Apples and oranges; I'm not trying to "fight emotions with logic." I'm not trying to fight at all. It's an interesting puzzle to me. She's a subject; file her under 302 in the old Dewey Decimal System. My interest in her is purely self-referential; I'm interested to the extent that she regularly makes herself a burr under my saddle.
Oddly enough, and this is something @pollyanna and co. have been discussing on her post-D relationship thread, STBX is most well-behaved in the days after I find myself having to slap her down, rhetorically speaking. My unwillingness to step into the old roles seems both to agitate and intrigue her.
(And that's a more broadly applicable lesson, insofar as it says something about this thing with women being attracted to men who seem distant and aloof. It certainly would seem to be in play in STBX's case - every Signore she gets is, by her own words, "either emotionally or geographically unavailable or both.")
But most of the time I hardly think of her as being human at all, other than in the most abstract sense of the term, except when she degenerates into one of her now near-weekly batsh*t-crazy-a-thons, and then I just think of her as being a really irritating human -- like one of those people who think they can browbeat the airline people at the gate into giving them a better seat.
But her feelings, hopes, dreams -- what about those? Call me Mr. Butler because frankly I don't give a dam -- that's for Signore Schmuckatelli n to worry about now.
Think of it as relationship archaeology. I have a few fragments of a past civilization, and I'm trying to figure out how they fit together. Doesn't mean I regret not living in Sumeria.
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How has policy been effective in changing religious beliefs in the Middle East?
I wasn't aware that "changing religious beliefs" was an objective of American policy in the Middle East.
Oddy, though, policy has been very effective in changing religious beliefs in the Middle East -- though in an almost certainly unintended way. Apart from some inside-baseball discussions among intellectuals and the occasional imam hanging around coffee shops in Cairo and Damascus, there was almost no such thing as "Islamic fundamentalism" until the U.S. starting mucking about the place.
