Kolko at CP
The United States’ problem is compounded today by the deepening disparity between its military doctrines and reality, and by much else. When we discuss US foreign policy we must differentiate between the ideology and the motives that have guided it in the Western Hemisphere, from as early as 1823 when the Monroe Doctrine excluded the colonial European powers from any further expansion and left the entire region to the US, which even then was eyeing great parts of Mexico and the Spanish empire for itself. (Even today, only 82 per cent of all Americans speak English. Most of the others speak Spanish.) The US interventions that came much later in Europe were ad hoc responses to the crises between European nations that emerged from the breakup of colonialism, or to fears of communism – sometimes real but often fictional and convenient. Many of these responses were unpredictable and involved everything from a need to ensure the “credibility” of military power – as in Vietnam – to sheer ideological fixation and a belief that firepower would solve political challenges quickly, as in the case of the present war in Iraq. Crises in the Western Hemisphere, like those that emerged elsewhere since 1947, may also have involved unpredictability, but the US role in the West has often, perhaps always, possessed a crucial geopolitical dimension that rarely, perhaps never, existed in Asia or the Middle East. Economically and strategically one must always look at crises in the Western Hemisphere through a prism that is much older – and more vital to the United States’ real interests. Less than a fifth of its petroleum today comes from the entire Persian Gulf, where it is fighting what has become a major war. Wars in the Eastern Hemisphere take the US away from its own interest and history.
But the United States seeks and finds other problems. The Korean War first…
Michael Anderson:
If we’re looking for enemies, it seems we will create them:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/05/world/05patrol.html?_r=1&th&emc=th
I’m not convinced, given the totality of the present system of global capitalism; of which Russia has been a part of all along, even as a sort of exile as the USSR; that Russia is a real enemy….but that could change as energy-oriented priorities change.
And therein is the key (or ONE OF the keys), underscored in Kolko’s article. Massive ambition and ego is sustained by massive external energy throughput. Hubris, elevation of self at the expense of others, and narcissistic immersion can only be maintained by commodity (and machine) fetishism achieved through general purpose money and energy consumption.
I’ve just spent a weekend being around “Monster Truck” video games, and it has made me ill-tempered. The monstrous trivialities we have made into major entertainment obsessions (and money-making enterprises) are an indicator of where we are…
5 August 2009, 9:01 amAllen:
“The monstrous trivialities we have made into major entertainment obsessions (and money-making enterprises) are an indicator of where we are…”
Michael, if it makes you feel any better, it’s not just the U.S. who is into such. It is everywhere. I just spent over a month in Korea (the southern half). I went up to the DMZ with my wife and in-laws expecting to see lots of barbed wire and keep out signs. While that was present, there was also a theme park complete with rides and a tour of discovered North Korean tunnels. I was surprised to say the least. After reading your post, I starting wondering about our current “War(s) on Terror”. It seems to me that many a freak gets a free taste of killing thanks to our current situation. Have we created the ultimate tourist trap for sadists?
7 August 2009, 1:09 amMichael Anderson:
As our system (speaking of unrestrained capitalism, US-Euro-based) reaches its limits, It does more of what it usually does just to maintain itself. Part of that maintenance is indoctrination. That can be accomplished by theme parks, video games, movies, print media, and actual experiential situations—witness the events at gun ranges where kids are allowed to shoot full-automatic weapons.
Sowing and cultivating recruits for Imperial adventures is necessary, from the standpoint of the existing power structure, and filtered down through many layers of Corporate and military administration, these items take on the multi-faceted agendas of the individual.
The aforementioned “individual” is almost always a white male, too.
12 August 2009, 9:35 amShamrock Pat:
I do not get something. The author talks about the continuity of policies from one administration to another despite a change in personnel. Then he talks about how the process is driven by ambitious or insane individuals or individuals with this that or the other type of charachter flaw, which implies that the system has no long term plan and no way of enforcing adherance to such a plan. That does not make sense to me.
Then there is something that bothers me about the whole situation. The people serving in the military are always talking about what high moral standards they have and how they are prepared to make personal sacrifices for the good of the country. (they take it for granted THAT is the highest value) Then Stan lays out another version which has been repeated by many many others before him that the military people especially the officers are overwhelmingly a bunch of con men who are just interested in carreer advancement for the prestige that it brings.
If Stan is right WHAT ARE THE CHANCES THAT THESE MEN CAN BE REFORMED IN LARGE NUMBERS? Can anyone even give one example besides, (MSG?)Stan Goff, and Col. Ann Wright, LTC Karen K…., 1LT. Watada, and a dozen or so low ranking NCOs and enlisted people that have refused deployment, of people who have seen the light and turned against the system. One could perhaps point to the thousands that have gone AWOL but soldiers go AWOL in peacetime. Thier decision to go AWOL may not be a rejection of the idea of an Amercian empire they may just have decided that they have now contributed more than they can afford to for such an empire because of family problems or some such thing.
Even most of those not reenlisting after 4 years must be leaving on good terms because it would seem to me if they just talked to their family and friends about how service in the military is the exact opposite of serving your country that the military especially the ground forces would have a very difficult time even in a bad economy of meeting their recruitment goals. Of course that implies a citizenry that is not morally bankrupt.
But if the citizenry is morally bankrupt there would obviously be no hope that they could be reformed in large numbers.
The implication of that is terrible. It means that they will have to be killed in large numbers. The implicatoin of that is even more terrible they will fight back and kill hundreds if not thousands for every casualty they suffer. But the implication of not killing them in large numbers is also very terrible before they destroy the planet they will destroy us. Then they will destroy themselves fighting over the last shreds of our flesh.
Yes I left out all the gory details but I think that you can fill them in if you want to make the picture.
14 August 2009, 11:02 amPerhaps you do not like such a picture. Then paint your own picture. Make sure you use lots of pink. I mean Pink.
Stan:
I have never contended that military officers are more or less cycnically ambitious than any of the rest of us. What I have said is that the military is first and foremost a bureaucracy. Advancment in that bureaucracy is not achievement, it is survival. It is a thoroughly cutthroat system, in which a lot of lieutenants or ensigns form the base of a great career pyramid; as one advances through the ranks, one is in competition with all one’s peers for the next promotion, which will be far fewer O-3′s, then again one is in competion up through the ever narrower pyramid for even fewer O-4 slots, etc etc etc. If an officer is a good captain, but a lackluster major, you would think it would be the smartest thing to let Captain X continue being a captain until he retires, at which time he would be a highly experienced captain that would surpass in wisdom all the young pups in the current system. This, however, is not the case. In its sheer opacity, the military bureaucracy wants fresh meat at every level, perpetually fresh and ambitious, and if you don’t get promoted within a brief period, you are removed from service, and another vulnerable new first lieutenant, or captain, or whatever, will take that slot under the same damoclean sword of compulsory advancement. Up-or-out this system is called, and the whole shebang is blindly designed by its complex administration to be above all else non-accountable.
The Boykin-Cult of the Weaponized Jesus is a different animal, and includes only a minority of officers.
And I’m not killing anyone.
14 August 2009, 3:44 pmShamrock Pat:
In your speech at Wake University you said you knew officers looked for comabat opportunites to advance their career. That sounds an awful lot like cynically ambitious to me. No war- no combat opportunities- so do not try to end a war as fast as possible keep it going until I get me credits would be a good summary of such people. How much more cynical can one get. (Well there is no need to answer that I already know the answer. It is, we have to kill the enemies children before they grow up and become our children’s enemies.)
I believe you when you say that you are not killing anyone.
But if someone were going to kill someone they would not be able to talk about here on the internet anyways.
But a person could talk about the subject in a general way.
If a person was for example named General Beck (Ret.) and he spent his career serving an institution that was carrying out great crimes in foreign lands and on June 20th 2041 a Major came to him and said in 2 days our Army is going to launch a massive attack against another country in Asia but I have a plan to notify this country and help them launch a preemptive strike against our country but we need one General officer to act as a figure head for our group. Before you answer you should know that we plan to assassinate some leading officers and blow up several critical locations. We have come to you because we have studied your development since your retirement and we believe you are the only General that will side with our attempt to minimize this looming tragedy and bring an end to the ongoing tragedy.
General Beck could answer no I have found Jesus and despite the fact that I helped create this institution that has convinced our leader that an attack against this central Asian nation is necessary I would advise anyone opposed to this action to just go home and do not take part. If you take action you will only add to the unnecessary suffering because you will not prevent this attack you will only needlessly get yourselves and some of our fellow countrymen killed.
The major could answer, you know what you are absolutely right, no one, outside of me and my 15 or so accomplices gives a shit anymore about the concepts of doing what is right by universal concepts of truth and justice. Even if we were successful we would just be scoffed at for delaying our nations ultimate victory.
Besides if Jesus said it it must be the right thing to do because we all know that the Bible contains all of the thoughts that Jesus ever had and that we can be 100% sure that those thoughts were accurately compiled by by objective sources. And that since Jesus died for our sins we now owe him so much that we are his slaves.
Now I understand why Muslims say if Christians really study the bible despite all of its inaccuracies in their eyes that a devote Christian can achieve salvation. You see the Koran is about submission to the will of God. Christianity is too. In both cases you become a slave to the thoughts of God. What a wonderful expeirence to be the slave of someone who claims to be loving, merciful, and compassionate and yet inflicts us with Malaria and then to top it off inflicts us with Sickle cell amenia to fight the malaria. What a wonderful expierience to be the slave of a God that tells us not to be jealous and admits to being jealous HIMSELF. A God that tells us to beat our wives and that a womans testimony before a court is only half as good as a mans. Of course I am going to have to pretend that during the enlightenment the Bible was not shown to be such a mass of contridictions as to be totally useless as a guide to moral behavior. But hey you did not hear me say that to myself because I would not want you to feel that I am mocking your (General Beck) new found faith in christian
pacifism. That would be really rude and for a former Benidictine Monk it would be a mortal sin if I had already not been condemned to hell by the pope. Of course if I had not written him that letter that the ultimate theological point of both the Bible and the Koran is that God is SATAN he would not have excomminicated me nor would I have to worry about that pending Islamic Fatwa. Sheets now that I can go home and spend perhaps 18 months in prison for dessert. I have nothing to worry about. No more pressure. Let those Asians get blown up they were just a bunch of stupid Muslims anyways. Hip hip horay let us have a drink to loving our fellow countrymen more than people who dress funny even if our fellow countrymen are murders who refuse to admit that they have a problem. Let us give a toast to all those who say killing someone who goes halfway around the world to kill others who have not attacked them is the same as going half away around the world and killing others who have not attacked anyone. Jesus and (who is) God said, thou shall not kill. That means killing an adult who is about to kill a child is not allowed. Fortunately the Koran says it is allowed or we would really be in big trouble. But maybe that is why we are in big trouble because it is those war mongering Muslims who are making the world unsafe for democracy. They just do not want to surrender after they have been beaten because they want to gain opportunities to do manly things to impress the women.
Of course maybe the Major would not say all of that, he might just say, OK but do not tell anybody about this conversation we will be watching you and if you do you will live not to regret it. I want you to pay special attention to how carefully I worded that.
Now the hypothetical part is over. I am a horribly out of shape drunk. No I am not trying to be sued for making fun of Irish Catholics it is the truth. Do I expect that I will get the opportunity to kill anyone or get killed myself. Not at all. Would I try kill someone under the right circumstances, one never knows for sure, until the trigger is actually pulled. Would I care if I got killed. After being with someone who has died of cancer I really no longer think that death in war is all that bad of a way to go. Of course one could end up a quadraplegic but they move on. Furthermore people who are in the military are under a higher obligation to do the right moral thing not the thing that is best for their career. But from what can be seen of the way that they are preforming a person would never know that.
14 August 2009, 8:17 pmSean:
Interesting comment by Kolko. I don’t agree with his appraisal of what is happening in Iraq. The use of the military in Iraq is not to solve a political problem. It is to do one primary thing: enable theft of Iraqi oil. This is not a political problem. There is nothing political about murdering innocents by the millions in order to steal their oil. A “political” approach would be to alter the Iraqi culture from within, using persuasive diplomacy. The use of murder is hardly political. It is simply immoral grasping, a form of rank greed.
The political angle may be justifiably argued with respect to how US soldiers are encouraged to behave in Iraq — as if they are on a mission to “protect” innocent Iraqis from “insurgents”. There isn’t enough education on the ground to inform the troops of the real purpose… is there? Are they being told they’re there to protect engineers, construction companies, and oil profiteers? I’m pretty sure they’re not. So there’s some political spin layered on top of the mission, but at the top command level, the decision to invade Iraq and murder Iraqis for the gain of oil access, that’s not political.
14 August 2009, 8:57 pmShamrock Pat:
From thinking about my tirade I noticed another factor at play. Some of The people on active duty seeking combat are looking for a way out. They are looking for a way out of dying of cancer. More importantly they are looking for a way out of needing to deal with……….forget that prepared post……Col. Reese wrote something much closer to the truth than the system and all its high ranking generals have been telling us. Yet they simply dismissed him as…….. get this……. uninformed….Does anyone here know what a Fatwa is?
15 August 2009, 4:33 amStan:
Guess we need to define “political.” From where I stand, organized plunder and murder — called warfare — has always been part of the repertoire of the state, a critical part inasmuch as urbanization (a seemingly universal project of expanding states) requires policing the peripheral parasitic-hosts.
I’m missing something in your use of the word “political.”
15 August 2009, 6:58 amSean:
It’s simple, Stan.
Murder is murder. Calling it an act of politics is the same as calling it war. It’s murder. It should be called nothing else.
If we are to split hairs, then we should call it murder for politically motivated ends… or something like that. To simply call it “politics,” that’s a serious watering-down of the severity of the moral crimes involved.
I think it clear that there are morally sound reasons for when we call the killing of another human “murder.” It’s distinguished from permissive lethal force used in self-defense. It’s distinguished from an accidental death. When there is conscious planning and execution, it’s murder. Not politics. Murder.
When murder is used for political ends, it remains murder, and should not be glossed over by calling it mere politics. That’s a rhetorical trick used to diminish the moral wrong.
STAN: No, it’s an attempt to stop denying and-or glossing over the brutal character of politics and the state. There are semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic levels to this discussion. You’ve wrapped yourself around the axle of the semantic.
15 August 2009, 12:47 pmShamrock Pat:
@ Sean or Stan or Anyone else for that matter.
15 August 2009, 4:26 pmIf I were to meet a company 1SG or Commander and he says to me, look I am not going to Iraq to help the Sunnis or the Shias or the Kurds or even the Christians. I am going to Iraq (or Afghanistan) to build schools and nothing more the really big picture is none of my business I do not get paid to worry about that and building schools is not a war crime so I do not have to take any of your criticism let alone put up with your support for the people who are trying to kill me. We (the US military along with our Iraqi allies) have to conduct patrols in our area because we need to protect ourselves from idiots like you who do not understand what we are doing here.
How would you reccommend that I respond to such a comment?
Juan:
I gather that we can take it for granted that high command officers tend to be s.o.b.’s. That is certainly how it looks from the outside, so your assessment strikes me as very plausible–to say the least.
16 August 2009, 1:53 amShamrock Pat:
Juan, but what about middle ranking officers? what about those who are in charge of non combat units? What about those people involved with reconstruction? What about those who work on developing weapons systems in the US?
16 August 2009, 3:13 pmWhat about an Air Force meteorologist that works in Japan? 1/) or !7(?
Stan:
What Shamrock laid out above, in the middle of all that whatever-it-was, is a “tempo task.” It’s not a real emergency or rush, like we experience in real life pretty much every day at some level. It’s a structured artificial scenario designed to back one into a corner and force her/him (usually him) to (1) break rules or (2) commit violence. It’s a big what-if that forecloses other options in the set-up.
It’s also a very common formula for books, films, tv shows, and politicians trying to start wars to whip up xenophobia, steal resources, or get weapons manufacture contracts in their districts.
I’m going to jump this convention to post-status.
17 August 2009, 6:22 amShamrock Pat:
Yes that is true. But then there are people being killed Right Now by a continuing criminal enterprise.
17 August 2009, 9:10 amWhat is or is not an emergency is in the eye of the beholder. Just because things could be worse does not mean that they are not bad. Furthermore the US has war criminals enjoying their lives on the Calivornia coast and in Palm Springs Golf courses and the entire legal establishment just ignores their crimes as if they did not happen.
Again I repeat what is an emergency is in the eye of the beholder.
m.c.:
I’ve noticed that the MSM gives the SPLC good coverage. In college I wrote a
poli sci paper about Capital Punishment(particularly in the South) and first came across Stephen Bright and the Southern Center for Human Rights based in Atlanta. As a undergrad I wondered over to the Law School for the first time and discovered the helpfukness of the staff there for a non-student. The US in on a small list of nations who commit Capital Punishment but do I see Stephen Bright or others on TV?
btw, Mark Potok, the Inteligence Project director of SPLC is a U. Chicago alum according to wiki.
17 August 2009, 11:30 amTimothy R. Anderson:
The ugly and simple truth is that the USA-led military coalition in Iraq has NOT kept alive hundreds of thousands of non-terrorist Iraqi civilians.
Persons here in the USA dutifully paid their taxes year after year
after year after year. Still, on September 11, 2001, American
civilians were killed on American soil. It is evident to
those capable -of- being -honest -about -it, that the
defense of the common persons here in the USA is NOT a priority.
Persons such as Rumsfeld and now Gates are in the BUSINESS
17 August 2009, 11:37 amof war, not protecting the lowly regular persons of Afghanistan, Iraq,
and the USA . . . . . It is fascinating to me, to see certain persons
reactions when I point out that on September 11, 2001 the USA’s military was stationed in South Korea and other “necessary”
troubled-spots on the globe – T.
Sean:
Stan,
With all due respect, you’re not contradicting me. All you’re doing is restating what I said, and saying I’ve got it backward. I’m not saying politics doesn’t include the use of murder. I’m saying that if it’s murder, it’s murder. I don’t know how you could possibly refute that.
Let me try to explain it more clearly, more broadly.
Let’s say we’re in a parallel universe with the same exact criminal laws that America has here. I plan and then kill the president of the parallel America, the president is a parallel of Barack Obama. The act is done, I have killed him.
Now for the sake of reality, let’s drop the “parallel America” device and just come back here.
It doesn’t matter whether I did it because I hate his politics, or because I hate his skin color, or because I hate his smug Ivy League/Rockefeller U attitude, or because I hate the Democratic National Committee or the Democratic Leadership Council.
Stan, you’re talking about motive.
I’m talking about the act itself. All the motive does is provide fodder for analysis of sentencing severity.
Not all acts of political motive are murder. But murder remains murder whether done for political means, racist reasons, jealousy, or simply because the murderer was paid whatever is his price for committing murder.
I don’t know how you could consider the act of murder to be anything other than murder. It’s murder even when done by soldiers in uniform, provided there is no self-defense issue in play. This is a bigger issue than what you argue about politics, or about sexual power. War is murder. To call it “war” when it is nothing less than murder, that’s a cheapening of the lives of those who are murdered.
And that’s precisely why people insist on calling it war.
To avoid the analysis under murder.
And that’s why saying murder for political reasons is “just politics,” that’s wrong too.
17 August 2009, 7:03 pmcabdriver:
I just read the new post, concerning the concept Stan refers to as the “tempo task”- there’s enough grist for me t consider that I’m going to put my thoughts on that topic aside for now, until I might have something cogent to contribute.
Beyond that, what’s being discoursed upon in this comment thread is also touching upon a hugely important problem of modernity- the problems associated with what constitutes legitimate authority, especially to someone embedded in a hierarchical bureaucracy- questions such as “what is integrity- for individuals, and for institutions?” What is loyalty- for individuals and groups?” “What part does mythos and idealism play within instiutional structures- either in terms of clarifying values, in mystifying and confusing them, or…?” “Where does the buck stop, anyway?”
Questions like those.
Sociologist Max Weber was one of the first to apprehend and attempt to grapple with those questions, through his studies of the functioning of complex bureaucracies and hierarchy in Bismarck’s Germany. He foresaw the dilemmas associated with “I’m just following orders; I’m just doing what my superior told me- and he’s just doing what his superior told him”, etc.
The military is not the only structure that partakes of bureaucractic organization, ranked hierarchy, and the sort of complexities that lead to petty tyrannies, sub-fiefdoms, and bureaucratic turf wars. Corporations, educational systems, universities, government departments…they all partake of those same fundamental characteristics of bureaucracy. The institution of the military is, however, arguably the peerless example of such pyramidal, top-down authoritarian institutions.
And in the U.S. military, the top of the pyramid is complicated by a unique shell game: the top commanding generals of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are all groomed and vetted for the task of obedience to the Commander-In-Chief- the U.S. President, a civilian elected by the popular franchise (or something like it, operating through the Electoral College, of course.)
And the President, in turn, has to somehow “prove” his “toughness” bona fides in order to be held suitable to the task of Commander In Chief, as part of his office.
I would argue that there’s a pre-screening process for the President that precedes the final ballot, the ostensible final popular referendum on whether a presidential candidate is worthy of Commander-In-Chiefdom- and that this is carried out by the funders and backers of the successful candidate, as early on as the first primaries, or even before then, and- a most important factor- by the national communications media establishment that plays such an overwhelming role in projecting the images of all those seeking presidential office and power, along with crafting the ongoing narrative of their “worthiness”, as measured by their rhetoric, their stance on issues, their public appearances, and that host of information details which they construct of contrive in order to “present” the candidates to the American public. Frankly, the analogies to a “beauty contest” are uncomfortably close, in some ways- only instead of presidential candidates being groomed, ranked, and judged on a trait like “congeniality”, they’re judged on “can this Contestant make his bones for the Empire?”
And, of course, the pre-existing Military Establishment can hardly to be said to be standing quietly on the sidelines, as far as influencing the judging in that respect…interestingly enough, this is not simply a matter of what opinions the top-ranking generals might have to offer; in terms of American political reality as presented by the US establihment media, it more often comes down to what groups like the VFW and the American Legion think- as well as the pronoucements of anyone claiming “military veteran” status in this country. And that is a huge electoral demographic- one that’s treated with what might be termed a peculiar reverence, to boot. Indeed, it often seems as if the mere fact of military service is treated as evidence of more credibility for one’s opinions than those offered by those without such service in their resume; and perhaps even an exalted status among those exercising the voting franchise, with more influence over the public at large than mere civilians, as it were.
I need to note my perception that this exaggerated reverence, as highlighted by the media, is something relatively new- it’s something that I associate with that era following George Bush I’s 1991 statement that “we’ve licked the Vietnam Syndrome.”
You remember how it all caught on- the Yellow Ribbon stuff; the trope “Support The Troops”, that still echoes through the national discourse, most often as a blanket cheer of support for every sort of U.S. military effort, up to and including aggressive invasions and blatant war crimes; and, ultimately as an exaltation of American Militarism itself.
For sure, military service has typically been respected and even revered in American society, and in the news media- but in terms of the all-pervading cult of the Soldier as Hero and National Protector, I think all that’s been taken to heights that I never noticed in the Cold War era.
It isn’t as if I wasn’t paying attention during that time- I’m a Cold War era Army brat, son of a career military officer; and I was age 25 during Reagan’s first year in office.
Mind you, I thought that the end of the Cold War- Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika, the fall of the Berlin Wall- would bring on something like a milennium of global democracy, liberalization, and brotherhood. And a Peace Dividend.
I could go on and on about what I think we’ve gotten here in the U.S.A. instead; but I’ll just provide a two-word observation- “decadent empire”- and stop there, for now.
18 August 2009, 1:53 amStan:
On war and murder. Calling war murder is like calling a boat a sail. There are differentiations and elaborations between the aspects of a thing, and the thing-as-a-whole. One cannot appreciate or understand war in a purely moralistic way, reducing it to the act of killing and ignoring every other aspect of it. This is not semantic (struggle over definitions) and only partly syntatical (struggle over logic); mostly it is pragmatic. That is, it doesn’t work. It’s not enough. Killing (murder) is inadequate to describe what wars are, how they emerge, the development of logistics and war technology, the political history that leads to war, or the personalities who make decisions in the conduct of war.
All porpoises are whales, but not all whales are porpoises. (There is that syntactical domain)
Insisting that whale-ness is the essence of porpoises is arbitray and reductionist. It’s technically true only if you put an equal signe between twowords and leave it at that. War = murder. But for that to be true (syntax and pragmatics again), the equation would have to be valid when reversed. Murder = war. The equation turns out to be false; and the conclusion gives us inadequate material to work with.
18 August 2009, 5:05 amJuan:
Re: How would you reccommend that I respond to such a comment?
I would respond as follows: “You are a responsible human being, of sound mind, equipped with a moral sense and an intelligence capable of analysis and synthesis, and above all with a sense of truth and justice. In short, objectivity. Therefore, you have the obligation to be aware of the “big picture” in all that you do, to the extent possible for you. It is part of being a real human being.”
18 August 2009, 11:13 pmStan:
Objectivity, aka the god-trick.
Objectivity is a masculinist, liberal myth, a view from somewhere posing as a view from nowhere (or everywhere at once, the god-trick).
19 August 2009, 4:31 amShamrock Pat:
Juan, I am fully on your side. So is Virginia Hall. She is no myth. She says that you are perfectly capable of defending your own statement and that I should just give you moral support. She also said that children like to stretch the rules to see how far they can be stretched before they break. She apparently knows that I was thinking about writing a story here about for Law and Order about a mafia don man who was dumping the body of one of his underlings who had betrayed him for a second time when he sees another man dumping the body of a child in the same area. Virginia also said that the only good health care system is found in Sound Trek. I tried to draw her out on that but she disappeared.
19 August 2009, 9:03 amMichael Anderson:
I think I understand the concept of Objectivity, or Objectivism, as it relates to “liberal” and “enlightenment” concepts (both of which were instrumental in the founding of this country), and also how emotions related to cultural experience influence our thinking, no matter how much we try to get around them.
Having said that, I’m asking—-is some degree of “objective” detachment necessary to try and understand concepts, especially when you’re trying to make a change in your own thinking? I’m thinking at this moment of gender and race.
Or am I talking about Apples and Oranges here?
19 August 2009, 10:38 amJuan:
Re: Objectivity, aka the god-trick. Objectivity is a masculinist, liberal myth, a view from somewhere posing as a view from nowhere (or everywhere at once, the god-trick).
No, it is not. Properly understood, it amounts to adquatio rei et intellectus. Without it, the value of truth or justice would be impossible to realize. Morally, it amounts to the capacity to be impartial and disinterested. Exactly what we mean when we want someone to be “fair” to us. Objectivity in your view, is a sociological and psychological deformation–that is an abuse of the term, even as it refers to a reality, to be sure. Objectivity in that sense is just “the corruption of the best becomes the worst.”
Your way of thinking here constitutes a clever way to be unintelligent. It gets you nowhere, and leads to the subhuman.
19 August 2009, 3:36 pm(Boer) Tom:
To Juan:
My own experience with impartiality is that it has its limits, which arise from e.g. imperfect knowledge – it is quite easy to manipulate impartial people, especially so-called disinterested people – no one is truly disinterested – one may wish to be fair (equitable), but that is not disinterest either. An example may shed some light: My neighbor has a criminal record; I had given him access to my garage over a weekend, during which some tools that a friend had stored, went missing. He claimed that he had found the door open (possible – I had disconnected the hinges while trying to rehang the door, and had set the dead-bolt on, but it would have been possible to enter, in principle, with enough force); I was gone in that period. My friend immediately suspected my neighbor, seeing holes in his story where none existed (as well as drawing heavily on a few strange claims). Later, I had lent my car to my neighbor, and items were missing. I was as impartial as I could be, and quite possibly my neighbor didn’t steal the tools, but I’m very confident he stole the items out of my car – he was also trying to manipulate me. Impartiality with (necessarily) incomplete knowledge is no guarantee of justice. A half-truth is often more dangerous than a complete falsehood. Your soldier cannot know the origin of most, let alone all, the violence in Iraq, even proximally; the notion that occupation lends to violence (which I hold) is a generalization of a pattern – the more specious generalization that Muslim societies are very violent is presently empirically valid, even as (I’m sure) both of us can see that the first pattern (and associated support of extremely violent regimes) gives rise to the latter, but from your (Pat’s) soldier’s perspective, it is at least an open question – I’m not sure that either his reasoning or empirical knowledge would be inadequate! It strikes me rather as a problem of taking moral responsibility which can only happen when the possibility occurs that one is (a part of) the problem – not many people want to entertain that thought.
But there is a deeper problem with your argument: You discuss objectivity with regards to a soldier of an occupying army – again, it is quite a moral development that is necessary for the possibility that one is harming someone else in a morally problematic manner, to occur as a thought, even with dehumanization put aside: I do take that view regarding occupation, but can I demonstrate that I have reached some truly adequate reasoning? This amounts to an end of the road in moral development – can we really be said to arrive in our moral development? If one does not arrive (my view), was one’s reasoning inadequate previously? If yes, then it can never be adequate – hence faulty objectivity, and if no, objectivity is impoverished. If one does arrive, how does one know? How does one determine whether such effort to understand was made to the possible extent? In short, objectivity seems an impossible ideal. Empathetic attention to claims (with testing of claims, as possible) seems a more probable road to proximal justice.
19 August 2009, 9:44 pmcabdriver:
Juan, I think that what Stan means is that “objectivity” is a quality that inherently eludes the human mind (and, in all probability, any form of localized intelligence at all, human or not. No matter how vast its capabilities, compared to the viewpoints constructed or compounded by a human consciousness.)
As I see it, that makes the concept known as “objectivity” akin to the ideal of “truth.” A goal to strive for, while recognizing that it’s ultimately beyond possession. That means that any achievement of objectivity is at best approximate- and even more humbling to the human mind, inevitably lacking full certainty of its accomplishment.
There’s no such thing as a 100% confidence interval. And acting as if there is, and that one grasps a situation with that level of certainty, is a terrible misapprehension.
It’s a paradox: the certainty that one possesses a fully objective grasp of a situation is actually a solipsistic conceit.
Personally speaking, I’ve found- or learned, after a lot of reflection, with more than a few upsets to inspire that reflection- that it feels most honest to acknowledge that the subjective observer self and the ideal realm of objective reality are relative and relational concepts. Tip too far in one direction or another, and trouble awaits. Cognitive dissonance.
If one overemphasizes the Subjective quality of existence, that leads to vulnerability to delusions of reference, solipsism, and the denial of that wider world that won’t reframe through the efforts of subjective will- the “reality that, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away”, as Philip K. Dick once put it. The reality that eventually catches up with you. To your peril, if you think that wishcraft is all there is to life.
But overemphasizing the Objective aspect of existence is a function of the presumption- which I think is faulty- that it’s possible for a human consciousness to realize a state of total impartiality and disinterest. The presumption of objectivity is typically associated with rationality and materialism- the possession of something approaching ultimate wisdom as the result of having a wide knowledge base, a superior “command of the facts”- and, as the presumptive result, longer possessing merely A viewpoint, but THE viewpoint. The Big Picture.
That’s where Hubris lies. Megalomania. I think on oe Stan’s implicit points is that the pretense of Objectivity, and the associated Objective Wisdom, is a conceit of those who possess a measure of personal power and security. Marginalized people don’t have the latitude to indulge in that sort of self-deception.
Don’t get me wrong, here. I’m not arguing against literacy, education, continually broadening one’s knowledge base, and reaping the benefits of increasing one’s own intellectual skills and the ability to gain upward mobility and empowerment. But that doesn’t automatically equate to superior moral achievement. And it doesn’t necessarily make one wise. Higher intellectual achievement doesn’t ever lead to authentic “objectivity.” It just helps you know more stuff.
But beyond a given level in the social hierarchy, the illusion of objectivity looms large as a temptation. Inevitably, I think. Readings in the history of nations, empires, business fortunes, religious institutions, and the academy bear this out.
It’s often hard to tell the Eminences in those fields anything, once they’ve gotten a secure niche in a high enough perch. They think they know it all, already.
Malcolm X said something quite pointed, in relation to this: “The White Man has a God-Complex.” I’m a white guy, but I think I get it. The point really isn’t about race. It’s about this: the people ensconced in security and comfort, especially in terms of their status as achievers in a society- especially anyone lauded as an Expert, in a high-status field- they think they know it all. About Everything. Re-framing the quote a trace, for more relevance, hopefully without losing his point: “The Guys At The Top Of The Heap have a God-complex.”
I notice this on the Internet a lot- white guys who think that, because they have a college degree or two, or three, and they’ve achieved a reasonable measure of security and affluence, that the world is their diorama, or something. And that they’re experts in Everything. They have a degree in Petroleum Engineering, or Law, or Medicine- and that makes them eminently qualified to talk about, say, Aquatic Biology, too. And Meteorology. And 20th Century European History. And the African Diaspora. And Organic Agriculture. And they’re sure that they possess the Objective Viewpoint, and the malcontents and dissenters are…well, if they had your kind of cash- I mean, your expanded ability to grasp the Big Picture- they’d think just like you. Objectively.
(“…and in the meantime, well, the whiners should just shut up. They’re incapable of being Objective- especially about the Truth that it’s all Subjective, they’ve got their viewpoint and I’ve got mine, and it’s all good, as long as I always win. Because my viewpoint is Objectively better. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have gotten this far. And they would have gotten a lot further. And they’d be agreeing with me. I’m a Deep Thinker…” etc., etc.)
It can get pretty bad…I mean, I’ve had guys in my cab…by the time you’re a respected eminence or emeritus scholar in your field, commanding multi-thousand-dollar honorariums for giving speeches to associations of the corporate benefactors in your field of expertise…well, at that point, you’re a master of the universe. You’ve just gotten in from golfing in Argentina, and next week you’ll be doing an extended bike tour of France…jetting off in the morning, after you get done knocking down a few grand for a speech, the banquet, and some after-dinner converation…come on, is there anyone who can really tell you anything? Of course not. YOU’LL tell THEM something.
That’s what you might call American Bourgeois Status Quo “Objectivism.” (Let’s not even get into Ayn Rand, who made a neologism of the term, for her own subjective purposes. It’s another discussion.)
But that isn’t the only problem associated with an excess of Objectivity (or, more accurately, its pretense.) There are many other varieties of the imbalance.
Wilhelm Reich had some fairly cogent philosophical observations and criticisms of the excesses of both the Subjective and Objective viewpoints, in what was probably his best book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism.
Reich identified the Fascist and Nazi Right Wing of his day with obsessive mysticism, solipsism, and irrationality, the symbolism and values of the excessively and obsessively Subjective- the exaltation of “race” and phenotype; particularistic cultural mythos as the definitive impetus of societies; essentialism; tribal chauvinism and its inevitably linked militarism, which rob the individual of a higher realization of consciousness and reduce artistic creativity to ever more grandiose efforts at the recapitulation of the Idealized Mythic Past; and the cult of the Charismatic Leader- the divinely ordained personality, the embodiment of the national soul (and all the rest of that enthralling hocus pocus ego massage…)
But Reich reserved fully 50% of his unsparing critique for the excessively Objective- the inhumanity of the calculating rationalism and materialism of the Soviet Left, perennially claiming that they were guided by the Truth of Objective Conditions- all the while in the course of following a Will To Power as ruthless as the Ubermenschen of Nietzche. Defining success and progress with metrics and statistics; chillingly utilitarian; obsessed with management and pervasive social control- an absolute necessity in order to effectively engineer society to fulfill the goals of those possessing the omniscience of Objectivity; demanding the construction of that Objective Ideal, the New Soviet (Hu)man. Once again, a negation of individualism and creativity through the denial of a valid expansive role for individual autonomy, on account of the ingrained tendency of individuals to hold personal points of view- i.e., Insufficient Objectivity.
For the rationalist ideology of the Soviet Left, the existence of subjective individual viewpoints was identified with the potential for thought-crime- nonconformism, social parasitism, malingering- offenses against the Higher Good, the Collective Human Future, Objective Truth of the Common Benefit of Humanity. After all, in a world governed by Objective Truth, any dissent is a lie, prima facie.
Wilhelm Reich warned of the totalitarian pox running rampant through both houses- the Subjective Irrational Mysticism of Fascism on the Right, and the Objective Rational Materialism of Soviet Socialism on the Left.
20 August 2009, 4:54 amStan:
First of all, adaequatio rei et intellectus is a Medieval term that means the intellect is adequate to grasp the reality. So the people who actually used this Latin term (medieval theologians mainly) had not yet been exposed to the concept of objectivity as it is modernly used. This should give you a hint about your confusion being epistemological.
What is truth? What is justice? In particular the first question, since that goes to the heart of this question of The Objective. The ultimate-truth claim of objectivism, the reduction of all reality “external” to us (an imposibility built into the concept from the very beginning) to a dead, thing. It’s an arrogant separation; but a false one as well.
We heard this argument again and again when the Republicans had not yet realized they were committing political suicide during the Sotomayor dust-up. She uses “empathy” (gasp!) to render decisions from the bench. Judges must be “impartial and disinterested.”
So how does one be attentive and at the same time disinterested? And if one is to decide as a judge, how can the judge be impartial? On what basis does a judge predicate her decisions when the issues that emerge in a hearing are more complex that what has been grasped by the body of law (a frequent problem)? The answer, of course, is custom and precedent, but these are the products of culture and history, not a scientific ontology.
In our efforts to be fair with others, we ought to identify and sideline our self-interest and-or prejudices; but this is does not support objectivism (half the equation in the Cartesian dual formula – subject and object). The claim of objectivity is a grandiose claim, and historically constructed as a male claim. Read some of the linked material I provided.
It is impossible to eliminate standpoint from perception or epistemology. We can’t even reperesent the world to communicate it to one another (as we are trying here) without resort to a shared culture with a lot of shared symbols… and the symbols can neither envelop reality nor force it to conform in response to our conjuring. We are in reality, not stnading off from it.
I have to work, so I can’t stay long, but check Bordo and others on the masculine roots of the cultural construction, Objectivity. And don’t put words in my mouth. I never called anything a sociological or psychological “deformation”; in fact, your use of the term says a lot more about your perceptions than mine. That’s “I’m threatened” talk… this straw man gambit. And when Illich says the corruption of the best is the worst, he is talking about – in many cases – the church’s embrace of these pernicious dualisms, and of course the “criminalization of sin.”
Here is Bordo. If you can at least summarize her argument, then we will have a starting place. Objectivity has a history as an episteme; and that history is openly, emphatically, and repeatedly gendered male. Consequently, as enculturated beings, we males in particular have a very hard time not experiencing objectivity as some common-sense, axiomatic truth. Objectivity is a one of the pillars of liberal dogma.
Truth and justice claims – being universalized abstractions – always run into trouble in the day-to-day conduct of our lives, because embodied reality is too messy (complex) to be subjugated to the disembodied juridical fantasies of men. Objectivity is presumed to be nowhere and everywhere, anything but here, but we can’t even talk about it without manifesting the somewhere of the individual and the history of culture. In practice, is grants abstract equality to all; while preserving the concrete power of the powerful. Objectivity is a masquerade.
20 August 2009, 5:15 amm.c.:
Re: Objectivity
If something is on TV or the Movies, it suggests that viewpoint is Important and/or True, while if it isn’t on TV then the suggestion is that its neither Important and/or True.
We know in the real world though, that many things which are Important and True aren’t on TV or the Movies. This might be one definition of MSM.
20 August 2009, 7:38 amShamrock Pat:
I do not know where this intellectual exercise is taking us but I hope it is to Mulligans pub in Dublin.
20 August 2009, 11:41 amIf not at least to a paradise like garden with cool or warm temps.
Keep it mind it is sometimes the masculine manly thing to admit defeat especially when the opportunity costs of victory are to high. Perhaps that is a sexist sentence, that can cut someone who is not careful with it. Do I need to rewrite the sentence and say, it is often the objective, compassionate, loving thing to do especially when the opportunity costs are to high. Also keep in mind that to silence your opponent is not the same as converting your opponent although it is often a first step.
Juan:
But by objectivity, I mean precisely adequatio rei et intellectus (I am perfectly aware of its Scholastic origin; that is why I employ it). Your definition of the term is an equation with “objectivism.” I am not a partisan of “objectivism.” I made a rather simple observation to a reader. I think it is perfectly intelligible, and doesn’t merit being dragged into a polemic of the sort you envisage. I think you are barking up the wrong tree here.
I did not put words in you mouth. I said exactly what you are saying, in fact: that your view of objectivity seemed to be what you are here terming “objectivism,” namely a “cultural construction” that you view precisely as a psychological and sociological deformation or aberration. That is why I agreed that while such “objectivity” (objectivism) doubtless corresponds to a reality, that definition is not what I mean by objectivity.
At any rate, I note that you have a certain “masculine” penchant for firing from the hip. Allow me to withdraw, please.
20 August 2009, 1:38 pmStan:
I have not meant to be personally offensive, and I apologize if I have in any way. I did not, however, call anything a deformation. I don’t see things in those static or normative terms at all.
20 August 2009, 2:14 pmSean:
“On war and murder. Calling war murder is like calling a boat a sail. There are differentiations and elaborations between the aspects of a thing, and the thing-as-a-whole. One cannot appreciate or understand war in a purely moralistic way, reducing it to the act of killing and ignoring every other aspect of it. This is not semantic (struggle over definitions) and only partly syntatical (struggle over logic); mostly it is pragmatic. That is, it doesn’t work. It’s not enough. Killing (murder) is inadequate to describe what wars are, how they emerge, the development of logistics and war technology, the political history that leads to war, or the personalities who make decisions in the conduct of war.”
Stan, really — that’s just solipsism, and romanticism of war.
Murder is always murder. Cute tail-chasing distinctions-without-differences do not change that fact.
Apparently you wish to avoid this issue, and talk about something else. It’s your site, and your thread, so I have no right to insist my view be discussed further. I just want to say that your position on this is more cutesy and less rational than what I’ve read from you on most every other issue. I’d wonder why that is. Maybe it’s my bad interpretation of your view. Or maybe you’re actually in the middle of a blind-spot on your own perspective. Or maybe there’s a 3d or 4th (or ad infinitum) alternative.
All I know is, splitting hairs on what war involves does not mean that murder ceases to become murder, and I don’t know why you’d work so hard to avoid admitting that murder is happening. Why you’d want to call it something else… I do not understand, and your posts thus far have not helped me understand.
21 August 2009, 12:41 amcabdriver:
Sean: okay, war is murder- in some sense. Murder is an intrinsic part of the endeavor of war.
But Stan’s point- and I think he has one, here- is that simply making the two terms snonymic- “war = murder”- isn’t all that edifying. It amounts to simply providing a moral condemnation that closes down the discourse rather than opening it up.
The examination of why and how it is that warfare has so often played a role in the dynamic of human group interactions is going to require more than a fiat judgement- “war is murder.” Consider one inescapable corollary of accepting that maxim: it condemns all those who have ever lended the institution of war their support, in all societies throughout history, as nothing more than accessories to murder. I find that to be an airy conceit.
There are several cogent distinctions between murder and warfare. In the case of murder, the decision typically begins and ends with the motives and actions of one individual. And when the motive for taking a life is given as “self-defense”, and accepted as such by those examining the evidence at hand, the act of murder is deemed to be a defensible, non-criminal act.
Warfare doesn’t work that simply- it’s always, always carried out by organized groups, to name just one important difference. And the dynamics of group decision making rarely reduce to the simple chain of cause and effect that typically characterizes the decision of one human to kill other human(s.)
Another important distinction- the motive for warfare is nearly always associated with a defensive rationale of “self-defense”, by those advocating that course of action. On both sides of the conflict.
Note that unlike murder, where the usual case is that one party- the surviving one- does all of the murdering, in warfare groups on both sides do some killing. It’s relatively easy to apportion all of the responsibility for the crime of murder to an individual killer- or to determine that the killing was justified as self-defense.
But in the group situation of warfare, both of the opposing sides commit murder and mayhem. And they both typically claim self-defense.
That’s a moral quandary that calls out for quite a bit more consideration than simply an airy collective dismissal of all concerned as guilty murderers.
For example: you can understand how the Americans of the WW2 generation who stayed stateside and offered their support for the war effort by purchasing war bonds, recycling metal, and working in factories building armaments may have had motives that differ from the sociopathic will to power that informs conspirators who commit premeditated murder– can’t you?
And (to dispense with any accusation of special pleading in regard to the previous example), you also understand how a conscript into the Japanese Army in that era, who kills several Americans in battle as a soldier fighting for the Japanese side, nonetheless doesn’t necessarily partake of the moral character of a serial murderer- right?
To make another important distinction between soldiers and murderers-participants in battle, and in warfare, are typically informed by the sense of duty to others. This is in marked contrast to the impulses of murderers, who as a rule express no sense of “duty” to anything, beyond their own gratifications and private ends.
Every military elite in history has sought to exalt a sense of loyalty and duty to the group- and a commitment to discipline, honor, valor, dedication, and sacrifice- over the wants and comfort of the individual. Another salient difference between the image of the soldier and warrior vs. the image of a murderer, someone killing exclusively to serve their own personal goals.
Both of those categories- combat soldier and murderer- put their energies toward the task of killing people. But I think it’s facile and inaccurate to conflate the two categories as identical.
If you think I’m wrong about that, I invite you to tell me how and why so.
21 August 2009, 12:34 pm(Boer) Tom:
To Sean:
21 August 2009, 9:26 pmHe’s saying that murder is a necessary component of war, not its totality. I think I understand where you are coming from, though. I often undergo extreme anger (as ‘cabdriver’ put it, hysteria) at what happens in the world, but when I calm down, the reality is of course unchanged; getting someone to call war murder does not change much either. Understand the different kinds of violence of contemporary war allows for different remediations to arise, e.g. composting oxidized depleted uranium items in water in the manner of this group, e.g. in Iraq or Afghanistan – radiation detectors would also be needed, or combining instruction for war-affected urban populations in urban food production and composting sanitation (material conditions!) with suitable psychological recuperation methods, e.g. that of Ilan Shalif. Of course, you’d first have to learn all the relevant technologies and play with them – e.g. with some basic electronics knowledge, as may be obtained e.g. in the ARRL handbook (see your local library), and a used GM tube, you could build a cheap radiation detector (new they typically go for ~200$, vs $40). Of course, you might also want to learn a relevant language, e.g. Iraqi Arabic. I raise these issues, as I assume that you care about doing something about these wars, rather than simply calling them murder. Or is there some other project that requires the redefinition?
(Boer) Tom:
To Stan:
First, I owe you an apology: I performed an experiment on your blog, and without your permission. That was utterly unethical of me, especially given the cultural context. I at least owe you a full account of my actions.
When I first made comments on your blog, my first goal, which I still view as ethical, and well though-out, aside from its presentation, was to introduce the method developed by Ilan Shalif to change habits, as I had modified it, to reshape and change masculinity spectrum problematic behaviors. I will justify and explain later.
My more recent activity on your blog was spurred by a sense that many of the comments were singing your praises, instead of engaging critically what you (and Clarke) had said and posted. As such, I performed an experiment: I loudly and persistently contradicted the idea that oligopolistic markets don’t respond to supply and demand. (The views I stated are my own, though I might not otherwise have stated them as forcefully.) The results were instructive: First, my position was attacked. After I defended my position, I ‘attacked’ your position regarding symbiosis (actually, it was a clarification, but I was also trying to make you look ‘defeated’), and you gave a response which did two things, namely indicate that your interest was pragmatic, and make you look ‘weak’ in a typical masculine emotional/interpretive framework.
Two consequences arose from this: First, people here gained the confidence to challenge you – I think that this is potentially healthy, as that may lead to more critical engagement with the material represented here, and second, I think that to a few people here, you were an alpha male who was suddenly knocked off his perch – hence the sudden hostility all round. Alpha-male status is emotionally heavily imbricated, to use your term, for those who have been denied alpha-male status – I speak from my own experience; it was only after I had worked through the initial emotional content of being ‘the leader’ (on and off) that I could finally let go. My interpretation of people singing the praises is an attempt to be associated with the alpha-male, in the (perhaps subconscious) expectation of gaining that status; it need not be consciously intentional, and may well apply to the rest of us, myself included.
I realize, of course, that being an alpha male is not your purpose, but it is perhaps the social, or biological, consequence of being a male leader (philosopher or otherwise), especially given your military background. I’ve come to accept that there is probably a biological aspect to the alpha male phenomenon, and having observed it, I think the way to defuse it quickly is to let a man in a group achieve that status, after having prepared for it, then lose that status, then work through the emotional responses that arise (See Shalif, below) – aside from the hormonal boost, being the alpha male is quite unpleasant: People become much less sincere and far more utilitarian toward him, giving automatic praise, and trying to become associated with him rather than being a comrade (I’m not saying that the praise you’ve received is entirely insincere, only that it is less sincere than it might otherwise be, and that it comes at the expense of evaluating what you are saying). The same hormonal boost is also available by being a member of an active social group where mutual respect prevails (perhaps one gains an internal alpha male-like status by having one’s contributions recognized). One must learn to voluntarily (and regularly) relinquish alpha male status, e.g. by passing it around. Most men never get to control the emotions arising from the hormonal variations and social behavior that arises from gaining and losing alpha male status, in part due to their suppression of said emotions (merely opening the flood gates of emotions leads to more subconscious suppression efforts, rather than changing the behavior associated with said emotions, and hence does not help much either – see Shalif), and in part because it does not happen with sufficient frequency to familiarize them over the shock of the emotions.
What Shalif’s method does, is to change the behavioral response to an emotion, once an understood alternative behavior is available. Here “cabdriver’s” idea of hysteria was very helpful – when hysterical, I could not effectively use the method – I would have to calm down first – I have not been able to use the method the last while. Incidentally, I still see my initial post on the matter as valid (it seems to have been deleted, or perhaps lost when you last moved servers – I was heavily criticized for it), namely that a man should work through the emotions of his sexual response toward women (whether heterosexual or not) in order to work toward a respectful stance toward women as comrades (or opponents, depending on the individual) and as intellectual beings – the impetus toward sexuality arises from a more fundamental (‘primitive’) part of the brain than either the emotions or reasoning (yes, sexuality is much more than that, social power and other matters are involved, but without that, no sexuality). If one merely suppresses sexually suggestive behavior because of ‘policing’, it reemerges the moment policing ceases, whereas if one suppresses it (in appropriate contexts, e.g. no cat-calls, or rape for that matter) of one’s own volition, i.e. as a political act of solidarity, cooperation and to set a standard of social behavior, it becomes indifferent to policing.
Sorry for the off-topic post. Feel free to delete.
23 August 2009, 1:07 pm(Boer) Tom:
I guess I should add, I don’t mean to imply that heterosexuality is more fundamental than homosexuality, only that the behavior of men, both heterosexual and homosexual, is highly problematic toward women. Of course, the behavior of men toward men is also highly problematic, and my suggestions in the previous post could also be applied to how men respond sexually toward men (howls of protest
.
23 August 2009, 1:40 pmJohn:
“The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity – much less dissent.”
Found this quote at informationclearing.info.
But of course, it is meaningless, since objectivity doesn’t exist anyway, according to Stan. Or if it does, you first better read hundreds of pages of Bordo to find out exactly how and when the use of this word is permissible and legitimate. Thank God for these people–before them humanity was deluded by its masculine abstractions and static conceptions.
STAN: Did the people of, say, the Mediterranean, circa 250 AD (our predecessors in some sense, at least culturally), have this thing, objectivity? The answer is no. The concept – as we understand it – did not exist… yet. There are certain ideas that constitute our epistemological framework; and these ideas have a history. The history of those ideas can reveal origins that are still manifest in our use of the idea(s). The history of obectivity – which exists (I have never said otherwise, though that straw man did) as a signification – reveals the highly gendered meaning attached to this signification. What modern news organizations have always culled away is not objectivity but the standpoints of those out of power. Women, as a whole, are still outside power; and objectivity is a signifier that reproduces an accepted philosophical dualism (or “gnosticism,” for theologians) that roughly equates male-subject to female-object, with the universe expanded as the dominated object. But no signification – even “objectivity” – can escape the fact of a signifier, Umwelt and all.
Word for today: semiosphere.
24 August 2009, 6:07 pmJohn:
Re: “Did the people of, say, the Mediterranean, circa 250 AD (our predecessors in some sense, at least culturally), have this thing, objectivity? The answer is no. The concept – as we understand it – did not exist… yet.”
You’re joking. Anyone who thinks that 2+2=4 will be valid by tomorrow morning, and independently of whether you are a man or a woman, or whether you like it or not, or whether you feel good about it or not, or whether you are black or white–a “static” “masculine” truth–understands what objectivity is; “a rose is a rose.” Juan got it right. I suspect you understand this perfectly well, but you have an impassioned commitment to an ideology. Anything can be abused–and almost everything has been abused by now.
25 August 2009, 9:35 amShamrock Pat:
Stan, you are using some mighty big words. I perhaps have misunderstood your position. Could it be restated as,
25 August 2009, 3:57 pmit is very very difficult to think outside of ones cultural, class, and gender background. Therefore outside of the sciences like physics where controlled experiments can be conducted what someone believes is objective is, or almost always is, determined by subjective criteria. Is that a fair way of restating what you are getting at.
If so this then you would say that this is important because…………….. ..
Stan:
Twos and fours don’t exist in nature. These are symbols, those things without which we cannot ascribe meaning to anything. Birds don’t use numbers. Neither does the sun.
My objection to objectivity (: is that it is half of an epistemological (not natural) split, ie, subject-object… and ne’er the twain shall meet. Born of modern patriarchy, it is an unexamined assumption that is highly ideological (what people accuse me of when I point this out). I will define my use of the word ideology as a set of beliefs that simultaneously conceals and reproduces a power relation.
We can turn this into a thread of its own if anyone wants to pursue it.
25 August 2009, 4:14 pmcabdriver:
Shamrock Pat: “…outside of the sciences like physics where controlled experiments can be conducted…”
Nope.
At the most fundamental level of physical phenomena, the quantum realm, the idea that humans apprehend anything like a concretized “objective world”- or “objective universe”, or whatever one wishes to term the place/non-place- has been utterly discredited.
It’s called the Heisenberg Principle. It’s experimentally possible to determine the location of a subatomic particle, OR the direction of it’s movement- but not both at the same time. The parameter measured by one experiment and set of instruments rules out the measurement of the other. And the quantum realm is what underpins every other level of reality.
Furthermore, humans are limited by our perceptual bandwidth. What sounds “objectively ” like total silence to us may contain a great many signals at the ultrasonic level where bats do their hearing and echolocation. The same holds true for the sense of smell of humans, as compared with that of dogs.
Once one acknowledges that level of relativity and varaibility- beginning with the variations basic perceptual senses that are commonly taken for granted as uniform (consider color-blindedness, for example)- it has to logically follow that a the notion of a “100% objectively real world” is invalid.
One trouble with reifying Objectivity is that it’s fraught with the peril of Reductionism. Metrics become exalted, which in turn bring in the concept of the Normal, and other pretensions of some fictional consensus reality that exists “objectively.”
I notice this problem all the time when I hear the reportage on topics such as experiments determining medical risk factors- and, worse, human psychology and social psychology. There’s nearly always an unexamined assumption present- that because a “controlled experiment” was done, that it therefore depicts a valuable insight into “objective reality.”
Yet the “controlled experiments” performed on these complex phenomena- in order to be controlled, and therfore doable- demand dispensing with “externalities.” In other words, having put a set of conditions in place that exist nowhere but in the realm of the experimental laboratory, the results are afterward held to be somehow offering a valid insight into that world of uncontrolled conditions where most humans spend their time- at least those with modicum of options and freedom. (If not Final Wisdom, itelf.)
I can’t speak for Stan, but I’ll speak for myself: I’m not implacably opposed to the very notion of objectivity as an ideal, or of determinations that attempt to roughly delineate something that could be properly termed “objective criteria.” I’m opposed to how far it gets taken.
That’s my objection to Freudians and Marxists- the “ist” thing, the “ism” thing. Not so much an objection to the topics that Freud or Marx might have put on the table, but the “ism” notion that their studies and proffered insights offer THE comprehensive, “obejctive” answer to Everything. It turns to complexities of the human mind, and of human social interactions, into a set of Just-so Stories. Reductionism.
And those are just two examples out of many that I could bring up.
Consider a dialogue that Carl Hammerschlag, M.D., records in one of his books- The Dancing Healers: A Doctor’s Journey of Healing with Native Americans. Hammerschlag is a new doctor fresh out of medical school with a degree in psychiatry, and he meets with a couple of Navajo healers. One of them asks him this question, point-blank- “What do you know bout the mind?” And Hammerschlag starts to hem and haw, and attempts to explain that there are a lot of factors and complexities, it would take him a long time to explain, there are a great many subtleties in various subjects that it took him many years to master- and the Navajo responds to him, “I can tell you what I know about the mind in a single sentence.”
“The mind is mysterious.”
Well, as Hammerschlag tells it, that rocked his world.
There you have it. The guy who isn’t trying to understand Everything, and to demand that Everything be explicable, who acknowledges the infinite Unknown surrounding the Known on all sides, has the humility of wisdom.
Whereas the idea of someone that they possess Objectivity presumes that they knows everything there is to know.
The more one considers the idea of Objectivity, the weaker the premise is shown to be. The more it’s examined, the more spurious it looks.
The acceptance of the premise of the One True Objective Reality can lead to that sort of obsession with the actuarial, the odds-on favorite, as that most determinative of Objective Reality. In line with those immutable Objective Mathematical Laws of Probability.
But that’s an intellectually lazy surmise.
Actuarial Probability does not determine Objective Reality, or the person betting the Don’t Pass line at the dice tables would win every time.
Laws of probability can be useful, but they have no bedrock value- they don’t resolve the big questions about Reality, except for one: the very fact of their existence demonstrates that there’s no such thing as 100% objective certainty about the totality of the phenomenal world, ever. Not for any bandwidth of intelligence with which I’m familiar, at any rate.
26 August 2009, 12:09 amShamrock Pat:
Stan, what you are saying is so abstract. Can you use the problem of Northern Ireland as an example of what you are getting at. How does your point effect someone who is a man as opposed to someone who is a woman, someone who is from from Dublin versus someone from Belfast, Tory or Socialist, Catholic or Anglican or Baptist, landlord or tenant, football or Rugby fan, mountain vacationer or beach vacationer, antique furniture lover versus a technology freak, and so on.
26 August 2009, 2:26 amtochigi:
“a rose is a rose.”
no.
26 August 2009, 3:37 amno two roses are the same. only the symbol (the word “rose”) is the same.
an artificial construct.
Stan:
… and “artificial” does not mean “not real.” Thanks tochigi.
Running to work right now, but I’ll put a bee in someone’s bonnet. There is more than a phonetic connection between the object of objectivity and the object of the objectified. The differences between a man and a woman — as experienced, as Umwelts – are further inflected by the list of qualifiers that Shamrock gave. The trick is to discover what about being male and female is shared across those other boundaries. What is considered normative about male and-or female… how is masculinity and femininity (unified opposites, that is, they exist only in relation to one another) constructed. I apologize for my uber-brevity. I’m not being enigmatic… I just am out of time.
In the beginning the subject was male, and the object was female… even when the object is nature (from which Bacon said we should “tear out her secrets”). The history of this particular dualism (subject-object) is important in order to discover what we no longer recognize in it; because the S-O dualism (as well as mind-body, instrumental vs expressive, et al) has become naturalized, just an accepted part of the epistemological scenery.
26 August 2009, 5:56 amShamrock Pat:
Stan, I look forward to your return to put explain how you think this fits in to our world at large. One assumption that I would make about the people who visit your site is that they are all interested in public policy decision making. So can you tie it in to that.
Cabdriver, I am aware of the points that you have made. Your supporting statements show that there is such a thing as objectivity. For example the direction of travel of a sub atomic particle can be determined. That is objective at a certain level. On another level if the sub atomic particle is not real then it has no direction of travel that can be measured. So I guess we could call the objectivity of physics the OPERATIONAL objectivity. The rules seem to be true here and now in this dimension of the universe or cosmos or whatever it is. I know that a number of experiments have been done that show that humans most basic understanding of space and time are wrong. These experiments do not tell us what is correct.
When it comes to public policy decisions, objectivity is of course difficult to achieve, we can perhaps never even be sure that we have achieved it. There may always be unknown facts that were not considered. These are all good arguments for being a tolerant open minded person. Yet even the line on tolerance has to be drawn somewhere. Decisions have to be made. A knowledge of facts is not all that is needed to be able to make a decision. Motives are also necessary. So while decision making has a subjective element, I do not think that it is a good idea to call objectivity, as I understand the word, a myth.
If we take the current debate over health care reform as an example we would probably like people to analyze the different options from the perspective as an outsider, or one who is not effected personally by the decisions. We would tend to label someone who does not do this as biased or not objective. But such labeling is itself clearly not objective because expecting people to overlook their own interests is clearly a value judgment. What could be pointed out to people is, OK this plan A is better for you today but if your life were to change and get better plan B would be better for you, or if your life were to get worse plan C would be better. Plan C seems to be the better deal for most people but it would cost you x amount of dollars more than plan A. How altruistic are you willing to be?
Of course it is even much more complicated than that because if plan B is adopted it may be the best plan for him/her after he or she has at least 3 children. So there is not only subjectivity involved but lots of guess work in reaching a public policy decision. Of course these things are all obvious but then sometimes we needed to be reminded of the obvious.
War is murder. Murder is sometimes justified. The military stresses self sacrifice for the benefit of the group. So do biker gangs. The military stresses self sacrifice for the benefit of the nation. So did the NAZIS. If that does not motivate the military member the military stress all of the personal benefits of military service. A months vacation! Wow! To bad they do not know many European civilians get more. Educational benefits! Wow! To bad they do not know Europeans get these benefits without military service. Early retirement!! Wow even Europeans have to work for 40 years. To bad that during those 20 to 30 years those military members will work as many hours as a European will work in 40 under much more dangerous conditions.
The admiration of those others that have served in the military. Biker gangs get that too. Finally the loving admiration of their families and society at large. Yes that love from the society at large is something unique about the military, at least the love from those that are not so drugged out that they know what day of the week it is.
I have a confession to make but i think that I will make it later.
26 August 2009, 8:47 amStan:
Let’s go with part of that. That health care thing you bring up.
Now policy is how political power is implemented. The debate about health care right now is heavily contaminated with electoral positioning strategies, but at its core we mostly share an understanding that health care – that is, medicine, is (1) a good thing, and (2) an entitlement that – since it is good – should ethically be available to members of the human race.
There’s obviously a conservative argument that challenges the second point; and there is a shared and fervent belief by both liberals and conservatives in point number one: Medicine is a Good Thing.
Here we have a shared epistemology and a divergent ideology.
I’m attaching Illich’s treatise on medicine here, Medical Nemisis, and I hope someone will have the time and inclination to read it. If and when you do, and whether or not you end up agreeing with Illich or not, you will find that this pamphlet brings epistemology out of the shadows of “common sense” and into the light of a critique.
I’ll come back to “objectivity” later, but most of what I’d have to say would be cribbed from Bordo and the like-minded, linked above somewhere, and easily accessible with a web search.
Are we in a rush, or can we take time to read?
(And be careful with internet confessions… seriously.)
26 August 2009, 3:47 pmM. D.:
Re: how is masculinity and femininity (unified opposites, that is, they exist only in relation to one another) constructed.
I wondered if this didn’t have some origin related to language far, far back in time, considering modern-day Romance languages are still concerned with gender for nouns.
I found this on Wikipedia:
Origins: Romance languages have their roots in Vulgar Latin, the popular sociolect of Latin spoken by soldiers, settlers and merchants of the Empire, as distinguished from the Classical form of the language spoken by the Roman upper classes, the form in which the language was generally written. Between 350 BC and AD 150, the expansion of the Empire, together with its administrative and educational policies, made Latin the dominant native language in continental Western Europe.
This paper by Hannah Washington, Anomalies in Romance Noun Gender: The Evolution of Latin Nouns and Cross-linguistic Variation, talks about how noun gender eventually got all mixed around, for mostly technical reasons or convenience, and I like it for understanding which of my own postulates I can toss out, to save time, before I take a closer look at things. http://dspace.nitle.org/bitstream/handle/10090/8323/s10inde2008washington.pdf?sequence=1
I came across this in her paper, “There is also the possibility – in all of these languages – that this particular post-verbal noun acquired gender through a cultural semantic association with women as conquered beings,” but she quickly goes on to say, “However, this author would argue that, at least in Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, this example simply demonstrates a regular pattern of evolution from a first-conjugation verb into a noun…”
Languages have a life of their own, change over time like people or peoples. They migrate, cross-pollinate and hybridize, evolve and devolve, split apart, take on a life of their own in isolation, give birth to new generations and die on the vine. But they inculcate belief, too, so if you control the language, you can control the culture.
26 August 2009, 5:18 pmM. D.:
Re: Medical Nemisis
Here’s an excerpt from a lecture in Zurich, 9th October, 1918. The lecturer was regarded in his time as a bit odd, and I think still is today.
“…knowledge of certain medicaments — but knowledge of a baleful kind!
“Everything connected with medicine will make a great advance in the materialistic sense. Men will acquire instinctive insights into the medicinal properties of certain substances and certain treatments — and thereby do terrible harm. But the harm will be called useful. A sick man will be called healthy, for it will be perceived that the particular treatment applied leads to something pleasing. People will actually like things that make the human being — in a certain direction — unhealthy.
“Knowledge of the medicinal effects of certain processes and treatments will be enhanced, but this will lead into very baleful channels. For man will come to know through certain instincts, what kind of illnesses can be induced by particular substances and treatments. And it will then be possible for him either to bring about or not to bring about illnesses, entirely as suits his egotistical purposes.”
26 August 2009, 5:29 pmM. D.:
Here is something for you, Stan, from the same lecture as above, that has an insight into, sounds a lot like, masculinity as a death cult. It seems to me that with the brutality of rapid empire expansion and urbanization, urbanization everywhere (fewer wild places, and we are increasingly cut off, insulated from nature/divinity so we understand it less and less, on the whole) and without practice in reverence, respect, compassion and mercy, we will all be in a sort of Abu Ghraib, where the prison guards are prisoners, too.
“This, my friends, is a fragment of concrete knowledge of the evolution of existence, a fragment of a conception of life which can be truly assessed only by those who realise that an unspiritual view of life can never grow clear about these things. If a form of medicine injurious to humanity were ever to take root, if a terrible aberration of the sexual instincts were to arise, if there were baleful doings in the sphere of the purely mechanistic forces of the world, in the application of the forces of nature by means of spiritual powers, an unspiritual conception of life would see through none of these things, would not perceive how they deviate from the true path … The sleeper, as long as sleep lasts, does not see the approach of a thief who is about to rob him; he is unaware of it and at most he finds out later on, when he wakes, what has been done to him. But it would be a bad awakening for humanity! Man would pride himself upon the growth of his instinctive knowledge of certain processes and substances and would experience such satisfaction in obeying certain aberrations of the sexual impulses that he would regard them as evidence of a particularly high development of superhumanity, of freedom from convention, of broad-mindedness! In a certain respect, ugliness would be beauty and beauty, ugliness. Nothing of this would be perceived because it would all be regarded as natural necessity. But it would denote an aberration from the path which, in the nature of humanity itself, is prescribed for man’s essential being.”
26 August 2009, 5:44 pmShamrock Pat:
OK?
26 August 2009, 6:10 pmIllich wrote a scathing attack on the assumptions underlying peoples expectations about medical care.
He is free to become a Christian Scientist or to manage his pain with meditation. Although that is a bit unfair to him because he was not really so extreme. I myself am an opponent of pain. When I hear people tell me we have to suffer pain I think of my childhood religion classes and I tune out. Of course it is obvious that when ever you try to eliminate something 100% you reach a point of rapidly diminishing returns. Illich said something about understanding our human limits and making political rules to observe those limits. On one level it is certainly true that we have limits. But are any human limits permanent? Many people are very skeptical that any non earth sentient beings have been here to earth. I suspect that such visits have happened. If they have then other sentient beings have achieved incredible levels of technological sophistication. If they have done it, then why not us?
By the way, the Bordo Link is very incomplete.
cabdriver:
Pat Shamrock: “Cabdriver…Your supporting statements show that there is such a thing as objectivity. For example the direction of travel of a sub atomic particle can be determined. That is objective at a certain level…”
My statements on that topic don’t demonstrate a claim of objectivity for physics at all. Taken with all of the implications intact, they illustrate the limits of what can be mapped as measured as knowledge in the framework of an experiment designed to measure quantum phenomena. The ability to measure a given vector or characteristic in isolation doesn’t equate to a measurement of “reality.”
Neither do mathematical equations map “reality.” In engineering and technology, the more practical forms of mathematics, like geometry, trigonometry, and calculus, provide what might be termed helpful hints. But the successful construction of an artifact or the successful invention of a technology doesn’t confer anyone with the status of Master of Reality. Even if what’s constructed is a hydrogen bomb.
26 August 2009, 9:18 pmJames M:
I vote for “Medical Nemesis” getting its own thread. Feel free to bump me or whatever; I just have to ramble a bit on this.
Like most of us here, I have observed at a closer, more personal level of magnification that which Illich critiques: My grandmother (RIP) wasting away in a nursing home, zombie-like, barely moving even to lift a finger, hardly uttering a word and unresponsive to all our attempts at rousing her spirits; she went in for circulatory abnormalities, physically less-than-optimal but never one to sink into apathy or despair … and within a week or so, her condition was that of near-catatonia and an expressed readiness to drift off into the dark night. My sister the PhD in Pharmacology thankfully intervened, only to discover (surprise) this nightmare was of the iatrogenically-induced variety; they’d put her on a list of pills so long and so full of interactions and contraindications as to defy belief. The cure? Taking her off of the previous “cures.” She came back to life and lived about a year longer, with all of us having gotten another lesson in the so-called benefits of institutionalized medicine – a patient reduced to a revenue-stream, with no continuity of care, and no accountability for her condition.
(It’s funny, I think this term “continuity of care” must only have been invented by the medical establishment for the purposes of defining a thing whose lack is so widespread.)
Illich’s argument for the deprofessionalization of medicine has resonance with a recent episode of the excellent tv series “Mad Men” (which is set in the early 1960′s) – the main character’s family is posed with the choice of putting a parent with dementia in a nursing home, or caring for him at their home (with all its attendant hassles.) It’s telling that the family chooses the latter, and that most people I know who saw the episode (myself included) viewed the decision with surprise. We are not only less rooted in family these days and less willing to be bothered thusly; we are also conditioned to trust in the greater competency of the medical establishment to such a degree that the thought of caring for someone ourselves seems beyond our purview. We have given over our autonomy, and that of others, in the way Ilich describes.
But despite all his talk of our Promethean impudence with regard to “natural human limits,” I doubt Illich is (or is he?) decrying the invention of medicines like Penicillin, which he fails to mention when he de-links life expectancy from professional medicine, which (along with other antibiotics) actually does apparently account for a jump of 8 years in human life span (though of course it’s leading to the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria … hmm. Iatrogenesis again.) It’s unclear to me how he’d feel about the medicine I take daily which has reduced my incidences of asthmatic attack to zero, with no side effects I’m aware of. (I feel pretty damn good about it, for my part.) And stem cell research … well, I think I can picture his take on that, actually, were he alive.
What I’m getting at is, is there perhaps not a distinction to be made between the invention of novel therapies, and the institutions which enforce them on us as a matter of “common sense”? Can we have these medicines developed in pursuit of Promethean ideals, while still retaining the cultural permission for the individual to refuse these as the individual desires? Does, along with their introduction, naturally come the expectation (sometimes even enforced by law) that we will avail ourselves or our dependents of them and thereby opt in to the system?
On a different note, what of my experience of British socialized medicine, which I encountered during an emergency as very kind, helpful, and respectful of my wishes as a patient? Are systems like Britain’s NHS perhaps less deserving of many of Illich’s criticisms? Could the profit motive at the core of our version of institutionalized of medicine be the real problem, and its removal a critical step in reducing the sense of dehumanization and alienation, “anaesthetised and solitary” suffering we reflexively and rightly associate with it?
I know as a white American male, these questions are supposed to be rhetorical and I’m expected to have an opinion and defend it even long past the point of tenability (especially on the internet, or in a town hall,) but I’m actually throwing them out there to see what any of you might think.
27 August 2009, 12:46 amStan:
Jumped. Link here.
27 August 2009, 4:48 amShamrock Pat:
Cab driver,
So is it your position that there is no objective reality, or that objective reality can not be known, or that HUMANS are incapable of knowing objective reality, or that it is possible but very difficult for humans to be objective, or that objectivity is irrelevant, or none of these listed options.
What do you think the ramifications of your position of this question are for public policy decisions and for personal ethics.
Feel free to answer on the linked thread. I was not sure myself what thread to put my questions on.
27 August 2009, 9:17 amShamrock Pat:
Oops I see I should have posted my comments on the new page. Better Luck next time.
27 August 2009, 9:21 amShamrock Pat:
By the way, calling something masculine or Bourgeois is just a form of name calling designed to shut down critical thinking. So what if something is masculine, males can be right once in a while. A broken clock is right twice a day. Say I can play the game too.
28 August 2009, 6:54 amConcerning objectivity, do not throw the babe out with the bathwater. Hey that was a fun game. I wanna play again. Only this time with real dolls.
Michael Anderson:
This from the Guardian this A.M.:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/31/general-mcchrystal-afghanistan-bull
“The situation in Afghanistan is serious, but success is achievable and demands a revised implementation strategy, commitment and resolve, and increased unity of effort,” General Stanley McChrystal said. His findings will be submitted to President Barack Obama, who faces a public increasingly restive over a war that has lasted eight years.
Sounds a bit Westmoreland-ish.
“The problem of running a vast foreign and military policy, not just for the United States but also for other nations, is that all decisions on vital questions are filtered through the prism of ambition. Since men and women who aspire to attain influence and power very often give advice with a view to advancing their own careers, THEY ARE GENERALLY ANYTHING BUT OBJECTIVE ASSESSORS OF OPTIONS.” (Emphasis mine)
Is this where the objectivity topic ran astray? I notice Kolko is not gender-specific here, either.
31 August 2009, 8:53 amStan:
Of course, it’s gendered. It is still emotionally detached and instrumental.
On the war, every mention of it presses the wind out of me with its grinding horror. Obama is soooo complicit now. Obama’s Af-Pak War… and the jury is still out on Obama’s covert ops fetish, whether that extends from Pakistan to Honduras, imo.
Need a new bumper sticker: “Obama’s war is not the answer either.” (I just wrote that big with a sharpie on the back of my car. It’s an old car.)
31 August 2009, 10:08 amxavexgoem:
Off topic: Honduras? I know of the Clinton connection (Giordano, et al), but I’ve not heard much about the Obama one. What’s the info, where’s it coming from vis-a-vis covert ops? (Seems like ever since this election, I’ve lost track of where the more frightening information is coming…)
31 August 2009, 10:49 amStan:
FULL
Another pot boiler.
Y’know, I read a book a long time ago that Katherine Kean gave me to read in Haiti, called Promoting Polyarchy. Aside from Robinson’s introduction of a new word into our social taxonomies, he gives a very good and often detailed account of the role of so-called NGOs, like NED, IRI, USAID, et al. It really is important for people to understand the mechanics (actual embodiments) of these things, because that is what power most tries to conceal. The mechanics of things are too truthful. That’s why factories have no windows. I wrote a fair amount about this stuff when I was writing about Venezuela and Haiti for FTW, but since then many other exigencies have shouldered in front of it, and I confess I haven’t kept up. IAW the sister-from-Venezuela’s account, lot of the same old same old… even the same ever-more-geriatric, hate-encrusted operatives. Negroponte. Sheesh. A lifetime as the devil’s lieutenant. At any rate, Robinson’s book probably deserves another look, with an account of what developed from there. IRI was certainly all up in the middle of the last coup in Haiti, about which Obama has been vigilantly silent.
Pakistan is all the evidence we need of Obama’s predisposition for covert operations. He shares Bush’s tendency to fantasize about war; and that his actions in Afghanistan are so pregnant with catastrophes proves he shares Bush’s ignorance about war, too. Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush I, keep going… stupid on the subject of war, but glad to be in charge of their very own superpower. Boys and their toys.
31 August 2009, 11:18 amStan:
Oh yeah, here’s a pdf link on semiotics, a college paper this fella did, but I like how accessible it is.
31 August 2009, 11:55 amCurt:
I have always thought that the events that led up to my being transfered from a position at Panzer Kasern to a position at Landstuhl Hospital were a set up.
11 July 2010, 4:33 pmObviously the military could not accept me working at that position in Panzer Kasern because it was an obvious security risk. I do not mean in terms of espionoge. I know darn good and well that I told a co.worker who was a former NCO in the Army Intellegence Branch of my anti American views. But I did not think that it was too important because I was cerianly not alone in having such anti American views. Besides although I was and am anti american (government) I also do not like the governments of almost any country for that matter.
So I am surprised that it has taken me until now to become more suspicious of the time line for these events. I am sure that people who needed to take part in this operation were not told the full reasoning behind it. They were told 1/2 of the truth.
It is true that when I took that job I was fully pschologically prepared for the day when I might have to do somethng to support forces oppossed to US imperialism. It was a perfect spot to be in. At least once a week I had a pair of Generals and a half a dozen Colonels walking right past me all at one time and I was armed.
The events that led to my transfer occured in the summer of 2001. I suspect that at least the General of what at that time was called the 21st Theater Support Command knew that the US would be going to war in Iraq. That is even before 9-11. I had to be moved before we went to war. Now the invasion of Iraq did not happen until 2003 but I of course have heard that it was suppossed to happen earlier.
The thing is that I know, but they could not have known, is that I would not have done anything rash in response to an attack on Iraq. I harbored ill feelings towards Iraq, especially its military, for its unprovoked invasion of Iran. Although since then I have come to understand how Iraqi soldiers could have been duped in to not thinking that the attack was unprovoked. Furthermore I had a young daughter who I was the primary caregiver for at the time.
But in addition to my comments that I made to coworkers, past events that are probably only avialable to the MI no doubt led them to having a clearer picture of who they were dealing with. But obviously some very high ranking people could not tell lower ranking people the complete truth of WHY they were doing what they were doing because the why would be very controversial.
Oh well he who laughs last laughs the longest. I wonder just what it is exactly that I am refering too? Maybe it is so taboo that it can only be spoken of in the inner rooms of the Kremlin. Maybe that truth is misleading. Perhaps I have to much time on my hands and not enough money.