Demonizing Putin vs. Behaving Responsibly - by Martin Hellman
Demonizing Putin vs. Behaving Responsibly
Posted on July 28, 2014 by Nuclear Risk
After presenting evidence that all sides bear some of the responsibility for the loss of 298 lives on Malaysian Air Flight 17, my recent Huffington Post article concludes, “Even without the above evidence, common sense alone would question the overly simplified narrative we have been fed in which the carnage in Ukraine is all Putin’s fault. Wars bring out the worst on all sides, and to be effective in preventing future tragedies such as MH17, we need to stop blaming others and start taking responsibility for our own mistakes.”
One of the most egregious forms of blame is to paint the other side as being in league with the devil, and Saturday’s edition of my local paper, the San Jose Mercury News, did precisely that when it picked up a Mike Luckovich political cartoon showing the devil holding a black box marked PUTIN’S SOUL, and saying, “I retrieved the black box” – a clear reference to MH17. A web search on images of Putin as devil turns up a number of related caricatures.
Comparing Putin to Hitler as Hillary Clinton did in March, similarly feeds our basest emotions and prevents us from responding rationally – which is at the heart of our behaving responsibly, both linguistically and logically.
Demonizing others feeds a false sense of moral superiority typical of irresponsible adolescents. If we want to behave maturely, responsibly, and effectively we need to do what I suggest in the Huffington Post article:
Putin is far from blameless, but we have no control over his actions and complete control over our own. So, to be effective we need to search in the dark recesses of our own nation’s soul, rather than cast stones at others.
Martin Hellman
= new reply since forum marked as read
Because we can only examine ourselves. When you're trying to understand a problem and find solutions and causes, if you only look at yourselves you're basically hamstrung.
So look at American education. Under 50% of student achievement, the research I've seen, is dependent on conditions in the school.
Of conditions in the school, a bit less than 50% is attributable to the teacher.
So the teacher is ultimately responsible for less than 25%.
However, the teacher is told repeatedly that s/he can't consider things beyond his/her control--which mean, just himself (or herself). Since that's the only person that the teacher considers, when push comes to shove that's the only person that the administrator is willing to discuss with parents. So the parents, not unreasonably, conclude that the entire problem is the teacher's and only the teacher's.
This blinds people to the other 75% or so of the problem. It's hard to talk about it or even get people to see there is something to talk about.
Which is why, when push comes to shove, most people focus not on "us" and how awesomely important we are--because apart from some ill-sourced and unsupported allegations we're not horribly involved.
I mean there was the DPR claim that snipers took out the 3rd officer while he was swimming at a Mariupol beach (which they corrected to a Zhdanovo beach--its old Soviet name, like Donetsk used to be "Stalino"
and wiped out a "racially American black" squad in the city of the same name(s). But that's even less well sourced than Ponomarev's (the Duma guy, not the long-gone-and-forgotten DPR politician) claim from yesterday that Putin ordered the transfer of weapons from Russia to the E. Ukraine rebels stopped at once. Reports are that 7 Grad, 10 Urals (trucks, good for troops or supplies) crossed the border in one place last night. And 7 tanks in another place.
