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Aside

13 Sunday Jul 2014

Posted by in FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philology, Political Psychology, Religion

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Response to lauding correspondence from Pakistan:

Perhaps we got better at laying in nuts-and-bolts development infrastructure than feudal-to-modern transitioning intellectual infrastructure. Much of the world needs a new poetics — new heroes, new legends — that connects deeply with the heart and sets them bravely against both the tyrant and the miscreant.

While it’s good seeing Pakistan’s Defense Force finally sanding away the Taliban, one wishes for far, far less disruptive methods (you have a lot of refugees moving about, many with freshly shaven faces) and intellectually more certain ones — in cultural development as well as intelligence – as well. It really is a kind of person that embraces or promotes violence and terrorism to achieve ends in which they themselves must be perpetually the star of the show

The “win” is toward the middle of humanity, not toward those who go against the grain of nature in human aspiration and adjustment.

However, forming the martial power of the moderate in their majority has proven most difficult.  For the sticks that are fear and punishment and the carrots that are bribery and patronage, “loyalty” (to the ruthless with guns) trumps integrity throughout the fronts of the Islamic Small Wars: it seems one either flees the “God Mob”, dies fighting it, or succumbs to its ultimately self-serving political program.

Among my favorite bulwarks for making this point: http://www.reuters.com/investigates/iran/#article/part1 – 11/11/2013.

My correspondent asked, “So very true, but where do find them?”

Well, whether legends or writers, my response —

We settle down to creative writing on behalf of the more innately fair, forgiving, and just of humanity. With that kind of writing, God helps, and I do not believe the contributors need to be raving bipolar narcissistic megalomaniacs themselves — just good people with great empathy and strength and some connection — the spooky part — with life, the universe, and a little bit the miracle that is God.

You’re among the writers or among the facilitators of such writers.

Our now familiar “malignant narcissists” count on “information control” — censorship, ignorance, repression — to get away with doing what they do.  The way to fight back: open the mouth: speak!

And those possessed of abundant empathy and integrity among the articulate and forceful: do your thing.

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Aside

11 Friday Jul 2014

Posted by in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Politics

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Reminder: http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300127270 & http://www.meforum.org/522/the-smoking-gun-arab-immigration-into-palestine The easy story that makes thugs of Jews and victims of innocent Palestinian, may not be the true story — and it’s not: “The Palestinians who were forced out of their homes . . . .”  What about the Palestinians who fled their homes in advance of Arab columns and the promised destruction of Israel and the Jews?  How is it that Arab Muslims and Christians came to comprise 20 percent of Israel’s fully enfranchised citizenry?  What does one make of the camps of Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria (yesterday’s Syria) in which Arab states have penned and manipulated and diminished the very people their armies abandoned in the field?

The prompt was the opening sentence of a bit of advice to the Palestinian leadership.

Around thugs, I suppose, it’s easier to live with a loyal lie — and attempt to live out that lie — than it is to wrestle with an uncomfortable but reliable truth.

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Aside

10 Thursday Jul 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Regions, Religion

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FTAC:

You know what, J. — I should not type with a glass or Rose next to me — I’ve become or am becoming more aware of the followers in these disasters than the leaders.

We know what Hamas is about.

The constituency of Gaza, whether endorsing or not, knows what Hamas is about.

But Hamas — not as an organization but as an event in the life of community — takes place anyway!

This is near to an historic day because out of the many hate-peace peace groups blathering all around the middle east conflict, we are all just one mouse-click away from chatyping with (what we may perceive as) enemy.

And I thought photography was an adventure . . . . 😀

And throw the calculus out the window because we know (from Vietnam we must know) that the numbers don’t mean nachas! What has meaning are basic principles and values _in the mutual defense of our own_).

What if “The Terrorists” had captured and murder three young men from Alexandria. Virginia. What if?

That’s the only question on the table.

Hamas has a big problem with Arabic. Hanniyah, in video, gets his pecker up exclaiming how “We believe in death as they believe in life!”

Well, bullshit.

http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Israeli-hospital-treats-Hamas-PM-Haniyehs-granddaughter-332193

Hamas believes in life!

Too.

Dictators, like the dictator “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” defend political absolutism in their own right (AKA “unlimited narcissistic supply”) — http://www.reuters.com/investigates/iran/#article/part1 (such a gentle looking soul . . .but don’t overlook Evin Prison or its population).

That’s where we are.

Wherever.

Now we can talk.

Who else is going to talk?

Talk with me.

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Aside

10 Thursday Jul 2014

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

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FTAC.

I normally indent these but wanted to make it easy to preview/view the YouTube clips.

 

It’s a 30-minute clip (there’s your warning) that echoes what I’ve viewed from the Belfer Center (e.g.,

).

The great democratic concept is that it should be able to integrate and reconcile or enable faith in peace as long as people argue and compromise about issues in which they’re invested.  With Islam, perhaps more specifically whatever portion has invested in political absolutism, the power of the democratic process stumbles: it meets an opposition disinterested in “trying it out”.

So the drones fly.

Shadi Hamid seems to me to find the next best position, i.e., a democratic Islamism — or one accepting democracy — but loaded with an illiberal drive.

Well, okay.

You decide.

(I’m switching over to reading Hemingway, watching the thunderstorms develop, that sort of thing).

Oh: http://www.brookings.edu/experts/hamids

Aside

10 Thursday Jul 2014

Posted by in Asides, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars

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I don’t worry about God or godlessness but rather appreciate that most humans have some kind of sentiment as regards divinity and that atheism is more the exception than rule.

The other concern, would that I would settle down, has to do with the way we organize ourselves in language and within language cultures. As boundaries shift or become transparent, differences become apparent temporally as well as spatially: we are simply not going to accept or tolerate anywhere a deeply feudal future, moats, and closed portcullis and all.

One thing changing, so I hope, is our propensity for judging the whole by a part — as when some talk about “those people”, who could be any — should be deeply degraded by far ranging conversation and greater knowledge, and that to the point where we can look at who and what specifically account for violent criminal and political adventures in this day.

In that vein, one may see that Bashar al-Assad and al-Nusra, for example, form a dark Janus: different talk – same walk. They’re not good people, and they are very similar in how they work as personalities. Knowing that, you would think the crushed middle would fight back with instant resolve, but it’s taking time for that middle to form its own robust defenses.

I’m going off to read for a while.

Gather.

Refresh.

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Aside

09 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by in FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philosophy, Religion

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What does not bear its cross?

When God has mercy, it’s through human agency, except for that first instance: thanks for sewing the skins, also the gifts of consciousness, self-consciousness, and conscience, and we’ll make our way, getting a little better with practice; so maybe we’ll see you again in 7,000 years.

Sound good?

By then, we’ll be talking with the elephant, and the elephant will be teaching us, and, who knows but that the elephant will be different too.

We’d rather not have the suffering, but even more, we’d rather not have it go on if we can do something about it, even late but not too late.

One tries to be careful with anthropomorphism, keeping the elephant the elephant and the human the human, but as we grow our intellectual capacity and ability to comprehend others, including elephants and other members of the animal kingdom exhibiting highly developed sentience, it’s inevitable that we will find our intersections and mutual interests and perhaps another chamber in the world’s greater soul.

The prompt, rightly, had to do with the inerasable suffering already experienced by Raju.

http://www.eonline.com/news/557548/elephant-cries-tears-of-joy-after-being-rescued-after-50-years-of-suffering-and-abuse – 7/7/2014.

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