Contraries at CIA

So, I'm prepping my resume. I read these two quotes as part of my due diligence, making sure the, ahem, company culture is one that I can live with. Now, do these two quotes represent past failure and future promise? What it looks like from the outside, and what it feels like from the inside? Or the Senate Intelligence Committee vs the House Intelligence Committee?

So -- just how should I present myself in my resume? Am I to be a "team player" or a "rugged individualist'?

Fun and Games

Play vs branding? Nintendo vs PlayStation? Master vs hack?

This juxtaposition of Miyamoto's single-minded focus on fun with the extraordinary caution implicit in Sony's somewhat arbitrary "tipping point" of 53 million illustrates, for me, the exatraordinary impact possible when you set two simple quotes side by side -- if and when they're read by an appropriately-furnished mind.

Hey -- I'm having fun!

Battling Goliaths

I set out in pursuit of two quotes that would illustrate this particular pattern after reading this paragraph:

The Israelis see themselves as David confronting a mighty Arab Goliath, whereas many Europeans view Israel as a Goliath against a Palestinian David.

Symposium, Israel & Europe: An Expanding Abyss, Jerusalem, June 28, 2004
http://www.jcpa.org/phas/phas-adenauer-f04.htm

In geopolitical terms, each of the two claims to the coveted "David" role can be defended and critiqued, while the truth isn't as simple as either proposition would make it seem.

What is most interesting here is the mere fact of a battle as to who whall be considered "David" -- because whoever wins the "battle for David" gains enormous "underdog sympathy" and a strong presumption of holding the "high moral ground".

The power of the "David vs Goliath" meme is extraordinary.

Global election

Doomed to Quote It?

Those who do not learn from history, in Santillana's well-worn phrase, are doomed to repeat it -- in this case, almost word for word, in the same place, a century later.

I came across these quotes via the A Tiny Revolution blog, which got them from a review piece by Tony Judt in The New York Review of Books, which also cited Napoleon, speaking just a little to the east of General Maude, a century earlier yet:

Oh Egyptians... I have not come to you except for the purpose of restoring your rights from the hands of the oppressors

And apparently the NYRB got the quotes in turn from Rashid Khalidi's Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East.

WTG y'all!

Democracy Squared

Two recent usages of the phrase, democracy is democracy, one with a but at one end, one with a but at the other.

I actually think this is one of President Bush's better statements, but a great deal depends on the force to be given to the but in each case... Democracy is tricky that way, it sometimes works against the wishes of those who proclaim its virtue.

Sources:

BBC News piece
Google cache of Moscow Times piece

Torture by Music

Should I mention the raised eyebrow caused by the idea that the Brand Davidians were exposed to worse sound effects than prisoners at Gitmo? The Dalai Lama was sufficiently disturbed at the use of Buddhist chants to annoy Christians belonging to an Adventist offshoot to protest the matter -- but then His Holiness doesn't recommend the conversion of Christians to Buddhism, he suggests instead that they should take a deeper look at their own tradition.

And what music exactly were the Gitmo captives exposed to? We learn this from a later paragraph in the article in the Gitmo quote:

David Sheffer, a senior State Department human rights official in the Clinton administration who teaches law at George Washington University, said the procedure of shackling prisoners to the floor in a state of undress while playing loud music - the Guantanamo sources said it included the bands Limp Bizkit and Rage Against the Machine, and the rapper Eminem - and lights clearly constituted torture.

I suppose the choice is made with an appropriate understanding of the significance of public diplomacy -- in this case, attuning culturally deprived Islamists to the finer nuances of western culture?

Not Innocent?

It seems the idea of juxtaposing Quotes makes sense to others besides myself: I got the juxtaposition here via a Tiny Revolution blog piece titled Thank God Our Leaders Are Completely Different From Osama Bin Laden at:

http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/000171.html

Excellent work, Jonathan Schwarz!

God will know...

I was struck by the almost exact correspondence between the Ayatollah's comment and that of the papal legate, Arnald-Amaury, at Beziers in the early 13th century CE. Some things regrettably never change...

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As a footnote: I have also prepared a "reduced" image of a pair of related DoubleQuotes for anyone wishing to post it to a blog with column-width constraints that prevent the larger image from being used:

I have called these two iterations of a highly similar meme "Theory" and "Practice" respectively, because President Bush is enunciating a principle under which other nations may be judged, the al-Qaida spokesman is describing a battlefield doctrine for application in the field.

It is also interesting to compare:

Another group, Aryan Action, praised the attacks of 11 September, saying: 'Either you're fighting with the Jews against al-Qaeda or you support al-Qaeda fighting against the Jews.'

Ed Vulliamy, Anthrax attacks' 'work of neo-Nazis', Observer, October 28, 2001
http://www.guardian.co.uk/anthrax/story/0,1520,582232,00.html

You lead the prayers

Here is a subtle one. It seems to me that bin Laden's friend, Jamal Khalifa, chooses an interesting manner of letting us know bin Laden is not someone he would expect to be a leader: he tells us that Osama would defer to others to lead the prayers. As it happens, the matter of deciding who shall lead the prayers also crops up in hadith describing the end times, when the Mahdi first defers to Jesus and invites him to lead them, and Jesus then defers in turn to the Mahdi (see Sahih Muslim, Book 1, No. 0293).

Gracious manners are of some significance in Islam: the prophet Mohammed was known for his courtesy.

Links and Handshakes

Hey, I am not suggesting that Secretary Rumsfeld in any way aided Saddam Hussein in his support of al-Qaida, absolutely not -- but I do think the pool of actors in geopolitics is fairly small.

Other handshakes of interest include that between the Dalai Lama and Shoko Asahara, guru of Aum Shinrikyo, and that between Mother Teresa of Calcutta and Jean-Claude Duvalier of Haiti, who presented her with the Legion d'Honneur (she ia reported to have said of Duvalier and his wife, "loved their poor" and "their love was reciprocated".

As I say, it's a small world...

Global Persecutions

[Quotable "reduced" image here]

My purpose here is to show a commonality in the way Christians and Muslims each feel -- with reason -- about persecution of their respective fellow-believers. In each case, I have chosen a quotation which utilizes the phrase global persecution. Perhaps each statement will help those who feel passionately about it to understand those who feel no less passionately about the other.

I could have created two other interesting DoubleQuotes by using one or other of the two quotes used here with the following:

One issue, however, has taken the foreign affairs community completely by surprise: global religious persecution. A worldwide report by two British researchers, Kevin Boyle and Juliet Sheen, notes, "Religious persecution of minority faiths, forcible conversion, desecration of religious sites, the proscribing of beliefs and pervasive discrimination, killings and torture, are daily occurrences at the end of the twentieth century." The victims include Christians, Buddhists, Baha'is, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs and animists.

Allen Hertzke and Daniel Philpott, Defending the Faiths, National Interest, Fall 2000
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2751/is_2000_Fall/ai_65576877

Equally, this third quote could have followed the first two in an extended analysis, which might have incorporated other related insights and tackled a wider terrotory, in which global persecution would have been just one of the issues considered.

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Sources:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2002/116/44.0.html
http://www.as-sahwah.com/viewarticle.php?articleID=603&pageID=193&pageID=223

Net War

Two very interesting articles, each one worth reading, presenting two sides of the same picture. My sources:

http://www.sftt.org/dwarchive.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1570-2004Oct1

Underground Cinema

I'm dropping this in during a relaxation-pause in some deadline writing, no time for writing commentary as yet -- but I believe this particular pair of DoubleQuotes may be my favorite thus far...

Realistic and Optimistic

I began by thinking I'd pair the first quote with this one:

As for the documentary's "research," a film positioning itself as a scrupulously factual "alternative" to "Fahrenheit 9/11" should not inflate Mr. Bush's early business "success" with Arbusto Energy (an outright bust for most of its investors) or the number of children he's had vaccinated in Iraq ("more than 22 million," the movie claims, in a country whose total population is 25 million).

Frank Rich, Now on DVD: The Passion of the Bush, October 3, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/arts/03rich.html

On reflection, I think the pairing I've now used above is more to the point -- the Frank Rich business isn't about Bush in person, which weakens it, and besides, it seems to me that the "optimism and realism" conjunction is just too wonderful to miss..

Family Values

[Quotable "reduced" image here]

I'd better make it completely clear here that it's not my intention to link the IRA and the New Testament in such a way as to endorse either one, although presumably the apocalyptic anti-papist Protestantism of Rev. Ian Paisley has been matched to some degree by the fierce Catholicism of some IRA personnel (early on, this tendency would give rise to Jimmy Steele's slogan, Good and Holy Men for Good and Holy Causes).

Religion is inextricably intertwined in the motivations of many terrorists and insurgency fighters, and my point here is simply and only to indicate the cross-cultual and cross-millennial force of the separation from family and friends which many forms of discipline and dedication involve.

Quoting in other blogs

I welcome bloggers who would like to "quote" the occasional DoubleQuote in their own blogs. I have realized, though, that those who wish to do so may find the usual format of my "beads" frustrating, because many blog formats will automatically reduce the size of my .GIF images -- which doesn't make for easy reading of their texts to say the least.

I shall accordingly make smaller, "quotable" versions of some DoubleQuotes which seem short enough to fit in a reduced format, as and when the mood strikes me and time pertmits, and post links to the smaller versions immediately under the larger ones for those who wish to use them.

Bryan Alexander uses one of these reduced images to quote me in his Infocult blog:

Another option, which will work for all the DoubleQuotes, not just the ones I have made reduced images of, is to download the image you wish to quote, full size, and use thumbnail software to post it as a thumbnail with a link to the original, full-size image.