{"id":262,"date":"2003-11-25T06:00:24","date_gmt":"2003-11-25T06:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:08:25","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:08:25","slug":"calpundit_on_terrorism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=262","title":{"rendered":"Calpundit on Terrorism"},"content":{"rendered":"

So Calpundit Kevin replied<\/a> to my post<\/a> on “sticking it out” below, and nailed me on one point that I thought I’d covered, but on rereading realized I truly hadn’t.<\/p>\n

He interprets my post as suggesting that the reason to stay in Iraq was less to rebuild the country than to show determination. Note that I think that would be a silly damn thing to do, and a waste of lives and treasure (which I thought I’d pointed out with the Schaar quote) and wish I’d written more clearly to make that point. We’re there to remove an evil dictatorship and to prevent the resources of that country from being used against us, against the people of the region, and against the people of the country itself. I believe that doing this will ultimately have a positive effect on a broader conflict which I perceive we are in. I think that to succeed in either of those efforts, we will have to both be determined and show determination.What I mean by ‘determination’ isn’t so much in the day-to-day policy arena as in the overarching goals and in how we communicate those goals. A bit more Churchill and a bit less Hamlet, if that makes any sense. And my point in doing that is that I genuinely believe that we are in a dialog between peoples, a dialog that is in ideas and words as well as blood. The hope is that through handling one well, we won’t need to handle the other.<\/p>\n

Speaking of which I went over to Calpundit’s comments section<\/a> and walked away kind of depressed. It’s not that they don’t like me – hell, lots of people in the real world don’t like me, which tells me that I’m an actual person as opposed to a Beanie Baby – it’s that I really and truly just don’t get the worldview that they are speaking from. I spend a lot of time on the left side of the media and blog world, and am increasingly finding islands there where the words are English and yet I just don’t understand the concepts laid out in those words, and I’m finding that depressing and frustrating, given my goal of creating constructive dialog. <\/p>\n

That’s my problem – I ought to be smart and flexible enough to understand arguments I may or may not agree with. And I need to do some work on that; there are too many people sharing a beliefset for there not to be an argument there, and I need to figure out what the hell those arguments are and what it is about them I object to so strongly.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile I’m reading boatloads of energy papers, and will get around to writing something about it soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So Calpundit Kevin replied to my post on “sticking it out” below, and nailed me on one point that I thought I’d covered, but on rereading realized I truly hadn’t. He interprets my post as suggesting that the reason to stay in Iraq was less to rebuild the country than to show determination. Note that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=262"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}