The Democratic National Committee excoriated John McCain because he said on “David Letterman,” in regards to the 3000+ soldiers who have died in Iraq, “Americans are very frustrated and they have every right to be. We’ve wasted a lot of our most precious treasure, which is American lives.” They asserted that MCain had insulted “our brave troops.” McCain subsequently apologized, believing that “sacrificed” would be the better word.
McCain should have told the DNC to sod off. But since he obviously didn’t want to risk an extended imbroglio, he said he used the wrong word. Okay, I’ll do it for him: Sod off, DNC. McCain’s gut instinct was correct, and furthermore the DNC knows it.
To say that young lives have been wasted isn’t to diminish their sacrifice or to demean them. It isn’t to say that they themselves threw away their lives in an empty pursuit. It’s to say that those who were entrusted *with* their lives, to not put them in harm’s way unless absolutely necessary, shirked their responsibility. They’ve done as crap a job at safeguarding our troops as they did safeguarding the Constitution. McCain’s comment was clearly not aimed at the troops; it was aimed at those who sent our troops into a war where they were assured we would be greeted as liberators and be out in no more than six months…while simultaneously destroying our international reputation at a time when, thanks to worldwide sympathy due to 9/11, we could have transformed that tragedy into some sort of true international coalition to fight terrorism.
Wasted opportunity. Wasted lives. The DNC should be ashamed of trying to spin McCain’s word choice into political opportunity and push him into using one that is less loaded…and less accurate. “Sacrifice” implies nobility, but there was nothing noble in the administration’s actions, nothing noble in lying to the American people, nothing noble in declaring “mission accomplished” while thousands more died.
But if “wasted” is off the table, then fine.
How about “squandered?”
PAD
• 
Predator.
“Mike at March 23, 2007 07:43 AM “
No, it’s “mechanical”.
I’m not going to get into a psychophysiology / biology discussion. I’m getting enough of that at Uni at the moment.
As it lacks the spontaneity of burps and farts, that isn’t how it seems. Babies don’t grunt and push in the first two as they do with soiling themselves.
If babies on breastmilk/ formula only are grunting when passing, I’d be taking them to the Early childhood nurse or doctor.
Voiding is part of the digestive process, just as the processes in the stomach and intestines. We can control what goes in and when, but once it leaves our mouths the rest is automatic. It is not an instinct or a drive. But that’s just my opinion.
As far as babies pass the breastmilk/formula stage require no lessons to push, I’d say they are pushing on instinct.
past
Well, if nothing else, Mike has certainly put a new spin on the thread title…
No, no, Patrick, this is my fault. I had the temerity to assert that we have an obligation to believe in and strive for a better tomorrow. I should’ve known dámņ well that would result in a discussion of babies burping, farting, and pooping.
“Posted by: Bill Myers at March 24, 2007 08:44 AM
No, no, Patrick, this is my fault. I had the temerity to assert that we have an obligation to believe in and strive for a better tomorrow. I should’ve known dámņ well that would result in a discussion of babies burping, farting, and pooping.”
That’s what usually happens.
“Eating and sleeping are RESPONSES to hunger and fatigue. As newborn babies REACT to hunger and fatigue by eating and sleeping, eating and sleeping are the most basic instincts we have.”
While I concede that eating can be an instinctual response (although I would say that the DESIRE to eat, or to FEED is instinctual, rather than the actual act), sleeping isn’t instinctual. It is physically impossible to will oneself to not sleep for an indeterminate amount of time and, contrary to what The X-Files episode Sleepless dramatized, the inability to sleep is a debilitating, not mention fatal, condition. (There was a rather interesting episode of Medical Detectives that dramatized the case study of a man who, through an incurable chemical imbalance, lost the ability the sleep. The man’s condition, both physically and mentally, worsened until eventually died.)
Wow, this is what happens when I go off on a movie shoot for a few days.
I had the temerity to assert that we have an obligation to believe in and strive for a better tomorrow. I should’ve known dámņ well that would result in a discussion of babies burping, farting, and pooping.
Well, duh.
Y’know, I was trying to keep this under my hat, but after Bill’s post, I just have to.
At least now we’ve got the straight poop on all this.
And that distinguishes sleeping from eating… how?
As that would be an evolutionary advantage to our inborn ability to sleep, your analysis works for me.
Is the thread not titled “Waste Deep?”
Posted by: Mike at March 24, 2007 08:21 PM
“And that distinguishes sleeping from eating… how?”
Well, obviously a person who wills himself not to sleep wil eventually fall asleep, while a person who wills himself not to eat will not involuntarily and automatically be fed. His body will disintegrate to provide nutrients, but that’s not he same.
“While I concede that eating can be an instinctual response (although I would say that the DESIRE to eat, or to FEED is instinctual, rather than the actual act), sleeping isn’t instinctual.”
Now, some people might call this semantics, but I don’t know that I’d call eating instinctual. WHAT to eat, THAT I can call instinctual. For example, you don’t see too many hummingbirds getting in line to dip their beaks into take-out from Burger King. Be a great ad, though. But I’m sure there’s some hummingbird activist group out there that’d protest, and then there’d be hummingbird support groups trying to actually teach them the darn words after all this time.
ANYWAY–have to agree that sleeping isn’t instinctual. But don’t try going without it. A couple years back, I spent the whole night writing after a week of very little sleep, came downstairs, my mom yelled at me for being awake all night, and then my much-injured noggin bounced off the floor tiles after my sight went a NICE pretty red. Morals of the story: 1) No matter how good the tale you’re telling, GO TO SLEEP. 2)If you can’t abide by 1) try to pass out on CARPET. TRUST ME ON THIS ONE.
And obviously none of this disqualifies sleep as instinct.
“And obviously none of this disqualifies sleep as instinct.”
You’re so defensive Mike. You asked “And that distinguishes sleeping from eating… how?” and I answered.
In a previous post I said at length that I do consider instinct to be involved in sleeping and eating. But we should distinguish between the need of the body for nutrients and sleep which is not instinct; hunger and tiredness, which are not instincts; the instincts that tells us to seek food and how to chew, or to seek sleep before we collapse; the rational management by humans of eating and going to sleep; and the comletely automatic processes of sleeping and digesting, which are not instincts.
I denied that you answered my question… how?
Wow.
Just wow.
Guys, I have to suggest — it is not worth following Mike down his little rabbit holes. Mike has a pathological need to “win” every argument. I mean, look at the tone of his responses: to him, it’s not ideas on the line. It’s his personhood.
While he appears intelligent on the surface, by the way, it’s all surface flash and no substance. His inability to acknowledge that he is wrong about the definition of the word “instinct,” and his apparent inability to understand that, bespeaks of a mind that can parrot seemingly complex arguments but cannot support them.
I’m just saying, how many times you gonna dance this dance? It ends up in the same place: Mike gets pissy and rude, and offends those who have given him chance after chance to prove he is something other than a paralogist who hides behind a vocabulary he barely understands.
Look, I realize this was already clear enough for most of you, but I’m going to be super-specific to try to bring some rationality back to this discussion:
I believe Micha is right about Mike’s assertions of moral relativism to be a cop-out. Morality is a thorny question that has been debated for millennia with few, if any, clear answers emerging. Nevertheless, slavery is illegal throughout most of the world today precisely because of a recognition that it is immoral. Martin Luther King Jr. and his followers were able to get the white majority of this nation to abolish segregation — a practice which was to our advantage from a purely selfish perspective — by forcing us to recognize that segregation is immoral.
Micha, Doug, and Chuck got it on the money. When I referred to our “baser instincts” I was referring to the serpent-brained tendency to hate and fear “the other.” I believe this irrational hatred and fear has largely outlived its usefulness as a survival mechanism. We have the ability to think rationally, and thus the moral obligation to do so. That gives us an obligation to distinguish between fear that helps us to survive — such as the tendency to go into fight-or-flight if we’re walking alone at night in a part of town with which we’re unfamiliar — and the fear that leads us to commit immoral acts of oppression.
So, yeah, when I was talking about ideologies, philosophies, and religions codifying our “baser instincts,” I was referring to the rationalization and codification of unreasonable fear and hatred. I believe that to be the line of demarcation between the “morality” of repression and the morality of liberation.
For example, I am aware that anti-homosexual attitudes are often rooted in religious scriptures and doctrines that condemn homosexuality as immoral. I believe such scriptures and doctrines merely codify and rationalize the “serpent-brained” tendency to hate and fear “the other.”
Look, guys, I’ve heard all of the justifications for not shrouding Mike. But in every thread in which we’ve engaged him at length — IN EVERY THREAD — the quality of the conversation and level of discourse has been degraded. Even when he’s not telling us to stop writing checks with our mouths that our butts can’t cash, his arguments are filled with paralogic, bizarre tangents, arrogance and discourteous language.
He’s like X-Ray on valium: a bit more calm, but still a troll through and through. So again I ask, how many times are you all gonna dance this dance?
As far as digestion is not an “aptitude, impulse, or capacity,” a “tendency,” or a “behavior,” it is disqualified as instinct. As far is sleep is one of those things, it qualifies.
The supreme court never struck down segregation as immoral, but as a violation of the fourteenth amendmant. Those upholding segregation argued it was “separate and equal,” and the court accepted that rational in upholding the practice in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson.
When “seperate but equal” was proven to the court to have never taken place, segregation was ruled a violation of the constitution in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Rosa Parkes was arrested at the end of 1955. As King rose in prominence from this event, he came after.
The day anyone can prove to the supreme court you can have both separation and equality is the day the fourteenth amendment no longer becomes a legal obstruction to segregation.
The supreme court is simply not a morality-enforcing body.
And, dude, I didn’t make this about me. I merely responded to an accusation.
Spoken like someone for whom his personhood, and not his ideas, is on the line.
Bill, I realize that you find tese Mike-arguments to be very frustrating. I don’t know about other people, but I go into these discussions with complete awareness of the risks, and it is my risks to take (not exactly big risks after all). You also have to know when to leave (which I think is also the title of a country song).
I am willing to engage in this weird arguments (up to a point) for several reasons:
1) Mike seems to have access to some knowledge, althogh I do not know how wekk he understands it — so I sometimes learn new things because of his posts, or recollect things that I’ve learned in the past.
2) Arguing with strange point of view strengthens the mind and improves the arguing skils and understanding of my ideas.
3) Mike’s strange points of view on issues creates an opportunity to think about them in different ways and question the obvious.
4) Sometimes underneath his arguments there are points worth exploring despite his belligerent tone, and unwillingness to actually explore his or anybody elses ideas seriously.
5) I like to place myself in other people’s minds to understand how they think.
6) Sometimes interesting ideas occur to me as a result of the conversations.
7) These discussions usually occur when one thread has died down and another is yet to begin.
8) The issues that are discussed are usually abstract and not of real importance to me, which is a little bit of a relief sometimes.
9) He’s not going to go away, so I might as well make lemon of lemonades.
I am not distressed by these discussions since — as Mike said — I’m a green blooded Vulcan. So no harm done. Soon PAD will start another thread, and we’ll all move on.
correction:
Mike seems to have access to some knowledge, although I don’t know how well he understands it.