Did Viet Cong soldiers get PTSD?

It seems some did, but not so often as among American soldiers:

I had wondered whether the disparity might be down to differences in culture, but it seems it has more to do with factors affecting morale. The authors of this study contrast US servicemen's experience of war with that of the Vietnamese:

"The situation of the Vietnamese veterans was totally different. The Vietnamese had justified reasons for engagement in the war, could discern the adversary,were able to feel relatively safe, and had the strong support of their country, and the local population. The Vietnamese veterans fought for their lives, for their families, relatives and country. They were founders of the guerilla war therefore they knew actively what they were doing, how it should have been done, or where and when they did it. They knew who were their comrades or adversaries. They did not have the passive or uncertain feelings characteristic of many American soldiers. The hit-and-run tactics, the fluidity, and the mobility of the Vietnamese soldiers generally made the American soldiers confused in locating them, and this, in turn, helped them minimize their casualties. Additionally, the Vietnamese soldiers got strong support from the Vietnamese population. As a result, they had greater feelings of safety than did the American soldiers."

Another hypothesised factor was how American Vietnam vets were treated when they returned home:

"The lack of social support for American veterans probably contributed to the development of PTSD symptoms. The Vietnam-America war was a politically unpopular one, and many American veterans were ostracized on their return home. This was in contrast to the experiences of veterans coming home from previous wars such as World War II who were given a hero’s welcome. [...] Society had subjected American soldiers to catastrophic combat victimization, and, when they returned, society avoided the victims, then blamed them for what they had done in Vietnam."

More here:

http://www.ffrd.org/AO/CGFED/12PTSD.pdf


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Bethnal Green teen terror brides: Cameron acts

As usual, Mr Cameron has a two-pronged solution:

a) He has had an emotion at it ("deeply concerning").

b) It is everybody's responsibility to deal with it ("We all have a role to play in stopping people from having their minds poisoned by this appalling death cult").

Job done!




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David Malone, TTIP, TISA and Russian dolls

http://www.theguardian.com/membership/2015/feb/18/guardian-live-what-is-ttip-and-how-does-it-affect-us

Practical example: Raytheon.


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Why the TTIP will end the NHS...

... and much more, including democracy itself:






Q&A, including an idea how to handle the banks with a "depositors' union":




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The enigma of Pilsbury Castle

Illustration of Pilsbury Castle as it may have been.
Taken from the nearby signboard

We were out walking the hills above the Dove valley near Hartington yesterday. Pilsbury Castle lies in the valley, mid way between Hartington and the tiny village of Crowdecote. 

The castle is an odd place. Stuck in a remote spot at the bottom of the valley, nothing is left but the earthworks because it never had any stonework.

There are some obvious conjectures of course, but nobody seems to know for sure why the castle was built, why it was never rebuilt in stone or why it was built in such an out of the way place overlooked by hills. After all, it is in a valley and it doesn’t take a military genius to see the potential problems.

Wikipedia says:-

Pilsbury Castle occupied an area of high ground approximately 175 by 150 yards (160 by 137 m) overlooking the River Dove, near the village of Pilsbury.

It is high ground, but only relative to the valley floor, not the hills looming over it. See my photo below. The Dove is not navigable either and the valley floor tends to be boggy so how much traffic it controlled is unknown. Possibly none at all.

Pilsbury Castle
In the distance is the conical shape of Chrome Hill

Pilsbury Castle well illustrates how fragmented history can be, how easy it is to add supposition to known facts in pursuit of a coherent story. One might surmise that the Dove was navigable in those days. Or maybe the whole project was a mistake. In some respects it clearly was a mistake because it was never rebuilt in stone even though there was obviously plenty of limestone to hand.

Here’s what the signboard says. Oh by the way - the valley is a beautiful sight from nearby hills under a blue sky.

In front of you is the earthworks of Pilsbury Castle.

It is a motte and bailey castle and never had any stone buildings or walls. The motte or mound was the defensive core of the castle, probably with a wooden watch-tower on top. The two baileys or enclosures (see plan) contained timber buildings such as kitchens, stables, store-rooms and accommodation for the garrison. The baileys are protected by ditches and banks which would have had a wooden palisade on top of them.

There is evidence of a hollow-way (a sunken track) which would have been the access route from the south to an entrance in the southern bailey. Entry to the castle would have been across a bridge and through a gatehouse.

The castle was built partly on a reef limestone knoll which is incorporated into its defences and extends onto a shale promontory overlooking the River Dove. It also overlooks a long rectangular hollow on the low ground north of the castle. This was probably a fishpond for supplying occupants of the castle.

We do not know precisely when the castle was built. It was certainly built after the Norman Conquest of 1066 and may have been after the unsuccessful rebellion in the north against William the Conqueror in 1068-9 as a reminder of the power of the king. Certainly the castle would have controlled the Dove valley, the local population and all traffic along the valley route. The castle may only have continued in use for a few decades into the 12^th century.

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Once a generation (revisited)

Updating last year's speculation:

1914
1939
1964-ish (young v. old)
1989 - the crumbling of communism
2014 - what James Kunstler describes as "apocalyptic Jihadism", notably ISIL

None of it is to do with reason, some of it is against a background of societal stress as described in Norman Cohn's "Pursuit of the Millennium"... but how much is down to gonads, and the time it take for a new generation who don't know how hot fire burns, to come to the fore?


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Postdialectic socialism

source

I was playing with the Postmodernism Generator earlier. These things have been around for a while, but if you haven't seen it before, it's much like Chomskybot, a nonsense generator which is amusingly close to genuine academic output. Here's an example.

Postdialectic socialism in the works of Tarantino

“Sexual identity is a legal fiction,” says Sontag. In a sense, Derrida uses the term ‘cultural narrative’ to denote the role of the artist as poet.

Baudrillard suggests the use of capitalism to challenge sexism. But the subject is contextualised into a subcapitalist feminism that includes truth as a reality.

Abian implies that we have to choose between capitalism and neoconceptualist libertarianism. Therefore, Sartre uses the term ‘capitalist theory’ to denote the genre, and subsequent paradigm, of precultural narrativity.

The message is obvious and quite unsettling. For example, if we build artificial intelligence which spouts such verbiage, then some poor souls will see it as proof of genuinely superior intelligence instead of a software goof.

Human language has the capacity to slide from common sense to abstruse argument to nonsense with not a single dividing line to tell us which is which. Many thrive on it.

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