Steve Rogers: Can I ask you a question?

Dr. Abraham Erskine: Just one?

There will always be those who are willing to follow, even grovel before, bullies, so long as they are within the bully’s protective orbit.

The relationship of opposites is symbiotic. A bully attracts the weak because a bully does not like to be challenged, and those weak will not challenge.

I once heard an anecdote, purportedly from 101 Arabian Nights. A slave master freed his slave, and asked his slave, “Now you are free, what is it you most desire with your freedom?” The slave responded, “A slave of my own.” Security, not freedom, was what the former-slave had learned to value.

If the Bully were deposed, those weak still would not stand for themselves. They would seek another bully, or a new Queen Bee to anoint and/or follow.

Historically, it has been that the vulnerable were most drawn to religion – Christianity, Islam, or other. Those who had reason to fear.
But when a once-vulnerable person finds security, he/she can choose one of two paths:

– Raise others out of their vulnerability, out of a sense of empathy and compassion, or

– Exclude others from rising out of vulnerability, out of a fear that “I just got in, and the raft is not big enough.”

Both the above began “weak,” in the sense of being vulnerable to external circumstances.

Only the latter is truly weak, in the sense of weakness of mind and character, fearful of losing one’s own sense of security.

NOTES:

1. Richard J. Neuhaus, “The Public Square: A More Real World,” First Things, 78: 68-83, December 1997 http://www.leaderu.com/ftissues/ft9712/public.html

“The unborn, the dying, the radically handicapped, the lepers, those afflicted with AIDS—all those who are shunned by the sleek and strong because they smell of neediness and death—live along the fault lines of society. Mother Teresa understood that a people is judged not by the successful whom we celebrate but by those along the fault lines for whom we care.

The message she embodied, and the message of the thousands of sisters all over the world who joined her in the Missionaries of Charity, is disturbingly countercultural.

2.  “Pope Francis: You can’t defend Christianity by being ‘against refugees and other religions’”,  Catholic News Service, 13 October 2016

http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2016/10/13/pope-francis-you-cant-defend-christianity-by-being-against-refugees-and-other-religions/

Meeting a pilgrimage of Catholics and Lutherans from Germany, Pope Francis said he does not like “the contradiction of those who want to defend Christianity in the West, and, on the other hand, are against refugees and other religions.”

“This is not something I’ve read in books, but I see in the newspapers and on television every day,” Pope Francis said.

“It’s hypocrisy to call yourself a Christian and chase away a refugee or someone seeking help, someone who is hungry or thirsty, toss out someone who is in need of my help,” he said. “If I say I am Christian, but do these things, I’m a hypocrite.”

See, also,  Vatican Radio, “Wellbeing of society measured by response to migrants”, 27 January 2017

 http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2017/01/27/wellbeing_of_society_measured_by_response_to_migrants/1288774

(Vatican Radio) The way a country responds to the needs of migrants and refugees is a “thermometer” of the wellbeing of that society. That’s the view of Canadian Jesuit Father Michael Czerny, recently appointed as undersecretary of the Vatican’s new department for Intergral Human Development.

3.  When Pope Francis supports the “March on Life”  and supports refugees, that’s “Pro-Life.” When American evangelicals support “March on Life” but reject refugees, that’s Anti-Abortion. Very different things:

John Pavlovitz, “White, Conservative, Christian Friend – I Wish You Really Were Pro-Life,” 12 October 2016

http://johnpavlovitz.com/2016/10/12/fellow-white-christian-friends-i-wish-you-really-were-pro-life/

“I actually don’t believe you’re pro-life, I believe you’re anti-abortion, which is a far more selective and convenient defense of Humanity.

“From where I’m standing it seems as though “Life” for you, comprises a very narrow demographic—one that bears a striking resemblance to you. The unborn are easy to advocate for because you can idealize them into something palatable to you, something benign and comfortable, something in your own image.

“You see, it’s not that you’re really pro-life, you’re pro-straight, white, Christian fetuses.

“I can tell by how often your heavy burden for the sanctity of life evaporates upon delivery. In so many cases this compassion really has a nine-month expiration date, as if life begins at conception but ends upon leaving the birth canal. The completion of that third trimester is actually the shelf life of your passionate regard for much of the living.

“Because if that life you say you so treasure, one day converts to Islam, you label it dangerous, you see it as a threat, you applaud suggestions of its expulsion, you deny it open worship.

“If that life eventually comes out as LGBTQ, you condemn its soul, harass it in your workplace and church, try to prevent its marriage, tell it where and when it can use a public bathroom. You bully it and drive it to suicide.

“If that life has brown skin and wears baggy pants and gets gunned down during a traffic stop, you not only have little grief over its loss, but readily blame it for its own execution.

“If that life doesn’t reside in the continental US or speak English and comes here fleeing oppression, poverty, and war you’ll never understand, you ask it to go back and “go through the proper channels”, instead of the barely sea-worthy makeshift raft or the stinking, stifling storage container it nearly died in trying to get here.

“I wish you were pro-life, my friend—I really do.

http://johnpavlovitz.com/…/fellow-white-christian-friends-…/

“I wish all human beings mattered as much to you as caucasian embryos do. I wish that once these diverse babies are thrust out into a violent, difficult, painful world; many enduring disadvantages, obstacles, and trials you will likely never experience—that you actually gave more of a damn about them.

“Because if you did, Life would be far bigger to you.

“You would want to do more than prevent abortions.

“As vigorously, passionately, and loudly…

“You’d want to prevent hunger and poverty.
You’d want to prevent illiteracy and child mortality and forced prostitution.
You’d want to prevent racism and bigotry and homophobia.
You’d want kids in the “bad neighborhood” to have great schools and teachers just like your kids have there in the “good neighborhood.”
You’d want to support single parents and the terminally ill and the mentally ill by helping them carry their oversized burden.
You’d want religious freedom even for people who aren’t Christian.
You’d want LGBTQ people to live and work and worship and love as they desire.
You’d want people of color not to have to fear law enforcement and not to be disproportionately incarcerated.
You’d want fewer guns in the hands of kids and criminals and those with mental illness.
You’d want to prevent violence and workplace termination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.
You’d want a living wage for all people who work hard, and healthcare for their children that won’t have to replace their daily meals.

4.

Tragedies less tragic  SUNDAY, MAY 31, 2009

1/3:  My sense is that a resistance is already in place – not from democrats in Congress, or protesters marching in the streets – but within the executive agencies themselves:

2/6: https://www.lawfareblog.com/more-donald-trump-and-justice-department

I’ve posted this before, but see it becoming both increasingly relevant, and apparent that there is a struggle taking place:

More on Donald Trump and the Justice Department
By Benjamin Wittes Wednesday, June 8, 2016, 4:25 PM

“First and most importantly, the bureaucracy is the front line of defense against executive abuses. So yes, in my opinion, my correspondent and others like him have—as he puts it—some “ethical and civic responsibility to stay here to do [their] small part to try to keep things in check.” The amount of damage that an abusive chief executive can effectuate is dramatically lessened if he has professional staff that will only behave legally and ethically. 

…. That means that people acculturated to modern ethical and legal norms of behavior among government lawyers should remain in place, at least at the outset. The same is true of FBI agents and CIA officers. It’s important, very important, that the government be staffed at the career level by people who know the lines they will not cross.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/josh-rogin/wp/2017/01/26/the-state-departments-entire-senior-management-team-just-resigned/

3/6:

Bureaucracy – the Fifth Estate
NOVEMBER 9, 2016 JASON LEAVE A COMMENT

https://youhatemosquitoestoo.com/2016/11/09/bureaucracy-the-fifth-estate/

One of the deepest impressions I took away from Afghanistan 2009-10 was an appreciation *for bureaucracy. 

#Bureaucracy in the United States carries a lot of baggage, and negative connotations, and yet, what struck me in Afghanistan was the challenge of sustaining a democracy amidst rampant corruption, when the country had a ~92% illiteracy rate. 

A competent bureaucracy was precisely what was needed, because how do you fight corrupt practices and run an accountable government when the vast majority of the people cannot read or write? We had one out of twenty Afghan National Police on our outpost who was literate – i.e., only one person could document witness statements, keep records, etc. – sometimes tedious things to ensure shit wasn’t just made up out – and that there was a Process for things.

You leave a place like Afghanistan with its history of tribalism and Warlords, in an externally imposed and nascent attempt at a centralized democracy, and you just think, if only they had a Bureaucracy- a functioning and professional Civil Service working in institutions free of all the cronyism, nepotism, parochial influences that manifests itself in the corruption.
Well, maybe this is the last line in the United Stated for those who fear Executive overreach – that those who make the Bureacracy is up to snuff, and having spent more than a spot-Political Appointee term at one thing or another, know what lines they will not cross. 

###

What Trump has said about the CIA and the military has “put us in a difficult position, but the flip side is there is an institutional ability to survive,” said a second senior U.S. official. 

“Bureaucracies chug along and take lumps and have conflicts. If you ask about rank and file, for a long time there has been a sense that [presidents and administrations] come and go, but we’re still here. You’ve got to assume that the Foreign Service at State, generals at the Department of Defense, have that belief. There’s an institutional stability built into the system that can withstand spasms.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/with-trump-about-to-learn-the-nations-deepest-secrets-a-sense-of-dread-in-the-intelligence-community/2016/11/09/e4206810-a676-11e6-ba59-a7d93165c6d4_story.html

4/6: Feb 24, 2016

https://youhatemosquitoestoo.com/2016/02/24/15/

Say what you will, your USG is not a monolithic entity of robotic bureaucrats. There may be folks who disagree with you on issues, whether due to personal ideology, or job role, but they are not inherently unreasonable, even when under immense political pressure from elected leaders.

Now, imagine if a Trump, who proposes things that constitutional scholars of all political inclinations pan as unconstitutional, were president, and simply said, ok “You’re fired” and put into the Executive Branch a cabal of Yes Men.

Essentially, think of Nixon, but probably worse. Much worse.

Watergate and Nixon era intelligence scandals broke a lot of trust the American people had in its government, that today’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies still pay a price in trying to overcome – e.g. the broad distrust between Academia and law enforcement that has roots in historical enmities, and has never recovered in a way that the relationship between the public and the Vietnam era US military has.

The way the President of the United States intends to wield the instruments of Executive Power can diminish those instruments standing with the American people for years to come, and long after those Presidents are gone – and to the detriment of American society. 

We’ve not, it seems, gone over a tipping point, in which the breach becomes too wide to mend, but, given the tenor of a Trump candidacy, its disdain for rule of law, and the demeanor of Trump himself, where this puck is heading toward is scary indeed.

—-

“The next day, as terrorist bombs killed more than 200 commuters on rail lines in Madrid, the White House approved the executive order without any signature from the Justice Department certifying its legality. Comey responded by drafting his letter of resignation, effective the next day, March 12.

“I couldn’t stay if the administration was going to engage in conduct that the Department of Justice had said had no legal basis,” he said. “I just simply couldn’t stay.” Comey testified he was going to be joined in a mass resignation by some of the nation’s top law enforcement officers: Ashcroft, Mueller, Ayres and Comey’s own chief of staff.
Ayres persuaded Comey to delay his resignation, Comey testified. “Mr. Ashcroft’s chief of staff asked me something that meant a great deal to him, and that is that I not resign until Mr. Ashcroft was well enough to resign with me,” he said.

The threat became moot after an Oval Office meeting March 12 with Bush, Comey said. After meeting separately with Comey and Mueller, Bush gave his support to making changes in the program, Comey testified. 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/15/AR2007051500864.html

“Reflecting the context of this heart-breaking case, I hope folks will take a deep breath and stop saying the world is ending, but instead use that breath to talk to each other. Although this case is about the innocents attacked in San Bernardino, it does highlight that we have awesome new technology that creates a serious tension between two values we all treasure: privacy and safety. That tension should not be resolved by corporations that sell stuff for a living. It also should not be resolved by the FBI, which investigates for a living. It should be resolved by the American people deciding how we want to govern ourselves in a world we have never seen before. We shouldn’t drift to a place—or be pushed to a place by the loudest voices—because finding the right place, the right balance, will matter to every American for a very long time.”

https://www.lawfareblog.com/we-could-not-look-survivors-eye-if-we-did-not-follow-lead

5/6:

This is probably disturbing to both many liberals and many conservatives, who view Comey as the reincarnation of Hoover, and know his name primarily through the context of the presidential elections (and might have also believed he would be gone regardless of who won the elections.)

I have different views, from a sense of what I’ve gathered both over the years and also how he has responded to different situations.

Nevermind what my dreams tell me – 😂
http://on.wsj.com/2k0amlw

(And then the shitstorm hit, except it was Attorney General Lynch punting on the decision – but only after compromising herself by being caught meeting privately with Bill Clinton – and we know the rest of the story)

6/6

“They should insist in being heard.”
9:00 – 11:00
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tKIJKQRb53o
and 

General Anthony Zinni, United States Marine Corps; The Obligation to Speak the Truth;
2003, United States Naval Academy:

“Senator McCain was very upset with me, and he said to me, “What gives you the right to question this?” Later on, I got the same question from the National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger: “What gives you the right to question this?” My response was the First Amendment. You know, they didn’t appreciate that answer, but that’s what gave me the right.

And I mentioned to the Senate Armed Services Committee that, unless I forgot something, when I first came before you to be confirmed as the Commander in Chief of U.S. Central Command, Senator Strom Thurmond required of me to raise my hand and swear that I would come before this committee in the Senate and give my honest opinion and my honest views, even if they were in opposition to Administration policy or any other policies that may have been implemented by our government. I swore to do that, and yet those who were not hearing what they wanted to hear objected to it. It was very painful.

I managed to get called over to see my boss, the Secretary of Defense, along with the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, and got an appropriate portion of my anatomy chewed on. I had to respond to questions like: “Why did you do this? Why did you say this to the Senate?” And I said, “Because they needed to hear the answer. They needed to understand my view, that I have an obligation if asked a question to provide that.” I asked the Secretary of Defense, “Do you think I’m wrong? Do you agree with them and disagree with me, because if that’s the case, then you know, you obviously need to get another Commander in Chief.” He said, “No, I agree with you, but I disagree with the way you said it.” I said, “Well, I don’t understand. I spoke in declarative sentences. I know that’s unusual for Washington, but you know, it’s the way I was brought up.”

The Undersecretary for Policy said, “No, you don’t understand the problem. You weren’t nuanced enough,” and I said, “You know, if you want nuance, don’t send a Marine. We don’t do nuance very well.”

The Undersecretary for Policy said, “No, you don’t understand the problem. You weren’t nuanced enough,” and I said, “You know, if you want nuance, don’t send a Marine. We don’t do nuance very well.”

Not long after that, David Hackworth, one of my favorite guys, because he is irreverent and p—-s everybody off, wrote an article in 1999 about Marine generals, and he said, in effect, “What is it with most of these Marine generals? They get inoculated with double shots of truth serum in boot camp? Why is it that Jack Sheehan, Chuck Krulak, Charlie Wilhelm, and Tony Zinni speak their minds? Why doesn’t anybody else speak their minds?” I liked it. Most of my bosses didn’t.

There is an obligation when you are in uniform to follow orders. There may become a point in time in your career when you have to make a decision. Your choices are only two: to follow those orders or to step aside. You have no other choice when you swear that oath to the Constitution of the United States except to follow the orders of our Commander in Chief, but you have, up until that point when you have to make that decision, a sincere obligation to give your honest view and opinion on what’s going to happen and what in your view is right or wrong about the decision that’s being made.

If you speak out, you’re going to find that there are things that work against you speaking out. One of them is the question of loyalty. You’re required obviously to be loyal to your bosses and loyal to the system…. There can be an issue that you feel you need to deal with, you need to speak out on. It’s a personal decision. It’s a difficult one to make. What you have to say may not be well received. What you have to say may come back in some way to harm you career-wise or other ways. 

In my war, back when I was your age, we went into a conflict, as you heard Secretary of Defense McNamara say, with the right intentions, but we did it the wrong way and found the wrong cause. We created an incident, the Tonkin Gulf incident. We had the United States of America and its citizens believe in the President of the United States, who created a falsehood for going into war. 

We fought, based on a strategy that I believe the decision-makers felt was right, the domino theory. If you don’t stop communism in Vietnam, all of Southeast Asia will begin to fall, and it will affect us adversely around the world. It was a flawed strategy. It was based on a lie, and we fought it terribly. We didn’t mobilize this nation for that war. We went to individual replacements instead of unit replacements and made a whole series of mistakes and bad decisions at the lowest tactical levels all the way up to the highest strategic policy decisions. We can’t let that happen, when you get yourself in that strange situation where you need to trust and believe in your leadership and that point where you as someone who has sworn an oath to the Constitution must obey the order or step aside, but have those doubts and those gnawing concerns that tug at your heart.

No one can give you the right answer. It’s pretty clear what your obligations are in terms of whom you answer to and what kinds of answers you’re supposed to provide, but in most cases, the timing, the decision to speak out, ends up having to be a personal one. There is no universal rule about all this, and it’s very difficult for anyone senior to you to give you the advice on how to do it. Those judgments have to be made from within.

We do not swear an oath to the President of the United States. We do not swear an oath to the king or the queen. Each one of us swears an oath to the Constitution of the United States. It is unique. Even our closest allies, the Brits who are on the battlefield with us, swear an oath to an individual, to the Queen. We don’t. You swear an oath to a concept, to an ideal, to a law, and with that comes the obligation to protect the men and women that you’re responsible for, to protect the concept, the values, the ideals of what our country stands for, and it supersedes any obligation or duty to any one individual. What goes with that is the understanding that when the order is issued, you have to follow it or step aside, but up to that point, there is this obligation to speak out and to speak the truth.

https://www.usna.edu/Ethics/publications/lectures.php

Are you loyal to your family, your faith, and your country?
– If Brock Turner was your child, would you hold him accountable, or defend him before the law.
– If you were Catholic in the 16th century, would you support Martin Luther’s rebellion in the Reformation, or choose loyalty to a corrupt Papacy?
– If you were German in WW2, would you question Nazi authority, or choose patriotism and serve your country faithfully.

17 January 2017

Took a trip to #YadVashem, the Israeli #Holocaust memorial on Mount Herzl. The strange thing I thought about while there, was a refrigerator magnet I once saw. 

It was one of those “quotable” magnets, with a proverb, attributed to the Talmud: 
“You can educate a fool, but you cannot teach him how to think.” 
Toward the end of the museum, was a wall with profiles of Third Reich leaders tried at Nuremberg in 1945. The display consisted of individual flight recorder “black boxes” which could be opened, and contained excerpts of the respective testimonies, explaining why they did what they did, given by the individuals during their trials.
Our guide made an emphatic point that all the Nazi leaders were highly educated men, and, by some accounts, also “normal” – going home from “work” to their families, being husbands and fathers like any other person. How could this have happened? What were they thinking?
These men were no fools. Given IQ tests by psychiatrists, the majority of those tried at Nuremberg scored above 120. 
But it does occurs to me that too often we conflate “educated” with “thinking.” It’s one thing, for example, to be “educated” with Nazi propaganda on international jewish conspiracy theories and “medical data” by Nazi doctors showing that jews were a “sub-human” race. 
It’s a separate thing entirely, to think critically, and to periodically evaluate and to question the various things we are taught or are exposed to.
To Hannah Arendt, “the Nazi war criminal’s actions stemmed from her well-known phrase ‘banality of evil,’ not as a result of mental illness but as a result of a lack of thinking.” 
I imagine that each of us, if put in a comparable situation, would like to believe that we would be among the “Righteous among the Nations.” 
But maybe only if we are inclined to question and capable of thinking critically – and that a liberal education is not an ends to itself, but a means to advance critical thinking, by exposing us to diverse thought in the first place.

Notes:

1.  http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/07/inside-the-nazi-mind-at-the-nuremberg-trials.html

2.  Obedience, orthodoxy, and faith.

3. 

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/the-san-antonio-spurs-are-coached-to-think-for-themselves-1475768553?

By Ben Cohen

Oct. 6, 2016 11:42 a.m. ET

San Antonio

Gregg Popovich came to San Antonio Spurs training camp this year prepared with some questions for his players. Such as: Who were the explorers pushing west in early America? What is the fourth holy city of Islam? And where is one in danger of being attacked by wombats?
This is not what most NBA teams talk about. It’s not what employees in a typical office talk about. But their boss is the one who demands the Spurs broach these topics and more serious ones at their place of work.
Popovich has been quizzing the Spurs on current events and world history for years. Now he wants them to engage more than ever. So this season, for the first time, he also plans to track which players know the most about everything other than basketball.
“What’s cool is that everybody looks at that person, like: How do you know that?” Popovich said….

“It’s in large part because of Popovich’s intellectual curiosity that this basketball team in the middle of Texas is usually acknowledged as the most progressive organization in the most socially conscious American sports league. For years, being an informed citizen has been a prerequisite of playing for the Spurs….
Popovich spoke out during Spurs’ media day on the morning of the first presidential debate. After the first 2012 debate, Popovich gave his players DVD copies to watch. He did not subject them to the same exercise this year. Popovich found the first debate incredibly disheartening. Then he tried to watch the vice-presidential debate and couldn’t get through the whole thing.
“I worry that maybe I’m being a little too pessimistic, but I’m beginning to have a harder time believing that we are not Rome,” he said. “Rome didn’t fall in 20 days or 30 years. It took a couple hundred years. The question is: Are we in that process and we don’t even know it? I really am starting to think about that. It’s not just the two candidates. It’s the way the whole thing is being treated.”
The Spurs try to exchange ideas, especially about race, in more substantive ways. In last year’s training camp, they hosted John Carlos, the Olympian who raised his fist on the medal stand in 1968. During the season, they scored tickets to the Broadway show “Hamilton,” and they had a private screening of “Chi-Raq,” the film by Spike Lee, who answered questions from the players and then joined them for dinner.
This year, when they arrived at training camp, they received copies of the Ta-Nehisi Coates book “Between the World and Me” and previewed “The Birth of a Nation,” the new film about Nat Turner’s slave rebellion. The Spurs were so moved that they sat silent through the entire credits sequence, Popovich said. He expected they would talk about it on their own the next day.
“I think it’s important for their lives, for their kids, their wives, for our basketball team,” he said. “Everybody’s gotta get engaged with this elephant in the room that we all have to deal with, but nobody really wants to. People are, like, tired of it. Is it race again? Do we have to talk about it? Well, the reason we do is because it’s still the elephant in the room. Because it still has never been taken care of. Because it’s still there.”
What’s most remarkable isn’t that Popovich is one of the few people in sports to speak about such issues sensibly. It’s that, at this point, it was almost expected of him. People slap “Popovich for President” bumper stickers on their cars here because of his reputation for being utterly reasonable.
“If I just did basketball, I’d be bored to death,” said the coach with five titles spread over three decades. “How much satisfaction can you get out of doing jump shots and teaching someone to deny in the passing lanes? OK, that’s cool, that’s my job, that’s how I earn my living, and I have a good living and I enjoy it. But I’m not a lifer. It doesn’t define me. If I win a game, I’m fine. If I lose a game, it hurts, but I’m fine real quick. It’s not that important.”
His perspective has influenced the entire NBA. Popovich’s coaching tree casts a long shadow: More than one third of the league’s teams are now run by coaches or general managers who have spent time in San Antonio and understand the value of their organizational culture. The result is that the Spurs are the team that other teams want to be.
Popovich says there’s a simple reason he wants his players to be engaged citizens: It makes for a fuller life. He believes there are basketball advantages, too. He thinks it makes them want to play with and for each other. “I think it’s sad if a person’s whole self-image and self-worth is based in their job,” he said. “Whether you’re a basketball player, a plumber, a doctor, a mailman or whatever you might be, why not try your best to live a more interesting life that includes other people, other cultures and different worlds?”
The Spurs certainly have. They are loaded with foreign players who tend to follow the news and debate international politics more than anyone else in the locker room. “They like to tell us what’s wrong and right about our country,” said Spurs forward Kyle Anderson.
The Spurs never quite know what Popovich might ask when they show up for work. But the foreign players often have an advantage when their coach tests them “to see who’s paying attention in the world,” as American guard Danny Green put it. Which is why they’re sometimes disqualified from Popovich’s quizzes….
3. 

When I was a captain at Marine Corps Base Hawaii in 2008, all the HQ Battalion officers had to attend a PME (“professional military training”) that talked about Stanley Milgram’s experiments. 
For all the alleged rigidity of the military, it has been the *only place I’ve ever worked that gathered its leaders and said, hey – if *everyone else is doing something, but it doesn’t feel right to you – DON’T FORGET TO FUCKING THINK
4.

“They should insist in being heard.”

9:00 – 11:00

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tKIJKQRb53o

and General Anthony Zinni, United States Marine Corps; The Obligation to Speak the Truth;

2003, United States Naval Academy:

Senator McCain was very upset with me, and he said to me, “What gives you the right to question this?” Later on, I got the same question from the National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger: “What gives you the right to question this?” My response was the First Amendment. You know, they didn’t appreciate that answer, but that’s what gave me the right.
And I mentioned to the Senate Armed Services Committee that, unless I forgot something, when I first came before you to be confirmed as the Commander in Chief of U.S. Central Command, Senator Strom Thurmond required of me to raise my hand and swear that I would come before this committee in the Senate and give my honest opinion and my honest views, even if they were in opposition to Administration policy or any other policies that may have been implemented by our government. I swore to do that, and yet those who were not hearing what they wanted to hear objected to it. It was very painful.

I managed to get called over to see my boss, the Secretary of Defense, along with the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, and got an appropriate portion of my anatomy chewed on. I had to respond to questions like: “Why did you do this? Why did you say this to the Senate?” And I said, “Because they needed to hear the answer. They needed to understand my view, that I have an obligation if asked a question to provide that.” I asked the Secretary of Defense, “Do you think I’m wrong? Do you agree with them and disagree with me, because if that’s the case, then you know, you obviously need to get another Commander in Chief.” He said, “No, I agree with you, but I disagree with the way you said it.” I said, “Well, I don’t understand. I spoke in declarative sentences. I know that’s unusual for Washington, but you know, it’s the way I was brought up.”

The Undersecretary for Policy said, “No, you don’t understand the problem. You weren’t nuanced enough,” and I said, “You know, if you want nuance, don’t send a Marine. We don’t do nuance very well.”

The Undersecretary for Policy said, “No, you don’t understand the problem. You weren’t nuanced enough,” and I said, “You know, if you want nuance, don’t send a Marine. We don’t do nuance very well.”

Not long after that, David Hackworth, one of my favorite guys, because he is irreverent and p—-s everybody off, wrote an article in 1999 about Marine generals, and he said, in effect, “What is it with most of these Marine generals? They get inoculated with double shots of truth serum in boot camp? Why is it that Jack Sheehan, Chuck Krulak, Charlie Wilhelm, and Tony Zinni speak their minds? Why doesn’t anybody else speak their minds?” I liked it. Most of my bosses didn’t.

There is an obligation when you are in uniform to follow orders. There may become a point in time in your career when you have to make a decision. Your choices are only two: to follow those orders or to step aside. You have no other choice when you swear that oath to the Constitution of the United States except to follow the orders of our Commander in Chief, but you have, up until that point when you have to make that decision, a sincere obligation to give your honest view and opinion on what’s going to happen and what in your view is right or wrong about the decision that’s being made.

If you speak out, you’re going to find that there are things that work against you speaking out. One of them is the question of loyalty. You’re required obviously to be loyal to your bosses and loyal to the system…. There can be an issue that you feel you need to deal with, you need to speak out on. It’s a personal decision. It’s a difficult one to make. What you have to say may not be well received. What you have to say may come back in some way to harm you career-wise or other ways. 
In my war, back when I was your age, we went into a conflict, as you heard Secretary of Defense McNamara say, with the right intentions, but we did it the wrong way and found the wrong cause. We created an incident, the Tonkin Gulf incident. We had the United States of America and its citizens believe in the President of the United States, who created a falsehood for going into war. We fought, based on a strategy that I believe the decision-makers felt was right, the domino theory. If you don’t stop communism in Vietnam, all of Southeast Asia will begin to fall, and it will affect us adversely around the world. It was a flawed strategy. It was based on a lie, and we fought it terribly. We didn’t mobilize this nation for that war. We went to individual replacements instead of unit replacements and made a whole series of mistakes and bad decisions at the lowest tactical levels all the way up to the highest strategic policy decisions. We can’t let that happen, when you get yourself in that strange situation where you need to trust and believe in your leadership and that point where you as someone who has sworn an oath to the Constitution must obey the order or step aside, but have those doubts and those gnawing concerns that tug at your heart.

No one can give you the right answer. It’s pretty clear what your obligations are in terms of whom you answer to and what kinds of answers you’re supposed to provide, but in most cases, the timing, the decision to speak out, ends up having to be a personal one. There is no universal rule about all this, and it’s very difficult for anyone senior to you to give you the advice on how to do it. Those judgments have to be made from within.

We do not swear an oath to the President of the United States. We do not swear an oath to the king or the queen. Each one of us swears an oath to the Constitution of the United States. It is unique. Even our closest allies, the Brits who are on the battlefield with us, swear an oath to an individual, to the Queen. We don’t. You swear an oath to a concept, to an ideal, to a law, and with that comes the obligation to protect the men and women that you’re responsible for, to protect the concept, the values, the ideals of what our country stands for, and it supersedes any obligation or duty to any one individual. What goes with that is the understanding that when the order is issued, you have to follow it or step aside, but up to that point, there is this obligation to speak out and to speak the truth.

https://www.usna.edu/Ethics/publications/lectures.php

6.

“We have a great deal of difficulty acknowledging the role of what we don’t know. So we know what we know, and we tell a story about what we know. If I ask you is this national leader and I tell you, well, she is intelligent and strong. Now you already have a sense that she’s a good leader. Now, I could continue, you know nothing about her character. I could tell you she’s corrupt and cruel. But you have already jumped to a conclusion on the basis of very little information. You have a story. If I’d stopped there, you would feel that you know that here is a strong leader. That’s the way the mind works. It’s intended to jump to conclusion”

http://www.ttbook.org/book/transcript/sonic-sidebar-daniel-kahneman-thinking-fast-and-slow

KAHNEMAN: Suppose you ask people that are about to travel abroad, and you offer insurance and ask, some of them would be willing to pay for insurance. And in one case the insurance is for something that happens during the trip, is for death for any reason. And in the other case you offer them a policy that covers death in a terrorist incident. 
That study was done when there was a fair amount of terrorism in Europe, and it was done in the United States. People pay more for the second policy than for the first.
PAULSON: Even thought the first presumably would include the second, right?

KAHNEMAN: Now, this is absurd. It would include the second, and it would include many other sources, forms of death, which are a lot more likely than dying in an incident. But, what happens is this, what we do when we do when we buy insurance is we measure how afraid we are. 

That’s a simpler question than, how much should I by willing to buy insurance. So the first (?), what comes to mind immediately is the reaction which is basically, the intensity of the fear that I experience. 

And then you map that intensity of fear into a number, and amount of dollars that you are willing to pay for insurance. 
That is answering the wrong question.

http://www.ttbook.org/book/transcript/sonic-sidebar-daniel-kahneman-thinking-fast-and-slow

7.  How to become a Donald Trump.

1) Be smart, even very smart

2) Be good at at least one thing, even very good.

Example:

(a) Imagine you are smart, and good at, say languages. In Russian class, you shine. The kids good at math suck. But you aren’t in calculus with them. You only see how smart you are and better at Russian you are. You start to think you are just smarter than everyone, period.

(b) Your growing confidence leads to to make quick conclusions and take extreme opinions. You dismiss people who disagree because you think you are obviously smarter than them. Maybe all that math stuff is just bullshit anyway, because if those kids struggled so much in Russian – they obviously aren’t *that smart – how can all those numbers they come up with really mean anything? Fake science.

(c) At some point, you might even begin to engage in conspiracy theories. But people who recognize your extreme opinions and quickness to conclusions don’t bother arguing with you because they know you already made up your mind and don’t listen to anyone else. You actually interpret the lack of anyone challenging you as confirmation of your own positions and your natural and wide-ranging superiority on all subjects you express firm opinions and reach quick conclusions on.

(d) By habit, you become convinced you know everything, are very smart, have a good brain, can figure anything out, don’t need experts in math or science or climate change to tell you whats up.

4) Donald Trump.

The biggest thing I observed in 2016: Loyalty and respect must first flow down from Power, before Power can demand that loyalty and respect flow up.
Otherwise it leaves an every-man (or clan)-for himself tribalism. Instead of #citizens, you are left with clansmen.
p87 – “citizens were no longer citizens… loyal to the nation …. The more government persecuted its own people the more those people headed back into their tribe, traditions, their church and hunkered down, like among like.”

About the spasms of violence yesterday … I’ve been thinking about this in the domestic context – why it is that in America extremists are sometimes praised for their ideological “purity”, but when it comes to Islam we condemn their extremists for their “fanaticism.” One reason might be the association with militancy. But the reason for the militancy, in the first place, is a perceived or actual lack of *peaceful options. In other words, the American political system permits free speech and protest from the most right-wing or liberal groups, whether neo-Nazi or Code Pink. That may not be the case in many secular but authoritarian governments which *happen to be predominantly Muslim countries, and in which the communities then and *only then (though not always) perceive their only option as militant resistance:
“… ‘#radicalization’ does not simply happen out there in society apart from the state; it is produced in a symbolic and material struggle with the state. Research conducted by many of the signatories of this letter demonstrates that theology and doctrine are largely irrelevant in explaining why mobilization takes place in the majority of instances. In other cases, the demonization of a religiously-identified group by a militantly secular government can create a conflict where there was not one before. When the #state declares its own #opposition to a religious group, its members are left with no choice but to either abandon their religious beliefs or find themselves in opposition to the state. However, in Central Asia, there has not been a direct correlation between state oppression of religious groups leading to people taking up arms in resistance. Repression does not automatically lead to #rebellion.
“The point is that the factors are specific and multiple, most of them are non-religious, and none of them are sufficient in and of themselves. They are not about a lack of modernization, and rarely much to do with theology, but about conflicts between #political #factions about #inclusion, #inequality, and political #economies perceived as unjust….”
President Trump announced that he would “eradicate” radical Islam from the face of the earth. But maybe there is also a *radicalization process, in the United States, that is a direct result of anxiety that his very Presidency – (1) through his persistent attacks on those who disagree with him (ordinary citizens and institutions alike) threaten America’s democratic traditions allowing open forums for dissent, and (2) through his refusal to release his taxes, divest himself from his businesses, and his hiring of his son-in-law as a close advisor, that he will be a president not for all Americans but his own faction and family.
“When the *state declares its own opposition to a [] group, its members are left with no choice but to either abandon their [] beliefs or find themselves in opposition to the state.”
http://thediplomat.com/2017/01/understanding-islamic-radicalization-in-central-asia/?

JUST IN… Russia Today and Breitbart coordinated news reporting. (Joke)
looking around on FB to see how people’s perceptions can be shaped by where they get their info, via the filters the sources themselves apply. 
i noticed, for example, a cluster of reporting on “obama approval rating” by certain sources on December 15, 2015, in contrast to more widespread reporting on the same in the June-July and October-December 2016 timeframes.

RUSSIA TODAY, the Kremlin-run state media, and BREITBART appeared in lock-step reporting on low approval ratings on December 15, 2015. 

Then there was The Atlantic and the mainstream media reporting on “high” approval ratings scattered in the summer time, then again in the final months of the Obama presidency.

Any person who relies on a single set of sources *exclusively might conclude one of several things:

(a) The sources reporting inconsistent information are “#fake” (rather than the possibility that things change/changed over time)

(b) The sources reporting on different information are “#biased” (eg, that “mainstream” sources only report when Obama has high ratings, rather than that ratings of incumbents leaving office are of historical interest)

(c) THE ONION is the *best* source because it explains the discrepancy. (#FakeNews)

Notes

1.  See, Jill Dougherty, “How the Media Became One of Putin’s Most Powerful Weapons: After decades of wielding Soviet-style hard power, Russia is developing a subtler form of influence”, THE ATLANTIC, April 21, 2015

Vladimir Putin is a news junkie.

The Russian president’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, didn’t use that expression when we talked by phone, but that’s what he described to me: a man at the center of an ever-churning machine processing vast amounts of news and data at his command.

“Sometimes we’re wondering what is the limit for a human being for absorbing this huge amount of information,” Peskov told me, “but, well, it’s really a very, very, very heavy job.”

Peskov, speaking fluent English, described the operation. “First of all, the information and press department of the presidential administration prepares digests on print media, on Internet sources, on domestic media—federal and regional.

“We have special people working around the clock, preparing TV digests. We’re recording TV news on the [Russian] federal channels for him during the day. Obviously, it’s very hard for him to watch news so we make digests, let’s say, zip versions of TV news, divided into issues.”

“It’s quite convenient when he’s going home, let’s say, from [the] Kremlin, when he is not spending a night here … he can use this 20 minutes for really understanding what happened during the day in terms of information.” He watches TV news channels in English and German—a language he speaks fluently thanks to his posting in Dresden as a KGB agent in the late 1980s—and receives English- and German-language newspapers.

“Frankly speaking, I wouldn’t say that [Putin] is a fluent user of [the] Internet,” Peskov added, “but he is fluent enough to use some resources, plus, definitely, he is comparing what he sees and hears from [the] press … with the news he’s receiving—when it comes to foreign affairs—from his foreign ministry, from his special services, from intelligence, from various ministries, and so on.”

As a former KGB officer and head of the KGB’s successor agency, the FSB, Putin knows the value of information. 

His concept of the media, however, is a far cry from the First Amendment. For him, it’s a simple transactional equation: Whoever owns the media controls what it says.

Putin positions himself as a renegade abroad, deploying the hyper-modern, reflexively contrarian RT—an international news agency formerly known as Russia Today—to shatter the West’s [liberal media] monopoly on “truth.” The Kremlin [Bbt] appears to be betting that information is the premier weapon of the 21st century, and that it can wield that weapon more effectively than its rivals.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/391062/?

2.  But, see, Alex Isensradt, “Trump vexed by challenges, scale of government: The new president’s allies say he has been surprised that government can’t be run like his business”, POLITICO,  02/10/17 

 “Trump, a voracious consumer of cable news…” 
(That’s like saying someone gorges on cheetos)
http://politi.co/2kabPlg
3.  Cf. 

President Barack Obama does not watch cable news. This was the take away from an interview with former White House Press Secretary Jay Carney on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” this Sunday. 
When asked by host Brian Stelter about the president’s news diet, Carney listed The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and Politico, describing Obama as a “voracious consumer of the printed word.” But when it comes to CNN, MSNBC and, especially, FOX News, the president respectfully declines. 
“I don’t think it would be accurate to say by not watching cable news, he’s not aware of what the political fight of the day is,” said Carney. “But he does maintain, I think, a healthy distance from it.”
Carney added that governing by the whims of the media might not be the most effective way for the White House to operate. 
“I think that it’s hard to find the sort of perfect balance because you don’t want, and I don’t think any of us should want as citizens, a White House that governs by cable news or governs by Twitter,” he said. “I think that would be very counterproductive.”

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/6054190

1. “Nabokov, for his awareness of how our suffering can make us callous to the obvious suffering of another. Conrad, for his hypertuned sense of how miscommunication between people can so profoundly impact their lives. Literature not only illuminated another’s experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection.” 
Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air, Random House, 2016

2.  “Books are uniquely suited to helping us change our relationship to the rhythms and habits of daily life in this world of endless connectivity. We can’t interrupt books; we can only interrupt ourselves while reading them. They are the expression of an individual or a group of individuals, not of a hive mind or collective consciousness. They speak to us, thoughtfully, one at a time. They demand our attention. And they demand that we briefly put aside our own beliefs and prejudices and listen to someone else’s.”

Will Schwalbe, The Saturday Essay: The Need to Read, The Wall Street Journal, November 25, 2016
“Reading books remains one of the best ways to engage with the world, become a better person and understand life’s questions, big and small.”

3. “It always troubled me that the truth doesn’t fit into one heart, into one mind, that truth is somehow splintered. There’s a lot of it, it is varied, and it is strewn about the world. [Fyodor] Dostoevsky thought that humanity knows much, much more about itself than it has recorded in literature. So what is it that I do? I collect the everyday life of feelings, thoughts, and words. I collect the life of my time. I’m interested in the history of the soul.”

Svetlana Alexievich, The History of Socialist Utopia, Financial Times, December 18, 2015

https://www.ft.com/content/74182b38-a3e9-11e5-8218-6b8ff73aae15

4.  

“… the American president asked the author if she was worried about people not reading novels anymore, as they are “overwhelmed by flashier ways to pass the time”. 
For himself, Obama said, “when I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting aside being president, and the most important set of understandings that I bring to that position of citizen, the most important stuff I’ve learned I think I’ve learned from novels”.

“It has to do with empathy,” Obama told Robinson in a conversation which is published in the 19 November issue of the New York Review of Books. “It has to do with being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of greys, but there’s still truth there to be found, and that you have to strive for that and work for that. And the notion that it’s possible to connect with some[one] else even though they’re very different from you.” 

Obama [noted] that it isn’t that Americans don’t read; “It’s that everybody is reading [in] their niche, and so often, at least in the media, they’re reading stuff that reinforces their existing point of view. And so you don’t have that phenomenon of ‘here’s a set of great books that everybody is familiar with and everybody is talking about’.”
Television shows can “fill that void”, he felt, but “we don’t have a lot of common reference points”. And in a world where a premium is placed “on the sensational and the most outrageous or a conflict as a way of getting attention and breaking through the noise”, a “pessimism about the country” develops.

“Because all those quiet, sturdy voices that we were talking about at the beginning, they’re not heard,” said Obama. “It’s not interesting to hear a story about some good people in some quiet place that did something sensible and figured out how to get along.”

Alison Flood, “President Obama says novels taught him how to be a citizen”, The Guardian, October 28, 2015

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/28/president-obama-says-novels-taught-him-citizen-marilynne-robinson?

and

President Barack Obama, State of the Union Address, January 13, 2016
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/01/12/remarks-president-barack-obama-–-prepared-delivery-state-union-address

January 1, 2017

The slow train from Nairobi to Mombasa runs 18-20 hours to cover the 300 miles. First class cars provide sleeping “cabins” and access to a dining car with overhead fans that do not work. The toilet, as with all other cabins, is a hole through the floor, where whatever exits hits the rushing tracks below. A sign posted by the hole advises passengers not to use the facility while the train is in station (maybe the use would be too obvious to all those waiting at the station).
The slow train allows you to see the countryside unravel, from shantytowns outside the urban center to villages further out. Children from the shanties and villages alike rush out to greet the train. What does the train mean to them? What does it symbolize?
The looks on the faces of some “western” passengers in first class, particularly the females – from resigned despair to muffled revulsion – accompanied by the men wearing equally apologetic looks, suggest that the once-proud railroad line is long a relic of some past industrial glory. The excitement greeting the train as it “speeds” past the shanties and villages, however, suggests a different mythology lives amongst the imaginations of the dark complexioned children. 
An older Kenyan points out the new railway line under construction. The bridges connecting the hilly country, he says, are built by the Japanese. But the new railway line – connecting Nairobi and Mombasa by a mere four hours – and the highways, are Chinese-made. “This road is very nice” he declares, on the way to Mombasa’s Moi international airport. “You see there, that will be the new highway to Nairobi.” It is all being built by the Chinese. “You see, there!” He points to an Asian man in a yellow hard hat, standing admist a handful of African laborers working with rock and concrete. But the suspicion of foreign workers prevalent in the United States is not present in Kenya. The man almost seems to praise the Chinese without any prompting. “They work very hard. They build things fast.”
Hard work is admired in Kenya. The man saves his disdain for the ruling Kenyan elite. This administration is going around claiming credit for all the construction. He laughs: the projects were approved before the current administration and will be completed, perhaps after it- new elections will take place in August. The man believes that the opposition will win and take over the government.
I ask him about the contrast between the many schools I see along the roads – evangelical, baptist, pentacostal, and yet a common sight of women walking, covered completely, faces veiled, in flowing black hidjabs. [1] He seems to either not understand or chooses to ignore my question. Instead he offers, in a tone that hints at longing, “In America they welcome everybody.”
The mythology survives.
Notes:

1.

Postcript / slow train to Mombasa (1/1/2017)
[1] 1980, Kenya: “The charismatic Christians were no less aggressive than the fundamentalist Muslims in those days. The whole country was beginning to fall apart; perhaps people were grabbing for certainties. Preachers of some sect or other were all over the place…. The state in Kenya was crumbling from within, buckling under the larceny and nepotism of the men in control…. It was happening, in fact, almost everywhere in Africa and throughout the Islamic world. The more corrupt and unreliable the apparatus of government … the more those people headed back into their tribe, their traditions, their church or mosque, and hunkered down, like among like. 
“A new kind of Islam was on the march. It was much deeper, much clearer and stronger … than the old kind of Islam my grandmother believed in, along with her spirit ancestors and djinns …. It was a huge evangelical sect backed massively by Saudi oil wealth and Iranian martyr propaganda. It was militant, and it was growing.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “Infidel,” Simon & Schuster, 2007
2.  January 16, 2016

My uber driver Ali is from Fez, the old capital of Morocco. Fez is dangerous now, Ali says. There is a lot of crime; there is “no government – it is just a show” for the monarchy. But Ali wants to go home.
Ali left Morocco after his father died, and his older brother took care of the family. As a man, Ali felt that he had to try and make it on his own, and decided to strike out for the Big Apple.
After eight years in the US, obtaining his college degree, and American citizenship, he is counting the time before abandoning the dream. Ali wants to start a family. There are no opportunities in Morocco, but at least it is home, he says. Here, there are no opportunities either, Wall Street is “corrupt”, *and* there is racism.
I tell Ali that New York City is not the United States. America is a large country. Maybe there is someplace else. Though I also tell him how people have said things to me like “Go back to where you came from” (not in NYC) – ostensibly judging me first by the color of my skin. But I was born in New Jersey and have no desire to move across the river, either.
Lack of economic opportunities, a sense of humiliation/absence of dignity, and the belief that the government does not work for its citizens – these are all flash points for radicalization amongst young men in the Maghreb. 
And people are expressing it here in the United States.
Anti-Terrorism (AT) is not a matter of simply defeating the actors carrying out violent ideologies. AT is a matter of creating/enabling functioning civil societies where people have the opportunities to make a life for themselves, are afforded basic human rights, and have the faith that the government exists to work, rather than take, from the people.
Otherwise, you will never stop treating the symptoms while the roots of terrorism persist. And it will be a “war” that never ends.

My theory is this – in the prevalent framework of nation-states, we divide things through the verticle axis Y. So, maybe I’m American, and you’re Russian, and that nation-state paradigm shapes how we define conflict. But in a way, this is a superficial distinction, like branding.

The more useful differentiation is functional – along the x-axis, which says one truck has more in common with another truck, and one sedan with another sedan, than a truck with a sedan, regardless of the brand.

So the real tension isn’t America v Russia per se, than it is autocratic forces v liberal movements, pragmatist v ideologues, radical elements v moderate factions, secularists v Islamists/evangelicals, etc, etc that exist in each society.

And if, as with citizenship, the choice of “brand” is largely pre-determined, then the struggle in choosing a vehicle is a more matter of truck v sedan, than it is brand A v brand B.

This, in fact, is expressed whenever a politician argues that “moderate Muslims” aren’t doing enough to reign in radical Islamists. But no argument has been put forth that “moderate” Americans have failed to do enough to overcome our version of political extremists. 

(Frequently because those fanning the broader winds of Islamophobia are themselves the American extremists and, when challenged, seek to enforce the Y-axis, by denouncing X-axis dissent as unpatriotic, lacking the virtue of loyalty)

Notes:

1.  “Libtards” don’t win in times of crisis precisely because they aren’t tribal enough – the other side fights from a sense of self-preservation of us v them. While libtards talk about empathy, the other side is, well, calling them Libtards. Name-calling is nothing more than a declaration that “You and I belong to different tribes.” Liberal criticism of Conservatives tends to adopt the (accusatory, condescending, etc) formula of “you are wrong,” while the reverse just as often reveals the (reflexive) sentiment “you are different”
One triggers stronger survival instincts than the other.
2.  Nick Cohen, “Russian Treachery is Everywhere” The Guardian, January 7, 2017

 “… nationalists hate enemies in their countries more than they hate the enemies of their countries. Millions of American conservatives … voted for Donald Trump… Local hatreds, not national security, moved them. They hated Obama more than they feared Putin. They hated political correctness. They hated – not without reason – the attacks on freedom of speech. They hated rich liberals and defence lawyers…. 

“Even connoisseurs of the grotesque have had to take a deep breath and count to 10 after watching the Republican president-elect of the United States preferring the word of Julian Assange to the word of his own intelligence agencies. That Assange is cowering from rape charges in the basement of the Ecuadorian embassy, and maintaining that the same United States would persecute him if he emerged to face his accusers like an honourable man, only made the task of regaining your composure harder.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/07/russian-treachery-extreme-and-everywhere?
3.  Yitzak Rabin and ‘Alī ibn Abī Tālib died not because they didn’t face their enemies, but because they didn’t guard their flank from ideologues in their own party.
Anybody who doesn’t purport to be a radical, extremist, or ideologue, needs to be able to defend from not just one, but at least two fronts.

One of the most difficult things we nevertheless do, automatically and with no conscious effort, in day to day life, is determining intentions. We hear words and see actions, and read intentions into them.
On a larger level, its a subject of not insignificant study in the fields of economics (presuming rational behavior, spawning ideas like John Nash’s Game Theory) and international relations (in which many a movie has been made about *mis-reading intentions, eg, 13 Days on the Cuban Missile Crisis)
That reading or interpreting (really) intentions, from observed words and actions, is tremendously difficult may be understated.
We often misread the intentions of people we know well: co-workers, friends, family. It’s not uncommon at all to have “misunderstandings.” You spend enough time with kids, you often hear, “I didn’t mean it!” As adults, we forget how kids think (or don’t think …) when we judge their actions.
Another field in the social sciences – psychology – addresses reasons for potential misunderstanding. One such phenomena of the human mind is Projection. That is, we read into others behaviors, intentions bases on what *we would do in similar circumstances. Ie, we “project” upon others, the image of outselves. Thus, our interpretations are better reflections of who we are, than they are reliable observations of who others are.
Back to international relations. Much conflict persists between sides interpreting others actions through their own lens, and in their own shoes. One problem is language. We’ve seen movie titles that, when translated directly from or into another language, seem comical. Imagine where complex narratives with political undertones are involved.
But we do this everyday, in our day-to-day lives as well, interpreting intentions, ultimately revealing more about who we are, than shedding light on those we presume to read.
***
Antoine Walker is a good dude. Whereas a lot of people project their own insecurities and venality onto others, in interpreting the intentions behind other people’s actions, he projected his own sense of loyalty onto others:
“You know, when you are friends with so many people, whether it’s professional athletes or other friends, I wasn’t so much worried about a phone call, like “Hey, I need some money,” I was more worried about, I didn’t get the “Hey, ‘Toine, you all right?” Because when I was playing, the phone was ringing. I had three cellphones! All of them ringing. So it’s disturbing sometimes when that becomes your reality. Look, when you are a giver, you’re a giver. You know what I mean? I didn’t give to go through this and say to people, “Now it’s time to kick back to me.” It’s about [that phone call], “Man, let me call to check on you to see how you are doing.” I know how I would carry it if a friend of mine was in the same situation that I was in. And sometimes in life you have to learn that everybody doesn’t care like you. That’s the one thing I learned in this process over the last two and a half, three years of going through this. People sometimes just don’t care like you do, and you can’t expect people to do things the same way or care the same way that you do. And I’ve learned to download those situations for later on in life.
http://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/11262284/antoine-walker-reframes-tale-woe-sessions-scoop
***

Standard piece of #interpretation: 
“Republicans and Democrats alike who warned against Trump in severest terms have been all too willing to backtrack for the sake of political expediency”
http://www.grubstreet.com/2016/12/a-look-at-chef-jos-andrss-legal-battle-with-donald-trump.html
This doesn’t tell me that the Romneys and Tim Cooks cave to political expediency. There’s a legitimate thought that you can more effectively advocate for issues within the system, even if you disagree with the guy at the top – and have his ear – than from staunch opposition in the wilderness.
People write or say stuff, and their own words more accurately reflect who they are than the other persons they purportedly describe. 
So what Hannah Goldfield is saying is – “I would let the perfect be the enemy if the good- my worldview is such that I want it all or I want nothing at all.” (And that is the standard by which I judge the actions others)
She could almost level the same accusation against Barack Obama, for having been conciliatory with Trump for purposes of a smooth transition. 
So now that “caving to expediency” narrative is out there for readers to digest. Those really upset with a Trump presidency may eat it up without much thought and come to see the Mitt Romneys as unprincipled political weaklings, when the truth may be that it’s much more difficult to learn to work with people you disagree with for the sake of the country, than to sit in the desert of self-righteousness.
#projection #rorschach #inception