On Nov 7, 2010, at 4:04 PM, Miles Jackson wrote:
>
> This is exactly why I share Carrol's lack of patience for parsing
> people's political motives. In terms of the political and social
> effects of O's administration, O's motivations and intentions are
> irrelevant. --A crude analogy: a gun goes off, someone dies. That
> person will remain dead regardless of the intent of the person who
> fired the gun. (Saying "it was an accident, I didn't mean to do it"
> won't alter the effects of the gun shot.)
On the contrary, if you're a cop the effects of the gun shot include one dead body and one notch on your belt. If you're a black kid the effects include two dead bodies. Its a matter of motives. The prosecutors believe the cop's lie and reject the kid's truth out of hand.
Likewise, if the effects of a politician's actions are in accordance with his motives, the effect will be that he continues to act in the same way. If they aren't. he looks around, maybe desperately, for another course of action (Stalin's motive for allying with Hitler was to protect his rule over the USSR. When the effect of that action turned out to be the 1941 blitzkrieg he protected his rule over the USSR by all-out war against his recent ally).
People don't act unless they are motivated to do so. Obama, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin and the like carry out the policies that they expect, rightly or not, to achieve their ends. Their policies reflect their motivations, and their motivations can be read from their political course.
Shane Mage
Porphyry in his Abstinance from Animal Flesh suggests that there
are appropriate offerings to all the Gods, and to the highest the only offering acceptable is silence.