Four things to consider. On one extreme there's BRAVADO. Then, INNOCENT FOOLHARDINESS. Next is BRAVERY. Finally, COURAGE.
Bravado. This is false bravery, and it's a show. In some cases it may be noble. In an extreme emergency, when lives are on the line it may give others a (false) sense of security and allow cool heads to prevail. Mostly, it's just some fool's pride.
Innocent Foolhardiness. This is close to Bravado in showiness, but not for others benefit, and close to Bravery in it's fearlessness. A good portion of time it's just ignorance. Such as someone crossing boundaries at the zoo to pet the pose next to the bear.
Bravery. This is a lack of reasonable fear. Some people just aren't scared. These are the people who put themselves in risky situations that others won't. Often, there is the attitude that the worst that could happen is you die. Brave people are often working for a cause, and in that respect are very close to being Courageous, except they're not overcoming fear, they don't have it.
Courage. Courageous people are afraid, but not cowards. Courage is always noble, and always a reaction to the greatest fear. Courage is the putting of others wellbeing above your own.
Bravado will step into a bullring, on the far side from the bull, so everyone will see him in with the bull. Bravery will think, "What an idiot" and go in to get him because he knows the bull and is in control. Foolhardiness will think that was cool and jump into the ring, hoot, holler and flail arms because it's fun after eight beers. Courage, after yelling cautions from the safety of the fence will run in when the bull feigns charges. His fear for himself is great, but his fear is greater for what will happen to the Fool if he does not act.
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Friday, July 20, 2007
ADHD
This one kills me. I think mostly it's a crock. Everyone has impulses. Many of mine are to backhand kids diagnosed with ADHD. I control those impulses. So far. Controlling impulses isn't easy. These I suppress because of outside influence. There are laws and if I started backhanding unruly children I'd go to jail. That's a consequence. It is applied with consistency. It has a meaningful impact on my behavior. I don't backhand children who deserve it, I do have the impulse. I often wonder how much of ADHD is really just parents who suck at being parents. Without the law in place I assure you I would be backhanding a few children. Many homes have no law in place. There are no consequences for actions. Without consequences there is no reason to curb impulse. And we arrive at children with no impulse control. They are diagnosed with ADHD, wrongly because it's not caused by any chemical imbalance but by neglect in the home. Well meaning doctors prescribe drugs found to be effective in cases of actual ADHD, but these drugs are inefective when the problem is lack of parenting. There have, apparently, always been ADHD children. There have not always been the problems associated with them. In older, less "enlightened" times, stark discipline was well able to distinguish between actual cases of ADHD and children who lacked discipline at home. Even now I know children who will behave for me but run rampant over their parents. They know, beyond any doubt, that I will punish them if they misbehave. They know, beyond any doubt, that their parents will not. This even seems to have worked with the actual ADHD children, to an extent. But that was an extent that curtailed the problems we commonly see now. And that was without any drugs. Anyone doubting this should interveiw an old teacher, especially a nun. Knuckle rapping works to maintain order. Even with kids who have poor impulse control it gives pause. A moment of thought about the impending consequence for unruly behavior. And that often results in impulse control in children who have poor impulse control. Mostly, though, I think it is a problem with adults that manifests in their children. If you are ill equipped for parenting, which takes much time, effort, care, planning, participation, relief, backup, etc. then you should definitely refrain from having six children. As the problem is most often an imbalance, not in the head of the child, but in the head of the home, perhaps that is where some consequences should be directed. In Arizona parents are responsible for the torts of their children. Perhaps what we should do is call the police and file for disturbing the peace. If you can't control your children that's your problem, don't make it mine. Let them run amuck at home, not in the restaurant where I'm trying to enjoy a meal.
Monday, July 9, 2007
Junk e-mail
I'm happy to say that, although the bored 25 year old girls don't seem to want to talk to me anymore, probably because nobody wants to sell me any ED drugs this week, but, oh yeah, happy to say that my home refinance loan has been preapproved. By about a dozen people so far. If I could just figure out a way to refinance with all of them at once and then declare bankruptcy.
About Cool
There are two kinds of cool. Real and imagined. Some people just are cool. I don't know what really makes them that way, they just are. Some people want to be cool so bad they'll do anything to get that quality, the one I don't know what is, that will make them cool. You see this all the time in teenagers, and it makes a certain bit of sense that they'd be going through some identity issues. What gets me is that you see it in so many adults. I guess nobody knows what that cool quality is, really. Evidently, a lot of people were counting on it being the iphone. They waited in line for days, for a phone. I guess to be cool you have to have all the right stuff. Unless, of course, you're one of the real cool people who just are cool. Until we find a way of injecting the imaginary cool people with the real cool quality I suppose there'll be all those people trying to fake it with gadgets. Now a question for all the fakers, one of which I'm sure I am. If you are so insecure with yourself that you have to buy all the tools of cool in the hope that you will then somehow be cool because you've got the stuff, can you ever really be cool at all? Maybe the first step to actually being cool is to accept yourself and stop worrying about whether anybody thinks you're cool.
Sunday, July 8, 2007
Things about the "war on terror"
What annoys me about our present “war”
Politics is an attempt to change an opponents policies utilizing logic, pressure, reward, influence, etc. War is an attempt to overpower the opponent so that you can implement your own policy. The use of politics to reach an end of armed conflict is perfectly legitimate. In that regard war can be seen as a political tool. However, war should always be what it is. It should always be a legitimate attempt to conquer. The political part comes in the form of motivation. “Let’s solve this at the table while you still have power before I solve this on the battlefield and you have no power.” In this present conflict we have, and have had, are highest military powers on sight acting for political purposes. There is much talk, it is in fashion, about “winning the peace.” It is not a new idea. Sun Tsu’s The Art of War addressed it. If I remember correctly by going to war we lost the peace. The idea now is to win the war. This should be a decisive effort. Perhaps I don’t remember so well. Perhaps Sun was wrong. And I realize he didn’t actually write it. What we have now is a combination of aborted politics and aborted military action. All in all, just an abortion. Unfortunately, since the abortion is being conducted by our military, our militants are in the middle of it. We have fought in such a politically motivated way that one of our concerns was minimizing the American body count, but on a day to day basis. We didn’t go in, overwhelm and secure. To do so would have cost too many American lives that month. It’s the same as the financial policies that brought down so many huge corporations. I would have rather had ten times as many dead at the beginning and on third the dead now. And I think those go together. And I think that’s why Sun wrote what his student wrote. And I think he was right when someone else wrote it. And I think the best course of action now is to do the job, do it fully, and do it forcefully so that it gets done. I think the second best course of action is to get out without doing the job. I think that would be mocking our dead, but it wouldn’t be making more of them.
Speaking of mocking our dead. I am also mildly sickened by the media’s, and to some extent the concerned families’, use of the term hero. The word means something to me. I checked in the dictionary, and granted I use an old dictionary, I prefer them, and it says I’m right. Being a hero means you did something extraordinarily courageous. We send out ten patrols on the same route on some certain day. The first nine complete the route without incident. The last goes along without incident until it’s blown up by a roadside IED, killing the entire crew. They are touted in the back home press as heroes. They did the same thing the other nine crews did. That means they did nothing extraordinary and therefore nothing heroic, in as much as their patrol was concerned. The only thing they did that was different from the rest was dieing. That brings us to the common meaning of hero. As commonly used in our press, hero just means dead. In reality, many of those who die in war may be heroes. But dieing didn’t make heroes of them. I’d love to see some news reports that honor those who die by reporting what did make them heroes. By reporting all who die as heroes our press only mocks the heroism of those who truly are heroic, including those heroes who die in roadside bombings and are called heroes only because they died.
The third thing is the use, or overuse, of the term terrorist. I’m not sure how we define it. Clearly, we mean our enemies. My mind, though, continues to return to the earlier discussion of fairness. I guess I’m a little concerned with absolutes. For instance, what is terrorism in absolute terms. From there I can work back toward reality, which rarely exists in absolutes. Are we the greatest terrorists of all time? I refer to the mass killing of civilians perpetrated by the United States against the Japanese. I don’t think anyone could make a decent argument against it in terms of lives. By simple numbers I think we’re ahead having dropped the bombs, on both sides. The Japanese warriors were tenacious. They would have killed many, many more American warriors had the war continued. That is clear. It is also clear that many, many more Japanese warriors would have died had the war continued. In terms of numbers, I think that more Japanese soldiers would have died than Japanese civilians who did die. So a great number of military lives were saved on both sides. We traded those military lives for civilians. Non-combatants. We killed people who weren’t fighting us to save our own soldiers’ lives and the lives of the soldiers who were fighting us. We call the tragedies of 9/11 great acts of terrorism because of the human toll, and because that was just people like you and me who went to work that morning, or were simply traveling, people who were non-combatants. We killed teens and preteens, the elderly who had to be held up when they walked and mothers suckling their infants, and their infants. When I step back to where my terms of absolute are and try to decide what an act of terror is, without the luxury of whether the person(s) committing the act are our enemies, I am ashamed of us. And that statement extends past WWII. The actions of our troops in non-battle conditions and the CIA’s recent “Extraordinary Rendition,” as well as other, long standing policies regarding clandestine ops, or a sniper’s SOP concerning POWs.
Lastly is that there is a war on terror at all. President Bush, Sr., got our troops onto the Saudi peninsula on an explicitly temporary basis. That has changed to semi-permanent at the very least. The presence of our (infidel) troops there is sacrilege for Islamics. This isn’t because they took a vote after we went there and decided they didn’t want us. This was part of their religion before the discovery of the new world. Not since we got there, not since the formation of this nation, not since the colonization of the Americas by (predominately) Christians, but since the time that the terms of their religion were set out. We knew this. Sr. put us there knowing the sentiments it would cause, and Presidents and Congresses on both sides of the aisle have kept us there knowing it. Our politicians knowingly went looking for a fight and got it. Our presence on their holy ground is the origin of the terror we now fight. Our continued presence is it’s nourishment. Withdrawing our troops from the Saudi peninsula would do more, and be cheaper, than all previous and current efforts combined toward eliminating the scourge of terrorism.
Politics is an attempt to change an opponents policies utilizing logic, pressure, reward, influence, etc. War is an attempt to overpower the opponent so that you can implement your own policy. The use of politics to reach an end of armed conflict is perfectly legitimate. In that regard war can be seen as a political tool. However, war should always be what it is. It should always be a legitimate attempt to conquer. The political part comes in the form of motivation. “Let’s solve this at the table while you still have power before I solve this on the battlefield and you have no power.” In this present conflict we have, and have had, are highest military powers on sight acting for political purposes. There is much talk, it is in fashion, about “winning the peace.” It is not a new idea. Sun Tsu’s The Art of War addressed it. If I remember correctly by going to war we lost the peace. The idea now is to win the war. This should be a decisive effort. Perhaps I don’t remember so well. Perhaps Sun was wrong. And I realize he didn’t actually write it. What we have now is a combination of aborted politics and aborted military action. All in all, just an abortion. Unfortunately, since the abortion is being conducted by our military, our militants are in the middle of it. We have fought in such a politically motivated way that one of our concerns was minimizing the American body count, but on a day to day basis. We didn’t go in, overwhelm and secure. To do so would have cost too many American lives that month. It’s the same as the financial policies that brought down so many huge corporations. I would have rather had ten times as many dead at the beginning and on third the dead now. And I think those go together. And I think that’s why Sun wrote what his student wrote. And I think he was right when someone else wrote it. And I think the best course of action now is to do the job, do it fully, and do it forcefully so that it gets done. I think the second best course of action is to get out without doing the job. I think that would be mocking our dead, but it wouldn’t be making more of them.
Speaking of mocking our dead. I am also mildly sickened by the media’s, and to some extent the concerned families’, use of the term hero. The word means something to me. I checked in the dictionary, and granted I use an old dictionary, I prefer them, and it says I’m right. Being a hero means you did something extraordinarily courageous. We send out ten patrols on the same route on some certain day. The first nine complete the route without incident. The last goes along without incident until it’s blown up by a roadside IED, killing the entire crew. They are touted in the back home press as heroes. They did the same thing the other nine crews did. That means they did nothing extraordinary and therefore nothing heroic, in as much as their patrol was concerned. The only thing they did that was different from the rest was dieing. That brings us to the common meaning of hero. As commonly used in our press, hero just means dead. In reality, many of those who die in war may be heroes. But dieing didn’t make heroes of them. I’d love to see some news reports that honor those who die by reporting what did make them heroes. By reporting all who die as heroes our press only mocks the heroism of those who truly are heroic, including those heroes who die in roadside bombings and are called heroes only because they died.
The third thing is the use, or overuse, of the term terrorist. I’m not sure how we define it. Clearly, we mean our enemies. My mind, though, continues to return to the earlier discussion of fairness. I guess I’m a little concerned with absolutes. For instance, what is terrorism in absolute terms. From there I can work back toward reality, which rarely exists in absolutes. Are we the greatest terrorists of all time? I refer to the mass killing of civilians perpetrated by the United States against the Japanese. I don’t think anyone could make a decent argument against it in terms of lives. By simple numbers I think we’re ahead having dropped the bombs, on both sides. The Japanese warriors were tenacious. They would have killed many, many more American warriors had the war continued. That is clear. It is also clear that many, many more Japanese warriors would have died had the war continued. In terms of numbers, I think that more Japanese soldiers would have died than Japanese civilians who did die. So a great number of military lives were saved on both sides. We traded those military lives for civilians. Non-combatants. We killed people who weren’t fighting us to save our own soldiers’ lives and the lives of the soldiers who were fighting us. We call the tragedies of 9/11 great acts of terrorism because of the human toll, and because that was just people like you and me who went to work that morning, or were simply traveling, people who were non-combatants. We killed teens and preteens, the elderly who had to be held up when they walked and mothers suckling their infants, and their infants. When I step back to where my terms of absolute are and try to decide what an act of terror is, without the luxury of whether the person(s) committing the act are our enemies, I am ashamed of us. And that statement extends past WWII. The actions of our troops in non-battle conditions and the CIA’s recent “Extraordinary Rendition,” as well as other, long standing policies regarding clandestine ops, or a sniper’s SOP concerning POWs.
Lastly is that there is a war on terror at all. President Bush, Sr., got our troops onto the Saudi peninsula on an explicitly temporary basis. That has changed to semi-permanent at the very least. The presence of our (infidel) troops there is sacrilege for Islamics. This isn’t because they took a vote after we went there and decided they didn’t want us. This was part of their religion before the discovery of the new world. Not since we got there, not since the formation of this nation, not since the colonization of the Americas by (predominately) Christians, but since the time that the terms of their religion were set out. We knew this. Sr. put us there knowing the sentiments it would cause, and Presidents and Congresses on both sides of the aisle have kept us there knowing it. Our politicians knowingly went looking for a fight and got it. Our presence on their holy ground is the origin of the terror we now fight. Our continued presence is it’s nourishment. Withdrawing our troops from the Saudi peninsula would do more, and be cheaper, than all previous and current efforts combined toward eliminating the scourge of terrorism.
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