(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: We have met the enemy...

[dlgood.livejournal.com]

Greed is a perversion of our nature, not our nature. Greed results from scarcity. Tell me what is still scarce. Why are we still hording?

Because it is in our nature, because it is instinctual to do so, because it is an inborn survival urge. Excessive greed is a perversion, yes. Greed is not. It isn't going away.

We are humans. We possess the urge to perform acts of charity and compassion. We possess the urge to sin. Specific sins, yes, may be learned. But the urge is innate. We can strive to learn ourselves, so that we might better approach our 'perfect' selves instead of fulfilling the baser aspects of our nature. But it would be folly to delude ourselves into thinking it isn't our nature. To deny that, is to deny that we are human.

The system is not humanity any more than the clothes I wear is me. I can discard it and start a new one. It has done before and it will be done again.

And the new system will be infected by the same humanity the old one possessed. Because it's not just the clothes. It's your skin. It's your heart. It's your brain. The System isn't something external or alien - it's an extension of our humanity. And you will discard again ad infinitum - because the system is you.

You can rail about how "thinking like that perpetuates the system". Mere existence perpetuates the system.

Re: We have met the enemy...

[bhadrasvapna.livejournal.com]

It is hard to say what exactly is innately us and what is how the system has changed us. The best way to examine this is to look at very young children and children from culture to culture. A baby does not sin. A baby is perfect. It is perfectly human. Its instincts have not been changed by anything yet. It eats when it is hungry and doesn't when it isn't. It sleeps when tired and doesn't obey the clocks its parents are slaves to.

Sin cannot be learned and innate. They are sort of opposites. To "sin" under certain circumstances is innate. It is natural to strive to fulfill our needs. To continue this behavior once those needs have been met is not acting innately. Greed is not fulfilling our needs. It is exceeding them. Greed is acting because of behavior we learned when we were acting innately. IMO to act that way under conditions of scarcity isn't necessarily a sin. To act that way when scarcity is no longer present would be a sin.

This doesn't deny our humanity. It embraces what is really us and allows us to express it. Humans aren't angels and devils. We are humans. We can act like devils, but we aren't devils.

And you have done nothing to demonstrate how greed is our nature. You have just asserted that it is. Why not explore this assumption rather than just accept and work with it? If we were born greedy, my child would have gorged herself on breast milk and her stomach would have burst. We have an instinct to meet our needs, not to exceed them.

The System is not something we are born with. It is something we are born into. It isn't an extension of us. It is an extension of our parents and grandparents. As we mature, it is harder and harder to tell where we end and the system begins. We get more and more away from who we are and become what we are molded into.

And that is where our salvation lies, figuring out what is us and what isn't and living who we are. It is realizing we don't have to be this way. It is realizing that the system can be changed. It is realizing that we aren't demons and things aren't inevitable. We can kick the board over.