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Pastimes : The Boxing Ring Revived -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Philosopher who wrote (4653)	2/20/2003 12:15:03 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 7720

You fail, I think, to identify the difference between "dismissing the POV" of other countries and understanding but disagreeing with their POV. Maybe I spent too much time immersed in consensus building processes and my fulcrum is off causing me to thing something is dismissive when it's simple disagreement. But it seems to me that the roles of the party taking action and the party whose interests are at stake are important in determining what is dismissive and what isn't. Tim "dismissed" <g> my analogy about the neighbor and the shrubs. He said we have a right to defend our neighbor. Well, I wouldn't argue against it being a "right" but I would argue about it being good-neighborly when, as in my analogy, the neighbor doesn't want to be defended. Seems to me that if the threat is against us, then it's our prerogative to disagree with or even dismiss the POV or third parties. There's no reason that we "should always do what the other countries want us to." You're right. I don't buy that at all. Let me try another neighborhood analogy. Say there's someone on the block, a mean-spirited fellow, who comes and goes at odd hours of the night with his car radio blasting waking all the neighbors, particularly the little old lady next door who suffers from migraines. You want to smash him or his radio or both. But the lady and the rest of the neighbors disagree with that approach. Say they think it would just make things worse or they think it's immoral to damage him or his radio. Seems to me that it's un-neighborly and arrogant to dismiss the POV of the rest of the neighbors and go a-smashing anyway. If the interested party is just you, then go ahead and take whatever action you see fit. When the neighbors are also interested parties, then you have a social obligation to work with them to find a consensus. This is not a lot different from my reluctance to just storm in and take over my father's health care when I know it's important to his quality of life to feel independent and competent. It would be arrogant and disrespectful to dismiss that. I need to work with him to find some role I can play in the quality of his medical care that he's comfortable with. And if he'd rather suffer lesser quality care than have me intervene, that's his prerogative as long as he's competent, which he still is, IMO. So when I get on my hobby horse about being dismissive of world opinion, I'm talking about when the world is being threatened, not about a scenario that's just between Saddam and us. I think that "disagreement" becomes "dismissive" when the POV's in question are of interested parties.