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Tag Archives: epistemology

A Little Wisdom Having to do with Empiricism and Integrity

08 Friday Jan 2021

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, A Little Wisdom, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology

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Tags

empiricism, epistemology, integrity

*

Only two words really matter with information — empiricism and integrity. Where we dismiss the former, people will entertain anything; where the latter goes missing, people will tell others anything — and they’ll do it for greed and lust expressed as money and power.

*

We know the characteristics of good information.

There is the reporter’s standard, “clear, accurate, and complete”.

The empiricist may want to know what is cogent, valid, and reliable — and in what precise measure against chance (probability).

Most of the time we want to know “how things work”, and we want answers we may rely on for making decisions, but in difficult times — or just with troubled machinery — we may want to know as well why things don’t work.

Agitation, disinformation, and propaganda fail always the two-part test: is it true? Is it honest?

Related on BackChannels

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/10/23/fake-news-genuine-fake-news-the-real-fake-news-get-your-fake-news-here/

###

Live at Posting: Addressing Disinformation — “RIGA STRATCOM DIALOGUE 2018 | Day 2 Evening session”

13 Wednesday Jun 2018

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Free Speech

≈ Leave a comment

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combating active measures, disinformation, epistemology, information integrity, information warfare, NATO


The event may be wrapping up, but it should persist on YouTube and remain here in the BackChannels’ record of witness.


–33–

FTAC: A Note on War, Cultural Preservation and Transformation

28 Monday Aug 2017

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Politics, Religion

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epistemology, Islamism, Islamists, Islamophobia, shaping battle

Some filling in on the intellectual history of Nazism and the spread of anti-Semitic myth seems in order:

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/27/excerpt-1920s-the-spread-of-hate-russia-germany-laqueur/

Plainly, the defeat of “Nazi Germany” neither displaced the German language nor the German People (in their majority) but it did transform Germany into a modern and multicultural state haunted by and reacting to the crimes of the mid-20th Century.

The brutal, cowardly, and underhanded methods developed by the Nazis in their achievement and expression of martial and political power may remain — and I hope they remain – unparalleled in intensity and scope in history. Lesser cabal, like ISIL, and some states, as with Russia’s behavior in Syria, may prove equally sadistic but lesser in reach, not that we don’t pay attention.

Regarding Islam and “how many Islamists” — Daniel Pipes has been publishing on that question since 2005 — there are some approaches to coming up with percentages, but the bottom line is that Muslims would seem first in the way of jihadi violence, and so much so that their own security interests focus on keeping the Muslim Brotherhood and their relations neutralized and largely out of power.

The Moscow-Tehran relationship with Hamas and Hezbollah and others and the histories both centers of power have had with terrorism might encourage a good look those two and their historic promotions of anti-Semitism plus participation (state sponsorship for) associated with terrorism.


The prompt: an Islamophobic tirade blanketing all absent of resolving observation and reflection.

–33–

 

FTAC – On Empiricism and Power

15 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation

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empiricism, epistemology, politics, power

There may be subjective experiences, but there’s is no “whose truth” in empiricism, and especially as regards forensic investigations and the courts (open, of record) and processes the support them. The feudal lords of any era would, of course, control the courts and influence or control the clergy, dealing themselves the power to rule capriciously. As regards the leverage provided by metaphysical beliefs to provoke mobs, there is no end or settlement: what human would presume to know the nature of God? 🙂 The structures built atop such assertions lend themselves to arguments that cannot be resolved — in Obama’s term pluralized, “dumb wars”.

Among observers — detectives, journalists, lawyers, scientists — one viewer always views only a portion of the crime, parade, or war, so there’s room for “whose report” but as data developed with integrity compiles into contribution to case, hypotheses, and theories, that subjective character becomes increasingly objective plus + “valid and reliable” — and the same remains challengeable forever although challenges may stop as they drift into absurdity.

Perhaps loyalty to one point of view or another proves power because someone (by way of intimidation or reward) has developed the ability to get others to see as might be wished.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/quote-manipulation…/

The blog represents only a developing perspective, of course, but the reference points and their sources may all be examined. We do not have to live in a world “framed” by the caprice and foibles of the powerful. The public has tools more powerful than the same and can in good conditions hold the same to account.

# # #

FTAC – Israel – Response to Remarks Delegitmizing Israel

02 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by commart in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Israel, Philology, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics, Religion

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anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, BDS, bigotry, epistemology, Israel, political, political psychology, politics, propaganda, rhetoric

“Arabs were made to pay for the crimes of the Europeans by the creation of Israel.”

I know that is what has been heard and the fiction constructed around it total, but Zionism predates WWII, and thousands of Arabs were drawn before it to the agricultural fields of the nascent Jewish state.

If you believe statehood in the name of religion must go, then Rome must go, as must Pakistan, Saudi Arabia — well, actually all Islamic kingdoms and dictatorships — as the same have become “real headaches for the entire civilized world, completely engulfed in injustice and violence.”

The only “inescapable issue” in the reconstruction that is the modern State of Israel is the 5,000+ year existence of Jews and Jewish culture — beliefs, calendar, customs, language, religion — on the land and continuously. Ancient Israel, the Roman “Palestine”, and modern Israel have never been “Judenrein” (as some might wish).

Jews don’t “deserve a homeland” — Jews have a homeland.

Regarding terrorism, have a look independently into war and low-intensity conflict across 2,000 years.

Regarding genocide, let’s keep these two buddies in mind: http://www.tellthechildrenthetruth.com/…/2-mufti2_jpg… (Hussaini-Hitler handshake).

Also, you may want to look into how Ben Gurion crushed the terrorist Irgun at the earliest opportunity.

Your emphasis tells where you want to go (anti-Semitic / anti- Ziionist, actually, anti-justice) but the deeply poisonous programming and scripting that got you there has to this hour stayed out of the picture.

I beg you for patient new introspection and scholarship, for fresh ears and eyes, for skepticism in regard to a destructive loyalty.

I ask no less of myself and do read, say, Ma’an and look into issues having to do with the refugees of 1948 and their humanity, which one may believe better than that of their leaders who build and disseminate libels for a living.

______

The response was to a writer in India who ran through the common anti-Semites screen, from declaring the State of Israel a colonial project directly and only corresponding to the destruction of the Jews of Europe in the Holocaust of World War II to suggesting the entire state should have been constructed elsewhere.

What a load of fictional crapola one wakes to if participating the “middle east conflict”, which has weirdly become the signifier for Israel’s conflict with the Arab world while the same Arab world melts down in conflicts within its portion of the Islamic Small Wars (e.g., signaled by political violence in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Syria).

Nowhere is the “Religion of Peace”, nor the states founded on it, at peace, and not even within themselves, the Muslim Brotherhood gangs ever threatening established state power, the same state power incompletely in control of powerful families willing to back al-Qaeda and its affiliates and likenesses.

Additional Reference

Amin Al Husseini: Nazi Father of Jihad, Al Qaeda, Arafat, Saddam Hussein and the Muslim Brotherhood – Tell The Children The Truth – Homepage

# # #

FTAC – CIA, Pakistan, Taliban – It Ain’t Charlie Wilson’s War No More!

10 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

CIA, epistemology, intelligence services, Pakistan, political, Taliban

Let’s access some empirical method and policy on this: I believe U.S. officials know that when Pakistan received domestic and military aid funds, those moneys are then managed by Pakistanis, and they may go where they’re supposed to go, or they may go where they shouldn’t. Is that aspect of Pakistani corruption America’s problem?

The CIA is one of a number of the world’s shadowy intelligence compartments — as long as the lingo “Secure Compartmentalized Information Facility” is in use, I’m inclined to use “compartment” too (and, for the record, I ain’t paid by nobody!). It has therefore been easy for the injudicious and paranoid to cite the “usual suspects” — but not from the side intended in the film _Casablanca_ — without having to resort to verifiable records or reports.

Asif Irfan — Americans are not against Pakistan, and by extension, the CIA, State Department, Department of Defense, the whole shebang, isn’t “against” Pakistan either. To place the “locus of control” in the creation and myth of a “Great Satan” may comfort the fearful, but such comprises a false comfort. The truth is people like me, truly just another human being on the planet, speaking English, and hoping to prove more decently so than not over a lifetime, to partner with and provide Pakistan, as need, if needed, with access or insight into every kind of development or ecological knowledge available. We want to help with good things — health, longevity, quality of life, security — not bad ones.

At 9:29, Pakistan becomes an aggressor against all others.

My rabbi notes, “Some people are in a hurry to get to the end of the story.” He was referring to apocalypse. I don’t want to get there? Do you? Does the CIA want to get there?

How about the FSB?

MI5?

Ah, but there’s another to include in this question: ISI?

If you were to feel the energy-developed wealth of the privileged states of the Arabian Peninsula was contributing to mischief in Pakistan at at least sub-state levels — private money, also poppy money, also _diverted_ money — to the literal immediate expression of Islam in the modern world, including the imposition of 9:29 on all others, I might agree with you.

I may also agree that western military hardware manufacturing interests may have interest in continuous conflict, but those especially know they lose if lobbying — or working in underhanded ways — to perpetuate conflicts. The American Fourth Estate — my fellow journalists — would have a field day, and the American people would shut them down by way of elections.

Where else in the world — in cyberspace too — can one have a conversation like the one implied by the above posted fast chatyping?

No one but their overseers or owners know what state secret services may be up to, but that is no cause to fill in the gaps with emotionally-driven suspicions and, worse, assumptions!

At the moment (well, around the moment, lol), I am reading The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB by Andrei Soldatav and Irina Borogan.

Thank God for highest-integrity investigative journalism and the immensely nervy people who work at it!

In any given nation state, constituents may not need nor wish to know operations undertaken on their behalf, but the same have every need to know — and the moral requirement to know — the state policies driving operations.  Without that knowledge, or less than true knowledge, their freedom comes to an end, leaving only ruthless narcissists to fight about who might be prettier in God’s eyes, even if all such may be as unclothed as the famous fairy tale emperor and equally as ugly.

# # #

Be Careful of the Truth — Crucified Christians in Egypt — Not Corroborated

22 Wednesday Aug 2012

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

conscience, credibility, epistemology, integrity, journalism, knowing, libel, rumor, slander, truth

I’ve pulled directly from my Facebook wall on this.  It’s too long a rant for my “A Little Wisdom” section, which may one day make a fine chapbook, but for any coming aboard the good blogship Backchannels, it’s a fair reflection of how I think:

—–

Be careful of the truth — whatever it may be — and be even more cautious with insinuation and rumor.http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/08/22/jonathan-kay-how-egypts-crucifixion-hoax-became-a-classic-internet-urban-legend/ Those who mislead to lead always lose their followers. It may take a while; the damage done by sewing animus and confusion may be immeasurable; but, God willing, and often proven so, those arrows called “libel” and “slander” have a way of turning around and returning direct to the hearts of their owners.

Within the complexity of what I call the ‘Islamic Small Wars” and in the interface with many traditions, there are two words that may determine how things go: they are “credibility” and “integrity” — and they are ideal. They refer not only to what people may tell others and what others may accept or choose to accept even well aware of their existence as lies, but they are all things said within hearing of God, or, if the reader should not believe, that good sense of better nature one might call “conscience”.

—–

My experience with the habits of the special interest press has not been reassuring.  Horrific political accommodations, limited press access to hot spots, remoteness itself seem to encourage lying, whatever the writer (and publication) can get away with until someone plods through the muck to check it out.

There may be one problem with our heads on this topic: can a way out story — a good conspiracy theory, say, or simply a tree that fell in the forest with one “listener” reporting — be definitively scotched?

Welcome to the land of things left unsaid (so many things, eh?) and things not shown (there were not many people around or no one had a cell phone or no one wanted to take the picture).

Uh huh.

Be wary of tarrying too long long in the Land of Unconfirmed — and impossible to disprove — Possibilities.

  • Compassion
  • Empathy
  • Justice
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  • Integrity
____________

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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