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Aside

08 Tuesday Jul 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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Hamas may be institutionally weak in governance — loud in voice, manipulative in the malignantly narcissistic manner, for sure, but incapable of maintaining a coherent program and cohesive constituency within its domain. Consequently, and not for the first time, others show up to usurp the Hamas mission. Where the aspiring and production know “there is always somebody better than you” (in some way, lol), it appears the criminal and destructive know the other competition: there is always somebody worse — more criminal, cruel, and vicious — than themselves, and that darker mirror of their own soul may be coming to get them on their own ground.

The appearance of ISIS in Gaza — http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4392/isis-gaza – 7/4/2014 — may have the ring of poetic justice if true, but it’s not the justice anyone wants, not even for Hamas.

“We are preparing for a battle against Hamas which will not end within a few days,” said Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-israel-hamas-conflict-20140708,0,603670.story – 7/8/2014.

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Aside

08 Tuesday Jul 2014

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

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The absolute worst thing Israelis and Jews in the Diaspora can do is engage in propaganda, specifically the disingenuous information techniques exploited by enemies.

What I call “The Islamic Small Wars” in which Israel is in inseparable element revolve deeply around the social grammar of family and tribal loyalties and consequent to that the diminishment of integrity as the highest of social values. To put it bluntly, to curry favor — often the favor of thugs — with lies is fine as it may appear to align with perceived personal security and survival. There is in that a civilizational principle that the Jews en masse and the decent and good of humanity must reject outright. To do otherwise, condones, engages in, and encourages evil.

A writer had expressed doubt about the Palestinian “three-fingers campaign” celebrating the kidnapping (later, murder) of three Israeli teens.  The note was to the effect that there may have been some confusion with a sports figure also associated with integer three.

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Aside

07 Monday Jul 2014

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

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I know you don’t condone them.

ISIS and others nonetheless believe themselves Muslim, the tip of the spear of Islam, and reference related lore and literature to justify what they do, and there is no gray about what they do. We are all — Muslim, Christian, and Jewish and everyone else, including Chinese nonbeliever oligarchs 🙂 — are looking for ways to shut them down, and that needs must include addressing their intellectual engines as well as arms supply, financing, organization, outreach, etc.

Pakistan’s military has been hard at work on this: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/pakistan/Taliban-fighters-cut-hair-and-beards-to-flee-Pakistan-army-assault-in-North-Waziristan/articleshow/37894679.cms

These “Islamic Small Wars”, as I call them, will not end in the field. They have to end in the minds of those who most propel them, and those souls cannot be reached with drones and tanks and infantry.

News from the Pakistani theater.

Hundreds of Taliban fighters rushed to disguise themselves with new haircuts in the weeks before a Pakistani army assault, it has emerged, as refugees revealed details of life under the militants — and their taste for imported luxuries.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/pakistan/Taliban-fighters-cut-hair-and-beards-to-flee-Pakistan-army-assault-in-North-Waziristan/articleshow/37894679.cms – 7/6/2014.

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Aside

07 Monday Jul 2014

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

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Hebrew culture has place x calendar and customs x language x religion and because of traditional tribal transmission, it’s generations may be schooled in “the old ways” with not much discomfort. However, large groups have converted, and in modern times the Abuydaya — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abayudaya — converted as a whole people and continue in the path.

Dispersion (into the “Diaspora”) alters land and language relationships, and, indeed, Jewish identity has suffered recession through intermarriage and national identification in other lands. Nonetheless, as may Shia, Jews worldwide have long taken measures to remain Jews, rejecting conversions en masse, maintaining language knowledge and customs, and sustaining identification with the Land of Israel.

As such affiliations go down to the bone, part of the genocidier’s motivation wants sheer sadistic control and humiliation, i.e., more than eliminating the presence of this “other”, the murderer has in mind the theft of the humanity and dignity of the same.

Some thoughts — probably most of mine — just get too long for Facebook.  A thread wants for a few words, not whole essays.  The above was on the way toward discussing the Islamic overlay over many distinctive cultures across feudal-to-modern history.

Fitra-65fitra-66

Source: Philips, Abu Ameenah Bilal.  The Fundamentals of Tawheed (Islamic Monotheism).  Pp. 65, 66. Second Edition. Riyadh: International Islamic Publishing House, 2005.

My parents did not make me a Jew.

God did.

Imagine, however, the insecure parent obsessed with power and control over progeny.  Trust is given, but dependence must be cultivated, and in the trust-me voice of the father, the child is told ” . . . the child is not strong enough in the early stages of its life to resist or oppose its parents”, which presumptuously impugns the authority of other parents, but the writer being a parent too, either in fact or in spirit, may not be immune from his own declaration.

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Aside

04 Friday Jul 2014

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

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When God (being God) introduces Eve to the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (via the Snake, who is also God’s creature) and awakens her to human awareness, self-awareness, and conscience — yeah, well she had to share THAT with Adam, poor fellow, considering what comes next in instruction), He’s careful (through the snake’s mouth) to conceal the presence of that other tree (by not mentioning it).

Knowledge is funny: how much do we really want to know, how soon, toward what end?

As issues may be parsed into dimensions and dimensions further defined, observed, explicated, the one or two central dimensions that cross all of the lines of the Islamic Small Wars are (imho) 1) Integrity Universally and its complement 2) Loyalty Selectively. A lot of things slip into the columns beneath those headers to then show up in events on the ground.

We may not see or hear the conversations that led to the murder of three Israelis and shortly thereafter an Arab boy — but we know somebody’s “holding out”. Similar behavior in business we often sanction as private and proprietary, but in politics undermining peaceful processes and whipping up crowds, the lying should get much less respect and, in fact, the general public must become more cognizant of processes below deck.

I skip down to the base when I think about “conflict, culture, language, and psychology” and the power of legacy in poetry to organize communities. That dives beneath the obscured layers of information but also lands one in the areas detached principle and theory — pure rather than applied research or thought.

For this thread, and having to shut down here for other obligations plus the Sabbath, I would suggest that those most in want and in need of the next new world may have to give up some old thoughts to climb into it, to come forward of positions, look over what we know of ourselves in myriad dimensions and ways and engineer to obtain for most of humanity improvements in (another of my terms of art) “qualities of living” — from cash supply and distribution x N-pop. x Area-Sq. to psychological and spiritual appreciation of the experience of living.

That said, conditions are pretty shitty for millions of souls, and some are getting attention in peace — anyone wish to include me in a peace and development project, let me know — but too many are suffering in the shadows of crime, criminal governance, and war. A prayer for those in line with “Tikkun Olam” and hope to continue doing what we do by bringing more to light and to mind and to heart universally.

What’s a writer to do?

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Aside

04 Friday Jul 2014

Posted by in FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Religion

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“Secular” does not exclude religion or considerations related to religion: what it does is contain all with policy appropriate to predominant population while in fact endorsing all to the limits possible.

The effect of this “all for all” thought in contemporary western theological communities has been to foster a host in variety of ecumenical dialogues and related scholarly research. The fruits of that research, in turn, inform the educated that care, dip into so much material, or run into the same over the course of a lifetime. In the famed “melting pot”, we are all a little bit of one another, starting with the influence of the indigenous before the first landing. Perhaps that goes on — e.g., reading _The Masks of God_ or William James and _The Variety of Religious Experiences_ — to relax our grip on any single religious basis for the creation of law.

Fans of America may be reminded that some of our colonialists also burned “witches” at the stake in their day. In this age, we have a few who play with rattlesnakes to prove their relationship with God. Sadly, some die that way (and perhaps are thought less deserving, sigh, for not having been truly protected . . . or they’re on their way to heaven).

Imho, we’re a wild species possessed of great intelligence, language, and imagination, and perhaps more of all three than is good for us, but that’s the condition. We’re not all alike. Sometimes cultures, sometimes persons become destructive in nature as their boundaries collapse or as they seek to expand themselves much against others, and they confuse the space they get into and make a mess of everything they touch. Those we need to recognize sooner and deal with in various ways.

Blah blah blah, blah blah, blah.

I may have to settle down with fiction.

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Aside

03 Thursday Jul 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology

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Imagination is tricky.

While it appears to me to have an hallucinatory and mimetic  existence apart from language — so in dreams and in creative-expression nonverbal invention we have a prior-to-expression sensory experience (universally) — when we attempt to community via any art / any mode, we have to produce an external facsimile of that interior experience.  A large part of that becomes integrated into some verbal behavioral repertoire (lexicon, grammar, social grammar).  Our problem is that on the receiving side of this model, words become real and symbols, dreams, experiences, memories, and so on float in our cerebral soup together — and suddenly every little Muslim boy wants to be Muhammad and every Jewish kid understands perfectly the commanders exhortation, “Go in like Goliath and fight like David”.  The external reference becomes an internal marker.

The stories relayed by good men to their children, and the manner of their delivery, intend their children’s survival, and with the same the transmission of the tribal culture through time.  Some men, however, become the “bad daddy” in various ways and the bullying, cowardice, lying, and other facets of malignant narcissistic manipulation begin.  As head of a family, one might beat up his kids; as the head of a state or a movement, the same may lead the vulnerable and infantilized to ruin.

If that kernel of an explanation seems to work, well, perhaps we should struggle with it some, punch it around, road test it.

Back-story confession: my graduate school era introduction to Maslow –not on the curriculum . . . I stumbled into that one all on my lonesome — had a profound impact on my own stance, and, indeed, shifting focus toward the perceived healthy individually and communally may become a part of helping to make things a little bit better for the world (another lookup: “Tikkum Olam”).

The melding in imagination of language-derived or language-delivered concepts, injunctions, legends, and myths may play a mighty role in conflict — and we’re getting too old — and too powerful in destructive capacity — for “letting God decide” these matters on fields of battle.

In five words –

Confused
Subjective inner states
Exteriors

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Aside

03 Thursday Jul 2014

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

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It’s about shame.

The more militarily defeated they feel, the more determined in defiance they may become because that defines their heroism, “resistance” (of course, it’s resistance to economic development, education, employment, etc., but they’re on a civilizational mission for Islam, and that mission sense needs to be redefined and channeled elsewhere). Lowa Kay’s thought adheres to the simple notion that “if they’re enemy, they should be treated like enemy” and indeed conquered and eliminated.

Although we (Jews, others similar in outlook) prefer to “do conquest” with language and policy, it hard missing the fighting bands and legions of what appears to be traditional Islam (in my new vocabulary, I hereby declare the compassionate, moderate, reasoning, and reforming the “radicals”). Barack Obama — I know how he’s viewed in conservative circles — has tried to integrate Brotherhood members into the Federal mixing bowl; Europe has promoted multicultural accommodation, and has reached its limit (http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2014/07/02/Europe-Takes-One-More-Step-Toward-Eliminating-the-Burqa); in the Middle East, Iraqis and Syrians have taken a beating between combinations of fascist and tribal military and political powers, and the pride-goeth-before-a-fall appearance of the “Islamic State” tells how even Islam in its majority cannot tolerate what Islam — by way of hundreds of _conservative_ inventions — has in mind for the humanity of humanity.

We’re waiting for _radical Muslims_ (compassionate, moderate, reasoning, reforming) to a) understand what has been or is being done to them, and b) find the courage in themselves to combat the forces that would enslave them — and, so sorry, those forces are not Jewish or Christian or anything else: those forces are of a dark portion of their own and of themselves.

Coming to their feet on that basis would be honorable, for the rest has been really shameful.

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Obama’s trying to wriggle out of it while trying to get the Muslim targets and victims of “Islamist” aggression to stand up on their own!  Unfortunately, deep divisions within the community have weakened it for the onslaughts brought by the Islamic State, which might be a good thing: everyone can see it for what it is, what it represents, and what it intends to do with humanity, including its own.

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The Awesome Conversation moves along swiftly as the tempo of events promotes greater engagement at a faster pace.

I don’t know what to do with my part of the commentary other than as swiftly post some part here for greater permanence (and even that’s uncertain).

The Islamic Slaughter (IS) operating in Iraq and Syria displays itself well.

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