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...
I agree that it was a blunder, but unfortunately it was not a political one.
ReplyDeleteI don't like the implications of the statement "There's no nice way to wage a counterinsurgency."
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2011/03/libya-nadir-achieved.html
Afghanistan seems to be a very important geostrategic point. I fear there are other reasons the US is there for so long.
ReplyDelete- It is a possible transit country for pipe lines
- It is rich in various natural recourses
- It really confuses me that since US occupation drug production has increased big time there. How is that possible? Really fishy...
- They installed a corrupt government
- And it is next to Iran
I think humanitarian reasons are not really an issue, so I am not sure if you can call it a "mistake"...