ShrinkWrapped

Saying Whatever Comes to Mind XXXII

Due to technical difficulties, the Sanity Squad Podcast did not get posted until this morning.  As luck would have it, our topic has remained timely, since we discussed the Iranian seizure of the British sailors and the rather incomprehensible rules of engagement under which they surrendered.  The ensuing British reaction, thus far highlighting the weakness of will of the West, continues to be disheartening, but sadly not unexpected.

Download or listen to Sanity Squad: High Stakes Hold'em and allow Neo-neocon, Dr. Sanity, Siggy, and me to enlighten.

When Will They Ever Learn? (Part II)

A few days ago I wrote about how difficult it was for a young woman to learn some uncomfortable things about herself.  (When Will They Ever Learn?) She had a powerful need to not-know that part of her character, her habitual way of interacting with important people in her world, consistently led to behavior that was self-defeating.  She could not begin to alter her behavior until she recognized her own contribution to her dysfunctional life.  Once her own unconscious tendencies were made more available to her she could start the arduous process of change.

There is a corollary to this idea that only by becoming aware of your unconscious tendencies can you begin to change them.  That is that as long as you remain unaware of how your basic assumptions, your world view, affects how you interpret information, you will tend to force all new data to fit your pre-conceived notions of how the world works (or should work) and will continue to pursue dysfunctional behavior until catastrophic failure.  As an example, on an individual level, a man who is unaware that he treats his wife as an object will not be able to develop increasing emotional intimacy as their relationship progresses (or, fails to progress) until one day he is surprised that she has hired a lawyer and changed the locks.

The same maxim can hold true for a society, a culture, a country, a political party.  Failed policies that gratify deep-seated longings among the population and the elites, will be adhered to tenaciously until catastrophic failure even in the face of a mountain of contradictory evidence.

The Bush administration has had many failures in the last few years.  They failed to recognize that winning the peace was, if anything, more important than winning the initial stages of the war.  They failed to recognize that their model of how Iraq worked was incorrect and were 2 years too late in changing course in Iraq.  Perhaps most crucially, they failed to understand that the world had changed and that the information warfare component of our trans-global battle with the forces supportive of Islamo Fascism was the key to the long term outcome of this trans-generational war.  It has taken electoral disaster for the Bush administration to change course in Iraq and the outcome will remain in doubt for quite some time to come.

Our Friends, the Saudis

On 9/11, 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia.  The special relationship between Saudi Arabia and America was jolted and potentially in danger from the al Qaeda attack.  By now, most Americans who have been paying attention know that al Qaeda represents the apotheosis of Sunni Muslim fanaticism and has been supported with manpower and money by Saudi Arabia since its inception.  The Saudis have always played a very clever game to protect their interests.  They are weak militarily and rely on Western (ie, American) power to protect the Royal family from threats, yet have also bought off their internal opponents by funding the most violent of the Jihadi groups, the Wahhabi sect of Islam, and directed their hate and violence outward, toward Westerners, especially Jews and Americans.  At the same time the Saudis have a long and storied habit of paying off their friends in Washington, especially in the State Department, but not sparing the Legislative branch, by hiring retired politicians, diplomats et al at high salaries, paying exorbitant speaking fees, making huge investments in their Presidential libraries or investment firms, and in general making post-Washington life very pleasant for American officialdom.  9/11 threatened these cozy arrangements. 

Furthermore, the rise of Islamic radicalism and Iran's increasing stature in the neighborhood following the American invasion of Iraq, led to a threat to Sunni rule from the Shia infidels newly empowered in Iraq joining their co-religionists in Iran on the ascendancy. 

One optimistic view was that the threat from Iran, and from the turmoil in Iraq, would "concentrate the minds" of the Saudis who would recognize their true personal and national interests lie with the West, and the Americans.   It is becoming clear that this optimistic hope, that a nascent accommodation between the Arab Sunnis and the West, via an acceptance of Israel's right to exist, may have been misplaced.

The most obvious sign of how wrong-headed this view occurred when King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, host of this years Arab League (more appropriately named "Arab Sunni League") meeting in Riyadh, commented on the current situation in the Middle East.

My comments are interspersed.

GLOBAL WARMING, A CITIZEN'S PRIMER

Jimmy J is one of the voices of reason who comments at ShrinkWrapped and from time to time offers a guest post which I am delighted to host.  In today's post, he offers a dispassionate way for the non-scientist to educate himself about the question of Anthropogenic Global Warming.  Between AL Gore's hysteria, with 20 foot rises in sea level, the UN's obvious desire to enhance the power of the international community by leveraging the 7-20 inch rise their consensus supports, and the recent rising tide of voices critical of the entire hypothesis, it is hard for a non-scientist to know what to think of this issue.  Allow Jimmy to be of assistance:

Global warming is much in the news and it generates a lot of passion on both sides of the issue.  It is a very important issue because, if those who believe man made CO2 is the only cause of the recent warming are right, it means that the government is going to be restricting our freedoms in a very big way. That is why I believe it behooves all of us to inform ourselves about the issue so we can evaluate the claims of those who  believe in Anthropogenic (man caused) Global Warming (AGW) and those who believe the warming is just part of the Earth's normal cycles of warming and cooling.

For myself I believe we don't know the answers yet. To definitively prove the case for AGW we need to see what happens over the next 10 to 25 years. If the warming continues over that period as predicted by the climate change models  then the case would be much stronger than it is today. Many people on the AGW bandwagon will tell you that we can't wait 10-25 years, that we are in a CRISIS now. (The Earth has a FEVER! It needs treatment NOW!) My opinion is that they are, for whatever reason, trying to stampede people into letting the government take away a lot of the freedom we now enjoy.

I am not going to attempt to make the case pro or con other than to say that I have spent a lot of time studying the information on the Internet and I have come to the conclusion that the case for AGW has not been definitively made. That said, I believe there is some reason to believe they could be right.

But I do want to address what the real issue that is causing all the heat and light. The real issue is that if we are causing warming by burning fossil fuels, it means that it can be slowed, stopped, or even reversed only by changing the way we live. Our society is dependent on cheap, abundant energy from oil, natural gas, coal, hydro-electric, and nuclear power. To reduce man made CO2 means we have to replace oil, natural gas, and coal as sources of power. Think about that! More than 80% of our energy comes from those sources. We can develop more nuclear and hydro-electric plants, given enough time and money. However, it also means replacing most of our engines of transportation with engines that burn a fuel that doesn't release CO2. Hydrogen has been touted as a possibility, but it takes energy to produce hydrogen as a fuel. And hydrogen research is in its infancy. There are many, many problems in trying to change the energy we use for transportation. With a Manhattan scale project with trillions invested over 50 years this country could probably make that transition because we have the technological ability and we are rich. The problem is, what about the three other big CO2 producers - China, India, and Russia? Will they or can they make the same effort and investment?  If the USA is the only country to drastically slow its CO2 emissions will it make any difference in the warming?  Probably not.

When Will They Ever Learn?

On Sunday, Richard Landes reminded me of an article by Danial Pipes from December of last year which described How the West Could Lose. Pipes noted three major weaknesses that the West has in fighting against the Islamic fascists.

(In an interesting discussion at Breath of the Beast, Yaacov Ben Moshe refers to the enemy as Caliphate Islam.)

Pipes describes pacifism, self-hatred, complacency and elaborates on all three points in his article, which is well worth reviewing. I would concentrate on complacency, since that is the primary danger that arises from the apathy of the majority, especially on the liberal end of the political spectrum. I do not see them as evil, or in league with the enemy, but I do find most liberals to be intellectually lazy and complacent; many have commented here that when people write notes that disagree with the thesis that we are facing an existential danger, they rarely address arguments with any facts or take issue with particular points, rather they typically make ad hominem arguments and/or simply assert that the dangers are overblown and the result of the cynical politics of fear. I agree with Pipes that their complacency puts us all in danger; as Pipes puts it:

Complacency: The absence of an impressive Islamist military machine imbues many Westerners, especially on the left, with a feeling of disdain. Whereas conventional war – with its men in uniform, its ships, tanks, and planes, and its bloody battles for land and resources – is simple to comprehend, the asymmetric war with radical Islam is elusive. Box cutters and suicide belts make it difficult to perceive this enemy as a worthy opponent. With John Kerry, too many dismiss terrorism as a mere "nuisance."

• Islamists deploy formidable capabilities, however, that go far beyond small-scale terrorism:

• A potential access to weapons of mass destruction that could devastate Western life.

• A religious appeal that provides deeper resonance and greater staying power than the artificial ideologies of fascism or communism.

• An impressively conceptualized, funded, and organized institutional machinery that successfully builds credibility, goodwill, and electoral success.

• An ideology capable of appealing to Muslims of every size and shape, from Lumpenproletariat to privileged, from illiterates to Ph.D.s, from the well-adjusted to psychopaths, from Yemenis to Canadians. The movement almost defies sociological definition.

• A non-violent approach – what I call "lawful Islamism" – that pursues Islamification through educational, political, and religious means, without recourse to illegality or terrorism. Lawful Islamism is proving successful in Muslim-majority countries like Algeria and Muslim-minority ones like the United Kingdom.

• A huge number of committed cadres. If Islamists constitute 10% to 15% of the Muslim population worldwide, they number some 125 to 200 million persons, or a far greater total than all the fascists and communists, combined, who ever lived.

How is it that so few people's minds are changed by argument? We claim to be rational beings and pride ourselves on our rationality, yet if we are truly rational, then good arguments would defeat fact-free exercises in "arguments from emotion" that pass for debate in our current climate; the fact that so few can be convicted to question their basic assumptions, let alone change their minds and/or admit uncertainty, speaks for itself.  [This comment can certainly apply to both right and left, but I would submit that I rarely see reasoned argument from the left these days.]

This reminds me of a proto-typical experience among first year candidates in Psychoanalysis.

Thoughts on Freedom

Over the weekend I finally saw "300" and found it viscerally powerful and quite moving for its depiction of the sacrifice of the Spartans at Thermopylae. There is a good argument to be made that without their sacrifice, Greece would have been conquered by the Persians, ending the nascent experiment in democracy and freedom, stillborn, perhaps for all time. A powerful argument can be made that democracy and freedom are not inevitable outcomes of human striving and in fact, are very likely to be completely in opposition to the most basic aspects of human nature. That our experiment in freedom has lasted for over 200 years is a testament to the remarkable foresight of the men who founded this nation.

I often think about freedom and what it means, perhaps more so at this time of year: Passover, the Jewish celebration of Freedom, begins next Monday at sunset.

It is natural for a working Psychoanalyst to think about Freedom, since so much of our work involves the attempt to elucidate the inner, unconscious chains, which bind our patients' minds. How one conceives of freedom makes a dramatic difference in how one experiences and views the world. That Freedom means different things to different people is a tautology.

Dictionary.com offers fully 17 different definitions of the word "Freedom". Wikipedia suggest there are 13 different types of political freedoms and lists numerous uses to which the word is put at the service of political ideas, ranging from libertarian to anarchist to communist; in many cases the word freedom appears to have completely contradictory meanings depending on one's political stance. However, it seems to me that when we discuss freedom we must start with two intimately related aspects of freedom: Freedom of Thought and its derivative, Freedom of Speech. Without these two aspects of Freedom, no man can be considered a free man.

Freedom of Speech and Thought were meaningless when our distant ancestors lived close to the edge, when survival transcended concerns about speech or thought. The world was the way it was, and did not allow for much in the way of free thought. In tribal settings, everyone was and is constrained by the needs of the tribe. Rights are far out-weighed by responsibilities. Freedom of Speech and Thought are quite literally non-sequitors; they are not meaningful concepts.

Epidemics: Viral and Political

I entered NYU Medical School in 1974 and in 1978 started my four year training in Psychiatry at Belleveue Hospital in New York. Bellevue is the oldest public hospital in America and was ground zero for the AIDS epidemic. In the late 1970s, a growing number of Gay men were being diagnosed with an unusual lung infection, Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, and were found to have severely depressed immune systems. The disorder was labeled GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency) and later, when it was recognized that the causative agent was transmissible, the name was changed to AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.) Wikipedia has some of the history:

Author Randy Shilts mentioned that what was later called AIDS became evident in the gay community in the Fire Island, New York area in the four years after the 1976 Bicentennial celebrations. The infection tended to double in numbers about every nine to ten months. It therefore took a couple of years before a new disease was suspected because there were at first not enough symptomatic individuals to be noticed.

The official date for the beginning of the AIDS epidemic is marked as June 5, 1981, when the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report newsletter that unusual clusters of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia had been discovered in gay men in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. Over the next eighteen months, more PCP clusters were discovered among otherwise healthy men in cities throughout the country, along with other opportunistic diseases (such as Kaposi's sarcoma and persistent, generalized lymphadenopathy), common in immunosuppressed patients.

By 1983 the virus had been isolated and identified by two different research groups (in New York and Paris) and our understanding of the disease and its interactions with the human immune system has been progressing ever since. The AIDS epidemic shows some significant differences from typical historical epidemics. This relates to its mode of transmission and length of incubation.

Consider mankind's typical experience of epidemics. The "Black Death" of Bubonic Plague spread rapidly in two phases.

Jewish Leftism: An Unconscious Courtship With Death (Part III)

Part I: The Suicidal Pursuit of Perfection

Part II: Self Criticism and its Pathologies

My current interest in this topic was stirred up by two recent developments. Solomon took note of stirrings on the far left:

British anti-Zionists Purge the anti-Racists

... you probably already have seen this, but I wanted just to mention something about it -- the UK Palestine Solidarity Campaign has purged (effectively) a number of its members who, disturbed about anti-Semitism within the movement beyond even their own profound ability to overlook, attempted to get the group to do something about it. No tears for these, please, as the group includes uber-boycotter Sue Blackwell amongst others who, in any other context, are nothing but rogues...nevertheless, the incident is notable for just how bad things are way out there on the fringe. Read the entry at Harry's Place and follow the links if you're not already familiar: Atzmon's Triumph.

A couple of notes: One, while this is all an incident occurring way, way out there on the political fringe, it is not as fringe in the UK as it is over here. Second, I believe things happening out there on the penumbra have the potential for a butterfly effect of sorts -- it all seems irrelevant and fringy, but the fact is that these things have a way of echoing into the mainstream and moving the nature of the discourse. Just as very few mainstream Democrat politicians would admit to any kinship with Chomsky, yet their rhetoric often contains within it the very echoes, so this stuff that seems so way out there has its pull, whether you realize or not."

Judith Weiss extended the discussion, at Kesher Talk The Left eats its own again:

The word "schadenfreude" was invented for this situation.

Be Careful What You Wish For

Bill Clinton was hated by the Republican right, for all sorts of reasons stemming from the unresolved culture wars of the 60s. Clinton was an anti-Vietnam War child of Woodstock and represented everything the Right deplored in America. His victory in 1992 was a humiliation and was responded to with intense hostility. The Republicans, with the unwitting complicity of the Clintons, in their tone deaf exercise of their powers, began the series of investigations which, following the Republican sweep to victory in the House in 1994, became a flood and culminated in Clinton's Impeachment. During the crescendo of investigations, with various arcane scandals breathlessly and superficially reported in the Media, a few points should have been obvious to the Republicans. Their attempt to criminalize every objectionable piece of political behavior of the Clinton administration was winning them few friends. History shows that the Republicans' lust for vengeance overwhelmed their rational assessment of the political mood of the country and led to Clinton's re-election in 2006. When Drudge revealed the blue dress (the end of a long series of more and more removed issues that the overzealous Ken Starr was investigating in his attempts to prove, once again, the old maxim that "power corrupts") the Republicans salivated with desire and proceeded to impeach Bill Clinton. This proved to be a disaster for the Republicans and fortified Clinton's powers for the rest of his Presidency. Worse, it prevented the Republicans from investigating much more serious executive branch derelictions (the sale of advanced technology to China, the influence of Chinese money on American politics, the failing policy toward North Korea, the growing influence of radical Islam, etc) and it prevented the Clinton administration from devoting the resources in time and attention that the gathering threats required.  It damaged both parties and America.

Since those early halcyon days of the Internet, the power of the bases has only grown, magnified by the modern day equivalent of the corner soapbox, the Blogosphere. It is a truism that Blogosphere time moves faster than old Media time and today's scandals come and go with much greater alacrity than in the past. During the Clinton administration, leaked articles could be counted on to dominate the headlines (especially once sex was introduced into the mix, a weapon that Bill Clinton effortlessly handed to his enemies) and the "blue dress" link directly to the President, so fervently desired and searched for, was the Holy Grail for the Right. Today, scandals du jour appear and disappear with a speed that is breath taking. When a particular scandal fails to find any traction (ie, it cannot be clearly connected to the current President) it is dropped and we are off to the next scandal. This is politics as usual on amphetamines, and the addiction needs to be fed until the ultimate "high" can be found.

Saying Whatever Comes to Mind XXXI

Khalid Sheikh Muhammed declared his guilt last week and what does the Media focus on?  The context of his confessions rather than the content of his crimes.  The Sanity Squad ponders the curious tendency of the Media to consistently miss the forest for the trees.

Join  Neo-neocon, Dr. Sanity, Siggy, and me as we attempt to enlighten.

Download or listen to Sanity Squad: Killer Confession