Tag Archives: time

FTAC – A Note on ‘Trump – Manafort – Millian – Kilimnik’ and the Irrelevance of Old News

25 Friday Nov 2016

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

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In paraphrase, the prompt was how would Hitler have been viewed if he had not produced the genocide of the Jews of Europe, i.e., The Holocaust.

Hitler would not have been Hitler without the ‘racial” foundations of Nazism already laid through the 1920s.

I’ve noted only recently the near concurrence of Stalin’s installation as the leader of the Soviet Union, the establishment in 1928 of the Muslim Brotherhood (in response to western colonial abuses, but also accessing religious supremacist thought in defense of Egyptian Muslims), and the already-built intellectual ferment — papers circulating in universities — for Nazism.

I have tried venturing toward the kind of conversation Stalin may (!) have had with Hitler in the course of coming to a delusional agreement over the parsing of Europe between them and then Hitler’s treacherous move against the same.

It’s too soon to draw the comparison “Stalin : Hitler” as “Putin : ? ” 　 , but that there is a conversation between feudal powers may be something that cannot be either doubted nor overlooked nor in content — i.e., what’s the story behind the public’s glimpses of Manafort, Millian, and Kilimnik? — known.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/paul-manafort-ukraine-kiev-russia-konstantin-kilimnik-227181

What appears to my _imagination_ is a conversation involving medieval lords and their knights, who are today well paid “nobility” suited up in suits and carrying briefcases full of explosive agreements. 　

From the Politico article:

Joking aside, Trump has demonstrated more interest in Russia’s affairs than in perhaps any other area of foreign policy. And his laissez faire approach toward Russia’s confrontational relations with its neighbors, combined with his open admiration of its authoritarian President Vladimir Putin and his employment of Manafort, have led experts from across the political spectrum to predict that a Trump presidency would augur to the Kremlin’s benefit.

How far passed is the election season “past” as America moves toward the inauguration of its new President?

The conversation prompted here is only quasi-public or constrained by the social distribution chosen for the original topic post. Therefore, we may be of the public, but we may also note in passing that this now old “Trump-Manafort” news has been discarded from the public conversation.

As news, it’s old news.

As a theme (for foreign policy wonks) it may remain relevant, but as much becomes a conversation between specialized journalists and researchers, and therefore politically irrelevant.

The public will rush on to the next day’s headlines, and the same will overlay, blanket, and suffocate the previous day’s curiosity and its items of interest.

The powerful and wealthy of the world have always inhabited a world greater than their own family, clan, tribe, and nation-state: whether Chinese political elites or Forbes-listed billionaires, the world has no boundaries and its laws must suit them for them to keep them, provided, lol, they keep a lot of other interested parties — above the table and quite some distance beneath it — interested in their success and largesse.

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FTAC – Pride in Heritage – It May Be Greater Being Humble

06 Sunday Sep 2015

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

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato It’s okay to indulge in pride but perhaps a little less exclusively, especially in the area of knowledge and culture, and that with the idea that every culture, however great or small, cosmopolitan or isolated, represents an adjustment among a gathered people to the exigencies of place at some point in time.

I think the world is done with “uncontacted people” — isolated primitive societies — at this point. All, probably, have been observed and brought under the protection of the more proficient states whose sovereignty claims responsibility for their land base. At the moment, Homo Sapiens sapiens enjoys about 7,000 living languages and about a fair number of major religions and their dozens of subcultures, schools, and rival factions, and every one of those languages and religions developed in time, and for some the origins have been lost in the mists of time and become the subjects of academic curiosity and exploration.

http://ancientchinesedynasties.weebly.com/the-zhou…

When Cleopatra was queen, Egypt had already a history ancient even to her.

The poem “Ozymandias” has had something to say about pride in accomplishments. In the western ethos and often a part of wisdom elsewhere, humility becomes a virtue. Not only God is greater but our own appearance and development species-wide may be a thing greater than we can comprehend, however we approach such knowledge about our own existence.

The stimulus: a rightly proud statement about the world’s first degree-granting university, but presented as simply the world’s first university, i.e., a center and repository for knowledge.

Revealed by the post-statement lookup:

The University of al-Qarawiyyin or al-Karaouine (Arabic: جامعة القرويين‎) is a university located in Fes, Morocco. It is the oldest existing, continually operating and the first degree awarding educational institution in the world according to UNESCO and Guinness World Records[5] and is sometimes referred to as the oldest university.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_al-Qarawiyyin

Posted to YouTube 11/8/2008

If we set out to brag just a little less — while accomplishing a little more, quietly — we might have more peaceful world.

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FTAC – Iran’s Political Evolution – Wider Angle, Please

18 Tuesday Aug 2015

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iran, Political Psychology, Politics, United States of America

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I relay some conservative thought, as in the above video, with hesitation as it doesn’t represent my thoughts, but my thoughts . . . egads! smile emoticon

I think issues associated with any aspect of the “Islamic Small Wars” (my term) are by nature intergenerational and likely to be longer-lived than any single American presidential term. Therefore, the prism through which these events and processes are viewed must be wider than the instance in which they occur.

While it’s true that the Obama Administration appears to have done as much as possible to accommodate a tyrannical regime that has refused all compromise on its barbaric, lethal, and piratical agendas — outside Iran and within — it’s also true that there will be another American Administration in about a year, that other and alternative games (political and military), ideas, and plans developed and out of sight are going to be “forwarded” into that administration. While the future has yet to be written, Iran will have a new generation of professional, about 50 percent or more of it female, graduating from its colleges in the same period; it will have within whatever influence has been brought to its elites and “masses” (I hate the term, but it suits) by Internet, relationships, and by new trade; if the regime gets its money back (from sanctions), it may have issues with avarice and greed at the highest levels.

I believe Time is with the west, not the medievalists, but it takes some tolerance of threat and related patience to get through time, and, granted, the Obama Administration has embarked on a long-term but still perilous course.

The question for the medievalists — Putin, Assad, Khamenei: how well have you done, really? Extended in Yemen, stalled in Ukraine, one-third of Syria beyond state control — and each situation appears stalemated at best?

This is a long video, but it may help some readers align with the observations and thoughts of more specialized intelligentsia.

Posted to YouTube 11/26/2013.

Related: Abbas Milani.

Near horizon: uncomfortable.

The Iranian regime is known for its aggressiveness, anti-Semitism, duplicity, egoism, and piratical character.

It is also known to be ageing.

Persians know too their greater history — and none among the educated have forgotten Cyrus.

A little offstage: the effects of the history of state police forces, from the czars to the Soviet and KGB to today’s FSB in Russia and VEVAK in Iran.  At about 25:15 in the above video, Professor Milani invokes the modern update term on feudalism: “state capitalism”.  Oligarchy.  (The URL trope to insert here: Reuters “Assets of the Ayatollah” — and so done).

Whatever one might wish to call such dictatorships operated by state mafia or theocracy, I believe the form still feudal and formed around the concentration of political power and access to wealth in one human demagogue.

In any case, the demagogue in Tehran has at hand a latent nuclear weapons making capability, in state or beyond (who knows?), and the worth of any agreement with the same has no basis in experience or earlier history (save that scandal with the illicit arms trade and even perhaps rougher politics).

Still, time is time, and the more time floats around and past the dictator, the more cultural evolution may temper the excesses of the malignant personality.  Where The Great Leader will not, or cannot, change, the Greater Society may.

Related Reference

Alliance of Iranian Women: Until Victory

“In September 2012, women made up more than 60 percent of all universities’ student body in Iran.”

Norman, Natasha.  “5 Badass Iranian Women Who Are Shattering Stereotypes of What Feminism Looks Like.”  World.Mic, July 23, 2015.

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Links – Dismissing “Islamophobia”

06 Monday Apr 2015

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

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“Martin said we must put Taylor’s concerns in a broader context. “It’s not just anti-Muslim rhetoric that puts Canada high on the radar list of enemies, or the upping of the ante by extending the Islamic State mission to Syria.” It’s also that the Harper government shut down the embassy in Tehran, as if that’s a bad thing. He might want to read The Islamic Republic of Iran—State sponsor of Terrorism by Shabnam Assadollahi, human rights advocate and Iran expert. Martin also suggested Harper has endangered us in the Arab world through unconditional support for Israel. If I understand Taylor’s statements, the last thing we want to do is upset the Arab/Muslim world for fear of the reaction of alienated Muslims in Canada. Is he suggesting Canada should make policy based on the potential actions of Muslims or any other ethnic/culture/ religious group in Canada? Should Canada turn a blind eye to Muslim on Muslim murder and Muslim on Christian murder for fear of hurting the feelings of Muslims in Canada?”

Bederman, Diane Weber.  “If I were a Muslim I’d be embarrassed”.  Canada Free Press, April 5, 2015.

. . . .  The problem is the Prophet Muhammad. If he were alive today, Amnesty International would certainly have a problem with his followers obeying his laws, which demand that certain people have their limbs amputated and their nose cut off. The Democrats would have him in their crosshairs as being at the forefront on the “war against women”. The New York Times would certainly seek to expose him and any whistle blower in his ranks would be celebrated as the next Julian Assange.

The Huffington Post and Daily Kos would be collecting signatures, to demand that our government do something to stop him. Media Matters would be reprinting all of the outrageous things he said, such as “I have become victorious through terror”.

Bell, Eric Allen.  “Facebook is Enforcing Islamic Blasphemy Laws.”  Faith Freedom Organization, February 2, 2015.

Rejecting criticism may serve to reject shame for a while, but time may develop an awareness greater than the narrative to which one clings for honor.  Acts and roles simply age, some better than others, but with greater cognition and comprehension become antiquated and archaic.

Conservative voices chattering around — not in — the BackChannels environment have a consistently straightforward way of dealing with feudal and psychological evil: call it out; detail it; echo justified observations; and, in general, maintain the critical front line defense of informed modern values and pluralism in intellectual battlespace.

The classically liberal conservative modern Muslim voices to which BackChannels has listened over the years offer a convoluted defense of Islamic thought — how good of Islam to “defend” the interests of select dhimmis in exchange for the acceptance of second-class status and the payment of tribute for it — or evade the portent of demonstrations of the obvious, as with Daesh Baghdadi’s strenuously studied recapitulation of General Muhammad’s experience and vision — at least as well as he may have gleaned through his scholarship — albeit with the contribution of otherwise unemployed former Baathist military.

For such strident and damning criticism of a core civilizational history once isolated in space and now, perhaps, isolated by time — the 7th Century is a long ago “then”, and this is now — when is it too soon to speak?

And when might it be too late?

Oh, one more thing . . . if the nut is loosened from the monkey’s grasp, what is to take its place?

In rare vocal encounter yesterday, BackChannels heard, “Islam doomed to its own self-destruction . . . disintegration from within . . . ethnic system – no solid ground to walk on . . . . maintained by brutality.”  Indeed, the penalties for apostasy, heresy, and hypocrisy seem high.  It also heard about Obama’s perceived role: ” . . . to destroy American hegemony . . . proto-Marxist . . . emulating his father . . . anti-colonialist . . . .”

Given that American has failed to colonize even Baltimore, BackChannels might be a little leary of that last characterization.

😉

Then too, those who follow this blog know that it may have as an underlying theme the want of bringing things to light, of digging around in the modern wells of seemingly limitless information and — this with a nod to political psychology — dredging and filtering what appears persistent across a broad spectrum of political expression plus separated historical observations over time.

Online — just a mouseclick away from where you are reading — “Change Navigator” Holger Nauheimer poses both a telling observation and question on slide 4 of 31:

  1. Attributed to Chris Spies (2006): “The dilemma with change is that everyone likes to talk about it, but very few have insight into their own willingness to change, let alone their ability to influence change.  Those who see the need for change often want others to change first.  That applies to adversaries and onlookers, but also to analysts and practitioners.  Why is this the case?”

  2. Stated in a thought cloud: “How to construct an environment in which people in conflict can safely explore new ideas towards a better future?”

Directly related:

Spies, Chris F. J. “Resolutionary Change: The Art of Awakening Dorman Faculties in Others: A Response by Chris F. J. Spies.”  Berghof Research Center for Constructive Conflict Management, August 2006.

Mitchell, Christopher R. 2005. Conflict, Social Change and Conflict Resolution. An Enquiry. Berlin: Berghof Research Center for Constructive Conflict Management/ Berghof Handbook for Conflict Transformation (online). http://www.berghof-handbook.net/uploads/download/michell_handbook.pdf

Chris Spies wraps the essay cited with this closing paragraph:

The time has arrived for change agents to wander with their partners, not as initiative takers (see Mitchell’s list on page 20), but as accompaniers and walking partners whose conversations reawaken people’s energies and imagination. They are partners in the forest – fellow human beings.  They will know the forest. They will navigate the rivers. Together they will transform competitive spaces into listening spaces; tactical planning into strategic planning; escalating dynamics into dynamic stability; and resistance to change into risk-taking for change.

Time has been space from the beginning, but only recently has the hard fact of it had, well, time to settle in: only for God is there a day without end or beginning; for all else, time moves along, transforms, runs out, begins anew.  It has features too, and perhaps for “accompaniers” some breathtaking rivers.  Moses, the Jews, and a “mixed multitude” found their way to just one such crossing.

Addendum

The Islamic virus first divests the person of his most fundamental human attribute. It takes away his right to make decisions himself and absolves him and in return, of any responsibility for his actions rendered in blind obedience to it.

Imani, Amil.  “The Virus of Islam: Can It Be Cured?”  Amilimani.com, April 8, 2015.

Too soon?

Too late?

In recent years, the search for an alternative to Islamism has been thwarted by the widening sectarian conflict within Islam, which has increased tensions and driven violence across the Muslim world. In light of this emergency, the need to reform Islamic jurisprudence and social thought has become more urgent than ever. Islamism’s menace to Muslims, however, has been compounded by the weakened state of critical thinking within Islamic religious and political traditions. In developing a reformist alternative to Islamism, Muslims do in fact have a substantial body of both historical as well as contemporary thinking that they can draw upon to help improve their political and social structures and create more just, inclusive societies.

Rumi, Raza.  “The Prospects for Reform in Islam.”  Hudson Institute, near March 30, 2015.

Watching the evolution of jihad videos, propaganda and message traffic I note a growing movement towards collective consciousness. This collective identity is nurtured with vitriolic attacks. What causes Muslims residing across the globe to be drawn to the hive of Abu Borg? Why choose divestment of individual personality (a gift from God) and investment in life as an assimilated slave? I no longer speak. We speak. I am no longer a free moral agent. My will bends and sways to the sound of thousands of voices. I become the enslaved.

Swofford, Tammy.  “Shadow.”  Daily Times, April 10, 2015.

Additional Links

http://www.berghof-foundation.org/

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Aside

15 Friday Aug 2014

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

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Jewish rejectionism — start with Pharaoh (what a lousy deal for everyone else!) — includes the rejection of Jesus and Muhammad as the representation or agent of God on earth. Them’s might be fightin’ words, as some say out in my backyard, but the sensibility may have begun (who knows?) with the idea of taking the power asserted by a deeply narcissistic monster — Pharaoh — and throwing it out into the universe and beyond to become the Almighty, the “King of the Universe”, a god immensely greater than what Pharaoh (today: Baghdaddi) would purport to represent. Not only do the Jews refuse Pharaoh’s legitimacy (and leave — with God’s help and under his aegis) but the “instructions” received refuse also to begin with mention or allusion to either mankind or power — and then the form of discussion invoked is that of vigorous inquiry and argument, a look-twice-and-think-about-it method of understanding one’s own humanity. Against that kind of a start, the Roman gods become decorative as well as instructive in other ways, or we should not speak of nor comprehend in Narcissus in the first place.

After Hillel (“the Elder” and the more obscure), Jesus-Paul-Constantine have the thorn of what to do with the Jews; Muhammad later wrestles the same question with perhaps Arab elan with the seduction ot surrender and subsequent easy slaughter of the Banu Qurayza.

And here we are and with a huge political problem.

If no one gets the story that yesterday imagined, then all are more free to get on to a new footing.

However, yesterday has its charms. Whether I pick up a fountain pen 🙂 or the young, mostly, dress up to “war” in societies of “creative anachronism” — http://www.sca.org/ — or primitives cling and some nutty alphas would be khalifas, the nostalgic affords the comfort of the fixed, known, and in terms of time, spacious. A man at a computer is busy — a man with a fountain pen and foolscap has time for dreaming.

Against this depiction of monotheist man and time, Hassan Nasrallah and Hezbollah dwell in the romance of their own spacious, timeless experience. The technology of the progressive appears in their environment –or they would not be counting on fiber optic communications cables to abet their “defense” of southern Lebanon — but the mind remains locked in a yesterday becoming continuously more distant from the day that has developed around their enterprise.

Writing like that is like reaching back and trying to pull a brother out of a time hole.

“What are you doing back there?”

“Living as we’ve always lived.”

“Is that so good?”

“It’s worked for us a long time.  We have a deep investment in a promise yet to be fulfilled.”

“That’s some promise.”

“It’s the whole world.”

“The whole world isn’t your world.  Perhaps you should try something a little more modest.”

“We’ll think about it.”

“It’s a shame to see you keeping yourself down there.  Frankly, it’s not looking like much fun, rather bloody and self-defeating, but, hey, it’s your call, and trust the world to be around when you’re ready to join with it rather than fight to the end of your day.”

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Iraq – Imagining Time – As a River – As an Infinite Table

20 Friday Jun 2014

Posted by in A Little Wisdom, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Philology, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics

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As similes go, I think “time is a river” is done.

Iraq suggests to me that time, as here humans may conceive of it, may resemble something more like a table riven with canyons.

Some come to the edge of the end of something: if they turn back, they go backward while time continues advancing others around them; if they look toward the edge out ahead of themselves, they have to devise a crossing – and then take it.

Sometimes, I refer to Hillel the Elder (circa 35 BCE to 10 CE) who said in the course of arguing the meaning of Judaism with his rival Shammai, “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.”

🙂

Hillel has been reputed to have said a few other good things as well (I believe three epigram have been listed to the left of this post), but that just quoted is the one that suggests a story about how we got to this edge.

If the Next Poetry looks difficult for writing (someone, please, channel Rumi), the separation of a kind of personality from the encouragement of a more human and natural ethics may want for sophistication greater than immediately available.

Simply pointing the finger at the despotic and spitting out the words “malignant narcissist!” might not do the trick.

Suggesting that the world is full of “bad daddies” might be more helpful: at least it would focus on the nature of some men and that of most men and women in light of the appearance of relationships between dictators, control of others (starting with what others hear and what they say), the exertion of power over others (whether they like it or not), and, always, the exploitation of the same for “narcissistic supply” accompanied by spectacles of murder and plunder undertaken with the greatest cruelty imaginable and achievable.

Now I / you / we can see them: The Despotic.

The Democratic stand opposed, but, alas, not quite put together themselves.  In Iraq, in fact, it appears they may be getting mauled, and the story in Syria tells exactly what happens to undefended good deed doers.

Time spreads out always to the end of things with a moment of division before the beginnings of new things.  That “now” may be short — somebody made a decision! — or it may be very long and tortuous as with forty years in a wilderness.

For some, perhaps myself included, time is also an island.

Every day is yesterday but a little different, but then — at my age — not too much so.

I have read that there are no longer “uncontacted people” — isolated tribes entirely untouched by the world beyond themselves — on our small planet, but some who may flee from further contact, probably with good practical reasons in mind, may live similarly.

The rest of us have to deal with one another in some way, and the “some way” we do that brings with it change — and better change we want than that assumed by a handful of tyrannical others.

Interesting Reference

Everett, Daniel.  Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle.  Vintage, 2009.

Golub, Alex.  “Are there ‘uncontacted tribes’?  The short answer: No.”  Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology, July 1, 2008.

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Iraq – Status Update – June 20, 2014 – Past Noon

20 Friday Jun 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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When does one stop looking?

Some might ask me, when does one stop talking (chatyping)?

As I type, I’m listening to the Brookings forum noted (in bold) in reference.

I’ve also seen more than I would have wished.  The new answer to “Do you see what I see?” — click through.

While I may suggest that Islam in Iraq has come to a rift in time, a place where the Sunni and Shiite communities may turn their backs on the future and race backward in civil war, or they may bond in their inherent sense of decency, dignity, and humanity and evict ISIS and wrestle with the host of issues that revolve around a habit of deep and mortal discrimination that lives primarily in the head suspended in the language and related mythos of the culture.

The future will unfold for others all around the Iraqi Islamic world (and similar), and it will wait for Iraqis to gather at this edge in time in preparation for making the crossing.

Reference

AP.  “Top Shia cleric Ali al-Sistani call for new government in Iraq: Press on PM Nouri al-Maliki to resign as offensive by Sunni militants rages on.”  CBC News, June 20, 2014.

Breitbart.  “ISIS’s Gruesome Iraq Propaganda Includes Severed Heads, Music Videos.”  June 19, 2014.

Brookings. “Iraq in Crisis: What Options Does Washington Have?”  (forum video, 1.5 hours), June 19, 2014.

Fassihi, Farnaz.  Waiting for an Ordinary Day: The Unraveling of Life in Iraq.  Public Affairs, 2008.

McClam, Erin.  “‘More Extreme than Al Qaeda’?  How ISIS Compares to Other Terror Groups.”  NBC News, June 20, 2014.

O’Hanlon, Michael.  “Iraq needs a new team at the top: Column.”  USA Today, June 16, 2014.

War Porn – Not “Work Safe”

ISIS.  “Criminality Daash with the general Muslim elders and children .. ..!!”  Firing Squad.  YouTube, June 20, 2014.  Encountered by BackChannels on Facebook and on Twitter, June 20,2014.

Relay from Brookings. “Iraq in Crisis: What Options Does Washington Have?”  (forum video, 1.5 hours), June 19, 2014.

Brookings Events regularly delivers conference and forum webcasts and after-the-fact videos from the same.

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Proposed: A Great Conversation About Power

18 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Iraq, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Regions

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http://youtu.be/mEhHeILa3HE

Pharaoh to Hitler to Assad to ISIS: let’s have our talk about power, personality, and politics.

Now.

I don’t know what metaphor suits that concept that is time when it is time for one to seal off a section of history, to have arrived at the end of a chapter of one’s own story, and to have to look across a river (in time) or desert (in time — add the biblical term of forty years for wandering lost in the foyer to the future) — and to leave one bank (in time) to wade, swim, or bridge and walk to that other shoreline.

Is there parochial time?

Is there universal time that contains parochial time?

I feel that with the destruction of Syria, which carnage has exceeded that involved in the Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus (70 CE) and the challenge posed today by ISIS in Iraq, some Islamic introspection and review of Sunni-Shiite rivalry (throw in Arab anti-Semitism while at it) might be helpful.

Iraq is a test: will parochialism seek through blood letting a nation divided by sectarian identification that guarantees perpetual war — or will the middle, mild, and moderate of Sunni and Shiite humanity recognize ISIS as an alien force inimical to the survival of either and therefore band together to eject and destroy it?

What is the timeline for the development of either path?

The world would seem to have all of the time in the world for this conflict between (BackChannel’s trope coming right here) “two mad wasps in a bell jar”.

There’s a terrific political cartoon by artist Talal Nayer at this location: http://tnayer.blogspot.com/2014/01/sunni-vs-shiite.html.

Irshad Manji has featured the same on her Facebook fan page, and it has been shared about 500 times, a good indicator that others are seeing the same thing.

Power.

I think the Jews — because our stories compel us to argue about these things and one may have opinions — took the monotheist power represented by Pharaoh and threw it out into the universe — and beyond the universe — to an abstract conception of God (“King of the Universe”) — and that was that for the people who walked away from what Pharaoh represented as a power unto himself.

http://youtu.be/7jMhJW7-HUs

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