Military Incompetence and Being a Good Person

Living in central London means you hear a lot of drunk people spilling their souls or stomach contents onto the streets at night. This is fine of course, unless you're an insensitive, selfish person trying to sleep. I happen to be one of these people, and try as I may, even considering my almost inexhaustible capacity to sleep anywhere, any time, my sleeping powers have proven worthless. The best solution to this of course is to fall asleep late enough that your slumber is so deep as not to be interrupted by these noises. And for me the easiest way to achieve this is to fall asleep reading a fascinating/captivating book.

On recommendation of a very interesting friend of mine I started reading a book on "Military Incompetence" and it was indeed fascinating reading first facts of various conflicts which the British had engaged in, and then a psychological assessment of the leaders of the conflicts. I am not sure if this is an entirely correct view, but this assessment made me realise that most of the qualities that good commanders/leaders should have, I definitely want - not only that, I see as necessities for being a good/reasonable person.
This of course is a simplistic view - as being a good military commander doesn't mean you're a good person, and being a good person is definitely not going to ensure that you're a good military commander - or is it? I guess what I'm trying to say is that being a good military commander necessitates being in possession of some qualities of a good person (...terribly insightful :P).

Ah, why is nothing ever simple! One of the most interesting point raised by the book is this idea of 'cognitive dissonance' something I am feeling right now...
...as well as sleepy :) Yay! So I'm going to have to leave this - until I thoroughly mull over these ideas and achieve cognitive consonance :D

Lunchtime

So I have again noticed that I am reading too many work related texts, and forgetting who the Prime Minister of Australia is (yes... I have actually done that... Kev, who?... very embarrassing...)... so at lunch I decided to peruse a favourite journal - Foreign Affairs, and found this very interesting article: Hydraulic Pressures - http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/66578/james-e-nickum/hydraulic-pressures?page=show.

The whole article I thought was interesting, well written, and especially at the end, some very interesting comments:

As water experts say, water flows uphill to money. The rich and powerful, frequently the urban and industrial, have the biggest pumps. And there often is an inverse relationship between economic rationality and political rationality: the economic laws of scarcity push prices up even as the political laws of scarcity give officials a reason to keep prices down. Another complication is that water problems are irremediably connected, sometimes as a symptom and sometimes as a cause, to many other issues: globalization, demographics, governance, energy, health, the role of women and children, the environment. The world's water problems reflect all the world's problems.

But finally, what made me reflect a little (off topic of the water crises), is the next to last sentence on the issues, and namely the particular mention of 'women'. It didn't say: people, children, the environment, women were singled out. I guess the reason this struck a chord was that as far as we have come in equality in Western countries, there are still so many many places where women are less than people.