they need to civilized there war by letting the politicians run it. That way it can last 4 times longer than and cost 10 times as much in all categories with no definite out come..
I’ll admit it. This is one damn tough call to make. Nobody wants troops sent in to a civil war that does not appear to pose a threat to America.On the other hand, regimes across the world seem to already view us as a paper tiger the last few years. Lots of bark about red lines, yet never a bite. This opens up numerous possibilities of aggression by unfriendly nations without any fear of repercussions.O applied for this job and now he needs to show that he’s qualified by making the right decisions.
Yes, but there are probably two different situations: (1) there is no good answer; (2) there is a good answer, but I don’t know it, and maybe no one else does either. (Some famous math problems belong in the second group.)
lonecat, I’m with you on this. There is no good answer. As tempting of a target as Obama is, I don’t envy his position. But, whatever his decision is, in order to maintain any sense of legitimacy, he must obey the war powers act. He’s already toed the line on this one. Full-on engagement of US Troops in another mid-eastern country without that will completely destroy his credibility.I honestly think this is a damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don’t. If we go in, we’ll be inserting ourselves as the police force… mind you, a police force that everyone loves to hate. If we don’t go in, the next regime may be worse than the current one, or worse. I can honestly say that the use of Iraqi chemical weapons in Syria is a war crime, and the leaders must be held accountable. To do anything less is to condone said actions. I think we need to learn about what happened with Somalia and take a lesson from how that ended. If anything, we send troops in to secure humanitarian locations to protect women and children and nothing more. Provide UN-Sanctioned Safe havens where refugees can come. They are stripped of all weapons on their way in, and they can at least live in peace while the blockheads duke it out in the sand.
Hmm , was that “Made in Saudi Arabia” in English, or Arabic? Saddam’s chemical weapons “read”, “made in Germany, paid for by America, with kickbacks to Cheney and Rumsfeld”. Anyone remember the “highway of death” in ‘91 when we bombed Saddam’s troops, and civilians, fleeing from Kuwait? (But GHW would support Shia in the south, like he did the Kurds in the north, with air support, and Saddam lasted a decade longer than he might have had we “done the right thing”.)
Syria is the rock AND the hard place, and Egypt isn’t any better, and the smartest thing we can do is ignore all the chickenhaws (who stand to profit), and keep out of the whole mess unless ALL the U.N. and “allies” agree, and take part in any actions- especially all the Arab and Muslim countries!
Thanks for the article. I’m interested in their comparison at the end to a violinist. My own experience as a musician has formed a lot of my ideas about judgment, experience, and common sense — all of which I use as somewhat technical terms. For instance, I would argue that the ability to identify intervals by ear is a matter of what I call judgment, based in experience (rather than experiment), but even though it is an individual perception (and therefore “subjective”) it is common sense, that is, everyone who has the proper training will agree on the judgment, so that it amounts to a common judgment based on sense, that is to say, common sense. This is part of my theory of work in the Humanities, and why it can be rigorous without being “scientific”.
My work isn’t concerned with the social sciences, but with what some people call the “human sciences”. I’m actually not sure why anyone would want to say “human sciences” rather than “humanities”. I guess the word “science” has some prestige. I was a musician before I was anything else, and I never thought I was engaged in “musical science”.+But I get annoyed by a lot of what gets presented in the humanities, because it seems to me it’s just somebody having an opinion. Opinions are great, interpretations are great, but I think they have to be founded on something. So part of my project has been to try to work out what the foundations of literary scholarship should be. I would never trust a musicologist, for example, who didn’t have a decent background in history and theory, and I would never trust a literary scholar who didn’t have the comparable background. One of the reasons I went into Classics rather then Comp Lit was that Classicists still had a sense that there was such a thing as a foundation, while the Comp Lit crowd were off in the land of deconstruction. All this is probably of no interest to anyone but me.
Don’t get me started. Well, you got me started. I will try to control myself.+I’m not sure what you mean precisely by “objective” but I’m pretty sure that I don’t care about “objectivity” in quite the way you do, at least in some circumstances. Here i would note the difference (in English) between “experiment” and “experience” — both obvious from the same root, but with different senses (in French there’s only one word). Experiments should be objective, but experiences probably can’t be. But that doesn’t mean that experiences leave us with nothing to talk about. Two different performances of a piece of music are different experiences, but they can be compared and evaluated.+What should the foundations be? I won’t give you my whole curriculum, but I’ll give you one example. I have my students read the second chapter of a book by C. S. Lewis, “Studies in Words” — the second chapter is just about the meaning of the word “nature”. It turns out that there are twenty-five or thirty distinguishable meanings of the word. It’s a word that comes up a lot all over the place in various kinds of writing, but people often get tripped up by reading the wrong meaning. So it’s a benefit if students can get some practice in interpreting the word in various contexts. So after they read the chapter I then give them examples of the word in passages, and they have to figure out which of the twenty-five or so meanings is operative in each instance. Multiply that exercise by as many words as you wish, and you’ve got a start. That’s one level of foundation, but there are others.
klr562 over 10 years ago
they need to civilized there war by letting the politicians run it. That way it can last 4 times longer than and cost 10 times as much in all categories with no definite out come..
lonecat over 10 years ago
I would bet he will. Will you criticize him if he does?
ConserveGov over 10 years ago
I’ll admit it. This is one damn tough call to make. Nobody wants troops sent in to a civil war that does not appear to pose a threat to America.On the other hand, regimes across the world seem to already view us as a paper tiger the last few years. Lots of bark about red lines, yet never a bite. This opens up numerous possibilities of aggression by unfriendly nations without any fear of repercussions.O applied for this job and now he needs to show that he’s qualified by making the right decisions.
Dave Ferro over 10 years ago
Should be interesting to see how zero, I mean O, handles this… Will there be an official announcement of WMDs
lonecat over 10 years ago
Yes, but there are probably two different situations: (1) there is no good answer; (2) there is a good answer, but I don’t know it, and maybe no one else does either. (Some famous math problems belong in the second group.)
Wraithkin over 10 years ago
lonecat, I’m with you on this. There is no good answer. As tempting of a target as Obama is, I don’t envy his position. But, whatever his decision is, in order to maintain any sense of legitimacy, he must obey the war powers act. He’s already toed the line on this one. Full-on engagement of US Troops in another mid-eastern country without that will completely destroy his credibility.I honestly think this is a damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don’t. If we go in, we’ll be inserting ourselves as the police force… mind you, a police force that everyone loves to hate. If we don’t go in, the next regime may be worse than the current one, or worse. I can honestly say that the use of Iraqi chemical weapons in Syria is a war crime, and the leaders must be held accountable. To do anything less is to condone said actions. I think we need to learn about what happened with Somalia and take a lesson from how that ended. If anything, we send troops in to secure humanitarian locations to protect women and children and nothing more. Provide UN-Sanctioned Safe havens where refugees can come. They are stripped of all weapons on their way in, and they can at least live in peace while the blockheads duke it out in the sand.
Dtroutma over 10 years ago
Hmm , was that “Made in Saudi Arabia” in English, or Arabic? Saddam’s chemical weapons “read”, “made in Germany, paid for by America, with kickbacks to Cheney and Rumsfeld”. Anyone remember the “highway of death” in ‘91 when we bombed Saddam’s troops, and civilians, fleeing from Kuwait? (But GHW would support Shia in the south, like he did the Kurds in the north, with air support, and Saddam lasted a decade longer than he might have had we “done the right thing”.)
Syria is the rock AND the hard place, and Egypt isn’t any better, and the smartest thing we can do is ignore all the chickenhaws (who stand to profit), and keep out of the whole mess unless ALL the U.N. and “allies” agree, and take part in any actions- especially all the Arab and Muslim countries!
lonecat over 10 years ago
Thanks for the article. I’m interested in their comparison at the end to a violinist. My own experience as a musician has formed a lot of my ideas about judgment, experience, and common sense — all of which I use as somewhat technical terms. For instance, I would argue that the ability to identify intervals by ear is a matter of what I call judgment, based in experience (rather than experiment), but even though it is an individual perception (and therefore “subjective”) it is common sense, that is, everyone who has the proper training will agree on the judgment, so that it amounts to a common judgment based on sense, that is to say, common sense. This is part of my theory of work in the Humanities, and why it can be rigorous without being “scientific”.
lonecat over 10 years ago
My work isn’t concerned with the social sciences, but with what some people call the “human sciences”. I’m actually not sure why anyone would want to say “human sciences” rather than “humanities”. I guess the word “science” has some prestige. I was a musician before I was anything else, and I never thought I was engaged in “musical science”.+But I get annoyed by a lot of what gets presented in the humanities, because it seems to me it’s just somebody having an opinion. Opinions are great, interpretations are great, but I think they have to be founded on something. So part of my project has been to try to work out what the foundations of literary scholarship should be. I would never trust a musicologist, for example, who didn’t have a decent background in history and theory, and I would never trust a literary scholar who didn’t have the comparable background. One of the reasons I went into Classics rather then Comp Lit was that Classicists still had a sense that there was such a thing as a foundation, while the Comp Lit crowd were off in the land of deconstruction. All this is probably of no interest to anyone but me.
lonecat over 10 years ago
Don’t get me started. Well, you got me started. I will try to control myself.+I’m not sure what you mean precisely by “objective” but I’m pretty sure that I don’t care about “objectivity” in quite the way you do, at least in some circumstances. Here i would note the difference (in English) between “experiment” and “experience” — both obvious from the same root, but with different senses (in French there’s only one word). Experiments should be objective, but experiences probably can’t be. But that doesn’t mean that experiences leave us with nothing to talk about. Two different performances of a piece of music are different experiences, but they can be compared and evaluated.+What should the foundations be? I won’t give you my whole curriculum, but I’ll give you one example. I have my students read the second chapter of a book by C. S. Lewis, “Studies in Words” — the second chapter is just about the meaning of the word “nature”. It turns out that there are twenty-five or thirty distinguishable meanings of the word. It’s a word that comes up a lot all over the place in various kinds of writing, but people often get tripped up by reading the wrong meaning. So it’s a benefit if students can get some practice in interpreting the word in various contexts. So after they read the chapter I then give them examples of the word in passages, and they have to figure out which of the twenty-five or so meanings is operative in each instance. Multiply that exercise by as many words as you wish, and you’ve got a start. That’s one level of foundation, but there are others.