That seemed like a valuable ethos for an interviewer

Monday, March 8th, 2021

In The Targeter, Nada Bakos explains that a book she threw in her bag before leaving Washington — Buddhism without Beliefs, by Stephen Batchelor — was surprisingly helpful as she began to interview detainees in Iraq:

“A compassionate heart still feels anger, greed, jealousy, and other such emotions. But it accepts them for what they are with equanimity, and cultivates the strength of mind to let them arise and pass without identifying with or acting upon them.”

That seemed like a valuable ethos for an interviewer. Little did I know how many times I would need to repeat this to myself in the coming weeks.

Comments

  1. Sam Vara says:

    Stephen Batchelor’s book would be better if it were entitled “Beliefs without Buddhism”. In accounts of what compassion actually is, the Buddha himself explicitly pointed out that the state has no anger or other negative emotions.

    What is being described here is some type of “mindfulness” technique filtered through the likes of Jon Kabat-Zinn and retailed by Batchelor. She still has some way to go before experiencing compassion.

  2. VXXC says:

    If you believe her horseshite.

    I don’t.

    This is actually a marketing book for her, and as far as how compassionate all the woke spies are — if they got one of us red stater backwards racist MAGA types in the chair all the rules would be gone and anything goes. They’d also indulge their petty sadist side.

    She’s mostly bragging how woke good she is, this is of all things spies doing public marketing. She’s not alone of course but neither is Madoff in finance or neoliberals in crime.

    I’m a compassionate interrogator lol, look at me how woke I am.

    If she’s even not a complete fabulist, her type plays nice then leaves the room while someone else comes in and hurts the ‘subject’ as much as necessary, then she shows up to play whatever scam she’s running on the ‘subject.’.

    I don’t know why you even put this up, clicks? You don’t have ads lol.

  3. Wang Wei Lin says:

    It’s called maturity or wisdom. Most people practice restraining negative emotions everyday without bragging about it. You can’t have civilization without controlling the human animal inside yourself. I gather Ms. Bakos truly knows nothing about the Muslim mindset assuming that applying ‘niceness’ will get results. People like her get innocent people killed.

  4. Kirk says:

    The theory is the same one that that German interrogator used on Allied pilots–No brutality, just polite supportive questioning.

    But, like anything, it’s a specific solution to a specific cultural set of assumptions. Gandhi’s “non-violence” worked nicely when set up against late-Imperial British civil service and military officers, but posit him trying that idiocy against John Company officers and employees… Or, more imaginatively, Nazis. Care to imagine how well that would work, or the likely results?

    I am not an advocate for what the Imperial Germans called “Schrecklichkeit, but I’m also not stupid enough to imagine that what one culture intends as a “reasonable” path of behavior actually comes across to another one as being at all “rational”.

    The Israelis have f**ked things up by the numbers, with regards to dealing with the Palestinians. The overall thrust of Israeli mindset is no longer consonant with the environment they’ve put themselves into… In the Middle East, you don’t gracefully defeat someone and then help them back to their feet. You put them down, hard, and then you put your boot to their necks and keep it there. Nothing else computes. So, when the Israelis think they’ve defeated the Arabs, they do the magnanimous things they’ve learned in Europe, playing “nice” with the Arabs after the fact, giving them fair terms in their negotiations and offering to rebuild things. The Arabs are totally confused by this, because they see Israeli generosity and fair play as signs that they were actually victorious, not defeated. The Israelis are not acting as thought they won, to the Arabs, so they keep right on fighting. Had the Israelis just crushed them, taken their men as eunuchs and their women as sex-slaves, there wouldn’t be shit for Arab resistance today–They’d know they lost, down in their souls, and they’d capitulate fully. Because the Israelis don’t behave like the Arab image of conquerors, they’re simply not taken as having won anything.

    The Israelis simply don’t understand this fact, and neither do the Arabs. The whole thing is going to end in a genocide, because eventually the Israelis are going to tire of the game, and just absolutely lose their shit–Which is what they really should have done back in the ’40s. More Arabs would survive, over the long haul.

    Cross-cultural communication has to be carefully thought through and then you need to run some real-world experiments. The idea of applying the nice-nice principles of Buddha to 7th Century-mindset Afghan tribal assholes just boggles the mind… You want to deal with them, you send in the Gurkhas and tell them that Kali says “No mercy…”. The Afghans might gain a clue, afterwards… Or, not.

  5. Contaminated NEET says:

    >if they got one of us red stater backwards racist MAGA types in the chair all the rules would be gone and anything goes

    Yes. The poor little Muslims are just our friends who don’t know it yet. Inbred Nazi hicks are actual enemies.

  6. Sam J. says:

    “…The Israelis have f**ked things up by the numbers, with regards to dealing with the Palestinians….In the Middle East, you don’t gracefully defeat someone and then help them back to their feet…they do the magnanimous things they’ve learned in Europe, playing “nice” with the Arabs after the fact…”

    Israelis “helping someone back on their feet” and “playing nice”

    http://lh3.ggpht.com/-w40fYTc2cYo/UewEXamV7hI/AAAAAAAAVYg/lSJbrVcjk9E/bodysnatcher_thumb%25255B6%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800

    http://www.kawther.info/wpr/2009/12/21/is-israel-a-state-or-an-organ-harvesting-mafia

  7. Harry Jones says:

    All this talk about compassion is just semantics. If it helps you relax and keep levelheaded, then it’s a good technique.

    Most moralizing is mere semantics. The rest is signalling by platitude. Just be the best possible you in the situation you find yourself in and leave it at that. Any God worth worshiping will accept that.

    I’m a pragmatist. The only virtue I recognize is what works.

    Love the lovable. Detest the detestable. Wait and see when you don’t know. Don’t go looking for fights. Don’t go looking to avoid fights. Look to win every fight that comes your way. It’s not that hard to figure out.

  8. VXXC says:

    “The theory is the same one that that German interrogator used on Allied pilots–No brutality, just polite supportive questioning.”

    The British were not so polite. Then again, they were losing. I wonder how polite the Germans really were.

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