"Among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages."
— Samuel Johnson: Idler #30 (November 11, 1758)
One of the finer points of Johnson's writings is that they are based on shrewd observations of human behavior, behavior which shifts little over time. Thus, much of what he wrote nearly 250 years ago still has the ring of truth.
In the spring of 2003, much of America believed (or wanted to believe) that invading Iraq was a good thing; credulity supported beliefs that there were weapons of mass destruction to be found there, little knowing that these beliefs were propped up by unreliable sources like the CIA's "Curveball" and echoed by Iraqi exiles longing for more power. Many did not believe, of course: I, for one, had seen plenty of evidence of information twisting by the Bush administration prior to the war on much smaller issues, and felt that our best source of information was UNSCOM inspectors, who really did need more time.
As the war progressed, threats to perceptions of our effort's beneficence — like the prisoner abuses in Abu Ghraib — were brushed off by the military as isolated events, when internal examinations would have revealed that there was a long chain of command that went up to Rumsfeld and Bush and the orders they signed. (Even today, witnesses to abuses in Iraq feel as if the investigators are trying to direct the investigations away from the brass and on to the troops.)
And yesterday, while it wasn't in the theater of war, former FEMA head Michael Brown testified before Congress that practically nothing which went wrong in the Katrina relief efforts was his doing. Another effort to play with the truth (see here and here).
Yes, people will always have vested interests in the truth. And many times people will play with the truth to either protect themselves, their interests, or perhaps even claim new advantages where none existed beforehand.
An alert people, however, have to recognize this, and be more skeptical of those who have special access to the truth.
Permanent Link, September 28, 2005:
"We don't like to think of ourselves as a militant nation, but we are, in fact, an incredibly militant and militaristic nation.
It's not a view of ourselves that we wanna carry around but the fact is, we are. If the President and the military-industrial complex, the defense establishment, if they all have decided that suddenly there's a problem somewhere and we need to drop some bombs or even put land forces somewhere in some country, this is a ritual that we have been seeing for decades.
We've toppled governments. We've done coup detats. We've used intelligence services for covert and done horrible things around the world. And we have put up with the most heinous human rights abusing countries. We have propped them up. We've even trained them how to commit human rights abuses.
Today's demon was yesterday's friend all in the name of either the Cold War, or for commercial reasons.
It's basically economic colonialism. (Neocolonialism)
No one uses the colonialism word, but instead of just taking over the countries, we have a better way. We just go in and have free markets. Whether we're trying to sell our products to their citizens or we're trying to mine their resources, we need to be in that country for some reason. And, therefore, we're gonna talk about free markets, free trade. But what's really going on is we want our companies to get rich in your country.
We have been lied to in every military escapade, frankly, over the last 50 or 60 years without exception.
There's no better example, probably, than Vietnam, where you had the President of the United States and the top generals in the Pentagon, out-and-out lying about the Gulf of Tonkin incident that got us into the war, about the casualties, about how the war was going. Anyone who has ever looked closely at the Vietnam War can see that the public and the media were manipulated substantially."
― Why We Fight (2005), Charles Lewis is an investigative journalist based in Washington D.C. Founder, and ex-executive director, Center for Public Integrity—non-profit, non-partisan "watch-dog" organisation established in 1989—investigating and reporting their research about U.S. public policies.
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I don't think you can be somebody and not be corrupt.
I was always told I should want to 'be somebody', 'make a name for myself'.
I'd think, 'I AM somebody, and my own name will do'.
That way, I wasn't enticed into lies, or more lies.
I doubt war is often understood, the actual why of it.
I read PM Modi had ELEVEN negotiations with the farmers
I find that amazing, and tolerant.
I'm not sure though that negotiating solves everything all the time.
And I'm not sure overall what war accomplishes. Individuals, families, companies, all corrupt, yes, but not the big picture.
Has there ever been a good war?
BTW, I never saw anything said about hell, as in after death.
It's Hades, the unseen realm.
2FollowHim
Level 8
Mar 6, 2022
0
"Has there ever been a good war?"
Yes. After all without war you should not know what peace was. In the world of limited resources and competition to horde as much as possible for one self, conflict of interest is part of human societies. Politics exists as a necessary means of limiting unconstrained violence. War is continuation of politics by other means.
However if your cause is just and you are defending yourself, sometimes war is the only option left. Because everyone respect violence. As for peace. Do not kid yourself. If you are not capable of great violence and the other side does not respect, that, you are not peaceful, you are harmless. And than you are conquered.
To be peaceful is to make a choice form a power position. Everyone knows this except liberals. They seem to still prefer their la.la land.
Part of the reason you and I exist and are here to disagree, is because someone fought some wars at some point.
“A wise prince then...should never be idle in times of peace but should industriously lay up stores of which to avail himself in times of adversity so that when Fortune abandons him he may be prepared to resist her blows.” ― Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
The commonwealth of Venice in their armory have this inscription:
“Happy is that city which in time of peace thinks of war.”
"No country without an atom bomb could properly consider itself independent."
— Charles de Gaulle
"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy."
― John Adams
Freedom is never given; it is won. – A. Philip Randolph
"Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them." - Assata Shakur
.......................................................
From the movie "The Punisher (2004)" as told by the Frank Castle (Character):
"I leave this as a Declaration of Intent, so no one will be confused.
"Si vis pacem, para bellum." It's Latin. Boot Camp Sergeant made us recite it like a prayer."
"Si vis pacem, para bellum - If you want peace, prepare for war." by Carl von Clausewitz.
War cannot be avoided. You can only postpone it to the advantage of your enemy. Hence often, offense becomes the best defense.
"I read PM Modi had ELEVEN negotiations with the farmers
I find that amazing, and tolerant."
Probably because he tried to sell them out to big corporations and starve them to death, so almost 200 mil of them campaigned for a year to force Modi to negotiate. Yeah, real tolerant.
@dd54 “[T]he important thing is that you should not argue with them. Communism has become an intensely dogmatic and almost mystical religion, and whatever you say, they have ways of twisting into shapes which put you in some lower category of mankind.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald
Regarding atheism, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn declared "Men have forgotten God":
"Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened." Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened."
There is nothing more dangerous than atheist playing god. I am an atheists, but I do not consider myself a God, while communists do.
“Marxism was a simple substitute for Christianity. Replace God with Marx, Satan with the bourgeoisie, Heaven with a classless society, the Church with the Party,” ― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
"A belief in heaven is an assertion of the immortality of the soul, and the Moral Order of the universe. Without this faith, we'll never see heaven on earth. We're seeing hell instead." - Mike Stone, Restoring Belief in Heaven
That being said. As the Christian Missionaries have discovered, there are nations that leave in peace and are based on moral code, but have never heard of Jesus Christ or Christianity. In other words, I do think that an individual can be non religious and find morality on his own, but for a society to survive it needs an anchor, some kind of universal truth that does not change and shared sense of morality, and for that it needs organized religion.
Modern ideologies, or modern religions, like liberalism, communism etc have replaced God with themselves, and there is nothing more dangerous than atheists playing god. They may be godless, but they are far from irreligious.
God provides the highest value, above mere mortals and source of moral truth. Hence it provides stability for the society and limits to abuse of power.
It does not have to be Christianity, it can be other religious as we have seen, but it is true that Christianity has proven itself over 2000 years to be phenomenally successful and it is the world most popular religious for a reason.
@dd54 I don't think calamity comes from man rejecting God per se, but by trying to replace the function that concept of god performs in a society. The concept of God in a society provides an anchor to the society and in the case of Christian God it also provides a shared source of morality, critical for society to remains cooperative and not tear itself apart.
I am not a believer in God as a real all powerful being, but I believe the concept of God as created by man is an important one. I am an atheist, but I'm not anti-theist, because I understand the value of deity in human society and indeed in the life of individuals. But just because I'm not anti-theist, it does not mean I consider all religious to be equally good. Certainly, I prefer Christianity to Communism. Both are religions.
As for creation, usually the discussion leads to nowhere productive when people like you and me meet. If you believe we come from creation by a God, that's fine with me. I don't share your belief, but I don't feel threaten by it either.
I would not call communist lost souls, they may seem that way to a Christian, but just like Christians have firm bealif in their religion, so do Communists. They are not lost , they know where they are going, they just usually don't understand what it means to get there.
@dd54 "My communication is not meant to threaten you, but to share truth. I only wish you well, my friend, no matter how much we may disagree."
Thanks. Same to you as well. 
I would not dismiss communists or rather communist religious so easily, just as I don't dismiss Christianity easily, I try to understand better both of them. Even if I myself do not follow them.
" That said, I always find it interesting that intelligent people can't believe in God, but neither can they deny Him. "
I don't think that is accurate. First, I think that intelligence has no relation to belief in God or lack thereof. It is a matter of what function does believe perform in the life of an individual or society.
Self-esteem for example also has virtually no relation to intelligence. Because self-esteem is a particular way of experiencing oneself, or doing self estimation. Intellect is there to the extent a person needs to articulate it.
As for denying HIM, by him, I imagine you mean Christian God in particular. An individual can surly deny or accept the belief in such a God.
If you mean proof, a more realistic premise, I think that part is easy. You don't need to prove or disprove the existence of an all powerful deity, you simply need to prove that it created by men, and that part is not hard. After all, if that part was not true, then communist could not exist, and neither could endless Gods trough human history. And yet they exist, they exist because they are what people created for themselves to fulfill the needs for them.
I am not saying that to mock it, or ridicule it. On the contrary, I think it is a remarkable adaptation of us Humans, and it has served us more or less positively. Certainly Christianity as a religious has been more constructive than destructive, otherwise it could not survive for 2000 years.
In terms of how did we came to be, Argument that creator is the one that created the universe and humans in it, is an acceptable myth because it is so simple and performs the function well. As logical argument it is more of a problem, simply because it is circular logic. If creator created the universe. Who than created the creator? You end up where you started.
If that is the basis of a religious bealif, than it is not a problem. If it is a logical argument that it fails because it is circular logic.
Anyway, I'm talking to much in small hours of the day, soon I'll be counting Zzzz's in the horizontal position.
@Krunoslav HBy tolerant, I contrast Trudeau with the Freedom Convoy who only asked that unworkable mandates be removed.
That kind of tolerant when he, not the farmers had the power.
Having read the issues, the pressures, Modi needed to keep India viable, working at all.
The world has changed, and thousands of tiny farms don't work.
I read that although 58% were involved in farming, it only gave 18% return.
This will not work, obviously.
So, relatively, I found him tolerant.
How many people in India? All at risk?
Unless, of course, there is and was no risk, only greed.
If so, I would be surprised others did not point this out.
@Krunoslav What the goal of z Christian is, is to totally convert, and the analogy to the process of eating is accurate.
We eat food. It goes to the stomach, which is hot, which prepares for separation.
The goal is separating what is useful from dross which we eliminate,
solid and liquid.
Spiritually, we are entwined with sin, or destructive ways, leanings,
flaws that if you've gardener, you know the nature of weeds, how they will try to wrap around the roots of the good plant.
So, God gave us the real second chance.
Well, I appreciate those Z's, and will pause here.
@2FollowHim Here is some good info on the India and Farmers and Great Reset.
IWWH EP 25 InflectionsReflections of India Protests- Farmers- Governance by Fictitious Capital
Jan 11, 2022
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