Section: BackChannels (USA)
FTAC: Moscow, Islamic Terrorism –> Reactionary Politics
Old message on this message but perhaps new distillation. The prompt for conversation was a Henry Farrell piece appearing in The Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/04/10/hungarys-government-wants-to-shut-down-its-most-prominent-university-that-may-be-backfiring/ — Lines of compatible feudal power: Putin –>...
FTAC: Reprise: How ISIL Serves Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran
Again: Assad (w/ Putin and Khamenei looking on) incubated ISIL as a tool with several interesting functions: –A “jihadi” trap that has drawn thousands of fighters to itself, including from Chechnya, to serve as a “Kill Zone” for the type. Not a bad idea, eh? –However: the same ploy turns out for bribing the west — “Assad OR The Terrorists” in...
FTAC: Syria – “Expect ‘Mission Creep’”
Posted to YouTube by The New York Times, April 7, 2017. Comment: The public presentation of conflict may attempt to keep separate Syria, Ukraine, Russia, and Iran, but I don’t think the Kremlin (this is a good comment for Kremlin Watch) has an “Off” button in association with the defense of the autocratic feudal past that each dictatorship...
Private Domain: USA: A Note on “Proprietary Government”
Read as I do. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was poised to ride this momentum into Northeast Asia last week, but instead sustained a series of self-inflicted wounds. Before even departing Washington, he broke tradition by not inviting the State Department press corps on his plane, needlessly damaging relations with the media and forgoing the...
FTAC: Worlds Closer Together
Inspiration for the response came from the “blame America first” community intent on demonizing the same for past horrors, and in this instance the horror was the “Halabja chemical attack” ordered by Saddam Hussein against the Kurdish community at the end of the Iran-Iraq War. In the second part, an accusing and conspiratorial view of the United...
Reflexive Control Process: “Allahu Akbar Terrorism” -> New Nationalism –> Neo-Feudalism
The prize of science: prediction with increasing certainty AKA “predictive validity”. Why should models in the social sciences, much including political science, differ from those proven useful in biology or physics? And what if apparent terrorism — the act as defined by the most immediate actor — were to mask another design altogether? When the...
Navalny on Medvedev – How That Other Half Do Live!
Alexie Navalny Related in the news: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/24/russias-conviction-of-opposition-leader-alexei-navalny-arbitrary-european-court-says – 2/24/2016. Dmitry Medvedev Related in the news: “Kremlin Critic Says Russian Premier, Dmitri Medvedev, Built Property Empire on Graft” –...
Murray at Middlebury
Four days ago, conservative libertarian Charles Murray stood on a stage at Vermont’s Middlebury College to talk about his latest book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, with political science students. Instead of being heard out, this in Murray’s own words is what happened before a packed house: Then I went onstage, got...
BackChannels News Day, March 4, 2017
Today’s compilation may be light – what am I even doing here at the computer, and so early? Still, my eyes see a lot of political coverage from around the world having to do with the support of democracy and its liberal humanist values. This kind of post has had its own category on BackChannels for years, but has not been a staple for the...
Information Space in the Feudal Mode
Posted by eOne Films, October 26, 2012. Synopsis of a Different Kind of Script Putin’s mission: sustain feudalism in service to political absolutism and reap the benefits of sustained conflicts and, eventually, subjugated and taxed populations. KGB method: Reflexive Control via the indirect channeling of terrorism to promote the...
