"Straussian and neoconservative professors have had most success in political science departments, in which they are coming increasingly close to making the discipline their own, as Marxists have accomplished to some extent with sociology and right-libertarians have accomplished with economics."
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/erard.htm

If I ask myself who has the most to gain from the assassination of Lebanon's Rafiq Hariri, it would appear to be either the U.S. or Israel, certainly not Syria. It gives one or both of those countries the justification it may want to take action against Syria.

I wouldn't be surprised if Scott Ritter's statement about the U.S. bombing Iran in June is also a bit of creative U.S. disinformation (with or without Ritter's complicity). As in any Poker (or mind) game, you want to keep them guessing - well, just as long as it takes to get them to blink.

Intelligence is all about discovering your opponents' vulnerabilities, understanding their cultures, fears, wants (lusts), etc. Then, once you learn what they are, you exploit them, i.e., you play poker.

Someone wrote the following:

>>All this talk about America's Military being over-extended and tied down in Iraq is bait for the trap.<<

Here is my reply:

Exactly. Intelligence is political poker - bluffing and all. Intelligence, in this case, involves the conveyance of disinformation designed to lull Iran and Syria into complacency. If they don't think that the U.S. will attack them, or they are not sure, they many be more likely to pursue their present courses of action which will, in turn, provide the Anglo-American alliance with the pretext it wants to bomb those countries.

Much of intelligence, even the NSA's signal intelligence, is dialectical. First, you outline your own strategic objectives. Second, you carefully study the objectives of your opponents. Finally, you engage in tactical mind games with those same opponents.

The goal is to manipulate these leaders to do your bidding - to make them blink- all (hopefully) without ever realizing they are doing so. It is the application of child psychology to international relations.

My views are just my views. Given that I am not a partisan, I don't consider that my perspectives occupy a side and have no desire to speak from any standpoint but my own.

At this point, I want to stress my intention to avoid conflating poststructuralism and postmodernism, which are of different categorical orders. Poststructuralism refers to a specific group of continental (mostly French) philosophical discourses that took shape in the 1960s and, as the name implies, attempted to bring various modern structualist theories to a crisis. Poststructuralist theories engaged in a methodological shift away from (1) a closed system of signification, (2) order and hierarchy through oppositional or binary operations, (3) explanation by origin, and (4) the person as a unified subject. Postmodernism is a broad term that includes sociohistorical, theoretical, and aesthetic phenomena. Postmodern theory draws many of its conclusions from the poststructuralist theories of Lacan, Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida; but in the forms of cultural studies and theories of gender, ethnicity, and postcoloniality, postmodern theory also exceeds, departs from, and critiques poststructuralism. Though the two most common forms of postmodern reading, the ludic and the resistant, can both be traced back to poststructuralism, resistant reading turns a critical eye on the refusal of poststructuralist theory to allow for (or its inability to account for) agency. Postmodern theories interrogate conventional constructions of subjectivity and reconceptualize alternative notions of the subject. Whereas poststructuralist theories concentrate on deconstruction, postmodern theories engage in deconstruction and reconstrucion (Michael 27).

It is that the modernist fiction of writers such as Joyce and Woolf began to displace readers from the privileged position they had enjoyed in respect to works of classic realism, a position deriving from their admittance to the imaginary space of a metanarrative from which autonomous rational subjects determine truth and reality. But in representing the experiences of a bourgeois subject, modernist texts were still committed to the Enlightenment project of rendering “subjective experience in all its uniqueness and irreplaceability” (Bürger 96). Postmodern fiction, on the other hand, works against the recuperation of the autonomous subject; instead, it demonstrates the subject as a discursive construct engaged in a performance of subjectivity that involves the reiteration of cultural norms. In postmodern fiction, the writer as subject is subsumed by the author function; narrative perspective is fragmented or constantly in flux; fictional characters often dissolve or fuse with other characters and sometimes are the other(s) who refuse to fulfill the conventional role of the appropriated other. By pushing the reader to take up a different relationship to otherness, postmodern texts frustrate the reader’s identification with the subjectivity implied by the cogito of Enlightenment thinking, but offer alternative possibilities for agency. Through opacity, heterogeneity, heteroglassia, and the lack of a master narrative, postmodern texts open themselves to a plurality of readings and admit that all readings are misreadings, in the sense that a reader’s interpretation is not constitutive of the meaning of the text. Though achieving interpretive agency—the ability to resist being fixed in the subject position of the textually implied reader—this reader is not a self-regulating subject.1

The most significant difference between modern and postmodern texts is the relationship established between the subject and the other/object. Whereas modernist texts are absorbed in the project of exploring challenges to subjectivity, these challenges are ultimately resolved through the author’s autonomy as well as through thematic and narrative resolutions. However, postmodern texts undermine and deconstruct this conception of subjectivity and offer up other subjects with whom the reader is not meant to identify. An experience that allows readers to more fully perceive and acknowledge otherness, including their own otherness, strikes me as being a positive effect of postmodern fiction. By not only identifying hegemonic cultural perspectives but moving beyond them in our teaching, we might achieve a political effect form this kind of reading that extends well beyond the isolated experiences of discrete readers.

Literary reading generally involves performance, with the actual reader playing the role of the ideal textual reader. Postmodern reading often consists of a sustained, complex performance composed of several roles—such as reader as co-conspirator, detective, confidante, priest, voyeur, student, dupe—the most challenging of which may be the learned responses required by the political imperatives of feminist and multiculturalist postmodernism2. To think of the postmodern reader as always playfully but aggressively having his or her way with a text that invites such treatment is to overlook the range of the various writer-text-reader relationships that characterize actual postmodern transactions. The striations of different codes and layers of meanings that Barthes’s promiscuous reading uncovers below the smooth surface of a classic realist text are on open display in a postmodern text, which exhibits the fact that it is not natural, finished, and seamless but rather is constructed, open, fragmented, and plural. This exhibition can be playful and promiscuous in tone, or it can be harsh and honest. Often the tone is mixed. In any event, the postmodern reader oscillates between immersion and interaction distance.
http://www.colby.edu/personal/i/isadoff/pap/Sexing.doc

"... critical poststructural theory sees science as merely one way of knowing the world and Kuhn sees science as having its own cycles of knowledge, and Nandy historicizes science and technology arguing for a view in which there is a plurality of ideas ...."
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0403.html?printable=1

The great contribution of poststructuralism to historical writing is the demonstration that nothing can be known independently of language, and that the past has no ‘essential’ meaning. No longer is it possible to regard men as naturally aggressive, women as naturally maternal, workers as naturally socialist, or Celts as naturally wild. … As poststructuralists argue, the external world impinges upon humans in the form of sensory perceptions that have no inherent meaning. Only through language can we make sense of these perceptions, and so the meanings created could vary infinitely, especially in the case of human constructions such as classes, markets or states.
(Kevin Passmore, Writing History, pp.131-2)

The following message was emailed to Heartland, John Kasich's program on the Fox News Channel:

I can't say I am surprised, but why didn't Kasich confront [Bob] Jones on his university's [Bob Jones University] long history of institutionalized racism?

Kasich mentioned the subject in passing, though he did not call it for what it is (racism), but he never came out and asked Jones about it. How can Jones claim to be a Christian when he has never repented for his shameful behavior?

And how can Kasich, who never called Jones on the carpet for his previous racist policies, claim to be a Christian given his apparent lack of outrage at this university president's hypocrisy? If it were me, I would not have allowed Jones to get in a word edgewise on any other subject until he explained himself.

On the contrary, Kasich went out of his way to say that, even though he was asking Jones certain questions, he did so as a journalist, not because he was being personally critical.

Fair and balanced?

Copyright © 2002- Mark A. Foster, Ph.D. All rights reserved.