Tag Archives: malignant narcissism

Syria – al-Qaeda – Putin – Obama – American Isolationism – Foreign Constituent Independence

29 Wednesday Jan 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Fast News Share, Islamic Small Wars, Politics, Religion, Syria

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The United States has picked up where it left off more than a month ago and started shipping nonlethal aid to Syria in hopes that al Qaeda won’t seize it and keep it from reaching its intended rebel fighting recipients.

U.S. restarts aid to Syria, hoping al Qaeda won’t seize it again – Washington Times – 1/28/2014.

Officials may have strengthened the chain of custody by winnowing down the trustworthy to “Free Syrian Army Supreme Military Council members”.

Last night’s State of the Union Address by President Obama emphasized domestic economic progress and de-emphasized foreign policy, and that to the extent that American involvement in the Islamic Small Wars appears to have been pared back to the 12-year-presence in Afghanistan and the diminishing of Islamist strength in that theater with but a nod to the whack-a-mole games played with drones and special forces and familiar to Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.

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The number of al-Qaeda linked fighters active in Syria has mushroomed from 2,000 to more than 30,000 in just two years, a senior Israeli intelligence official has warned . . . .

Over 30,000 al-Qaeda linked fighters’ in Syria, Israeli official claims – Telegraph – 1/25/2014.

Syrians, ordinary Syrians, Syrians who bake bread or lay brick, Syrians who were hungry three years ago at the hands of their kleptocrat government and sought a better deal for themselves, have been suffering mightily between the malignancies of their regime and a now strong portion of the regime’s challengers.

Where’s Putin now?

Not a word.

Web search “Syria Putin al-Qaeda” and the top page list comes back with the mud slung in early September: it’s the Americans that have backed al-Qaeda.

We know it’s not true.

Americans have backed the above mentioned “Free Syrian Army” led, nominally, at least, by General Salim Idris.  That army has found itself forked between the brutal dictator — this is one who flew jets against large noncombatant populations — and the equally unconstrained primitives of the al-Qaeda affiliates.

Read the still recent headlines:

FSA chief: Free National Army is a pipe dream « ASHARQ AL-AWSAT – 1/16/2014.

‘We don’t have long,’ say Syrian rebels locked in battle with Al Qaeda, Assad | Fox News – 1/17/2014.

President Obama turned up the populist card last night with brags about progress in the American system within its borders, from energy independence to health care, and while he proffered continued support for nascent democracies in war torn space, he made clear that American troops were staying at home.

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“Dozens of Antonov 124s (Russian transport planes) have been bringing in armored vehicles, surveillance equipment, radars, electronic warfare systems, spare parts for helicopters, and various weapons including guided bombs for planes,” a Middle East security source said.

“Russian advisers and intelligence experts have been running observation UAVs around the clock to help Syrian forces track rebel positions, analyze their capabilities, and carry out precision artillery and air force strikes against them,” said the source, who declined to be identified.

Report: Russia stepping up military aid to Syria’s Assad | JPost | Israel News – 1/17/2014.

Perhaps in Putin’s cold political calculus, Syria will be held in The Bear’s paw at any price to Syria’s humanity.

President Bashar Assad’s military and the Free Syrian Army may wake up to realize that their enmity may be misdirected, for the true axis is not, has never been, Assad vs al-Qaeda but rather The People vs Assad.  Forget about that old rusty post-Soviet chain: Russia – Syria – Iran | Saudi Arabia – NATO – America.

Syria is.

Syria exists for Syrians.

Syrians internally displaced or made refugee by war — about nine million souls (6.5 million IDPs; 2.1 million refugees) —  need peace and home for themselves, and all they have for getting that are two armies, in body, and their differential in leaderships, that should be the last to be at their own throats.

As much hell comes from misguidance and propaganda helped along by a surrounding sea of greed.

Obama’s America with NATO returned to a defensive posture would seem to have zero interest in intervention in Syria apart from keep General Idris’s enterprise in sufficient weaponry for maintaining the three-way stalemate while talk-talk-talk fills time.

Putin’s Russia, which well may view Syria as part of its post-Soviet inheritance, seems immune to humanitarian overtures apart from bending, twisting, and spinning it some around Bashar al-Assad, who in state propaganda and RT has been made to look like a blameless angel.

So far as may be gleaned from the news online, Putin’s in it for the money and to maintain an anti-western post in a client buffer.

Compared to Putin’s glory — and how glorious that glory will be at the $50 billion Winter Olympics in Sochi — the depth and expanse of civilian Syrian suffering, in state and splayed out in the refugee camps of hosting neighbors, would seem by comparison invisible.

Here’s another cycle in headers:

Russia And China Provide Practically No Aid To Syrian Refugees | ThinkProgress – 9/3/2013.

Russia Provides $10M to Syrian Refugees | World | RIA Novosti – 10/1/2013.

Russia to Send Additional Humanitarian Aid for Syrian Refugees in Lebanon — Naharnet – 11/25/2013.

Donors Offer $2.4 Billion to Aid Syrian Civilians, but U.N. Says More Is Needed – NYTimes.com – 1/15/2014.

Get the picture?

Perhaps this will help: Russian President Vladimir Putin’s $50-billion Olympic Games | Toronto Star – 6/25/2014.

Disclaimer: I confess I now write with a “nice pen”, acknowledged as such by an expert.  It’s best feature is its 21 karat gold medium-fine nib, so I know a little bit about fine things too!  But my fine things would seem fit to living in a cabin, which is more or less how I live (but I can dream).

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I have seen the face of suffering and hate online in many faces.  Someone has been lied to or manipulated; someone has a mind confined to state media or a wallet meagerly fattened by the patronage of a despot, a shameful situation where conscience and ethics have not been entirely extinguished.  What may be done to repair that person?  Or, collectively, such people captive to closed information (remember: mouth – ear – mind – heart) systems?

I don’t know.

I do know the world online is larger than the space in which I live and the freedom to speak has its complement in the freedom to read, listen, or watch widely with great curiosity and with some ambition and discipline as regards discerning the nature of things.

Additional Reference

Syria talks face immediate hurdle of Assad’s refusal to step down | World news | The Guardian – 1/19/2014

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FTAC – On Syria — Mirrored Sides

09 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Politics, Psychology, Syria

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It’s not sinking in but I keep asserting this: the same personalities — different talk; same walk — occupy both sides of the combat. There is no winning, and they are proving that by mutually losing, not only treasure but also respect and self-respect. I noted earlier this morning that more than 11,000 children have died in the Syrian Civil War, most beneath the bombing on the state’s side and some at the hands of snipers aligned with the state. That doesn’t shift the black/white, good guy/bad guy thinking at all considering what the global jihad does to children. That both sides do similarly unrestrained things — they exceed limits — tells about the “malignant narcissism” of the characters driving the war. Neither care about people. The care about control, power, subjugation, and self-aggrandizement and they use fear and force to get their share of “narcissistic supply”. There’s nothing actually in the predominant warring parties — not God; not humanity — over which to bargain and make peace. In the end, they will be seen as killers and nothing else.

The key: “different talk — same walk.”

The dictator and the revolutionary have the same self-aggrandizing drive, and God above and humanity at their feet are of no real account: they have already bent words to clothe themselves and provide to themselves the exclusive privilege of determining the fates of others.

God works through both — the blood bespattered dictator and opposed zealot alike — does He not?

So they themselves might say.

The humanity of humanity may beg to differ.

Sideways Related Reference

OCHA | Coordination Saves Lives – Second International Humanitarian Pledging Conference for Syria | OCHA

As UN prepares for mammoth Syria aid conference, Assad regime keeps relief from the suffering | Fox News – 1/7/2014.

Snowmen and suffering: A bleak winter for young Syrian refugees – CNN.com – 12/21/2013.

Aid sought for Syrian refugees facing harsh winter | GulfNews.com – 1/8/2014.

Sharjah’s Sheikha Jawaher’s plea to UAE residents help Syrians as winter conditions turn ‘catastrophic’ | The National – 1/8/2014.

Champion the #childrenofsyria

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Chris Christie and “Bobby” Mugabe

09 Thursday Jan 2014

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

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“Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee,” Deputy Chief of Staff Bridget Anne Kelly emailed at 7:34 a.m. on Aug. 13, 2013.

The recipient, a Christie troll at the Port Authority named David Wildstein, emailed back at 7:35 a.m., only a minute later.

“Got it.”

In New Jersey, There’s No Exit for Chris Christie’s Bridge Trolls – The Daily Beast – 1/9/2014.

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From August 2008 to July 2009, over 4,200 Zimbabweans died in one of the worst recorded cholera outbreaks in Africa.

The high death toll – far beyond the worst case UN scenario – was the result of collapsed water and sanitation infrastructure and state health services rendered dysfunctional by political tension and hyperinflation.

” . . . rendered dysfunctional by political tension and hyperinflation.”

I would have imagined that “political tension” leads primarily to heart attacks and nasty rhetoric as opposed to interference in the delivery of basic public services.   Taking down water sanitation stations, however, has to do with chemicals and some routine maintenance, which may be withheld or denied by removing their funding.

I recall the Zimbabwe’s 2008 cholera outbreak as tracing back to Mugabe’s efforts to sabotage the reputation of a district-level election opponent — and I can’t find the online source for that.  This may do:

Before the ZANU-PF government nationalized municipal water authorities in 2006, water treatment and delivery systems worked. The Mugabe regime, however, politicized water for political gain and profit, policies that proved disastrous, and which have clearly contributed to the ongoing cholera epidemic.  All Harare residents PHR interviewed reported that trash collection has effectively ceased. Throughout 3 Harare, and especially in the poor high-density areas outside the capital, PHR investigators saw detritus littering streets and clogging intersections. Steady streams of raw sewage flow through the refuse and merge with septic waste. A current Ministry of Health official reported to PHR: There is no decontamination of waste in the country.

www.jhsph.edu/research/centers-and-institutes/center-for-public-health-and-human-rights/_pdf/PHR_HealthinRuins_Zimbabwe_Jan09.pdf – December 2008.

While the consequences differ quite between New Jersey and its governor and Zimbabwe and its President for Life (so far), the manner of control — for the malignant among narcissists, “control” over others is what it’s all about — seems dreadfully similar.

In addition to sabotaging basic services to smear opposing district politicians, we know what goes on in President Mugabe’s invention of a state inside his head that, unfortunately, has been imposed on the Zimbabwean experience of reality.

President Mugabe, this with little thanks to the hated white man — and not only white men but people of color everywhere may be thankful for that —  has led Zimbabwe on a lifelong tour into the dismal regions of widespread disease, hunger, poverty, and political subjugation.

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Apart from screwing up some east coast traffic royally, as may befit his self-concept, we don’t know what else Governor Christie may be pursuing or thinking about as regards his political enemies.  What we do know — what New Jersey’s constituents may know or come to recognize — is a signal from leadership associated with venturing on to a bad track (first the poo bah slows down some traffic . . . ).

USA Today decided to have a little fun with the George Washington Bridge scandal this morning.

The newspaper offered 10 lessons Gov. Chris Christie can learn from fictional mob boss Tony Soprano in the wake of Wednesday’s news.

10 lessons Chris Christie can learn from Tony Soprano courtesy of USA Today | NJ.com – 1/9/2014.

Related: 10 lessons from ‘The Sopranos’ for Chris Christie – 1/9/2014; Punchlines: Traffic jams Chris Christie in corruption? – Comedy video (5:13) compilation – 1/9/2014.  The video features the denial of responsibility well known to dictators.

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▶ Chris Christie Press Conference VIDEO Q&A Christie Denies Knowledge Of Bridge Payback Scheme – YouTube – 1/9/2014.

“How did this happen?” Christie asks.

Damage control follows scandal.  Christie’s conversation may well involve “credible denial”, and that’s far from Mugabe’s reflexive finger pointing at Great Britain for all of Zimbabwe’s failure, which is really the expression of his guarded inner state and his manner of responding to that turmoil.

Operating in so scathing an open democracy and with military and treasuries separate from the grasp of a governor, Christie’s political environment may have developed its share of corruption and dirt, but it’s not going to give him the excess of power that may channel into real trouble.

Whatever the trouble, Christie can still clean it up.

That’s more than one might say for “Bobby” Mugabe and a pretty good cast of well established dictators (with far greater powers and reach) worldwide.

Related on the Reestablishment of Cholera in Zimbabwe

IRIN Africa | ZIMBABWE: The politics of suffering | Zimbabwe | Economy | Food Security | Governance | Security – 10/11/2012.

Case Raises Questions About U.N.’s Role in Zimbabwe – 2/22/2010.

Letter to African Union Chairman Jean Ping to Address Key Concerns During the African Union Summit | Human Rights Watch – 1/22/2009.

Zimbabwe – Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health – n.d.

Underlying causes of cholera in Zimbabwe remain unattended to | Sokwanele – 6/30/2009.

When the affected state causes the crisis the case of Zimbabwe – Issue 43 – Humanitarian Exchange Magazine – Humanitarian Practice Network – June 2009.

Cholera Epidemic Sweeping Across Crumbling Zimbabwe – NYTimes.com – 12/11/2008.

Zimbabwe: Cholera, Dictatorship, Ignorance – Oppenheim Arts & Letters – 12/9/2008.

Zimbabwe on brink of collapse as outbreak of cholera spreads | World news | The Guardian – 11/24/2008.

Zimbabwe’s cholera epidemic spreads | Video | Reuters.com – 12/7/2008 or 2009.

The 2008 Cholera Epidemic in Zimbabwe: Experience of the icddr,b Team in the Field – 10/29/2011.

Update – 1/9/2014/1650: Chris Christie did everything right today. But Bridge-gate is still a very real problem for him. – by Chris Cillizza – The Washington Post.

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FTAC – A Question Regarding Social Media and Realpolitik

29 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by in Politics

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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.

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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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FTAC – Assertion Regarding the Malignant Aspect in Vanity

04 Wednesday Dec 2013

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Politics, Psychology

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A note on narcissism and vanity: both are to be found universally in the human experience. The aspect of malignancy is social and transactional — it has to do with HOW we do our thing and what we might do to others to do it. The difference is that between fair dealing and mafia dealing; also between accountable and open democracy — if you can get it — and corrupt and thuggish tyranny; also between a president that preserves a democratic constitution and relinquishes power at the end of his term, and one who manipulates the law and his political surrounds to keep himself central to power and in power.

The subject of a sociopathic narcissism came up on a wall, and after putting in my two cents with “Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy” — now a hobbyhorse of a phrase — I thought to give just a little more thought to what is contextual, what might better suit Hollywood than Washington, what is normal — or we should be without air conditioning, golf courses, and Cadillacs — and what is malign.

A part of “malignant narcissism” would seem to involve “license”, i.e., absence of conscience in regard to others and no brakes on behavior associated with boundaries, propriety, and, down the line, sadism as a dimension in the capricious and ultimate control of others.

As much the treatment of Shweyga Mullah within the Qaddafi household (at the hands of daughter-in-law Aline) stands signal (with much else from that regime) as to how crazed and depraved that cruelty may become.

“License” — perhaps Muhammad would have applied the term “exceeding limits” — seems to me a late expression along a curve that may find a basis in language (from the uptake stage) and “narcissistic mortification” for its path that will, for the person so affected, inevitably lead to the dehumanization and discounting of others.

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To Be Abandoned and Betrayed by Politics’ Malignant Narcissists

03 Tuesday Dec 2013

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

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“This is how I live, day in, day out, in Gaza. Most of the population is less privileged than I am. When poverty wins out and there is no work and no solution on the horizon, there’s nothing worse than losing hope.”

My sea, my day – Israel Opinion, Ynetnews – by Dr. Mona al-Fara 12/2/2013.

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” . . . . there are 1,200 millionaires in Gaza since Hamas took power… these people took advantage of the tunnels and the commerce of fuel to Gaza and took advantage of the people in Gaza.”

Gaza Strip full of corrupt millionaires, says Palestinian official – Middle East Israel News | Haaretz – 11/16/2013.

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Briefest Observation: for dictators — “malignant narcissists” — political space, locality to state, provides exclusively for their own aggrandizement and comfort through the accumulation of wealth and has otherwise no significance as regards the interests of other constituents in their immediate surrounds.

For such “kleptocrat” personalities and the systems they create around themselves, the achievement of murderous and thieving power would seem the main thing, and whatever holds together to sustain that “thing” — their thing — is the only genuine concern.

As much would seem as true for “Putinistas” investing their wealth and their lives outside of Russia, for the Assads who have decimated their constituent population in Syria — now one-third displaced or refugee, and for Gaza’s “tunnel millionaires” who have essentially forsaken those around them: all have in common the abandonment and growing impoverishment of those who had believed in them and counted on them most.

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FTAC – Introducing, Recalling the Ouroboros

10 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy, Islamic Small Wars, Philology, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Religion

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One appreciates your resolve, would that the instructions, historically enforced, regarding dhimmi status for Jews and Christians were absent from the text. That one element alone lends dignity to the Muslim’s position at the expense of Christians and Jews, not to mention what’s in store for everyone else. It’s a flattering concept; it probably feels large (as in “living large”) but that seems to me a facet of an unbridled and untenable narcissism of a sort to which the world, Muslims first, must respond.

Islam shimmers with this aspect that may embrace and welcome in one part while also reserving to itself the mission to destroy others without restraint. That part today it wishes to cast off, which it must to save itself culturally and socially, but its head meets its tail in this again and again and again across time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros

Civilizational narcissism and the Ouroboros would seem thematic kin.

With either, we may drown in our own reflection or, same thing, devour ourselves, such is the nature of all closed ideological and tribal systems.

A good architect would not only design in some path of retreat out of his magnum opus but also a gateway to other gardens and a window to other worlds.

Additional and Cited Reference

Ouroboros – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Force of Reason: Oriana Fallaci: 9780847827534: Amazon.com: Books — This volume starts with an overview of Islamic aggression in Europe.

Running in circles – latimes.com – by Ed Park – 12/2/2007:

In “The Origins and History of Consciousness,” he writes, “It slays, weds, and impregnates itself. It is man and woman, begetting and conceiving, devouring and giving birth, active and passive, above and below, at once.”

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