Wednesday, May 30, 2007
A Few Things
I believe in the rights of gays to adopt children or have their own as they see fit, legalization of marijuana, and that the First Amendment protects both pornography and hate speech. I support public schools and would double or triple their funding if they could be held accountable for truly liberal education. I believe that government should seed the creation of mass systems of public transportation which will then run for profit or at least at cost. I believe Creationism is the product of fearful and ignorant minds. I believe God is a concept that arises naturally from biological evolution, yet a concept we should take very seriously. I believe in human progress and in individual liberty. I believe the Earth is shrinking rapidly in terms of humanity's impact upon it. I believe that if humanity does not learn within a few short centuries how to get along (possibly as few as one), human civilization will cease its upward turn, and will shrink bitterly and endure an endless night. In the service of these beliefs, I am also apparently something of a neocon, depending on your definition, and am still generally of the opinion that when confronting Iraq we were not so much wrong as ahead of our time. At the strategic level, my views are reasonably echoed here by Norman Podhoretz.
24 comments:
It's amazing how many things we agree on, Don, up until the end there of course. I guess we disagree so often because we tend to dwell upon the subject we disagree the most about.
Funny, eh?
Gays, pot, and porn, yep. Hate speech only if it's not inciting to violence or lawbreaking. Mass trans, YES! SoCal is so far behind on this. God, sure, just keep it out of my face. Help each other and the environment, including animals within reason. Iraq was a mistake, though I supported it at first when I thought it'd just be a bit o'bombing to teach Saddam a lesson. The worst thing about it is now we've lost ability to deal with Iran.
Paula, you are wrong. We are perfectly able to deal with Iran. We simply need leaders who do not think the answer to every problem is to throw tons of ordnance at it. I will not comment on your belief that bombing a nation's citizenry is the best way to teach its leader "a lesson".
Zen - How is Podhoretz a lunatic? In other words, at what point do his facts go astray, or his interpretation of how they should be used? Obviously you disagree with his opening statement. Starting from the historical record we all do agree upon, where does ho go wrong, and what makes it lunacy?
Joe - What we disagree on is what to do "in the service of these beliefs" we do agree on. The horrific wars that today's alleged peace activists are in my opinion working to enable will more than undo all the positives that I've listed, and more besides.
Zen again - I haven't swallowed Podhoretz whole. But history repeats because human nature doesn't change, and some of his warnings are more than valid.
History repeats because people refuse to learn and acknowledge it.
For instance, a lot of people feel that the biggest problem with Vietnam was that people didn't respect the troops, so the whole "support the troops" campaign was started to avoid that. However, there was a lot more wrong with Vietnam than just the attitude of the American populace. There was, for example, the fact that the military and it's leaders had little understanding of the enemy, their motivations and tactics, and that alowed the situation to deteriorate into a "quagmire". This is how history has repeated itself already despite the warm fuzzies we have for the soldiers themselves.
Another great example is the war on drugs, which is based on the pretense that this is somehow diferent than the failed prohibition of alcohol.
History lessons have gotten weaker and weaker in schools over time, so future generations will be doomed to make the same mistakes with greater frequency. I wouldn't be surprised if the Black Plague came back by 2100. Or another freaking Crusade.
I know....I'm not very optimistic when it comes to my species.
Although it would be the logical course for big government, I would prefer the decriminalization of MJ as opposed to outright legalization. The latter would create heavy-handed oversight complications with, at the very least, taxation, licensing, and delivery. With decrim, simplicity rules the day and users get to tell the DEA to fuck off. The "manufacture" and delivery system for the current crop (!) of users is pretty well set in place - nothing upon which the government could improve.
BUT, until there is a THC-level instant DUI test, law enforcement will not budge from their position in the "war."
Oh, and I'm pretty disappointed in the whole medical MJ movement, which IMO is going way beyond the advocacy of treatment in trying to backdoor legalization. The majority of rampant supporters of medical MJ are fellow travellers who are obviously just recreational users. They should drop the BS and come right out and say "We want to get high."
I think that puts a fine enough point on three words in Don's post. TYVM.
I read Podhoretz's article, and agree with little of it. Still, I thought it worth a debate until the last paragraph. This sentence is the one that knocked me out of the box:
"It now remains to be seen whether this president, battered more mercilessly and with less justification than any other in living memory,...."
Jeezus! George W. Bush has EARNED and RICHLY DESERVES every ounce of battering he has taken, especially over his foreign policy. He is a walking disaster in every sense of the word. The examples are too numerous to be listed here. For the author to praise this hopeless tool of a president puts everything else in this opinion piece under suspicion.
Spot on, Harry. I'm still waiting for him to "restore honor and dignity to the White House" as he's promised. All he's done is increase the secrecy and corruption.
"Honor and dignity" for this mob of mendacious sociopaths are things saved for photo ops and other press activities. Compared to these guys, Clinton was nothing more than a smart overgrown, horny frat boy who made good.
Clinton was nothing more than a smart, overgrown, horny frat boy who made good. Decent President, too, so far as that goes.
It makes no difference to me, within this discussion, how fucked up the current Administration is. Which of Podhoretz's concerns do you disagree with? I can think of a few on my own. But no one has challenged the overall thesis that Iran et al. are gaining position to become dominant players a decade or so hence and that this will likely lead to much expanded warfare. The lessons of history are being taken from the 1930s, not the 1960s ... as well as the axiomatic fact that what drives war is conflict over resources, or their dissemination, and control thereof.
But with regard to Vietnam, the lesson could be that a quagmire results if you don't fight to win from the outset, in other words if you don't over-fight the war from the get-go. None of this escalation bullshit. You should start fully escalated. It is now acknowledged that our mistakes in Iraq included not just the attempts at de-Baathification but the relatively gentle manner in which we dealt with ongoing insurgencies. Weakness or a perception thereof encourages more trouble, as anyone who's ever walked an Oakland street at night knows.
How did Vietnam end? The NV were encouraged by our increasing disinterest in the war and kept mounting the pressure to build on that disinterest and opposition. After the peace accords of '73, the U.S. Congress, in the interests of "peace", soon canceled all aid to SV, and NV was able to ignore all the agreements they'd signed. Ask a few million boat people what they think of that sort of peace. Looks to me like we're intent on ignoring history yet again.
(WRT the drug war, I think we should stop using it as a pretext to fuck around in other countries immediately. The drug problem, such as there is one, is at home, not the Colombian highlands.)
Perhaps the biggest lesson of Vietnam was that we love to get into fights so much that we fail to pick them wisely.
Perhaps the biggest lesson of Vietnam was that we love to get into fights so much that we fail to pick them wisely.
That's not far from how I see it. But I'd flip it over and expand it to say that we're fundamentally not a warlike people yet have a culture that is paranoid about failure. We fear it so much, we overstep ourselves to forestall risky situations such as we found ourselves in around 1941-42. So to avoid that we occasionally try to prevent threats germinating overseas. But this doesn't work because, not being warlike at heart, we haven't the stomach for it, not unless we really know in our bones we are threatened (as in WWII). We aren't now, and we weren't in the 60s. Yet still, we elect people who look at the long picture and figure that getting into a 1941 situation again, with weapons and delivery the way it is nowadays, would just not do.
To people like Podhoretz who wish we'd stopped Hitler in '38, meddling in the Middle East seems like a (regrettable) necessity. But it seems we can only do so much, and so that 1941-like situation is inevitable. It'll be closer to 2021 (yes, I'm crazy enough to estimate a date), and there will be a good chance the U.S. and possibly much of the planet will never be the same again. Kinda bums me out, man.
Actually, I don't think Podhoretz feels that meddling in the Middle East is all that regrettable. He works himself into a lather about the need to eventually bomb the hell out of Iran. He doesn't bring in a whole bunch of factors such as the apparent relative weakness of Ahmadinejad's government, and Ahmadinejads great unpopularity among the populace. He tries to compare the willingness to appease in 1938 with the unwillingness to use force now. In 1938, people had relatively recently lived through the worst war since the 30years war. They were still exhausted by it and unwilling to start it up again, not to mention being brutalized by The Depression. Nowadays, I think it's more a matter of talking until talking clearly does no good at all, a point which we probably haven't reached. Talking is preferable to firing weapons, and any military authority who isn't basically insane would say the same. Podhoretz doesn't seem to understand that. IS there something weak about not wanting to make the situation in Iraq even harder to deal with by opening a front with Iran, who would surely march if attacked from the air? He excoriates Britain for not reacting with military force when its' Marines and Sailors were taken. It's easy to do that from your desk in the think tank. He wasn't there, and he isn't privy to all the considerations that Britain must take into account. I wonder whether he thinks we should've attacked North Korea when the USS Pueblo was taken.
It's one thing to be prepared for war if need be, and another to start wars under the false pretense of preventing something when your clearly looking to seize an asset and control it in perpetuity. Now that we've become embroiled in Iraq, we are weaker overall, and stretched badly, on top of which the nation does not support this war as they did in 1941. I hope it was worth it. George is going to ride off into the darkenss, leaving us all with a big shit sandwich for dinner.
Don, I'm going to fisk it for you.
You've got to stop posting this crazy shit though, Don:
"we're fundamentally not a warlike people"
This is bonkers. You are a strongly militarist state, which spends half the world's total spending on "defence"! Not warlike? That's like saying grass is not all that green.
Fisk what? Why bother? I could criticize a bit of the Podhoretz thing if I wished. As for this post, I'm moving forward.
All that spending doesn't make us militaristic. Maybe it means we're rich and don't know what to do with it.
A militaristic state would have a militaristic aspect. Nowhere in the U.S. do you find that. Virtually everyone is going about their lives quite unmilitaristically. By "not warlike" I meant we don't go about thumping our shields and making a lifestyle out of being warriors, as you will find to a somewhat greater degree some other places. The international media may give a different impression but they don't live here.
I'm going to have to disagree as well, but in so verbose a fashion that it's better to make a post of it.
Is "fisk" a new verb? How does one fisk? Have I ever fisked?
Don, are you living on this planet? Or some other one? YOu have the most heavily militarised society in the world, bar Myanmar. You people worship the military in a way that no European has for sixty years
Joe, "fisking" means to take some bs from the "other side" and give it a thorough up and down kicking.
YOu have the most heavily militarised society in the world, bar Myanmar. You people worship the military in a way that no European has for sixty years
Yes, and Norman Podhoretz is the one who's mad. Indeed.
I HAVE fisked! I'm a FISKER!!!!!!
YOu have the most heavily militarised society in the world,
Certainly not per capita, mon Zen. I mean, North Korea? Those who aren't starving are serving in the military, which is Kim's version of being wealthy.
Are there no other nations with a penchant for public display of humongous and cheesy portraits of their top dog? Africa's got to have at least a couple.
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