Tag Archives: psychology

FTAC: MEC – Passing Into History (One Hopes One Day Soon)

04 Sunday Jun 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Gaza, Israel, Middle East, Palestinia, Political Psychology, Politics

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Q: “Is it our psychology or our nature that prevents us from being peace loving people?”

A: As regards the “middle east conflict”: _malign and manipulated_ psychology.

Post-WWII, post-Nazi Germany, Soviet Era agitation-propaganda leveraging anti-Semitic sentiment –> “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation“, i.e., the myth that the Jews were out to take over the middle east —

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/12/ftac-tip-to-the-kgbs-amplification-of-middle-eastern-anti-semitism/

_Reflexive Control and the Encouragement of Absolute Nationalism_

Terrorism promotes intense concern with basic security wherever, however, and for whatever reason politically-focused violence takes place. In crayon fashion here (I’m pressed for time this morning), political violence associated with the Palestinian cause, from the air hijackings of the 1970s to the latest murder by car, essentially promotes Israeli nationalist fervor and the western program. The deeper problem: it never helped the Palestinians but rather the piratical leaderships drawing income from the sustaining of the conflict. Arafat passed away a multi-millionaire; Abbas has accumulated a similar share of wealth; Haniyeh and Mashaal have developed reputations as billionaires.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/10/03/palestinian-kgb/

Israelis and Palestinians genuinely tired of near 70 years of artificially sustained conflict — and the “information / disinformation psychology” has been a part of keeping things just as they have been — may need to bring these questions up with “Moscow”.

Historically, Moscow has been intensely anti-Semitic — https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/12/27/excerpt-1920s-the-spread-of-hate-russia-germany-laqueur/ — but under Putin’s guidance, somewhat opposite today. Things have changed even though Putin continues to foster or control or appreciate (choose any option) kleptocratic absolute power. This seems to me something Palestinian intelligentsia need to consider and research independently.

I often note that “the Hebrews are back in the Land of the Hebrews”, a trope that lends emphasis to authentic ethnolinguistic cultural affiliation with land. At the moment, there are fewer than 7,000 living language cultures on the planet, and each developed their language somewhere at some time. Baloch, Kurds, Hebrews, Pashtun have land claims as do others. I may grant that after 70 years of isolation and wicked disinformation, the Palestinians need not be the leading edge of “Arab pan-nationalism” which should have passed away with the Soviet Union (at the end of 1991). One may urge reconsideration for having become unique but perhaps misguided by the politics of a much earlier era and, all may hope, one passing finally into history.

 

End the Preoccupation With the Jews!

Easier said than done?

The world’s political science scholars may be unraveling the relationship between Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany in the first half of the 20th Century,  and today there’s plenty for reading as regards Moscow’s efforts to sustain a piratical feudalism even as it runs short on ready cash and the rest, less ready, appears sunk in western assets and banking institutions.

Change, so BackChannels may observe, must come slowly where it involves BIG Family, Military, and Religious Institutions.  In the feudal mode, money moves along more by way of relationships than by way of merit or virtue.  That’s life.  Such themes will never be black and white but they may be better balanced for ethical and moral merit — greater rule of law; greater real justice — in the long run.

Whether the latest assault on innocents will be quelled by security organizations or grown into an absurd set of what should be archaic struggles based in race and religion and any number of assorted lesser discriminators — black/white; Asian/European; gay/straight; single/married; poor/rich; etc. — we together shall see.

–33–

Books – Reading Recommended – Maslow

28 Sunday Feb 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, A Little Wisdom, Books, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Psychology

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An indisputable fact about the work of A. H. Maslow is that it gives off sparks — very nearly all of his writing gives off sparks.  An attempt to understand this by thinking of him as simply a psychologist would probably prove futile; he must first be thought of as a man, and then as one who worked very hard at psychology, or rather, who rendered his growth and maturity as a man into a new way of thinking about psychology.  This was one of his major accomplishments — he gave psychology a new conceptual language.

Geiger, Henry.  “Introduction: A. H. Maslow”.  P. xv.  The Farther Reaches of Human Nature.  New York: The Viking Press, 1971 (Second Printing, 1972). 

While for some, life may be about the balance of forces involved in charting individual courses; for the Moslowans, life may be more about becoming, and that by way of the development of an authentic person (on the inside) and struggle with the world to enjoy that person and the related engagement with, indeed, the external forces of the world.

Of all the books encountered in the life of the BackChannels editor, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature produced the greatest hope and longing and it reset the editor’s personal course — and a great course it has been — entirely.

Readers from every walk in politics and religion may find the journey taken with Maslow perfectly universal in appeal and practicality.

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Update to “Shimmer”

29 Friday May 2015

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

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Primary Page Address:

https://conflict-backchannels.com/coins-and-other-terms/shimmer/

Update – May 29, 2015

After first believing in this predator’s lies, Lessing eventually began suspecting something about him is not right and after some detective work found out his real name and the fact that he is a cleric who works at Shi’a Association of the Bay Area (SABA) in San Jose, California and that he is actually married.

Lessing wondered whether she should go to his mosque and expose him publicly. This tells me how little non-Muslims know Islam and the Muslim mind. What do you think would happen if you tell them? At first they deny it categorically accusing you of smearing the name of a good man and vilify you. If they see the undeniable proof, they change tactic and condemn him in your face assuring you that Islam does not allow that. Once you leave, they pat him on the back and laugh heartily.

Sina, Ali.  “Muslim Men Preying on Western Women.”  Faith Freedom Organization, May 17, 2015.  http://www.faithfreedom.org/muslim-men-preying-on-western-women/

Primary text: Lessing, K. M.  God Has Failed Me: A True Story, Part I.

The BackChannels response to the correspondent who sent the piece: “I wanted to share the link with (name withheld) because it so mixes themes toward a demonizing that leaves no channel out for the Muslims who would themselves revile the cleric on display.

Earlier today from The Awesome Conversation: ” . . . a part of the American / North American / NATO / western public responds to Islam as represented by al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, et al., plus any number of western writers who emphasize the medieval qualities embedded in texts and taken up by the organizations mentioned. That’s what they see. It’s too little — not the whole thing — but that’s what they see.”

Shimmer.

With every act of disrespect — betrayal, deception, desecration, intimidation, libel, murder, seduction, slander, and theft — toward another person or group, Islam, through one person or many, displays itself exactly as its most vociferous critics describe, which makes the work of the Ummah’s more conscionable, introspective, and reforming adherents that much more difficult to impossible.

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Link & Comment – On Islamist Violence and Mentality

27 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by in Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Religion

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I find it interesting that Muslims in the West who kill Christians, Jews, and soldiers in the name of their religion are referred to as “lone wolves” suffering from a mental illness. Are all those millions of people who belong to Hamas, Hezbollah, Boko Haram, al-Nusra al Qaeda and ISIS-are they mentally ill, too? Or poor? Or uneducated and disadvantaged?

When we go down a road of justification, root causes, we deny the fact that these people choose an ideology that promotes hate.

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/67041 “We Will Remain Undaunted” by Diane Weber Bederman – 10/27/2014.

My note to the author:

Our conflict solution is to address a political psychology that does indeed derive from ideas in psychology proper. The malignant narcissism surrounding the political existence of Putin, Assad, and Khamenei as well as other dictators in the middle east and around the world cannot be avoided, nor with that recognition their arch-criminal, manipulative, and piratical skills that foster animus with the west, stage conflicts that then leverage them additional political power, and then underwrite their oligarch / billionaire handlers.

My most recent book read, _The Zhivago Affair_ on the trials of Pasternak and the CIA’s effort to get his book into Russia, and the one I’m reading now, _Putin’s Kleptocracy_, are frightening books about criminal political power radiating through state authority. It’s frightening reading, but it opens the eyes to the manner in which — perhaps as demonstrated by Muhammad — ideological and religious thought may be leveraged into boundless absolute power and wealth.

To back that comment on Islam, one may direct attention to the now contested presentations of the Banu Qurayza legend, a story so ethically and morally lost that Tarek Fatah has denied its authenticity and others, so I have read recently in the Facebook aquarium, have separated Muhammad from the beheading of 800 Jewish males who had surrendered unconditionally rather than lose additional life through fighting.  Also read: “the Jews were just as bad”.  I don’t believe that: I believe wealth obtained through earnest trade was simply obtained by a barbaric pushiness abetted by provocations that ended in capricious judgment, mass murder, rape, and plunder.

There may be more pleasant descriptions of the crushing of the Jewish Banu Qurayza, but none have any legitimacy in a caring, gracious, and merciful world.  It has appeared to me that those who want that world, as may Tarek Fatah, decry the legend while those who want the merciless and sadistic powers of that world for themselves extol and pursue it for themselves.

The Prophet had the husband of the Jewess Raihana Bint Amr hacked to pieces before her very eyes, hours after he had murdered her father. No doubt this was the Prophet’s perverted version of a wedding present, because after these atrocities he raped the mortified girl and tried to force her to convert to Islam.
Muslim historians still describe the savage rape of Raihana Bint Amr as her “willing submission to Islam and wifehood to the Prophet”

http://www.davidicke.com/forum/showthread.php?t=115614

One thing leads to another on the web.  This in The Huffington Post surfaced along a moderate-look at the challenge (here’s an excerpt):

We are a wounded nation, not a terrorized one.

Canada may have a benevolent exterior, but we all understand the steel at our core. We know that freedom exacts a steep price, because we’ve paid it before. And we know, as we enter military hostilities to confront ISIS in Iraq, that it won’t hesitate to exploit the stupid, the gullible and the deranged as a means of attacking its enemies in their own lands.

If we weren’t prepared for that on Monday, we should be now. And even without spurs from ISIS there’s no telling what these same people will do (or have done) on their own to bootstrap themselves into Canada’s history books.

Let’s not be their victim.

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/sandy-garossino/nathan-cirillo-terrorists-patrice-vincent_b_6045168.html – 10/26/2014, updated 10/27/2014.

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FTAC – Will the New World Wake Up? Wake Up! Wake Up!

21 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Philology, Political Psychology, Politics, Syria

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If there were a “true religion” God, perhaps, would have created fewer of them for waging wars that seem to pit all against all. However, despite mankind’s many religions and near 7,000 living languages, there may be a sufficient progressive tendency to bond toward the mild, moderate, and virtuous middle however we may conceive — of have conceived — of the meaning of our existence. Developing that bond, tending toward good, minimizing the power and impact of dogmatic absolutists may be our common struggle.

While mentioning the Soviet, now post-Soviet, vision accompanied by the familiar oligarchies of kleptocrats mad for power and wealth (and their display), one should not overlook elements of the Christian mythos in Hitlerism and its propagation in the Muslim world during and after World War II. This old fighting is not only or always about belief and religion: it is about the language-shaped character of humanity and the idea of human virtue and dimensions, ideals, and values associated with the same, e.g., “dignity, equality, fraternity”; human rights, equal justice; the balance between communitarianism and individualism; idealism itself.

As some doors may open on a new world, others may close, and we hope — I hope together we hope — that the door closes firmly over time on absolutism, dictatorship, terrorism, and totalitarianism.

Pretty words.

Across social divides, the human heart suffers from a sympathetic astigmatism: “the good” are in about the same place emotionally — please stop the fighting! — but also a different place for each language-informed and poetry-embracing mind and spirit.  Nonetheless, the horror meted out in such as the Syrian Civil War, where the razory madness of a brutal dictatorship matched to an implacably evil fascist religious movement — just set all those millions in the middle aside for a moment — have been out on full display, tells that an end is wanted and the vision need not be Muslim, Jewish, Christian, or atheist or Arab or anything other than the largest possible human response to the twin obscenities of the unrestrained greed and sadism of the unconscionable and ruthless.

Now return to those millions traumatized at least, displaced most likely, maimed at worst — although the worst, the dead, number beneath the first million on the grim statistician’s abacus — and their inability to date to grapple with the twinned evils noted.  They can do it, they can stand up on their own land, but only if — IF — they can arrange themselves with others, including those they may have believed competitors, enemies, rivals, and threats.

As with Syria, so the world: the want is for a bonded middle force that today does not exist.

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

20 Thursday Feb 2014

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

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Well, it’s not over yet.

🙂

It’s hardly begun.

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

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

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

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

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How are we of the democratic open societies doing?

Not so well.

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

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

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

We know we know we know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Has that been helpful?

I don’t know.

We shall see.

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Central African Republic – Behold: More Malignant Narcissists!

03 Monday Feb 2014

Posted by in Africa, Central African Republic, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy, Islamic Small Wars, Politics, Psychology

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“The ultimate cause of our instability is not religious but political, because whoever comes to power makes his entourage commit abuses to stay in power,” he said, “They treat the country as their private money-making business. We need a real democracy with politicians who have a vision to look after the needs of everyone.”

Riptide – Foreign Policy – Peter Bouckaert – 1/31/2014.

I didn’t want to get this blog on to Congo before it’s time, but, conflict is conflict, this is a blog about that, and I really don’t see any difference in worthiness between a Burmese tribe ethnically cleansing another (and hanging children along the way) and some other conflict zone horror involving killing by “machetes, torture, lynching, shooting, explosions, and burning,” which list you will find in the lead to the above cited story by Peter Bouckaert.

Then too, as with Syria and its brutal and mindless dictatorship opposed by an equally brutal and mindless al-Qaeda laden devolutionary force, one may notice the relative helplessness of noncombatant constituents on the land: they’re trapped between monsters, and the monsters are of similar kind: “malignant narcissists”.

Little dictators.

Modify that some: “little dictators with “Advanced Small Weapons” and lots of primitive ones as well and nothing of conscience, only greed offsetting fear and filling up enormous egos and their ambitions.

This strain in mankind — not the peacock per se, but the vicious peacock — proves a disaster wherever it appears.

Related: reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/Gold and diamonds in the Central African Republic.pdf – February 2013.

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CAIR, Spencer, Narcissism, Universalism

28 Tuesday Jan 2014

Posted by in Political Spychology, Psychology

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It is more likely that the NSA has placed everyone under surveillance in order to avoid singling out the Muslim community, so as to avoid appearing “Islamophobic.”

Hamas-linked CAIR staff attorney: Spying and surveillance “disproportionately affecting the Muslim community” : Jihad Watch – 1/27/2014.

In the above cited article, Robert Spencer catalogs criminals, crimes, and attempted crimes, all connected to Islamic Jihad, and he goes on to document incendiary speech by Muslim notables.

Related and highly recommended: The Threat from Within: What Is the Scope of Homegrown Terrorism? – 7/1/2012.  Posted by the ABA Journal, the abstract at the top read, “Gordon Lederman, chief counsel for national security and investigations of the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and Kate Martin, director of the nonprofit Center for National Security Studies, ponder how we should weigh security against liberty.

Wikipedia’s brief and nonpartisan historic overview of terrorism in the United States: Terrorism in the United States – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

We’ve a long way to go as regards the self-destructive “specialness” in play within at least a part of Islam’s advocacy community in the U.S., not to mention elsewhere militant Islamist organizations — the al-Qaeda affiliates — active in the fields of the Islamic Small Wars from Afghanistan to Somalia, but in the American way, principles developed to address such conflict have to be conceived for universal applicability.

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As an aside, sometimes in unrelated conversation, the matter of having to deal with an aggressive, evil, and large force in life, say, for example, a bullying father or an abusive husband or a sadistic employer, and so on, comes up, and what I suggest goes like this: to the Jew, the Nazi is a problem; however, the character of the Nazi is not the Jew’s problem — it’s the Nazi’s problem.

For Nazi, substitute “asshole”, “bully”, “dictator”, and so on.

What the overbearing asshole (bully, dictator, malignant narcissist) flying under the Jolly Rodger of his kind has for a problem is himself as reinforced and made inescapable by his own bombast accompanied or followed by criminal or malicious and irretrievable, and irreversible action.  Such personalities talk themselves, their admirers, and their cronies into an evil corner, and there they live with their bigotry, contempt, and crimes, including war crimes for those who come to own and drive their own states, until other forces, sadly including natural death, come to dispossess them.

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