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Morris Dovey

Tim Daneliuk (in ) said:

| Morris Dovey wrote:
||
|| I understand your desire for retribution for wrongs; as well as
|| your loathing of evil and your desire to eliminate it. I also
|| understand that you would impose your own personal notion of
|| justice (and perhaps your own personal definition of evil) on all
|| the rest of the world.
|
| Not the case, or at least not as you frame it. The only "evil" for
| which I see redress is that "evil" which causes harm to others. For
| instance, I think drug abuse is "evil" in that is causes great harm
| to the individual abusing the drug. But until/unless their drug
| abuse causes harm to others, I seek no legal (i.e., forceful)
| remediation. In the matter of geopolitics, I similarly do not see
| it as our (the democratic West) job to intervene until/unless the
| actions of other people or nations jeopardizes that democratic West.

That's a form of isolationism that I don't think will work.
Interventions are seldom welcome; and we would do well to participate
as members of a global community intervention team. Unilateral
interventions should only be done as a last ditch desperation effort.

| The thing that makes the current situation difficult is that the
| threat is a gathering and growing one with very real potential for
| global nuclear holocaust. The moral question is analogous to this:
| If you're in a bar and someone threatens you, just *when* do you
| have the right to act forcefully? Assuming they have the means to
| carry out their threat ("threat" is only meaningful if the capacity
| to deliver the promise exists), do you wait until you've actually
| been struck by the beer bottle or can you act during the backswing?
| What is distressing about this entire debate is that the political
| Right wants to use this as an excuse to "deliver" the enemy into
| democracy, which clearly does not work. By contrast, the Left seems
| to want to wait until we're actually bleeding on the bar counter
| before acting, and in the mean time have some silly nuanced
| discussion about whether our domestic legal protections ought to be
| invoked. What is rarely discussed is the dimension of the
| asymmetric threat in a nuclear world connected by travel,
| transportation, and techology. In this case, the "beer bottle" once
| delivered will be devastating.

Your assessment seems to be unduly pessimistic; which doesn't mean
that you're necessarily wrong - but I just don't think the actual
threat level is really so high.

I don't go to bars - in part because I really don't enjoy being around
****faced people who can't control themselves. In the relatively few
real life fights I've been in, I've tried first to avoid a fight
altogether, taken the first and only blow from an oponent, and then
fought berserk. I've never fought to inflict pain - I fight to end the
fight as quickly and decisively as possible.

| Like you, I dislike much of what is going on at the moment, but what
| choice do we realistically have? Do we wait for an apocalyptic
| culture of suicidal maniacs to be armed to the point that we have
| no choice but to respond with nuclear weapons? In the real world
| the choice is not the Sunday School choice of simple Good vs. Bad.
| It is the choice between Bad and Worse.

We have a number of choices: We can become culturally aware, learn a
bit of world history, and recognize that all peoples have something to
offer. We can be the kind of friend that no one wants to pick a fight
with. We can look back at our own recent history and notice that power
flowed to us most rapidly when we empowered others; and drained away
most rapidly when we attempted to use our power to control others. We
can do a lot better job of listening to both friends and adversaries.

| The thing that makes this discussion so perverse is that the
| neo-cons have conflated defense and "bringing stability and
| democracy to the region". No wonder their critics shake their
| heads in dismay. But, that said, no matter how lousy the
| rationale', the general trajectory of stopping the disease before
| it is an epidemic is a sound one. Given any realistic and possible
| alternative, I'd support it, but I just don't see one.
| Lockeian/Jeffersonian Liberty is and always should be our
| inarguable guiding principle. But, it's not a suicide pact and
| ugly conditions demand ugly responses.

There are possible ways of slowing down and ultimately stopping the
"disease"; but we'll first need to decide that's what we really want
to do...

|| I've seen this before - and don't need more.
|
| I understand and share your angst for exactly the same reasons, I
| suspect. But I find it telling that the relatively minor sins of the
| West in these matters get magnified out of all proportion but the
| very real and far more serious abuses of the asymmetric warriors
| get's only a brief glance in the popular debate. As I've said
| previously, one of the (many) reasons I've become so completely
| disaffected with the political Left is that they have utterly
| failed in their role as the "loyal opposition". Instead of
| dissecting every small failing of the Bush administration, the US
| Left should have been acting quietly and diplomatically within the
| halls of power to steer a course everyone could live with. They
| haven't. They've taken the stance that *anything* W and his crew
| does is wrong with hope against hope they can regain majority
| power. Their political ambition trumps the good of democracy.They
| are contemptible for this. (N.B. That the neo-cons, however wrong
| you think they are, have *not* done this. They have taken a
| position and stuck to it in the face of great political pressure
| and possible loss of power.) Unfortunately, this means that, at
| least for now, the neo-cons get it all their way. I find this
| chilling, but not as chilling as doing nothing while we argue about
| whether US Code applies to Jamal The Suicide Bomber ...

The sins of the West are "relatively minor" only to westerners. There
are cultural issues at play with no shortage of ignorance and
misunderstanding at any side.

One of the difficulties we've made for ourselves is that we've allowed
political and economic stakeholders to fabricate "wedge issues" to
polarize our thinking. We really need to rediscover our center - to
focus on what we have in common and the amazing kinds of things we can
do when we work together to get problems solved. That doesn't mean
that disagreements vanish - but it does mean that we see differences
of opinion as indicators of opportunity to engage in constructive
dialog to work out better solutions.

A pox on both the left _and_ the right! Let's get back to the center.

--
Morris Dovey
DeSoto Solar
DeSoto, Iowa USA
http://www.iedu.com/DeSoto