• Home
  • About
  • Concepts, Coins, and Terms
    • Anthropolitical Psychology
      • Civilizational Narcissism
      • Conflict – Language Uptake – Social Programming and Scripting – A Suggestion
        • Language Uptake – Programming – On Learning to Listen
        • Mouth –> Ear –> Mind –> Heart System
        • Social Grammar
      • Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy
      • Malignant Narcissism
      • Narcissistic Scripting
      • Normative Remirroring
      • Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation
    • FTAC – “From The Awesome Conversation”
    • God Mob
    • Intellectual Battlespace
    • Islamic Small Wars
    • New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left
    • Political Spychology
    • Shimmer
    • Syndicate Red Brown Green
  • Library
    • About Language
    • Alpha by Author
    • Dicks and Spooks – Political Spychology
    • Judaism and Jewish Culture and Life
    • Russian Section
  • Comments and Contact
  • X of Interest
    • A-Z Links
    • Alpha – Zulu
      • Associated Articles of Governance – United States of America
      • Daniel L. Everett – Reading Highly Recommended
      • Khamenei and Iran – Assorted Reference
      • Lee Smith’s Comment on ‘Media Warfare’ in the Middle East
      • Lies are Told for Only Two Reasons
      • On Being a War Journalist — Francesca Borri in Syria – 7/1/2013
      • Putin and Russia — Assorted Reference

BackChannels

~ Conflict, Culture, Language, Psychology

BackChannels

Tag Archives: sophistry

Also in Media: “Putin’s Real Long Game” – POLITICO Magazine | Molly K. McKew | January 1, 2017

02 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

democracy, information warfare, Moscow, political absolutism, political infiltration, Putin, Russia, sophistry, totalitarianism

What both administrations fail to realize is that the West is already at war, whether it wants to be or not. It may not be a war we recognize, but it is a war. This war seeks, at home and abroad, to erode our values, our democracy, and our institutional strength; to dilute our ability to sort fact from fiction, or moral right from wrong; and to convince us to make decisions against our own best interests.

Those on the Russian frontier, like my friends from Ukraine and Estonia, have already seen the Kremlin’s new toolkit at work.

Reading highly recommended: Putin’s Real Long Game – POLITICO Magazine – 1/2/2017.

Related in Media

4. Don’t listen to “realists.” Self-described “realists” have suggested that Russia be given a free hand in the former Soviet republics in return for cooperation on issues that are vital to U.S. and Western security. This call to make a “deal,” in addition to its blatant immorality, ignores the fact that it makes sense to reach an understanding only with those who will keep their side of the bargain. The fact that the Russians are seeking to deny the former Soviet republics their rights as sovereign nations is all the indication one needs that an unenforceable “gentleman’s agreement” to cooperate with the West will be violated the minute it ceases to be to Russia’s advantage. The rejection of a moral framework for relations, meanwhile, will set the stage and help provide the justification for new and more outrageous Russian demands in the future.

Satter, David. “Obama and Russia.”  Forbes, November 24, 2008.

–33–

FTAC – A Note on the Dark Mirror in Language

20 Tuesday Nov 2012

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

agitprop, conquest, dark mirror, defense, delusion, delusional, dominance, grandiose, Hamas, ideation, Israel, language, leaving, magical thinking, Moses, Pharaoh, propaganda, rhetoric, sophistry, submission

Language contains a dark mirror.

It allows or even tricks Hutu into accusing Tutsi of planning the genocide of the Hutu, but when this happens, it is actually the Hutu who have in mind the slaughter of the Tutsi in their entirety.

The dark mirror in language has a poisonous base: all it takes, it seems, is a small suggestion that God favors . . . blue eyes, for example, not green, and an elaborating process takes over . . . blue eyes and blonde, pure of heart and race, superior to all the rest of mankind, and ready to prove it out of factories melting ore and transforming it into cold steel.

The dark mirror in language confuses the mind: it convinces the Ayatollah dressed in white that he is God’s emissary today even while he runs Evin Prison and doles out patronage to thugs who then keep suppressed the more true revolutionary forces of Iran; it convinces Hamas who agreeing to truce in 2009 that it may continue launching rockets at Israeli residential space — more than 1,000 of such attacks in 2012 alone — because it believes it has a divine right and cause, one that allows it to exceed limits not only as regards its ambitions for the Jews (articulated: genocide right to the last Jew hiding behind a rock or tree) but in regard to the minds and bodies of its own children and women whom it keeps placed around its weapons and materiel stores and before itself in battle.

The Jewish story begins not with conquest but with fleeing an ugly condition — enslavement in Egypt under Pharaoh.  With the direct intercession of God and with the company of a great mixed multitude. Canaan and the Canaanites were in the future and for 40 years the hard scrabble of desert was to be the reward for leaving Egypt.

In the archaeology, Canaanite and Hebrew artifacts have been found in proximity, but, not yet, evidence of a battle royal, suggesting perhaps that the story is an idealization, a template, an illustration of an historic change in ways of life. Again, for reading, The Peace and Violence of Judaism (Oxford University Press) provides a straightforward compilation, neither always pretty nor ugly, of the defense and military doctrine of the Israelite.

For the record, about 20 percent of the population of modern Israel is Muslim and Muslims at their own discretion may elect to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces, and some do.

Reference

Beno, Goel.  “Muslim woman: Arabs must enlist in IDF.”  YNet News, June 28, 2012.

Hoffman, Jordan.  “His deep, dark secret: He’s Arab, Muslim and serves in the IDF.” The Times of Israel, November 10, 2012.

Jewish Virtual Library.  “Biblical Jerusalem: From Canaanite City to Israelite Capital”.

Oppenheim, James S.  “Jews, Muslims, and the Halls of Dark Mirrors.”  Oppenheim Arts & Letters, July 7, 2009.  Excerpt:

“Muslims who determine the worth of women as half that of men . . . Jews who would determine that their study of the All may require (lesser) others to support them: these may be the first distorted mirrors in the hall of dark mirrors that would make Hamas and the haredi liberating forces–and all others “kafir”–such are the opposite mirrors that ascribe to the other one’s own worst and most distorted contemplations.

Those mirrors are there because the writers of the monotheist foundation texts found a way to elevate their audiences into an atmosphere engineered around divine right.  Jews and the gentiles, Believers and the “kafir”, the righteous and holy and the sinners–how deep those divides that for their existence rely on not much more than stubborn ideation or “habits of mind” and the political power that comes of wielding intellectual levers and wedges that divide some humans from others in accord with their literary endowments.”

My perception of conditions have change but not my comprehension of the natural basis for the pursuit of health, individuation, and freedom.

Ruda, Bennett.  “Muslims in the IDF–It’s Not Just the Druse.”  Daled Amos, July 29, 2011.

Science News.  “Earliest Known Hebrew Text in Proto-Canaanite Script Discovered in Area Where “David Slew Goliath.”  Science Daily, November 3, 2008.  Related update: Boyle, Alan.  “3,000-year-old artifacts reveal history behind biblical David and Goliath.”  Cosmic Log on NBC News, May 8, 2012.

Smith, Peter.  “Christian Arab youth come under fire over desire to enlist in IDF.”  The Right Context, November 3, 2012.

Wikipedia.  “Israel Defense Forces”.  Subsection: “Minorities in the IDF”.

Wikipedia.  “Merneptah Stele“.

Wikipedia.  “Muslim supporters of Israel”.

Yitzhaki, Michal Yaakov.  “An Officer and a Muslim Zionist.”  Israel Hayom, September 7, 2012.

Yossi, Yehoshua.  “First female Arab soldier joints elite unit 669.”  YNet News, April 4, 2008.

YouTube.  “Muslims soldiers serving in the Israeli Army – Audio (1/2)”.  Posted September 11, 2009.

“I’m joining the army in order to make a change, to make peace between the nations.” From the film Ameer Got His Gun.  

FTAC – A Note on Anti-Semitic Bigotry and Sophistry

06 Tuesday Nov 2012

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

anti-Semitism, attitudes, behavior, bigotry, language, metonymy, New Old Now Old and Lost Left, psychology, social grammar, sophistry, structure

11/6/2012/1212H

J. — wade into academe and you wade into a flood tide of anti-Semitic ranting.

What do you want to do about it?

Report it to CAMERA, Honest Reporting?

Kick it around in the peace groups?

For any close reader, the sophistry shows up in the first paragraph: “Just recall the final TV debate as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney competed to prove who could pander more to the pro-Israel side while treating Palestinians as if they didn’t exist.”

This is well-recognized false witness and slander, but because it targets a people and a state — the Jewish People and Israel — there are no legal remedies. The cultural remedy is to make ourselves honestly known through ourselves around the world.

More we cannot do.

God, although I know you don’t believe, or Nature, and that should suffice, inspired in us a great mission in a world much larger than ourselves, and we have been on it for 5,000 years — perhaps I should say only 5,000 years — and we have eased, fully, close to 3 billion people to monotheism, not that 2.85 billion give a rip about thanking us for their better tracks.

That, of course, is their problem.

I may publish this on BackChannels, it makes me so angry and, as the Jew-baiting writer might calculate, a little bit helpless as to how to approach the repair of this form of bigotry and hate.  Such behavior in language stems from a deeply embedded social grammar — it is not a reasoning behavior but one rigidly set in attitudes and emotions — acquired by children in their earliest years, including probably some weeks in the womb with their ears turned on.

FTAC – Having to Do with Responding to Disingenuous Recycled “Argument” – Combating Sophistry

25 Thursday Oct 2012

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

bigotry, character, commons, disingenuous speech, ethos, Facebook, freedom of speech, hate speech, integrity, language, political, politics, sophistry, true speech

Regarding responses to familiar anti-Semitic rants, I wouldn’t mind seeing a WordPress or other blog architected specifically to rebuff the favored mud of the day.

For those specifically interested in language behavior and attitudes, I’ve a blog I’d like to boost in that area — http://conflict-backchannels.com. In relation to that, I’ve been more active in the Pakistani community than Israel’s, but the work is the same: there are those who reason with integrity (and we find one another in this affinity-encouraging environment) and those who reason their wills or willpower and do so disingenuously.

I’m a strong free speech advocate and really don’t want to shut anyone up (or have anyone banned from the commons, online or in real space) but rather help produce the community, worldwide, in which bigoted and intemperate loons find themselves making themselves smaller and in their “actions” (as old communist’s might say) transforming themselves into common criminals.

I started out a romantic in many ways, but age plus a little education has taught me to look at the numbers when looking at the many characteristics — amplitude, frequency, distribution, intensity — of an adverse signal.

Also the Hebe’s GB’s (of the boat show persuasion  should any need the hint) provide for armoring and training. I got into this area with an Ozraeli just a few years ago and had never encountered The Bigot (or the bigots) so closely, if ever.

I’d no idea there were so many dozens influencing thousands to millions unable to contain or restrain either themselves or their hate.

* * *

BCDN – BackChannels News Day

23 Tuesday Oct 2012

Posted by commart in BCND - BackChannels News Day

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

cultural, culture, disingenuous speech, Iran, language, Malala, political, politics, rhetoric, sophistry, spin, Syria

I have shared a reading log through “delicious” for a while, but with this blog I’m inclined to try posting each day, or for every few days, a rolling list of articles, the kind of thing I had intended for the “Fast News Share (FNS) category.  This seems like it might be less disruptive to the blog as well as more pleasant for the reader stopping by in his own newsy meandering through the conflict arena and related subjects.  –jso


Possibly intended to assure or incite westerners in the MEMRI fashion, Quradhawi is telling a story about political and sectarian Islam without fully comprehending the post-WWII arrangements that today have Syria’s nuts — seriously as well as every possible pun intended — in a vice.

Posted by MEMRI, October 15, 2012.

In the post-WWII world, Syria has been Russia’s client and buffer for decades, and the mixed bag of a revolution in Syria has threatened to bring Russia and NATO into conflict.  Recognizing that, both have agreed to stand off while Russia fulfills its contractual obligations with the Assad regime (for economic and military support) and the United States, probably most unhappy with this state of affairs, fears Turkey tugging on its leash to drag into a war in which it has little interest.

Within Islam in the middle east, large rivalries defined as Shia vs.  Sunni and Arab vs. Turkish vs. Iranian (I’m not going to endorse the morally hideous regime there by linking it with “Persian”, even though that is what it wants) will keep blood flowing in Syria because there is no solution to the kinds of problems combatants (from the dictator to the shia to the sunni to the Turk, the Arab, and the Iranian) have in their heads.

War in Syria involves the power of language and promises expressed.

One — to be clear, everyone — would inherit their power by family or ethnic or sectarian assignation, not by building the same painstakingly on good business and good deeds all around.

Interfering with transformation: the locked down mind cultivated by multiple literary clerical bodies insulated from criticism through a haut posturing developed to reject  the same out of hand.

The video was sourced as a reblog via Counter-Jihad Report, then back to Creeping Sharia and forward to an AFP article in The Nation — “Russian Troops Kill 49 Militants in Massive Sweep”.

* * *

The assassination of Malala’s character – By ROB L. WAGNER – Monday, 22 October 2012

Well, the Malala Yousufzai backlash took all of … five minutes. The outpouring of shock and outrage over the Taleban’s attempted assassination of the teenager who advocated for girls education has been replaced with a campaign of character assassination and conspiracy theories.

***

Farewell to Afghanistan, with sadness and affection

A Times correspondent ending a three-year assignment reflects on the fears and horrors, but also on the beauty and people that will make her miss Afghanistan.

By Laura King, Los Angeles Times
October 22, 2012, 5:04 p.m.
KABUL, Afghanistan — After years of comings and goings, almost everything about leaving Kabul is familiar: the ride through dusty dawn streets, skirting past old men on bicycles and boys in horse-drawn carts, the long airport trudge through four luggage screenings and pat-downs, the way the plane’s wingtips seem to almost scrape the jagged peaks surrounding the city.

Everything is the same — but the knowledge that this is the last time.

***

  • Compassion
  • Empathy
  • Justice
  • Humility
  • Inclusion
  • Integrity
____________

Caution: The possession of anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist thought may be the measure of the owner's own enslavement to criminal and medieval absolute power.
___________

Diane Weber Bederman Recommends BackChannels on Facebook!

"If you want to read great ideas and great prose, check out this FB page: BackChannels. James S. Oppenheim is a brilliant writer Get a glass of wine or a cup of coffee, sit down and enjoy."

Recent Posts

  • FTAC: Onward – Addressing a Reactionary Politics
  • 59th Inauguration – Beautiful to Have Watched
  • FTAC: China’s Behavior, Our Military, and Calls for War — It’s Complicated
  • FTAC: A Quick Comment on the Social Networks and Information Traps
  • Trump and the Question of Insurrection
  • FTAC: Reflection on the Political Power of the World Wide Web in America 14 Years After the General Uptake of ‘Broadband Internet’

Categories

  • 21st Century Feudal
  • 21st Century Modern
  • A Little Wisdom
  • Also in Media
  • American Domestic Affairs
  • Anti-Semitism
  • Asides
  • BCND – BackChannels News Day
  • Books
  • Conflict – Culture – Language – Psychology
  • COVID-19
  • Epistemology
  • Events and Other PSA's
  • Extreme Brown vs Red-Green
  • Fast News Share
  • foreign aid
  • Free Speech
  • FTAC
  • FTAC – From The Awesome Conversation
  • International Development
  • Islamic Small Wars
    • Gaza Suzerain
  • Journal
    • Library
  • Journalism
  • Links
  • Notes On Reading BackChannels
  • Philology
  • Philosophy
  • Poetry
  • Political Psychology
  • Political Spychology
  • Politics
  • Psychology
    • Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy
  • Referral
  • Regions
    • Africa
      • Central African Republic
      • Kenya
      • Libya
      • Mali
      • Morocco
      • Nigeria
      • South Africa
      • Sudan
      • Tunisia
      • Zimbabwe
    • Asia
      • Afghanistan
      • Burma
      • China
      • India
      • Myanmar
      • North Korea
      • Pakistan
      • Turkey
    • Caribbean Basin
      • Cuba
    • Central America
      • El Salvador
      • Guatemala
      • Honduras
      • Mexico
    • Eastern Europe
    • Eurasia
      • Armenia
      • Azerbaijan
      • Russia
      • Ukrain
      • Ukraine
    • Europe
      • France
      • Hungary
      • Poland
    • Great Britain and United Kingdom
    • Iberian Peninsula
    • Middle East
      • Egypt
      • Gaza
      • Iran
      • Iraq
      • Israel
        • Palestinia
      • Jordan
      • Kurdistan
      • Lebanon
      • Palestinian Territories
      • Qatar
      • Saudi Arabia
      • Syria
      • United Arab Emirates
      • Yemen
    • North America
      • Canada
      • United States of America
    • Norther Europe
    • Northern Europe
      • Sweden
    • South America
      • Argentina
      • Brazil
      • Columbia
      • Ecuador
      • Venezuela
    • South Pacific
      • Australia
      • New Zealand
      • Papua New Guinea
      • West Papua
  • Religion
  • Spain
  • Syndicate Red Brown Green
  • transnational crime
  • Uncategorized
  • Visual Data

Europe

  • Defending History
  • Hungarian Spectrum
  • Yanukovych Leaks

Great Britain

  • Stand for Peace

Israeli and Jewish Affairs

  • Chloe Simone Valdary

Journals

  • Amil Imani
  • New Age Islam

Middle East

  • Human Rights & Democracy for Iran
  • Middle East Research and Information Project

Organizations

  • Anti-Slavery
  • Atlantic Council
  • Fight Hatred
  • Human Rights First Society
  • International Network Against Cyberhate
  • The Center for Victims of Torture

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

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.

Archives

Blog at WordPress.com.