JOE | 2005-12-27
Joe writes,
""Everybody" and "nobody" is misleading. Misleading is not acceptable when you are trying to convey a message. Your credibility will suffer. Somebody attempting to give you information is not necessarily an opponent. It could be someone who wants to stack some chips on YOUR side of the table. It is not always a good idea to take an adversarial view of things. Your "opponent" may not be performing for an audience. He may be speaking directly to you and only you. That was some excellent wriggling, Bob, but I'm afraid you can't wriggle out of generalizations. They are still generalizations. Pointing out generalizations is not quibbling. It is pointing out generalizations. Maybe readers don't want to see things that they consider "boring." On the other hand, maybe they're too lazy or timid to ask, not sufficiently interested to pursue the subject, or have no business reading you at all. I don't find you boring. My criticism is free. No cost. I'm not just one great big bag of criticism. I just today listened to your talk on "Incurable Fools" and I highly recommend that all your readers have a go at that one. It's a humdinger. "
Joe, I keep begging people to correct me on facts, and you have not been particularly bashful about doing so.
But take a look at the article I just wrote, "Elizabeth."
Each point I write there has at least a dozen books dedicated to it.
Good books from a careful credibility point of view.
Every one of those books goes into excruciating detail. They are written to have credibility.
But the simple fact is htat they have had little or no effect on hte real disasters that result from the situation all those books, if you had them all and read them all, describe piece by piece.
I do not share your idea that someone who will not read all those books is not worthy to be reached. In fact, a person who is knee deep in all those books is precisely the sort of person who is useless in the real battle.
So I sacrifice what you consider "credibility" in order to string the whole obvious situation out in a short statement.
I am not writing a book on a defect in our intelligence system. I am stating that the whiole thing is, if you just put together what we know, unworkable and irretrievable.
Let me ask you to do something. Write what I just wrote with your own total credibility angle. See if you can say what I said in an article some reader, you know who I'm talking about, would consider an acceptable length.
Do it first, preach it afterwards.
Let me add that I, with my series of declarations, am more ACCURATE than those tomes that get credibility and no results. They are describing a workable worldview into which a workable intelligence community fits.
That, Joe, is the kind of thinking that comes from Mars. If you throw it together the way I do, you end up witht he world the way it IS, a set of absurdities which make American intelligence an insoluble mess from the word go.
You cannot have intelligence with Wordism in a free society.
Before this gets too long for you, Joe, I will devote another article to that contradiction.
By the way, Joe has just forced me to demonstrate my whole way of argument. He couldn't have done that if he had been too awed or respectful to call me out.
Joe THINKS about it and just plain disagrees.
That is VERY stimulating on this end.