Saturday, November 21, 2015

If This Was A Fundamentalist Christian and the Subject was Evolution...

From Breitbart:
Wednesday on Newsmax TV’s “The Steve Malzberg Show,” veteran journalist Sharyl Attkisson said her sources have told her that President Barack Obama does not want and will not read intelligence reports on groups “he does not consider terrorists,” despite being on a U.S. list of designated terrorists.

Attkisson said, “I have talked to people who have worked in the Obama administration who firmly believe he has made up his mind. I would say closed his mind, they say, to their intelligence that they’ve tried to bring him about various groups that he does not consider terrorists, even if they are on the U.S. list of designated terrorists. He has his own ideas, and there are those who’ve known him a long time who say this dates back to law school. He does not necessarily—you may think it’s a good trait you may think it’s a bad trait—he does not necessarily listen to the people with whom he disagrees. He seems to dig in. I would suppose because he thinks he’s right. He is facing formidable opposition on this particular point.”
 Instapundit points to this New York Times report:
A 2012 report by the United States Defense Intelligence Agency was direct: The growing chaos in Syria’s civil war was giving Islamic militants there and in Iraq the space to spread and flourish. The group, it said, could “declare an Islamic state through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria.”

“This particular report, this was one of those nobody wanted to see,” said Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who ran the defense agency at the time.

“It was disregarded by the White House,” he said. “It was disregarded by other elements in the intelligence community as a one-off report. Frankly, at the White House, it didn’t meet the narrative.”
If "narrative" means the telling of a story to you, you aren't spending enough time in the ivory tower:
The simplest way I can think to explain it is that it's a particular way of explaining everything that happens in a society. It is an ideology which seeks to explain every aspect of a civilisation from its own perspective. Societies function because people will hold similar metanarratives to be true, which gives people a common way of explaining, judging and functioning within society. 

Some possible examples of master narratives/metanarratives could be feminism, Marxism or certain extremely fundamental religious groups. Each will try to explain (and influence) every element of society... the roles of men and women, how an economy should work, what language should be used etc. etc. 
The other academic term for this is "reductionism," in  which you attempt to reduce complex problems to a simple (usually too simple) explanation: an example, all financial/economic problems are caused by international Jewish bankers.  Usually this term is a negative in academic circles, but metanarratives ARE JUST FINE.

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