Archive for the ‘meme’ Category
Monday, February 21st, 2011
Fouad Ajami’s The Vanished Imam: Musa al Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon was among the first books I read about matters Islamic, and the close parallel between the vanishing of Musa al-Sadr and the vanishing — or, more properly speaking, Ghayba or occultation — of the Twelfth Imam or Mahdi struck me forcibly at the time.
I don’t have my copy to hand, so I can’t tell how strongly Ajami himself made the comparison — but I was certainly not alone. Daniel Pipes, in his review of Ajami’s book writes:
What made the Imam’s vanishing so significant is that it exactly fit the millennial expectations of Shiism, a faith premised on the disappearance of righteous leaders and their reappearance at the end of time.
And now it may be — the report has yet to be confirmed — that Imam Musa is back among us.
@rallaf is an Associate Fellow at London’s Chatham House.
*
The mind sees one thing, which reminds it of something else. It’s the oldest trick in the book, and it depends on the recognition of pattern, or you might say, parallelism.
The return of Imam Musa would be significant not merely for his admirers, not only for what he might have to say or what role — now aged 82, after 30 years in prison — he might yet play, but also, I suspect, for the vivid premonition of the Mahdi his return might stir…
Posted in analogy, arab world, Charles Cameron, CNAS, cognition, culture, geopolitics, intellectuals, islamic world, meme, psychology, Religion, symmetry, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
Thursday, February 10th, 2011
[ by Charles Cameron — cross-posted from Brainstormers on the Web ]
You know, we talk a lot about Facebook and Twitter as technologies for change, but how about painted fingers?
Sources: Iraq — and she was too young to vote! — Iran
Posted in analogy, Charles Cameron, connectivity, creativity, cultural intelligence, emotion, free speech, freedom, freeplay, geopolitics, innovation, iran, iraq, islamic world, legitimacy, media, meme, Perception, personal, politics, presentation zen, propaganda, psychology, public diplomacy, revolution, symmetry, synthesis, Tactics, thoughts illustrated, visualization | Comments Off on The colors of hope
Thursday, February 10th, 2011
[ by Charles Cameron ] Zombies! Can’t live without them! Sources: Ursula Lindsey — Steve Benen
Posted in America, analogy, anthropology, arab world, Charles Cameron, conspiracy, culture, disinformation, extremists, fiction, framing, fun, hezbollah, humor, islamic world, meme, myth, Perception, propaganda, psychology, satire, stalingrad, symmetry, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Egypt: the conspiracies
Sunday, February 6th, 2011
[ by Charles Cameron — cross-posted from Brainstormers on the Web ]
There are so many possible lessons to take here:
That a single image speaks louder than dozens of words. That we are more easily persuaded by images than by words. That FB and Twitter are clearly important to Egyptian youth. That dozens of words can convey nuances that a single image misses. That FB and Twitter were at best among the vehicles, rather than the drivers, of the events of January 25th.
That we’d do well to bear the Aristotelian distinction between material, formal, efficient and final causes in mind when talking about what “caused” or “becaused” those events – and elsewhere.
That the simple juxtaposition of two closely similar ideas can illuminate both, and perhaps create a spectral “third thing” which possesses the full detail of both with greater depth than either one in a single understanding, by a sort of stereo process not too different from stereoscopic vision or stereophonic sound.
That we live in exciting times…
Posted in analogy, analytic, arab world, Charles Cameron, cognition, complexity, computers, connectivity, culture, democracy, dictator, Epistemology, framing, free speech, freedom, innovation, insight, insurgency, islamic world, logic, media, meme, metacognition, Perception, propaganda, psychology, revolution, social science, symmetry, synthesis, Viral, wired | 2 Comments »
Thursday, February 3rd, 2011
My amigo Sean Meade ponders:
Notes: The Problem with Sparta
So here are some of the ideas and notes, for posterity.The Problem with Sparta (and Greece)
References
300 (original graphic novel by Frank Miller and better-known movie)
Gates of Fire, Steven Pressfield
The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides
A War Like No Other, Victor Davis Hanson
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea, Thomas Cahill
The fiction glorifies Sparta while the non-fiction is more critical than laudatory. I was struck by how much the fictional Sparta, in three stories I really love, did not match the history I’d been studying.
Did Pressfield make his story more palatable to his readership by soft-pedaling Helot slavery, radical conservatism and aristocracy, oligarchy and homosexuality and pederasty?
We moderns are very critical of the real, historical Sparta. Insofar as it stands in for Greece in the fiction above, it’s an inaccurate portrayal. To say nothing of all the problems with our view of the Golden Age of Athens…
Ah, the tension between history and myth.
Admiration for ancient Sparta was imprinted into Western culture because Sparta’s Athenian apologists, including Xenophon but above all Plato, left behind a deep intellectual legacy that includes a romantic idealization of Sparta that contrasts sharply with the criticisms leveled by Thucydides against Athens in The Peloponnesian War. The Melian Dialogue remains a searing indictment against Athens 2,500 years later but no equivalent vignette tells the tale of the Helots living under the reign of terror of the Spartan Krypteia. Plato’s Republic upholds oligarchic authoritarianism inspired by Sparta as utopia while Athenian democracy is remembered partly for the political murder of Socrates and the folly of the expedition to Syracuse. Somehow, ancient Athens lost the historical P.R. war to a rival whose xenophobic, cruel, anti-intellectual and at times, genuinely creepy polis struck other Greeks as alien and disturbing, no matter how much Sparta’s superb prowess at arms might be applauded.
The fact that the vast majority of the ancient classic texts were lost, or as Dave Schuler likes to note, very selectively preserved and edited – at times, invented – by later peoples with agendas, may account for some of the discrepancy.
Posted in 300, academia, ancient history, authors, book, classics, culture, democracy, dystopia, fiction, frank miller, historians, historiography, history, ideas, intellectuals, interact, meme, movies, myth, Oligarchy, Perception, philosophy, propaganda, reading, Republic, sean meade, social science, spartans | 5 Comments »