(no subject)

[dlgood]

Comments re:Anti-American sentiment and US diplomacy by Stephen Holmes of NYU Law. Emphasis mine.

We should not assume, without looking into it, that anti-Americanism will necessarily affect our national interests. Indeed, hatred of the U.S. should concern our national-security community only if it galvanizes individuals and groups with the capacity to harm us, either positively, by inflicting grave injuries, or negatively, by withholding the cooperation on which we depend to solve our most urgent problems. The latter method of inflicting damage merits special emphasis. WMD proliferation and offshore plotting by terrorist cells may or may not require active sponsorship by rogue states. But they can both benefit decisively from slovenly oversight by disorganized, distracted and incompetent states. Public officials around the world can inflict the most serious imaginable damage on the U.S. by simply being negligent. And negligence, it so happens, comes effortlessly to most human beings.

Man. Is that last sentence, not the most beautiful line. Negligence comes effortlessly. Yeah. It sure does.

Comments

Re: And that attitude is what got us in the huge messes we are in now

[dlgood.livejournal.com]

It is this attitude that they should compartmentalize themselves, divorce themselves from their humanity in order to see things clearly and practically is total and utter bull shit.

A quick question - the urge to be practical, to use and act upon reasoned analysis, is inhuman? Who developed the scientific method, Martians?

Re: And that attitude is what got us in the huge messes we are in now

[bhadrasvapna.livejournal.com]

I didn't say it was inhuman. I said it is Bullshit. It is attempting to divorce ourselves from our humanity. I say attempting because as an analytical psychologist there is plenty of evidence that we can't just shut off parts of ourselves. We just shove them to the shadow where their effects can be rather destructive. We can see this exemplified in our current president's speech patterns.

There is much more to us than "the urge to be practical, to use and act upon reasoned analysis" so to just do so is not really human any more than an arm is human. It is a human arm, but the arm itself isn't a human being. National and international policy need to be constructed from the totality of our being. The heart that believes that people shouldn't suffer cannnot be removed any more than the brain that figures out how to accomplish this.