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Serpent logics: the marathon

Sunday, November 24th, 2013

[ by Charles Cameron — oh, the sheer delightful drudgery of finding patterns everywhere ]
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I’ll start this post, as I did the previous one to which this is a sort of appendix, with a (deeply strange, tell me about it) example of the…

Matrioshka pattern:


That’s a piece of jewelry made out of disembodied pieces of Barbies from the extraordinary designer’s mind of Margaux Lange, FWIW.

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This post is the hard core follow up to my earlier piece today, Serpent logics: a ramble, and offers you the chance to laugh and groan your way through all the other “patterns” I’ve been collecting over the last few months. My hope is that repeated (over)exposure to these patterns will make the same patterns leap out at you when you encounter them in “real life”.

Most of the examples you run across may prove humorous — but if you’re monitoring news feeds for serious matters, my hunch is that you’ll find some of them helpful in grasping “big pictures” or gestalts, noting analomalies and seeing parallels you might otherwise have missed.

Have at it!

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Here’s another Matrioshka, from the structural end of lit crit that my friend Wm. Benzon attacks with gusto over at New Savannah:

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Enantiodromia:

You’ll recall this is the pattern where something turns into its opposite… as described in this quote from the movie Prozac Nation:

I dream about all the things I wish I’d said.
The opposite of what came out of my mouth.
I wish I’d said
“Please forgive me. Please help me.
I know I have no right to behave this way?”

Here are a few examples…

Ahmed Akkari Repents Violent Opposition to Danish Cartoons Lampooning Islam:

After a Danish newspaper published cartoons satirizing the Muslim Prophet Muhammad, Ahmed Akkari spearheaded protests that ultimately cost the lives of 200 people. Now he says he’s sorry. Michael Moynihan on what changed Akkari’s mind.

That’s impressive!

That one’s run of the media mill…

And this one’s from my delightful, delicious boss, Danielle LaPorte:

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A friend sent me this:

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Let’s just plough ahead…

Nominalism:

Nominalism is the category where the distinction between a word and what it represents gets blurry — a very significant distinction in some cases —

How’s this for naming your donkey after your President?

Consider this one, another instance of nominalism in action, from the French justice system:

A mother who sent her three-year-old son Jihad to school wearing a sweater with the words “I am a bomb” on the front, along with his name and ‘Born on September 11th’ on the back, was handed a suspended jail sentence on Friday for “glorifying a crime”. A court of appeal in the city of Nimes, southern France, convicted Jihad’s mother Bouchra Bagour and his uncle Zeyad for “glorifying a crime” in relation to the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11th 2001.

The classic nominalist image — with which I’d compare and contrast the French three-year-old with the unfortunate name and tsee-shirt — is Magritte’s cdelebrated “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”:

And here’s one final nominalist example:

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The spiral:

Here’s a potential downwards spiral, for those watching India:

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Straight parallelism:

This one’s from Jonathan Franzen:

And meanwhile the overheating of the atmosphere, meanwhile the calamitous overuse of antibiotics by agribusiness, meanwhile the widespread tinkering with cell nucleii, which may well prove to be as disastrous as tinkering with atomic nucleii. And, yes, the thermonuclear warheads are still in their silos and subs.

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Simple Opposition:

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Some of these categories seem pretty fluid — or to put that another way, some of these examples might fit with equal ease into several doifferent categories. Here’s another oppositional class:

Arms crossed:

From Ezra Klein and Evan Solta blogging at WaPo’s Wonkbook: The Republican Party’s problem, in two sentences:

It would be a disaster for the party to shut down the government over Obamacare. But it’s good for every individual Republican politician to support shutting down the government over Obamacare.

A great “values” juxtaposition:

And hey, nice phrasing:

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Here’s an example of one of the central patterns of violence and justice:

Tit for Tat:

[ the account this tweet came from, which was a media outlet for Shabaab, has since been closed — hence the less than euqal graphical appearance of this particular tweet… ]

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And here, without too much further ado, is a whole concatenation of…

Serpents biting their tails:

[ … and that last one of Nein‘s appears to have been withdrawn from circulation ]

This one I love for its lesson on biblical pick-and-choose:

This one is also a DoubleQuote:

when closely followed by:

And this one really bites:

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To close the series out with more of a bang than a whimper, here’s Serpent bites Tail with apocalypse & gameplay for additional spice:

Posted in art, Charles Cameron, Cyberwar, Doublequotes, education, egypt, europe, france, games, India, Islam, language, literature, media, movies, nairobi, new york times, obama, republican party, scriptures, shabaab, Specs, state department, Taliban, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Serpent logics: the marathon

Sunday surprise 9: surreal art imitates real life?

Sunday, October 20th, 2013

[ by Charles Cameron — my semi-official idiocy to cap the week ]
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Here, surreal art imitates real life — ahead of time, and or much later.

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Sources:

  • Tokyo Times, An abandoned and atmospheric Japanese school in the mountains
  • Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory

  • A tip of the hat to Bryan Alexander of Infcult

    • **

    Footnote:

    Time itself is a curious business, and the question of its “reality” comes up from time to time. Physicist Sean Carroll talked about it a while back on the pompously named Closer to Truth series, and makes some interesting points. I have to say, though, that I wasn’t overwhelmed — Carroll may be the equivalent of Hawking when it comes to physics, but the equivalent of Wittgenstein when it comes to philosophy he has yet to prove himself.

    But then of course we have never seen Wittgenstein talking off the cuff on YouTube: my sense is that this was a wise decision on his part — although many of the slips of paper on which he typed the aphorisms that go to make up his Zettel might well have been Tweeted, give or take a century.

    Twitter’s immense fan-base does include thousands — and likely hundreds of thousands — of folks who would follow a Witty Wittgenstein twitter-feed among it’s half-billion (2012 estimate) users if wittgenstein were alive and tweeting… Indeed, the entirely posthumous Wittgenstein Tweets feed has more than 4,000 followers, and you might care to join them — although the quotes in the tweets are more than 60 years old at time of tweeting. My own preference for a philosophical feed, btw, runs to Kim Kierkegaardashian.

    But it’s Sunday, we were talking surrealism, and I digress.

    Posted in Charles Cameron, Doublequotes, earth, education, japan, philosophy, physics, Specs, twitter, Uncategorized, youtube | Comments Off on Sunday surprise 9: surreal art imitates real life?

    And a little child shall lead them…

    Monday, October 14th, 2013

    [ by Charles Cameron — on two viral videos of children ]
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    Malala Yousafzai has been in many hearts and minds recently, and deservedly so. Her speech before the United Nations Youth Assembly, like her John Stewart interview, went viral on YouTube– here’s a version that has the grace to include her opening invocation of the Name of God:

    Thinking idly about her the other day I was reminded of anither video of a schoolchild that went viral just a few months ago — this one the more off-the-cuff speech of a boy, Ali Ahmed, interviewed on the street. He’s twelve, Malala spoke at the UN on her sixteenth birthday, but he testifies eloquently to Malala’s point by his own obvious clarity and intelligence:

    I think it’s worth holding these two video clips in mind together, the young woman and the young man, she almost fatally wounded and now recovered, he happening to be at the right spot on the right moment to be interviewed, her words reaching us directly in her fluent English, his coming to us only via sub-titles, as in an art-house “foreign” movie… If she has eclipsed him, let us remember him again.

    The intelligence, the clarity. the education. And how many thousands more must there be, unviral and unsung, but no less intelligent?

    **

    Unless ye become as little children, saith the Gospel, and a little child shall lead them, saith the Prophet.

    Posted in Character, Charles Cameron, christianity, education, egypt, Islam, judaism, scriptures, Uncategorized, united nations, youtube | Comments Off on And a little child shall lead them…

    AQ branding, ISIS cool for school

    Wednesday, September 4th, 2013

    [ by Charles Cameron — AQ & Friends have adopted another of our technologies against us — this time it’s branding — what’s next — gamification? ]
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    Aymenn J Al-Tamimi tweeted to alert us to the ISIS school bag today, with the comment:

    Yes, folks, it’s real: Islamic State of Iraq & ash-Sham school bag for kids going to ISIS schools in #Syria.

    This in turn reminded me of the Al-Qaida version of an Adidas logo. — I don’t recall who pointed us to the logo image, but Joshua Hammer talks the same design in A New Turn in Tunisia?— published in the NYRB this July:
    July:

    Yassin wore a black T-shirt emblazoned with jihadist imagery: on the front, a map of Syria with a Kalashnikov- carrying fighter from the Jabhat al-Nusra, the radical Islamic rebel group in Syria that has recruited many fighters from Tunisia; on the back, a portrait of Osama bin Laden accompanied by the legend “Jihad Is Not a Crime.” A picture of the World Trade Center, with a jet about to strike, adorned his shoulder. It suggested the Adidas logo, but instead of “Adidas,” it read “alqaïda.” “The police threw me in jail for wearing my T-shirt, and held me for four days,” he told me, grinning. “But they had to let me go, because there is no law against defending my views.” What were those views? “Al-Qaeda represents Islam, and al-Qaeda defends Islam,” he replied. Despite the incendiary messages on his T-shirt, Yassin insisted that he had entered a pacifist phase. “I’m doing dawaa, making people aware of their religious obligations,” he told me. “I’m not killing people.”

    Do they buy these things at Target (TGT)?

    Posted in al qaida, brand, Charles Cameron, Doublequotes, education, Specs, sports, syria, twitter, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

    The Spaceball Jihad

    Thursday, August 15th, 2013

    [ by Charles Cameron — hidden humor in deep scholarship, ahoy! — with hat tips to JM Berger, Phillip Smyth, and Aaron Zelin ]
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    I’ve noticed that JM Berger wrote an excellent book on American jihadis and has been keeping us seriously informed on a whole host of related topics including jihadist activity on the hidden gardens of the internet, but it’s only when he notices an AQ attempt to crowdsource suggestions for improving AQ’s social media presence, appropriates their hashtag and invites his buddies to add their own suggestions that his work at last catches the attention of a larger audience via Rachel Maddow:

    Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

    Okay, lesson learned — it’s the “tainment” in edutainment that makes the “edu” suddently attractive.

    **

    So here, for your edutainment and general entercation is a serious piece of writing by Phillip Smyth in his Hizbollah Cavalcade series on Jihadology, which will no doubt be of interest to some ZP readers — Hizballah Cavalcade: Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq’s Liwa’a Kafeel Zaynab:

    Albeit, it was a rarity for groups like LAFA to make an official written statement over social media or on forums stating AAH was a supplier. Instead, the inference AAH was supplying fighters to the group could be made by looking at the AAH imagery for their dead, which was then reposted by LAFA.

    However, starting at the end of May, 2013 a number of videos (posted to YouTube) explicitly claimed Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq’s fighters were in Syria. This differed from the more typical rolling of AAH personnel into the ranks of LAFA or other militias. While these videos were sporadic, they were the first piece of a trend which would culminate in the announcement of a unique organizational name for AAH’s force deployment in Syria.

    Here’s a sampling of the wares displayed therein:

    and here’s the pop-cultural ref that I missed when I first saw Smyth’s article:

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    Foolish me: Smyth even had a dead giveaway footnote:

    [5] See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UunQXXxAWY and “Have a nice day”.

    Posted in Aaron Zelin, Charles Cameron, education, hizbollah, JM Berger, media, movies, terrorism, Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

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