[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
No one has this delusion. Keep attacking those strawmen![/quote]
Bullshit. Those notions come straight out of the national security strategy and other official documents/positions held by the government.
It is the policy of the United States to seek and support democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss/2006/sectionI.html
[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
No kidding? Unfortunately you have recently gone on record indicating that you don’t think Muslims want to spread their religion and Sharia law and the whole war on terror is just an excuse to set up a police state. Those people in East Africa have fallen right for Bush’s clever scheme. Especially where he turns over power of a police state to the Democrats.[/quote]
I never claimed to know either of those things with certainty. I have stated simply that they were relatively plausible. For the record, I think the pope wants to spread Christianity. I think the Grand Wizard of Scientology would like to spread that religion. And yes, I think that fundamentalist Muslim clerics would also like to see their ideology spread throughout the world. What I’m not willing to commit is the blind certainty on the part of some neocons that any of these groups would necessarily be willing to sacrifice themselves wholesale in order to advance their ideologies. There is simply no evidence for the latter assumption; it goes against human nature and against the facts.
[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
Earth shattering but wrong. There are plenty of coincidences unless you believe in some outlandish conspiracies such as this being all part of a master plan to create a domestic police state.[/quote]
How do you deal with the unknown, or the not-yet-known? That is the what lies at the root of this issue. To call something a “coincidence” is to put it into a definitive existential category. You are saying, in effect, that there can be NO causal explanation for an event, that it is purely and unalterably “random”. Yet what happens when a causal explanation surfaces, after all? Then you no longer have a coincidence. Which makes the term nearly worthless, in the first place. Hence: there are no coincidences, there are only events for which there have not yet been identified any plausible causalities. This is the mindset of a scientist versus the mindset of the average person.
[quote]Zap Branigan wrote
Yeah, fuck those people. Let them starve.[/quote]
No, they will starve anyways, regardless of whether you fuck them, hate them, love them or completely ignore them. They will continue to starve and die even if you and everyone you know commits the rest of his life to working to support them. That’s the point I’m making. You can’t change the situation. In order for Africa to truly be saved, it would take nothing less than the economic ruin of a modern, Western nation. So, now that you know the real stakes, are you willing to let America become a 3rd world nation in order to “bring up” the current 3rd world nations? Most people wouldn’t play the game if they knew the actual stakes. Needless to say, most people don’t know the stakes.
[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
Heavy stuff man. I am sure glad they have the dictatorship over there so we can be free here, at least until we have our police state.[/quote]
You would have no conception of what a “dictatorship” is if every nation in the world shared the Western standard of living and form of government. Conversely, you could be living under a dictatorship and have no idea how “bad” you had it if there were no existing democracies. This is all relativism of course. Relativism gets a very bad rap in the social sciences. So much so that there was even a dedicated school of political ideology designed to combat it: egalitarianism, also known as Marxism. Without relativism, that’s the only place you can end up.
[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
Yeah, fuck those people too.[/quote]
Who fucked who? We did when we supported Hussein’s regime in the 80’s. The British did when they created the country. Someone else did before that. Each of the groups has alternately been fucking the others for as long as they’ve been there. Once again, you have a situation that simply cannot be “fixed”, a knot that cannot be tied, if you will. What is the point of intervening in a situation like that? The only thing you can possibly do is change the balance of power and let some other group get fucked, for a change. This is “progress”? No, this is a joke. Leave them be and let the situation sort itself out. Ultimately, the only way this can possibly occur is if one group amasses enough power to wipe out the others. Sorry, but that’s reality. That is how the world works. Look at every single culture today (especially the powerful ones) and trace it’s path to it’s current position. Would America be the world’s superpower if we were still fighting the Indians for control of the continent? Hell no, we wiped out the Indians and THEN we became #1. I can’t stress enough that this is very essence of all international relations – it cannot be changed, it is forever set in stone.
Also: Where in the Constitution does it grant authority to the government to run around and try to solve the world’s problems? Or is it a “universal law”? If so, then why not let, say, China, try to solve America’s drug trafficking problems? And perhaps Sweden could justify a military occupation of the US mainland in order to help reduce the crime rates? Don’t you see how absurd and hypocritical this whole concept is? These analogies are perfectly valid. If they won’t drill the point home to you, nothing will.
[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
There is a word for people that do not use a moral lens. I believe it is sociopath.[/quote]
Yes, and unfortunately, there are academic fields for idiots who feel inclined to play with advanced concepts. These include psychology/sociology, “political science”, all of the “social sciences”, and many others.
“Sociopath” is a meaningless and subjective term that is the creation of the mental health cult in this country. The psychological establishment and everything it represents is religion, not science. Given the axiom that faith is stupidity (Robert Anton Wilson), I don’t feel at all inclined to defend myself or my arguments against such tripe.
[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
On another thread I am decried because I support tactics that are not considered good and pure. I must be two-faced.[/quote]
According to the neocon mindset, everything that America does is “good and pure” by default. That’s what needs to go. Obviously, the recipients of America’s “goodness and purity” often describe it in slightly different terms.
[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
Sounds like something Hitler said, or maybe it was Stalin.[/quote]
And they were two of the most powerful individuals in the world during their time (indeed, in all of history), so that goes to show you that there is a great deal of truth to the statements, although you will never see it if you hide behind your cloak of morality. Stalin and Hitler, like all humans ever born, were simply taking advantage of the circumstances particular to their time and place. If it hadn’t been them, it would have been someone else – because the circumstances permitted it. But by demonizing certain individuals as “living incarnations of pure evil”, you conveniently ignore the empirical circumstances which allowed those individuals to commit their acts. So, if you want to ensure that there will always be nascent Hitlers and Stalins in the world, simply treat each one as a “spawn of Satan” and make no effort to understand the real-world circumstances that allowed them to come to power and do what they did.
Three cheers for Christianity and it’s political disciple, neoconservatism!
[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
Don’t worry, you are not changing any minds, just giving us something to laugh about.[/quote]
I’m fine with that because I’m also getting entertainment out of this. So it’s a mutually beneficial exchange. Capitalism.