Obviously suicide attacks (in the name of Islamic extremism and anti-capitalism) have been hot news items since 9/11. Western cultures (and the vicitim in the article below) see these acts as despicable, monstrous, and cowardly, and maybe even insane. W was the poster boy for dismissing the attackers at face value, and most of the country agreed, especially right after 9/11. At that time and still partly now I was 100% behind bulldozing the Taliban and anyone associated with al-Qaeda, and asking questions later.
Murdering innocent people is horrible, and inexcusable. But why don't we ask "why" more often? --This is not the liberal "we must deserve it" theory.-- I recently raised the question of "how can we ever beat them if we don't understand their motives?" to my stepmother in Iowa, and she said "who cares, they're evil and that's all that matters. We need to blow them all up." Hearing her say that, without ANY interest in knowing ANYTHING about these people, just felt, well, incomplete. Something is missing. To beat cockroaches, don't we study them first to understand their motives? We can never negotiate with them, but we can know more about them, and hopefully minimize their actions. "Understanding" is not the same as "condoning."
As the war drags on and the suicide attacks continue, I am wondering more and more, what the HELL is motivating these people (other than insanity because I don't really believe that anymore.) Are they just killer cockroaches, or something smarter than that? Is there any sense in reasoning with them, or not? Why doesn't anyone know this? Last I heard Obama wants to try it, with a lot of hoots and hollers from people like my stepmother. Or, are our cultures SO vastly different, that we'll never agree? Kind of like the movie Independence Day where the aliens just wanted to kill everyone for no reason? I guess it's possibly but I kind of doubt that. They're not Nazis that want to invade the world...we're not our grandfathers stopping the spread of communism. It seems like this version of Nazi keeps to themselves, at least as far as I know. They're just mad at western culture, right? (Really, desperately, insanely mad.)
So I guess the question is, are these extremists pure tools of Satanic evil, with whom we'll never be able to negotiate, and the only way to beat them is to kill them one by one, and also hope to somehow stop the education of future extremists? It's definitely possible, but my western logic tells me otherwise. These people are just way too pissed off at something that we're doing, or that our leaders are doing, and I just feel like we should be looking at that a little closer. Wow, never thought I'd be writing something like this, but then again I never thought we'd still be in Iraq 7 years later, with bin Laden still on the loose, and my trust in W all but gone.
If a guy on the street punches another guy, is it the victim's fault because he must have done something wrong to piss off the puncher? No. Is it ever right to hit? No. But I do think the motive is something to consider, is all, before completely dismissing it as insanity.
I also must disclose that I read the book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man recently, in which a retired secret agent describes the US's hidden agenda behind its foreign aid since WWII and the Marshall Plan - basically we loan other countries huge sums of money (or infrastructure projects) that we know they can never pay back, and then we control them forever. If the leader of that country smells a rat and rejects the offer, we find a way to replace the leader. (He uses Saddam as an example - which is a reach I know.) It's definitely conspiracy theory, and has been rejected by most experts as purely fiction. But if any of it's true, yikes.
Article mentioned in 1st paragraph-
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081114/ap_on_re_as/as_afghanistan
Taliban kill mullah critical of suicide attacksBy RAHIM FAIEZ, Associated Press Writer Rahim Faiez, Associated Press Writer Fri Nov 14, 8:05 am ET
KABUL, Afghanistan – Suspected Taliban militants killed a religious leader in western Afghanistan after he criticized the use of suicide attacks as a weapon of war in the country, an Afghan official said Friday.
Militants kidnapped Shamsudin Agha in Farah province's Anar Dara district on Tuesday, days after he led prayers condemning the practice of using suicide attacks, said provincial police Chief Abdul Ghafar Watandar.
Suicide attacks are one of the Taliban's preferred tactics in their assaults against Afghan and foreign troops. Most of the victims of such attacks have been civilians.
Authorities recovered Agha's body on Wednesday night, Watandar said.
Violence by the Taliban and other insurgent groups has spiked this year to record levels. Attacks are up 30 percent from 2007, military officials say.
On Thursday, another suicide car bomber struck a U.S. patrol, killing eight Afghan civilians and one U.S. soldier and wounding 74 civilians, Afghan officials said.
Nearly 1,000 civilians are among the approximately 5,400 people killed in insurgency-related violence this year, according to a tally by The Associated Press of figures provided by Afghan and international officials. Most of the reported dead have been militants.
Elsewhere, U.S. troops killed four al-Qaida-linked militants during a raid in eastern Afghanistan on Thursday.
The troops were targeting militants who helped local Taliban leaders bring Arab and other foreign fighters into Afghanistan, the U.S. military said in a statement Friday.
None of the militants killed was identified.
Friday, November 14, 2008
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
A president who can comprehend complex situations is a bad thing?
You are seriously arguing that a dumb president is better than a smart one? That one who is intellectually lazy is better than one who actually does his homework on important issues?
Well we just had 8 years of a case study in anti-intellectualism and I will still wager some serious beer that history will view the bush administration as an overall failure.
Also, who is really supporting our troops? Those who send them into battle without armored humvees, up-to-date body armor and a well thought out plan for victory, or those who question why these wrongs aren't corrected?
The answer is everyone respects our troops so stop with this pathetic faux patriotism argument.
Here is an example of the intellectual disaster that was the Bush administration. Where ridiculous statements like "no one could have anticipated sectarian violence in Iraq" became the norm.
Well we just had 8 years of a case study in anti-intellectualism and I will still wager some serious beer that history will view the bush administration as an overall failure.
Also, who is really supporting our troops? Those who send them into battle without armored humvees, up-to-date body armor and a well thought out plan for victory, or those who question why these wrongs aren't corrected?
The answer is everyone respects our troops so stop with this pathetic faux patriotism argument.
Here is an example of the intellectual disaster that was the Bush administration. Where ridiculous statements like "no one could have anticipated sectarian violence in Iraq" became the norm.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Bill Ayers, Intellectual
From David Horowitz' Radical Son, p. 117:
When Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not run for reelection, many activists concluded that they had the power to topple presidents. Hayden's riot at the Democratic Convention was almost an inevitable hubris of these events.
So was the election of the new leadership of SDS. Until then, the organization had incarnated the ethos of the New Left--spontaneous and antiauthoritarian. But the new SDS president, Bernadine Dohrn, announced on taking office that she was "a revolutionary Communist," while with calculated and (to me) repellent pride, her vice president, Billy Ayers, declared that he had not read a book in a year. Learning from the past seemed to me the only way progress was possible. I had read through shelves of books in an effort to find out why previous revolutions had gone wrong. Now, the anti-intellectualism already present in the Movement had become a revolutionary badge of honor.
(emphasis mine)
When Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not run for reelection, many activists concluded that they had the power to topple presidents. Hayden's riot at the Democratic Convention was almost an inevitable hubris of these events.
So was the election of the new leadership of SDS. Until then, the organization had incarnated the ethos of the New Left--spontaneous and antiauthoritarian. But the new SDS president, Bernadine Dohrn, announced on taking office that she was "a revolutionary Communist," while with calculated and (to me) repellent pride, her vice president, Billy Ayers, declared that he had not read a book in a year. Learning from the past seemed to me the only way progress was possible. I had read through shelves of books in an effort to find out why previous revolutions had gone wrong. Now, the anti-intellectualism already present in the Movement had become a revolutionary badge of honor.
(emphasis mine)
Reply to "Amen"
From one of my favorite African American Intellectuals, Thomas Sowell:
November 11, 2008, 0:00 a.m.
‘Intellectuals’
Ignorance has consequences.
By Thomas Sowell
Among the many wonders to be expected from an Obama administration, if Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times is to be believed, is ending “the anti-intellectualism that has long been a strain in American life.”
He cited Adlai Stevenson, the suave and debonair governor of Illinois, who twice ran for president against Eisenhower in the 1950s, as an example of an intellectual in politics.
Intellectuals, according to Mr. Kristof, are people who are “interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity,” people who “read the classics.”
It is hard to know whether to laugh or cry.
Adlai Stevenson was certainly regarded as an intellectual by intellectuals in the 1950s. But, half a century later, facts paint a very different picture.
Historian Michael Beschloss, among others, has noted that Stevenson “could go quite happily for months or years without picking up a book.” But Stevenson had the airs of an intellectual — the form, rather than the substance.
What is more telling, form was enough to impress the intellectuals, not only then but even now, years after the facts have been revealed, though apparently not to Mr. Kristof.
That is one of many reasons why intellectuals are not taken as seriously by others as they take themselves.
As for reading the classics, President Harry Truman, whom no one thought of as an intellectual, was a voracious reader of heavyweight stuff like Thucydides and read Cicero in the original Latin. When Chief Justice Carl Vinson quoted in Latin, Truman was able to correct him.
Yet intellectuals tended to think of the unpretentious and plain-spoken Truman as little more than a country bumpkin.
Similarly, no one ever thought of President Calvin Coolidge as an intellectual. Yet Coolidge also read the classics in the White House. He read both Latin and Greek, and read Dante in the original Italian, since he spoke several languages. It was said that the taciturn Coolidge could be silent in five different languages.
The intellectual levels of politicians are just one of the many things that intellectuals have grossly misjudged for years on end.
During the 1930s, some of the leading intellectuals in America condemned our economic system and pointed to the centrally planned Soviet economy as a model — all this at a time when literally millions of people were starving to death in the Soviet Union, from a famine in a country with some of the richest farmland in Europe and historically a large exporter of food.
New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for telling the intelligentsia what they wanted to hear — that claims of starvation in the Ukraine were false.
After British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge reported from the Ukraine on the massive deaths from starvation there, he was ostracized after returning to England and unable to find a job.
More than half a century later, when the archives of the Soviet Union were finally opened up under Mikhail Gorbachev, it turned out that about six million people had died in that famine — about the same number as the people killed in Hitler’s Holocaust.
In the 1930s, it was the intellectuals who pooh-poohed the dangers from the rise of Hitler and urged Western disarmament.
It would be no feat to fill a big book with all the things on which intellectuals were grossly mistaken, just in the 20th century — far more so than ordinary people.
History fully vindicates the late William F. Buckley’s view that he would rather be ruled by people represented by the first 100 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard.
How have intellectuals managed to be so wrong, so often? By thinking that because they are knowledgeable — or even expert — within some narrow band out of the vast spectrum of human concerns, that makes them wise guides to the masses and to the rulers of the nation.
But the ignorance of Ph.D.s is still ignorance and high-IQ groupthink is still groupthink, which is the antithesis of real thinking.
© 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
—
COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
November 11, 2008, 0:00 a.m.
‘Intellectuals’
Ignorance has consequences.
By Thomas Sowell
Among the many wonders to be expected from an Obama administration, if Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times is to be believed, is ending “the anti-intellectualism that has long been a strain in American life.”
He cited Adlai Stevenson, the suave and debonair governor of Illinois, who twice ran for president against Eisenhower in the 1950s, as an example of an intellectual in politics.
Intellectuals, according to Mr. Kristof, are people who are “interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity,” people who “read the classics.”
It is hard to know whether to laugh or cry.
Adlai Stevenson was certainly regarded as an intellectual by intellectuals in the 1950s. But, half a century later, facts paint a very different picture.
Historian Michael Beschloss, among others, has noted that Stevenson “could go quite happily for months or years without picking up a book.” But Stevenson had the airs of an intellectual — the form, rather than the substance.
What is more telling, form was enough to impress the intellectuals, not only then but even now, years after the facts have been revealed, though apparently not to Mr. Kristof.
That is one of many reasons why intellectuals are not taken as seriously by others as they take themselves.
As for reading the classics, President Harry Truman, whom no one thought of as an intellectual, was a voracious reader of heavyweight stuff like Thucydides and read Cicero in the original Latin. When Chief Justice Carl Vinson quoted in Latin, Truman was able to correct him.
Yet intellectuals tended to think of the unpretentious and plain-spoken Truman as little more than a country bumpkin.
Similarly, no one ever thought of President Calvin Coolidge as an intellectual. Yet Coolidge also read the classics in the White House. He read both Latin and Greek, and read Dante in the original Italian, since he spoke several languages. It was said that the taciturn Coolidge could be silent in five different languages.
The intellectual levels of politicians are just one of the many things that intellectuals have grossly misjudged for years on end.
During the 1930s, some of the leading intellectuals in America condemned our economic system and pointed to the centrally planned Soviet economy as a model — all this at a time when literally millions of people were starving to death in the Soviet Union, from a famine in a country with some of the richest farmland in Europe and historically a large exporter of food.
New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for telling the intelligentsia what they wanted to hear — that claims of starvation in the Ukraine were false.
After British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge reported from the Ukraine on the massive deaths from starvation there, he was ostracized after returning to England and unable to find a job.
More than half a century later, when the archives of the Soviet Union were finally opened up under Mikhail Gorbachev, it turned out that about six million people had died in that famine — about the same number as the people killed in Hitler’s Holocaust.
In the 1930s, it was the intellectuals who pooh-poohed the dangers from the rise of Hitler and urged Western disarmament.
It would be no feat to fill a big book with all the things on which intellectuals were grossly mistaken, just in the 20th century — far more so than ordinary people.
History fully vindicates the late William F. Buckley’s view that he would rather be ruled by people represented by the first 100 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard.
How have intellectuals managed to be so wrong, so often? By thinking that because they are knowledgeable — or even expert — within some narrow band out of the vast spectrum of human concerns, that makes them wise guides to the masses and to the rulers of the nation.
But the ignorance of Ph.D.s is still ignorance and high-IQ groupthink is still groupthink, which is the antithesis of real thinking.
© 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
—
COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
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