That may sound fuzzy. I see it, looking back at what I just wrote. So let's take an example, your typical barking-mad, Republican ideologue thinking that surely only good things can happen if we invade some flaming shit-hole like Iraq.
Oh my God. I realize now that by their standards only good things did happen: the price of oil has collapsed, we're in it ass-deep with the Israelis and the military subcontractors and peddlers of war matériel are making a killing, so to speak.
Hear me, I am not accusing Republicans of deliberately getting hundreds of thousands of people killed, including thousands of Americans, but only of not caring. This is an example of linear, static thinking used in a complex and dynamic situation.
They shouldn't have acted, irrespective of their aims, especially since the same catastrophically bad decision-making that applied to starting the war was also applied in its execution, resulting from problems of perspective and moral incapacity.
Anyway, I didn't set out to find fault with those blindly ignorant murderers and incompetents but to illustrate the importance of using appropriate methods to make decisions in difficult situations, firstly by recognizing the complexity of everything.
Secondly it is helpful to learn from your mistakes, as part of acknowledging and owning complexity. Think of all of the inventors of the Iraq war, now shamelessly pretending they didn't fuck-up or even defending what is obviously a fiasco.
There I go again, though it's their fiasco. It's an important lesson for us, if not them, in the importance of approaching problems in fitting and productive ways, that is, in not having your head up your ass.
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