Watching the posts to a list that serves Long Beach California, and a list that serves Minneapolis, Minnesota, I'm seeing the same thoughts, and to a great extent the same words attempting to shut off local discussion of the Iraq issue. As far as I can see, the reasoning behind the idea that Iraq should not be discussed in local lists amounts to Ring Lardner's famous line "Shut up," he explained, that I used in the Subject Heading.
The "shut up" request appearing so widely, and the similarity of the phrasing and "reasoning" is too much to believe as a "spontaneous" outburst of "intelligent" opinion. This pattern strongly suggests to me that there is a nationally orchestrated, probably heavily supported campaign to keep the public from openly discussing this war-making project. It is well-known that violence breeds violence. Common sense and observation of our surroundings tells us that those who live by violence bring on themselves, and on those who can be forced to play their game an inexorably deteriorating environment. The most glaring example in the world today of the social and psycho pathology of violence is the Middle East. I personally believe [but you will of course not believe] that there is a virus or other infectious agent endemic in that area that affects people the way rabies affects dogs, causing them to snap, growl and bite crazily at everything, including themselves. Other possible analogues are things like Creutzfeld-Jacob, or, even more appropriately, the horrible self-mutilation [genetic] disease, Lesch-Nyhan. However, common sense and recently, research, shows that such pathologies can spread behaviorally like an infection. Conversely, the benefits of cooperation are so great [Bergstrom and his cites], that cooperative activities can out perform and drive out competitive ones [e.g., farmers versus hunters or bandits - Usher cite]. There are many historical examples [analysis of 40 international conflicts by Leng; references there on the elicitation of cooperative behavior]. For brevity, taking only the destructive ones: The rapacity of the conquest of a large portion of the Russian Steppe by Genghis Khan resulted, over the period from about 900 to 1200 in the depopulation of the area, and the total destruction of this formerly productive and prosperous farming culture. Those who left went largely to Poland, and are believed by some authorities to be the origin of the Ashkenazic Jews. The Steppe area has not recovered, 800 years later [Koestler]. The depredations of the Roman Empire, in my opinion, brought on the Dark Ages, from which Western Civilization has only recently recovered [Rosenberg & Birdzell]. In the Pacific, the Conquistadors found it necessary to kill all the males on a number of islands in order to pacify the native populations. In our own policy in Latin America, it has apparently been necessary to kill much of the population of El Salvador to pacify it, just as it was deemed to be necessary and proper to destroy villages in Vietnam in order to save them. If you were Iraq or another Muslim State, what would you think might be waiting in the wings for you? The same people who orchestrated our policy in Vietnam, and in Central and South America are now in full charge in Washington DC. Ariel Sharon and other powerful Israelis have boasted publicly that they control the U.S. The secret police CIA/FBI/NSA and the media obviously play an important role in this control. Government by blackmail reached a fairly high point with J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, but went into rocket propelled booster flight with the passage of the National Security Act during the Truman Presidency. We have reached the point where General Richard Secord can be said to have threatened "famously": "If a Democrat doesn't have a problem we can control him with, we will make one for him." [Martin]. Think of the long line of individuals, [not all Democrats] at the height of their power, who suddenly decided they needed to spend more quality time with their families. Think of the members of local government who suddenly turn into Zombies, like all the others, shortly after they are sworn in. Do you think that local police departments are going to ignore a tool that has been so effective at all other levels of government? The collection and sharing of dossiers by a Bay Area police department was exposed in a noted law suit. Going from the obvious to the Psychology Labs, it has been shown that a single exploitive individual, seeded into a group of cooperators will force a non-cooperative behavior pattern on those who are inclined to cooperate. This is particularly destructive if the cooperators are denied the exit option, and have to continue to interact with exploitive persons [Gilovich; Macy and refs with these]. The exploitive individual, in contrast to the naturally cooperative persons, finds that his expectations are self-fulfilling: He forces a non-cooperative behavior pattern on those who are forced to play his game, or sees his environment turn into one of ALL exploitative players, if cooperators are permitted to identify and refuse to play with exploiters. He thus comes to believe from his experience that people are no damn good, since that comes to be an apt description of those who continue to play with him. Cooperative groups, playing a market economy type of game tremendously outperform groups that are seeded with exploitive persons. If you think this is unreal, think for a moment about teams. How successful would a coach be if he sent 11 players out on to the field with directions that each player would be rewarded according to how many times the player, personally, carried the ball across the goal line. The players would spend all their time slugging each other, trying to get hold of the ball. Such a group would have no chance at all against an opposite eleven who played according to rules as a trained, disciplined team. The same idea applies to a so-called "market" economy. If one existed anywhere, about the best that could be said for it is that if you don't know where you are going, any path will get you there[Stiglitz 2002]. The lesson for local government is to do whatever it takes to avoid internal "arms races." Emphasize what all participants have in common. Don't let Machiavellians succeed in Divide and Rule, and it's modern auxilliary Strengthen the Weak and Weaken the Strong so they will more perfectly cancel each other out when pitted against each other. Don't fall into the almost universal trap of having the public sector get into an adversarial relationship with the public itself [Glaeser & Gyourko - study of 300 U. S. cities]. In California especially, there are economic inefficiencies that are so large that all participants in the local economy can be made wealthier, without creating any losers. Any competition should be with other jurisdictions, just as sports teams cooperate within the team, but compete with other teams. At the next layer, the teams cooperate with each other to make a better league. By analogy, dities would cooperate to strengthen their collective hand versus state and federal government. It is widely accepted that the more centralized government, the more thoroughly it is corrupted - it is a more tempting, lucrative target [difficult as that is to believe, coming from Long Beach!]. If you are interested in citations of sources on these topics, see my book Prosperity and Quality of Life Notes, vol. 1. Most of the sources for these particular comments are listed under Gilovich, Macy, Martin, Glaeser & Gyourko, and Koestler. The book is available for free download via my website. If you haven't recently re-evaluated what you believe about myth and reality in economics [particularly with regard to the mythical market economy, and why so many people believe in it], a good place to look is Stiglitz' Nobel lecture in the latest issue of the American Journal of Economics. JIM GRAHAM wrote: > Jordan Kushner would have the Minneapolis City Council take over the Iraq > problem as a Minneapolis issue. (I am NOT talking about this forum when I > say Minneapolis Issue, so David doesn't get his nose out of joint). -- William Colbert (AP&SR�), [EMAIL PROTECTED] website http://www.colbert2422.com _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A Civil City Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
