zenpundit.com » 2013 » September

Archive for September, 2013

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »

Branding the Syrian Jihad: the cars

Sunday, September 15th, 2013

[ by Charles Cameron — keeping up with the branding thing ]
.

A hat tip to Aymenn Al-Tamimi for each of these two images:

Sources:

**

And in case you prefer transport by air or sea to visit the “far enemy”, this “future passport” might come in handy at your port of entry…

— this image courtesy Phillip Smyth. Thanks, both.

Posted in brand, Charles Cameron, islamist, law enforcement, syria, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Branding the Syrian Jihad: the cars

Serpent logic and related

Saturday, September 14th, 2013

[ by Charles Cameron — where paradox begets form in phrasing, redux ]
.

Here for your entertainment and entrainment are some further instances where the tweet doubles back on itself, bites its tail, or otherwise embodies some form of “form” that’s noteworthy in its own right, and possibly indicative of the heart of a problem — think of these tweets as eddies in the flow of things, knots in the wood…

Two arms crossed as in that MC Escher hand-draws-hand piece:

And a net version of the same, aka “tit for tat”:

Speaking of economics, here’s a bit of spiral logic — the economics of spiralling out of control?

And here’s an example of “endless” recursion, as featured in two tweets about “end” times from Barth’s Notes:

and its 2013 equivalent:

**

Okay, here are some simple sample opposites. First, the weather forecast for Syria:

— spelled our explicitly by Andrew Stroehlein, who tweeted “Sunny with a chance of cluster bombs…” in response.

That one seems fairly fair, but click on the links yourself to see the nuances in King‘s actual statements.

**

Now for some regular serpents’ tails, from the reasonably light-hearted to the heavier end of the scales:

Okay, here are two from Mikko Hypponen, the first of which is frankly outdated, but still fun:

— Angela Watercutter caught the tide at just the right moment with her Wired piece, Skynet Becomes Self-Aware: How to Welcome Our AI Overlords:

The time has come. According to the Terminator clock, at 8:11 p.m. Tuesday, Skynet will become self-aware. And humanity will be screwed. Going by canon set out in the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles TV series, Judgment Day should hit Thursday.

Never mind Mikko, this one’s funny too — if and only if one’s also familiar with Wikipedia, which seems plausible in all cases for those who follow twitter — it wins double-honors in fact, hitting it out of the self-reference ball-park and into parallelism as satire:

**

Namarupa, or “name and form”, has to do with parallelisms between a name and its referent — or what zen might call the “finger pointing” and the moon — always fun:

The next one depends on your knowing that the Greek mythological creature known as a Naiad refers to “any of the nymphs in classical mythology living in and giving life to lakes, rivers, springs, and fountains”:

— aptly named indeed.

**

We’re almost done — here’s one with a built in time-factor:

It it still there? Aha!

**

Finally, this isn’t a serpent eating its tail by itself:

— but it becomes one, I’d suggest, when Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s Ambassador to the US from 2008 to 2011, retweets it!

**

Until next time…

Posted in Apocalyptic, Charles Cameron, complexity, economics, egypt, form, hard problem in consciousness, Lebanon, logic, pakistan, paradox, philosophy, quant & qualit, Religion, sports, statistics, syria, twitter, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Serpentine logic: enantiodromia, or a sudden turn of events

Saturday, September 14th, 2013

[ by Charles Cameron — an intriguing example of enantiodromia aka reversal or the hairpin bend ]
.

Let’s start with this tweet from Glenn Greenwald on September 11th 2013, a dozen years on from that tragic day:

Click on Greenwald’s link, and you’ll find it leads to an article by Mike Riggs, and refers specifically to this image of an ad in a DC metro station:

Riggs, who had written his article Oath Keepers Group Places Massive Pro-Snowden Ad Inside Pentagon Metro Station a couple of months eariler on July 24 2013, clearly thought that OathKeepers’ ad was strange enough to comment:

Last Thursday as I was rolling into the Pentagon Metro station I noticed from the train window a giant sign that read, “Snowden Honored His Oath. Honor Yours! Stop Big Brother!”

Before I could snap a picture or see who’d sponsored the sign, the train was rolling out. For the rest of the weekend I wondered who had the chutzpah (and the inventiveness) to praise Snowden at the Pentagon stop, where it’s far more common to see ads from lobbyists praising the merits of some piece of military tech.

Turns out it was the Oath Keepers, “a coalition of current and former military, police, and other public officials [who] have pledged not to obey unconstitutional commands.”

Following hot on the heels of Greenwald’s tweet of September 11, Charles Johnson wrote a piece on LGF titled Why Is Glenn Greenwald Promoting an Extreme Right Wing Militia?

And that in turn led to friend JM Berger’s tweet, also on Sept 11th:

And the enantiodromia here, the sudden switcheroo? That’s to do with Greenwald suddenly tweeting an appreciation of the OathKeepers — not his usual allies by any stretch of the imagination. So this one might equally be filed under “strange bedfellows”.

Or a “one two combo” perhaps? Left jab right cross, to be specific?

**
So where does the word come from? Carl Jung more or less borrowed the word from Heraclitus, as quoted by Diogenes Laërtius (ix. 7) in a passage that defies easy translation. Fortunately, as Wikipedia helpfully notes:

Plato in the Phaedo will articulate the principle clearly: “Everything arises in this way, opposites from their opposites.” (sect. 71a).

Jung explains Heraclitus’ meaning as he understands it:

In the philosophy of Heraclitus it is used to designate the play of opposites in the course of events — the view that everything that exists turns into its opposite…

and as he himself uses the term:

I use the term enantiodromia for the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time.

Would you prefer a more contemporary reference? John Perry Barlow even gave a TED talk about it:

**

Enantiodromia turns out to be one of the classic forms of paradox in history — t’s a form I’ve written about before on Zenpundit, in my post Jung in Tehran, aka “enantiodromia”, and also referred to in a comment on Pamela Geller.

Here are two notable examples. The first comes from Reinhold Niebuhr‘s The Irony of American History:

Everybody understands the obvious meaning of the world struggle in which we are engaged. We are defending freedom against tyranny and are trying to preserve justice against a system which has, demonically, distilled injustice and cruelty out of its original promise of a higher justice.

The second is from UK’s Labour MP, Sir Gerald Kaufman, who once said:

My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town a German soldier shot her dead in her bed. … My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza.

Right or wrong, Kaufman was in effect asserting the danger of enantiodromia…

**

Note well that enantiodromia is mostly used to refer to a single switchback: iterative enantiodromia would be a form of boustropehdon.

Note also that David Myatt, whose comment on enantiodromia in Heraclitus I linked to above, is an interesting fellow in his own right, having been a leading UK neonazi for decades, then converting to Islam and preaching jihad and praise of bin Laden — now finally settling into his (hopefully, final) role as an English country gentleman and proponent of moderation in all things — an ex-twice-extremist anti-extremist, itself quite an enantiodromic turn of events…

Hurrumph! Enough for one post…

Posted in britain, Charles Cameron, defense, form, IC, intelligence, islamist, Israel, JM Berger, logic, media, Militia, nazis, paradox, philosophy, psychology, Theology, twitter, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Serpentine logic: enantiodromia, or a sudden turn of events

Should we Laugh or Cry?

Friday, September 13th, 2013

[by Mark Safranski a.k.a “zen“]

Throughout the past half century or so, it became commonplace for high level officials to speak to reporters cloaked in anonymity as “sources in the White House” or who were “close to the Oval Office” in order to pass along slightly harder truths or acidic observations to the public without attribution. Generally, these comments, however troubling the format, were usually smarter and more honest than the ones that could be heard extolling the administration line at official briefings or press conferences.

Well, the Obama administration is working hard to reverse that impression. In a little over a week, we have had these gems from senior officials regarding Syria and Russia:

A second senior official, who has seen the most recent planning, offered this metaphor to describe such a strike: If Assad is eating Cheerios, we’re going to take away his spoon and give him a fork. Will that degrade his ability to eat Cheerios? Yes. Will it deter him? Maybe. But he’ll still be able to eat Cheerios.

This is actually the less disturbing of the two examples. While inane as a choice of metaphor, it did at least correctly indicate the strategic insignificance of doing a “protest bombing” of Assad narrowly targeted to punish for chemical weapons use. That’s something.

This next one is truly amazing:

“Putin is now fully invested in Syria’s CW (chemical weapons) disarmament….

He put this proposal forward and he’s now invested in it. That’s good. That’s the best possible reaction. He’s fully invested in Syria’s CW disarmament and that’s potentially better than a military strike – which would deter and degrade but wouldn’t get rid of all the chemical weapons. He now owns this. He has fully asserted ownership of it and he needs to deliver.”

Yes, I’m certain Putin will put that right at the top of his to-do list now that he has finished submitting his ghost-written op-ed spiking the ball and doing a five minute celebratory dance in the White House end zone.

Let’s hope that was cynical posturing and not an expression of the administration’s operative geopolitical power calculus because it sounds remarkably like a political consultant type trying to import the effects of domestic political spinmeistership into foreign policy making. It is at best an exercise in wishful thinking unhinged from the cold and cruel realities of international relations.

If it represents the quality of thinking on foreign policy surrounding the President of the United States, then we may all be in big trouble.

Posted in #FAIL, cognition, diplomacy, disinformation, foreign policy, geopolitics, government, leadership, national security | 15 Comments »

Boyd and Beyond 2013 Agenda, 11&12 October, Quantico, VA

Thursday, September 12th, 2013

[by J. Scott Shipman]

Friday

0730-0800 Introduction, Stan Coerr

0800-0900 Michael Niehuser (1 hour) The Colonel John R. Boyd Oral History Project:  A Search for The Truth

0920-1020 Francis J.H. Park (1 hour) How The USMC Came to Maneuver Warfare

1040-1140 Jim Burton — Recollections of John Boyd

Lunch brought in

1215-1315 Michael Moore (1 hour) Boyd and the Big Picture

1335-1405 Andrew Dziengeleski (35 min) Operational Planning in Afghanistan or How John Boyd Rolled Over in His Grave

1420-1450 Mark Hart (30 min) A Graphics Version of Operating Inside Adversary’s OODA Loops

1605-1650 Alexander Olesker (45 min) Counter-deception in the Information Age

Saturday

0800 – 0900 Dean Lenane (1 hour) Using Boyd in Business

0915-1000 Bob Weiman (45 min) Strategic Legalism Indicator of Bad Strategy According to Boyd

1015-1115 Carlos Balarezo & Robert Paterson (1 hour) Get Inside Your Own OODA Loop: A Practical Tool

Lunch brought in

1145-1245 Dave Diehl (1 hour) Boyd & the Cyber Domain

1300-1400 Jim Roche (1 hour) Boyd, Neuroscience, and the Decision Cycle

1415-1515 Pete Turner (1 hour) Mass Communications in Support of Political Development

Wrap-up

Slots remain to attend but if you have not, RSVP via email.

Cross posted at To Be or To Do.

Posted in Boyd 2013, J. Scott Shipman, john boyd | Comments Off on Boyd and Beyond 2013 Agenda, 11&12 October, Quantico, VA

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »

Switch to our mobile site