If you've posted in forums you might remember writing some decent responses. I usually spend a lot of time polishing my discussion forum responses depending on the subject or who I am talking to. Often I want to remember what I said about something, but finding the original post can be difficult. So it makes sense to capture the better responses for later review. Welcome to Clint's Reposts.Sunday, March 21, 2004
The problem with historical analysis (Politics Forum)
You've done a great job of supporting your viewpoint through reasoned historical analysis. The problem for you is that even if your historical analysis is sound, and ties neatly into a defensible resolution of your position, the world is much crazier and unpredictable than your arguments can sustain. The reason is that while you can put a historical context to present events, it is human emotion that carries the day.
It doesn't really matter that we shouldn't have gotten into WW1, we did. And I don't think you'll find many who would agree that we shouldn't have entered WWII. The same can be said for what James Woolsey calls WW3, which led ultimately to a huge shift in the geopolitical scene. As for WW4 (fine, lets call it that), already Al Qaeda is claiming possession of "suit-case" nuclear weapons--who knows if it's true, but emotionally we are prone to believe it. Even the name Al Queda is a placeholder name for something much larger than Al Qaeda. Just saying the name Al Qaeda--doesn't it evoke a sort of fear and worry to one's thoughts? That would be the emotion I'm talking about.
It comes as no surprise to me and I doubt to you either, that the political class uses these emotions to further their aims. I would go so far as to say most politicians are acting from emotion as well and simply amplify and reflect the emotions of their constituents. If it were simple for everyone to sit down and simply analyze the geopolitical situation as you have been doing, we would have resolved all our global relationship problems long ago.
If we analyze our own inclinations, we see that we, too, are bringing our own emotional bias to the table here. Interestingly, we've both reached different and often opposite emotional conclusions, even though we have access to the same historical data. We paradoxically *create* our own results based on our historical interpretations. Physicists have discovered such paradoxical results (and this has huge metaphysical implications) in their experiments with light.
The only real escape from the grip of this is to consider what Tao has been going on about in other posts: a strong sense of nothingness. I prefer to call it having a position and yet being positionless, but frankly I don't think we have the language to adequately describe the place.
My initial post in this thread was meant to reveal why and where we are going with WW4. You could be right as rain historically and it wouldn't matter. I am saying that what is going to happen will happen as a result of something other than historical experience. Tao, speaking of fundamentalism, got it correct. And he acknowledged that he doesn't have an answer--how could he?
C
It doesn't really matter that we shouldn't have gotten into WW1, we did. And I don't think you'll find many who would agree that we shouldn't have entered WWII. The same can be said for what James Woolsey calls WW3, which led ultimately to a huge shift in the geopolitical scene. As for WW4 (fine, lets call it that), already Al Qaeda is claiming possession of "suit-case" nuclear weapons--who knows if it's true, but emotionally we are prone to believe it. Even the name Al Queda is a placeholder name for something much larger than Al Qaeda. Just saying the name Al Qaeda--doesn't it evoke a sort of fear and worry to one's thoughts? That would be the emotion I'm talking about.
It comes as no surprise to me and I doubt to you either, that the political class uses these emotions to further their aims. I would go so far as to say most politicians are acting from emotion as well and simply amplify and reflect the emotions of their constituents. If it were simple for everyone to sit down and simply analyze the geopolitical situation as you have been doing, we would have resolved all our global relationship problems long ago.
If we analyze our own inclinations, we see that we, too, are bringing our own emotional bias to the table here. Interestingly, we've both reached different and often opposite emotional conclusions, even though we have access to the same historical data. We paradoxically *create* our own results based on our historical interpretations. Physicists have discovered such paradoxical results (and this has huge metaphysical implications) in their experiments with light.
The only real escape from the grip of this is to consider what Tao has been going on about in other posts: a strong sense of nothingness. I prefer to call it having a position and yet being positionless, but frankly I don't think we have the language to adequately describe the place.
My initial post in this thread was meant to reveal why and where we are going with WW4. You could be right as rain historically and it wouldn't matter. I am saying that what is going to happen will happen as a result of something other than historical experience. Tao, speaking of fundamentalism, got it correct. And he acknowledged that he doesn't have an answer--how could he?
C
