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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: D. Long who wrote (78318)	2/28/2003 11:49:04 AM
From: tekboy	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

I've been wanting to clarify and extend my remarks on that subject, and this is a good opportunity to do so. Lindy compared my expression of the foreign policy professionals' hauteur or "God complex" with that of doctors, and I think that's not such a bad analogy. Doctors go through extensive serious training and are taught to approach their life-and-death subject matter in a rigorous way, putting the best interests of the patient at heart. They quite naturally have scorn for people who have strong opinions on medical subjects without serious intellectual justification, and for people who make medical recommendations based on furthering interests of somebody other than the patient (those people themselves, or the insurance industry, or big pharma, etc.). As for non-doctors who have boned up enough on medical subjects to have well-informed views, I suppose doctors probably consider those people pains in the ass, but give them a certain amount of grudging respect, and even non-grudging respect if their expertise is put to constructive purposes. My criticisms of Congress fall into precisely these same two categories. Many people in Congress simply do not have the knowledge or experience necessary to hold informed, independent views on thorny foreign policy questions. And most approach the subject not from any judicious consideration of what the general national interest calls for, but rather from the perspective of what will win them votes, or contributions, or kudos from key interest groups. I think they are parallel, in other words, to the brother-in-law who tells you to treat your cancer with some avocado pit extract because he saw a segment about it on Frontline once, or the guy who tells you to get this (irrelevant or expensive or even harmful) treatment rather than another, better one because it serves his own interests if you do. At its best--and we all know that despite the silliness and name-calling and stupidity and chicanery, sometimes there is indeed a best--financial discussion on SI involves the exchange of information, advice, and support by independent, well-informed, well-intentioned investors. When it comes to wireless, or storage, or software, or even financials, the best SI mavens are at least as smart and knowledgeable as most "professionals" who deal with these subjects. And unlike those professionals, many of those SI mavens are not trying to push a self-interested agenda. So that's why many of us take the best discussions here even more seriously than we do the reports by, say, industry analysts, for whom true, disinterested judgment is not the highest priority. I think the same is true of the foreign policy discussion here, again, when it's at its best. That's what I meant. tb@yup.com