>Call me Captain Pedantic,
yeehah! that's what we need for the LOB line of buoy toy! Captain Pedantic! You can be our first, how do you say it, rusty haired -- is that how you've described yourself? anyway, you can be the first rusty-haired, beer swilling Super Hero Action Buoy Toy. Wooohoooo!
> but I said that I _took_ an agnostic view on the
>question, meaning that, given Max's assertion that it was hard to believe
>that Thiago's capacity to analyse was greater than that of the US
>government, it was incumbent on me to _provide_ a contrary view, rather
>than an agnostic one.
gotcha!
>On yet another of my rapidly sprouting hands,
oooh. another idear for your Special Super Hero Abilities.
>however, there is voluminous
>evidence from, say, memoirs of CIA operatives (I'm thinking particularly
>of Frank Snepp's "Decent Interval" here) that the US Government has
>repeatedly in the past interpreted the data available to it in ways which
>the operatives who provided that data considered to be perverse to the
>point of insanity. These are the people who brought you the Bay of Pigs,
>after all.
well, a memoir written by an individual. classis american motif, too: organizations and institutions suck; individuals are great and can save the day. colin powell's autobio says the same.
i share your sympathies to some degree, but it's not because they are collective, it's because they are organizations and institutions that operate according to norms and practices that are constitutive of and constituted by oppression.
i think a much better read on the topic is, Jackall's _Moral Mazes_. it's a very good analyses of how bureaucracies break down.
>But I'm only prepared to defend the agnostic position; that we really
>can't say a priori whether or not Thiago or the US government has the
>greater analytical capability, and should thus probably address each
>others' arguments on their apparent merits in this instance. I'm not a
>fan of short ways with the pragmatic case against bombing which depend on
>the assumption that the powers that be are acting rationally.
agreed. i just didn't read that in what you wrote.
kelley