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[ by Charles Cameron — I thought it might be timely to consider trinary thinking in light of Zen‘s recent post featuring Clausewitz‘ Trinity ]
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I know, it sounds inherently ridiculous, but what would happen if we thought in threes instead of twos? I mean, we tend to see things in terms of black and white, good and bad. Let’s set up a binary of our own — US President George W Bush vs the Aymara of the Andes and Altiploano:

Two into three won’t go, as they used to say in math class when I was a kid.

Hegel thought otherwise. Hegel thought two needed to move on into three, or we’d be stuck with binaries in stasis for ever. Hegel’s dialectic is about the possibility called three — which opens the otherwise static two up to various kinds of process…

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We tend to view conflicts in binary terms: “who goes there, friend or foe?” is the challenge I was supposed to offer Mad Mitch the Axe Man if I ran across him as a CCF trainee in the grounds of my old school, Wellington College.

What is conflict is viewed in trinary?

Here is Chris Crawford, from his justly famous 1982 Art of Computer Game Design:

The advantage of asymmetric games lies in the ability to build nontransitive or triangular relationships into the game. Transitivity is a well-defined mathematical property. In the context of games it is best illustrated with the rock-scissors-paper game. Two players play this game; each secretly selects one of the three pieces; they simultaneously announce and compare their choices. If both made the same choice the result is a draw and the game is repeated. If they make different choices, then rock breaks scissors, scissors cut paper, and paper enfolds rock. This relationship, in which each component can defeat one other and can be defeated by one other, is a nontransitive relationship; the fact that rock beats scissors and scissors beat paper does not mean that rock beats paper.

We’re back in play…

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Here, too, is a bit from m’friend Wm. Benzon, jazz-player, blogger, polymath:

Three against two is one of the most important rhythm ‘cells’ in all of music. What do I mean, three against two? You play three evenly spaced beats in one ‘stream’ in the same period of time you play two evenly spaced beats in another ‘stream.’ It sounds simple enough but, the problem is that three and two do not have a common divisor, making the ‘evenly spaced’ part of the formula a bit tricky. The two patterns coincide on the first beat, but the second and third beats of the three-beat stream happen at different times from the second beat of the two-beat stream. And if you think that’s a lot of verbiage for something that ought to be simple, when then you’re beginning to get the idea.

Noting that the brain has a hard time moving from two to three this way, Benzon quotes old-time piano virtuoso Joseph Hoffman:

In faster motion it is far better to practise at first each hand alone and with somewhat exaggerated accents of each group until the two relative speeds are well established in the mind. Then try to play the two hands together in a sort of semi-automatic way. Frequent correct repetition of the same figure will soon change your semi-automatic state into a a conscious one, and thus train your ear to listen to and control two different rhythms or groupings at the same time.

Those readers already familiar with my insistence on many-voiced (ie polyphonic) listening will quickly grasp that Hoffman is speaking of just that kind of broadening of our mental horizons — of our thinking capacities.

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I’d like to close part 1 of this two part post within my “Numbers by the numbers” series, with a quote from LtGen Paul Van Riper (USMC Ret.), The Foundation of Strategic Thinking at Infinity Journal:

The United States and its allies need senior civilian officials and military officers who grasp the fundamental nature of systems, are adept at building shared mental models, comprehend the significance of Clausewitz’s paradoxical trinity, understand operational art and can connect strategic thinking with tactical actions through operational design. These are the true competencies of modern defense professionals.

As in conflict, as in Clausewitz, so in conflict resolution: we need to be able to think in trinary — in trinities — and beyond.

More on that — which interested me enough that I once designed a trinary game of my own, played with great splash and delight by three kids in a swimming pool — in the second part of this post.

[ by Charles Cameron — Putin the Magnificent and his gaggle of geese ]
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--- upper image from the motion picture soundtrack album

In the film version, according to Wikipedia, there’s “an emergency landing at a U.S. Air Force base on Lake Ontario”

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[ nothing too original here, the Guardian story mentioned the film ]

[ by Charles Cameron — Sunni and Shia, Mecca and Qom, Saudi and Iran and the balances between them, with special attention to Mecca — and sideways comparisons with Las Vegas and Somoza’s Nicaragua ]
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Consider this map:

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It was ZenMeister who pointed me today, via Notes from Thermopylae, to Stephen Crittenden and his Global Mail piece, The Clash Within Civilisations: How The Sunni-Shiite Divide Cleaves The Middle East, from which the map above is taken. Crittenden writes:

There is a dangerous 2,000-kilometre fault line running through the Middle East between Beirut and Bahrain via Damascus and Baghdad, which marks the present line of demarcation between the two main branches of Islam, Sunni and Shiite.

The 1,300-year-old schism between Sunnis and Shiites was caused not by a theological dispute (those came later), but by rival clans in Muhammad’s tribe, the Quraysh, squabbling over the succession after his death in 632 AD.

Mostly the “Sunni-Shia Line” lies dormant, and ordinary Sunnis and Shiites live out their separate lives, side-by-side in relative harmony. In Lebanon and Iraq it has not been uncommon for Sunnis and Shiites to intermarry. But the Line is still always there, just below the surface, and it has recently re-emerged as the most significant factor reshaping geopolitical relationships in the Middle East, a region where religion and politics are always inextricably intertwined.

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Suppose it, at least for now. And in that context, consider as a counterweight to all the talk about Iran, two fascinating pieces by the Pakistani novelist Maniza Naqvi.

Naqvi’s piece The Remit of Fear in 3 Quarks Daily today is worth reading — you may be interested in any one or more of her various critiques of the House of Saud:

I fear the perverse purchase of petrodollars from Saudi Arabia: the twin ideologies of Salafism and Islamophobia. …

[ … ]

I fear to imagine a county which produces no art, film, theater, song or dance. Yet such is the country created by the State of Saudi Arabia. I fear the reasons which cause 16 million citizens most of whom are not Saud in Saudi Arabia to remain silently compliant. The bulk of this population is under the age of 25 and disempowered and is ruled absolutely by old men who do not tolerate dissent or diversity of opinion. I fear the mindset that treats women as blots and clots to be erased or managed.

There’s plenty of food for thought there, not least about Pakistan:

I fear that the people unlearned and illiterate impressed by influence and the purchasing power of Saudi Arabia might be confused and unable to distinguish the House of Saud as being apart from the origin and the authors of Islam. I fear that this may be the case for Pakistan where matters are so far gone that if the father of the Nation, Mohammad Ali Jinnah were alive today he would not be able to go about freely for fear of being shot to death for being a Shi’a.

My own interest, as usual, draws me to the religious drivers at work and their impact:

I fear that after thirty years of petrodollar bonanzas and propaganda, Muslims are unable to delink Islam from the House of Saud. There are 5000 Saud and in comparison there are 1.2 billion Muslims all over the world. A majority of whom, for a myriad of reasons including illiteracy, poverty and sudden wealth are unable to resist or protest against the Saudi influence upon them. I fear that the populations of the world are unable to resist, protest and fight against the privatization of all that is their sacred to them: their lands where they grow their food, to the places where they congregate and live, to their own thoughts and even their bodies.

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But you should read too her linked critique of the remaking of Mecca, The Architects of the War on Islam, from August 6th:

This is addressed to Muslims who think that Islam is under attack: They are right. Just take a look at the images of the House that Abraham built, the Ka’aba and see how progresses that ancient attack. Just look at the transformation of the environs of the Ka’aba and the Haram Shareef into a garish resort rivaling Las Vegas or Atlantic City.

Just look, at the transformation of the sacred environs of the Haram Shareef into a shopping mall and Disney world–to understand the war on Islam and who is responsible for waging it. Just look at this and see how Islam has been trafficked as though it were a bonded slave, dressed up in bells and baubles to be whipped and sold in the marketplace.

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Note finally her remarks, in today’s piece, on fear and silence:

Much is at stake if people are not silent. Much is at stake if people remain silent.

[ … ]

I fear that Haj and the Ka’aba, a central principal of Islam, sacred to 1.2 billion people have been privatized, by an estimated 5000 people belonging to one family. Why? How is the privatization of the Ka’aba different from the wholesale seizure and privatization of the commons and public lands and spaces all over the world? I fear that the Ka’aba and the Haram Shareef which is sacred to 1.2 billion people has been privatized and occupied by the members of one family and that this is the same as what is happening to the entire world and its public goods and commons and public space which have been eroded and literally stolen from the people.

And now you can see, too, why I am reminded of Somoza and his farm, Nicaragua:

With this profound difference: that the Ka’aba is the Qibla, the point of orientation to which all Muslim prayer turns, as others orient their prayers towards Jerusalem.

[ by Charles Cameron — attempting the unbiased exploration of nuance in often low-nuance discourses ]
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As usual, billboards, pamplets and ads on the sides of buses are worth watching. Let’s start with the Shariah twins:

The similarities are pretty obvious — what are the differences?

Well, the upper one was put up first, while the lower one was a response to it — that’s one difference, and it accounts for the similarities. Another difference has to do with the URLs each of them provides for further inquiry:

http://www.defendingreligiousfreedom.org
http://www.defendingreligiousfreedom.us

Again, the second is a response to the first and mimics its URL, although it switches automagically to http://freedomdefense.typepad.com/leave-islam/ when you click through. And “defending religious freedom” is clearly a double-sided coin…

The actual situation is neither that “Islam is a religion of Peace” nor that “Islam is a religion of War” — I would suggest it is that Islam is a religion that believes in opposing injustice in the name of peace, for the sake of eventual peace. In this regard, Islam is not unique.

Islam also has adherents who would like to see the entire world under Islam’s banner. In this again, Islam is not unique. Islam has given the world great poetry, history, architecture, philosophy, music, mathematics, science. Again, Islam is not unique in this. In one of my own fields of special interest, social entrepreneurship, Islam has given use Muhammad Yunnus and the Grameen Bank… The Islamic world also includes many religious leaders who espouse virulent anti-Semitism. In short…

Islam as expressed for better or worse in a vast diversity of human lives and situations neither renders each and every adherent an angel nor a beast. God may be perfect, but Muslims are only human. In this again, Muslims are not unique.

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Let’s turn from religion to patriotism:

According to the lower image, the Tea Party is not the enemy. That’s fine by me — I have friends who are Tea Party stalwarts. According to the upper image, which was put up by a local Tea Party related organization using the Tea Party name, the sitting President of the US is the equivalent of Hitler and Stalin. And if they weren’t seen as enemies by the US, I don’t know what the Second World War and Cold War were all about…

So let’s just say that when Obama‘s death camps pass the five million mark in Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, poets, Christians or whoever killed, I will no longer think the comparison a trifle overheated. To put it mildly.

But hey, I have a question for the Oath Keepers among our readership.

If you are supposed to fire on the enemy, and the illustration in your ad specifically features British red-coats, but you’re not allowed to fire on American citizens, and Col. Kevin Benson, who wrote the disputed article in Small Wars Journal, is an American citizen whom you consider a “red-coat” — are you supposed to shoot him? Please note, I also have friends who are SWJ stalwarts.

What about droning Anwar al-Awlaki? I suppose these paradoxes of double identity all belong in the same category as Bertrand Russell‘s celebrated paradox of the Spanish barber:

There was once a barber. Some say that he lived in Seville. Wherever he lived, all of the men in this town either shaved themselves or were shaved by the barber. And the barber only shaved the men who did not shave themselves.

All of which is fine, until you begin to wonder, as Russell did, whether the barber shaves himself?

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Back to religion (jihad) — or are we still on politics (Israel)? — for a quick look at the San Francisco Muni advertising discourse, which has now reached the point where I need to amend my usual two panel format:

Pamela Geller paid for the first ad, which encourages US support for Israel, okay, but also seems to call some group or other “savages” — we’re not quite sure who that group consists of since she doesn’t specify it — but she could plausibly be meaning all Palestinian suicide bombers, all Palestinians, all Arabs, all Muslims, even perhaps all those who support Israel… we just don’t know.

Given the amount of hatred floating around on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, I’d suggest the ad is indeed inflammatory, and that the Muni — who didn’t think they could refuse it under applicable US law — was acting appropriately if somewhat surprisingly in posting its own ad in response, seen here in the middle panel.

Now Geller has announced her intention to respond to the Muni’s ad with one of her own, seen here in the third panel — and all eyes will be on Muni if and when she does — to see if they will continue the back and forth.

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The world is the cinema. There actually are people setting fires in several parts of the cinema, and others whose words could be the sparks that ignite yet more fires. Some of the fire-setters have names like Ajmal Kasab and Osama bin Laden, some like Timothy McVeigh or Anders Breivik, some like Vellupillai Prabhakaran. The theater is crowded, and some people are yelling “fire”…

Furthermore, there’s a difference between panic and precaution.

[ by Charles Cameron — miscellaneous appearances today of the traditional “Wanted” motif ]
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Just another instance of the close proximity of opposite ends of a spectrum…

A poster on one of the Al-Qaida forums would like to see the SEAL who was on the raid that killed bin Laden dead, while the Reverend who delights in burning other people’s scriptures appears to want the head of his President in a noose… metaphorically, perhaps?

Sources:

Screenshot of threat to Navy SEAL author posted on “Al-Fidaa”, an officially-sanctioned Al-Qaida web forum, with h/t Evan Kohlmann @IntelTweet
Dr Terry Jones says Obama dead in 2012, with h/t JM Berger @intelwire…

As JM says: Stay classy, Terry Jones.