naked capitalism

Keenan says:

Yves:

Here's the link fix on the headline item:

Australia Seeks New Military Robots

DownSouth says:

Robert McNamara failed to grasp what Annonymous Jones pointed out yesterday, and that is that people don't always, and perhaps seldom do, act rationally.

This is the point that Daniel Yankelovich, Amitai Etzioni and Reinhold Neibuhr try to drive home. As Daniel Yankelovich wrote, McNamara's "objectist strategy utterly failed to give those responsible for our nation's policies a proper sense of the issues and how to deal with them."

Any serious student of human behavior would not make the same errors that McNamara did.

The availability, management, and control of natural resources were certainly determinig factors in the formation and development of ancient communities; but it is no less important to recognize that such a complex adaptive human experience is never simply an outcome of economic activity or utilitarian purposes. Day-to day existence and the long process of culural evolution are much more than relentless competitions for goods and material survival, for there are also other subltle patterns at work. The lift of mountains, the path of the sun, the rebirth of the seasons, the migration of animals, and the legends of earlier life provide many sources–seen and unseen–that inspire the creation of myths, the invention of symbols, and the rhythm of festivals, giving shape to basic patterns of thought. A sense of order and place is deeply interwoven with the human need to understand the beginning of things, explain the embracing design of nature, and conduct individual and collective activities in accord with the regular, predictable cycle of life, death, and renewal. The pragmatic business of obtaining food went hand in hand with the making of a culturally meaningful habitat.
~
–Richard F. Townsend, Ancient West Mexico: Art and Archeology of the Unknown Past

The ideaology embraced by McNamara was that science and objectivism could somehow allow us to rise above societies like those of ancient west Mexico. This has proven to be a pipe dream, as human nature always seems to find a way to reassert itself.