a ranty opinionated bitch - that's me! :)
I'm feeling opinionated today. Heh.
So I'm going to write about my opinions in 2 completely unrelated (on the surface anyway) areas: astrology and war/Iraq.
Never let it be said that I can't hold 2 thoughts at once. ;-)
The astrology train of thought was brought about by last night's entry, and expanded when reading the comments to
marginalia 's similar entry, particularly this one by
juleskicks :
"Tropical zodiac isn't actually based on the stars and planets' movement, it's based on the seasons and mathematical calculations. So yes, the constellations have shifted in relation to the planet, but that makes no difference if you follow tropical (the traditional system we're familiar with) astrology, because tropical astrology isn't based on the constellations in the first place, so that they've moved is irrelevant."
See, this is similar to the argument I have with the conventional season dates: they're calendrically convenient, not astronomically sensible.
I know there are people on my flist who wholeheartedly adhere to astrology, and others who think it's total bullshit. Colour me an open-minded skeptic on this one. I see no reason the stars shouldn't impact our attitudes and behaviors. We are stardust, after all. It falls well into the realm of my as-above-so-below cosmology of things we don't fully understand yet, but that lack of scientific precision doesn't mean that people's observations of patterns are inherently invalid. That said, I don't for a moment think my strengths, weaknesses, interests and personality are entirely or even mostly determined by the juxtaposition of Earth, Moon, Sun and constellations at the moment of my birth, nor am I identical in traits or outlook to the many many others who share those accidents of timing. What if I'd been born on July 4th, when my mother first went into labour and it was stopped with drugs and other medical intervention? Would I be an entirely different person? Or would I be me, with essentially the same psychological traits and preferences and interests and ways of viewing the world, but six and a half weeks older? I tend to think the latter.
Okay. That was the easy-to-explain opinion that people aren't going to get in too much of a lather about. Now on to the quagmire morass flamewar. :D
These thoughts were spurred by several things: namely reading my flist and friendsfriends, watching several prominent Democratic leaders kind of waffle the issue of what to -do- about Iraq, and hoping the Congress, after it completes its first hundred hours goals (which it is doing a kickass job of accomplishing, I must say) manages to actually determine something concrete on the matter. Problem is, I don't think they can.
I don't think anybody can.
I'm not that politically savvy. I tend to think more from the gut, and from my own sense of ethics and responsibility for one's own actions, than from the point of view of what's "smart" or will get one ahead in the long run. And from that perspective I think, instead of posturing, instead of simply running with the notion that "whatever Bush wants must be wrong, so we'll just oppose that without offering an alternative," the most honest thing Democratic leaders can say at this point is "We don't KNOW what to do."
I wish the Democrats in the House and Senate would say "We don't think the President is right or has ever been right about this - but that's water under the bridge now. The problem we face is that we don't know how to fix this either, and we DO think it is our responsibility to fix what we - not we as individuals, but we as a country with a policy that has failed - broke. In summary, it's really, really FUBAR, and it's FUBAR because of our previous actions, and we don't want to make it worse but we have no idea how to make it better."
Because the situation, as I see it, is: we broke something that belongs to somebody else, and now we don't have the faintest idea of how to fix it, and instead of taking responsibility for that many of the people who were most instrumental in breaking it in the first place are petulantly saying to those to whom it rightly belongs: "Okay, YOU fix it, while we watch over you to make sure you do it right (i.e. a way we approve), and if you don't get crackin' we're gonna control what you can do even more closely," while other folks who opposed breaking it just want to walk away and pretend we never got involved, which was what they always wanted anyway.
It's almost like an irrational parent, fed up with a child refusing to clean up his room on his own, who loses it and screams "This is a goddamn mess! I've given you plenty of time to clean it up on your own, but you're a stubborn brat and you just won't! So if you won't clean it up on your own I'm going to show you just how bad a mess it can be!" and then dumps the laundry basket and overflowing trash can on the floor, kicks the toys so they break, smashes a few things, and leaves the room saying "don't come out until it's clean!" Making an overwhelming task that much more overwhelming, without offering anything other than recriminations and punishment.
(No, this sort of incident never happened to me, nor did I ever do it. But I've heard of such things from emotionally abused children, and it's an example of what I'd consider irrationally tyrannical, power-mad parenting. Even without extreme physical punishment, which I would argue we've ALSO inflicted on Iraq.)
Contrary to some current conservative posturing on the matter, I never opposed the war in Iraq because I don't hold the Iraqi people as deserving of the same human rights as Americans. I never thought Saddam Hussein was an A-OK guy, or that anyone deserves to live under a dictatorial, repressive, and abusive regime.
I opposed it from the get-go - from when the idea first started being kicked around in public sometime in 2002 - because a) I did not believe the stated reasons for the war, which in case anybody forgets had NOTHING to do with the arguable meta-reason of "freeing the Iraqi people from the oppressive regime of Saddam Hussein" but rather with ephemeral, or perhaps mythological, weapons of mass destruction; b) it still seems to me that most of the people who DID or DO support the war have made no personal, emotional, life-threatening investment in actually FIGHTING the war - they want other people, people different from them, cardboard-cutout people they don't know, to do that messy bloody disgusting work; and c) the question of the power vacuum. No majority of Iraqis ever stepped forward and said "if you help us do this, we're ready to govern this nation as a democracy". A few grievously oppressed, extremely disunited minorities made such claims, of course - but grievously oppressed minorities CANNOT govern any sort of democracy on a moment's notice. (Even an arrogantly and more overtly imperial plan to "install" them as an effective, less-abusive while non-democratic government would be a gravely doubtful enterprise, although thankfully that apparently was not considered by the Bush administration.)
So the upshot is, we went in without significant or coherent local support or backing; what local support we had was fragmented, uncoalesced, and ill-equipped on the level of basic knowledge and experience for running an independent nation of multiple, habitually opposed and hostile peoples; and our "successful" efforts utterly destroyed a hugely dysfunctional, yet basically functioning, governmental infrastructure that held the country together, if not happily. But we're all surprised now that Iraq has descended into sectarian violence, civil war, tribalism, thuggery, terrorism targeting intellectuals and professionals, and virtual anarchy?
My attitude toward highly risky endeavours is probably why I never became an engineer, or a molecular biologist, or something similar. I have a very real aversion to the thought of irrevocably fucking something up so bad that no one knows how to fix it. I do like to tinker, honest, but in the end I want to be able to amend my mistakes, to put toothpaste back in the tube, to not do something of such enormity that it will have lasting destructive impact on anyone else. The thought of unleashing a rogue biological entity, or writing a program that inadvertently destroys other people's work (or even their lives) horrifies me.
And I certainly don't want to shatter a functioning, if unpleasant, country, to depose a tyranny no matter how vile only to have an entirely unpredictable and infinitely deadlier inter-tribal rage fill the vacuum I just created.
That never seemed to enter the heads of the Bush Administration when they embarked on this war. Then their raison d'être for the war evaporated, and suddenly they were talking about "liberating" the Iraqis. (Which leads me inexorably to the pesky question of, if this is truly a meta-war and not a war to get rid of fictitious WMDs - in other words yeah the WMDs were made up, maybe we should just admit that now, peel the onion and confess that there was a Moral Imperative to ending Saddam's tyranny, but the White House and Pentagon in their infinite wisdom knew the American people were too self-centered and ethically uncommitted to support a war based solely on Moral Imperative - then why aren't we likewise "liberating" Darfur, and relieving dozens of other brutal, tribe-icidal tinpot dictators of their positions around the globe? What makes Iraqis more deserving of such freedom than the Sudanese, anyway?)
But how liberating is it, really, to be liberated when you never asked, and possibly never wanted, to be "liberated" in such a destructive way? And how patronizingly filled with hubris do your "liberators" have to be to shift their paradigm from what's best for them - destroying WMDs, let's say - to assuming they know what's best for you, and furthermore assuming that you'll be happy to endure the horrors of liberation just because they -think- it's what they'd want, if they were in your shoes, which they aren't?
When you ask me to help you, I'll try, if I feel I can make things better in the way you want, instead of worse, without endangering others. If you don't ask, and I notice you're struggling, I might ask if you want my help. But I'm not going to just waltz in and up-end everything on you, then try to run things for you, or impose a new "system" on you without bothering to check with you first and see if that's what you want, and if so is it to your benefit at many other people's expense, or truly a benefit at large. And I'm -certainly- not going to just walk out when things get rougher, especially if my up-ending everything was instrumental in making it so rough.
I just wish my country would think that way, for once.
So I'm going to write about my opinions in 2 completely unrelated (on the surface anyway) areas: astrology and war/Iraq.
Never let it be said that I can't hold 2 thoughts at once. ;-)
The astrology train of thought was brought about by last night's entry, and expanded when reading the comments to
marginalia 's similar entry, particularly this one by
juleskicks :
"Tropical zodiac isn't actually based on the stars and planets' movement, it's based on the seasons and mathematical calculations. So yes, the constellations have shifted in relation to the planet, but that makes no difference if you follow tropical (the traditional system we're familiar with) astrology, because tropical astrology isn't based on the constellations in the first place, so that they've moved is irrelevant."
See, this is similar to the argument I have with the conventional season dates: they're calendrically convenient, not astronomically sensible.
I know there are people on my flist who wholeheartedly adhere to astrology, and others who think it's total bullshit. Colour me an open-minded skeptic on this one. I see no reason the stars shouldn't impact our attitudes and behaviors. We are stardust, after all. It falls well into the realm of my as-above-so-below cosmology of things we don't fully understand yet, but that lack of scientific precision doesn't mean that people's observations of patterns are inherently invalid. That said, I don't for a moment think my strengths, weaknesses, interests and personality are entirely or even mostly determined by the juxtaposition of Earth, Moon, Sun and constellations at the moment of my birth, nor am I identical in traits or outlook to the many many others who share those accidents of timing. What if I'd been born on July 4th, when my mother first went into labour and it was stopped with drugs and other medical intervention? Would I be an entirely different person? Or would I be me, with essentially the same psychological traits and preferences and interests and ways of viewing the world, but six and a half weeks older? I tend to think the latter.
Okay. That was the easy-to-explain opinion that people aren't going to get in too much of a lather about. Now on to the quagmire morass flamewar. :D
These thoughts were spurred by several things: namely reading my flist and friendsfriends, watching several prominent Democratic leaders kind of waffle the issue of what to -do- about Iraq, and hoping the Congress, after it completes its first hundred hours goals (which it is doing a kickass job of accomplishing, I must say) manages to actually determine something concrete on the matter. Problem is, I don't think they can.
I don't think anybody can.
I'm not that politically savvy. I tend to think more from the gut, and from my own sense of ethics and responsibility for one's own actions, than from the point of view of what's "smart" or will get one ahead in the long run. And from that perspective I think, instead of posturing, instead of simply running with the notion that "whatever Bush wants must be wrong, so we'll just oppose that without offering an alternative," the most honest thing Democratic leaders can say at this point is "We don't KNOW what to do."
I wish the Democrats in the House and Senate would say "We don't think the President is right or has ever been right about this - but that's water under the bridge now. The problem we face is that we don't know how to fix this either, and we DO think it is our responsibility to fix what we - not we as individuals, but we as a country with a policy that has failed - broke. In summary, it's really, really FUBAR, and it's FUBAR because of our previous actions, and we don't want to make it worse but we have no idea how to make it better."
Because the situation, as I see it, is: we broke something that belongs to somebody else, and now we don't have the faintest idea of how to fix it, and instead of taking responsibility for that many of the people who were most instrumental in breaking it in the first place are petulantly saying to those to whom it rightly belongs: "Okay, YOU fix it, while we watch over you to make sure you do it right (i.e. a way we approve), and if you don't get crackin' we're gonna control what you can do even more closely," while other folks who opposed breaking it just want to walk away and pretend we never got involved, which was what they always wanted anyway.
It's almost like an irrational parent, fed up with a child refusing to clean up his room on his own, who loses it and screams "This is a goddamn mess! I've given you plenty of time to clean it up on your own, but you're a stubborn brat and you just won't! So if you won't clean it up on your own I'm going to show you just how bad a mess it can be!" and then dumps the laundry basket and overflowing trash can on the floor, kicks the toys so they break, smashes a few things, and leaves the room saying "don't come out until it's clean!" Making an overwhelming task that much more overwhelming, without offering anything other than recriminations and punishment.
(No, this sort of incident never happened to me, nor did I ever do it. But I've heard of such things from emotionally abused children, and it's an example of what I'd consider irrationally tyrannical, power-mad parenting. Even without extreme physical punishment, which I would argue we've ALSO inflicted on Iraq.)
Contrary to some current conservative posturing on the matter, I never opposed the war in Iraq because I don't hold the Iraqi people as deserving of the same human rights as Americans. I never thought Saddam Hussein was an A-OK guy, or that anyone deserves to live under a dictatorial, repressive, and abusive regime.
I opposed it from the get-go - from when the idea first started being kicked around in public sometime in 2002 - because a) I did not believe the stated reasons for the war, which in case anybody forgets had NOTHING to do with the arguable meta-reason of "freeing the Iraqi people from the oppressive regime of Saddam Hussein" but rather with ephemeral, or perhaps mythological, weapons of mass destruction; b) it still seems to me that most of the people who DID or DO support the war have made no personal, emotional, life-threatening investment in actually FIGHTING the war - they want other people, people different from them, cardboard-cutout people they don't know, to do that messy bloody disgusting work; and c) the question of the power vacuum. No majority of Iraqis ever stepped forward and said "if you help us do this, we're ready to govern this nation as a democracy". A few grievously oppressed, extremely disunited minorities made such claims, of course - but grievously oppressed minorities CANNOT govern any sort of democracy on a moment's notice. (Even an arrogantly and more overtly imperial plan to "install" them as an effective, less-abusive while non-democratic government would be a gravely doubtful enterprise, although thankfully that apparently was not considered by the Bush administration.)
So the upshot is, we went in without significant or coherent local support or backing; what local support we had was fragmented, uncoalesced, and ill-equipped on the level of basic knowledge and experience for running an independent nation of multiple, habitually opposed and hostile peoples; and our "successful" efforts utterly destroyed a hugely dysfunctional, yet basically functioning, governmental infrastructure that held the country together, if not happily. But we're all surprised now that Iraq has descended into sectarian violence, civil war, tribalism, thuggery, terrorism targeting intellectuals and professionals, and virtual anarchy?
My attitude toward highly risky endeavours is probably why I never became an engineer, or a molecular biologist, or something similar. I have a very real aversion to the thought of irrevocably fucking something up so bad that no one knows how to fix it. I do like to tinker, honest, but in the end I want to be able to amend my mistakes, to put toothpaste back in the tube, to not do something of such enormity that it will have lasting destructive impact on anyone else. The thought of unleashing a rogue biological entity, or writing a program that inadvertently destroys other people's work (or even their lives) horrifies me.
And I certainly don't want to shatter a functioning, if unpleasant, country, to depose a tyranny no matter how vile only to have an entirely unpredictable and infinitely deadlier inter-tribal rage fill the vacuum I just created.
That never seemed to enter the heads of the Bush Administration when they embarked on this war. Then their raison d'être for the war evaporated, and suddenly they were talking about "liberating" the Iraqis. (Which leads me inexorably to the pesky question of, if this is truly a meta-war and not a war to get rid of fictitious WMDs - in other words yeah the WMDs were made up, maybe we should just admit that now, peel the onion and confess that there was a Moral Imperative to ending Saddam's tyranny, but the White House and Pentagon in their infinite wisdom knew the American people were too self-centered and ethically uncommitted to support a war based solely on Moral Imperative - then why aren't we likewise "liberating" Darfur, and relieving dozens of other brutal, tribe-icidal tinpot dictators of their positions around the globe? What makes Iraqis more deserving of such freedom than the Sudanese, anyway?)
But how liberating is it, really, to be liberated when you never asked, and possibly never wanted, to be "liberated" in such a destructive way? And how patronizingly filled with hubris do your "liberators" have to be to shift their paradigm from what's best for them - destroying WMDs, let's say - to assuming they know what's best for you, and furthermore assuming that you'll be happy to endure the horrors of liberation just because they -think- it's what they'd want, if they were in your shoes, which they aren't?
When you ask me to help you, I'll try, if I feel I can make things better in the way you want, instead of worse, without endangering others. If you don't ask, and I notice you're struggling, I might ask if you want my help. But I'm not going to just waltz in and up-end everything on you, then try to run things for you, or impose a new "system" on you without bothering to check with you first and see if that's what you want, and if so is it to your benefit at many other people's expense, or truly a benefit at large. And I'm -certainly- not going to just walk out when things get rougher, especially if my up-ending everything was instrumental in making it so rough.
I just wish my country would think that way, for once.