zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — eerie distances between thus and so, this and that — and Trump, Wolff ]
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Speaking practically: switching between the delicate details of the North Korean situation, and those of the Iranian situation, each of which involves a potential nuclear adversary and some deterrent balance, and each of which contains the other as a subset — what’s the mental distance between those two mindsets? How fast can a sharp mind switch betweeen them. Or, for that matter, between foreign affairs and domestic politics? Or between dealing with House and Senate? Or between treating with Democrat and Republican?

Is there a zoom at work here, between these difficult distances?

**

I’d been wondering recently about some mental distances that illustrate the difference betweeen qualitative and quantitative realms, subjective and objective realities..

I’ve been asking myself, what’s the distance between inside and within, between x-ray and insight, or sky and heaven?

Wm Blake, Newton (left); Angel (right).

And what scale should we use to peer into such questions? — the compass Blake’s Newton uses to parcel out earth is purely terrestrial, purely rational, and Blake’s own blazing angels would have no place in it. Should we perhaps use Taleb‘s Wittgenstein‘s ruler?

Unless you have confidence in the ruler’s reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler.

Here, the distance between the measurer and the measured is itself in flux.

**

Back to politics.

How do those whose entire lives have been concerned with the largely substantial, ascertainable or verifiable facts of focus groups, polls, votes, election results, majorities, minorities, policies and so forth — with no time for Rilke‘s “angels’ hierarchies” — function when weighing the “mental stability” or “very stable genius” of a President with that same President’s policy with regard to — gasp — Kim Jong-Un?

Who has his own issues of “very stable genius” or “mental stability”?

And who doesn’t even have a semi-reliable chronicler like Wolff to illuminate the swathe he is cutting through ideology, dogma, doctrine, advisors, generals, and.. Juche?

How many minds do we have among the generals, among the punditry, who can roam at all scales of the relevant realms, psychological and political, blatant and nuanced, knowable and profoundly unknown?

[ by Charles Cameron — continuing in the pesky socratic tradition ]
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**

Here’s the possible parallelism, d’you dare say it’s a moral equivalence, are the scales even close to equal, or isn’t that the moral point anyway?

Just a few years after the destruction of European Jewry, the soldier wonders, have we now become oppressors? Have the Arabs now been sent into exile?

Here’s the whole paragraph:

In 1949, Yizhar Smilansky, a young Israeli veteran, national legislator, and novelist writing under the pen name S. Yizhar, published “Khirbet Khizeh,” a novella about the destruction of a lightly fictionalized Palestinian village near Ashkelon, some thirty miles south of Tel Aviv. Writing from the point of view of a disillusioned Israeli soldier, Yizhar describes the Army’s capture of the village and the expulsion of its remaining inhabitants. The time is 1948, the moment of Israel’s independence and its subsequent victory over five invading Arab armies that had hoped to erase the fledgling Jewish state from the map. It would be forty years before the New Historians—Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, and Simha Flapan among them—marshalled the nerve and the documentary evidence required to shatter the myth that hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs had all voluntarily “abandoned” their cities and villages. Yizhar was there to bear witness in real time. He wrote from personal experience; he had been an intelligence officer in the war. In “Khirbet Khizeh,” Yizhar’s protagonist is sickened as he comes across an Arab woman who watches as her home is levelled: “She had suddenly understood, it seemed, that it wasn’t just about waiting under the sycamore tree to hear what the Jews wanted and then to go home, but that her home and her world had come to a full stop, and everything had turned dark and was collapsing; suddenly she had grasped something inconceivable, terrible, incredible, standing directly before her, real and cruel, body to body, and there was no going back.” Just a few years after the destruction of European Jewry, the soldier wonders, have we now become oppressors? Have the Arabs now been sent into exile? And why can’t I bring myself to protest? “Khirbet Khizeh” eventually became part of the Israeli public-school curriculum.

**

Source & resource:

David Remnick, How Do You Make a TV Show Set in the West Bank?

Netflix, Fauda

**

With any luck, I’ll report back at some point. It seems to me that a love of the individual Palestinian should nest within a love of the State of Israel as the circles in the tai chih symbol rest within the swirls of the opposite colors. But what a charged topic!

A koan!

[ by Charles Cameron — wondering, roughly: is the world digital or analog? if that even means anything ]
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This post — Facebook’s Secret Censorship Rules Protect White Men from Hate Speech But Not Black Children — together with the tweet about it below —

Facebook moderation against hate speech allows the first four examples, but not the fifth. (source: https://t.co/zWwjusW3dM) pic.twitter.com/9ew4C2pxXG

— Alex Goldman (@AGoldmund) June 28, 2017

— triggered Zeynep Tufekci‘s latest. Here she goes:

What happens when your product is about human society but you run it from so neat Venn diagrams & uniform rules with too small a workforce. https://t.co/83yeJ309f4

— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) June 28, 2017

I understand the complexities here—but that's the point. A 2 billion user base cannot be reduced to powerpoints for rushed, tiny workforce.

— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) June 28, 2017

Code scales easily, but dealing with complexities and messiness of human societies does not. Facebook's business is almost all the latter.

— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) June 28, 2017

Treating human societies like simple, abstract toy models—a great tool for computer science—is how you end up here. https://t.co/fVxVd6UwWe

— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) June 28, 2017

And here’s the tweet she’s quoting in that last one:

This is a real slide from a Facebook training document for its censors. The correct answer is #3: White men. https://t.co/vpvSVMIEsC pic.twitter.com/rWkuu0BwO0

— ? kade ? (@onekade) June 28, 2017

**

A significant ouroboros from that ProPublica article, BTW:

Facebook also added an exception to its ban against advocating for anyone to be sent to a concentration camp. “Nazis should be sent to a concentration camp,” is allowed, the documents state, because Nazis themselves are a hate group.

That should give us pause for thought, I think.

**

There’s something very important going on here in this discussion as a whole and Tufecki’s tweets in particular: quite aside from the powerful issue of Facebook and its rules for moderators, there’s a more general question about quality and quantity — or should I say qualitative and quantitative approaches?

I’m wondering how well this distinction between (depending which tweet you quote) “human societies” and “simple, abstract toy models” — or “human society” and “so neat Venn diagrams & uniform rules” or “code” and the “complexities and messiness of human societies” or a “2 billion user base” and “powerpoints” — maps to the distinction between digital and analog..

Any thoughts?

[ By Charles Cameron — William Blake asks, David Jones responds ]
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William Blake asks:

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

I won’t quote the rest of the poem, because it’s those last two lines that interest me:

And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

**

Is there a glimpse of Jerusalem to be had, among the mills and chimneys of industry? David Jones, I think, takes the question very seriously, not looking for an answer to some Glastonbury Festival site, but to the contemporary manifestation of those mills — the skyscrapers of the city — not turning his gaze away from them but peering into them, questioning the very assumption that paradise cannot be found among them.

And here, I think, Jones answers — his quest unsatisfied:

I said, Ah! what shall I write?
I enquired up and down.
(He’s tricked me before
with his manifold lurking-places.)
I looked for His symbol at the door.
I have looked for a long while
at the textures and contours.
I have run a hand over the trivial intersections.
I have journeyed among the dead forms
causation projects from pillar to pylon.
I have tired the eyes of the mind
regarding the colours and lights.
I have felt for His wounds
in nozzles and containers.
I have wondered for the automatic devices.
I have tested the inane patterns
without prejudice.
I have been on my guard
not to condemn the unfamiliar.
For it is easy to miss Him
at the turn of a civilisation.

I have watched the wheels go round in case I
might see the living creatures like the appearance
of lamps, in case I might see the Living God projected
from the Machine. I have said to the perfected steel,
be my sister and for the glassy towers I thought I felt
some beginnings of His creature, but A, a, a Domine Deus,
my hands found the glazed work unrefined and the terrible
crystal a stage-paste …Eia, Domine Deus.

It is, I think, a very great poem. Eia, Domine Deus.

[ by Charles Cameron — who like Ryan Evans has more questions than answers ]
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This, for the use of the DoubleQuotes format:

SecState Tillerson and NSA McMaster just gave two conflicting statements on Syria strikes. Message discipline sorely needed right now. pic.twitter.com/6cPRrCEgsI

— Christina Wilkie (@christinawilkie) April 7, 2017

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Okay, undeclared warfare has clearly been declared, if it hadn’t been already: maybe someone should tell Congress —

The President must get Congressional approval before attacking Syria-big mistake if he does not!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 30, 2013

In the meantime, consider:

Now that Trump has directly struck and taken out an Assad regime air base, the regime to watch for reaction isn't Russia's but Iran's.

— ?yad el-Baghdadi (@iyad_elbaghdadi) April 7, 2017

together with:

It's worth pausing to think about the Chinese angle here, too. What do they make of this happening during Xi's visit?

— Howard French (@hofrench) April 7, 2017

**

Reaction from the furthest right in two tweets:

Bannon out. Nunes out. Flynn out. Sessions recused. We won WH & both houses! Imagine if we lost. GOP would be picking up Dems dry cleaning.

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) April 6, 2017

together with:

If Bannon does not resign, I will have lost a tremendous amount of respect for him. #NoWarInSyria

— Richard ? Spencer (@RichardBSpencer) April 7, 2017

**

And just for the sheer fun of it — no DoubleQuote here!

One Syrian tells me the new nom de guerre for President Trump on the ground in Northern Syria is Abu Ivanka al Amriki. #syria

— Clarissa Ward (@clarissaward) April 7, 2017