Members of Congress make about $165,000 a year. Some of them seem to believe they are paid to be cheerleaders for war profiteers and a corrupt CIVILIAN command. I've yet to hear a compelling explanation as to how criticizing war profiteers is the same as criticizing soldiers in harms way. IMHO, the war profiteers ARE NOT looking out for the soldiers. The corrupt civilian command and their war profiteering pals (with the help of their loyal echo chamber...think tanks and the corporate media) claim their escalation policy honors the troops.
Actually, the civilian command is hiding behind soldiers to escape accountability for their actions. That is disgraceful. About as sick as Republicans who sat by and refused to do proper oversight for years. Or Democrats who can't bring themselves to stop the occupation, offering a cowardly non binding resolution instead.
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There is no group. Not in the material sense. There is only the tendency to see abstractions as realities.
Yet the behaviors we must modify are the ones that generate attitudes toward an individual as an expressive part of a whole, even while the whole is a fantasy. A "Group" is a meme. We are fighting a shadow, nothing material. it is hopeless until we understand that this is an Ideology war.
Does Bushco run the corporation or does the corporation run bush. Bush said, "Jesus was his favorite philospher", not his god. He serves mamon; mamon doesn't serve him. When I speak of Bushco I do not mean him personally, I mean his ilk. The meme within a meme.
Our "tribally-minded" scarcity model.
These tribal memes, living in our socially knit, but separate brains, manipulate us to the point that Muslim, Jew, Black, Fundamentalist, Old, Young memes overshadow our possible positive relations with individuals.
Hop the fold, each ONE of you... the tesseract... What we need is an 'New Era of Thought' When I talk about society (meme) and where I want it to go, and what I want it to stop doing (meme action), I am giving life and substance to a tendency for my mind to see things that aren't there.
There is a "group spot" in the brain, that constantly assesses collections for similarities. It doesn't seem to matter what elements are, the collection attains, eventually, the same sense of reality that concrete objects do. Then we treat these recently concretized collections as real objects, with characteristics, even though the characteristics might not exist.
It's been a useful tool, in some cases, to survive as gene carriers, but now we are being threatened by our tendency to group things, unaware that the negative outflow from that habit can destroy us as a species. I won't get into the effects on the planet.
Karl Popper, in his book, The Open Society and Its Enemies, goes back to Plato and Socrates to show how this works. Poppers scorns Plato because Plato takes the side of the collective against Socrates' pristine individualism, even distorting Socrates' views to support Plato's own opinion on the ideal society.
An interesting read, because Popper decided to write the book in 1938, when fascism (a modern collectivism) was being hotly debated, and Austria had just been invaded. Popper finished the book in 1943, and revised it as late as 1965, a turbulent period in social philosophy, what structure a state should take, and the place and moral actions of an individual in it.
My recent insight came after rereading the book, and striving to find a synthesis of all the well-meant advocacies here, from anarchist to collectivist, along the lines from "no loyalty" to "family loyalty" to "constitutional loyalty."
All seem to be talking about the same thing: how should a person divide their emotional links among the various groups they tend to align themselves with?
Should ALL the loyalties align with one "group" (remembering the meme above) or is it possible to parcel them out without generating such an effort of compartmentalization or cognitive dissonance that the personality takes permanent damage or fails completely.
We are told to have loyalty to family (which is really a socially conditioned loyalty to similars), loyalty to groups we've been initiated into through acquaintance, (play, school, and teen peers, marriage, sexual play or even just orientation, work, hobbies) or groups we discover through intellectual resonance, (politics, religion)
Each has its way of working through our mind modules, conditioning us through chemical addictions to endorphins.
We decide all our rationalizations this way, unless we are adept at waylaying the memes as they modify our behavior. And that's where we switch now from analysis to action.
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