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What’s good for the geese is good for the ganders

Saturday, September 21st, 2013

[ by Charles Cameron — with modesty for all ]
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Some while Back, I posted a piece titled Concerning the enforcement of morals, in which I quoted the upper section of this DoubleQuote:

The lower panel comes from one of Aymenn Al-Tamimi‘s tweets today, in which he offered us a glimpse of an Islamic State of #Iraq and ash-Sham pool party near Latakia in Syria.

That’s it: fair and balanced modesty.

Posted in Doublequotes, sharia, Specs, syria, twitter, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Photographic enantiodromia at the Zaynab shrine?

Friday, September 20th, 2013

[ by Charles Cameron — in recognition that Photoshop is a weapon that can turn enemies into friends, at least within Photoshop! ]
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How to describe this? It’s a DoubleQuote in Two Tweets from Phillip Smyth in which [Almost] the Same Photo of a Guy with an Israeli Rifle Poses on Both Sides of the Conflict around the Sayyida Zaynab Shrine in Southern Damascus:

So the guy in the original photo does a bit of an enantiondromia thanks to Photoshop…

**

For some in depth reading:

  • On the Shia side of things, see Phillip Smyth‘s Hizballah Cavalcade posts at Jihadology.
  • For the same on the Sunni side, see Aymenn Al-Tamimi‘s Musings of an Iraqi Brasenostril series, also on Jihadology.
  • And for both and all else, well, there’s always Aaron Zelin‘s Jihadology itself!

    • Posted in Aaron Zelin, analytic, Charles Cameron, Doublequotes, hizbollah, photography, photoshopping, shia, Specs, sunni, syria, twitter, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Photographic enantiodromia at the Zaynab shrine?

    Serpent logic and related

    Saturday, September 14th, 2013

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

    It’s been a while since anyone last used a nuclear bomb, right?

    Monday, September 9th, 2013

    [ by Charles Cameron — keeping you in the “loopy” loop ]
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    There’s more ridiculous sloshing around on the web than I can hope to monitor, but my personal collection hit a couple of high points recently that I thought I should share with you. Did you know, for instance, that Israel recently exploded a nuclear bomb in Syria? How could you consider yourself informed, and be unaware of such a thing? It was on YouTube…

    But pshaw, that’s secular nonsense, and as you know, my tastes run to the religious. So did you know the emeritus Pope Benedict had a demonic advisor by his side while he was making a major speech?

    That sure as hell beats out the namby-pamby 10 Weirdest Fundamentalist Christian Conspiracy Theories an Alternet writer came up with, eh?

    In any case, please watch both the above videos: I trust you will then realize that the world is in far worse shape than you thought it was before reading this post.

    After all, it’s on YouTube.

    **

    How about this?

    Hang on a moment, Sayyida Zaynab is the shrine dear to Shiites that Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada is defending, as this graphic suggests:

    And last but not least, consider this, from a US Senator:

    Coincidence!?!? — or just a clumsy creative leap?

    _________________________________________________________________________________________________

    NB: Updated to replace “Hezbollah” with “Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada” above — h/t Phillip Smyth.

    Posted in America, Benedict XVI, Charles Cameron, christianity, conspiracy, hizbollah, internet, iran, Israel, nuclear, syria, twitter, Uncategorized, youtube | 17 Comments »

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