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Blind Loyalty verses Competence


LaurieAG

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Blind Loyalty verses Competence

 

IMHO thats the crucial point where things always start to go wrong, the appearence of competence as opposed to actual competence or if you like style over substance.

 

Why does the political animal always choose the wrong response at the most crucial times and cause much harm to those they were supposedly trying to gain benefit for?

 

Why do they punish honesty and integrity and reward dishonesty and slavish loyalty?

 

Where does human civilisation expect to get to in the future if it cannot break the mould forced on us by our politicians and their fervent desire to win at all costs?

 

I would like all of your honest opinions, especially those who wish to argue that blind loyalty is more important than competence, and welcome any realistic suggestions that could be implemented to prevent the human races political race to oblivion.

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Blind Loyalty verses Competence

This title appears to proposes the dichotomy that blind loyalty and competence are opposites.

 

In a philological sense, this dichotomy is, I believe, false. Competence is the ability to reliably perform a particular activity, while blind loyalty is the trait of remaining allegiant to a person, organization, or principle, regardless of any but the strongest evidence that one should not. Though I’ve not at hand sound statistical data supporting it, numerous examples of people who are “blindly loyal”, such as soldiers, and very competent, particularly in the jobs and vocations involving the people, organizations, and principles to which they’re blindly loyal, as well as many people who strive to avoid blind loyalty, such as self-described skeptics and free-thinkers, and very competent in many professions and disciplines, are sufficient to disprove any strong correlation between blind obedience and competence.

 

Psychologically, some modern schools of though suggest a more complex relationship between blind loyalty and competence. In his 1996 book Moral Politics, George Lakoff proposed that, in cognitive psychological terms, people can be divided into two groups by the conceptual model of morality they hold. One of these models, “strict father morality”, promotes unquestioning loyalty to authority, while the other, “Nurturant Parent morality”, emphasizes questioning authority. According to this model (terribly oversimplified) SFM holders, however, also tend to favor an ethic of success through hard work and practice, while NPM holders tend to favor one of success through flexibility. In its most common usage, I think competence implies the ability to perform routine tasks adequately, while, in my anecdotal experience, people who are unreliably competent at routine tasks are often best at handling novel situations. Though a bit of a stretch, I guess this suggest that blindly loyal people may be more likely to be, in the usual sense, merely competent, while questioning ones may be less competent in the usual sense, but more “brilliant” at the unusual.

IMHO thats the crucial point where things always start to go wrong, the appearence of competence as opposed to actual competence or if you like style over substance.

 

Why does the political animal always choose the wrong response at the most crucial times and cause much harm to those they were supposedly trying to gain benefit for?

As a claim that all of or a representative of a large collection of people always succeed or fail at some critical task, I believe this is hyperbole, and incorrect. Political decision are rarely, I think, simply wrong or right, but fraught with “shades of grey”, where their consequences are often difficult to determine even long after they’ve occurred. However this aside, I believe Laurie makes brings up a good point.

 

Confusing the appearance of competence – which I think might be better phrased the appearance of goodness – with its actual presence, is, I think due primarily to a lack of critical thinking skills – a lack much discussed, along with how and if it can be remedied, in these and many other internet forums

 

Why do they punish honesty and integrity and reward dishonesty and slavish loyalty?

From an anthropological perspective, “they” – governments and leaders – obviously reward slavish loyalty in order to encourage it, as an even somewhat authoritarian state can’t maintain its authority without loyalty, and a totally authoritarian one requires that loyalty to be total, that is, slavish.

 

A more interesting question, I think, is why, if as conventional political science wisdom (or at least my take of it) holds republics of free-thinking, informed, consenting citizens are presumably the desired goal for present day governments, authoritarianism and slavishness remains an important factor in politics? I believe the best answer to this lies in cognitive psych theories like Lakoff’s, which explain why large number of people in many societies – SFM holders, in Lakoff’s terms – believe that authority and unquestioning obedience are, if not wholly good, necessary for their states and societies to survive.

 

This, I believe, in a nutshell, explains why strong leaders (in some circles one would call them fascist, but as his isn’t such a circle, I’ll avoid more than this mention of this inflammatory term) and unquestioning loyalty, reflected in such slogans as “my country, right or wrong”, remain in many people’s opinion good and/or necessary. In my personal opinion, another key trait of strong father morality holders, not directly implied by that conceptual model of morality, it the belief that moral models other than SFM are not only wrong, but will lead to the annihilation of their holders – in other words, that if nations and societies are not strong, they will actually be physically or culturally destroyed by those which are. I believe this is wrong, and atavistic.

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Hi CraigD,

 

while blind loyalty is the trait of remaining allegiant to a person, organization, or principle, regardless of any but the strongest evidence that one should not.

 

I must point out that redefining 'Blind Loyalty' to mean 'Competence' is just a clever political tactic that redefines wrong to mean right and totally reinforces my main point and the topic of this thread.

 

I Googled 'neocon Lakoff "Karl Rove"' and got 14,000 hits.

 

Thank you very much for your contribution CraigD.

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It was difficult for me to read between the lines of the last post because there were so few of them. However, it did seem that you were criticising Craig for a biased and hence worthless contribution.

If that was your intent I should be interested to here some specific rebuttals.

If that was not your intent perhaps you could rephrase, or contribute funds to allow me to take lessons in English comprehension.

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Hi Eclogite,

 

It was difficult for me to read between the lines of the last post because there were so few of them. However, it did seem that you were criticising Craig for a biased and hence worthless contribution.

 

I highlighted the redefinition in the quotes used in CraigD's post and explained it succinctly. I was not criticising his post but questioning the validity of the political method of redefining right and wrong as defined by neocons.

 

If you have any genuine contribution to this thread then please state your opinions with regard to the subject matter of my original post without attempting to justify the redefinition of 'blind loyalty' to mean 'competence'.

 

I just Googled 'Lakoff neocon' and got 44,500 hits.

 

Thank you for your contribution Eclogite.

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The past 2 times I posted on this thread and tried to post again I was informed that the server was too busy despite the fact that there were only 3 non guest users logged in at my last attempt and I had just accessed Google both times.

 

I had to completely reboot my computer (and gain a new IP) to be able to post on this forum again. I have never had this problem before and can only wonder what users of Google China put up with.

 

You may wonder what China has got to do with the topic of this thread and the discussion so far?

 

Recently the British government protested about the Chinese government prosecuting and executing a British subject who suffered from a mental problem. While the British don't execute people anymore they have no qualms about prosecuting and jailing people who their own experts claim are so mental that they cannot be brought to trial 3 months earlier.

 

The problem is that the only prosecution of this nature so far was for an alleged offence where the bodies of two 11 year old girls were found in a ditch outside a US airforce base less than 6 months after the British government had signed a waiver against prosecuting any US soldiers on their home soil in a slavish example of political 'Blind Loyalty' to the US military.

 

Competent soldiers don't need this protection from prosecution and at the moment the most competent soldiers on this planet are the Isreali soldiers who are locked up in jail because they refuse to go on missions that have a high likelyhood of killing innocent civilians.

 

While the US military has got a reputation for treating its own women with contempt and makes very little progress in preventing the rape and sexual exploitation of its own women in its forces the female children of other countries have a habit of being killed or raped especially if they live around US military bases and are aged between 10 and 14.

 

Why does the US military protect sexual offenders in a show of 'blind loyalty' when the victims countries want to bring the offenders to justice? Why did the people of south Korea consider the US as more of a threat to their nation than the North Koreans in an international survey a couple of years ago, before the US politicians got their politicians to sign the waiver?

 

I'll tell you why. When your politicians condone the horrendous treatment of your own women and your allies children in the interests of the resemblence of 'competence' by redefining wrong to mean right, it doesn't matter how many battles you win or how many enemies or collateral damage you kill or maim, if you cannot protect the innocents you will never win a war, ever.

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It should be very obvious that competence, at least in military matters, involves true offense against those who would harm humanity and the true defense of humanity. not just one or the other as narrowly defined politically but a combination of both. It should also be apparent that, unless you subscribe to a paranoid 'us and them' political type mentality, that offense involves defeating the enemy within and without just as true defense involves a combination of defending 'humanity' within and without.

 

If you regard defending 'your own' in the political sense when they are the actual enemy of 'humanity' through their crimes then it's not surprising that you will also attack 'innocents' when they are not the actual enemy in the same vein.

 

An article in The Australian Newspaper today illustrate this point.

 

Sailor broke ranks to rescue

...

Paul Hetherington told an inquest into the deaths of 5 Afghans aboard SEIV 36 when it exploded off Ashmore reef last year that he had found several asylum-seekers in the water holding on to the burning boat. He was trying to reach asylum=seekers in the water from his inflatable boat when he heard an order by loud hailer from the patrol boat HMAS Childers to get away from the burning vessel. Leading Seaman Hetherington said he disregarded the order. "There were people on the burning boat, sir", he said, "They needed rescuing; we were there."

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Hi JMJones,

 

I would love to see statistical support for any of the claims made in the last post.

 

Here's a report for the US Congress. Just how many dead girls do you consider a statistic?

 

http://www.fcnl.org/pdfs/6may03_rok.pdf

 

Underlying these sentiments is the declining sense of threat that

South Koreans feel from North Korea. This trend was evident in the late 1990s, and

has deepened since the North-South Korean summit in June 2000.10 Two events in

2002 caused the critiques to coalesce into massive anti-U.S. demonstrations:

President Bush’s inclusion of North Korea in his “axis of evil” countries, and the

June 2002 killing of two Korean schoolgirls by a U.S. military vehicle.

 

Thank you for your contribution.

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1995 Okinawan rape incident - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

The 1995 Okinawan rape incident refers to a rape that took place on September 4, 1995, when three U.S. servicemen, U.S. Navy Seaman Marcus Gill and U.S. Marines Rodrico Harp and Kendrick Ledet, all from Camp Hansen on Okinawa, rented a van and kidnapped a 12-year-old 6th-grade Japanese girl. They beat her, duct-taped her eyes and mouth shut, and bound her hands. Gill and Harp then proceeded to rape her, while Ledet claims he only pretended to do so out of fear of Gill. The incident led to further debate over the continued presence of U.S. forces in Japan.

...

After the incident became known, public outrage erupted, especially over the U.S.-Japan Status of Forces Agreement, which gives the U.S. the right of extraterritoriality (exemption from jurisdiction of local law). While the crime was committed off of a U.S. military base, the U.S. initially took the men into custody, but later handed them over to Japanese law enforcement to be tried.

 

Rape of Iraqi girls by US mercenaries and soldiers was rampant in Baghdad

 

Case 1:

 

On May 22, 2003, in Baghdad, a nine-year-old girl was abducted from the stairs of the building where she lived, taken to an abandoned building nearby, and raped. A family friend who saw the young girl immediately following the rape informed international human rights groups.

 

The report quotes the family friend, "She was sitting on the stairs, here, at 4:00 p.m. It seems to me that probably they hit her on the back of the head with a gun and then took her to [a neighboring] building. She came back fifteen minutes later, bleeding [from the vaginal area]. [she was still bleeding two days later, so] we took her to the hospital."

 

A human rights group saw a copy of the medical report by the U.S. military doctor who treated the baby girl six days later. The report documented bruising in the vaginal area, a posterior vaginal tear, and a broken hymen. Lieutenant Monica Casmaer, a physician’s assistant attached to a U.S. military unit, examined the nine year old girl. with the pediatrician. She described the injuries as fairly severe, especially given the time that had elapsed before she was examined.

 

Case 2:

 

A young Iraqi woman told an international human rights group that armed men abducted her from her home on a Thursday night in early May, 2003. She said her captors gang-raped her at an unknown location before dropping her in an unfamiliar district of Baghdad the following morning.

 

The report of the woman says, "I was here, on the stairs by the door when a car pulled up with four men. My daughter was on the upper floor, I was on the ground floor. The four men got out of the car and approached me. They were armed, they put guns to my head and said come with us. I screamed and said take the pistol away. My daughter started to scream. They pulled my hair and pushed me in the car and they started shooting at the house, more than fifty shots. My daughter was screaming the whole time. Many neighbors started to shoot too, but they couldn’t catch them".

 

The victim added "In the car they made me put my head down between my legs, and put a pistol to my head. They said that if I moved my head I’d be killed, so I don’t know where they took me…. [Then they took me into a building where] they were hitting me on the head and arms, and I still can’t stretch out because my whole body hurts. They used hot water on my head, my eyes still burn from that and my arms. They raped me, in many, many ways. They kept me until the next day, I begged them, I said I have a young child, I said she might die if I leave her alone. And so then they left me alone. When I came home my appearance was so bad, my hair was a mess, my mouth was bloody and my legs too. They burned my legs with cigarettes. They bit me, on my shoulders and arms. All of them raped me, there were five or six more than the four who kidnapped me, there were ten of them total and I was raped by all ten of them.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

 

There was an outpouring of frustration and anger by women survivors of military rape, and their supporters who attended The National Summit of Women Veterans Issues that took place on June 18 -20. They complained about the Department of Defense (DOD) refusal to act to stop rape, and the difficulty many survivors have in getting benefits and services from the Veterans Administration. Sexual assault of US servicewomen and men is widespread – some estimates are as high as 43-50% among some sectors. Among active duty soldiers, 78% of women have experienced sexual harassment. At the same time, some of these women survivors of rape have been fighting for 20 years to get benefits and services owed to them, calling this deprivation a second and third rape. Many women veteran survivors have experienced homelessness, one of the workshop topics, as a result of their trauma and lack of benefits.
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Thank you for your prompt reply. It should go without saying that any instance of sexual assault is horrendous, nothing I say should be construed as an attempt to make an excuse for these actions.

 

I happened to be in Okinawa at the time of the 1995 incident. Your statement-

 

While the US military has got a reputation for treating its own women with contempt and makes very little progress in preventing the rape and sexual exploitation of its own women in its forces the female children of other countries have a habit of being killed or raped especially if they live around US military bases and are aged between 10 and 14.

 

We (ALL US service members on ALL bases in Okinawa) were under base restriction for several weeks after the news broke. And for months after we could only leave base in uniform, to make identification of us as military personnel particularly easy. The acts committed by those people were horrendous, and they were punished. The above assertion is simply false. If you look at any group of more than 30,000 individuals for more than 50 years, you are bound to find some horrendous acts happen. This is a human problem, not specifically a US military problem.

 

There DOES appear to be an abnormally high number of assaults by male US service personnel against female personnel. There is no excuse for this and there must be a continuing effort to change the off-duty social structure in the US military to prevent this. I am not current on their efforts, but in the past it has been largely left up to local commanders to ensure that there is no pattern of harassment taking place. It is my personal opinion that unit commanders should be held more accountable if they allow an atmosphere to develop that makes women vulnerable to attack, just as a boss is liable in a civilian workplace for negligence.

 

The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) that you deride in your post is absolutely necessary to prevent harassment and unjust prosecution of off-base personnel from locals, for a similar reason that foreign diplomats receive partial immunity. In the 1995 incident, after it was determined that there was a reasonable expectation that the individuals involved were guilty, they were handed over for prosecution by the locals. This is precisely the way it is supposed to work. You can make the argument that we shouldn't be there in the first place, and frankly you'd get no argument from me, but that is another topic altogether.

 

I do not see how the reference to an anti-American shift in popular sentiment in South Korea due to the acquittal of service members involved in a fatal traffic accident supports the statement-

Why does the US military protect sexual offenders in a show of 'blind loyalty' when the victims countries want to bring the offenders to justice? Why did the people of south Korea consider the US as more of a threat to their nation than the North Koreans in an international survey a couple of years ago, before the US politicians got their politicians to sign the waiver?

 

I do not disagree that an institutional problem exists in the US military, but I do not see how making exaggerated and inflammatory claims helps to solve this problem.

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Hi JMJones,

 

Thank you for your prompt reply. It should go without saying that any instance of sexual assault is horrendous, nothing I say should be construed as an attempt to make an excuse for these actions.

 

The lack of progress with regards to this problem is the real problem and the core of my initial argument.

 

The acts committed by those people were horrendous, and they were punished. The above assertion is simply false. If you look at any group of more than 30,000 individuals for more than 50 years, you are bound to find some horrendous acts happen. This is a human problem, not specifically a US military problem.

 

I couldn't find a reference to the previous instance where 2 girls were raped and it took 8 years before the military returned the servicemen for trial at the insistance of the Japanes govt. In international perspectives, particularly with the US being regarded as a sort of 'global policeman', these types of things must not be covered up but should be resolved to give a perception of justice not blind loyalty.

 

The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) that you deride in your post is absolutely necessary to prevent harassment and unjust prosecution of off-base personnel from locals, for a similar reason that foreign diplomats receive partial immunity.

 

Australia didn't sign the agreement but other countries around the world, allies, have been pressured into signing it. This is a political path that just allows the problems to be swept under the carpet instead of being resolved. I still maintain that any competent soldier is in controll of their behavior in and out of the field and does not need such legal protections if they are competent.

 

I do not see how the reference to an anti-American shift in popular sentiment in South Korea due to the acquittal of service members involved in a fatal traffic accident supports the statement-

 

You might notice that there were 2 separate statements, sentences in fact, each ending with a '?'. I was taught that the '.' at the bottom of '?' removes the requirement for a reduntant full stop at the end of a discrete sentence that ends in a question mark. This may be why you conflate my two separate sentences into what you regard as 'exaggerated and inflammatory claims'.

 

con·flate (kən-flāt')

1.To bring together; meld or fuse.

2.To combine (two variant texts, for example) into one whole.

 

Doing nothing and sweeping things under the carpet to give an appearance of unity does not help solve the problems either they just hide the real problems and allow things to fester. I think tactically that the good men in the military, such as yourself, should make a decision to resolve this problem ASAP, out in the open, before the women unite with the gays and resolve it without you, possibly in ways that might not be to your own liking.

 

Once again thank you for your contribution.

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