=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

Something I wrote to a friend who commented on my recent letters...

When I was @ my previous employer, the first couple of years I was really into "culture building" which boiled down to a tension between should we continue to be a 'cowboy' development shop or should we actually introduce a bit (just a bit, it's wafer thin :-) ) of process.

One of the similarities between that experience and the current political divide is that there doesn't appear (to me) to be any way to reach closure i.e. for the dominant viewpoint to be either proved / shown to not work through experience.

This isn't to say that we (those of us in the reality based community) can't see how completely failed the Iraq endeavor has been but that there's no point at which we can pin down these guys and say "Hey, you said if we did A, B, and C, we'll have X, Y, and Z results but instead we wound up with J, K, and L." in any meaningful fashion.

I've thought for years that you can apply paradigms usually applied to the individual to a group (and vice versa). In this case the equivalent individual pathology might be something similar to an addiction and the addict won't admit they have a problem.

This can be distressing because it's well known that a) you can't 'fix' a problem until you admit you have one and b) if you won't fix it, eventually reality will fix it for you (i.e. the addict will face increasingly problematic issues (i.e. lose the job, lose the family, imprisonment, etc.) until either she faces up or is dead).

It's bad enough for an individual (who causes suffering to those around them in addition to themselves), but for a country to have the same problem...