Discovering Columbus 2012

Sir;... I agree that it was a disaster of a debate... Your average democrat is a superior human being and that is why I don't qualify...But it is too easy for people to judge the moral quality of a man by his determination when pressed to explain his position...Democrats are moral, and they stand up for humanity, and they deserve leaders who will stand up for them in their standing up for others...
This is no time for equivocation... This is no time to beat around the bush... If Mr. Obama the low born black man does not find the nads to call Mr. Romoney what he has proved himself to be out of his own mouth and repeatedly: A LIAR; then the democrats need to find another candidate and quickly...
The morality of the democrat base is worthy of a determined defense... Mr. Obama should not take it personally or make it personal... All he has to say is: All I have done in office is try to get the economy up and running with the best advice I could find, and it was not always what it might have been, and it did not always work as intended; but what ever was done by this administration was done with an eye and a heart for the best interest of the American people...
They have not failed; but they never acted without the burden of a great debt, or a world economy in the tank... All Mr. Obama has to do is tell the truth; and then he has to get angry because angry counts as a measure of moral fibre...
Who is this liar who stands before the public, who lied to get there, who lies to stay there and lies with nearly every breath??? Is he Janus??? Is he Voldemort??? Does he think to lie the economy into recovery??? Does he expect to lie America into world ascendency??? You need more than a pack of lies to become president, and you need a lot more than a pack of lies to make a successful presidency... Yes; it is possible he could feed one half of the population on the rights of the other half, but not without enough resistence to tear down the whole junk pile society...
All Mr. Obama has to do, is stand fast, tell the truth, and point out that while the republicans may be happy with the prospect of having a lying president willing to sell his soul for office, that the American people need some one who dares to level with them, even if that man is some low born black man...The democrats have the high moral ground... They need one willing to lead them with some fire in his belly...The cause is good... The candidate is as good as any other... He needs to quit hemming and hawing and nodding his head like a bobble head Jesus, and fight back...
I know it is hard to hit some one who is never there... He ought to try hitting them where they ain't... Make up something to get Mr. Romoney to commit to something on the bug light that he will not be able to deny later...
Thanks...Sweeney

I am getting utterly disgusted with comfy mediocrity, and sadly, I feel the same about Mark Shields, who I have been in the habit of looking to for leadership, but whose writings and interviews have been leaving me increasingly disappointed.

How in the world those two idiots debating Thursday night could have neglected to mention the shooting of Malala Yousafzai in Pakistan is utterly beyond me--that is, until I tell myself again and again that these nitwits are not true leaders.

That insult to the entire human race, in addition to being a tragedy that cannot be highlighted enough, may well be a history changing event. We just saw, a couple of weeks before, the Muslim world explode in outrage over a silly video, resulting in lawbreaking and lethal riots throughout the middle east. And now that we see an event that justifies an explosion in true human outrage over a subhuman act, people seem unable to find their tongues.

But this tragic event may well illustrate why we have been doing what we're doing in Afghanistan, and what the struggle between civilization and Islamist terrorism is really about. Did we hear a mention of that by those two mental diminuitives last night? Nope. Nada.

What an opportunity that would have been to express united American outrage over what we are fighting in the middle east in general and Afghanistan in particular. But, of course, only a true leader would be able to do that.
So, I don't expect to hold my breath over how those two might respond. But I expect more out of the talking head commentariat, especially those like Mark who purport to lead.

So what is Mark's excuse? Too comfy, too old, too complacent?

Re: Masako... What many people in poor countries do in directing limited educational resources at men who are already dominant in society works against the whole of the society raising itself through education... People say I was lucky to find my wife, and it is no lie; but I was also looking for my equal or intellectual superior when I found her...I accept it as a challenge, and a challenge that has led to my improvement morally and intellectually...But we also have the advantage of a wealthy and advanced society... Since our goals are the same it does not much matter who is calling the shots at any moment...
As Shakespeare is supposed to have said: If two people ride a horse, some one has to sit in front... Every relationship is like that, and every form is that horse... We should recognize that in many respects we are losing the cultural battle we would dearly like to win because for many, this constant conflict over who should sit in front between the sexes is a pointless diversion... It is not so much for myself because I am goal oriented, and when some one is right, as my wife is with her great big open woman's intellect, she is simply right... But if you look closely you can see Hispanics doing well, and Muslims doing well, and all because culturally they are not fighting the battle of the sexes...
It is determined before hand that the women will do this, and the men will do that, and because people do not depart from their assigned roles, or even bring up the matter they are more successful... I have seen these people in restaurants, and when daddy talks, everyone listens... If every man is smart, he will take his wife's councel... If that whole society were smart, they would disregard that part of their culture that relegates women to a second class, and educate their best minds with their limited resources...
For men to hold women down is exactly like a man standing on his own foot... He will not make any progress... I understand the threat men feel from educated and intelligent women... Just because you deny women education does not mean they do not know, but it does mean on the whole that the whole society suffers much more its ignorance, prejudice, poverty, slavery and brutality...The gentile society of the Iroquois offers a prime example of the moderating influence of women on government...They simply have better sense than men whether educated or not, and since they more often than men suffer the failures of society they should have more control...And I would say they should have the final say in all matters if they did not so much follow their men into their cultural predjudice...
If you were suddenly to offer all women in Afghan society the right to education upon a free national vote in favor, for example, how much support do you think you would get from the whole society???... Many women would vote for no change as would many men...The natural conservatism of all people is their most common quality across all times and places... That is what makes any change of forms the most spectacular and celebratory of events... Why do we celebrate the fourth of July...
To make that conscious effort to depart from the past, and step into the future is the most frightful act any person or society can take... Moses was denied the promised land... Do you think he needed to see it to imagine it??? God love that child; but her fate awaits any who try to push this world faster than it will go... As that old line goes I think by Kipling, but often repeated: Here lies a fool who would hustle the East... It will go as it will go, and no faster than minds may change...
I know what I ask of people when I ask for change... I ask for the impossible... I ask for the absolute extreme of courage any person can exhibit...If people must think anew to live anew, it has nothing in common with a change of clothing, and is more like a change of skin, or a metamorphosis into an imago... What that child was asking from her society was nothing short of revolutionary change... A crossing of a street is not accomplished without courage... Think of that leap of faith required to change ones forms completely...
It is dangerous to ask for change, and I know because I do it every day...But the very courage you demand of those who must change themselves in order to change their world is bound to remind those cowards who cannot face the future -of what cowards they really are, and they will hate you for it...

Re: Sweeney and Masako, you are both right. That child in her youth and innocence and intelligence reminds all of us of how we once were or wanted to be; full of courage and righteousness. In many societies, including our own, that youthful fire is quickly extinguished or brought down to a handleable flame. As Sweeney so often says, we fear change,
including internal changes brought about by external change.

According to their society, she was an insult to her culture and her family. A child, a female child with a voice and a mind and a keen understanding of her own self worth, an anathema and someone to be ridiculed, and silenced. It wasn't so long ago that our society was the same way towards blacks and women.

Re: morgan. It was very long ago. And the Ku Klux Klan never came close to toppling the power structure in this country. They murdered some SNCC folks, but when the government sent troops, they quaked in their boots. The women's suffragist movement was not well received either decades before that, but their kids didn't get bullets in the brain.

Remember Benazir Bhutto? I followed her progress for more than three decades before those subhumans blew her away. She was my hero. I was so thrilled when she came back to power after all that time, but I kind of knew in my heart she would not live. Malala Yousafzai is my hero now too.

This is not a matter of cutting some folks slack because they are just a little backward and are reliving the mindset of Europe's Inquisition. These creatures are a cancer that has matastisized throughout the middle east. And if they succeed in toppling the government of Pakistan, they will have nuclear weapons. Think about it. That's what Obama has been dealing with, and that is why we are in Afghanistan.

We may well have seeded and fertilized the whole thing because the oil trade elevated an entire bunch of backward thugs who had little to offer science, philosophy, or any of the other treasures of civilization we all cherish. Whatever it has been that has fostered barbarians overcoming civilized and peaceful Muslims, Baha'i, Christians, and Jews, we have a big problem now.

Re: Masako... Sir;.. You might well compare those people socially and culturally with cave men, but they are not sub human... You are seeing the effects of two powerful things, and I do not use the term thing at all lightly, upon their minds, and those two powerful things affect our minds in like if not exact fashion: Culture and ignorance... All humanity knows culture and all of humanity suffer their ignorance... We are not much better than those people if better at all, and are in many respects worse...War is a clash of cultures but it is from the point of view of humanity the greatest of immorality...Yet, they are not here lecturing us about our morals, or enticing our children to behave in ways we would prefer not... If we have enough love in our hearts and room in our homes for such people as that child who eschew ignorance and love God, the quietly spirit them away, because conflicts of culture are invariably fought and suffered by individuals... If we want peace with such people it will be on their terms as well as our own... Their culture, which is not entirely Islamic culture because even Islam could not change custom- is very settled and not easily changed... To demean these obvious human beings as sub humans does not demonstrate the patience necessary to any great endeavor... Ask yourself: Who was the injured party here???
Certainly the child was injured, and in your opinion the whole society is damned; but ultimately, it is that whole society which must suffer its ignorance... Where is our claim to a higher morality; because I will assure you that our drone strikes which aim at the death of one or two high value targets often hit those targets in the middle of community activities like marriages, and which take out a lot of innocent children... We are very indescriminate about our violence, and we cannot say that about the Muslims... They targeted that child when they might have taken out everyone with her...
Culturally we are abhorant to them... If they are told to spank their daughters if they are lewd, we are told to buy our daughters lewd clothing so they are not stigmatized by those lewder... If we do not want their children to be like them, they are not alone in not wanting their children to be like ours... Change is a quality of our culture as it is not to them, and in many respects their societies work as ours does not... Clearly, education is no threat to Islam and Islam once led the world in education... To their minds, the changes represented by us, by the U.S., lead inevitably to the disolutions of their communities (as it has with us), and with the breakdown of the influence of Islam on their lives much as the force of religion has broken down in our lives...Those people in attacking that child were attacking a symbol or a symptom of all that is attacking them, and that is an act of futility...
Maybe I am wrong to see the intractability of their society in magalithic proportions... Perhaps it is only a sign of its brutality and brittleness... It does not change because it cannot change, for any litttle chink in the wall seems to threaten the whole structure... I think their fear is misplaced...Islam at its essence is very durable, but that is not what they are defending...They are defending a culture older than Islam...
You are right to guess that we have seeded it... In fact we daily make the situation worse, and there will be great terror there after we leave... All you have to do is look at that part of the world and see how many invaders it has swallowed up to know it was not a good idea to hang around...
Thanks...Sweeney

James: I would call them animals if I didn't feel that is an insult to the entire Animal Kingdom. I can't find an animal to compare them to that I don't respect more than them.

I don't damn the whole society--I think you can figure that out. But I damn the movement. It is huge and it threatens civilization itself in very large part of the world.

And I will tell you one more thing. You can come out with all of the philosophical, pseudo-empathic platitudes you want, but if that was your daughter they had blown away, you would probably be signing up for military service and dreaming about how you could cut them up, or maybe even urinating on some corpses, as I write.

Re: Masako;... You could not live like those people a day, and hour, or a minute... There is no possible way you could be transported into their shoes, if they had any... Where poverty, death and brutality are common, people become inured to it, and there is nothing in the stress Western society has put them under, or the war we have subjected them to that was ever likely to make them more humane... And the stupidity of even the people we send their to deal with them person to person is extreme... And it is not Afghanistan, or Pakistan, but some place much more modern, which is Syria; but when a 60 minutes reporter says upon hearing that some men had given their vow on a certain matter interrupted the speaker and said: Vows are easy...
That person will never grasp the extent to which a society can be bound by their honor, individual and collective... A vow may certainly mean nothing to us... A man may vow his love and whore the next day... We do not get it, and we do not get them; and we are limited in our stupidity as much as they are limited in their ignorance... And seriously, we might well know of them, even if we do not fully understand them, but their knowledge of our society is limited to the war we bring them, and the men we send to fight it... The men have the sense to know that uneducated and illiterate, their only hope of dominance in their society is to suffer women more ignorant and illiterate yet...They cannot possibly escape their culture any more than we can escape ours... They might obliterate much of their culture in the process of accepting ours; but in what sense is ours that much more superior that they should accept it???
We kill people too... We destroy the environments upon which lives depend... Tell me we have enough honor among us to believe those who give us their oaths of office....Consider: If under the pressure of economic competition soap become watered down more every time we buy it; and there is no government or honor to limit the amount that soap is watered, at what point will the soap we buy be only water???... Dish soap is more coloring than soap, and as the price of food items remains the same packages become smaller...
No matter how much a society tries to live without honor, it must some where have some honor or there will be no difference between commerce, even political commerce, and thievery...In the commerce between people in the East which is inevitable everywhere, it is nearly impossible to sell dreams and promises because people are already buying what works or seems to- because it has worked since the dawn of time... Their culture is more durable because it has been built through trial and error, and ours is less durable because it has been built upon theology, philosophy, ideology, and soft science...
You and I both realize that their culture keeps them in poverty and isolation...You cannot argue that it does not work... They are obviously able to defend themselves... Do you think they even care what we think about them???If we demean them, we cannot but be meaningless to them... As we are much of the time to each other....
Thanks...Sweeney

Re: Masako;... I hope you do not think I am some nice guy... I don't need an excuse to piss on people... My whole life has been a search for reasons to not piss on people... I do martial arts; but early on in life I learned to fight, and long into adulthood, when I must have known better I had actual physical fights with people... And since I like to travel, and want to go with my wife, I try to stay ready, and not look like some victim... But I don't pick fights, and even when a fight is trying to pick me, I know pretty well how to avoid it, and if it is unavoidable I know how to fight...
Our fight in Afghanistan was one we did not have to fight... Once it was clear Mr. Bin Ladin was on the run we should have departed... You can fight armies, but you cannot fight populations; and the cost of laying back while always being on guard is expensive in material and morale... I would not have fought that fight to begin with, and I would have pulled out at the first opportunity because for the price of staying their once, we could have returned ten times, pulled out, and went in and beat the shit out of them again until they wanted to make a deal...We are good at invasions... We are good at attacks... We should have let them form up so we had them where we could destroy them, and done just that... But it is so much easier to kill a person than change a mind... And there is not much wiggle room in their culture for mind changing...Short of killing them all as we pretty well did with our Native Americans, there is little chance of us changing their culture... We can have peace with them, but it will not be on our terms alone...We have missed our best opportunity for even that, since the cost of staying for nothing has brought us to leaving with nothing...
We should ask: Why did we go; and why did we stay??? Mission accomplished, after all... Everything ventured, everything lost...Why should they even talk with us... They know we are on the run, ready to go home, ready to lick the wounds for the most part self inflicted by our culture of political and military stupidity...Their faith in Islam is not greater than our faith that technology will win all wars...We are in the business of exporting our best young men, and importing human wreckage and coffins...What a deal...
Thanks...Sweeney

Re: James A, Sweeney. There is a war going on in the middle east. It is between humans and subhumans. It's about that simple.

Next time you are tempted to think Israel is being too harsh, think also about the neighbors they are dealing with. If I were a woman or a girl in Israel, I would be scared to death.

Re: Masako... The first step toward murder is the objectification of some other human being... You have taken the first step... What is holding you back???...
We are making a bad situation for women worse... Everytime they see a broadcast from American with American girls running around nude or slightly clothed, their reaction is to bind their own women more fully in discrimination and segragation... I will not say it is bad, given that it has so clearly worked at creating a tough and cruel population...
I will say that to change a few, it may be necessary to kill nearly all of them; but since we are here, and they are there, and their ability to hurt us is slight unless we give the opportunity to them, -then why not leave them alone...Generally their society works in that the culture reproduces itself in the population... We do not like certain aspects of their society and would tweak it; but any such tweaking is bound to be considered interference...And though their ways of treating women may not have much support from their religion in fact, their religion casts its shadow and blessing over their whole recieved culture, so that where one leaves off, and where the other begins is impossible to tell...
I know that I would not change places with them, and yet, if I could say that I truly believed in God I would be a Muslim simply because they take it seriously, as a believer should... Remember what Jesus said: Give unto Caesar; but what is not God's after all, if you believe???
I think it is a wrong to believe that these people do not some how love their miserable lives and their children, and that they cannot smell the poppies when the wind is right, and that they cannot see beauty... During a great part of my life time these peoples have suffered attack and duress...You cannot look at Americans going through the stress we are, of economic decline and injustice and see us as we are, as we want to be and as we have often been...You cannot judge a people as if unstressed in the times of stress... Just at those with a religious tradition in this land revert to earlier beliefs and forms in reaction to the breakdown of the economy and government, so do those people seek the brutality and austerity of their religion in former days...Some of ours reject science, learning, and democracy for faith, ignorance, and theocracy... What makes you think they are in any respect different from our religious bigots???
When forms are failing people, people are often more inclined than ever to cling to them... The bottom is falling out of their world... We offer them a lot of temptation, and no good examples... They cling to that which gives them a sense of meaning and purpose much as we ourselves do in our own lives...
So call them animals and kill them...That makes a lot of sense... I would only say: Don't bother killing just a few, cause that will just make the rest mad... Kill them all or don't bother with them in the least... They are already living in the past with the dead...Throw dirt in their faces, and they may thank you... Try to help them and they may kill you...Better no contact what so ever...
Thanks...Sweeney

Re: James A, Sweeney. Sometimes you have to objectify to kill. And sometimes you have to kill to survive. That's how nurturing human beings deal with eating the flesh of other animals. Maybe some day we will become evolved enough to forgo meat, which I sincerely hope, but alas, we are stuck in the primitive time known as the early 21st Century.

It was the same with Nazi Germany. In many ways, we enabled them, and I truly believe we have enabled these subhumans in the middle east, thanks to utterly stupid foreign policy and naked, get-it-now-and-screw-the-future, greed for oil.

I don't know how you feel about pacifism in the face of WW II, but my father fought and I would too. That experience fucked him up and in many ways me too. This phenomenon in the middle east is a stain on the face of humanity just as Nazi Germany was, and I don't think any person with a conscience and a brain knows quite how we should deal with it, but pacifism, platitudes, denial, and Buchanan-style shirking of any responsibility at all for dealing with it clearly aren't the answer.

Would be nice to find ways that don't involve violence, but just as I can't think of anything other than violence or the threat of it that would have dealt with Hitler, other than preventive political measures long before he rose to power (nice dream), I can't think of another solution here and now dealing with this cultural, spiritual, political, and military cancer spreading throughout the middle east.

Re: Masako;... I guess I have read to much of Anthropolgy to judge any culture on limited knowledge... People outside judge others subjectively, and people inside judge others oustide based upon their own... No one can free themselves from their culture and the best one can be is culturally conscious... A lot of people nominally Islamic can be judged as poor and miserable Muslims, but Islam only took over many cultures, much as Christianity did without fundamentally changing them... So Christians may be judged as well on the basis of Chrisitianity, and it can easily be seen that they are Chrisitians in name only to take meaning and power from the form from their religion without adding a bit of good to it... They have their reward, and it is often worth their souls...
When having such conversations as we have, I often consider the attitude of the black robes to Native American attitudes to homosexuality, which was very relaxed... If a boy wanted to wear an apron, or a girl wanted to play with a bow, that was what it was, and though the priests were scandalized by this behavior, they recognized in the Natives a superior morality... A person is moral or is immoral within the context of their own culture...
The Jews and the Arabs are both culturally obsessed with morality, but morality guides only ones conduct towards ones own, and this affects the behavior toward others only to the extent that the whole of ones community is held responsible for individual actions against other communities... What we consider terrorism is often the expression of group responsibility which all moral people practiced... In that sense, there are no non combatants... Everyone is a target or a victim, a friend, or an enemy; and vengeance belongs to everyone who values their honor...
There is no human morality as yet... Morality is what defines every member of any group, and every group against another... You can see the similarity of the words ethic, and ethnic, and the first referes only to the character or customs of the other...
Morally; why should I have any objection to your killing of anyone who offends you, so long as they are not one of my own??? To offer an example: Under Athenian homocide law only a relative of a victim, and upon good evidence, could bring a case for murder against anyone, and no one could bring a case against a citizen for the murder of a slave because they were considered only property, and unrelated...While reason may be found for moral behavior, moral behavior is never rational, so it will certainly be easier to kill an Afghan than to change his mind...
What you might want to understand is that all of humanity was once like that poor slob without the pressure of technologically advanced societies straining his culture as recieved from pre-history...We have all managed to change, but we are centuries and perhaps millenia ahead of that man... Yet; the technological advantage is not all there is to culture... He can live with his primitive conditions with a superior culture, and our technology allows us to live as though culture were meaningless...
We talk of the melting pot; but in this country we have an acid bath for cultures... What do we know of cultures here??? Ethnic foods, spices... Some friends of mine own a Chinese buffet... When I drove two of them to Chicago to renew passports, they took me to a restaurant in China Town... It was nothing like the food in their place, or like the many Chinese places I have eaten; more like the food in their home, and as the waiter said: A taste of China... It is hard to imagine that some one would eat with pleasure and nostalgia the fare of a place they had to work very hard to escape, but it was not all bad, and it it was a reminder to them of who they are... No one in touch with their culture has any doubt about who they are, but many Americans have no idea...
Thanks...Sweeney