Center for Strategic Communication

[ by Charles Cameron — bribery regarding bribery in Ukraine and Iraq, form & pattern recognition as analytic markers ]
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You might think it would be difficut to cap this, from Ukraine, which I quoted recently:

but I believe this, from Iraq, just might do the trick:

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Let me be explicit.

As an observer of the global scene, these two tweets are about bribery and corruption — but they are also recursive. As an analyst, I find that formal property, present in each case, compelling: these are not simply example of corruption, but of the corruption of the anti-corruption process.

But there’s more, there’s yet another form here, a pattern which allows us to connect otherwise unrelated dots. It is found in the doubling effect of the quick succession of the Ukrainean and Iraqi tweets. This pattern is that of repetition — more fancifully put, echo or rhyme. We see here something more than a simple isolated incident no matter how interesting — an being cognizant of that, we can be on the alert for it elsewhere in the future.

To the heuristics follow the money and cherchez la femme, I’d add take note of the form — use pattern recognition as an analytic tool to cut across disciplines and silos, and thus capture aspects of life’s complexity that the trammels of linear cause-and-effect thinking will tend to miss.

For the DoubleQuotes aficionado, these two tweets are a rich haul indeed.