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Politics : About that Cuban boy, Elian -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (5921)	5/21/2000 11:38:00 PM
From: average joe	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 9127

"...I'm a dreamer, a pragmatic, utilitarian, relativistic dreamer"). I think you are more of a minimal expressionist post modern neo-symbolist.

To: epicure who wrote (5921)	5/22/2000 12:14:00 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9127

I think that AJ and X2 are using what I have come to call "the e-Bill technique", which means that when they realize they've said something more than usually stupid and gotten caught at it, they go away until they think everyone's forgotten. Let's not forget, shall we? I would really be so curious to know what was going through their minds (well, in a loose sort of way I suppose you could call them minds) when they wrote those things.

To: epicure who wrote (5921)	5/22/2000 2:08:00 PM
From: marcos	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9127

Interesting .. yes, the bloodless-for-one-side technological warmaking capabilities are a factor that is acting at the same time as the factor of the reality of a single overwhelming superpower - together they reinforce one another, and a search for effective brakes gains importance. Yes, Iraq has been bombed more than Serbia, off and on now for over ten years, and you hardly ever hear of it [and you never hear of Saddam taking a hit] ... like in the war on Viet Nam, where more tonnage of explosives was dropped than in all of WW II, and the statement of that fact appears only as occasional dry lines of obscure trivia ... the vietnamese didn't have an Edward R. Murrow reporting on their blitz. "He wonders if we will become neo-imperialists- with a sort of human rights imperialist agenda." Nations, like individuals, act in their own self-interest, or whatever they perceive such self-interest to be ... and like individuals, they make mistakes. In the field of Geopolitik there is endless opportunity for mistake-making ... some of this stuff is really hard to call. For instance - where do you draw the national boundaries [assuming you intend to respect such a thing at all]? Over time the borders have moved and the people have moved and the political systems have moved with them ... Yugoslavia is a good example of this - Where do you draw the lines? Any decision is going to be arbitrary, and incorporate inherent injustice against some proportion of the population. It would have been very difficult to sit back and not intervene in Kosovo ... still, look at the effects of intervention - now a bunch of albanian drug-dealers have been handed power, the place is now the heroin and stolen-Mercedes capital of Europe. The style of intervention is the cause of that, imho - without men on the ground, and lots of them, with a comprehensive plan for construction of participatory democracy, the dictator types take over in a power vacuum ..... and i don't really think the transition can be imposed from outside, barring exceptional cases - the inhabitants themselves have to be ready to assume the responsibilities that go with the rights of suffrage. You can't push the river. It's easy for north americans to fall into the trap of assuming that because we are able to view events of the planet so thoroughly that we understand how people everywhere think - that's not the case, imho ... what we see is so media-filtered that it is inevitably distorted ... as well, we filter everything through our own limited experience ... there is just no substitute for being personally on the ground ... i think more net lasting good is done by travellers and NGOs than by the armed forces of their states. You might find this interesting - 'the Interruption of History' - prometheus.demon.co.uk I'll ask about 'Virtual War' at the library ... thanks ... cheers