Speaking of reductionism, Zinni also said something very refreshing in the face of those that would reduce all/most/many Muslims to terrorists, ‘Islamists’, or some such epithet. He’s lived in Muslim countries for 17 years and has yet to meet a Muslim who’s even spoken of every alarmist’s favorite – the ‘Caliphate’. He continued to say that institutions in society have to be culturally acceptable as/and ‘order’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘stability’.
Gray said that we need to get back to who we, as Americans, are as a people. I took this to mean (based on his tangential stories and other things) good, just, open, smart and free – imbued with a truly pioneering spirit and a joy of discovery. He said we must educate society as a whole and that, actually, we know nothing of the world compared to what we could in truth. He also said that Foreign Policy and Domestic Policy should work to balance the equation of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. I must admit, I wasn’t prepared for such comments from a former Commandant of the USMC – and one of his magnitude at that. We were sitting in a building complex named for him. I’ll chalk that up to my own joy of discovery and hope for an anthropologist and/or philosopher in each future platoon.”
Thanks Isaac!
ADDENDUM:
The return of monster tdaxp graphics!!!!
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Anonymous:
July 18th, 2007 at 2:46 am
Mark,
It’s an honor to be re-posted on ZenPundit. Thank you. I’ve re-posted much of all of our ‘Quantico Cartel’ stuff on Lotus at work, along with some background docs, and it’s generating some good discussion. And, yeah, maybe I’ll get around to that other thing…
Isaac
mark:
July 18th, 2007 at 3:19 am
The honor is mine. Good material always gets pride of place here.
“I’ll chalk that up to my own joy of discovery and hope for an anthropologist and/or philosopher in each future platoon”
I note that Socrates and Wittgenstein were both noted for their performance in battle. David Kilcullen should like your sentiment as well.
deichmans:
July 19th, 2007 at 2:29 pm
A minor edit to Isaac’s very lucid comment: “10128” should read as “10^128” or “10**128” or “1E128” (i.e., many quintillion times googol, or a 1 followed by 128 zeros). There are estimated at 10^80 particles in the known universe, so these numbers are mind-bogglingly big.
You may be familiar with Huxley’s riddle of the monkeys: “Six monkeys, set to strum unintelligently on typewriters for millions of millions of years, would be bound in time to write all
the books in the British Museum.”
However, the real answer (which we had to prove in my Thermodynamic class) is that a billion monkeys, typing a 10 keys per second without pause, would take more than 10^28 years just to type Hamlet. Since the Universe is less than 2E10 years old, the probabilities of random strings of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be…” soliloquy are inordinately low.
The point is the general public’s grasp of large numbers — and associated probabilities — needs to be bolstered if we are to make effective policy decisions.
sf/ shane