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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cosmicforce who wrote (92630)	1/6/2005 12:18:11 AM
From: Rambi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Hey Cos, I have had wine and liqueurs and have no idea what will come from my keyboard, but what the hell. I can agree with some of that. In fact, I feel like that many mornings- how I am expending great energy getting out of bed for naught. Individual lives are kind of like that. Maybe there were positive communal values in hauling those stones around together, maybe they increased the ability of communities to achieve cooperative endeavors, intrinsic values in ways that we can;'t judge thousand of years after the fact. Or conversely, look at what the Church did to preserve knowledge through the Dark Ages-- did they understand what they were doing? The incredible impact of it? It's hard to see big pictures when you are just a Seuratian dot in the center of one. Anyway... I just don't think that presenting Levy as a creditable source and saying that, not only Bush, but half the population is delusional is terribly sound reasoning or persuasive, if indeed you and grainne meant it to be. If as you are indicating in your post to me, it is merely amusing to you, that is one thing; if it was meant to seriously propose we are in the grip of madmen and to use Levy is confirming evidence, then I question the source, and see it as pretty unreliable. We aren't going to be destroyed in an eight year term. Damage may be done, but one of our strengths is the temporariness of our regimes. But regardless, in a sort of moot court argument: Many on SI argue that trying to bring democracy to a people who had been systematically and arbitrarily tortured and abused by a dictator is right up there with treating the sick and the old in terms of good works. they do not believe this is about oil or power. They believe this is the Right thing as strongly as you believe it is Wrong. But that doesn't mean that everyone who supported the war was participating in a mass delusion. It's far more possible that Bush and his group are not crazy at all, just working from a totally different agenda than you or I. It may feel good to say he's nuts but it's not really likely. And it's even less likely that half of the US is suffering from this shared psychosis. A sort of extended folie à deux. (folie à milles?) More likely they drew conclusions from the presented facts (whether intentionally misrepresented or not). Or they shared the idea that we are doing somehow the Right Thing. Or they just backed the president because goldurn it, that's what we DO in these here United States. You may believe that there are a lot of people who are going to prove to be wrong, but that's a far cry from some bizarre shared psychosis a la Jim Jones. That's just backing the wrong horse from either lack of thinking, or poor thinking, or insufficient facts, or just poor guessing-- or it may even be-- and I think it is still early to tell in the great scheme of things-- the right choice. I found something more about Levy in my search. He had a breakdown, apparently a true psychotic episode, twenty years ago, and was hospitalized several times, but amazingly, he decided it really WASN"T a bipolar disorder. No, the doctors were wrong! He was actually having some sort of spiritual awakening/shalamic initiation process. Now I have no problem with this- Whatever gets you through the night and your life- but I do have a problem with someone picking and choosing from the same professional terminologies he rejected for himself to assign them to someone else, someone he is seemingly obsessed with. In fact, in fairness, he ought to consider that Bush is actually NOT a narcissistic, powermad nut but merely in the throes of his own shalamic initiation procedure and being unfairly judged and labelled! All those doctors were wrong about Levy, after all. Ok, that part was a :) I do agree that we chase hobgoblins at times, but I also don't believe I have some superior ability to recognize and judge hobgoblins as absolutes, only the right to ask questions and try to come to an informed decision for myself. And I question if there really are right or wrongs in this or just differing views. Labelling contrasting views as soulless, as neurotic, as dsyfunctional--- well, frankly, that makes me pretty suspicious about the writer himself. It's too narrow. Too potentially self-descriptive. I have never approved of this war, how we entered it, or our preparation and reasoning for it. But I am not ready to say anyone is a madman. Yet.