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To this extent media discourse* is never to be taken literally: as such, it never contains anything but nonsense.  But as semiotics it remains of incaculable value: it reveals, to the informed man, at least, the most precious realities of cultures and inner worlds** which did not know how to "understand" themselves. Media discourse*** is merely sign-language, merely sympomology . . .

A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

Current discourse on human experiencing tends to ignore the privacy of experience for a very good theoretical reason: much of the discourse has emerged as a counter-reaction to the solipsistic view of human experiences based on Cartesian philosophy, and has thus sytematically highlighted the intersubjective nature of human experiencing—the primacy of the interpersonal over the intrapersonal.  p. 108
In order to understand language, then, I suggest that we have to abandon both the Kantian dictum, the foundational presupposition of the cognitive sciences, that all human experiences comply with a universal interpretive scheme, and the neo-Kantian conviction, the foundational presupposition of most of the social sciences, that the members of every culture and sub-culture experience the world in the same ways.  We have to begin with the acknowldgement that each human individual lives in a private, experienctial world which is different from that of the others, and is inaccessible to them.  p. 109  Roper, Lacan
All languages are socially constructed technologies for the instruction of imagination, but the actual dynamics of exploration and stabilization in each and every language could be as variable as their communities, their histories, their particular communicative needs, their collective capacities, and the private experiential worlds of their speakers. 124

from Maryanne Wolf, Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (Harper Collins, 2018), p. 179
from Edward Frenkel And Hung-Hsi Wu, "Republicans Should Love 'Common Core'.  National standards can revive the way we teach math and science," Wall Street Journal, 5-6-13

The interviews and documents, many of them previously unpublished, show how the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump hid the truth for two decades: They were slowly losing a war that Americans once overwhelmingly supported. Instead, political and military leaders chose to bury their mistakes and let the war drift, culminating in President Biden’s decision this year to withdraw from Afghanistan, with the Taliban more powerful than at any point since the 2001 invasion.

"If the history of Afghanistan is one great stage play, the United States is no more than a supporting actor, among several previously, in a tragedy that not only pits tribes, valleys, clans, villages and families against one another, but, from at least the end of King Zahir Shah's reign, has violently and savagely pitted the urban, secular, educated and modern of Afganistan against the rural, religious, illiterate and traditional.  It is this latter group that composes and supports the Pashtun insurgency. The Pashtun insurgency, which is composed of multiple, seemingly infinite, local groups, is fed by what is perceived by the Pashtun people as a continued and sustained assault, going back centuries, on Pashtun land, culture, tradtions and religion by internal and external enemies."

Scholars of all ideological persuasiions have downgraded the importance of preindustrial economic interests, prebourgeois elites, predemocratic authority systerms, premodernist artistic idioms, and 'archaic' mentalities.  They have done so by treating them as expiring remnants, not to say relics, in rapdily modernizing civil and politial societies. They have vastly overdrawn the decline of land, noble and peasant; the contraction of traditional manufacturing and trade, provincial burghers, and artisanal workers; the derogation of kings, public service nobilities, and upper chambers; the weakening of organized religion; and the atrophy of classsical high culture.   p. 5

As for the class formations of this precorporate entrepreneurial capitalism, the owners of small workshops were the backbone of the indepenedent lower middle class.  In turn, proprietors of medium-sized as well as larger plants, especially in textiles and food processing, constituted a bourgeoisie that was predominantly provincial rather than national and cosmopolitan. This bourgeoisie including commercial and private bankers, acted less as a socal class with a comprehesive political and cultural project than as an interest and pressure group in pursuit of economic goals.  (20)

Clauswitz does not see war as a continuation of diplomacy--that is, of interstate relations--by other--that is, violent means.  Significantly, he invariably opts for the comprehensive concept of politics, which subsumes diplomacy, thus leaving open the possibility that recourse to war can be not only influenced but, in some instances, even determined by internal political considerations.  p. 136

Here, then, is the paradox.  Whereas wars whose motivation and intent are primarily diplomatic and external retain their political purposes, as conceived by Clauswitz, those whose mainsprings are essentially political and internal fail to acquire a well-defined project." p. 138

As for wars of primarily partisan and internal dynamic, they are decided by political actors and classes whose political tenure and social position tend to be insecure and whose latttiude for foreign policy decision tends to be circumscribed.  Precisely because their internal influence and control are tenuous, these actors and classes are inclined to have recourse to external war which, if successful, promises to shore up ther faltering positions. . . .  at the outset even the minimal external objectives  of wars that are sparked internally have a tendency to be singularly ill-defined.  p. 138

Wars "whose mainsprings are essentially political and internal fail to acquire a well-defined project."

"As for wars of primarily partisan and internal dynamic . . . . at the outset even the minimal external objectives of wars that are sparked internally have a tendency to be singularly ill-defined."

Throughout late 2001, 2002, and early 2003, the Bush Administration worked to build a case for invading Iraq, culminating in then Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 2003 address to the Security Council.[5] Shortly after the invasion, the Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence agencies largely discredited evidence related to Iraqi weapons and, as well as links to Al Qaeda, and at this point the Bush and Blair Administrations began to shift to secondary rationales for the war, such as the Hussein government's human rights record and promoting democracy in Iraq.[6][7] Opinion polls showed that the population of nearly all countries opposed a war without UN mandate, and that the view of the United States as a danger to world peace had significantly increased.[8][9][10] UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan described the war as illegal, saying in a September 2004 interview that it was "not in conformity with the Security Council."[11]

Accusations of faulty evidence and alleged shifting rationales became the focal point for critics of the war, who charge that the Bush Administration purposely fabricated evidence to justify an invasion it long planned to launch.[12]