In an example of unparalleled hubris, Iraqi officials are demanding that the United States apologize and pay $1 billion for the damage done to the city. Officials are complaining that the blast walls installed by the U.S. to protect the public are ugly and that Humvees and vehicles have caused damage in patrolling the city and fighting insurgents.
The city released a statement saying “The U.S. forces changed this beautiful city to a camp in an ugly and destructive way, which reflected deliberate ignorance and carelessness about the simplest forms of public taste . . . Due to the huge damage, leading to a loss the Baghdad municipality cannot afford . . . we demand the American side apologize to Baghdad’s people and pay back these expenses.”
For those of us who opposed the war in Iraq, this is a particularly maddening moment. We continue to lose lives and billions in public funds as our states sell off parks, buildings, and cut critical programs. We have wasted billions of dollars in Iraq with little or no evidence of where money has gone.
In Afghanistan, we have a corrupt president who repeatedly states that he prefers the Taliban and views the United States as an enemy. Karzai also sought to tax U.S. contractors supporting his government and a bailout for his banks.
Yet, we continue to assume towering losses because our leaders are unwilling to take personal responsibility to pull us out of these countries. Rather than risk political backlash, President Obama and others allow our military personnel to die every day for countries that are increasingly openly hostile to us. This is becoming a truly Felliniesque farce.
Source: Reuters
Jonathan Turley
RE: Buddha Is Laughing, February 18, 2011 at 11:57 am
Does simply saying that you’re an antisocial/anti-legal propagandist tool count as a diatribe?
Your “work” is still crap, windbag.
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Thank you.
Tootie
1, February 18, 2011 at 9:32 am
Blouise: Where you having a premonition?
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TootieB,
Nope … it was an inside joke from the Carter thread
Does simply saying that you’re an antisocial/anti-legal propagandist tool count as a diatribe?
Your “work” is still crap, windbag.
It may be wise to take into account the long-term effects of the perhaps 100,000 civilian deaths in terms of the damage done in the form of trauma to the yet-living relatives, friends, and acquaintances of the now-deceased.
It was asked in an earlier thread whether I had “read Freud” (Sigmund or Anna?) and my answer was and is, “No.” For me to read a person, the person needs to be alive and I need to be in sufficiently direct communication with the person as to be able to adequately interact.
However, I first did read Sigmund Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams” when I was eight, shortly after we moved from Eureka, California, to Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin.
The ongoing “cost” of the trauma to living Iraqis totally dwarfs the “cost” of the physical damage to the infrastructure of Baghdad. The ongoing “trauma cost” to the people of the United States as a consequence of having been deceived dwarfs all other costs incurred by the United States related to the Iraq-Afghanistan wars.
As illustration of the nature and “costs” of trauma and its proclivity to promote war-mongering, one who is able to so do may usefully review the collection of comments I have posted on the Turley blawg and the comments in response to my comments.
Then someone who really understands dream interpretation may usefully explore to what extent I have accurately described my method of using exceptionally direct truthfulness to elicit trauma defense mechanisms, especially with respect to those who derogate my professional standing, competence, research methodology and research results.
Someone sufficiently competent in terms of psychoanalytic technique may readily recognize how and why my use of exceptionally direct truthfulness elicited responses as though of profound hatred, as though directed toward me.
However my psychoanalytic method (Affirmational Therapy by name) reverses Freud’s approach in its essential, existential core mechanism.
Once I establish an interpersonal communication channel, based upon what happened in the process of establishing the channel to send forth a countertransference before the analysand has the opportunity to send to me a viable transference. Instead of waiting in abject silence avoiding all possible contact between analyst and analysand, I initiate the countertransference-transference process and I maintain executive control of it, in ways so gentle compared to traditional Freudian methodology as to give little hint of anything other than a conversation between two people who do not yet know each other very well.
The reason that there is little hint of anything other than a conversation between two people who do not know each other very well is that such is quite precisely what is actually happening.
How does this method work in practice on this blawg? There is a thread-starter, from one of the authorized folks, most often Professor Turley. People post comments. When a comment appears to me to merit a comment from me, I post the comment, and that is the initial psychoanalytic countertransference. What I write in my psychoanalysis-initiating comment posting is as directly, truthfully of my real view and understanding as words allow.
Most of the time, the returned transference is apparent silence. From time to time, what I write stirs a person into posting a comment in response to my comment, and that is the elicited transference.
One book which I found particularly useful as background for writing my doctoral dissertaion is Richard Webster, “Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science, and Psychoanalysis,” Basic Books, 1995.
From Webster, page 264, “While Fliess used a series of arithmetical transformations to change his key numbers 23 and 28 into any number he needed in order to prove the correctness of his formula, Freud juggled with symbols in a similar way so that even the most apparently frustrating, tragic or pessimistic dream could be interpreted as secretly fulfilling some wish or desire on the part of the dreamer. The English psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers pointed to one of the most remarkable features of Freud’s hermeneutic strategies early in the development of the psychoanalytic movement. Although Rivers was sympathetic to Freud’s enterprise, he drew attention to the fact that one of Freud’s rules was that only the analyst, studying the dream as a whole, was in a position to decide whether a particular symbol in the dream should be interpreted in one way or its opposite. ‘Such a method,’ wrote Rivers, ‘would reduce any other science to an absurdity, and doubts must be raised whether psychology can have methods of its own which would make it necessary to separate it from all other science and put it in a distinct category.’ ” For references and context, get and read Webster’s book for yourselves…
Because Sigmund Freud reserved to the analyst the dream symbol interpretation, his method was authoritarian/passive-aggressive in its mechanism and process, which is most likely, in my view, why classical Freudian methods tend to drive people identified as having schizophrenia deeper into their psychotic condition.
In my work, schizophrenia is a brain-trauma response to authoritarian tyrannical coercion of such intensity as to result in an enduring dissociative brain state in which the coercion has been so shattering as to have resulted in a brain state of such “subconscious” abjectly stark terror as to be as impossible to remember as it is impossible to forget.
For those who have not thoroughly studied the writings of Sigmund Freud, perhaps his English-translated “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious” (originally, methinks, published in 1900, and now public domain) has within it much about the way I have been using subtle multiple, multiply-nested entendre countertransferences to elicit overt expression of underlying unconscious trauma responses from those who sadly may believe they can refute my work by unconsciously validating it.
As much as Sigmund Freud’s transference-first, analyst-interpretation-driven method exacerbates authoritarian/passive-aggressive dissociation, the method and process of Affirmational Therapy, by reversing the information flow direction (the analysand makes the interpretations of the symbols) of the flow of information, with the analyst identifying and providing useful tools for the analysand to achieve gently guided self-analysis, which the analysand is fully able to test and evaluate for effectiveness, efficiency, and economy.
Because, in rather stark contrast with much of early psychotherapy approaches, Affirmational Therapy grants full personal validity to both analysand and analyst, it is truly a peer-to-peer approach in which the analyst comes with a tested and validated set of psychoanalytic tools which the analyst shares with the analysand in ways such that the analysand is in ever-increasing control of the analysis. When the analysand has effectively achieved total control of the analysis, the essential psychoanalytic work is completed, with refresher sessions happening as needed.
The way Affirmational Therapy works is to first give a person practicable tools for becoming and being at peace with the whole of the person’s life, regardless of what has previously happened, and to remain at peace with the person’s life for the rest of the person’s future.
A person at peace with the person’s own life then learns to be at peace with the rest of the world, including all people.
Exit war-mongering from the human condition.
Authoritarianism, as is the mandatory basis of the Anglo-American Adversarial System, in the form of the Adversarial Principle, is so catastrophically traumatizing as to make its adherents as though utterly oblivious to the dastardly carnage the Adversarial Principle produces when implemented in social structures and mechanisms.
Indeed the dissociative trauma appears to me to be of such unbearable agony as to deny to the adherents of the Adversarial Process any practical capacity to reach, much less grasp, its inner horrifying terrors.
Those captured by the Adversarial Process are without fault and without valid blame, for the simple fact being that the Adversarial Principle is indoctrinated at typically 18 months of age (or the age of the sometimes-recognized infant-child discontinuity which results in many people having amnesia as a brain-damage-trauma response to many events happening prior to the successful internalization of time-corrupted-learning-dishonesty into unconscious self-deception and its panoply of consequent human catastrophes.
W. H. R. Rivers identified Freud’s method as outside the realm of science, such that it would need to be separated from all other science.
The work of Freud, however, as needing to be separated from all other science, is pitifully trivial in that regard when compared and contrasted with the Anglo-American Adversarial System of Jurisprudence.
In Freud’s schema, the analysand was allowed to express personal views and be heard. In the Adversarial System, the rule of law has largely become, “Now, SHUT UP and DON’T DO AS YOU ARE TOLD TO DO, OR YOU WILL BE PUNISHED UNTIL YOU LEARN TO DO EXACTLY AS YOU ARE TOLD, WITH IS TO NOT DO WHAT YOU ARE TOLD TO DO, OR ELSE, AND YOU WILL BE AS BRUTALLY PUNISHED AS IS NECESSARY FOR YOU TO LEARN TO DO AS YOUR ARE TOLD, EVEN THOUGH WHAT YOU ARE BEING TOLD TO DO IS PERFECTLY IMPOSSIBLE.”
I find that, to truly believe in the Adversarial Process has as inviolable prerequisite having been so perfectly innocently traumatically shattered as to have become consciously utterly oblivious to the internal contradiction which is the ultimately absolutely mandatory core of the Adversarial Process and its absolutely terrifying implementation as the Adversarial System of Jurisprudence.
While it is obviously so, in my research of human antiquity, that the system of law of the civilization of Sumer was resolutely constructed based on the Adversarial Principle, it is quite simply a dastardly falsehood to assert that there have been no civilizations which omitted the Adversarial Principle as an aspect of their civilization.
The civilization of the !Kung people of the Kalahari was, from what I have been able to learn, bereft of Adversarial Law until it was brought to the !Kung by the adversarial murderers from Europe. Prior to the European invasion, the !Kung had no need of a system of adversarial laws and lived in an egalitarian civilization that endured for millenia until Europeans came with ways of abusive adversarial destruction.
Also, until Europeans acted as though with adversarial destructive intent, the Inuit also had neither need of nor use for any sort of Adversarial Process and Adversarial System.
It is my observation, alas, that the !Kung and the Inuit civilizations, prior to their threatened ruination by European Adversariality, were of such form as to plausibly have become adversarial through the same sort of mechanism as led to Sumer being of an adversarial system of law. Thus, looking back to times before adversarial law developed for the remedy for adversarial law is, methinks, certain of failure because primitive, non-adversarial civilizations were the precursors to adversarial civilizations, and hence, methinks that pre-adversarial civilizations were bereft of what is necessary for remediation of, and/or prevention of, the formation of Adversarial Process based civilizations.
Ergo, I expect the remedy for the atrocity of the Adversarial Process and its horror as implemented in the Adversarial System of Law and Jurisprudence remains to be sufficiently developed as to become practical and practicable.
Hence, the research I have done and continue to do as a Bioengineer working within my licensed standing as a Wisconsin Registered Professional Engineer.
What would strike me as beyond being trans-ultimately ridiculous is finding people who, I allow, have J.D. degrees who are so unaware of their system of law as to not make clear to me that my fraudulently representing myself as a Registered Professional Engineer, were I actually doing that (and I am not so doing) has adversarial law sanctions which would be personally disastrous.
This suggests to me that I have come to an understanding of the process of law which surpasses that of the J.D. folks, and others, who take exception to my research.
Now comes the next “chess fork gambit technique” implementation…
It has been my purpose to learn what, if any, refutation and/or rebuttal efforts might occur in response to my comments. The comments of those who have, in writing, challenged my work comprise the data of my research purpose in my writing the comments I have written and posted on this blawg.
So, if this comment results in further “diatribes,” those “diatribes” will simply add to my research data collection by validating my research work and further validating my research findings.
Surprised?
http://tpmlivewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/02/to-defeat-muslim-stereotypes-daily-show-creates-muslim-cosby-show-the-quosby-show.php?ref=fpb
Blouise: Where you having a premonition?
Buckeye:
I bought the war because of Powell. I never trusted him before that because he was for abortion. But because he agreed with Bush, I felt what the admin. was saying was true. 🙁
It’s so very sad.
It’s not just our military personnel that are dying. Perhaps the hostility has something to do with the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi’s killed under false US actions, with a US-installed government and prospects that the US occupier will be controlling the country for decades to come?
“You break it, you own it.” – Colin Powell Summer, 2002
One could ponder whether it is the present City of Baghdad or the 2002 Bush administration which may be “out of touch with reality and overestimating one’s own competence or capabilities” – the definition of hubris, but our moral culpability is clear. We owe them.
Woost:
You wrote in part: “this Country it is confused with FEAR.”
Correct.
I’m always amazed how right-winger men (especially media types like Rush and Hannity) are so unbelievably afraid of Muslims. I mean, Muslims are something to be afraid of but what are they going to do? Swim over?
Iran has, what? A few motor boats in its laughable “navy”. And nothing of a military. And, if Ahmadinejad really wants to commit suicide why does he have security detail?
And if right-wingers are so brave, why is it that the left-wingers (and I’m mostly thinking menfolk) are not afraid of all this? (I mean outside of right-wingers being so stupid and all). It is supposed to be left-winger men who are the cowards (according to the right-winger men).
The truth is the sissiest left-winger, dude, tree-hugger touchy-feely type is going to fight like mad the day this country is really invaded by a foreign power.
Anyway, that’s how I see it and you hit the nail on the head.
Tootie … is that you?
It looks like I posted prematurely!
Woosty,
I agree with you that we owe Iraq for the damage that we caused based on lies by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, et al. I would like to find the 9 Billion that George and Cheney and Rummy lost in Iraq. That being said, Iraq has already received far more that to date. I think someone is looking to pad his own bank account in Iraq.
Woosty,
I agree with you that we owe Iraq for the damage that we caused based on lies by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, et al. I would like to find the 9 Billion that George and Cheney and Rummy lost in Iraq. That being said, Iraq has already received far more that
RE: Karl Friedrich, February 17, 2011 at 11:03 pm
This so-called example of “hubris” by historically oppressed & victimized brown people reminds me of the Brookings Institution’s Beltway policies.
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Yes, and it also reminds me of the Tuskeege Project.
Some people live in the Projects.
Some die in the Projects.
What are the projected deaths to win in Afghanistan by losing there?
What will the Final Solution really be?
Who will finally project it?
This so-called example of “hubris” by historically oppressed & victimized brown people reminds me of the Brookings Institution’s Beltway policies.
RE: Karl Friedrich, February 17, 2011 at 8:01 pm
How the hell is the demand of an apology and only a billion in reparations for such monstrous war crimes against an urban infrastructure an example of “unparalleled hubris”? WTF?
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I am beginning to doubt that there is enough money in the universe to repay the rest of the world for what University of Wisconsin professor, William Appleman Williams, wrote of in his book, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy.
There is available the 50th Anniversary Edition, now. Check the Amazon reviews, read the book and figure out what to do in response that is of civil decency.
If you care.
How the hell is the demand of an apology and only a billion in reparations for such monstrous war crimes against an urban infrastructure an example of “unparalleled hubris”? WTF?
When (Sorry…. IF!) we leave, let’s be sure to clean out the furnishings inside the world’s largest embassy. The Strong Man who takes over when we leave will need a palace. I think we blowed up most of Sadaam’s palaces.
Billy Sol Hurok: “He blowed up good!”
Big Jim McBob: “He blowed up REAL good!”
This is a good site for activism. http://www.worldcantwait.net
“For those of us who opposed this war” — and who have been proven to be right in spades from whatever angle one looks.
How many more times and ways do we have to [try to] oppose the depravity of the corporatist state before we just trow in the towel? Sometimes I think we are just useful idiots so the controlling forces in our so-called democracy can have an opposition to point to on their way to steamrolling this country into the dirt.