[MD] Bill's Intellectual Level

[Ant McWatt]

Platt misleadingly stated June 20th:

>“Craftsmanship, like honor, is something individuals hold internally as
>moral goals. They come from a deep intellectual understanding of how
>the world works at its best.”
>
>Steve quickly realised the low intellectual quality of this statement and 
>then corrected it (using a supporting section from chapter 6 from LILA):
>
>I suspected that honor was in SOLWAQI’s individual level. Honor is a
>social pattern in the MOQ because it is about social recognition and
>respect. It is also is a good word for describing Rigel’s values.

Ant McWatt comments:

Very true, Steve.  Moreover, thinking of the desert island illustration that 
I gave to Dan recently, a person stranded on their own can’t be honourable.  
It would be a useless concept because, like money or saying excuse me after 
sneezing, it needs at least two people (i.e. a society) to have any 
relevance.

Platt’s assertion that “Seems the author and I are on the same page” in 
regards to the intellectual level only appears correct if the section he 
quotes is not read in its full context.  When the sentence Platt refers to 
is read in its proper context, it can be seen that the “author” (Phaedrus) 
is not agreeing with Rigel but actually questioning the latter’s high regard 
for honour i.e. as I noted in my post of June 21st, the “author” states:

“There’s always been something wrong, logically,” the author went on.  “How
can an act of love, that does no injury to anyone, be so evil?...  I mean 
was it Lila who was to blame for your friend’s misfortune or was it his wife 
and his so-called friends and his superiors at the bank?  Who really did him 
in?”

Moreover, as DMB reminded us on June 25th, in Chapter 31 of LILA the 
hypocrisy of Rigel’s position is shown when it comes to light that Rigel 
also had sexual relations with Lila:

“Did you ever have sexual relations with her?” Phædrus asked.  It was a
shot in the dark.  Rigel looked at him with surprise.  Then he laughed 
deprecatingly.
“Everybody has!” he said.  “You’re no exception in that regard!”

So to return to Bill Clinton and the neo-cons (who I’m sure have never 
engaged in adultery, drugs, etc), I was fortunate to recently view programme 
2 of the “Powers of Nightmare” TV series that Arlo mentioned last month.   
Note the following from the transcript where David Brock (the journalist at 
the centre of the Arkansas Project which was the neo-con campaign set-up to 
discredit Clinton by any means) now admits that the attacks on Clinton went 
too far, and, in fact, corrupted conservative politics:


INTERVIEWER (off-camera): Was Whitewater true?
BROCK : No! I mean, there was no criminal wrongdoing in Whitewater. 
Absolutely not. It was a land deal that the Clintons lost money on. It was a 
complete inversion of what happened.
INTERVIEWER : Was Vince Foster killed [by the Clintons]?
BROCK : No. He killed himself.
INTERVIEWER : Did the Clintons smuggle drugs?
BROCK : Absolutely not.
INTERVIEWER : Did those promoting these stories [i.e. those politicians and 
journalists that Platt puts on a pedestal] know that this was not true, that 
none of these stories were true?
BROCK : They did not care.
INTERVIEWER : Why not?
BROCK : Because they were having a devastating effect. So why stop? It was 
terrorism. Political terrorism [but that’s OK because they weren’t 
“biologically terrorists”].
INTERVIEWER : But you were one of the agents.
BROCK : Absolutely. Absolutely.

http://www.daanspeak.com/TranscriptPowerOfNightmares2.html

(and also at: www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares)

As Joe Conason (the author of “The Hunting of the President”) observes after 
the above section:

“In the leadership of conservatism during the Clinton era, there was an 
element of corruption. There was an element of a willingness to do anything 
to achieve the goal of bringing Clinton down. There was a way in which the 
people who perceived Clinton as immoral behaved immorally themselves. They 
ended up behaving worse than the people who they were attacking.”

As with Rigel, the hypocrisy and immoral behaviour of the neo-cons make for 
disturbing viewing/reading.  But note their belief (like their counterparts 
in Fundamentalist Islam) that they are on a moral crusade.  And, in a sense, 
they are, but it’s a moral crusade based on social values, not intellectual 
ones.  And this is why these “moral” crusades have largely failed.

As Adam Curtis (the writer of the “Power of Nightmares”) observes:

“All the moral fury, and the deception, came to nothing. The impeachment 
failed because the polls consistently showed that Americans still did not 
care about these [socially orientated] moral issues. One leading 
neoconservative, William Bennett, wrote a book called “The Death of 
Outrage”, which blamed the people. He accused the public of making a deal 
with the devil. Their failure, he said, to support the impeachment, was 
evidence of their moral corruption.”

Ant McWatt comments:

Unlike Bennett, I’d say the failure of Clinton’s impeachment was evidence of 
the American public’s ability to place intellectual values over social ones. 
  Since the 19th century, they have largely moved on from the Victorian 
orientated sentiments of Bennett.  Moreover, note how similar the sentiment 
of Bennett’s is to Zawahiri (Bin Laden’s colleague) concerning the 
“immorality” of the general populace (whether in the States or the Middle 
East):

“1997 was the [Fundamentalist Muslims] failure. Egypt, Algeria; it worked 
nowhere. It went wrong because populations would not back them. Because even 
people who were sympathetic to them in the beginning were frightened away by 
their violence, by their incapacity to communicate and to have access to the 
people, and this was very clear in Zawahiri’s book “Knights under the 
Prophet’s Banner”, where he sort of goes back from this experiment, and 
laments over their incapacity to raise the consciousness of the masses, and 
feels that, you know, as a vanguard they did not manage to communicate. They 
remained isolated, and this is why they failed. And this is when they 
started this new strategy.”

Another important point that Curtis draws out is that the neo-cons and the 
Fundamentalist Muslims have given each other a useful phantom enemy to fight 
against:

“In May, 1998, [Osama] bin-Laden and Zawahiri invited a group of journalists 
to a press conference, where they announced a new jihad. Zawahiri was 
convinced that it was not their theories that were to blame for the failure; 
it was the fault of the Muslim masses. Their minds had been corrupted by the 
liberal ideas from the West. But rather than give up, they believed that the 
solution was to attack the source of the corruption directly. The new jihad 
would be against America itself….”

“What Zawahiri and bin-Laden were about to do would dramatically affect the 
future of the neoconservative movement. By 1998, all their attempts to 
transform America by creating a moral revolution had failed. Faced with the 
indifference of the people, the neoconservatives had become marginalized, in 
both domestic and foreign policy. But with the attacks that were about to 
hit America, the neoconservatives would at last find the evil enemy that 
they had been searching for ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union. And 
in their reaction to the attacks, the neoconservatives would transform the 
failing Islamist movement into what would appear to be the grand 
revolutionary force that Zawahiri had always dreamed of. But much of it 
would exist only in people’s imaginations. It would be the next phantom 
enemy.”

Ant McWatt concludes:

It seems to me that as long as the majority of people keep supporting 
intellectual values (and the politicians/leaders promoting the latter) 
rather than the myths and social values promoted by right-wing "religious" 
extremists then things should work out just fine (politically speaking).  
However, matters aren’t helped by people such as Platt who not only confuse 
social values with intellectual ones (to support their own political biases) 
but also uncritically accept and parrot the fundamentalist myths (with the 
latter’s self-fulfilling prophecies of doom).  That's not Quality.

Best wishes,

Anthony


“The Power of Nightmare series, I recommend you check it out… With the 
collapse of the Soviet Union, as the Absolute Evil that America (the 
Absolute Good) had set itself up against, new and ever-changing bogeymen 
have to be invented, the people must always see something as a ‘Great 
Threat’. And the [fundamentalist] politicos (BOTH sides, mind you) pander 
and sell this fear.”

“Whether or not such a ‘need to be afraid’ is human nature, the need to have 
the
world illusively dichotomized into Absolute Good vs. Absolute Evil seems to 
be.
Complex historical situations are perverted into wars that pit us (The Noble
Warrior Fighting Eternally For Truth and Justice) against them (The Evil
Barbarian Seeking to Enslave and Destroy the Human Race). But one thing is 
for
sure, the politicos are playing it for all its worth.”

“And so goes the Nightmare... ‘You reap what you sow.’”

(Arlo Bensinger, “Manufacturing Nightmare” MD post, May 6th 2006)


.

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