Love Your Enemies

Love your Enemies No Pain, no gain. Charles Jordan What would Jesus Christ say about dealing with countries like Russia or China? “But I tell you not to resist an evil person. But whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also… Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you… You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden.” This might be tersed into a simple phrase. No pain, no gain. How do we bring reason and solutions to large problems? The United States, in my opinion, has become hugely successful over the years relying on solutions rather than ideology helped by the melting pot idea. Pragmatism is the key to progress. Our centers of thought, the universities, have become part of the problem, They no longer try to find solutions. They think that they have the answer and no longer have to think. Consider the difference between freedom of speech and academic freedom? Freedom of speech is an individual thing. My opinion is as good as any professor about whether Hamas should be supported or rejected. Academic freedom is the right to be free to discuss an academic question in the professor’s chosen field. Relying on an opinion on whether Russia should be bombed by asking the professor of physics should not be seen as representative of his University but his personal opinion, for example. How the bomb should be built is appropriate to the physicist’s expertise and opinions varied in WWII about whether it was dangerous to test an atomic bomb was discussed with academic freedom. And the letter of Albert Einstein to President Truman was important due to the effect of the bomb which clearly was important, but the decision to drop the bomb was clearly the result of contrary considerations. If the University finds that clashes of personal opinion has brought negative controversy to the University, it should have the option of removing the person from the faculty or requiring him to clearly say that his opinion is not the opinion of the University every time he opines in public. News programs regularly require that from non-expert speakers . An example of this problem played out at the University of Illinois which led to the stepping down of the University Chancellor and the University President. The assignment of a Palestinian prospective professor to the Indigenous People Department of 5 people was not approved due to his ongoing diatribe against Israeli bombing on a school inhabited by Hamas which resulted in the death of some students. He was looking for a platform and a salary. But what about the university department of political science or what I would like to call rhetoric, how to write or speak about a subject to convince others of your opinion, independent of whether it is effective policy or not. No opinion is completely true or false. It is hard to consider all the environment of a problem. In physics we’re look for solutions by the KISS method.(Keep It Simple Stupid). My Nobel-Prize-winning group leader at Stanford, Richard Taylor, was of the opinion that any large decision is a partial mistake so it makes sense to delay that decision as long as possible. My word for the art of making those decisions is wisdom, based on a peculiar gene pool of common sense which won’t solve some people’s problems but is solid to a majority of them. It's almost impossible to separate general political strategy from political indoctrination and where does it end? Perhaps political science should be eliminated from the curriculum? Was that ever a part of the learning curriculum in the early University? It’s not really an academic subject. It’s a performing art sort of like music or art, better studied in a separate school. Professors should not be able to portray their expert university standing as an verification of their ideas in areas where they are not expert. In class, a professor shouldn't ever reveal his opinion, but present the case and try to lead his students to analyze it on their own and be able to express their own opinions for a solution. We could call Political Science Civics or Government, if we want to avoid the connotation of politics with power seeking and manipulation. But the intimate connection between good government and simple power seeking makes the successes dependent on who succeeds and the losses dependent on the losers. Finally we come up to a practical decision and that is called an election. As we find in most if not all questions like this, there are the rules for the elections. It might be thought that the simplest and best solution is that all citizens vote. But the tendency of charisma and manipulation is to dominate those who don’t understand what is going on and need the government to solve their problems. My personal opinion is that we need to rely on the citizens who understand the details of governance and have a horse in the race. Literacy tests shortly after the Civil War were seen to be aimed at former slaves and were adjusted accordingly, particularly to those whose primary language was not English, but I don’t see any reason why such a requirement wouldn’t improve the quality of our elections. A pure democracy has many problems since it is so close to mob rule. The result of a logical analysis is normally overwhelmed by the charisma of the politician. With a U.S. population of 350 million people, 1% represents 3.5 million people. And bizarre cases involving one person going viral touch many millions of people and makes the control of democratic principles like majority rule almost impossible to obtain. It often seems that the minority rules more often than not. Whatever your opinion of LSQBT+ groups might be (for example), they have no special rights which should be able to be voted away by the majority in a democratic government. Or by the money involved. Collegiate sports, in my personal opinion (I was a 4 year letterman in track and field at the University of Texas in the Southwest Conference.) has been monetized by sharks of the financial world due to its popularity. Even though the athletes get a token from the system, I suspect that they would just as well play against regional universities in long standing leagues with classic rivalries. That the universities and their presidents have been seduced by the money is not an acceptable excuse for their betrayal of educational principles, Plato aside. I sometimes wonder whether future elections will just be a comparison of the amount of money raised by each party. As we see, this monetary emphasis has generated a new class of people, the influencers, who depend on a platform which is accessible to large numbers of people, social media. We are seeing how politicians need to express themselves through interviews with influencers with large followings due to the guaranteed attention of a large number of voters. Their followers are often people who don't use logic but emotional response to these gurus, and their feelings on a subject are based on their lack of leverage ((victims due to lack of education, money, and organization), pet peeves rather than solutions, details rather than universality. I was interested by a question by Mark Levin on his Fox broadcast as to whether the Congress can vote the US into bankruptcy. Does the executive have a role in blocking spending which would cause that? Is deficit spending legal or ethical? States in general don't allow deficit spending. The Fed has accumulated $37 trillion of debt. Something isn't working. Do we need an amendment to the constitution? We won’t gain a balance again until the government is required to make pragmatic decisions between well meaning options. With our present debt, No pain, no gain.