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~ Conflict, Culture, Language, Psychology

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Tag Archives: Internet

FTAC – “Trusted Others” – Online

18 Thursday Jun 2015

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

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Tags

conflict, Internet, news analysis, open information environment, open source intelligence, social networking

“Trusted others” has been an issue here, and I haven’t found a way to handle it except by being circumspect, diplomatic, and in line with the run of the western opposition. The beauty of “open source intelligence (OSI)”, a very fancy way of saying one reads the news and socializes online and draws on that for commentary (it’s a hobby), is that it is open: the world that can access the Internet in English is reading off the same pages. Those of us in the “social network” here and elsewhere are pioneering together in time.

The only thing available to adverse parties in these online news and social zones is their own reflection: they are left reading about their image from multiple perspectives and sources, not that they don’t try to inform that image creation themselves.  However, for political narrative, truth and its stability are easier to work with than the anarchy that comes of clumsy, doubtful, and self-serving fictions.


So pithy, I’ve assigned it to the “A Little Wisdom” section of this blog.

# # #

FTAC – New Boundaries – Normative Adaptation

31 Sunday May 2015

Posted by commart in FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Politics

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Tags

global intelligentsia, global normative values, intellectual evolution, intellectual history, Internet, political norms, politics

International trade and the Internet have altered the world’s boundaries in many ways, and with associated processes irreversible — some things cannot be turned backward — change in how we think about ourselves and others and our social and spiritual perception may be due.

“Google” has turned out a pretty good name for the past two decades of democratized intellectual exploration.

I’ve been calling “Time the New Space”.

We know what has been bothering (and bloodying) the world from the past: what lies ahead? What can be put ahead, i.e., developed now and placed in the future?

This whole conversation is a miracle.


The New Global Intelligentsia is going to be “new” for a while longer. It may be fragile too — too few where needed most — but perhaps growing peace is what time is for.


Time is the New Space.

When one can call in a pizza, Skype with a Facebook buddy 9,000 miles away, build a library, and fill a closet with one click (often enough), “space” — real space, earth space, physical space — becomes a little bit more recreational space and separate from common intellectual and social operations, including social and political projects.

No matter where one lives on this planet, very practically so, one may have a Great Conversation with countless others.

When the conversation turns to culture and conflict (for fun: add “language and psychology”) and the more callous mudslinging subsides or may be eluded by way of our aggregated and collective choices in conversational partners, watch out: change would seem to be in the offing.

Timeline for transiting from where we are (take a bearing) to where things are “a little bit better”?

Unknown.

Perhaps unknowable.

Nonetheless, whatever the differences may be in our sources of laughter and moans, those with whom we “chatype” online or, perhaps, who stumble across this blog, are traveling together on one blue pearl of a planet now thoroughly wrapped in talk.




Loose Additional Reference

Tetterner, Stuart James.  “Norms Perspective”.  Confluence, Cornell University.  Last updated September 5, 2007.

DiMaggio, Paul and Eszter Hargittai, W. Russell Neuman, and John P. Robinson.  “Social Implications of the Internet.”  27:307-36.  Annual Review of Sociology, 2001 (PDF).


. . . we believe that the internet activism of today is best perceived as informed by the spirit of the EZLN, the ‘Battle of Seattle’, and the diverse amalgams of social movements and subcultures that have matured along with the new media over the last five years. This is the internet as a living, historical force and one of the keys to understanding and shaping the political and cultural life of the present age.

Kahn, Richard and Douglas Kellner.  “New media and internet activism: from the “Battle of Seattle’ to blogging.”  New Media and Society, Sage Publications, 2004.  PDF may be found online.


Before the revolution, the Tsar in Russia had a system of internal passports. The people hated this system. These passports marked the estate from which you came, and this marking determined the places you could go, with whom you could associate, what you could be. The passports were badges that granted access, or barred access. They controlled what in the Russian state Russians could come to know.

The Bolsheviks promised to change all this. They promised to abolish the internal passports. And soon upon their rise to power, they did just that. Russians were again free to travel where they wished. Where they could go was not determined by some document that they were required to carry with them. The abolition of the internal passport symbolized freedom for the Russian people — a democratization of citizenship in Russia.

Lessig, Lawrence.  The Laws of Cyberspace.  Draft 3.  Essay presented at Taiwan Net ’98 Conference, Tapei, March 1998.


Because you may have heard this in the background of the video clip on the Family of Man exhibit (a related hardcover became my first book about photography).

# # #

Link

http://12mars.rsf.org/2014-en/enemies-of-the-internet-2014-entities-at-the-heart-of-censorship-and-surveillance/

16 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by commart in Political Spychology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

free press, free speech, Internet, journalism, political spychology, report, RSF, security, spying

http://12mars.rsf.org/2014-en/enemies-of-the-internet-2014-entities-at-the-heart-of-censorship-and-surveillance/

Three of the government bodies designated by Reporters Without Borders as Enemies of the Internet are located in democracies that have traditionally claimed to respect fundamental freedoms: the Centre for Development of Telematics in India, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in the United Kingdom, and the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States.

The NSA and GCHQ have spied on the communications of millions of citizens including many journalists.

Related: How the NSA Plans to Infect ‘Millions’ of Computers with Malware – The Intercept – 3/12/2014.

Curtain Up: The Beginning of the End of an Age of Dictatorships?

20 Thursday Feb 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

conflict, global culture, Internet, political, politics, psychology, web culture

Well, it’s not over yet.

🙂

It’s hardly begun.

______

What’s going on in Venezuela in a nutshell (English version) – YouTube – 2/14/2014.

______

The Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies maintains a “Global Threat Assessment” map that fairly well covers political turmoil worldwide, although I would add the persecution of the Burmese Rohingya to it (possible BackChannels slogan: “No People Left Behind”).

Then too I might want to work in resurgent eastern European nationalism (Hungary, Lithuania) but such complexity leads to specific foreign desks: again, our ability to survey may far outstrip any near potential to intervene between the repressed and subjugated and their tyrants.

Also, a map illustrating combined democratic and human rights levels of success might look quite different from one focused on international conflict.  We would have to work in Cameroon (Paul Biya) and Zimbabwe (Robert Mugabe) for that and perhaps give South Africa (Jacob Zuma) a bit of a once over too.

* * *

How are we of the democratic open societies doing?

Not so well.

We may glimpse all of it all at once, it’s true, but we may neither focus nor attend to it all at once.

In the week the above video has aired on YouTube, more than 2.1 million viewers have accessed it, which is kind of cool with our brave new high-bandwidth-Internet world, but what can those do?

Ask the same question about  the deep and expanding hellhole in Syria.

We know we know we know.

We can send band-aids (and the Israelis can put them on the Syrian injured it has today in its hospitals), but we can’t (yet) quell it.

Still, we’re connected and where others are in real trouble, we may either hear them or know they are screaming:

NORTH KOREA’S four main political prison camps are known only as No. 14, No. 15, No. 16 and No. 25. All are modern-day gulags. According to a new report from the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in North Korea, the population of the camps, now about 80,000 to 120,000 people, may have declined somewhat because of releases from a fifth camp, but also because the remaining prisoners are being exterminated.

North Korea’s crimes against humanity have ‘no parallel’ today – The Washington Post – 2/19/2014.

We — a fragile but growing and robust global political intelligentsia — are all over this stuff.

I’ve promoted a concept here: “malignant narcissism” and a lightweight approach, perhaps, toward the psychology of the dictator, the followers, and, ultimately, the better tendencies of the humanity of humanity.

Has that been helpful?

I don’t know.

We shall see.

# # #

Edward Snowden Tells on Big Brother

10 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

crime, Internet, NSA, privacy, terror

Poitras, Laura and Glenn Greenwald.  “NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: ‘I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things’.”  Video.  The Guardian, June 9, 2013.

Expect Edward Snowden’s breach of his NSA nondisclosure agreement to burn its way around the world.

What is freedom if it is not the ownership of one’s communications with assumed privacy?

What is security if it is not the state’s ability to operate “listening posts” to detect malice against those it has been charged to defend?

I have said of the Islamic Small Wars, and as much may be said of all organized crime and political terror, that they are wars for poets and detectives, the former because 1) what takes place in the mind takes place in language, and 2) what takes place in real space involves the most private forms of collusion and operational communication.

The recapitulation of international web traffic that starts at the Internet’s trunk lines, the robotic sifting for strings and patterns or known quantities, one might call them .  . . I’m not sure that bothers me so much.

I am more concerned when the FBI ignores or overrides a valid and reliable Russian intelligence tip-off and Boston marathoners and their families and friends lose their lives or legs: what motivated that negligence before the fact?

I’m also annoyed a little bit about the web bots watching my online shopping and pressing me to buy whatever I’ve browsed on every other Facebook or online news page.

In the end, if we don’t like so much electronic snooping, we can, I suppose, resume living locally and hope the bar, the coffee shop, the barber’s chair, and the local park are not infested with bugs that never bite but only listen.

# # #

The Devolution Will Be Televised

14 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Psychology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

devolution, experience, Internet, jading

  • A killer-soldier, allegedly of the Free Syrian Army, knifes the heart out of the chest of a battlefield casualty and bites into it.
  • In numerous videos: beheading.
  • From combat footage: jading, numbing recordings, from clinical green-screen Apache strikes to anti-tank weapon and RPG-abetted tank kills.
  • In the news: the aftermath of bombings of every kind.

And you are there!

Watching.

Already this morning — by 5 a.m. — I have either seen or been shown (both) drone footage of Taliban types planting a roadside bomb and, a day later, footage of an army vehicle being blown up at the same spot (while what looks like a mine sweeper stands off about 25 yards ahead of the blast).

Could have been a training clip, a how-not-to, punched up online as “testimony” to defense contracting conspiracy.

* * *

About ten years ago in the forums of a completely unrelated industry (fashion photography), some then idiot posted a link to the green screen cockpit recording of an attack against Muslim terrorists transferring weapons out of the back of a pickup truck.  Outside of Hollywood, which had the inside track on the look of night vision technology, few civilians had ever seen anything like it, and the clinical “range control” chatter and aim-and-shoot routine may have added to the outrage of aesthetes and tall girls.

Ah, those were more innocent days!

The imaginative wonders supplied by Stephan King notwithstanding.

🙂

It seems yesterday’s idiot would be a great — and entertaining! — Facebook buddy today.

* * *

The ever present advanced guard of sophisticates might argue that the world is the world, dude, get used to it.

No problem.

I have gotten used to it, and, dude, that’s the problem.

* * *

As we drink the world through our eyes and ears planted before hundreds of millions of computer monitors and gadget screens, should we wonder about the depth of our own depravity and jadedness in our having sought, perhaps, to see and hear too much?

Setting out to “track” conflict and related themes, whatever the motivation*, necessarily involves turning up unpleasant media and engaging as witness and commentator with the tragedies of the day, but one needs also to defend one’s humanity, more specifically an empathy with others, a sustained sympathy for the suffering, a whole response to encounter, even and especially online, and that as opposed to a clinical, jaded, and numbed reduction to political or other engineering devoid of sentiment.

So here I may be ready for some extended web-free “R and R”.

The Internet won’t care if I absent it awhile: it is a cold medium, more the invention of engineers than of poets, more the province of marketers, programmers, and pollsters intent on dipping into lives and pockets for gain than of artists and scholars delving into language and exploring the contours of the heart for a greater good.

—–

*Between advanced degree work in English and social psychology, a stint within the Office of Naval Research (public affairs environment, no clearance), enthusiasm for writing, and a well rounded American experience, I happen to think I’ve been cued and cut out for this sort of thing.

Associated Reference

BBC.  “Outrage at Syrian rebel shown ‘eating soldier’s heart’.  May 14, 2013.

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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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