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Tag Archives: absolutism

Greed is Good! Hmm. Just Kidding

01 Saturday Aug 2020

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, A Little Wisdom, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation

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absolutism, corruption, greed, shortcomings of some wealthy

From the Awesome Conversation, a comment on greed in America and American domestic and foreign policy —


Greed can and will kill the credibility and promise of the USA if the constituency abandons its Constitutional, ethical, and moral obligations and principles. The state will either evolve forward toward greater achievement and enlightenment or it will simply fall backward to the repeated of lost eras more delightful, if that, in memory then tenable in reality.


Bonbons or bon mots, what do with a nice ring than put it up on the web for a few to contemplate momentarily.

Gecko’s “Greed is good!” speech from the Wall Street film provided the prompt for the response (“FTAC” on this blog) — and the response is true: the three “superpowers”, lumbering sumo that each may be, have each autocrats for chiefs. One appears to seek the renewal of dynasty and empire; another appreciates the glory and grandeur of more vicious imperial days; and the last appears to believe that money is existence and existence money, and that is all we know and all we need to know.

😦

Compared to futurists, science fiction writers, and the advanced of 21st Century political and religious philosophers (well, maybe Thomas Berry), they’re kind of dumb and looking that way even cushioned by muscle and planted in luxury.

More —


How much is enough?
Enough to make us feel secure and happy.
How much is too much?
So much that the more we have of it, the less it fills our own wells made empty by the sense of our own shortcomings and related psychological and spiritual bankruptcy and exhaustion. More than enough becomes never enough.

–33–

FTAC – Opinion on the UN Vote Hostile to Israel (Resolution 2334 / 2016)

29 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia, United States of America

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absolutism, democracy, Moscow, opinion, political philosophy, Resolution 2334, UN

The fingers were erect and wagging at Obama as anti-Semite and turncoat, which I found a bit radical.

Of course, other analyst-pundits have been weighing in on the UN’s latest gang-up on the world’s One Jewish State and the Administration’s dithering abstention, and that cacophony doubtless includes similar charges (or language) from Right side of the aisle.

Be that as it may, the chorus was heard with the original poster’s complaint that no dissent had been heard.

Well, at least let there be an argument.


I’ll dissent.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/24/ftac-moscows-presence-in-the-middle-east-conflict/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/11/23/moscows-rules-a-module/

If there is, has been, or will be a contest between “medieval political absolutism” and the “modern democratic and checked distribution of power”, the same involves meeting the challenges posed by the “Phantoms of the Soviet” (the Union died 25 years, Dec. 25, 1991).

I think the west too quick to march on in post-Cold War glory — and the rush to do business with the reforming new Russia — and it got taken in by Moscow while Moscow, as represented by “Vertical-of-Power” Putin has gently but firmly twisted the state’s narrative from “Glasnost” all the way back to proto-fascist ultra-nationalism and neo-imperialism — backed by the demonstration of barbarism (in Syria), aggression (in Ukraine), and the possession of nuclear arms and updated weapons systems.

Is anyone feeling lucky?

While it’s true the Obama Administration has avoided direct confrontation with Moscow (how unseemly that would look! And I say that as cynically as any here), it has weakened Moscow’s ability to project and sustain military aggression in the near abroad. It will then be left to President Trump to address Putin and either abet, contain, or push back against what the Moscow Revival presents to western interests.

The UN resolution was execrable in every dimension!

https://www.un.org/press/en/2016/sc12657.doc.htm

However, the true target in east-west relations and in the middle east conflict remains a recalcitrant Moscow. A dangerous Moscow. A dictator’s Moscow (and check out the alignments on the voting).

Between Trump (Manafort, Millian, Kilimnik) and Putin, let’s hope the superficial media-relayed “bromance” is over — or it will be our lives more organized along more feudal principles in conflict with modern (democratic) ones.


Loosely related but from another conversation —


I wanted to suggest to you that a working “secular democracy” actually enables the full expression of religious passion as a private and private community matter. The system supports boundaries and a common agreement on the prudence and sensibility of good law, i.e., law that sustains a free and vibrant social order.

Jihad, provocation, and terrorism mean to upset civil order — and they can do it!

When will the west again push back against criminal, fascist, and proto-fascist aggression, I don’t know but know that as it loses its principles and values, if it does, it will have to respond to absolutism.


 

–33–

By Blind Obedience – Finished

22 Sunday Jun 2014

Posted by commart in Poetry, Politics

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absolutism, conscience, despotism, dictatorship, freedom, poem, political poetry, politics

Blindly

Obedient?

Finished

Owned

Subjugated

Enslaved —

And not by God

Oh no —

Jerks

# # #

FTAC – by Tanit Nima Tinat – A Comment on Tyrannies

22 Sunday Jun 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Poetry, Political Psychology, Politics, Psychology

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absolutism, democracy, despotism, Iraq, Islam, political, politics, Syria

People, eventually will unite against any form of tyranny and dictatorship, be it religious fanaticism or other forms- as they did against puritans and the dictatorial rule of Oliver Cromwell, who was known as : a self-styled Puritan Moses-in England, the copy of which exists in Iran, the so called Khamenei; who ironically refers to himself as Supreme actually, and so on. However, it is the actual people of a country themselves that have to bring about and cause a democratic government rather than an outside force. This might be the main reason for people criticizing America, or any other country’s role for that matter, in terms of interfering in their internal affairs. Many Iranians, on the other hand, and here’s the irony; actually criticize America and other countries silence during the bloody green revolution that took place in Iran a decade ago and was against the tyranny of Ahmadinejad.  They see America’s indifference to that secular movement as a green light to the continuation of the so called Islamic regime, which is not far from truth.


A big thank-you to my social network friend Tanit Nima Tinat.

My two-cent riff in reply —

The assumption that “regime change” and revolution may in order would seem to include the presumption that the change brought is what the people really wanted.

Americans have repeatedly given “blood and treasure” in the name of democracy and freedom for others, but once produced, whether in Iraq or in Afghanistan, it would seem up to The People and their own ethical and moral backbone to secure benefits obtained.

That may sound good to the ears, but the realpolitik of place includes themes not addressed by merely taking down a government.

Whether one speaks of Hamid Kharzai in Afghanistan or Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq, one confronts the sways of loyalties against the possession of integrity and merit, and the resulting nepotism undermines “equality, fraternity, and liberty” — and security most of all.

In the people, one also encounters various attitudes toward authority, which in the west turns up often skeptical and questioning, but elsewhere may be cowed or ingrained when it comes to obedience before the powerful.  Such observation brings up the arch comment, “With democracy, people get the government they deserve!”

Of course, from the perspective of Christian-Greco-Judeo-Roman esprit, people may get worse than what they might be supposed to deserve.  Some Germans may have well deserved Hitler, for example, but what Hitler brought to Germany and what Germans were made to suffer at his hands and then at the hands of the enemies made sails beyond comprehension.

And what to do about The People, many for whom the cleric’s words are yet today received as if from God Almighty himself?

Such faith — or fear, laziness, or weakness — makes obedience blind.

Note: in the Torah, while God sets out a test for Abraham, the purpose of the test is never defined, and the vaunted “test of obedience” may well have been equally a more a “test of conscience”, which Abraham fails.

Divine infallibility — caliphate, empire, kingdom, or papacy — ought to be left to just one indefinable, unreachable, irreducible, nearly inconceivable entity or symbol: God.

All else — and all others — are mortal.

If a constituency must assert, declare, and support a divine alliance and avatar with taxes, then perhaps too it should keep itself invested in its own freedom of conscience and armed with countervailing power as well.


Earlier today on Twitter, I asked in regard to Syria’s agony, “Who defended the humanity in the middle?”

Bashar al-Assad had an army; the al-Qaeda affiliates are armies: who was there to defend the interests of the happy homeowner?

For a while now, I’ve suggested that for the purposes of analytical political psychology, Bashar al-Assad and al-Nusra in Syria are of the same malignantly narcissistic personality: different talk — same walk.

With ISIS on the move in Iraq, the ability to entertain and perhaps recognize this thesis may be crucial to the future economic and spiritual well being of the large population beset with murderous forces all around them.

In effect the Islamic Small Wars may be reduced to the The Despotic vs The Democratic — and in realpolitik, absolutists and extremists against everyone else.

Whatever the despots win, they really do not give a shit about anyone, much less everyone, else.  In fact, everyone else exists to serve them, adore them, aggrandize them. die for them, and generally keep them (and their families and favored old friends) in wealth and power beyond measure.

Remember: they are the dictator Putin-Assad-Khamenei, and together they are defending absolutism.

ISIS is defending that too.

Where the people have bought into what those people are selling, they’re done.

# # #

FTAC – Syria – On Mirroring Amplification in Brutality

07 Tuesday Jan 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iraq, Islamic Small Wars, Politics, Psychology, Regions, Syria

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Tags

absolutism, fighting, mentality, political psychology, psychology, Syria, Syrian Civil War

The swings of cultural brutality involve mirroring amplification — as with brothers trading punches and raising the force used as they go, but that’s for fun — and a kind of dumbness as to where brutalization leads, which always is in two directions: the defeat of the human spirit and attendant subjugation or the Great God of War and Fire Without Limit and self-immolation in an orgy of death.

This dynamic seems not well understood in Syria.

Some wars end with an entropic complete expenditure of available energy, i.e., only stopping when there’s none left and some in the destruction of the war making capability of the enemy in its totality: no industry; no money; no projectiles; no weapons; no defenses.

Syria, because the same mentality sits on both sides of the table — it’s not the Wahhabism or the dictatorship separately: it’s the mutual quest for absolute power in the subjugation of others, each with its own political program — has a long way to go. The suffering of civilians and the destruction of moderating force carries no weight with the fighters on either side, even if each may believe he’s the savior of humanity aligned with his side.

The conversation follows from a state-aligned Syrian outlet impugning the character of the United States by portraying her as a terrorist arms supplier.

It’s not true.

The arms are loose Out There and gambling on secular technocrats like General Idris has proven, so far, bad odds.  Those Islamic Front fellows are mean: they promise to protect military assets held by more moderate warriors only to steal them for themselves and their immoderate ends (something like that: e.g., US, UK halt aid to Syria after weapons seized – 12/11/2013).

* * *

I hope you read the above “mean” as campy pouting understatement, a remark, in fact, about those trusting, uncertain, or vacillating souls who make deals with ruthless liars and killers.

Well, perhaps the embarrassments of December — perhaps along with some sense of limits that have been exceeded —  have done some much needed motivational work:

Even as ISIS, which got its start as al-Qaeda in Iraq back in the days of the American war, regains territory in the Iraqi province of Anbar, it is slowly being pushed out of its northern Syrian strongholds by a broad coalition of moderate and Islamist groups fed up with its draconian interpretations of Islamic law and its abuses of power.

Syria Rebels Fight ISIS, an al-Qaeda Group, Fueling Regional Chaos | TIME.com – 1/7/2014.

Related on Syria’s Battle of the Bands

Syria rebels kill 34 foreign fighters in northwest: monitor | Reuters – 1/7/2014.

Syria rebels fight Al Qaeda ally for control of key city – latimes.com – 1/6/2014.

Gangs of the Middle East: Iraq, Syria torn by fighting factions | Fox News – 1/6/2014.

# # #

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Epigram

Hillel the Elder

"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."

Oriana Fallaci
"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon...I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born."

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."

Online Source: http://www.rishon-rishon.com/archives/044412.php

Abraham Isaac Kook

"The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice.They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith.They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom." From the pages of Arpilei Tohar.

Heinrich Heine
"Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." -- From Almansor: A Tragedy (1823).

Simon Wiesenthal
Remark Made in the Ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria on the occasion of His 90th Birthday: "The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing."

Maimonides
"Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it."

"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."

Douglas Adams
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Epigram appearing in the dedication of Richard Dawkins' The GOD Delusion.

Thucydides
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."

Milan Kundera
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Malala Yousafzai
“The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.”

Tanit Nima Tinat
"Who could die of love?"

What I Have Said About the Jews

My people, not that I speak for them, I nonetheless describe as a "global ethnic commune with its heart in Jerusalem and soul in the Land of Israel."

We have never given up on God, nor have we ever given up on one another.

Many things we have given up, but no one misses, say, animal sacrifice, and as many things we have kept, so we have still to welcome our Sabbath on Friday at sunset and to rest all of Saturday until three stars appear in the sky.

Most of all, through 5,773 years, wherever life has taken us, through the greatest triumphs and the most awful tragedies, we have preserved our tribal identity and soul, and so shall we continue eternally.

Anti-Semitism / Anti-Zionism = Signal of Fascism

I may suggest that anti-Zionism / anti-Semitism are signal (a little bit) of fascist urges, and the Left -- I'm an old liberal: I know my heart -- has been vulnerable to manipulation by what appears to me as a "Red Brown Green Alliance" driven by a handful of powerful autocrats intent on sustaining a medieval worldview in service to their own glorification. (And there I will stop).
One hopes for knowledge to allay fear; one hopes for love to overmatch hate.

Too often, the security found in the parroting of a loyal lie outweighs the integrity to be earned in confronting and voicing an uncomfortable truth.

Those who make their followers believe absurdities may also make them commit atrocities.

Positively Orwellian: Comment Responding to Claim that the Arab Assault on Israel in 1948 Had Not Intended Annihilation

“Revisionism” is the most contemptible path that power takes to abet theft and hide shame by attempting to alter public perception of past events.

On Press Freedom, Commentary, and Journalism

In the free world, talent -- editors, graphic artists, researchers, writers -- gravitate toward the organizations that suit their interests and values. The result: high integrity and highly reliable reportage and both responsible and thoughtful reasoning.

This is not to suggest that partisan presses don't exist or that propaganda doesn't exist in the west, but any reader possessed of critical thinking ability and genuine independence -- not bought, not programmed -- is certainly free to evaluate the works of earnest reporters and scholars.

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