What the Heck was I Thinking!?

 Gagdad Bob, at One Cosmos, has a post up about “Truth and How to Avoid it.” It starts with these two paragraphs:

If truth exists, it seems that it is something that we would want to align ourselves with, no? For truth is what works, isn’t it?

Not necessarily. With psychoanalysis, Freud articulated an entire system of thought that essentially comes down to a means for investigating the many ways in which human beings lie to themselves. Thus, in a sense, these lies “work” — i.e., they have a function — or they wouldn’t have been erected in the first place.

I agree if we can say that it depends on what you mean by “works.”

Humans are notorious for finding self-destructive, or other-destructive, or both-you-and-me-destructive behaviors in response to trauma in their lives.

To say that a person has constructed a lie because it “works” for them, demands that we define what “works” means and “how” the lie works for the person.

Later, Bob notes that the term “religious” has an equally wide range of possible descriptions for its meaning,

It is a lie, but not really — more a simultaneous confession and confirmation of utter ignorance.

I tend to agree with his comments, but I want more clarity or depth to the definition. Not in the Clintonian way of obscuring the truth (the Clintonian Uncertainty Principle - you may think you know what you mean, but I can cause you to you think there are other ways to interpret that meaning.), but in coming to the moral clarity of agreeing on the definition in detail of the terms we will use.

Source: One Cosmos: Truth and How to Avoid it

 I missed the President’s speech on Wednesday evening. If this excerpt from a Washington Post article is accurate, this is a welcomed change of focus in the war against Islamo-fascists:

Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, charged yesterday that Iran is “complicit” in providing weapons designed to kill American troops. “We will do all we need to do to defend our troops in Iraq by going after the entire network regardless of where those people come from,” he said at a news conference with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.

Rice outlined a carrot-and-stick strategy, offering to meet with her Iranian counterpart “anytime, anywhere” to discuss “every facet” of U.S.-Iranian relations — with the condition that Tehran suspend its program for enriching uranium, which can be used for nuclear weapons as well as for generating energy. Until that time, she said, the United States will “use all our power to limit and counter the activities of Iranian agents who are attacking our people and innocent civilians in Iraq.”

Rice effectively dismissed a key recommendation of the Iraq Study Group, the bipartisan panel that last month urged the administration to launch a dialogue with Iran and Syria to help stabilize Iraq. She told reporters that Tehran and Damascus should not “be paid” to end their “destabilizing behavior,” and that such a move would both demoralize friends and embolden enemies across the Middle East.

That’s how you fight an insurgency supported by other countries -deny them the real world sanctuary of Iran or Syria from which they can get support and weapons.

Before the raids, U.S. forces did not consult with the Iraqi government, which is now trying to establish procedures and agreements for future operations, he said. “This is a very, very dangerous thing,” he said.

That’s a fair description of war, “a very, very dangerous thing.”

Source: U.S. Troops Raid 2 Iranian Targets in Iraq, Detain 5 People - washingtonpost.com