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Tag Archives: medieval v modern

FTAC: Onward – Addressing a Reactionary Politics

20 Wednesday Jan 2021

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, North America, Political Psychology, United States of America

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Beijing and Moscow's Political Absolutism, Far Out Right, medieval v modern, Old Communists - Wealthy Party Elites, Rule by the Rich

I don’t know why I should have the spread of friends that I do on Facebook, so many have turned out reactionary conservatives muttering about a communist front that just hasn’t been shaping up as such. Have a look at the Communist Party USA’s membership number. Read Jacobin if you want to — I rather appreciate the alternative views but seem to be missing out on the sound of the earth-shaking thundering herd raging behind it. Inspiration for the following: the boast that former President Trump fought Chinese Communism (China’s elite society and growing class of billionaires left that blue serge lifestyle behind some time ago) and rightly put “America First!” The slogan was old before it came out of his mouth and the go-it-alone of the paranoid narcissistic personality may have only abetted Putin’s 19th Century ideas for destroying the political cohesion of a truly democratic and modern EU/NATO.

November’s election and today’s inauguration brought back to the United States of America the most fundamental of American principles and values riding right beside our glorious Constitution: a government by and for — i.e., responsible and responsive to — The People of the Nation in all our varied colors, cultures, and creeds.

We are Americans — no adjectives required unless appreciated and enjoyed — once again.

From the Awesome Conversation


“America First” also references the earlier “America First Party” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_First_Party_(1943)

Beneath the banner of Communism, Beijing’s financial, ideological, and political realities differ quite from what imagination may supply in minds restricted by tired old presumptions. The state has been fairly minting billionaires and producing an elite within lines of authoritarian control in some ways mirroring what Moscow has going in the way of a deeply autocratic and politically repressive state.

For all intents in the United States, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) may at best boast a membership around or beneath 10,000.

Excessive autocratic control — totalitarian in China these days — backed by military and paramilitary force have marked Beijing and Moscow’s respective narratives. In EU/NATO, the post-9/11 “New Nationalism” has similarly scarred “The West” in Hungary, Italy, Poland, and Turkey. However, as bad ideas reach their nadir, one may expect the reactionary drift (also in the United States) to reverse and more return to practical democratic approaches to a spread of tough and real — rather than imaginary — issues involving how we live together and how we (Americans) work together as a political society.


###

FTAC: Reflection on the Political Power of the World Wide Web in America 14 Years After the General Uptake of ‘Broadband Internet’

09 Saturday Jan 2021

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, North America, Philosophy, Political Psychology, United States of America

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Absolutism v Democracy, medieval v modern, New American Anti-Totalitarianism, Responsible American Freedom

I don’t really want to introduce this lift of my own words 🙂 because it’s telegraphed well as is. Let’s try this that way.

From the Awesome Conversation


The World Wide Web is in civilizational terms still a new communications technology, and about 14 years ago, broadband and the advent of powerful search engines and networks made it an ideal tool for political friends and enemies alike. Here is the program of one of our enemies — https://conflict-backchannels.com/2020/02/13/active-measures/ Another term (on which I haven’t worked): “Hybrid Warfare”.

I try to sustain our broadest American Freedom of Speech character across partisan lines, but we must be aware — or become aware — of sophisticated agitprop, disinformation, disingenuous information, etc. across partisan lines. The vast majority here are Americans whether Democratic or Republicans. We work things out. We don’t choke down political language or presentations without critical facility of our own and an immense treasure in research capability.

The BackChannels blog is mine and represents probably the most consistently semi-productive thing I’ve been doing for about a decade.

I would view the former politically correct fascists on campus and the emerged Far White Right in Charlottesville as projects that have simmered beneath the former political surface and simply amplified and coalesced their national political presence by way of both surface and “dark web” social channels. They’re the “violent radicals” of our day and most of us should want to repopulate the positions around the aisle.

We have had enough bullying from extremists Far Out Left and Far White Right.


Additional Comment

Unlike our Russian counterparts who cannot today choose between lives in a modern and vibrant authentic democracy, Americans may choose at this time to live with modern demand for integrity and responsibility in their speech and thereby inhabit an authentically modern and revolutionary ever new world.

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Reading Suggested on Viktor Orban’s Corrupt Hungarian Neo-Dictatorship

27 Sunday Dec 2020

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, Hungary, Political Psychology, Political Spychology, Politics

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Hungarian nationalism, medieval v modern, Orban's Neo-Dictatorship, Politically Absolute and Corrupt

Orbán’s political takeover – buttressed by a German industrial lobby that relies on cheap labour in Hungarian plants – has largely been bankrolled by cash plundered from the European Union that he rails so fervently against. A 2019 New York Times investigation found that Orbán uses billions of euros in EU subsidies as a patronage fund that enriches his allies, protects his political interests and punishes his rivals. “The ideology is a ruse. The money is where the action is,” said Lane Scheppele.

Geoghegan, Peter. “Dark money, dirty politics and the backlash against human rights.” Open Democracy, August 20, 2020.

Related Online (Well, What’s Not Related Online These Days?)

Anti-Defamation League (ADL). “The Antisemitism Lurking Behind George Soros Conspiracy Theories.” October 11, 2018; “Disinformation: Conspiracies connecting George Soros to protests and antifa”, n.d.; “Soros Conspiracy Theories and The Protests: A Gateway to Antisemitism.” June 2, 2020.

Fruen, Lauren and Rory Tingle. “‘The perfect enemy’: How two Jewish American political consultants ‘started a deliberate plot to smear George Soros to help Hungarian PM and helped to create the world’s largest anti-Semitic conspiracy theory’.” Daily Mail, January 21, 2019.

Grassegger, Hannes. “The Unbelievable Story of the Plot Against George Soros.” BuzzFeed News, January 20, 2019.

Oppenheim, James S. “FTAC: A Short Note on the Demonizing of George Soros.” BackChannels, August 8, 2020.

Wikipedia. “Arthur Finkelstein”.

Wikipedia. “George Birnbaum”.

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FTAC: Medieval v Modern: Three Comments

20 Sunday Dec 2020

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, North America, Political Psychology, United States of America

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medieval v modern

What has the medieval world — its views of humanity and related political methods — been doing in our modern one?

Perhaps I’ve been naive about the evolution of the political management of power across time, for I have thought my modern American democracy and its many responsible and responsive institutions the most wonderful humanist and secular invention on earth and in history. However, some beg to disagree with the evolution of the optimal organization of open modern democratic communities, and here are we Americans saddled with surprisingly medieval mobs, an “authoritarian” president (on his way out) and, at least before the recent election, a senate full of head-bobbing lords before his questionable majesty.

Quite often on this theme, I’ve hauled in “Basic Training” — the pledge of America’s civilian and military officials and officers to the Constitution — or, as here, made mention of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, but as this morning’s start brought the following ‘graphs flying off my desktop, well, a copy-and-paste seemed fitting. The first comment addresses the basic issue of having the past dragging the world’s future backward toward what has been known not to work. 🙂 The second excerpt deals with Russia’s 19th Century political ambitions for what should be a thoroughly hopping 21st Century EU/NATO.

From the Awesome Conversation

I’ve come to see the great divide in the management of power as that between feudal-medieval political absolutism underpinned by desperation, dogma, and some propensities for evil and the MODERN open democratic distribution of the same by balanced and checked integrated systems and related processes. I think there’s difficulty in popular understanding of what has been deeply planted in the soul of medieval leadership where one inevitably finds the despotic and malignantly narcissistic among kings, essentially. In the milieu of despots and Presidents-for-Life remains the endowment we have inherited from the “Old World”, and while it is here in us, we are all together still part of an evolving New World. Putin and Xi see no necessity for it. Where one may place the present personalities may well have to do with that “Medieval v Modern” theme.


DJT chose this gentleman for his first campaign manager: https://www.businessinsider.com/paul-manafort-russia-ties-2017-10

From the Imperial Period to the Bolsheviks to Putin, Russia has not been able to escape feudal-medieval political absolutism. Worse, is has been able to encourage the same in EU/NATO with reversions in political modality standing out in Hungary, Italy, Poland, and Turkey. Great Britain has been a little mixed up in this too with its reaction to 9/11, post-9/11 attacks, and the Moscow-Damascus driven forced migration from Syria. It too chose to “swell” (as flesh does with stings and other assaults) against greater cooperation with Europe in the interest of sealing and securing its own culture and traditions via BREXIT.

Putin’s promotion of Russia as a pious White Russian Nationalist enterprise belies its own multicultural reality — and you have seen the Grand Mosque opening video from2015 — but for the time being in Russia and the European states mentioned, a resurgent past holds sway.

What we cling to for assurance and safety, no less than mother’s dress, is always somewhere back in time.

I’d say Moscow has had a good and medieval run against an unprepared West, but if the problem is the persistence of the Medieval world in our Modern one, then we may proceed with the greater development of a more modern and democratic world. It’s all a bump on time’s highway, not a permanent turnaround into a much, much less desirable past.


Our nation was born forward of the Age of Reason and designed to defy absolute power in favor of a checked and balanced distribution of power to be managed through democratic methods. The nation has (to this point) succeeded with that. In the regions of personal behaviors, ethics, and morals, it has been generous with tolerance but some part has migrated from raised eyebrows and winks (naughty!) into criminally dark enterprise plainly criminal incidents. Such matters require investigative and Justice Department solutions, not cultural overhauls.

###

Note to a Trump Fan in Canada Regarding “Hammer and Scorecard”

14 Saturday Nov 2020

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, American Domestic Affairs, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, North America, United States of America

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Hammer and Scorecard, Medieval Rumors, medieval v modern, President's Mental Health

Posted to YouTube October 28, 2020.

My conversational partner, a Canadian, fervently believes in the latest medieval rumor “Hammer and Scorecard” — a “Deep State” plot to pervert the election via the computing machinery — launched by the now surreal President Donald J. Trump.

From the Awesome Conversation


You should hate the kind of people who lie to you in order to keep you seduced for THEIR — not YOUR OWN — political purposes.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hammer-scorecard-vote-counts/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/11/12/trump-grasps-new-set-straws-computers-rigged-his-election-loss/

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/janelytvynenko/post-elections-debunks

Trump and his cronies know that YOU cannot check out his claims yourself, and by attempting to derail the most dedicated and professional workers in his own government and in the press, he can get you to believe anything HE wants while delivering not very much at all to America’s working men and women.

Remember, our small business community and voters in all of the communities of labor across the land voted for Biden too.

I would love to have you reason critically about beliefs that have become familiar to you but have no basis in reality.



Fear mongering; rumor mills; accusations in a mirror — what HE would do himself, he accuses his opposition of doing to him . . . such have become the medieval tactics now being launched through Donald J. Trump’s political machinery. The victims of President Trump’s false claims and myriad lies are not his critics or America’s journalists or his business rivals — those most exploited are his own and most devoted fans who must turn their backs on the truth and swim into the chaos and darkness he prefers to have swirling around him.

Related Online

https://www.cisa.gov/christopher-c-krebs

–33–

FTAC: Trumpervention.

14 Saturday Nov 2020

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

A New Medieval America, medieval v modern, President's Mental Health

The talk’s off the wall as one to some want an officer of the law to march into the Oval Office, pull him out of his chair, and subject him to a psychiatric evaluation.

The thought may inspire smiles, but I believe there are very few officials or officers warranted to intervene in what has become an absurdly surreal defiance of the Constitutional and cultural principles of the American state. Barr? White House Physician? Pence? Who else?

From the Awesome Conversation


There is no authority stepping up (yet) to do it — and we’re about to watch his minions march nationwide with themselves invalidating the election.

In a democracy, power rests with the will of the people as represented through elected assigns, and then it flows through legislatures and courts and is enforced by dutiful, honorable, and loyal military, paramilitary, and security forces. Well, we might see those forces tested in relation to their loyalty — as sworn — to the Constitution.


Trump appears so far to be pushing for the feudal or medieval solution: he’s the Great Leader; power is to revolve around himself and will be held together by the familiar carrots and sticks: patronage for those favored; threat and punishment for those inclined to resist his will.

How history may remember Trump’s Republican Zealots (to the extent that reasoning modern patriotic Republicans fail to find his behavior alienating) –>l


Sixteen federal prosecutors specially assigned to monitor 2020 election malfeasance told AG Barr in a letter today they saw no evidence of substantial voting irregularities, & asked him to rescind his recent policy change. w/ @thamburger https://t.co/ncFQmpjn2Q

— Matt Zapotosky (@mattzap) November 13, 2020

Related Online: https://www.psychiatry.org/newsroom/goldwater-rule.


Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate . . . .

https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/amendment/amendment-xxv

Medieval Political Philosophy

–33–

Trumpian Coup?

13 Friday Nov 2020

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, North America, United States of America

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

medieval v modern, Trumpian Coup

Start with Paul Manafort and ask why an urbane and sophisticated American businessman with his eyes on the Presidency would choose him for a campaign manager.

Raise that eyebrow again over Trump’s pressuring James Comey for personal loyalty as opposed to embracing him in the common project of defending America’s Constitution and Rule of Law.

Pause at the Helsinki Moment with Putin.

Revisit Trump’s impeachment and those who comported themselves and spoke truth to power like the American patriots they were — and those fired or sidelined for doing so.

Here’s today’s problem: those most enamored of America’s most cherished democratic principles and traditions, including the running of fair and free elections, have been methodically removed from powerful positions and placed beyond the President and Command in Chief’s direct sphere of control. The same may enjoy accolades and publish books, but absolute direct and personally loyal power now serves at the President’s discretion and pleasure, at least until the first official or officer refuses his order.

My fellow Americans — prepare to welcome Donald J. Trump’s New “American” Nobility as the power representative of our United States IF he continues consolidating what he believes is his grip on the Presidency. In the near term, at least, it won’t matter that Trump didn’t play fair — or behave like an American gentleman and patriot — but that on January 22, he arrived for work with military, paramilitary, all associated security forces, officials, and officers tied up behind him.


Well that was a bit of a rant.

I wonder what others think may happen if the President “pulls rank” and invalidates Joe Biden’s win by confronting the same with raw absolute command of America’s defenses leveraged and perverted to serve himself.

–33–

America Medieval Might Explain that ‘Supine’ Republican Senate

11 Wednesday Nov 2020

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, North America, United States of America

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America Medieval, American Political Absolutism, Lord Trump, medieval v modern

WHAT IF the United States of America were returned to aristocracy?

WHAT IF Americans less connected were returned to obedience to absolute authority?

Along the way, the Trump-hated Left has been off on its liberation trip with its eyes on universal basics and trashing of white male this and patrician that. What if the White Male Kingdom and America’s Old Money were gambling on some powerful representation themselves with the cooperation, of course, of police and military forces?

What if Trump’s World was primping to look like Putin’s World ordered by his loyal New Nobility and bounded by a corrupt faked up marriage between Church and State?


Related Online

Cagaptay, Soner. “From Ataturk to Erdogan: Reshaping Turkey.” The Washington Institute, August 14, 2011.

Collinson, Stephen. “Alarm grows over Trump’s ‘dictator moves’ as he denies defeat.” CNN Politics, November 11, 2020.

Fang, Lee. “Another Official Dismissed at the Pentagon as Trump Continues Unusual Shake-Up.” The Intercept, November 11, 2020. (Addendum).

Kenez, Levent. “Erdoğan forced out nearly all generals and admirals from Turkish military.” Nordic Monitor, November 23, 2019.

Oppenheim, James S. “Basic Training.” BackChannels, February 2, 2017.

Oppenheim, James S. “Putin’s Mirror?” BackChannels, July 15, 2020.

Seligman, Lara and Daniel Lippman. “‘Devastating’: Top Pentagon leadership gutted as fears rise over national security.” Politico, November 10, 2020.

Tait, Robert. “Turkey Says Farewell to the Generals.” RFE/RL, August 2, 2011.


It took a century and a democratic revolution invoked by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) — a coalition of conservatives, reformed Islamists and Islamists that came to power in 2002 — for Turkey’s “Kemalist Occident,” or dalliance with the West, to end. With the mass resignation of Turkey’s military leadership last month, the last standing Kemalist institution, the army, has succumbed to the AKP’s decade-long political tsunami.

This political bookend for Kemalism suggests that AKP leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan is Turkey’s “new” Ataturk. He doesn’t have the cachet of being Turkey’s liberator, but he enjoys as much power as Ataturk once had.

https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/from-ataturk-to-erdogan-reshaping-turkey 8/14/2011.

Posted to YouTube August 4, 2011.

Posted to YouTube, November 9, 2020.

The firing of Defense Secretary Mark Esper kicked off a rapid-fire series of high-level departures at the Pentagon on Tuesday, setting off alarms on Capitol Hill that the White House was installing loyalists to carry out President Donald Trump’s wishes during an already tense transition.

In quick succession, top officials overseeing policy, intelligence and the defense secretary’s staff all had resigned by the end of the day Tuesday, replaced by political operatives who are fiercely loyal to Trump and have trafficked in “deep state” conspiracy theories.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/10/pentagon-top-policy-official-resigns-435693 – 11/10/2020.

Posted to YouTube October 26, 2020.

–33–

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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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