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Tag Archives: open society

FTAC: Rah Rah! The Better American Way

03 Friday Jul 2020

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

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democracy, open political argument, open society, reason in public discourse

Some of my Right Wing Nut friends hate Black Lives Matters, Democrats, George Soros, any compassionate souls qualifying as “Libtards”, and probably just plain puzzled (and suffering) human faces on general terms. While the United States of America heads now into rougher waters — here’s a schematic –>

COVID-19 –> National Stand-Down of Basic Economic Activities (Bars & Restaurants and Events) –> Peonage (Americans in Unsustainable Debt) –> Foreseeable Loss of Hope, Independence, Opportunity, Property, and Stability –> De Facto Enslavement (and more about that on this blog later) –>

–> these same complain about “appeasement” before “radicals” (misguided youth generally among them) when governments stay their forces a moment to give peace a chance and clarify essential battlespace as the opponent has cared to define it. Those old levels of contempt, determination, and penchant for violence may remind us of how differently America works — when it’s working.

From the Awesome Conversation

Internally, Americans accommodate, compromise, and repair conditions through argument, reason, and talk.

None of that compares to “appeasement”.

Where are there foreign actors, however, fitting the label “agent provocateur”, then our tolerance of their presence, or disinterest in it, would amount to appeasement.

Islam has a concept for what interlopers may do in geopolitical space: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasad

In its feudal and narcissistic way, it’s self-centered with the Ummah in mind, but universalized, most statesmen would recognize the problem of having foreign agents in one’s domestic business.

BLM is domestic, somewhat poisoned by old rhetoric, and it may be infected by interlopers, but having become a visible element in OUR politics, it has to have its conversation with other Americans in public.

America’s two “rivals” in international influence and powers, Beijing and Moscow, believe in force and totalitarian control.

We don’t.

We don’t muzzle our critics: we defend protest; we investigate issues and try to bring their components into public view; we face political and social challenges and address them with peaceful but vigorous means. The day we stop listening, arguing, reasoning, accommodating, and compromising, and agreeing is the one on which we have failed as a democracy.

Those we refer to as “extremists” and “violent radicals” believe they have cause and permit to abandon those tenets and achieve their ends “by any means necessary”. Well, it’s at that point that the state must stand firm and take apart what has defined itself as a martial adversary. Generally speaking as regards that kind of “revolution”, the state wins.

If the state has been compromised, corrupted, and weakened from within, well then it may lose.

Even if a politically repressive regime “wins” against an enemy representing the better part of human values, as I believe democracies represent, it loses for being and displaying its ultimately closed, controlling, and destructive character.


Porch Talk at Magic Hour, Annapolis, Maryland, September 4, 2005. (c) 2005, J. S. Oppenheim.

Related on BackChannels: “Basic Training”.

Addendum, July 4, 2020

On FB, one reader posed the question, “What’s to like?”

Here’s the BackChannels answer –>

Our system of governance remains strong, i.e., embraceable and not yet hollowed out. I am certain most Americans are counting on America to work some political magic and return the ship to firm and steady sailing. Our present turmoil devolves to our hosting so many authoritarians, extremists, sophists, and zealots that supporting an authentic _and reasoning_ conversation has become nearly impossible. While throwing mud at one another, we seem to be ignoring “America the Beautiful” while melting down in fits of jealousy, greed, and resentment.
When idiots have tired themselves out with fighting or raiding — down on the street or up in the boardrooms — then more real people, so one may hope, will come out to sweep up the glass, turn over indictments, produce new law, and so on, and cobble the place back together and refresh it as it should be.

–33–

FTAC – A Note on Perceiving Hillel the Elder and Encouraging Greater All-for-All Inclusion in Global Politics

01 Thursday May 2014

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

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conflict, democracy, despotism, freedom, open society, politics, religion

“All for All” is a better deal the “All Against All”.

The spirits of each monotheist construction — taken as divine, oral history, written history, scholarly poetics, etc. — have each their ways of talking out of both sides of their mouths.

In the bloody American civil war, both sides held their Bible high.

To help everyone get off the self-destroying triangle and on to a better interlock (I’m about to change the popular perception of the Star of David, lol), I refer often to the intellectual who challenged, revolutionized, and revitalized the Judaism of his day and whose thought set the stage for Jesus, Paul, and Constantine and later Muhammad: Hillel the Elder.

http://www.amazon.com/Hillel-Not-When-Jewish-Encounters/dp/0805242813

I can take myself — mind and spirit — more deeply into this area only with funding that covers the specialization, as much in this area (reading-writing) and other parts of my life absorb greater time and energy. So far, we don’t have robust mechanisms for getting beneath independent scholarship. So I’m kind of stuck. Nonetheless, I hope a few will venture into Hillel’s thought not merely as a rabbi but a mortal “Everyman” of his era intent on developing wisdom within the sphere of divinity, as the conversations we have with one another may be also perceived as part of humanity’s great conversation with God, nature, and the universe.

Our survival as a species may also encourage greater emphasis on greater bonding over universalized principles and values, e.g., “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights” against those who would degrade or negate them.

Such has been part of my reasoning when aggregating “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” as a unit representing autocratic absolutism that by its nature indulges in and promotes kleptocratic state-exploiting and state-based theft serving the grandiose aspirations or needs of the “great leader”.

Dictatorship.

The bands of this theme, the despotic vs the democratic, the malignantly narcissistic vs a still boisterous humanity but one capable of containing itself and keeping itself within bounds as regards the exploitation and subjugation of others, are global.

Putiin-Assad and others at polar extremes have wanted to cast their conflict set as “secular vs religious” or, in their own eyes, perhaps, “Heroic Secularism” vs “Heroic Religiosity”.

That’s a small war, generally, and for many reasons having to do with the appeal of the cause and true motivation of the individual.  In light of such, I’ve called the current set of conflicts infused with religious dogma and confused by it “The Islamic Small Wars”; however, the same may not comprise The War — shall I type “The True War”? — which is the defense of a varied humanity overall — a creative and gregarious species supporting about 6,980 languages and the cultural perception and self-concept each represents — from greater subjugation by the despotic through he set of mafia-type methods and systems — first, they make you shut up (state control of the press): then deceit, flattery, intimidation, patronage, and murder — that produce and sustain idolatrous totalitarianism.

That’s the bare bones script I see.

The story to come is what the reader writes in the course of the political aspect of his living.

# # #

From Another Land of Information Control – China, Uyghurs, and Terrorism (or False Flag)

03 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by commart in Asia, China, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Politics, Regions

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Asia, China, closed societies, democracy, dictatorship, open society, political, political science, politics, terrorism, Uyghur

Knife-wielding attackers, dressed in black clothes, stormed the railway station of provincial capital Kunming shortly after 9 p.m. on March 1, slaughtering those who could not flee fast enough.

China: Deadly Terrorist Attack in Kunming Blamed on Uighurs | TIME.com – 3/1/2014.

Related: Chinese Communist System Rules! – Video – TIME.com — Narrator in regard to China’s political system: ” . . . notoriously opaque and mired, so far as we can tell, by corruption and a whole vast untold story of political intrigues . . . .”

* * *

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkQH6UasUNQ – 10/8/2013.

* * *

As an editor and writer, one might say of my own node on the web that it is itself a vast territory devoted to information control.

That would be true.

However, I don’t gate what others may have to say and, in fact, invite a fairly broad (but must be civil by my own mysterious standards) conversation.

*

The “Islamists” are ruining Islam as may be Muslim apologists and others who bend and twist to make it come out okey dokey no matter what murders and persecution may take place in its name, but we have also intimations of “false flag” operations and thoroughly evil impression-making pacts, such as appears to exist between Assad and ISIS in Syria, that also are destroying those who have bought into them: they think they are getting away with something — they are not: all comes out in the sun when finally the sun again comes out.

China is dark.

Beijing glitters some today, and magnificent-dangerous projects like the Three Rivers Dam astonish those with more modest ambitions (I’ve no ambition myself to make the earth wobble on its axis), but at the top sit another national elite — another cloaked dictatorship defended by The Party and beyond the influence and reach of the common worker and starving child entrusted to the care of the monster that runs North Korea.

China will be dark — and so will Islam — if it cannot turn up all of its cards, leaving to the truly aberrant within its districts a much reduced channel for criminal pursuits, for in the information dark, one cannot separate sophisticated thieves from perhaps even the most compassionate and earnest of politicians.

One more thing in loose regard to some tribal societies and precepts: 90 percent charitable and 10 percent murderous and piratical does not work where the surrounding world desires, promotes, and demands from itself  a good ethics and morality.

# # #

Reagan, Khamenei, the Old Evil Empire – Into the Shadows, All

08 Sunday Dec 2013

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

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Tags

closed society, dictatorship, diplomacy, open society, paternalism, politics, privileged knowledge, public knowledge

It seems like only yesterday.

Perhaps that’s because, and this for all the blood and treasure spent since then, it is still yesterday and yesterday remains captive to yesterday’s drives, experiences, and transmitted inter-generational cultural programming.

______

President Ronald Reagan – Address on Iran-Contra – YouTube – Posted 3/17/2008.

* * *

▶ Ronald Reagan Evil Empire Speech (Excerpt) – YouTube – 3/8/2013.

* * *

The Iran-Contra Affair – 1986-1987

One of the most complicated and intrigue-filled scandals in recent decades, the Iran-contra affair dominated the news for many months. It consisted of three interconnected parts: The Reagan administration sold arms to Iran, a country desperate for materiel during its lengthy war with Iraq; in exchange for the arms, Iran was to use its influence to help gain the release of Americans held hostage in Lebanon; and the arms were purchased at high prices, with the excess profits diverted to fund the Reagan-favored “contras” fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

Washingtonpost.com Special Report: Clinton Accused – 1998 (?)

Strangely, the page on my Chrome browser looks like garbage until copied down (fair use – one paragraph) to ASCII text.

* * *

The event in the year 1358 was a counterattack. Our courageous and religious youth attacked the U.S. embassy and discovered the truth and identity of this embassy, which was the Den of Espionage, and presented this fact to people throughout the world.

In those days, our youth called the U.S. embassy the “Den of Espionage”. Today, after the passage of 30-plus years since that day, the name of U.S. embassies in countries which have the closest relationship with America – that is to say, European countries – has become the den of espionage. This means that our youth are 30 years ahead of the rest of the world. This event was related to America as well. These three events were related, in different ways, to the government of the United States of America and its relations with Iran. Therefore, the 13th of Aban – which is tomorrow – was named “Day of Fighting Against Arrogance”.

The Office of the Supreme Leader, Sayyid Ali Khamenei – 11/3/2013

* * *

He believed that virtue was better revealed in action than in theory. He used hissimple lifestyle and behaviour to criticise the social values and institutions of what he saw as a corrupt society. He declared himself a cosmopolitan. There are many tales about him doggingAntisthenes‘ footsteps and becoming his faithful hound.[3] Diogenes made a virtue of poverty. He begged for a living and slept in a large ceramic jar[4] in the marketplace. He became notorious for his philosophical stunts such as carrying a lamp in the daytime, claiming to be looking for an honest man. He embarrassed Plato, disputed his interpretation of Socrates and sabotaged his lectures. Diogenes was also responsible for publicly mocking Alexander the Great.

Diogenes of Sinope – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – as viewed 12/8/2013.

* * *

The investigations were effectively halted when President George H. W. Bush (Reagan’s vice president) pardoned Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger before his trial began.[2]

Reagan administration scandals – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – as viewed 12/8/2013.

* * *

The scandal began as an operation to free the seven American hostages being held in Lebanon by a group with Iranian ties connected to the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution. It was planned that Israel would ship weapons to Iran, and then the United States would resupply Israel and receive the Israeli payment. The Iranian recipients promised to do everything in their power to achieve the release of the U.S. hostages. The plan deteriorated into an arms-for-hostages scheme, in which members of the executive branch sold weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of the American hostages.[2][3] Large modifications to the plan were devised by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council in late 1985, in which a portion of the proceeds from the weapon sales was diverted to fund anti-Sandinista and anti-communist rebels, or Contras, in Nicaragua.[4][5]

While President Ronald Reagan was a supporter of the Contra cause,[6] the evidence is disputed as to whether he authorized the diversion of the money raised by the Iranian arms sales to the Contras.

Iran–Contra affair – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – as viewed 12/8/2013.

______

Who are you going to trust?

Will that trust be based on clan, family, or tribe?

National identity?

Aesthetic, ideological, or religious affinity?

Flattery and patronage?

Money?

Fear?

______

▶ Skyfall – M Government speech (HD) – YouTube – Posted 1/13/2013.

How safe to do you feel?

How adult do you feel?

What is being kept from you?

Certainly from journalism’s second row seat to history, I ask what can be known or with confidence inferred by sifting and revisiting news — and what may be imagined in the widening gaps between surface coverage of many elements and their untapped depths.

In Pakistan, which information environment practically guarantees no one can know much of anything with confidence, one expects the floating of wild conspiracy theories, the kind that turn events upside-down and deliver them on a plate labeled “CIA-Mossad”.

In the open societies, Great Britain and the United States foremost, one expects such behavior to be minimized rather than encouraged, and yet we’re scratching our heads over growing “black budgets” and many things happening seemingly off the page as well as “off the hook”.

Of course, I’m reading spy novels, so perhaps that enthusiasm has begun to contaminate my appreciation of RT, CNN, Al Jazeera, Time . . . .

😉

______

▶ Video: Teary-eyed Putin addresses 110,000 crowd near Kremlin – YouTube – Posted 3/4/2012.

What price loyalty?

For whom?

For what?

And what is being protected or represented?

For how long?

______

I ask questions about many things that can’t be seen.

One cannot “see” psychology and political psychology — no sign ever hangs over a politician announcing that he may be “DICTATORIAL”, “DISINGENUOUS”, or “DISSIMULATING”, and yet memory serves for recalling milestones and other moments, puzzling moments, sometimes, and fitting them back together.

Then such signs start to emerge from out of the fog, we start to test them again.

How could Ronald Reagan, for example, a show business alumnus, fumble so badly on the Lebanese hostage crisis as to not be aware of Oliver North’s behind-the-scenes machinations to cut a deal somewhere inside the Iran-Soviet-South American political line?

The fair good Republican story begs credibility.

The Lebanese hostage drama was not third-page lead and flip to the back of the “A section” stuff: it was front page all the way, and the President, the Republicans’ most beloved, seems nonetheless to have dropped the reins.

* * *

At ABC News, where I worked at the time, one of our camera crews had been granted access to the Oval Office the previous night. We had video of Carter, looking grim and exhausted in a cardigan, consulting with his aides until, quite literally, it was time to dress for the inauguration of his successor. Those images and live shots of desperate diplomacy, followed by the stately run-up to the transfer of power in Washington, played on one side of the screen. The preparations for departure from Mehrabad played on the other.

The Iranians stage-managed the drama down to the last second. Precisely at noon, just as Reagan began to recite the oath of office, the planeload of Americans was permitted to take off. The Iranians’ message was blunt and unambiguous: Carter and his administration had been punished for America’s sins against Iran, and Reagan was being offered a conciliatory gesture in anticipation of improved behavior by Washington.

30 years after the Iran hostage crisis, we’re still fighting Reagan’s war – 1/21/2011.

“The Iranians” are still stage-managing “down to the last minute” the dramas in which they star themselves.  That is part of the “malignant narcissism”, a part of control, a part of the guaranty of continuing “narcissistic supply” from one’s ever awed (and battered and intimidated) subjugated others.

* * *

The original reason for the hostage-taking seems to have been “as insurance against retaliation by the U.S., Syria, or any other force” against Hezbollah, which is thought responsible for the killing of 241 Americans and 58 Frenchmen[7] in the Marine barracks and embassy bombings in Beirut.[8] Other reasons for the kidnappings or the prolonged holding of hostages are thought to be “primarily based on Iranian foreign policy calculations and interests” particularly the extraction of “political, military and financial concessions from the Western world”,[9] the hostage takers being strong allies of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Lebanon hostage crisis – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – as viewed 12/8/2013.

* * *

The Reagan’s [STET] made Americans feel good about themselves and about what we could accomplish. Obama’s arrogance by appointing 32 leftist czars and constantly bypassing congress is impeachable. Eric Holder is probably the MOST incompetent and arrogant DOJ head to ever hold the job. Could you envision President Reagan instructing his Justice Department to act like jack-booted thugs?

Presidents are politicians and all politicians are known and pretty much expected to manipulate the truth, if not outright lie, but even using that low standard, the Obama’s have taken lies, dishonesty, deceit, mendacity, subterfuge and obfuscation to new depths. They are verbally abusive to the citizenry, and they display an animus for civility.

A Black Reporter Summarizes Barack Obama! | LETVENT.COM – 11/7/2013

______

The divide between what an American President may know and what the American public may be allowed to know in the way of day-to-day foreign relations and states of affairs seems to widen with the growth and the heightened presence of the “Islamic Small Wars” and the concomitant development of an immense intelligence bureaucracy laden with missions the public doesn’t need to know about – or shouldn’t — until afterward, perhaps, and denoted affirming as regards American patriotism.

The acknowledged and most galling of the world’s dictatorships and still feudal societies don’t have this issue: they know what they’re about, and their subjects do as well, and that’s a sad state wherever it’s found; the states navigating between open democracy and paternalist nationalism or resurgent absolutism do have this issue, for certainly Moscow’s internal opposition has been tracking what has been and continues to be taken from them since the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Long opposite in stance, the United States may no longer be immune itself to cultivating suspicion throughout its constituency.

I neither condemn, demonize, nor patronize President Obama and have long noted, not alone, the need in even informal open source research to separate surface from what may be gathered and sifted as regards separate items of interest and their management.

Lo and behold, for example, where Obama has been roundly accused of abandoning Israel, throwing it “under the bus” (so I read too often), Israel holds sway over the critical cockpit avionics of the F-35 program, has developed with U.S. support long-distance refueling capability, and has access to “bunker busting” (tunneling-exploding) bombs.  Even though it appears contentious and stressed, I believe the American-Israeli relationship close, rather than not, and laudable given the general stakes involved for democracy, the fruits of The Enlightenment, and the general well being — measurable by indicators of improved qualities in living — of others worldwide.

Related: Text of S. 2165 (112th): United States-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act of 2012 (Passed Congress/Enrolled Bill version) – GovTrack.us

Related:  President Obama Signs the United States-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act | The White House – 7/26/2012.

______

Nonetheless, the American body politic may be slipping collectively into the land of innuendo, far right and left, and have less and less insight — or energy for developing insight — into the White House’s essential American rationality (or rejection of it).

Cock-a-doodle-do about Reagan or Obama, align with the Tea Party or the New Old Now Old, Lost, and Far Out Left, the policy axis may not align with either filter.

On the surface, for example, the Obama Administration has decried the “military coup” in Egypt (that would be Obama, the secret member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the ever clever “Manchurian Candidate” out to get “America, the Prise”) but the Egyptian military, Israel, and the United States would seem on some same kind of page as regards Iran, Hamas, Syria, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood.

While the political cant went that-a-way –> . . . the politicians, their armed forces, their wealthy benefactors and partners — do add “large swaths of their constituencies” — hold some central constructs together out of the light.

One might say of highest-level privileged conversations, whether taking place in “open societies” or decidedly closed or closing ones, that they are all taking place somewhere “in the shadows”.

* * *

WASHINGTON — When Shiite Muslim terrorists hijacked a TWA jet and took 39 Americans hostage in Beirut four years ago, then-President Ronald Reagan’s public stance was clear: There would be no negotiations with terrorists.

But in private, the U.S. position was quite different. Reagan quietly encouraged Israel to make a deal with the terrorists, to exchange Israeli-held detainees for American hostages–and that is how the TWA captives were released, as the first step in a massive swap of prisoners across Israel’s northern border.

HOSTAGE CRISIS IN LEBANON : Deal With Terrorists? U.S. Policy Not Totally Clear – Los Angeles Times – 8/2/1989.

# # #

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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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