The Internet has given huge libraries to ransack for free. Why should we not be teaching ourselves instead of having others do our thinking. When did we lose the knack of thinking for ourselves instead of parroting the ideas of Limbaugh, Beck – and of those on the Left? (Fairness makes me add that last bit but who else but the Right delights in the concept of Dittohead?)

So some suggesting reading – a place to start – for William James follow.

Why James?

• Because he was the last great American philosopher. Dewey seems dry in comparison. Others neither as broad or as original.
• Because I think his Will to Believe trumps Nietzsche’s Will to Power.
• Because his ideas have something to say about our current society and politics.

Pragmatism in the 21st century essay by Wesley Cooper.

WILLIAM JAMES SOCIETY

Episteme William James Links

Book overview

Essays in Radical Empiricism shows William James concerned with ultimate reality and moving toward a metaphysical system. The twelve essays originally appeared in journals between 1904 and 1906. James himself collected them to illustrate what he called “radical empiricism,” but this volume was not published until 1912, two years after his death. Included are such seminal essays as “Does Consciousness Exist?” and “A World of Pure Experience.” The distinguished scholar and biographer Ralph Barton Perry, who edited this volume, called the essays essential to an understanding of James’s writings.

By Garry Wills

Tanenhaus has studied Buckley very closely, and he must know more about him than I do, so perhaps his biography will validate the judgments just sketchily indicated in this brief book. Meanwhile we have his very original take on the last few decades of American politics, prickly, revisionist, and provocative. He makes us look at everything through a different lens. And whatever Buckley’s final views, Tanenhaus makes a scathing and convincing case against what George W. Bush tried to present as a legitimate conservatism:

And then there was Iraq, the event that shaped Bush’s presidency and, by most accounts, brought both him and the movement to ruin….The Iraq war was the event most at odds with classical conservative thinking. So indifferent to the actual requirements of civil society at home, Bush’s war planners gave no serious thought to how difficult it might be to create such a society in a distant land with a vastly different history. Those within the administration who tried to make this case were marginalized or removed from power.

At least there was no whiff of Burke in that.

I think Obama really agonizes over Afghanistan.  I think like a good many of us, he is offended that Bush never brought bin Laden to heel.  That there was a completely stupid war in Iraq while the people who killed our fellow Americans got away altogether.

Some people say we are tired of the wars brought us by Bush and the neo-cons.  Frank Herbert wrote about this in his Fed Up With War.

Americans’ minds are on other things, like trying to figure out why, if the Great Recession is over, as Ben Bernanke seems to believe, the employment landscape still looks like a toxic waste dump.

A New York Times/CBS News poll found that eight years after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, there is a general feeling of disenchantment with our military involvement there and a desire to bring it to an end. About half of all Americans believe that the war has had no effect on the threat of terrorism, and a majority want the troops out of there in two years.

Americans are tired of the war. Some of the young people currently being outfitted for combat were just 10 or 11 years old when Al Qaeda struck the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001. They are heading off to a conflict that most Americans are no longer interested in. The difference between the public’s take on this war and that of the nation’s top civilian and military leadership is both stunning and ominous.

Yeah, I know – I got the same problems, the same distractions as I wonder if I will survive this year or go completely broke.

And I strongly suspect that Obama is thinking hard on these points:

What we need to be assessing are the implications of forcing still more conflict on a public that is broke, dispirited and fed up with eight years of continuous warfare that have not yielded a victory parade or a sense that the nation is reasonably secure.

If the conflict in Afghanistan is as crucial to American national security as President Obama has said, then he needs to make that case to the public, clearly and compellingly. A presidential call to arms to meet a threat of that magnitude should surely overshadow the national debate on health care.

A lot has changed since Obama was elected and not all of it good:  an anemic economy, Karzai’s lousy election.

For all of Rush Limbaugh’s fulminating, this President has never indicated any liking for excessive spending.  He is going to save money where he can.  That thinking is why I think we withdrew the missile “shield” from Eastern Europe.  He seems to me to know how imperial overreach has ruined other empires.  A wrong move here could push us into financial ruin or international embarrassment, or both.  Neither thought seems to have crossed the minds of the conservatives – too far past their parasitic desire to remain in power.

Unlike the loud mouths on the right, I have never gotten the impression this President does not consider it his purpose to defend this country.  Garry Wills laments how much of the national security state remains standing under Obama.

Now a new president quickly becomes aware of the vast empire that is largely invisible to the citizenry. The United States maintains an estimated one thousand military bases in other countries. I say “estimated” because the exact number, location, and size of the bases are either partly or entirely cloaked in secrecy, among other things to protect nuclear installations.The secrecy involved is such that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy did not even know, at first, that we had nuclear missiles stationed in Turkey.

I have the same lament, but turning around empire may be harder than turning the ship of state.  The point here is that we do have an empire to manage.

When the neo-cons and the Republicans talked of withdrawal from Iraq as a surrender, a defeat, I thought what are they talking about?  We will have to pay reparations to al-Qaeda?  Surrender territory?  (I would have given up land around Crawford, Texas for that).  That we would look slighter in the world?  As if the Bush Administration had not already done with its use of phony intelligence to indulge our power in Iraq.  (Add to that now the former Vice President’s obvious taste for S & M and we should all blush for shame).

But with Afghanistan we face a more dangerous consequence to our failure.  Afghanistan is not ours alone: it belongs to NATO and to Pakistan.  And, do not forget that Pakistan has nuclear weapons.  No worries there about the meaning of Nigerian yellow cake.  Pakistan has the real thing and the means to get it where they want it.

Obama took to treating the problem as a regional one some time ago, and continues to do so:

The indications from different Asia Times Online sources are that next summer the battle between the Taliban and NATO forces will no longer be restricted to Afghanistan – it will expand inside Pakistan. The primary reason for this, sources say, is the deployment of coalition forces in Afghan border provinces such as Helmand.

Skimming the McChrystal report shows that the General is thinking of getting the population on our side.  It seems the politicians are thinking along the same lines:

Seems pretty simple to me: if the choice is between two choices the one that ought to win is the one that improves the lives of me and mine.  Which is why I think Frank Rich goes a bit off the tracks with this paragraph:

Obama’s decision, whichever it is, will demand all the wisdom and political courage he can muster. If he adds combat troops, he’ll be extending a deteriorating eight-year-long war without a majority of his country or his own party behind him. He’ll have to explain why more American lives should be yoked to the Karzai “government.” He’ll have to be honest in estimating the cost. (The Iraq war, which the Bush administration priced at $50 to $60 billion, is at roughly $1 trillion and counting.) He will have to finally ask recession-battered Americans what his predecessor never did: How much — and what — are you willing to sacrifice in blood and treasure for the mission?

We need not yoke ourselves to Karzai.  Rich’s analogy to Vietnam and the Diems goes only so far.  We need no longer to identify the country’s leader as the country.  (How many of us liked being identified with Bush?)  Afghanistan seems even less unified than South Vietnam.  Why not direct the aid and car to the locals and pay lip service to the national government?  Why not seem work from the bottom up instead of top down?  Yes, it is easier but do we not  pay our government officials enough to get them off their butts and work?  (I still count as the great error of the neo-cons in Iraq was in not understanding that nations are built out of localities – like bricks in a building – rather pre-fabricated.  I suppose their love for theory trumped any common-sense they might have had.  Combined with a complete lack of history, they were worse than useless).  David Brooks got this much right.

Still, I want to close with this from Frank Rich.  Mr. Rich probably means to cheerlead for the President to leave Afghanistan but I think Obama will not choice a simple solution:

Either way, it’s up to the president to decide what he thinks is right for the country’s security, the politics be damned. That he has temporarily pressed the pause button to think it through while others, including some of his own generals, try to lock him in is not a sign of indecisiveness but of confidence and strength. It is, perhaps, Obama’s most significant down payment yet on being, in the most patriotic sense, Kennedyesque.

Now consider the people who showed up in a state of generalized rage in Washington over the weekend. They have no leaders, save a self-described rodeo clown — Glenn Beck of Fox News — and some well-funded Astroturf outfits from the permanent lobbying class inside the Beltway. They are loosely organized under a Tea Party movement, but these people are closer to British Tories than 18th century patriots with a love of equality.

And they have the wrong target.

Mark Williams, a Sacramento talk radio host, was speaking to CNN on behalf of the demonstrators — many of whom carried signs comparing Obama to a witch doctor, an undocumented worker or a Nazi — when he played the blue collar card.

Who is Williams? A garden variety demagogue who calls Obama “an Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug” and the Democratic party “a domestic enemy” of America. He also refers to the president as “racist in chief.” That says all you need to know about leaders of the Tea Party movement.

Williams repeatedly invoked the “working stiffs” who feel left out. Working people are always the last to get aboard the gravy train, and the first to be used in campaigns that will not advance their cause. And with these demonstrators, and the hucksters trying to distract them from real issues, history repeats itself.

Where was the Tea Party movement when the tax burden was shifted from the high end to the middle? Where were the patriots when Wall Street, backed in Congress by Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, rewrote securities laws so that the wonder boys of Lehman and A.I.G. could reduce home mortgages to poker chips at a trillion-dollar table?

Which all gives rise to the talk about racism facing Obama. Yes, I think there is some.  Depends on which of Obama’s opponents is being talked about.  I wonder if in avoiding racial issues does not explain some of how Obama has handled political issues.

Or is that Obama has let the nutcases rant on so to stigmatize the Republican Party?  Do we really want people running the country who are supported by the nutcases of this summer?

A majority of the Indiana Supreme Court has rejected a proposed resolution of a misconduct complaint against Delaware County Prosecutor Mark McKinney that called for him to be suspended from the practice of law for 90 days.

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“Specifically, a majority of the court concluded that the agreed discipline, that being suspended from the practice of law for 90 days with automatic reinstatement, is insufficient in light of the misconduct agreed to by the parties,” Kevin Smith, Supreme Court administrator, wrote in a June 18 letter to McKinney’s attorney, Kevin McGoff, and Donald Lundberg, executive secretary of the Indiana Supreme Court Disciplinary Commission.

The court’s position leaves McKinney, expected to seek re-election next year, still searching for a resolution of a complaint verified by the court’s disciplinary commission in May, accusing him of conflict of interest and conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice.

The more you travel through Europe, the more you realise the “British disease” is real, our nation’s ever hastening route to booze-and-drugs-oblivion some inbuilt, knee-jerk, psychological compulsion to somehow set fire to our heads. During my travels through Europe this last year alone – Germany, Italy, France, Austria – the single most obvious cultural differentiation was the lack of falling-down youth, in bars, clubs and city centres. Last year in Berlin, spending time with the British band Keane, we visited their favourite bar, Café Schwartzes, which is open literally 24 hours a day. “It’s such a shame about the British attitude,” averred drummer Richard Hughes one night. “Not just the people but the legislative attitude which is to control and constrain. It’s past midnight, no-one’s shouting, no-one’s shit-faced and no-one’s fighting. You wouldn’t get that in Britain!” If our legislative controls are at least party to blame, they’re about to become even more so, with last week’s announcement that “legal highs” (herbal Ecstasy and man-made cannabis) have been deemed an “emerging threat” and are about to be banned outright, which coincides, curiously, with another new report which tells us that the single most common factor in arrests for Brits abroad is connected to the procurement and/or imbibement of – nurse, the screens! – drugs.

The human desire for altered states is as old as humankind itself and if we understood why any individual or nation did these things (and how we’re supposed to improve it – culturally, psychologically, criminally), we’d be millionaire consultants on hammocks in the Caribbean possibly smoking a colossal spliff. Can it be that we’re living lives of “quiet desperation” – more so than everyone else?