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Stardate
20020523.2059 (On Screen): You've all encountered it: the guy who thinks that his point of view is the only one that can possibly exist. He will patiently explain it to you, making sure you understand it, confident that once you understand it you will come to agree with him since his logic is overwhelming and irrefutable and his evidence comprehensive. He doesn't accept the possibility that you might well fully understand his point of view and still disagree with it; that isn't possible since his position is the only one which makes sense. So if, when he is done, you still refuse to grant his point of view, then he'll explain it again only he'll do it more loudly!!!
It's not possible to get across to such a person that you actually fully understand his point of view and still are not convinced. Since you haven't come to agree with him, it's clear that you don't understand it, because if you really, truly understood it you would agree with him. No flaws exist in his argument, thus the only flaw can be in your understanding of the argument.
Unless you're willing to lie to him and pretend to agree, about the only thing you can do with a guy like this is to walk away.
You would think that well-educated people, especially political leaders, would not fall in this trap and would understand that it's actually possible for people of good faith to operate from the same information and still have different opinions, if for no other reason than because they have different values.
You would think that, wouldn't you? Evidently Europe's press hasn't gotten that message, though. Iain Jackson sends me this article in Slate which quotes several European newspapers who say that this is Europe's best chance to get Bush to change his mind about such critical issues as the Kyoto accords and the International Criminal Court; their advice to Bush is to listen. Because, of course, once he fully understands the overwhelmingly-obvious-and-convincing European point of view on those issues and many more (such as how the US should ask for European permission before committing US troops into any kind of combat) then he will obviously come around to the sophisticated, advanced, post-modern European point of view and will stop being an undisciplined cowboy.
The Independent writes as follows:
But that alone does not explain today's chill – and it certainly does not explain how, in a few short months, the Bush administration has managed to exhaust the huge stock of European sympathy and solidarity that it was given after 11 September.
If anything, that horrific event has strengthened all the disturbing trends that were apparent in Washington beforehand – unilateralism, highhandedness, a disdain for any treaty that might, even marginally, tie the administration's hands, and a tendency to interpret the verb "consult" to mean making a weary pretence of listening to the views of others before doing exactly what it intended to do anyway.
I saw some sympathy, but I saw damned little solidarity in the aftermath of the September attack. I saw the US make plans to take out al Qaeda and the Taliban, and I saw round denunciations of nearly everything we planned or did from the capitols of Europe. I saw us accused of war crimes; I saw us being told repeatedly that we were going to lose; I saw us being told that we were going to cause a humanitarian catastrophe. None of those things happened.
I saw NATO invoke Article V, and the total extent of NATO commitment was to move half a dozen AWACS planes from Europe to the United States, to free up American planes to commit to combat. Also, a small number of NATO ships were moved into the eastern Mediterranean, far away from any potential combat. The only other thing NATO did was to try to claim that because Article V had been invoked, that the US no longer was permitted to do anything militarily unless it got permission from Europe first.
Oh, yeah, and the French moved one frigate into the Arabian Sea to help protect American carriers from any potential attack by the Afghan navy.
The British helped. The British really did help, but they did not do so as part of any NATO operation. The French finally moved their one-and-only aircraft carrier into place after the war had largely been won. They also refused orders once to bomb a location during a combat situation.
Solidarity, my ass.
"a disdain for any treaty that might, even marginally, tie the administration's hands". We in the US refer to that as "liberty". I know it's a foreign notion in Europe, but we actually fought a revolution to get it, and we'd like to keep it. We think it's pretty damned important.
"a tendency to interpret the verb 'consult' to mean making a weary pretence of listening to the views of others before doing exactly what it intended to do anyway"; as opposed to the European interpretation of the word, which meant "To lecture and browbeat and insult the Americans about how stupid and primitive and unsophisticated they are about everything, and how they'd do much better to obey the orders of their cultural and intellectual superiors in the capitols of Europe, who know s
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