Author: Milan
Crab juice
“HOLD FAST TO LOVE & JUSTICE”
Spring buds
US to withdraw from Afghanistan
The Biden administration has announced that most US forces will withdraw from Afghanistan by September 11th.
What have we learned since 2001 and what have the consequences of the war been? Could Al Qaeda have been expelled or destroyed without the invasion? How will the US / NATO / Canadian intervention affect Afghanistan’s long-term future?
Related:
- War is a Force that Gives us Meaning
- On Canada and peacekeeping
- Dangerous Afghan skies
- Donut holes in history
- Afghan opium
- ‘Enduring Freedom’ and Afghanistan
- The failure of liberal dreams for Afghanistan
- CIA given license to torture
- Two perspectives on air power and insurgency
- Improvised explosive devices
- Obama’s Nobel Prize
- Open thread: the future of Afghanistan
- The torture prorogation?
- How cynical should Obama make us?
- Obama and just war
- Prosecuting high-level Western war criminals
- Harperland: The Politics of Control
- Exploiting global misunderstanding for local purposes
- Fight them over there, not over here
- Open thread: Canada and Afghan detainees
- Indistinct nationalities
- Terrorism and counterfactuals
- Intentions, outcomes, and rejustifications
- JSOC and al-Qaeda
- Graeme Smith on NATO’s war in Afghanistan
- The draw of martyrdom
- The origin of al-Qaeda
- The success of bin Laden’s strategy
In a closed shell
Since I am going to be home and avoiding people indefinitely regadless, I am cutting out distractions to focus as completely as possible on getting thesis work done.
The rational mind as storyteller not decider
There is an intriguing hypothesis about the rational mind: while we think of it as a weigher of evidence that contributes to the decisions we make when faced with a choice, it’s possible that its real role is to construct a story after the fact about why we made the choice we did for instinctive or emotional reasons.
Chris Voss alludes to this in his book about negotiations:
In Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio explained a groundbreaking discovery he made. Studying people who had damage in the part of the brain where emotions are generated, he found that they all had something peculiar in common: They couldn’t make decisions. They could describe what they should do in logical terms, but they found it impossible to make even the simplest choice.
In other words, while we may use logic to reason ourselves toward a decision, the actual decision making is governed by emotion.
Voss, Chris. Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It. Penguin Random House, 2016. p. 122 (emphasis in original)
It has occurred to me that while the fundamental units of the physical universe may be the particles of the standard model or superstrings or something similar, the fundamental units of the psychological universe may be stories. We make decisions — perhaps — by analogy and imagination, using the stories we know as templates for projecting what could happen from one or another course of behaviour. This is compatible with the idea that generals are always fighting the last war, or that decision makers find an analogy as a schema for assessing the options before them in the present case (famously, the notion that states blundered into the first world war arguably motivated the appeasement policy toward Hitler which was later judged to have contributed to the second, while the lesson learned about the dangers of appeasement fed the undue combativeness of the cold war).
The idea that rationalization is after-the-fact storytelling risks feeding in to a nihilistic perspective that our decisions are just uncontrollable emergent phenomenon, coming out of a black box which we cannot control or influence, but that does not follow if we accept that we can influence the conditions that influence our emotions and train ourselves in how we respond emotionally. Voss’ book elaborates on this view with numerous practical details and examples, not taking for granted that people are emotional so they just do as they do, but highlighting how often-subtle mechanisms for influencing how people feel can powerfully influence how things turn out.
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