Comments on: It’s been a long, terrible week.

By: Sully

Sully — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 18:42:12 +0000

Barbara,
It’s very cheap used on Amazon. Or, if you’re comfortable sending your address to sullyaugustine@aol.com I’ll send you my copy. I’m engaged in a very long term project to send my books to good homes.

By: Barbara

Barbara — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 18:20:42 +0000

@Sully - I've always wanted to read that book- thanks for reminding me!

By: Sully

Sully — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 18:10:36 +0000

Barbara – “The most logical people on earth are in insane asylums”

Excellent book – The Professor and the Madman – about one of the most prolific contributors to the OED.

A quote from my Philadelphia junkman uncle to my dad, me about seven in the back seat of the car, as we passed the most impressively medical looking building of the Norristown State Hospital – “That’s the building where they give them the black bottle.”

By: Barbara

Barbara — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 17:30:09 +0000

And that's Beverley. L-E-Y. And don't you forget it, buster.

By: Barbara

Barbara — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 17:29:14 +0000

@CK MacLeod – Yes, CK: your answer is correct to the question you posed which was an appropriate response to the original question. The linkage between power and “craziness” (not the clinical variety, really) is vital. Let’s face it: a part of maintaining control is dealing with threats to your power. That in itself tends to feed paranoia. It’s an old story.

Dad ‘n’ Mum. When reading Chesterton, I discovered that he had a much longer and more entertaining way of expressing the same thought, but I’ll abbreviate: The most logical people on earth are in insane asylums. Isn’t that beautifully anachronistic? Oh, for the days when the mentally ill were confined.

By: CK MacLeod

CK MacLeod — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 17:11:39 +0000

And who are Roger & Beverly?

By: CK MacLeod

CK MacLeod — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 17:10:23 +0000

@Barbara - The question would be "Can a regime not be crazy?" I would say "no." It's a corollary to "absolute power corrupts absolutely": The more powerful an individual or group, the more fully realized their imperfections. The utopian statists are the worst, of course, because they are committed to monopolies of power. When they inevitably fail to deliver on their promises, their ideologies provide them with no alternative but to try even harder.

By: Barbara

Barbara — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 16:18:37 +0000

Excuse me! My hands been up for a while! Hellloooo….!!!

Is all this about whether or not a state or a regime can be “crazy”, as in clinically crazy? Because that’s what I keep reading in George’s comments: Mao doing this was crazy, the Khmer Rouge doing that was crazy, etc.

I’m learning a lot of interesting facts about history along the way, but it’s not really addressing the question, which I think began as “The Leftists are crazier today than they used to be.”

I propose that this is not really measurable unless you define a whole bunch of terms which this thread has failed to do. I also propose that the Iranian regime can’t be defined as “Leftist.” I also propose that you can’t define a state as “crazy” clinically. I also propose that just because an action is ignorant and destructive doesn’t mean it’s crazy. I also propose that just because an action looks ignorant and destructive to us, doesn’t mean it isn’t serving some useful purpose to the people making the decisions, which would make it pretty logical. Killing the pets of Jews served a purpose, and frankly had huge indoctrination/ coercion value. I mean, hell, you’re rounding up the owners and tossing them into camps: why are you going to treat their dogs any better? And can you imagine being horrified at the fate of the pooch in those circumstances? “Bye, Bubbe! Wait…Not Fluffy too!! Oh, the horror!”

Come on, guys. Time to get your own thread. Somebody put up a post, “Can a Regime be Crazy?” and go to town.

Time for Roger & Beverley’s 2nd Law: Anything taken to its logical extreme is ridiculous.

By: Sully

Sully — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:17:51 +0000

I’m surprised LeMay granted the possibility of that one Russian escaping his plans. As I recall McNamara discovered that the Moscow area was targetted with 60 or so weapons in the SIOP, at least a few of them surely multi-megaton devices, for that was at the end of the era when real men still delivered real bombs, not these little pipsqueak 200KT things they put by the handful on top of missiles.

Talk about assured destruction.

By: CK MacLeod

CK MacLeod — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:02:21 +0000

@George Jochnowitz – George, 3rd Worldists see Israel as a US aircraft carrier, and they see “colonialism” as a cultural and economic reality, not as an attempt to install little Plymouth Rocks and Roanokes in their territory. The “will leave nothing standing” is the Iranian version of deterrence. It does not occur in his statement as a promise to take place “on that day.”

Sully’s description gets closer, in my view, to the real danger, or one aspect of the real danger. As he also points out, we ourselves adopted a number of policies that seem crazy – and yet are still implicitly in force. For every scare quote patched together by ignorance and paranoia into something it isn’t, Curtis LeMay, as head of SAC and with the weapons to do it, had several explicit promises to wipe out both sides for the sake of “victory.” He once said if there were 2 Americans and 1 Russian left afterward, then we would have won.