Tr1v14l Pursu1ts: What Obama Can Do: Peace with Viet Nam

Maxims, rules of thumb and other observations on human cognition and sociocultural affectations

This will be added to on an irregular basis...

What is said to humans directly is received with skepticism and considered with dubiousness while that which is heard in passing, especially that which most conforms to their mentality or prejudices, is readily believed.
Humans have a certain cognitive latency between exposure to new information or experiences and the ability to think dispassionately and intellectually about it.
Humans have a certain cognitive spectrum starting with the moment of exposure to new information or experiences and ending with some point at which the thing is effectively "in the past" for them.
This cognitive spectrum is linked to the emotional process often referred to as shock, anger, denial and acceptance.
The more and faster information or experiences are presented to people and the closer the quarters and the lesser the distance between people, the more their early reactions in the passionate emotional stage are reflected back to them in the manner of responses to those reactions from others in light of those responses.
The more outrages which are suffered without sufficient time to allow emotional bleed-off, the farther the bar for subsequent reaction and outrage are pushed, and the more further events must progress before reaction and outrage.
It is possible for serious detriments to eventually sit below this threshold for long enough for their damaging effects to build and multiply until their entire society undergoes some reactive convulsion.

Sunday, January 18, 2009

What Obama Can Do: Peace with Viet Nam

A long time ago, we failed to respond to the call for support from Ho Chi Minh when Harry Truman ignored his pleas. We had a chance to steer Ho’s movement away from Communism to Republican Democracy, help free the Vietnamese people from French colonialism, and we blew it. The rest as they say is history.

Since 1995 or so, we’ve had diplomatic relations with Viet Nam but we’re not entirely normalized with that country based on misplaced American anger which rightfully should go entirely with the American people for failure to understand the nature of the war they were getting into, the government which played predictable political games with the situation, and the mainstream media which gave the public an entirely distorted view of what was going on at a time when the importance of their at least pretending to impartiality was supremely important for timely news given that the Internet did not exist yet.

If anything, Rambo movies expressed anger at that entire situation more than the Vietnamese people or even the Vietnamese Communists because we pretty much knew full well we could have been their allies and them been non Communist very quickly and we blew it.

Today as Islamic Supremacism spreads across Asia, we need to act to stop it and an economically strengthened Viet Nam is a definite good starting point as economic prosperity is one of the best bulwarks against dickery of that sort. They aren’t led in a haze of surrender by a crazy cult leader like North Korea. They aren’t China with their own set of internal difficulties with relinquishing Communism. Viet Nam if anything is very much ready to join the 21^st century and get on with the future instead of living in the past.

The USA has a history with them and is clearly on a collision course with France by France’s choice. We could very easily forge stronger ties with them that would only bring greater wellbeing to their people and allow them to become much more resistant to Islamism, which if it spreads to Viet Nam, will only be resisted otherwise by the Communist Party’s survival imperative and that means through bloodshed of the sort Islamist martyrs love and encourage.

Make the people of the world have no interest in the Islamist message and it will stop in its tracks. Fail, and their chicanery will only escalate.