I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
My own view is that our best defense against stirring up terrorists and inviting attacks at home would be to bring a good portion of our troops home, particularly from the ME.
ReplyDeleteI share your concern about the militarization (and centralization)of "homeland" security, but note that the units discussed here are not simly troops with guns and bullets, but all would be "trained to respond to a domestic chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or high-yield explosive attack, or CBRNE event".