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[ by Charles Cameron — yet another quick dip into the dizzying world of patterns enfolded in tweets ]
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My collection of “Serpent logics” or “patterns of thinking” in the miniature format provided by the Twitter-stream got a noble boost today — you can blame my insomnia for my noticing this — from Karl Sharro and Elizabeth Pearson:

Sbarro unwittingly triggered things off by tweeting:

Something this morning reminded of my three Arab post-colonialists walk into a bar joke: https://t.co/d1PgH4UkFs

— Karl Sharro (@KarlreMarks) October 7, 2013

Pearson picked upon the “nested” quality of this tweet, and tweeted back:

@KarlreMarks I like the joke, and also the neat self-citation over repetition.

— Elizabeth Pearson (@lizzypearson) October 7, 2013

and to clarify:

@KarlreMarks Er.. Self.. Citation. Inserting a tweet in a tweet. It's neat!

— Elizabeth Pearson (@lizzypearson) October 7, 2013

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That was neat enough indeed, what with three instances in a row of self-referential tweets, each of which enfolds a previous tweet within it — the pattern I’m always on the look out for, and call “Matrioshka” after those nested Russian dolls — but there was more to come. I turned back — how could I help it — to the first tweet from Sharro:

Something this morning reminded of my three Arab post-colonialists walk into a bar joke: https://t.co/d1PgH4UkFs

— Karl Sharro (@KarlreMarks) October 7, 2013

and searched for the tweet embedded therein:

Three Arab post-colonialists walk into a bar. But then they refuse to continue the joke because it's based on White Man stereotypes.

— Karl Sharro (@KarlreMarks) April 8, 2012

A little deeper into the conversation, I came across this rejoinder, which sent me off on a further journey:

@lizzypearson haha, no I'm not that vain, it's only my bar jokes which are collected here: http://t.co/nX5n1ileOy Oops, I did it again.

— Karl Sharro (@KarlreMarks) October 7, 2013

and lo, the embedded link here led me to a page that contained not one but dozens of tweets, all based on the formula of the three characters went into a bar joke, many of the examples turning Sharro’s mind to matters of philosophy and the Middle East…

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They’re all examples of the kind of “collision thinking” that Arthur Koestler specifies as the source of creative insight (aha!), comedy (ha!) and tragedy (aiyyeee!) — but I’ve selected three which represent three of the different patterns I’m intrigued by:

So three conspiracy theorists walk into a bar. Do you think it's a coincidence?

— Karl Sharro (@KarlreMarks) May 21, 2012

That’s a serpent biting its tail joke, if ever I saw one, a conspiracist take on conspiracism.

And the barman says 'why are you all dressed this way?' So, three time travellers walk into a bar.

— Karl Sharro (@KarlreMarks) September 25, 2012

Now that, I aver, is a extaordinary example of enantiodromia, or direct reversal.

And for the pattern I call nominal, one can hardly better this play between the word minimalist and its context…

So a minimalist walks into a bar.

— Karl Sharro (@KarlreMarks) November 24, 2012

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It’s time for me to get minimal, too. I have a quite a long line of “Serpent logics” more or less lined up and ready to go, but putting too many of them in one post gets tedious for the readership, so I’ve cut these examples out of the herd to give you a taste, and will follow up with two mmore selections in a day or two.

[ by Charles Cameron — a sign of the times? ]
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Definitely of interest, implications to be discovered:

Wow. Isfahan v conservative city in #Iran “@NegarMortazavi: "Death to America is not in the Quran" Isfahan's friday prayer Imam told Fararu”

— Suzanne Kianpour (@KianpourWorld) September 30, 2013

Excellent theology, that, at the very least!

[ Charles Cameron — receiving messages from the dead via Twitter ]
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I was surprised late last night when a tweet from the account of the late American jihadi Omar Hammami showed up in my Twitter stream:

[arabic text, hit “refresh” if the tweet-image is slow loading]

— abu m (@abumamerican) September 28, 2013

It was in Arabic as you can see, so I took it to Google Translate — which never quite makes sense but almost — and thought I recognized it, checked it out with the Quranic Arabic Corpus translation section, and it did look very much as though what @abumamerican had posted was from the Quran 7. 43:

Praise to Allah, who has guided us to this; and we would never have been guided if Allah had not guided us.

I checked with whoever was posting in @abumamerican’s name, and got the reply “you r right. Sura E Alaraf”.

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Okay, that’s one part of any Islamist communication that interests me a great deal, and others often not so much — the epigraph, the scriptural basis on which the communication in question is based. Everything that follows should be read as a possible variation on that theme — see my earlier ZP posts Speak the Languages, Know the Modes of Thought and especially Close reading, Synoptic- and Sembl-style, for parallels, patterns.

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In any case…

Follow for current updates on #Alshabab's atrocities in #Somalia with an inside view: @ibnjubayr @eyeonsomalia_ @sayfuladl

— abu m (@abumamerican) September 28, 2013

After that first, epigraphic tweet, a whole stream of further tweets from @abumamerican followed, many of them in English, and many of them indeed dealing with the notion that Omar Hammami had died remaining faithful to the Guidance, while his killer, Zubeyr / Godane, had gone wildly astray from it.

Others are better qualified than I to discuss the details of what the spectral @abumamerican said and will perhaps continue to tell us. For the moment, I can recommend these two sources:

Clint Watts post, Omar Hammami’s Ghost Tweets On Westgate, Kenya & Shabaab

Sahan Journal’s 8 Reasons Why al-Shabaab Killed al-Amriki

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Keep your eyes open, there will be more…

[ by Charles Cameron — of tweets, and telephones, and terminal points with teletype equipment ]
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The White House RTs Rouhani, Rouhani RTs State.

Is this a “sign of the times”?

Was any bookmaker offering odds on this happening?

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Would I have been excited enough to want to write it up if I’d just found out, fifty years ago, that the White House had a “red telephone” that connected directly to the Kremlin?

I doubt it — but this article from the Smithsonian, There Never Was Such a Thing as a Red Phone in the White House informs us that it wasn’t a question of telephones either — it was…

two terminal points with teletype equipment, a full-time duplex wire telegraph circuit and a full-time radiotelegraph circuit.

Now — why am I feeling just a tad saddened by that tidbit of lifelong learning?

[ by Charles Cameron — religious law enforcement, therapy incarcerated, and a quick blast of Johnny Cash ]
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As you know, I collect instances of various patterns I see recurring in my twitterstream and elsewhere — here, I’d like to introduce a new pattern that I’ll simply call “simple incongruities”.

My first example, which I ran across several days ago, was this one from Saudi Arabia:

Apparently, "religious police chase" is a thing in Saudi Arabia. http://t.co/96cW0AnqDZ

— Tim Mathews (@timmathews) September 24, 2013

From the [Lebanese] Daily Star news report:

A Saudi motorist died and a passenger was injured on Tuesday when a religious police vehicle crashed into their car during a hot pursuit in Riyadh, a newspaper reported. A patrol of the notorious police, known unofficially as Mutawaa, chased two young men travelling in a sedan before crashing into their vehicle, forcing it off an overpass and onto a lower-level road, Al-Hayat daily said. The patrol vehicle fled the scene instantly, the daily said. “We pray to Allah to forgive the dead,” said Mohammed al-Shraimi, assistant spokesman of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the official name of the Mutawaa.

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It’s my second example — from nearer home — which I only ran across today that inspired me to make a separate post about these incongruities. The image of caged prisoners in a group therapy session at San Quentin (see above) was just too remarkable for me to pass over. The tweet that brought it to my attention is below:

Astonishing picture of a group therapy session in a California prison; http://t.co/pirlQYqHG4

— Olivia Solon (@olivia_solon) September 25, 2013

Here’s a comment from Johnny Cash — to give you added San Quentin context: