zenpundit.com » Specs

Archive for the ‘Specs’ Category

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »

Serpent logics: the marathon

Sunday, November 24th, 2013

[ by Charles Cameron — oh, the sheer delightful drudgery of finding patterns everywhere ]
.

I’ll start this post, as I did the previous one to which this is a sort of appendix, with a (deeply strange, tell me about it) example of the…

Matrioshka pattern:


That’s a piece of jewelry made out of disembodied pieces of Barbies from the extraordinary designer’s mind of Margaux Lange, FWIW.

**

This post is the hard core follow up to my earlier piece today, Serpent logics: a ramble, and offers you the chance to laugh and groan your way through all the other “patterns” I’ve been collecting over the last few months. My hope is that repeated (over)exposure to these patterns will make the same patterns leap out at you when you encounter them in “real life”.

Most of the examples you run across may prove humorous — but if you’re monitoring news feeds for serious matters, my hunch is that you’ll find some of them helpful in grasping “big pictures” or gestalts, noting analomalies and seeing parallels you might otherwise have missed.

Have at it!

**

Here’s another Matrioshka, from the structural end of lit crit that my friend Wm. Benzon attacks with gusto over at New Savannah:

**

Enantiodromia:

You’ll recall this is the pattern where something turns into its opposite… as described in this quote from the movie Prozac Nation:

I dream about all the things I wish I’d said.
The opposite of what came out of my mouth.
I wish I’d said
“Please forgive me. Please help me.
I know I have no right to behave this way?”

Here are a few examples…

Ahmed Akkari Repents Violent Opposition to Danish Cartoons Lampooning Islam:

After a Danish newspaper published cartoons satirizing the Muslim Prophet Muhammad, Ahmed Akkari spearheaded protests that ultimately cost the lives of 200 people. Now he says he’s sorry. Michael Moynihan on what changed Akkari’s mind.

That’s impressive!

That one’s run of the media mill…

And this one’s from my delightful, delicious boss, Danielle LaPorte:

**

A friend sent me this:

**

Let’s just plough ahead…

Nominalism:

Nominalism is the category where the distinction between a word and what it represents gets blurry — a very significant distinction in some cases —

How’s this for naming your donkey after your President?

Consider this one, another instance of nominalism in action, from the French justice system:

A mother who sent her three-year-old son Jihad to school wearing a sweater with the words “I am a bomb” on the front, along with his name and ‘Born on September 11th’ on the back, was handed a suspended jail sentence on Friday for “glorifying a crime”. A court of appeal in the city of Nimes, southern France, convicted Jihad’s mother Bouchra Bagour and his uncle Zeyad for “glorifying a crime” in relation to the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11th 2001.

The classic nominalist image — with which I’d compare and contrast the French three-year-old with the unfortunate name and tsee-shirt — is Magritte’s cdelebrated “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”:

And here’s one final nominalist example:

**

The spiral:

Here’s a potential downwards spiral, for those watching India:

**

Straight parallelism:

This one’s from Jonathan Franzen:

And meanwhile the overheating of the atmosphere, meanwhile the calamitous overuse of antibiotics by agribusiness, meanwhile the widespread tinkering with cell nucleii, which may well prove to be as disastrous as tinkering with atomic nucleii. And, yes, the thermonuclear warheads are still in their silos and subs.

**

Simple Opposition:

**

Some of these categories seem pretty fluid — or to put that another way, some of these examples might fit with equal ease into several doifferent categories. Here’s another oppositional class:

Arms crossed:

From Ezra Klein and Evan Solta blogging at WaPo’s Wonkbook: The Republican Party’s problem, in two sentences:

It would be a disaster for the party to shut down the government over Obamacare. But it’s good for every individual Republican politician to support shutting down the government over Obamacare.

A great “values” juxtaposition:

And hey, nice phrasing:

**

Here’s an example of one of the central patterns of violence and justice:

Tit for Tat:

[ the account this tweet came from, which was a media outlet for Shabaab, has since been closed — hence the less than euqal graphical appearance of this particular tweet… ]

**

And here, without too much further ado, is a whole concatenation of…

Serpents biting their tails:

[ … and that last one of Nein‘s appears to have been withdrawn from circulation ]

This one I love for its lesson on biblical pick-and-choose:

This one is also a DoubleQuote:

when closely followed by:

And this one really bites:

**

To close the series out with more of a bang than a whimper, here’s Serpent bites Tail with apocalypse & gameplay for additional spice:

Posted in art, Charles Cameron, Cyberwar, Doublequotes, education, egypt, europe, france, games, India, Islam, language, literature, media, movies, nairobi, new york times, obama, republican party, scriptures, shabaab, Specs, state department, Taliban, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Serpent logics: the marathon

Familiar logo, familiar shape

Tuesday, November 19th, 2013

[ by Charles Cameron — at the intersection of drones and IRGC graphics ]
.

Just a quick note that as of late September 2013, Iran has begun mass-production of the Shahed-129 drone, having first announced it in September of 2012. Iran claims the Shahed-129 can fly to the “heart of Israel“. For another post on the raised arm and rifle graphic, see Of the arm, fist and rifle.

Source:

  • Iran unveils attack drone dubbed Shahed-129

    • Posted in Charles Cameron, Doublequotes, drones, graphical thinking, iran, Specs, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Familiar logo, familiar shape

    Of death and children, one way or the other

    Wednesday, November 13th, 2013

    [ by Charles Cameron — thoughts triggered by the Jeremy Scahill & Lawrence Wright documentaries ]
    .

    I don’t really enjoy writing this, because I’m loath to suggest that sixteen year old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was in fact a combatant, though it seems to me that he might have been. I was viewing documentaries the other night, though, and when Jeremy Scahill‘s Dirty Wars [upper panel, below], which deals with Abdulrahman, was followed directly by Lawrence Wright‘s My Trip to Al-Qaeda [lower panel, below], the age at which Ayman al-Zawahiri began his career as a radical stuck out like a sore thumb:

    Here, then, is Wright’s commentary on the young al-Zawahiri:

    Ayman al-Zawahiri, the man behind Bin Laden, a doctor, product of a distinguished family, from an exclusive suburb of Cairo called Maadi, his father was a professor of pharmacology; his mother — the daughter of a diplomat… Ayman had started a cell to overthrow the Egyptian government in 1966. He was 15 years old.

    How much agency do we believe fifteen and sixteen year olds have, anyway? Do we allow them to drink a beer?

    If we are ever going to have a debate as to the moral high ground in matters of the extrajudicial killing of US citizens, it seems to me that Abdulrahman al-Awlaki rather than his father Anwar should be the test case we focus in on.

    The truth is that young people, sometimes very young people, do on occasion play with fire. I don’t think that means we should “burn” them on suspicion, but I do think it’s part of the larger picture. And in this case, that means “drone warfare” and “targeted killings” aren’t the only relevant categories: we may need to factor the issue of “child soldiers” into our considerations as well.

    **

    Here, to give the Awlaki family’s side of the story, is an ACLU video with Abdulrahman Awlaki’s grandfather:

    **

    And how did I wind up here?

    Well, as I said, I was watching documentaries… but the first thing that caught my eye, to be honest, was this shot from Dirty Wars [upper panel, below], which ineitably reminded me of the rosary-and-rear-view-mirror shot from Manhunt [lower panel]…

    which I’d talked about in an earlier post, Manhunt: religion and the director’s eye.

    I’m beginning to think no documentary about jihad and counterterrorism is complete without one…

    Posted in Charles Cameron, children, Doublequotes, islamist, movies, Specs, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Of death and children, one way or the other

    DoubleBurn: mosque and synagogue

    Sunday, October 20th, 2013

    [ by Charles Cameron — tipping my hat to a moving interfaith gesture ]
    .

    This past Wednesday, a person or persons unknown torched a mosque in Gdansk, Poland, known to me as the place where Lech Walesa founded the Solidarnosc movement.

    Thankfully, the physical damage doesn’t appear to have been complete [upper panel, below]:

    What brings this particular event to our attention is the response from the city’s Jewish community [lower panel, above: an image of a current Gdansk synagogue].

    The Jewish Telegraphic Agency [JTA] gives us the story:

    Polish Jews say mosque torching reminiscent of Kristallnacht

    Representatives of the Jewish community of Gdansk, Poland, said the torching of a mosque had “frightening connotations” of the Nazi-inspired Kristallnacht pogroms against Jews.

    The association was inescapable, three of the city’s Jewish leaders wrote in a statement Thursday.

    “On the eve of the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht, during which synagogues were burned in the Free City of Gdansk, the burning of the mosque must bear frightening connotations,” the statement said.

    Unidentified individuals started the fire early Wednesday morning. It consumed the mosque’s door and some of the equipment, resulting in damages to the tune of $16,000.

    “In the face of this cowardly act of barbarism, Jews of Gdansk cannot stand idly by,” wrote the authors of the statement, Michal Samet, Michal Rucki and Mieczyslaw Abramowicz. “We express our deep indignation against the attack on the temple and the sadness of the fact that it took place in Gdansk.”

    **

    An echo in time.

    A powerful analogy, deeply felt.

    Posted in analogy, Charles Cameron, Doublequotes, Islam, judaism, peace, Religion, Specs, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

    Sunday surprise 9: surreal art imitates real life?

    Sunday, October 20th, 2013

    [ by Charles Cameron — my semi-official idiocy to cap the week ]
    .

    Here, surreal art imitates real life — ahead of time, and or much later.

    **

    Sources:

  • Tokyo Times, An abandoned and atmospheric Japanese school in the mountains
  • Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory

  • A tip of the hat to Bryan Alexander of Infcult

    • **

    Footnote:

    Time itself is a curious business, and the question of its “reality” comes up from time to time. Physicist Sean Carroll talked about it a while back on the pompously named Closer to Truth series, and makes some interesting points. I have to say, though, that I wasn’t overwhelmed — Carroll may be the equivalent of Hawking when it comes to physics, but the equivalent of Wittgenstein when it comes to philosophy he has yet to prove himself.

    But then of course we have never seen Wittgenstein talking off the cuff on YouTube: my sense is that this was a wise decision on his part — although many of the slips of paper on which he typed the aphorisms that go to make up his Zettel might well have been Tweeted, give or take a century.

    Twitter’s immense fan-base does include thousands — and likely hundreds of thousands — of folks who would follow a Witty Wittgenstein twitter-feed among it’s half-billion (2012 estimate) users if wittgenstein were alive and tweeting… Indeed, the entirely posthumous Wittgenstein Tweets feed has more than 4,000 followers, and you might care to join them — although the quotes in the tweets are more than 60 years old at time of tweeting. My own preference for a philosophical feed, btw, runs to Kim Kierkegaardashian.

    But it’s Sunday, we were talking surrealism, and I digress.

    Posted in Charles Cameron, Doublequotes, earth, education, japan, philosophy, physics, Specs, twitter, Uncategorized, youtube | Comments Off on Sunday surprise 9: surreal art imitates real life?

    « Previous Entries
    Next Entries »

    Switch to our mobile site