In his recent critique of the coalition intervention in Libya, Bruce Thorton raises a number of common misconceptions which he summarizes "... And our efforts to liberate oppressed Muslims will buy us their affection and support, further eroding the appeal of jihadism and making us more secure from terror."
No, we do not intervene to save others from genocide in order to buy their affections. We intervene because we could not be who we aspire to be unless we did.
This does not mean that others will behave as we do. But, as history does reveal, they in their turn aspire to be like us.
We play a different game than the zero-sum game of many of our contemporaries. From the American ideal, nations were born and are being born. If truth be told, the virus of democracy spreading in the Arab lands was first released by the Americans as a Weapon of Mass Construction in Baghdad.
Savor your victory America.
Soldiers without Honor
Duty, Honor, Country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn. -- MacArthur at West Point
... The motto of the United States Military Academy and the watchwords of the United States Army. We understand what duty and country mean, but what is honor? Is honor any different than pride? When honorable behavior is scarce in our civilian pursuits, why should the military adhere to a different code?
Today, the US Armed Forces are posed with the
question of whether or not to allow homosexuals and bisexuals to display their sexuality openly. The arguments for this innovation are along the lines that sexuality is an intrinsic property of the person, not a choice, and that service in the armed forces is a right, not a privilege.
MacArthur continues:
Let civilian voices argue the merits or demerits of our processes of government; whether our strength is being sapped by deficit financing, indulged in too long, by federal paternalism grown too mighty, by power groups grown too arrogant, by politics grown too corrupt, by crime grown too rampant, by morals grown too low, by taxes grown too high, by extremists grown too violent; whether our personal liberties are as thorough and complete as they should be. These great national problems are not for your professional participation or military solution. Your guidepost stands out like a ten-fold beacon in the night: Duty, Honor, Country.
As true today as in 1962. There is something eternal about the nature of war and of truth. Within the life and death struggle, there is a primal human invariant that either bends towards the bad or for the good. However, our civilian pursuits are much more vicarious. As technology marches along and urbanization increasingly becomes a global phenomenon, we are prone to think that man has changed as well regardless of the repeated lessons of recent conflicts.
MacArthur did not need to define the motto to the cadets. He knew that they each had a good understanding of its meaning. Duty is the obligation to the country that the soldier accepts for himself, honor is his integrity to keep that commitment, and country is the land, the people, and the ideals that are safeguarded and given life by the sacrifice of the soldier. But today, honor is considered by many to be a relic of the past--easily confused with baser things. In large, our society does not understand the meaning of the word.
Perhaps, before we take up the enigma of honor in earnest, it would be wise to revisit the questions of how women and minorities have been integrated into the US Armed Forces. A survey of the Army would find that minorities are
disproportionately represented in the combat service support units as opposed to the combat arms.
Are the
promotion guidelines blind to race and gender?
Why? What is wrong with our model of imposed egalitarianism? Is there something that we forgot?
If we cannot answer these questions satisfactory, then are we putting the conclusion ahead of the premise in regard to the question of sexuality?
Is human nature an anachronism? Has our ignorance of the meaning of honor obscured its importance? Most importantly, can our democracy rely on soldiers without honor?
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UPDATE: 18 Dec
Letter of Resignation to the Branch Chief of ARPERCEN (Military Intelligence)
Please process my resignation.
The reason why I served was out of a sense of duty to a country that is quite exceptional among countries. Indeed, that is still true. However, there must also be a strong component of honor in the service. The strength of that bond has been weakened by the recent Congressional decision to change the nature of the service.
We are a country that has decided that there is no pressing need at this time for that dimension of service that brings the ordinary into the heroic and through which we have won our greatest victories as history has shown. Alternatively, poor character and lack of integrity has lead to the recent phenomenal security lapses, the slaughter of our troops at Ft. Hood by a known traitor, and battlefield losses that we have been too remiss to attribute honestly. I have seen the results myself in Iraq of putting politics above mission. It has always been for the worse.
At times in the course of events it is necessary for the leader to take a moral stand and by his actions demonstrate a willingness to sacrifice for that which he asks his subordinates to follow. We lead by moral persuasion--not by dictate. No punishment will force a unit to hold a line against withering fire--only the stronger bonds that are forged by example. This environment in which we can build those bonds is by this recent action being swept away. I doubt strongly that a leader can stand with much credibility as he simultaneously guards the myriad of moral inconsistencies within his command that always follow when we replace the rule of insisting on conduct for the good of the whole with special privileges and prerogatives based on race, gender, and now sexual proclivity. He might administer, but he cannot lead. Our mission demands leadership as we have seen time and again in the recent wars.
We call the faithful service of duty, honor. Duty is not defined by the whim of the superior as we ourselves reminded the defeated Nazis. Duty serves a higher cause as it must for our country to be safeguarded against depravities such as My Lai and Abu Ghraib. The leader swears an oath to the Constitution because he brings to the relationship his own free will. Our entire government is based upon this principle.
In such a time and in such a condition, it is immoral for the leader to sit idly by. A decision has been forced. The Congress has made a horrible mistake. Let them know from my example that they are jeopardizing much more than what is wise and for no good purpose than to appease those that place their own peccadilloes above service. It is a blunder that will cost lives and jeopardize the mission. Silence condones malfeasance.
Process my resignation.
Paul Deignan
Between Want and Thought: Choosing our Religion
There are three main streams in religious thought developing in the globalized world: Atheism, Judeo-Christianity, and Islam. Each is differentiated from the others by a fundamental principle of philosophy.
Atheism asserts that while human existence may be of greater dimensionality than that which we directly perceive, there is no basis for a belief in an extra-dimensional organizing being. Whatever organization appears to the human is the result of chance being propagated in an immensely complex universe. As such our lives are only meaningful to the extent that we believe they are meaningful. There is no objective reference to infer a purpose of existence.
The moral code of public Atheism is utilitarianism. The private moral code of the Atheist is a path calculation for the satisfaction of want. Thus, when the Atheist finds himself unable to convince others to act according to his wants, it is seen as a fault in not being more clever in his manipulations. The information campaign that accompanies the path planning of the Atheist is necessarily deceptive since otherwise, the achievement of the most good for the most people would at some point act against the private interests of the Atheist.
If, however, we assert the existence of an organizing being beyond our direct human perception it seems natural to conclude that our existence is given context and meaning in respect to this unitary being and that within that context our own human activity can be organized. The primary differentiation between Theism and Atheism among most people is decided by their need to rationalize the observed discrepancy between their intelligent existence and the inability of man to give meaning to that existence within the space of their perceived world. While the Atheist may accept the concept of human will, the Theist is able to accept that will can be free. It is therefore rational for the Theist to believe in moral responsibility as a coherent public and private code whereas this coherence would make no sense to the Atheist.
Between the two major Theist religions, there is a choice in moral code regarding causality. Should thought follow action or action follow thought? This choice defines the present distinction between the main lines of Islamic and Judeo-Christian thought.
For the Muslim, the moral code is distilled to a number of actions that are directed by the organizing entity. The objective of the individual is to comply with those directives and to compel others to comply. Proper action leads to proper thought. In this paradigm, the human thought is noncausal. It exists in order to perceive the actions that must be accomplished. Free will is only free to the degree that a choice exists between subservience and insubordination to the organizing being. Thus, awareness of the moral code is transmitted by revelation without the ability to judge the validity of that revelation. In all practicality, the revelation is a product of the coincident will of the most forceful elements of the adherents to enforce a doctrine.
For the Judeo-Christian, thought precedes action. The validity of the revelation is judged by human experience and reason. Hence it is a greater heresy for the Judeo-Christian to believe incorrectly than to act incorrectly. Free will also carries with it the freedom to believe inconsistencies. For the Judeo-Christian, the moral code emanates from thought and is transmitted through reason and mutual inspiration.
Our clash or civilizations between these three fundamental lines of thought will determine the future of our world and will be felt thoughout this next century in ripples of action-thought-reaction. Our success in managing the damage of these tidal waves of human thought will depend on our willingness and ability to understand and respect the nature of the differences.
Compressive/Compressed Sensing/Sampling
So which is it?
Let me suggest that "Compressive" is the term we want to use rather than "Compressed". If something is already compressed, why should we bother with it unless we wanted to lift it back into its ambient space? When we sense or sample, we want to reduce dimensionality, thus "Compressive" is a more proper term.
Secondly, there should be a distinction between "Sampling" and "Sensing". When we sense, it is from an environment that is irreversibly changing. When we sample, it is from a population that is for the purposes of the experiment, static in some respect. So, "Compressive Sensing" is what we do when we convert measurements from a dynamic environment to information. "Compressive Sampling" is what we do when we down convert a statics set such as a previously captured image ordered set of pixels.
Scales and Perception
Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing. --Lincoln
This painting is
Lavender Mist by Jackson Pollock. One approach to understanding it is given by
Harley Hahn who describes how
Lavender Mist leverages our subconscious to inspire a range of feelings and thoughts that spring from its suggestive colors and composition.
If we saw this very same painting on the floor-covering canvas of a room in the process of being repainted, we would think not much of it. Instead, it is thrust upon us by Pollock and so we focus our attention on it. Like walking past a dull mirror, we are allowed to see in it what we might see. We stop and we are transfixed. Perhaps the colors and patterns bring to mind struggle and hope, potential and confusion, or some other complex combination of feelings and thoughts. Whatever meaning
Lavender Mist has, it is clearly subjective.
If we hadn't known that Pollock was an established artist we would not have been able to guess so from this painting. There is no critical agreement by experts or any other significant subset of viewers as to the meaning of
Lavender Mist, but one thing is clear: when viewed from less than five inches or beyond 50 feet, it is nondescript. Whatever structure it has,
Lavender Mist is meaningful only within a small slice of a distance dimension. Even abstract projections of the visual information of the painting at cognitive distances outside a limited range end in the amorphous. No matter how moved we may feel by
Lavender Mist when seen from five feet, the range of meaning of this painting is strictly bounded. Sometimes a drip is
just a drip. Yet, there is something that we recognize as "truth" in our consideration of the painting. It can be evocative as well as provocative.
But people think and feel characteristically in different ways. Freud suggested a
psychoanalytic model that seems to be of some applicability here. The Id type of thinking was recognized by
R-Doh who observes the debate and remarks:
How disgusting. Obviously, Bitch can't think:
“What’s interesting is that you’re trying to frame this debate around the ‘personhood’ of a fetus, while completely overlooking the personhood of women.”
Let's see. I know I've analyzed this kind of behavior before. What could it be? Where could it be?
Hmm.
Oh, yeah! Limbic dominated thinking.
Perception on this scale is instinctual, not factual.
Now consider an image of the Mandlebrot set generated by the program
WinCIG. We can recognize self-similar structures at different scales and amazing meta relations. While we can use the program to infinitely explore scales and discover an amazing variety of apparent complexity, the information throughout the entire range of scales is finite. In fact, the essential information can be related in a single mathematical formula. There seems to be "truth" in this graphic as well. This truth is objective.
These two graphics are related in that they are presented on a computer screen with a finite number of bits per pixel and a finite number of pixels. The information of both is compatible, appreciable, and quantifiable. The information from one can be communicated to the other by a bijective mapping of pixels--a set of rules for communication within limits of modern technology. Rather than a bit to bit mapping, we communicate information using encodings that are lossy, of certain robustness to transmission errors, and may or may not be decoded faithfully. In both cases we choose the source encoding and ultimate embedding of the information at the receiver. This ability to choose is the shared mystery of Pollock and Mandlebrot.
Hettle Settles
The libel laws are like the baffles of a ship's bilge. The bilge water is free to slosh around over the baffle, but a certain amount is retained to keep the ship aright and balanced. We do not prosecute opinions or small insults, but we do not either allow destructive lies to go totally unchecked.
The internet is a very large ship. These ships can sustain a great deal of bilge water and still remain afloat. However, like the
Titanic, all ships have their limits and like all cargo carrying ships, the greater the bilge the lesser the cargo.
Baffles also allow bilge water from local leaks to be easily expelled by the bilge pumps. And like a baffle, the libel laws are only as effective as their least reach.
No one likes working in the bilge. Bilge maintenance must be done--infrequently, but it is necessary.
One the two issues of concern was settled to my satisfaction this Friday afternoon. We have agreed not to post his letter of retraction. What remains are simple retractions and corrections to material published by the other libellant. So far, there has not been tangible progress on that front.
BTW, I just noticed that Blogger is attempting to self-regulate with the flag feature (up at the top right). In keeping with the Google
philosophy--a philosophy I share--if you agree that the information posted was
libelous, please consider flagging the
site.
Thoughts on the Forbes Article
As timely as ever, Forbes just published a cover article entitled, "
Attack of the Blogs" in which the author ravages the irresponsibility of some bloggers and presents suggestions on what to do in the case of cyberlibel.
These suggestions include exposing the libellants, using blogs to fight blogs, and lawsuits. Check, check, check.
As for assessing damages, I would like to also add the suggestion of tracing down links to all related sites that peddle in libel. After a subpeona of their Blogad, Paypal, and GoogleAd revenues and receipts, use those totals to assess the baseline economic damages. Perhaps
Posner would also agree. Obviously, libel has been good for the libellant's "business".
In line with the recommendations of the article, here is a map of the Toronto area.
Universities in the area with graduate programs in the humanities:
Brock UniversityMcMaster UniversityUniversity of TorontoWilfrid Laurier UniversityYork University
