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Tag Archives: social grammar

FTAC: A Note on Faiths, Political Attitudes, and Beliefs

23 Sunday Apr 2017

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

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21st Century Neo-Feudalism, attitudes and beliefs, cultural evolution, democracy, evolutionary conscience, human evolution, political psychology, social grammar

What happens when friends talk and compare notes, and discover they’re no long “on the same page”?


Attitudes rest on beliefs, and beliefs don’t always rest on empirical evidence nor good conscience and empathy.  Beliefs may be grown on lies, and when it comes to the once Soviet-engineered “middle east conflict”, there is a cultural Petri dish loaded up with lies to induce, motivate, and sustain anti-Semitism in the Arab world and in the world at large with a focus on Zionism.

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

When a friend changes the conversation so abruptly, the conversation has a chance to change.

The sun did not revolve around the earth.

And the earth was found to be other than flat.

Lo and behold . . . .


In addition to the early and academically relaxed BackChannels page on “Social Grammar” — how we learn the ropes around family, clan, tribe, and nation in the process of language uptake and with it the ingestion of the culture into which we have been borne, there are couple of other pieces quietly alluded to the in above note from the awesome conversation:

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

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/04/09/ftac-reprise-how-isil-serves-moscow-damascus-and-tehran/

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

Online, there’s telling BBC interview involving the Soviet instigating of Somalia’s Ogaden War:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03pk9c1

Around the world — and not least in the United States with President Donald J. Trump’s rants about “Fake News!” — the world may be having a quiet conversation — a social back channel consideration of which this post is a part– behind the storms of news that concerns itself with the authenticity, validity, and reliability of what is delivered to it in media.

For a few moments “back there” in time — perhaps only some months to years — I was getting word of a “post-constitutional America” and coming across such “lovely” (bogus) concepts as “illiberal democracy” (ain’t no such thing as the first principle in the establishment of democracy has been and remains that of embracing “classical liberalism”, a dignifying, loving, magnanimous, and magnificent view of humankind that speaks to every person’s potential nobility in freedom and in power) and “post-fact” world (facts, like red traffic lights and the dangers of leaping from heights) appear to persist despite their “post-modern” dismissal.

Democracies are not illiberal.

The world is not “post-fact”.

And while Muhammad may have had the final word on God as enforced by war in his place and in his day, the world with its nearly 7,000 living language cultures persists in proving greater than any one perspective on God, nature, and the universe or the many curses and miracles that accompany our human experience.  The evolution of our species — Homo Sapiens sapiens in its totality — and within it the emergence of human awareness, self-awareness, and the development of conscience may prove a thing greater than the observations and arguments of the many prophets and shaman who have accompanied and determined mankind’s cultural history.

–33–

Also in Media: “Polls Lend a Glimpse Into the Minds of Middle Easterners” – Philos Project – March 14, 2017

17 Friday Mar 2017

Posted by commart in Also in Media

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middle east, political attitudes, polling, social grammar

Although history books say that the Arab Spring ended five years ago, Stimson Center Middle East Fellow Ellen Laipson recently cautioned that the uprising’s revolutionary wave of demonstrations is in no way over. “There is enduring debate going on in the Arab world about the individual citizen’s thinking about their relationship to the government,” she said, during an event at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Laipson then yielded the floor to leading pollster James Zogby, who presented results from recent Middle East opinion surveys that documented the region’s unfulfilled desire for peace and prosperity.

More: Polls Lend a Glimpse Into the Minds of Middle Easterners – Philos Project

–33–

FTAC – Kansas City Shooting – Anti-Semitism and Social Grammar

14 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by commart in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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anti-Semitism, attitude formation, Kansas City shootings, language environment, psycholinguistics, social grammar, social programming

“The crime of antisemitism is an ageless one . . . .” — no, it isn’t. I may be above 2,000 years old, approximately, and Wistrich is more exact, but it has been very much a part of political rhetoric tuned to theft. Where Jews have done for others and reaped the rewards of service to others; where Jewish numbers have grown and Jewish wealth accumulated accordingly; where Jews, whether for ambition, divine guidance, or just the accumulated wisdom of the ages, have done well in myriad dimensions, someone has wanted to take it from them. The next day: they have killed Jesus; there are are too many of them; all that is evil may be ascribed to their presence (even when they’re completely absent from political space).

I have learned that with a confirmed anti-Semite, reason left that mind a long time ago and in its place is, indeed, the playing out of a “social grammar” probably internalized in infancy, the word “Jew” having possibly been heard and envenomed often over time sufficing for summoning a bad feeling.

“Poisoned ears” may have an epidemiology and etiology all their own, and I would expect the countermeasures for embedded anti-Semitism, bigotry, and xenophobia to emerge from approaches in psycholinguistics that focus on attitude, belief, and behavior formation.

The source of inspiration for the bounce: Small, Charles Asher.  “Violence Erupts When You Tolerate Antisemitism.”  The Daily Beast, April 14, 2014.

Related: Wilbur, Del Quentin.  “Von Brunn, white supremacist Holocaust museum shooter, dies.”  The Washington Post, January 7, 2010.

Although Charles Asher Small warns against bad mouthing the Jew as one might about bad mouthing the Muslim or anyone else, “political correctness” is not what is wanted with either anti-Semites or bigots: what is wanted is clarity with regard to the health of whole language atmospheres and then the encouragement of decency and mutual regard across divisions, and that with the mothers, perhaps, foremost on the lines defending democratic “all-for-all” social systems.

Here too, as with previous of today’s remarks, I may go a little further: America’s free speech concept specifically sets out to protect unpopular speech, the sort of speech we may not wish to hear, and while hoping for great and much needed revolutionary speech (come election time), it well includes hate speech.  Given so capacious a freedom, we leave it to social response to shape the intellectual environment of the state: e.g., we leave David Duke to do his thing from American soil, but, for the most part, we leave him a comparatively isolated figure in American politics and his followers equally isolated as political and social fringe.

If we fail to address and alter the language behaviors that embed in the very young the kernels of a bigoted social grammar, then, indeed, our open society states, our all-for-all democracies, will face greater challenges to their internal coherence and cohesion.

# # #

FTAC – On Social Grammar and Social Reality

06 Sunday Apr 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation

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language, political, political psychology, politics, social grammar, social reality

When?

Answer “why” first — and the answer may have to do with the roles played in language by loyalty and what might be called “secure feeling”. When people lie, which concept includes false accusations and omissions, it is to hide something or to get something.

Always.

Around the world, what competes with loyalty? Principle.

However, if dissimulation accedes to bullying (by the local god mob), if fibbing means being fed, if deflection of responsibility forestalls opprobrium and shame, if vicious slander summons murder and plunder to one’s greater glory, thuggish though it be, well, heck, lying works!

All of that is part of “social grammar”, which you are trying to change where it’s needed. Perhaps, unfortunately, social reality — with which language behaviors are integrated — trumps principle by maintaining and reinforcing the behaviors cited for scolding. To get to a better place, the reward system has to change in a pervasive way.

______

Inspiration for the comment: Tezyapar, Sinem.  “When Will the Muslim World Take Responsibility and End Preaching Hatred?”  Sinem Tezyapar, October 24, 2013.

From the above, one may sense how and where propaganda fits in and why it’s so important for autocrats to manage their state’s media to whatever extent may be possible: the systems they create in their own piratical interests are made to depend on their patronage and protection without exception, and for that, their subjects, the subjugated, must be made and maintained as the most loyal of believers: our “malignant narcissists” cannot afford the freedom of free minds when it comes to maintaining their “vertical of power” and their vision of expanding and limitless “narcissistic supply”.

Related: “The Emperor’s New Clothes”.

Are “grandiose and messianic delusions” actually delusions if the person possessed of them makes them even somewhat real?

Be that as it may, the challenge and puzzle posed by Tezyapar’s jihad of the pen nonetheless involves the unraveling of complex and long-lived systems of pandering and patronage on the part of the powerful — who for their own aggrandizement lie to their people to keep them manipulated — and systems of subjugation within which the weak may grovel or play — and pray  — as required and reap the benefits of an imperious acknowledgment, one by whom that if defied would be just as pleased to “barrel bomb” the children of the loyal every bit as much as the disloyal.

That last behavior, the throwing of an ungodly tantrum, I would not call indicative of “social grammar” but rather “criminal infallibility”, a state of being and regard most appreciated by dictators.

# # #

FTAC – A Note on Bigotry and Language

30 Monday Dec 2013

Posted by commart in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Philology, Psychology

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anti-Semitism, attitudes and beliefs, bigotry, language uptake, prejudice, social grammar

I think what’s going on is early infancy to childhood social rule formulation tied to language uptake. Anti-Semitic remarks within the family or close cultural quarters (church) may be met a) without filters because b) curiosity to create the rules for filtering data and generating speech have to be formed first. That learning may be congruent with what has been heard (by the very young human) or formulated for entertainment (we’re a really bright species and boredom is an existential problem addressed partially by art and artifice).

Feedback to the child’s rule-making and subsequent adventure in language may take place in a welcoming environment suffused with bigotry or otherwise just continue stubbornly on its anti-social course until the adult’s behavior finds its reflection in a larger cultural environment. That is our contemporary politics, of which this thread is a part. My suggestion that some portion of anti-Semitism — and other bigotry — is acquired as part of language learning and rule-based may help account for the difficulty encountered in argument with bigots who cannot access the origins of their earliest formed attitudes and beliefs.

I know I often hit the same keys — with this note, i.e., anti-Semitism and other prejudice may have anchors in language uptake and the discovery by deduction or invention of essential cultural language-shaping rules.

The source for inspiration was an article about Hollywood’s latest collection of celebrities who have taken anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist positions in the political facet of their careers: » Hollywood’s War On Israel – 12/28/2013.

From Walt Disney to Mel Gibson, attitudes toward the Jews inevitably surface in “The Business”.  Whether it’s good to harp and harass along this axis — there’s a lot of finger pointing and mud slinging involving a behavior I believe inseparable from persons from an early age — I don’t know, but as I suggest that the behavior is rule-based and acquired with language uptake, public opprobrium cannot get to it — nor, as I have been seasoned in this elsewhere, does adult argument or persuasion.

What airing in the media may do, however, is influence a part of a generation of mothers, fathers, and teachers to adopt and promote a greater tolerance of others and through the timbre of the environments known to infancy change the instructions imparted accordingly — and exactly that would seem implicit in the American and other open democracy stories.

# # #

FTAC – Islam vs. Islam vs. (Yawn) Everyone Else – A Note

22 Friday Nov 2013

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Philology, Politics, Psychology

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bigotry, Islamic Small Wars, ISW, language, language poison, political psychology, social grammar

“However, you all know the answer to the above questions. The painful truth is that much of the world is largely insensitive to the oppression and sufferings of Muslims” — the statement is not true, or I and so many others would not be engaged here at all. Every Muslim death matters! That the carnage involves Muslim-on-Muslim violence, however, makes every form of cooperation, criticism, and intervention difficult and problematic.

Just back of Harun Yahya’s statement lays a hidden grammatical rule involving the concept of loyalty that is true to the speaker but perhaps not every reader. The statement sides with Muslims on a familiar but provocative and timeless note: “it is more important, more safe, more good or good-feeling, to be with one’s own (on the basis of a single noun) than to be uncertain among others however decent and noble they may appear.” As much echoes the notion that it may be better to believe or tell a loyal lie than to live with an uncomfortable reality and truth.

Note that in the American Civil War, both sides held The Bible high in defense of their positions; perhaps similar ambiguity and ambivalence attends philosophy over the Qur’an; and it may be noted that Judaism involves itself eagerly in schismatic argument, but in Judaism, that’s part of the charm (look up “Hillel and Shammai”).

Values associated with the greater dignity of man, ennoblement — “One scholar is worth more against the devil . . . .” — may persist through the Ummah’s internal fighting and its interfaces, and I hope they do — but Islam’s travail ties to language behaviors and concepts largely irrelevant to others developed and engaged in living in other ways, largely nullifying the legitimacy of messianic intention, the mighty spark of “political Islam”.

My words.

The inspirational source (apart From the Awesome Conversation): Muslims must be valued as they deserve | The Jakarta Post – by Harun Yahya, Istanbul – 11/22/2013.

“Bigotry” is a loyalty-related issue bound up in the social grammar of one talking head or another within some population.  Reasonable and reasoning human beings contain themselves; nasty people may bait and provoke the reasonable; and nasty bigoted people cannot help themselves: with those, it’s “garbage in-garbage out” and the garbage probably gets in very, very early in the development of their verbal cognitive style to form the basis for the subsequent content and manners that erupt in their speech.

(For diversion, visit the old blog — “N-Word Metonymy – Richards, Schlessinger in Context”).

As of this moment, the Islamic Small Wars (ISWs) have nothing to do with how Jews think about Muslims, how Americans think about Muslims, how Buddhists and Hindus and Sudanese animists think about Muslims, or how Islamic Humanists think about Muslims, or even how Muslims think about Muslims.  The ISWs have to do with assumptive thinking seeded into the mind at a very early age and bending adult thought in a rule-based way for a long time to come.

Without a language update, without the fresh breeze of free, considerate, and empathetic thought, without the good and sweet rest of imagination and heart and preparation, perhaps, for something a little different and much, much better, the Muslim-on-Muslim destruction and self-destruction (in myriad ways, much including the drugs-for-guns criminality of the Taliban) will continue.

Relentlessly.

Let it stop sooner rather than later.

Now would not be too soon.

# # #

Observation – Higgs and the Haunt of Even One Anti-Semitic Act – Academic and Newspaper Politics

09 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by commart in Anti-Semitism, Fast News Share, Politics, Psychology

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anthropopsychology, anti-Semitism, attitudes and beliefs, BDS, Nobel Prize, Peter Higgs, social grammar, social process

In July 2012, physicists at Cern announced the discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson. He was in Geneva to hear the news, and wiped a tear from his eye as scientists made their announcement.

The news immediately led to calls for Prof Higgs to be knighted and for him to be awarded a Nobel Prize – perhaps along with others who had come up with the theory in the early 60s.

BBC News – Profile: Peter Higgs – 10/8/2013

” . . . perhaps along with others who had come up with the theory . . . .”

Dwell on that a moment.

The pioneer has already been awarded the Wolf Prize – considered to be the second most important prize in physics – but he refused to fly to Jerusalem to receive the award, because he is opposed to Israel’s actions in the Middle East.

Prof Peter Higgs profile – Telegraph — 4/7/2008

To be accurate and clear about this telemetry, Peter Higgs received the Wolf Prize with Robert Brout and Francois Englert in 2004.

Five years later, Peter Higgs, retired to the English countryside (I am jealous of that), hasn’t to settle for the second most important prize in physics.

JERUSALEM (JTA) — Francois Englert, a Belgian Jewish professor at Tel Aviv University and a Holocaust survivor, shared the Nobel Prize in physics.

The prize for Englert and Peter Higgs of Britain for their discovery of the Higgs particle was announced Tuesday.

Francois Englert, Tel Aviv U. prof and Holocaust survivor, shares Nobel for physics | Jewish Telegraphic Agency – 8/9/2013.

Years measured and perceived in the company of computers would seem packed with data and progress, so richly so that one might say that participation in the anti-Semitic BDS (“Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanctions”) movement so popular on the hip Far Left in 2008 would seem something to have taken place a long time ago.

No less a darling of the BDS crowd than Norman Finkelstein debunked the movement for what it was (and remains) in 2012.

Nonetheless, that the Nobel-prize winning Peter Higgs imagined in 2008 that he stood up to the Jews by expressing his contempt for Israel and refusing his presence at the awards ceremony for that second most prestigious prize in physics (Wolf!) seems a moment that has come back to bite his reputation in the butt.

______

Having tracked this mess back to 2008, lets return to the BBC’s reporting and it’s handy suggestion that Higgs would win the Nobel “ perhaps along with others who had come up with the theory . . . .” 

Why not mention the names?

Perhaps the reporter did not know their names, so he couldn’t write, say, “perhaps along with Robert Brout and Francois Englert, also at work on the issue.”

Or, thinking like a writer an editor, once one drops in a noun for a general audience, one has to fill in the “who” about the whom, and that comes with costs in column inches and old paste-up headaches (not everyone reads the papers online, y’know).

However, notably, The Telegraph reported in 2008 and in parenthesis within Roger Highfield,’s “Prof Peter Higgs profile” the following:

(He has had a few conversations with them in recent years to make peace over how he seems to have taken all the credit in the publicity – “they had reason to be aggrieved”).

One hasn’t to be that legal eagle with the BBC: the news was out with Higgs profile.  In fact, it compelled it.

Why leave the Jew out of it?

Why repeat the gaffe of 2004?

In the lands of deserving great egotism, I would think the British and the BBC have every right to crow about Professor Higgs’ Nobel-validated accomplishment while Israelis and Jews have the same prerogative to brag the same of the Belgian researcher and Holocaust survivor today working at Tel Aviv University, Francois Englert, but from yesterday forward, so one may declaim, “Peter Higgs and Francois Englert” are nouns inseparable for looking over winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics.

None are compelled to add any assembly of adverbs apart, perhaps, from “the physicists”.

______

Anti-Semite and Jew and Judgment

In casual terms related to our “anthropopsychology” — I’ll gum that one up and call it “evolutionary social psychology” — it seems someone is always looking down the microscope at someone else.  Who is doing the viewing?  Who has been smeared on the slide like that famous “patient etherized upon a table”?

Who is doing the doing?

Who is being done unto?

I believe anti-Semitism simply an expression of “social grammar”, i.e., the infant-to-child’s arrival via insight, autonomous invention (emotional perversity of mind), or repetition of a rule anchored in language that itself becomes the basis for guidance in the development of subsequent attitudes and beliefs.  When that lowest level language programming becomes stable, many other facets of expression, including ill will toward the world’s one very small but hyperproductive Jewish state (or Jewish-majority, Jewish ethnic, Jewish cultural) state, may fall into place.

Those who have tried know that one cannot argue with anti-Semitic ranters because the rule-infused core can no longer be accessed internally even while it generates the nastiest and most malign of mouths.

A gentleman not so stricken and genuinely sympathetic with a well doctored cause may be corrected but feel hemmed in by this application of political correctness — when it protects the Jews, it’s good; when it defends Muslims, it’s not, right? — and fume about it in private.

In reality as regards bigotry — involving anyone as target — the realpolitik isn’t quite so simple, but one thing is not only simple but quite probably universal in politics: one person stands in judgment of another | one kind of person stands in judgment of persons of another kind.

There is in that an uncomfortable part of the experience of social reality.

It’s easier to criticize someone else, starting with one’s children, much less one’s neighbors, than it is to “take it” from another soul, especially if that soul proves —— or is perceived — as controlling, malicious, overbearing, and vicious.

______

By way of America’s broadest “Freedom of Speech” concept, Americans, in general, defend the expression of politically discomforting speech, including that of the worst bigots. If there’s crime to come via conspiracy to commit a crime or incitement to riot, for example, it’s not in the expression of beliefs or associated attitudes, however hateful.

What we tolerate in the air, we nevertheless judge in private, and in the slow grinding of the gears associated with politics, those whose talk most don’t like become marginalized figures or organizations.  In effect, they’re free to exist: the minimum of popular endorsement, which may be restricted to themselves, has come to them naturally.

That a British Nobel laureate at least once boycotted a notable event over pique with Israel’s politics seems a fine expression of intellectual freedom and well within the gentleman’s rights — and rightly defended on that basis.

*

Do Jews point the judging finger too often at others?

That may be a question for the ages.

I have found it notable in the Torah that not only Moses and the Jews leave Pharaoh for the Promised Land but that all similarly fed up with Pharaoh’s Egypt — “a mixed multitude” — leave with them.

Some Jews argue that the Jews led by Moses made a mistake bringing along sundry others, but some time much, much later, the possible elder contemporary of Jesus, one of whose existence we are certain, Hillel would state, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me; if I am not for others, what am I,” and those words would be taken into the Jewish heart, infused with the Christian soul, and probably, likely, known to Muhammad.

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me?  If I am not for others, what am I?

If we point the finger too often at others, it may be for being more for others than they have been, historically or now, for themselves.

In Hillel, so my intuition suggests — nothing more than that — is the Modern House of Israel.

It is that Israel with which Peter Ware Higgs, a nice follow to judge by his picture, found exception, but as with so many other things in life, one might be urged to look twice.

Additional and Cited Reference

American Professors Share Nobel Prize in Chemistry | NBC Connecticut – 10/9/2013.

BBC News – Profile: Peter Higgs – 10/8/2013.

Elder Of Ziyon – Israel News: Norman Finkelstein slams BDS, ISM movements – 2/14/2012.

Francois Englert, Tel Aviv U. prof and Holocaust survivor, shares Nobel for physics | Jewish Telegraphic Agency 10/8/2013

Mideast Dispatch Archive: British co-winner of Nobel Prize boycotts Israeli university of Jewish man he shares it with – 10/9/2013.

Nobel Prize for Physics goes to ‘God particle’ scientists – World Israel News | Haaretz 10/8/2013.

Peter Higgs: Curriculum Vitae | School of Physics and Astronomy

Peter Higgs – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Prof Peter Higgs profile – Telegraph – 4/7/2008

PhysicaPlus – פיזיקהפלוס – Online magazine of the Israel Physical Society PhysicaPlus – פיזיקהפלוס – Online Magazine of the Israel Physical Society – Issue 12 – In Search of the God Particle

Professor Peter Higgs Supports Academic Boycott of Israel | KADAITCHA – 7/6/2012.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. T.S. Eliot. 1920. Prufrock and Other Observations

# # #

FTAC – Good, Evil, Language Metonymy and Social Grammar

04 Friday Oct 2013

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

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conflict, culture, language, metonymy, social grammar

The science experiment preceding the comment involved measurements of attitude affected by first introducing participants to short collections of words that might have an impact on subsequent perception of other subjects.

I thought the science silly, actually, but it lent itself to the kernel, which at this point for me seems iterative.

The “priming” referred to in the article attaches to two fundamental concepts in the cultural perception of good and evil: language metonymy and social grammar. To delve into one may involve dipping into linguistics and poetry and the other wants for focus on the processing of cultural and social signals in infancy’s language acquisition period.

In essence, science still gives us a glimpse of what may be known empirically and religion becomes the mirror of cultural expression, imagination, and invention. “Good”, from such a clinical perspective, becomes what culture and language have become together across time for the set of constituent speakers.

Two enjoyable reference in this area: Daniel Everett’s Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes and Language: The Cultural Tool.

I cannot emphasize the idea too much that a romantic combat signals the poetic arrangement of symbols suspended in language and woven around the fighter’s own self-concept and image.

When one has cause to denote the pen mightier than the sword, doing so recognizes that good and evil, beauty and sophistry, guidance and misguidance involve the speech of either healthy or poisonous tongues and then an accurate or inaccurate assessment of states of affairs.

*

We humans don’t live through our organics: rather, we live with them and at times, this with age especially so, barely tolerate them; where we actually live is within the mouth-ear-mind-heart system that we use to tell ourselves about ourselves and others and the world.

If we’re to find greatness and heroism within ourselves and our ranks, it’s in that vessel woven out of strings of words fashioned like steel; if we’re to be disheartened or humbled, it may be through the deformation or shattering of those same strings, and then perhaps for their being either too rigid to withstand a little pressure or too gimp with receiving a load of confusion to keep their own best form.

# # #

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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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