
What to call the present Sino-Russo-Iranian cooperation against the west?
This assassination campaign began in the aftermath of 9/11 when Pakistan allowed Taliban fighters and other allied fighters who were forced to flee Afghanistan to resettle in parts of former FATA. Over the years, these groups systematically eliminated tribal leaders and politicians who raised their voices against them. To this day, the Pakistani state has not solved any of these murders, perhaps because it has been tacitly using these unlawful groups to foment instability in Afghanistan and consolidate its influence over the region.
What follows are thoughts from the lengthiest of observations having to do with the Pashtun’s natural position between state forces and processes having to do with international development and war much, much larger than themselves.
When our President Nixon (a long time ago) initiated a new relationship with China, it was with hopes to offset Soviet Russian power and bring China closer to the normative behaviors of the modern world expressive of global compassion supported by international trade. On the topside, we do things for one another. Rather on the surface, well, we do things for money — and that makes “big picture” sense of Asian labor and western raw goods and Asian finished goods sold (for good profit — good markup — in western markets).
Mercantilism has been much the way of the world.
In the modern open democratic and liberal west, the abuses and excesses of business have been tempered through the actions of elected administrations, legislatures, and courts in the interests of electorates and justice. In the west, capitalists and wealthy have not gotten free rides from popularly elected governments even if seeding political careers and wins with their own money. There are just too many with too many differing motives for playing that game broadly.
In Asia, perhaps, money — and with China, now overwhelming wealth — does its work between elites and military behind closed door (“behind the curtains” goes the phrase fit to medieval politics) — and guess who’s in the way of the greater enrichment and glory of the disinterested or remote powerful?
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It doesn’t help the Pashtun — and whoever and for whatever reason — to attack PakDef military posts (IF that is what has actually happened recently), for that gives the military excuse to bother or maraud the Pashtun community.
With regard to some Larger Forces — here, Chinese and Pakistani trade interests representing government, military, and private entities — “anomie” (worth the looking up) may be a real issue.
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Don’t look to Russia for help — that state has minted defense sales using Syrians as targets for demonstration of its wares. In the AfPak region, its arms, however acquired, have helped sustain what looks to me an unfathomable misery borne of endless low-intensity conflict that has no end without financial, political, and religious insight plus political will and near immediate reconciliation.
The draconian nature of the FCR lies in the concept of “collective punishment”, where a whole tribe can be punished for the crime of one member of the tribe. It is telling that even after British India got its independence in 1947, the people of ex FATA were still facing the same colonial legal injustice till the year 2018. And while things definitely have changed on paper, there still is a long way to go before there is a change in the situation on the ground.These draconian punishments have always served a purpose, whether it was British India of the 20thcentury or the Pakistan of the 21stcentury. These laws are meant to subdue a population into giving up their rights, so that they can be sacrificed on the altar of “greater good”. Goes without saying that this greater good, has never been good for us, the people of ex FATA.
Launched in 2015, CPEC is a logical partnership for China and Pakistan—two close allies keen to cooperate on much-needed infrastructure projects in Pakistan, while contributing to China’s strategic goal of facilitating access to far-flung markets and expanding its global footprint.
Chinese Banking and Development Worldwide : flexes China’s financial muscle while leveraging infrastructure building expertise into a gateway for Chinese labor — which accompanies its projects — and through that mechanism Chinese cultural influence agents. As much would update the Cold War Era Soviet practice of sending thousands of Communist agents into the Middle East as embedded in the labor contingents attached to development contracts in targeted states.
PakDef | ISI –> Taliban encouragement : goad to Kabul : encouragement of “Islamism” within : further marginalizing of the Pashtun as a coherent and cohesive political force.
The above two paragraphs represent my thinking in cryptic fashion. If the world were practical and less inclined to fear and threat — as well as deeply dependent on international arms sales that support manufacturing bases and untold wealth in related Research & Development competitions — the promotion of dogma into violence — or “extremist dogma” — would be less attractive. As it is, “The Terrorists” (wherever “who” has become both ambiguous and ubiquitous) have turned out handy for some elites in the world’s more corrupt and cynical circles of military and political power.
Posted to YouTube by Caspian Reports, January 10, 2019.
With the authoritarian President Trump in the White House, it may be difficult to argue that the three “superpowers” have turned out other than feudal polities plundered by politically connected and wealthy elites. Nonetheless, and in the most simplified fashion, the following now comes to mind in relation to the quick assessment of China’s political character and culture.
Banking
China’s overseas lending, which was virtually zero before the turn of the century — well, about $500 billion in 2000 — stands today, ostensibly, at around $5 trillion. Indeed, they are now the world’s largest creditor, being twice as large as both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, combined.
Colagrossi, Mike. “New study uncovers China’s massive hidden lending to poor countries.” Big Think, July 18, 2019.
The low-hanging fruit may be plucked with the search string, “China, predatory lending” and, I’m sure, “China, debt trap” will do as well.
Difficult to beat for audacity, Chinese business, engineering acumen, and ethics have caused the more advanced and liberal world some concerns. The projects I have in mind are these: Three Gorges Dam; Coca Codo Sinclair Dam (Ecuador); oil extraction, South Sudan — while Sudan appears to be coming on to track with the west, the Sudanese of what is now South Sudan will have memories of a callous Chinese presence through the Darfur Genocide. The worst business and related ethical decisions and policies — or absence thereof — become always diminished, the shoulder shrug accompanied by the dull observation, “it’s only business”.
However, for black-and-white thinking evaluators, America’s issues with Chinese business, industrial, political, and scientific espionage loom large. Going over a few of the keys may be helpful.
Here is but one example of what has come out in the news in relation to the Thousand Talents espionage program:
Dr. Qing Wang, a professor of molecular genetics at the Cleveland Clinic and Case Western University, was arrested Wednesday on charges of lying to investigators and wire fraud related to more than $3.6 million in funding that he and his research group at the Cleveland Clinic received from the National Institutes of Health under false pretenses. At the same time that he was receiving millions of dollars in U.S. government grants, court documents reveal he concealed how he was also the Dean of the College of Life Sciences and Technology at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, China. He was also receiving grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China and hid his participation in China’s Thousand Talents Program, a Chinese Communist Party effort to recruit academics to gain access to foreign technology and intellectual property.
It should go without saying that the recipients of large research grants may not care to think too much about their financial good luck when it comes to keeping their laboratories, themselves, other faculty, and students flush in research missions and means.
A modern question comes to mind: Are the world’s leaders obligated to reproducing the worst of the world’s potential for feudal, medieval, and tribal warfare — or may the same be obliged to accept a deeply interconnected modern (and democratic) variegated world capable of cooperative strong integration without supposed “exclusive” genetic, racial, or religious “winners”?
The world’s refusal of Islamic supremacist tenets has produced some medieval resurgence through parochial versions of “New Nationalism”, and the Chinese have been no less susceptible to that than White Europeans and North Americans expecting to wake up and see a world that looks (and thinks) just as they do.
Whatever the answers, add a classic “house of mirrors” complication:
January 1, 1979
The United States normalizes diplomatic relations with China. Three years later there are 10,000 Chinese students in the US, and the FBI begins directing field offices to recruit students for counterintelligence operations.
As long as machines, materials, and processes produce exchange, people (and states) will steal proprietary information to either remain at parity with competitors and threats or get an edge up on them.
What has changed throughout the world: online proximity x time.
Here, for example, is a 2020 U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) unclassified statement involving China’s commitment to suppressing illicit trade related to fentanyl:
Effective May 1, 2019, China officially controlled all forms of fentanyl as a class of drugs. This fulfilled the commitment that President Xi made during the G-20 Summit. The implementation of the new measure includes investigations of known fentanyl manufacturing areas, stricter control of internet sites advertising fentanyl, stricter enforcement of shipping regulations, and the creation of special teams to investigate leads on fentanyl trafficking. These new restrictions have the potential to severely limit fentanyl production and trafficking from China. This could alter China’s position as a supplier to both the United States and Mexico.
Truth to tell: as regards the transnational narcotics business, China may not stand out as more or less problematic or troublesome than other states saddled with similar issues. Aided by corruption, suppressed by shifting tides in law, politics, mercenary and military relationships, and the value of facets of reputations, the operations known to TCOs (Transnational Crime Organizations) shift always to the paths of least resistance and highest profit. As example: https://www.occrp.org/en/daily/10259-unodc-warns-of-rising-role-of-organized-crime-in-southeast-asia (July 19, 2019).
Giant China, however, appears able to field labor sufficient for cultural incursions and producing huge financial obligations via huge critical infrastructure projects in client states. It’s when it comes to cooperation involving funding or manning investigations into smuggling the trail goes — and perhaps appropriately — dim. The chemicals get through and course through the illicit manufacturing economies of Central and South America, and while the products move north — and the money moves south — political instability driven by practical insecurity help create the chaos that also drives migration north.
As a dimension for thought, none can help but notice the North American pull that draws the business from the south. One may excoriate suppliers only so much.
Addendum: Totalitarianism
Mass Surveillance State
The above header needs little support here, which bothers me, lol, but China has produced an extraordinary reputation for mass surveillance and the development of related methods of social control. Here’s a lead from a Human Rights Watch report on the matter —
Classical totalitarianism, in which the state controls all institutions and most aspects of public life, largely died with the Soviet Union, apart from a few holdouts such as North Korea. The Chinese Communist Party retained a state monopoly in the political realm but allowed a significant private economy to flourish. Yet today, in Xinjiang, a region in China’s northwest, a new totalitarianism is emerging—one built not on state ownership of enterprises or property but on the state’s intrusive collection and analysis of information about the people there. Xinjiang shows us what a surveillance state looks like under a government that brooks no dissent and seeks to preclude the ability to fight back. And it demonstrates the power of personal information as a tool of social control.
This society may seem dystopian, but it isn’t farfetched: It may be China in a few years. The country is racing to become the first to implement a pervasive system of algorithmic surveillance. Harnessing advances in artificial intelligence and data mining and storage to construct detailed profiles on all citizens, China’s communist party-state is developing a “citizen score” to incentivize “good” behavior. A vast accompanying network of surveillance cameras will constantly monitor citizens’ movements, purportedly to reduce crime and terrorism. While the expanding Orwellian eye may improve “public safety,” it poses a chilling new threat to civil liberties in a country that already has one of the most oppressive and controlling governments in the world.
In Xiqiao, a city of roughly 300,000 in southern China, for example, officials have installed more than 1,400 video cameras and over 300 facial recognition cameras since 2006, ChinaFile found. The report said officials have blanketed most of the city’s public spaces with the cameras to address “the difficult problem of how to control people,” according to a government document obtained by ChinaFile.
Mass surveillance in lower-profile cities and territories reflects the 2018 launch of China’s Project Sharp Eyes, an ambitious attempt to equip 100% of Chinese public spaces—street corners, parks, train stations—with video-monitoring capabilities and amass the data into one central platform. China’s government says the project is aimed at improving public safety and security, but it’s seen outside China as a means for more state control.
Turning Point USA’s featured meme, November 20, 2020.
From the Awesome Conversation
You are wrong, Turning Point USA.
Qualities of Living (QOL) anywhere involve complex economic, political, psychological, and social arrangements, the same that have states adjusting infrastructure and tax-related variables to attract business (see Foxconn, Wisconsin for an egregious example of bending over frontward) and put populations and jobs together with the help of appropriate transportation systems, none of which are ever without local, state, and Federal government support in one form or another.
It’s good that California is losing population while the host of America’s “activists” and economic developers wrestle with basic floor-level habitability and standards issues.
Of course, California’s compassion, generosity, and wealth have done their job in attracting both labor and predatory elements, but with regard to the latter and the impoverishment and ravaging of the seemingly marginal, the state that also glamorizes its demimonde (see, for example, the film _Barfly_ or, really, just about any modern product playing up the mix of crime and wealth) has drawn exactly what is has created and invited. — I saw Patrick Moynihan years ago at a subcommittee hearing in D.C. on growth, and he noted that the difference between Columbia, Maryland and Calcutta, India was . . . government and planning. He was right. I would add culture and the vision in total of our own humanity. — Sweep California’s social issues off the rug or under it has seemed to me the persistent conservative stance. Perhaps (as complement to other “Turning Point” businesses picking up the broken pieces), engagement with corruption and crime, distribution of population, site-locating of new financial hubs elsewhere (!), and development of small homes communities for those looking for their next California in the interior, would be the better way to go.
For America’s 328-million souls, the “report card” is not that awful but what comes of a kind of geospatial political affliction in population affects the entire nation. Those you seem to need to label as enemies are your fellow Americans, and many among them appear to be engaging issues you just don’t want to see.
The meme’s featured fellow is actually . . . rather clean cut — great teeth, clean clothes, finely photographed!
My confession: life’s a lot cozier and secure viewing the world from my desktop as opposed (for this moment at 65+ at which I need to work on my own “fitness level” before further adventure’s forth) to playing a male Dorothea Lange — and what she saw was the economic migration out to California. However, two examples among the more brave with friends and partners: Mark Horvath documenting the homeless via his work published on Invisible People TV; veteran war photographer James Nachtwey via a Time “Special Report: The Opioid Diaries” (2018). In the world far from the armed and gated bastions of wealthy Californian conservatives — at least a few, I’m sure — “Turning Point” has a different meaning. However, there’s much more than the narcotics trade at work within California producing conditions for social ills and outbound migration. Issues: affordability, crime, desperation, greed, and — out of practical necessity as well as individual personality factors — plain old cold-shouldered inhumanity.
What is to be done?
🙂
For improved Qualities of Living (QOLs) for any Area-Squared, it might help if governments try to balance population with variables associated with basic physical and psychological security. For the troubled floors of myriad urban and rural economies, the only process answer for that is to know who has come from where with what purposes at heart — know thy community — and start to encourage the development of distributed alternative resources for living reasonably, lawfully, and with hope.
I would add here the necessity of serious criminal “filtration” associated with the end-to-end channels of the Transnational Crime Industries. Suffice it to say there are currents and pools of “dark money” all over the world, and all of them scrape from off the streets of the world. With regard to that theme, BackChannels would rather write fiction.
Posted to YouTube March 10, 2019.
“This Tiny Home Community Gives Homeless Veterans A Chance – Working To End Veteran Homelessness” – Posted to YouTube November 27, 2019.
Posted to YouTube June 26, 2020.
Administrative Reality
The data provided by LAHSA showed that 31% of those leaving the shelters went back to the streets and 35% to unknown destinations. An additional 13% found other temporary housing, either with friends or family or in a program; 4% checked into a mental hospital, detox program or nursing facility; 2% went to jail; and seven — less than half a percent — died.
Fewer than half the placements in permanent housing included supportive services, such as case management and housing assistance. Most were in subsidized rentals or with family or friends.
Well, they’re not “invisible” anymore, and they’re providing impetus for innovations in basic minimum housing design, shelter placements and programs, and perhaps thinking about “client” autonomy, character, and drift.
Is America sure it did the right thing? And why has he any support left? Are his followers dumb? Are the trolls on Facebook that good? Have Americans really wanted a “mafia state” of their own?
Trump and his organization “lies up” his projects, screwing his subcontractors out of untold millions. The Taj was just one project “inspiring” countless lawsuits.
The truth about Russian-borne disinformation: it’s designed to break us apart, Far Left and Far Right. Americans who lean Left have become (with disinfo) suddenly Communist and those leaning right get salted as something like white Christian nationalist extremists . . . .
The country has had four long years with this guy, and it voted him out.
— and you know how it’s done: someone pastes up the art, slips it into the Internet Wild absent of context and any thematic evaluation, and out it goes to intellectually poison the gulls.
Agitation/Propaganda (agitprop) is never clear, accurate, or complete. It is always twisted, lacking in context, in detail, and integrity.
Excerpted from the above URL.
“Nearly 40 African American religious leaders released a statement supporting the bill, saying: “While we do not agree with every provision in the crime bill, we do believe and emphatically support the bill’s goal to save our communities, and most importantly, our children.”
Now I have to ask my fellow Americans: what kind of person, what mentality, what measure in irresponsible character grabs an attention-getting image with potent political content or suggestion and goes with it without at least a look into the claim?
That person — the person who would do that — that’s not an American.
We’re a real country full of real GOOD people working difficult issues as we go along, and if we’re not that today, let’s get back to that real fast!
BackChannels 