In the midst of writing a lengthy post, it may eventually become my longest, about Socrates.
There’s no assurance that volume will equate with importance – most likely, the opposite. The post began as a book review and then grew to two books, then I reversed course and started over; it has been unusually slow going because the subject matter has forced me to stop periodically and uncomfortably rethink my assumptions – and then pick up new books. In one sense, there’s no hurry. After all, Socrates will still be just as relevant or not when I finish blogging about him than when I began. On the other hand, the spirit of our times calls out for Socrates’ techne logon, his “craftsmanship of reason”, so I keep plugging away at it.
The flip side to this intense focus has been an increasing desire for a little mindless entertainment. So, I started watching Sons of Anarchy of my iPad, Season One. So far, It’s fun:
The theme and setting is interesting and the characters and plot are generally more credulity-stretching than even The Soprano’s in their twilight seasons, but Sons of Anarchy fills the bill in terms of entertainment.Boardwalk Empire, is also supposed to be very good, even better, but one at a time.
[ by Charles Cameron — lightweight, feel free to ignore ]
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It isn’t Santa. It’s the image from Raffaello Pantucci‘s piece, Islamists in Africa emerge as threat to West, for the BBC. Raff’s a recently-minted Senior Research Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute.
Cognitive #FAIL on my part. Wishful thinking, perhaps?
For those studying war, insurgency, irregulars or terrorism ESOC will be extremely useful – and depending on your area of research, possibly invaluable – as a resource.
.…ESOC identifies, compiles, and analyzes micro-level conflict data and information on insurgency, civil war, and other sources of politically motivated violence worldwide. ESOC was established in 2008 by practitioners and scholars concerned by the significant barriers and upfront costs that challenge efforts to conduct careful sub-national research on conflict. The ESOC website is designed to help overcome these obstacles and to empower the quality of research needed to inform better policy and enhance security and good governance around the world.
The ESOC team includes about forty researchers (current and former) and is led by six members: Eli Berman, James D. Fearon, Joseph H. Felter, David Laitin, Jacob N. Shapiro, and Jeremy M. Weinstein.
The website is organized by countries and research themes. The six country pages are: Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Vietnam. The content is structured according to five themes: Demographic/Socioeconomic, Geography, Infrastructure, Public Opinion, and Violence. The website currently hosts about 45 ESOC data files, over 35 ESOC peer-reviewed publications (with replication data), and ten working papers. The ESOC team has also posted links to many external data repositories and external readings that have proven useful for analysis. The website will be regularly updated with new micro-level conflict data and contextual information, as it is compiled and submitted by ESOC researchers.
One caution: based on my source who was one of the folks gathering data for part of this project, as with all quantitative method research, there are hidden qualitative decisions in who did the counting, how and by what yardstick. If you are drawing conclusions about big picture trends in insurgency or irregular warfare across periods of time you are good to go. If your research is sharply confined to a specific and narrowly defined historical case study (say one campaign, a battle, one district – whatever), then drill down into ESOC’s data and methodology to the granular level before drawing a conclusion vice your sources and data outside ESOC.
[ by Charles Cameron — Guardian reporting on Gaza and Mali, weighed in the balance and found wanting? — with Fox News for company ]
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I frankly don’t for a moment buy that Fox News is fair and balanced, but then I don’t know if any news source is, so let me try to be a little even-handed here myself, and take a gander at a couple of recent Guardian headlines, using my SPECS format to display them:
I’m not the first one to juxtapose these two headers — there’s a site called CiF Watch that monitors the Guardian (specifically) for signs of “antisemitism, and the assault on Israel’s legitimacy” and it brought these two Guardian posts together with the comments:
The contrasts in language, tone and narrative focus between a report by Harriet Sherwood on Israel’s November conflict with Hamas and a recent Guardian report on the French war against Islamists in Mali represent an exquisite illustration of the paper’s egregious double standards. …
In Sherwood’s report, the deaths of Palestinian children represent the overwhelming narrative focus. The fact that the IDF was attempting to target Hamas terrorists is only mentioned in the strap line, and even then is qualified with the word “believed”.
In the report by Hirsch and Hopkins, on the other hand, we are informed via the headline that militants are killed, while the deaths of Mali children are only noted at the end of the strap line.
On the one hand, I appreciate this kind of close reading as an analytic technique, while on the other I can’t really expect editors to check previous possibly comparable events to make sure their treatment of breaking news is immune from this kind of criticism.
That’s a quandary, IMO — but not yet a quagmire.
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Forget the question of whether Fox News is more or less biased than the Guardian — or should I call them Faux News and the Grauniad? — and just think again about our passions, about how they can blind us, and about how that blindness can manifest in emphases, in choice of words or images — in so many conscious and unconscious ways.
We need to deploy considerable mindfulness if we are to explore, read, filter, balance and comprehend the world around us — with anything like the nuance required for making wise (rather than lop-sided) choices…
[ by Charles Cameron — strange intersections between Islamic, Judaic and Christian teachers around the end times, also Yehuda Etzion of the Jewish Underground, and Habayit Hayehudi’s Jeremy Gimpel ]
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My guess is that at least one aspect of this screen-grab will surprise you — but it’s hard to say which!
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One possible surprise is a 2013 end times prediction from an Islamic source — but there are enough other surprises here to go around, I think…
Okay, here it is. I ran across two videos of rabbis on two sites connected with Islamic end times expectations today, and they’re causing a bit of a re-set in my thinking about the various alignments possible in the complex world of competing contemporary eschatologies.
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I imagine the rabbi in the first of the two videos is from Neturei Karta or Satmar, because at one point he says:
this country (Israel) does not have the right to exist
and refers to the State of Israel as “the origin of evil”.
There is obviously much more going on here, and I’m none too confident of the accuracy of the subtitles, so I’d appreciate any comments from those who know more about either the rabbi’s Jewish context or the Muslim eschatological site‘s place within the Mahdist spectrum.
2013? C’mon!
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The second video comes from Adnan Oktar / Harun Yahya. What’s most intriguing to me here is the rabbi’s assertion that “Islam is the religion of Adam himself” — the Noahide or universal faith into which we are all born according to Judaism. And once again, I’d appreciate any commentary on the participants and their respective contexts:
He’s definitely an interesting fellow, this Harun Yahya — his teachings on Mahdism feature a peaceable Mahdi, he has reached out in dialogue to Joel Richardson, the author of Mideast Beast: The Scriptural Case for an Islamic Antichrist, and his Jewish contacts include Adin Steinsaltz, Talmudic scholar par excellence and president of the revived Sanhedrin.
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By way of abrupt contrast, consider the inflammatory words of this current candidate for the Knesset, Jeremy Gimpel, drawn from a speech he gave in a Florida church in 2011:
Imagine if the Golden Dome – I’m being recorded so I can’t say ‘blown up’ – but let’s say the Dome was blown up, right? And we laid the cornerstone of the Temple in Jerusalem. Can you imagine? None of you would be here – all of you would be like, “I’m going to Israel, right?” No one would be here, it would be incredible!”
Alongside these of Harun Yahya, from his conversation with the rabbinic delegation from the Sanhedrin:
Out of a sense of collective responsibility for world peace and for all humanity we have found it timely to call to the World and exclaim that there is a way out for all peoples. It is etched in a call to all humanity: We are all the sons of one father, the descendants of Adam, and all humanity is but a single family. Peace among Nations will be achieved through building the House of G-d, where all peoples will serve as foreseen by King Solomon in his prayers at the dedication of the First Holy Temple. Come let us love and respect one another, and love and honor and hold our heavenly Father in awe. Let us establish a house of prayer in His name in order to worship and serve Him together, for the sake of His great compassion. He surely does not want the blood of His creations spilled, but prefers love and peace among all mankind. We pray to the Almighty Creator, that you harken to our Call. Together – each according to his or her ability – we shall work towards the building of the House of Prayer for All Nations on the Temple Mount in peace and mutual understanding.
Note particularly, in Joel Richardson’s piece, this quote attributed to Rabbi Hollander:
It is said that the structure of the Dome in Haram E-Sharrif (the Temple Mount) was originally meant by (Caliph) Omar to be a House of Prayer for Jews, and the Al-Aqsa for Muslims.
When considering Gimpel’s remark, bear in mind also that Yehuda Etzion was imprisoned in the early 1980s for his part in a conspiracy to blow up the Dome of the Rock –a four year effort which included the recruitment of an air force pilot, the theft of military explosives, and the making of 28 bombs — oy — which was only called off when no rabbi could be found to give it his official blessing, and which resulted in a trial at which the judge praised the defendants for their “pioneering ethos”.
Zenpundit is a blog dedicated to exploring the intersections of foreign policy, history, military theory, national security,strategic thinking, futurism, cognition and a number of other esoteric pursuits.
