I often feel like I can see the future, not in the clear sense, but in a general way. For those of you who are skeptical, turn on your televisions, or type "the future" into your search bar and click on images and you'll see the future. Global warming, supernova, war, age and death, suffering. Somewhere in there, you might find happiness. Only when you see happiness are you seeing something which is not inevitable. Other times, it seems like what I thought I saw won't happen at all. At those times, the things that I write begin to lose their meaning, even to me. I assume it lost its meaning to you long ago, that all the views are merely because Non-Linear time theory is so clever that you read it despite the certainty you have that I must have stolen it from someone else (Parminides?) or perhaps the people who read it are random access, the person who typed "predestination" or "quantum mechanics" today and accidentally clicked their mouse below the Wikipedia entry; and who quickly clicked out lest they accidentally get some original thought.
I did, for the longest time, see a future, but it has disappeared this morning. Did it change? Am I wrong about predestination, the lack of dice in the universe, are we some slot machine like the multi-dimensional theorists would have me believe? Or am I just tired, my eyes sore from the chlorine, the struggle to remain viable for a little longer.
I'd stop reading now, but I did this blog the other day and whether it should be finished or not, I'm going to publish it this morning.
Intellectually, there are two extremes, broadly speaking to the response to the inevitable terrorism. My favorite is the pre-emptive strike although that has more ramifications than can easily be set out (although I will attempt to do so). The other is to absorb the punch (if possible) and then act (retaliate or absorb additional abuse). The Chinese are hiding from the intrigue, apparently the can, selling their products to both sides (indirectly in the case of the terrorists and not weapons necessarily, but the minutia of war, cell phones, back packs, etc). All that plundered wealth of the terrorists has to go somewhere and the USA purchases from China are far too thoroughly covered elsewhere to appear here.
The preemptive strike can be anything from politically diffusing the situation (good luck with that one) to all out war. The USA is in the middle, killing using technology, the cyborg killers. The "clean war" path, as long as our hands are not dirty, it seems to be relatively acceptable to the majority. In either case you need to come up with a set of concrete goals and to do this you should apply the three forms of intelligence. Otherwise, you are killing merely because you are picking one side to be the winner. In this case, we have picked one side to be the winner. The ones who are not cutting other people's heads off (at least not on facebook).
One problem is that we don't have any experience in applying three types of intelligence to political acts. As shown by the B-C war discussed previously, sometimes there is little more than emotion applied to problem with no overt intelligence at all which brings us to this point. We do have experience to some extent with an analysis of historical events but we never break them into three elements (short, medium and long term results) for purposes of study and this is critical.
Another problem is coming up with solutions that make sense. For this purpose we need to decide what our goals are, what our beliefs are. For this we need to decide what the west is. While we have the whole J-C religious thing, the west is too tolerant for our goals to be based on that.
The traditional East-West Religious war was relatively simple, each trying to destroy the other, the weaker barely holding out and The Turkey-Greek-Middle East block being at the striking point of the conflict, the center moving eastward or westward as if by some moral tide, sometimes because of religion and sometime because that location seems barren enough that neither side can plant a set of beliefs that firmly takes root; changing hands and becoming, of necessity by natural selection, more and more warlike and even intractable.
In fact, the only place where there was ever any agreement was "the jewish problem", a general intent to wipe out the Jews, which turned out to be a relatively poor idea historically; and for whatever reasons has not occurred, at least not yet. It should be noted that the Jews as a race historically seem to originate largely from the working class of the ancient Egyptian empire, probably a collection of the workers from Egypt, Greece and other places within hailing distance of that ancient empire drawn by the availability of food and work and run off when the work ran out or escaping from slavery depending on which version of history you chose (they actually overlap if you read them carefully) and therefore largely arabic in origin. Imagine that, arabic peoples killing one another! The kidnapping of jews, particularly women, during the crusades, led to the westernization of the jewish people. Origins aside, for whatever reason everyone seemed to agree in the past that there was some problem with them which is hard to fully appreciate today other than their poor decisions relative to real estate. I think it was a Jewish person who first said, "location, location, location" not because of anything other than the repetitive nature lends itself to some sort of cultural exchange where one person is trying to convince the other. "Its location that makes the middle east such a peaceful place to settle, Mort, location, location, location." And Israel, indeed the entire middle east has been peaceful in the past. It seems like only when people from outside come into the middle east does it erupt, like an ant bed, quiet until you put a stick in, and the violent and deadly. But I take the rare digression.
This is about how the west should reply to the inevitable terrorist attacks, wherever they originate.
The new West is a tolerant agnosticism (TA) so we need to know what set of goals or choices are consistent with a TA philosophy.
One idea relative to this is that we wipe out everyone who is not tolerant, the unstated goal of the current "clean war". While not particularly forgiving it starts out somewhat logical. On the other hand this is the ultimate hypocrisy. Tolerance has its limits. How about the right of the radicals of all religions to force their beliefs, on pain of death, on their neighbors? That is, after all, what the current battle is about. I've heard more noble explanations, to fight the existing power structure (partially true, if you accept the idea that one tyrant is better than another), to bring power and wealth to the leaders of the current war (always true, alas), but on paper, anyway, this is another religious war where the winner kills everyone who disagrees or makes their lives so miserable that they leave if they have anywhere to go (been there done that).
Herein lies the true issue, the one where you see the current struggle. It is not about the ability of the west to wipe out one group or the other in the middle east (or at least cripple them so badly that they can be ignored for a while) instead it is about deciding who we are, the long term "who" not the current "who". This is why you see all the flag waving, all the judeo-christian harping, even all the "peaceful muslimism". Different groups are sticking their toes in the water, "aren't we this? aren't we that?"
You might think I'm going to provide an answer, but perhaps not today. We are, by virtue of our current philosophy, Tolerant Agnostics, but we can move away from that at an instant. It only takes a few planes loaded with terrorist bent on destroying a concrete symbol of our success to do that, to turn us into flag waving avenging angels. But if we figure out what we are, then perhaps the next time we can apply some intelligent design to our response, rather than just kicking the ant bed and then sitting in it and waiting to see if the ants bite or not.
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