13 Wednesday Jun 2018
Tags
epistemology, NATO, disinformation, information warfare, information integrity, combating active measures
The event may be wrapping up, but it should persist on YouTube and remain here in the BackChannels’ record of witness.
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28 Monday Aug 2017
Some filling in on the intellectual history of Nazism and the spread of anti-Semitic myth seems in order:
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.
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15 Tuesday Dec 2015
Tags
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.
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02 Sunday Mar 2014
Tags
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.
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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.
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10 Monday Jun 2013
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.
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22 Wednesday Aug 2012
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:
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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”.
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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.
