11 Thursday Feb 2021
Posted in 21st Century Modern, Free Speech, Philology
The World Wide Web provides plenty of opportunity for posting disinformation as well as licentious and illegal content (from 4chan to the “dark web”).
The Awesome Conversation on Facebook would seem to want a little more in the way of civility, decency, honorable intentions, and information delivered with integrity.
Enjoy the discussion (live or recorded).
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22 Wednesday Mar 2017
Tags
21st Century Feudalism, 21st Century Neo-Feudalism, anti-Jihad, Facebook, freedom of speech, Islamic Small Wars, Islamofascism, Islamopho, web censorship
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Nothing like waking up to an alert from Facebook! And having no idea why this time you have been blocked-from everything! Can’t post or receive messages. Can’t like or love a post. Can’t post! Totally stifled.
I tried to find out why I was blocked. I sent a request-because I thought it was a mistake. I don’t use foul language. I don’t post pornographic photos or death threats. I don’t attack people- I do attack their facts.
I received the usual response-Nothing.I was “deleted” either because of my latest post Islam on the March:Part 1 or I may have insulted some Liberals (sadly so easy to do).
Read the whole response to Big Brother Facebook: Facebook Fascism | Diane Bederman- Your Passionate Voice of Reason – 3/22/2017.
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29 Sunday Dec 2013
Posted in Politics
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). 🙂 ”
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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.
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04 Monday Nov 2013
Last month, Sudan was roiled by a backlash of anti-austerity demonstrations. A media blackout was imposed after the seat of governance Khartoum became the bull’s-eye of the target for irate citizenry. I made an appointment to sit down with a man who lives in my area, a Sudanese who is well acquainted with the political climate in Khartoum.
Mohamed Elhassan was nominated as the presidential candidate . . . .
Tammy and I chat, mostly chatype, and she comments on this blog now and then, one of the few — perhaps the only serious regular participant here, so far. She is a powerhouse of a pundit, maintaining her own blog at http://tammyswofford.blogspot.com/ and publishing elsewhere. Her column appears in Pakistan’s Daily Times reliably every Friday.
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Ansar Abbasi proves his ignorance not just of worldly education and the modern world but also about Islam itself in his column. He claims that only Islamic knowledge is real knowledge, and therefore, all other knowledge is fake by implication. Nothing militates more against the spirit of Islam than this statement.
Daily Times – Leading News Resource of Pakistan – COMMENT : A rose by another name — Yasser Latif Hamdani – 11/4/2013.
Facebook’s English-speaking culture and civilization has brought to my own desktop a global network, a distributed and deepening layer of progress-inducing intellectuals, and I may append that with the preposition, “from Riyadh to Islamabad”.
I and the author of the above quoted passage have seven Facebook buddies in common: for the time being, however, I’ve elected to follow the writer on Facebook. I’m not full up on cyber associates, colleagues, and sources — and I’m way short on clients (editorial and research) and sponsors (say, for example, for this blog or more focused and private research) — but what a world one has at a computer’s keyboard for getting around: for several to many Pakistanis, I am the first conservative Jew they have ever met, and with a few, have talked face to face with via Skype.
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As per the Education Emergency of Pakistan (EEP) report, Pakistan is second in the global ranking for the total percentage of out-of-school children. As of now, seven million children are deprived of proper primary education and three million have never seen a classroom. Only 1.5 percent of the GDP is allocated for education, which is less than the subsidy the state gives to corporations like PIA, Pakistan Steel and Pepco. Across the country, over 21,000 schools have no buildings, only 39 percent have electricity, and 64 percent of schools are said to be in an unsatisfactory condition.
Daily Times – Leading News Resource of Pakistan – VIEW : An overview of education in Pakistan — Haroon Mustafa Janjua – 11/3/2013.
Haroon Mustafa Janjua has made himself a fixture in my Facebook experience. He has an extraordinary collection of oral history interviews with survivors of Partition and another set involved with the plight of women in contemporary remote village life — and he knows he’s welcome to share on this blog a short article or excerpt from that work.
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There is no need to name names but rather heed the warning that for any society, autocratic leadership, corruption, exploitation, injustice and violence may in part represent the expression and end products of having made way for the demands of a malignant narcissist.
An in-bounds narcissism may be part of the prerequisite for leadership — every would-be leader has to have the want of the role, the ambition to pursue it, and some good-feeling vision about seeing himself in it and modestly heroic — but the leap into the grandiose travels far beyond that. Consider, for example, Saddam Hussein’s genocidal persecutions of the Kurds and of the Marsh Arabs taking place beside the construction of Tikrit Palace and the building or maintenance of another 80 similarly opulent residences.
Daily Times – Leading News Resource of Pakistan – COMMENT: Beware the malignant narcissist —J S Oppenheim – 4/7/2012.
Yours truly.
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The concerns, desires, and observations formed today by an emerging global intelligentsia may be having effects in news reflection, specifically, i.e., how we encounter online our own image — individually, collectively — delivered and suspended in the language of remote others.
Expect normative adjustment from that interaction.
* * *
The old saying “Think globally; act locally” may need to be modified some by The Awesome Conversation and related capability in influence slowly working its way down into issues in remote (to one party or the other) regions, essentially producing around each intellectual node its own locality — it’s own intellectual geography — in cyberspace.
Distilled: there is nothing to keep a mind from working on either local or impossibly remote problems and participating in their management or solutions as if they were all taking place down the hall, next door, or one building over.
# # #
15 Tuesday Jan 2013
Abu Toameh, the son of an Arab Israeli father and a Palestinian mother, is a former senior reporter for the Jerusalem Post. He has reported that as of yesterday, his Facebook page had been deactivated.
The Commentator has learned that following complaints from the Palestinian Authority and Jordanian security authorities about his articles dealing with corruption, Facebook had taken the steps necessary to effectively censor his work.
Mark, really, suppressing Khaled Abu Toameh is just totally uncool.
I mean thanks for the communicating infrastructure and all, but a writer like Khaled influences how the world works.
That people would want to fly over their office carrels by way of the pc-enabled web and so expand their consciousness of the world: who wouldn’t dig that?
And we’re glad that as the web developed, you figured out how to make it swing.
However, we need to know such as “Palestinians: Fatah’s Armed Gangs Are Back” (January 15, 2013), chatype about it on Facebook, and know we have in addition the option of becoming Facebook buddies with the writer or subscribing to his feed or “Liking” his page.
Truly, what were you thinking?
There’s more to this story, of course. Calling out the top belies and hides the engineering on the floor. Facebook, so a quick web search will tell, has been wrestling with the idea that some content may be unpopular, undesirable, or, on this story, undiplomatic in the political arena. Does the virtual common carrier have input into what its servers and software will support in expression.
Must it support jihad sites, for example?
How about 9/11 Truthers?
How about bigots whom no one now dare call bigoted?
Washington’s Blog. “Political Witch Hunt by Popular Social Media Sites.” December 27, 2012.
25 Thursday Oct 2012
Tags
bigotry, character, commons, disingenuous speech, ethos, Facebook, freedom of speech, hate speech, integrity, language, political, politics, sophistry, true speech
Regarding responses to familiar anti-Semitic rants, I wouldn’t mind seeing a WordPress or other blog architected specifically to rebuff the favored mud of the day.
For those specifically interested in language behavior and attitudes, I’ve a blog I’d like to boost in that area — http://conflict-backchannels.com. In relation to that, I’ve been more active in the Pakistani community than Israel’s, but the work is the same: there are those who reason with integrity (and we find one another in this affinity-encouraging environment) and those who reason their wills or willpower and do so disingenuously.
I’m a strong free speech advocate and really don’t want to shut anyone up (or have anyone banned from the commons, online or in real space) but rather help produce the community, worldwide, in which bigoted and intemperate loons find themselves making themselves smaller and in their “actions” (as old communist’s might say) transforming themselves into common criminals.
I started out a romantic in many ways, but age plus a little education has taught me to look at the numbers when looking at the many characteristics — amplitude, frequency, distribution, intensity — of an adverse signal.
Also the Hebe’s GB’s (of the boat show persuasion should any need the hint) provide for armoring and training. I got into this area with an Ozraeli just a few years ago and had never encountered The Bigot (or the bigots) so closely, if ever.
I’d no idea there were so many dozens influencing thousands to millions unable to contain or restrain either themselves or their hate.
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