zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — it occurred to me to ask ]
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I have a question for the assembled horde — but first, the shoes:

Getting your feet x-rayed and fitted for a new pair of shoes, ca. 1950

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You know the way they say (Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, eg, with no implied claim of veracity here, just interest) that you go through various stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance?

Suppose there are stages of response to terror that governments, agencies, leaders, pundits, analysts & journos tend to go though. Suppose at the start they lean to the vengeful and are therefore prone to see things in black and white, no nuance, confrontational, response intense & military rather than diplomatic — and in later stages get calmer, begin to see motives less single-strandedly, catch details previously missed, suggest responses that are more measured, more proportional, etc.

If we got really clear on how this tends to work, could we begin to have an understanding of the ratio between “heat of the moment” and “after the fog of war clears” thinking, which in turn could allow us to discount initial reactions, look for “next stage” signals in the cognitive periphery, and get a more accurate read through the fog from the start?

We know now, eg, that the first reaction at OKC was to expect Muslim blame, but it become clear that McVeigh did it — and first expectations were dashed. With WMD in Iraq the clearing of the fog took longer, but it still happened.

I’m suggesting that people who have just been affronted or attacked will understand better, later, and that for more appropriate response, some time lag may be required. But does the lag time have formal features, styles of assumption that gradually give way identifiably and reliably to more nuance and accuracy as certain formal issues are addressed — so there could be a checklist, and a kind of 2 week, two month, two year, two decade look ahead / lookback methodology devised, charted, and implemented, eg as a part of scenario planning and / or red teaming?

Is some of this implicit in the second O in the OODA loop? Can we take it usefully further?

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Yes, when I was a boy, you stepped up to the x-ray machine in the shoe store, pushed your feet in and peered into the viewer at the top of the machine to see how well your new shoes fit your ghost-of-a-skeleton feet.

Later on, this was viewed as an unhealthy way to judge the fit of a shoe, and life and choice in shoe stores became more complicated.

[ by Charles Cameron — a terrific example of the DoubleQuote form, drawing on Obama at Ben Gurion Airport and Palmerston in the House of Commons, and why the form is useful ]
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Some time in between t-zero and t-aleph-null, some time between the First Day of Creation and Judgment Day, some time in between the Big Bang and the Heat Death of the Universe, there’s a stretch of time known as always.

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What does juxtaposing the two statements allow us to understand?

That times have changed?

That what you tell a foreign government is not what you tell your own?

That Brits are more understated and Americans more plainspoken?

That President Obama is showing specific support for Israel, while Palmerston was expressing the general rule which covers all such utterances?

That the word “always” doesn’t necessarily mean “for ever”, “unto the ages of ages” as the Eastern Church has it?

Perhaps “for the foreseeable future” would be a better phrase to use, if it didn’t sound so iffy. I’d say it means something closer to “in continuity” than to “in perpetuity”.

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The great thing about DoubleQuotes as a form is that they jump-start you into thinking about samenesses and differences, without demanding which particular implications you will select, thus giving rise to multiple possibilities and enlarging the scope of narrative or discussion.

And while I’ve sharpened the pairing of quotes — or graphics — into a tool for repeated use, it’s already a habitual form of thinking, as we can see from the fact that these two particular quotes were juxtaposed by Sam Roggeveen in his post, America’s BFF: Obama calls it, in the Lowy Institute’s Interpreter today.

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We naturally pair similars to contrast and compare them: it may be the most basic device that human memory affords us — this reminds me of that.

Here are a few of my own old favorites…

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You can read Obama’s speech, from which the excerpt above was taken, on this Israel Times page.

[ by Charles Cameron — global warming, global curriculum ]
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you can turn an aircraft carrier pretty fast -- but the human population?

Bill McKibben has an article out in Rolling Stone, Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math, in which he says:

When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic. But to grasp the seriousness of our predicament, you just need to do a little math.

Well, no you don’t.

You need something closer to global understanding. Once you’ve gathered — via that “little math” — that we’re not on a sustainable track, you’ll need to understand a few other things. Like:

• how individual minds get into and out of ruts
• how slow the turning circle of a society can be, and
• the places to intervene in a system

Look, I’m sorry to be so blunt, but… the problem isn’t understanding, it’s changing.

Psychology. Inwardness.

And I can’t speak for economy or ideology, but believe me — theology will have a role to play!