The Promethean Fire

You must connect with people. They must believe that you care.

Otherwise, all the good ideas in the world won't get you anywhere.

You must connect to a group one individual at a time.

Leaders must intiate connection.

You will attract people like yourself.

They will likely share:

Attitude
Generation
Background
Values
Life experience
Leadership ability

So I was walking across campus at one of the local universities and I was confronted with a poster featuring statistics about the Israeli conflict with palestinian terrorists. The poster was put there by some on-campus Islamic group or other and it featured a "body-count" of Israelis vs. "Palestinians."

Now I could get into a technical discussion of who should be counted in such an affair. For instance, did they include homocide bombers, and other terrorists in their body count? Or did they merely include "innocent civilians?" And were any of the innocents being used as human shields? I'm sure that there are many more such questions to ask, but I'm not going to ask them today.

I want to focus on one important fact: from the way that the numbers were portrayed on the poster, I assume that I was to take it as a prima facie evidence that the Israelis are clearly the bad guys here because they've managed to kill more people because these were the only facts presented. I've recently seen similar reporting in regard to the War in Iraq citing enormous body counts of Iraqi dead. Presumably these numbers were some mixture of Saddam's soldiers, and any innocent casualties.

The issue at stake here is actually freedom vs. annihilation. On the one hand you have the U.S. and Israel, which are relatively free nations which attempt to uphold some idea of individual rights, and representative government. On the other you have the Palestinian terrorists, which are made up of two basic groups... on the one hand you have the Arafat types, who from what can be gathered wants to set up some form of socialist state in Palestine. I'm personally imagining another Iraq here, but even were it significantly more benign, you'd still have the issue of socialism, a system dedicated to violating individual rights in the name of some alleged collective "good." The second group is the Islamo-fascist types who want to break all of our knees to insure that we're off our feet when it's time to pray to Allah every day. And if we still won't pray, they'll just blow us up, or in some other way kill us and let Allah sort us out.

Both of these groups have two things in common. 1) They want to kill all the Jews, and Westerners and drive them into the sea, and 2) Freedom is most definitely not what they have in mind, even for themselves.

So what it boils down to is this: the context that frames such discussions is freedom vs. annihilation(or, at best, slavery, which is just slow annihilation if you think about it). So if someone is pointing to a body count and attempting to justify their position by playing a numbers game, keep in mind what exactly it is that the people who are playing at such pretenses are advocating for rather than against.

Develop "Informed Intuition:"

Learn to read and respond to what is happening. Learn to prepare for the future by means of planning and studying.

Keep in mind the BIG PICTURE.
Know your available resources.
Know who is for and who is against you.
Know Thyself.