Tag Archives: political philosophy

FTAC: Old Worn Out Arguments About Nothing That Needs to Exist Purely

06 Friday Jul 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, International Development, Philosophy, Politics

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As long as the terms are black v white / capitalism v communism-socialism, the conversation seems bound to be boxed in or circular as well as suffocated by events and personalities locked in the past and best left there as well. A better springboard would be to query the character and nature of potential political power as groomed today and whether “power” needs be responsible power.

I’ve tried this framing: “Feudal Political Absolutism v Democratic Checked and Distributed Power”.

It’s too much of a mouthful but fully observable in Syria, east v west “contests”, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the rifts of the Islamic Small Wars. All involve feudal personalities applying martial power to plowing forward into the more dismal regions of their own political pasts.

I’m a little lazy now and this summer believe I should be reading (on deck: Goldman’s Lord of the Flies, Brodie’s Thomas Jefferson), settling down, regathering myself for what beyond my 60+ years looks like a still daunting and frightening future for myself and tens of millions of Americans as well as the middle classes and the surviving and struggling of the nations worldwide.  Time seems to have produced too many drowning in arms and drugs, directly related insecurity against depredation, general economic dissolution and isolation, and general political miasma and upheaval.

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FTAC: A Comment on Memory, The Holocaust, and Passover

12 Saturday May 2018

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

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Memory — personal, cultural, national, international (that about covers it ) — plays a huge role in conflicts at every level. We bear grudges; we want justice for something that happened last week or hundreds of years ago; we want revenge; we want sympathy; we want acknowledgment; etc. In the end, however, we want to be free of the past as well. Carry the lessons forward through time; leave the story alone; leave it also ineffable — beyond comprehension, explanation, and words.

I’ll go out on a limb here and suggest that one memory in Jewish life may be much, much more important than The Holocaust.

Passover.

We leave. We move on. We are joined by the mixed multitude that shares — down deep enough to gamble on moving with us — our political perceptions — our ethical and moral dimensions — and with God’s help, we leave behind the horrors and are strengthened in meeting the next challenges.

May we all look forward more than we do backward.

Someone had been upset over the overuse of the term “holocaust” — it seems everyone of late has come from some cultural background that has suffered one.

Not quite.

My other attempt at peacemaking over the matter:

While “THE Holocaust” may be regarded as a singular event in history, displacements and genocides have been a fair part of the history of warfare, the other part being conquest accompanied by longer-term plundering by way of subjection. The Jewish cultural and tribal history may be unique to the Hebrews but the same has developed an empathetic universalism accessible far beyond its own boundaries. So be it — and expect language to evolve accordingly.

May God (Nature, and the Universe) help us save ourselves from the “MaligNarcs” — “Malignant Narcissists” — that would subordinate our lives to theirs, have the chaos of the universe whipped up around themselves while embarking on the most heartbreaking and inhuman — and ungodly — of methods and practices known or imaginable in the course of their political arcs and inevitable failures.

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Inter-Generational Recap: Curtis’s ‘HyperNormalisation’

23 Tuesday Jan 2018

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, Philology, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics

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A quick note while watching (halfway through with the feed paused as I type): the Curtis documentary is one helluva time capsule hitting all the keys for the ‘Boomers’ now in the process of passing the western torch to perhaps drug-addled or money-crazed (or both) next population of inhabitants of the democracies.  Of course, things are not going so well, at least depending on one’s perspective and the sources of experience and observation that produces it.  Modern?  Hypermodern?  Post-modern? Or not modern at all but a grinding mechanical Orwellian nightmare?  Who knows?  Who would know?  Anyone?

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“Jerusalem”

21 Sunday Jan 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, International Development, Philosophy, Poetry, Political Psychology

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2012.

2016.

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54684/jerusalem-and-did-those-feet-in-ancient-time

2011.

Reflect ye on the work of Rome — aqueducts, castles, fortifications, ports, roads | estates, villages, towns, metropolises | centers of agriculture, education, industry | a magnificence unrivaled in expression of the constructive channeling of human energy | eagerly adapted or reluctantly accepted . . . .

Whatever one may think of “Western Civilization”, the fruits of the labor of it have been coveted and enjoyed worldwide, and the twinned ideas of “Jerusalem” and the “Kingdom of Heaven” may be where we live and anywhere on earth.

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FTAC: Poli-Sci / Poli-Psy / Poli-Phi: Evolution

09 Tuesday Jan 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philosophy, Political Psychology

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Inspiration: the argument that we are as we are, and we are ferocious and savage in our appetites, desires, and jealousies.  For proof: have a glance at the “Middle East Conflict”.

My response —

I’m more hopeful.

Civilizational establishment and change involve unique conditions and experiences in place and in time. While we’re fond of saying, “The more things change, the more things remain as they were”, we’re really not happy dragging our yesterdays into our tomorrow’s if and when we’re aware of other and better possibilities.

Whatever the impediments have been in addressing nature, including our own, experience and biological evolution works through us as well: as a species, we may more incline toward conscience and empathy over time despite the demonstrated savagery of earlier eras.

On another day, I may have said such things were to be left to God,l nature, and the universe.  On this one: perhaps we are in some ways responsible for how we manage ourselves and our conditions as a species dependent on the health of the earth itself and on ourselves for the qualities experienced in living.

Alive in the background: Aesop’s wisdom having to do with the character of the dangerous organism, scorpion or snake; however, there’s also Thomas Berry’s emerging earth spirituality: with the power to destroy our species-wide platform for existence, we may have also the obligation and ability — very adult thing that ability with science and technology shaped by concern — to be careful with Mother Earth as well.

Regarding “Qualities of Living (QOL)”

Dimensions

Biological / Physical

Economic / Distributed Degree of Freedom and Security

Psychological / Spiritual

The “QOL” concept needs a build-out to meet up with both the Freedom House audience and those who read article with titles like “Best Countries in Which to Retire”.

Still: let QOL stand x Area Defined, from community to region, and what takes place within the same over some measure of time.

Civil services and reporters naturally look into the “negatives” of space — crime rates, for example — while the development and planning communities also consider the architecture and engineering of environments for habitation.  The end of so much effort — and widespread across time — should be improvements in good and secure living for all, not decay back down into greater anomie, conflict, crime, dictatorship, and living hell itself.

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FTAC: Observation – Broad Public Critical Thinking on Politics

11 Monday Sep 2017

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“Tracking” (in education) aside, there’s a broad overemphasis in the development of “practical” knowledge — so the learner may earn back those student loans! — and an under-emphasis on critical thinking involved with the humanities and spheres in which political philosophy matter indirectly, as with much creative literature, or directly as with “poli-sci / poli-psy. However, appropriate departments (and other intellectual cubbyholes) have not been abandoned but perhaps made a little more elite or special by way of who drifts in at what price and under what terms and with what relationships out ahead.

“Political people” have lives in every state and are certainly not insignificant in numbers.

The greater public media audience suffers the effects of “practical education” and equally dutiful and practical careers, and for so many millions it is questionable what percentage have energy, focus, interest, and discretionary or leisure time for independent political research with some clinical discipline attached. I would bet that percentage of American adults very small or confined to students and retirees.

Here again . . . bloviating.

😦

My apologies (albeit knowing this kind of commentary has become so familiar to me that I may be certain to do it again).

However, the point stands: the more complex an issue and the more publishing (with agenda or hardened stance) about it, the less capable most will be to research and evaluate the same as a citizens.  The talk on most issues has to drift up into specialized circles, and many of those would seem to need to become plainly and industrially incestuous, i.e., de facto cabal of experienced executives cum lobbyists.

Still, oh ye free citizens: choose your field of public interest and . . . dig it up, sift, find the moving parts, and make the make sense!

🙂

Not that anyone online needs the suggestion: be certain to share your findings!

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FTAC: Political Philosophy: An Inversion

24 Thursday Aug 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics, Psychology

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I would suggest that feudal mafia may or may not be honest as regards politics within their closed circles, but that the same will lie for absolute power, which power becomes always sadistic — the power to visit suffering on others with impunity — should go without saying. By contrast, the idea of the “good society”, or great one, may be predicated on empathy (one foundational thought in law: “because it could happen to you”) and integrity. In the feudal mode, our cares may be restricted — me and mine and the rest of the world can go to hell — and in the modern, we note cruelty and suffering meted to others and try to address that in law and in policy.

For a while now, my context has been “Moscow v Washington” — the system of secret police, absolute central power, aristocracy v a modern democratic open society. In which world should one care most to live — as favored in the former where loyalty to power displaces principles and values; or as neglected in the latter where one may get a fair shake, or no “shake” at all?

Your original post asked for one idea. Perhaps two need consideration: empathy matched by integrity.

The cliche goes that where one stands has much to do with where one sits.

If yours is the campaign desk in the palace, the prince might be a good man; if it is the laborer’s bench downwind from “sanitation”, the prince might be a thoughtless one.

In general, liberal democracies strive to attenuate human caprice in the experience of good and bad fortune: law and reason may be slipped between the person and The Power.

In kleptocracy, The Power maintains the monopoly on law and reason — and the possession of all else.

However — and here’s the inversion repeated — would you rather live favored in the treacherous atmosphere produced by Power or at loose ends in a more or less just system that takes no special interest in your affairs,  your politics, or your fate?

Perhaps in hard times — or merely disappointing one — it may be more natural to seek favor than to extol the virtues of too clinical a system of justice and the “rugged individual” that may or may not make out well beneath it.

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Also in Media: “Steve Bannon Cited Italian Thinker Who Inspired Fascists” – The New York Times – February 10, 2017

25 Saturday Feb 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, American Domestic Affairs, Political Psychology, United States of America

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Evola became a darling of Italian Fascists, and Italy’s post-Fascist terrorists of the 1960s and 1970s looked to him as a spiritual and intellectual godfather.They called themselves Children of the Sun after Evola’s vision of a bourgeoisie-smashing new order that he called the Solar Civilization. Today, the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn includes his works on its suggested reading list, and the leader of Jobbik, the Hungarian nationalist party, admires Evola and wrote an introduction to his works.

Source is as presented above.

Note: BackChannels’ editorial stance is pro-democracy, pro-“American Wildness”, pro-creativity (the editor may have had more fun writing fiction or playing music).  🙂

BackChannels believes that by way of “Reflexive Control”, Moscow has manipulated “Allahu Akbar Terrorism” to promote patriotic nationalism wherever it has been able to get a manipulated “lone wolf” or more organized terrorist attack to take place.  In keeping with that hypothesis, it observes some politically psychological similarities between Le Pen, Orban, Erdogan, and Trump, if not others (the “New Nationalists”), if not others.

Given President Putin’s drive to reestablish the feudal mode in EU/NATO states, it seems less than surprising to find online these articles involving renewed interest in fascism.

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