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Tag Archives: Awesome Conversation

FTAC – A Question Regarding Social Media and Realpolitik

29 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by commart in Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Awesome Conversation, conflict axis, Facebook, FTAC, information control, malignant narcissism, propaganda, social media, Syria

I wonder what the relationship is between expression in social media and policy adjustment in state diplomatic and military operations.

Never before in history has the battle for “hearts and minds” been played through a global system linking individual minds in novel ways.  However, the old prediction that cyberspace will wind up looking a lot like real space haunts the conversation.

Are we making a difference, yet?

The theme topic contributing to this post involved a “Syrian Truth – English” (Facebook) plate featuring the slogan, “This is how we used to live” accompanied by a civil enough show of peace between the religious with Bashar Assad at the center of each photo-op, and “and this is how U.S. and its allies want us to live,” with that accompanied by images of beheading, crucifixion, field executions featuring armed soldiers wearing black hoods or black headscarves.

My response to that:

When power extends to power over information, that information becomes part of the control exerted by the malignant narcissist. For a catch-all, one may use the term “totalitarian propaganda”: such information either lies by omission, for example, here, the statistics approaching 11,000 children destroyed by state-side sniper fire, bombing, and torture. In the west, we can independently investigate claims made by journalists; in autocratic environments, one is helpless before presentations of factual data and their spin. The other form of lie asserts the presence of a reality that isn’t present, which includes the “threat” of the Jews (we’re out to drown the world in chicken soup and love is more the reality).

Related from this blog: FTAC – If Information is Power, How Much Greater Must Be Power Over Information.

My partner in conversation chatypes from Pakistan.

Together, we cover quite a bit of thematic territory quickly — about information, Wahhabi Islam’s expansion (and the barbarity expressed in its name), about minority security (he is a Shiite Muslim), about Israel, about values — but we neither of us know the effect on others whom we may know or on others who may be lurking over our conversation.

We’re chatting on an open floor hosting a substantial emerging global intelligentsia: how far up the chain do our thoughts go, directly or in aggregate?

While we’re having our conversation in the quasi-public space of a pro-Syrian page, we’re also conversing separately.  In that process, I noted the following to him:

This is the “back channel” conversation. The front channel may be feeding back to Syrian Truth’s wall, so we are “in it” in a sense. They’re reading about themselves, whoever they may be.

*

What if the political reality of a place were not manipulated by state and anti-state operations and forces?

And the chat goes on.

Who’s lurking?

What are they thinking?

What is in their hearts?

What is changing?

What is not changing?

What do they believe about power?

Can they isolate or separate their own assumptive habits of mind and behaviors involving loyalties, fears, and accompanying contemptuous thoughts and hatreds and introspectively and in some helpful way — or will it be only to help themselves to what others have? — adjust their own position?

My correspondent said, “It’s world simply, you have check a lot of things.”

True, and I said, “It’s a foundering ship, no captain, not much of a map, and the sea is stormy (but its sailors are on deck in the rain making up their minds about directions). 🙂 ”

______

Sometimes, and this a bit tired with age and other nonsense, including immersion in conflict news, I find myself resting with the windows open and the whole place sailing along in the universe with the local wind and rain providing only immediate atmosphere against that immense ineffable space.

# # #

From the Awesome Conversation (FAC) — Responsive Writing

30 Sunday Sep 2012

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Awesome Conversation, Jihad, politics

“And what about US attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, two Sovereign Countries . . . .” — Thank OBL and 9/11 for inviting the reversal of Taliban governance in Afghanistan; thank Sadaam for, among many other egregious behaviors, including theft from UN food aid funding, for not cooperating with international nuclear weapons monitoring agents (UN-based) in such a way as to threaten others with the possible possession of such arms. Unless one wishes to defend the Taliban and Sadaam Hussein, the question dispenses with cause for a “western jihad” (to defend its interests plus those to whom it provides massive aid, including Pakistan) and seems to reduce argument to an incoherent yearning for some kind of “cooperation” under the auspices of a “good dictator” — a proven oxymoron in contemporary politics worldwide — and involving the destruction of the freedom to speak . . . freely.

The American Revolution revolves around the articles and assertions of the Declaration of Independence — “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal . . . .”

No dhimmis!

It has taken more than 300 years in in the United States for policies and practices to more firmly and with greater certainty catch up with American ideals, and such ideals stem not from “Golden Eras” — which were not so golden — and Inquisitions and the medieval practices of kings and other absolute rulers, but from the best of ancient Greco-Roman culture, philosophy, and spirit — and also shaped by familiar Judea-Christian precepts about law and social transaction — and their flow through the Enlightenment.

That’s U.S.

We don’t set out to bend others to our will, to humiliate others, or to shut them up, but movements that set out to do that and steal the lives of innocents, transgress all boundaries and limits, and corrode the freedom to speak freely, albeit responsibly, the state — and many other sovereign states — take measures to defend their values, the best in humanity, borrowed and cultivated out of the contributions of many cultures, and altogether expressive and vital and life affirming and giving.

  • Compassion
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Caution: The possession of anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist thought may be the measure of the owner's own enslavement to criminal and medieval absolute power.
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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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