If only there were an industry of businesses that manufactured goods and services specifically geared to maintaining the peace (something more profitable and focused than libraries). Then there would be a weighty lobby to counterbalance the military-industrial complex. This Peace Lobby could sponsor NFL half-time shows. Instead of showing pretty photos of missiles taking off, they could show what happens to human beings when those missiles land. And they could sponsor research to explore the extent to which U.S. articulates meaningful objectives regarding its wars and also set forth detailed metrics to show whether U.S. wars actually achieve those objectives, using (as one example) the 20-year war in Afghanistan.
They could investigate the extent to which the U.S. government has been honest with the citizens regarding the need for each war. They could have teams of analysts assess the risks and benefits of going to war or not going to war. They could warn us that many media outlets uncritically and gullibly join in whenever politicians beat the drums to go to war. They could also explore the effect on diverting massive U.S. tax resources to war, and they could run campaigns showing the lost benefits of failing to spend those tax resources on peaceful uses, such as decaying U.S. infrastructure. They could also educate Americans of the dangers of the sunk cost fallacy.
Related Thought: If only were were better incentives for Hollywood to produce storylines where war was averted. Unfortunately, scripts permeated with visual violent conflict sells, especially visual conflict involving physical fighting. I wonder about the filtering that likely occurs when Hollywood script-writers and producers want the cooperation of of the military to use military resources in their movies (e,g., military hardware and access to military ships, planes and bases). If only we had the following data: How often does the U.S. military turn down cooperation of a movie-maker because the script puts the military in a bad light or makes war look like a bad idea?
From what I understand about Trump's decision to attack Iran's General Qasem Soleimani in Iraq, it seems to be a dangerous move, an unforced error that puts the U.S. at risk. There is a lot of outrage on the political left. Before attacking Trump, I think it's important to recognize that the U.S. is a bipartisan war-mongering state, and this includes numerous undeclared wars waged by Barack Obama. It also includes the fact that there are few vocal anti-war Democrats running for President. It also includes widespread Congressional nonchalance in the face of the recent report showing "U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it, an exclusive Post investigation found."
It's also important to recognize that Congress has the power to supervise and control these adventures, but won't. War is job-security for many politicians. It makes them look strong and thus more electable. Thus the waging of wars of discretion continues to be our non-stop horrifically expensive and dangerous hobby. War-mongering is a cancer in our bipartisan body politic. I'd urge everyone who is criticizing Trump to keep this in perspective. The problem runs much deeper than Trump, and the reason you won't see widespread protests in the street in reaction to Trump's terrible decision is the same reason you didn't see such protests while Obama was waging numerous undeclared wars, many of them with no clearly defined metric of success.
I completely agree with Bill Nye on the issue of "race." We should all reject the concept of "race." It is wholly and completely unscientific. We are all of the same species: We are all human beings. Yes, we humans come with different skin colors and we have various features that differ based on our ancestry, but we are all human. In rejecting the concept of "race," I would urge that we maintain and vigorously enforce laws that protect people from other people who foolishly continue to believe in "race" and act on that foolish belief. If we keep clinging to unscientific unsupported notions of "race," though, we will FOREVER be divided for an idiotic reason, regardless of how well-intentioned our belief in "race." Unfortunately, the belief in "race" has long been widespread; and it has long been institutionalized and repeatedly used as a tool for oppression, power and financial gain. Rooting it out of every little corner of the planet will be an immense task requiring that people listen closely to those who do careful science on this issue, and then do their utmost to recognize that every person is of the same species.
Nye does not reject that there are such things as social tribes but warns that they can be destructive: "There have always been tribes . . .but what we have to appreciate now is that we live in a global community. Tribal loyalties are fun when it comes to the Superbowl but they are not relevant when it comes to our future. We are all in this together.”
We can fully recognize the need to protect people from racism and racialism while rejecting the concept of race. In my view, we should all be fighting a two front war. Deny the existence of race while at the same time protecting people from the ravages of racism. To anticipate objections to this post, yes, race is social construct that is as real as any social construct. But it is inevitably and ultimately a destructive social construct. It's time to dismantle it while carefully protecting people from bigots.
We can fully recognize the need to protect people from racism and racialism while rejecting the concept of race. In my view, we should all be fighting a two front war. Deny the existence of race while at the same time protecting people from the ravages of racism. I thought I made this clear. Yes, race is social construct that is as real as any social construct. It is an ultimately destructive social construct. Time to dismantle it while protecting people from bigots.
I'm too impatient to wait for those who embrace "race" to wear each other out with insults, wounds and killings. I'm certainly not willing to wait for an interplanetary diaspora. I want the stupidity (and consequent mistreatment of innocent human beings) to stop NOW. There is no need to wait any longer. We can get entirely rid of the notion of race while yet embracing friendships, communities, extended families and extended ancestry, as well as 80,000 types of diversity rooted in real life things. And let's keep in mind that ALL of us have ancestry that undeniably extends to the same place: Africa. We are all ultimately African. Starting now, let's seek diversity only in meaningful things, such as the content of our character.
It will take many people immense effort to break out of the racialist matrix. One of my early steps out was reading about Star-Bellied Sneetches, a book demonstrating that even young children understand the problem. The concept of race is poisonous--used for mischief wherever it is used What I propose is that we embrace people while rejecting race.
this topic really frustrates me because we are all victims of this "race" scam yet we all continue to cling to this empty dangerous concept that you can use a smattering of physical characteristics to judge an entire person. And why is it that a President who has a "white" mother and a "black" father end up being called "black" or "African American"? Are we that low on brain wattage that we oversimplify like this? Why do so many of us cling to race? Ask cui bono, to whom does it benefit? It benefits many in many ways. For some it provides evidence-free victimhood. For others, an instant community. For others, evidence free scapegoats. And for most of us, "race" is a concept born out of laziness - we don't want to do the hard work of really getting to know each other
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Addendum 9-8-15
Path dependence plays into this issue big time. If people had been getting along, oblivious to skin color or other trivial physical characteristics we associate with "race," and if someone came along and suggested, "Hey, let's start generalizing about what kind of person we are dealing with on the basis of 'race," a totally unscientific and incoherent concept that I have invented based on trivial physical characteristics of humans. As people with geographically correlated trivial characteristics intermarry over time, it will become more and more absurd to determine who is of what race. I propose in fact, that a President who has a "white" mother and a "black" father will be deemed "black," and this will invite people to treat him/her with unwarranted presumptions as to what kind of person he/she is." If someone had made that proposal in this hypothetical scenario, it would (or at least, in an intelligent world) SHOULD be immediately rejected as absurd, divisive and dangerous.
My conclusion: the only reason we continue to divide people by "race" is because ignorant people from long ago started doing so, and they did it for horrible reasons related to power-mongering and economic advantage.
In their joint report— Body Count: Casualty Figures after 10 Years of the 'War on Terror—Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival, and the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War concluded that this number is staggering, with at least 1.3 million lives lost in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan alone since the onset of the war following September 11, 2001.
...
According to Gould's forward, co-authored with Dr. Tim Takaro, the public is purposefully kept in the dark about this toll.
"A politically useful option for U.S. political elites has been to attribute the on-going violence to internecine conflicts of various types, including historical religious animosities, as if the resurgence and brutality of such conflicts is unrelated to the destabilization cause by decades of outside military intervention," they write. "As such, under-reporting of the human toll attributed to ongoing Western interventions, whether deliberate of through self-censorship, has been key to removing the 'fingerprints' of responsibility."
Haven’t we been gearing up for some kind of O.K. Corral showdown pretty much since the announcement that there would be a grand jury? Haven’t we been gearing up for some kind of O.K. Corral showdown pretty much since the announcement that there would be a grand jury? Sure looked like we expected what we got. [More . . . ]
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