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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (15173)	11/4/2003 8:42:59 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793600

The other problem with that is that it indirectly establishes how the world will operate post cold war now that we're the only super power. We've been dithering about that. Now we've set our course. Might makes right is the new paradigm. That is the key in Foreign Affairs. We are now stronger than the rest of the world combined. Let's examine that fact. Life is an open, "thermodynamic" system that organizes energy. It is not "thermostatic." It does not stand still. So we grow, or we die. I think the reason we are the strongest is because we are the best system. And it is normal and natural that we would want to spread it, and normal and natural that others would want to stop us. People are, by nature, conservative. They don't like change. But we can't stand still. We are going to grow faster than others, like it or not, because we are the best organized. We can be destroyed. But only from within. The History of great Civilizations shows that is the only way they go down. And what destroys them is weakness. One of the symptoms of weakness here is Multiculturalism." The concept that some guy squatting on a dunghill in the Mid East, and shaking his fist at a passing car, lives in a civilization that should be considered equal to ours and should be studied and appreciated. I lived for years with the idea that, "fine, if they think they are as well off the way they are, let them enjoy themselves." But they won't do that. They keep attacking us. They have been attacking us for about twenty years, and we finally had to face up to that fact on 911. When I say "they," I am talking about the Intellectual core of fanatics throughout the Muslim World. They are mainly concentrated among the Wahhabis, but they have followers in all of the branches of Islam. It came out of the ground in Egypt in the '20s with the "Muslim Brotherhood" and has flowered throughout the Muslim world. Some of the strongest followers live in Europe and America. They didn't attack us on 911 for what we did wrong, they attacked us for what we do right. We built and are enjoying a civilization they don't understand and don't like. So there is no use apologizing to them. They view our attempts to negotiate with them as weakness. They don't want what we have. We can't withdraw into our "Fortress America" and ignore them. That is an attempt at a "Thermostatic" solution. It won't work. Either we win or they do. No compromise is possible. It's a "Thermodynamic" process. If you want to think of 911 as the start of WWIII, that's one way to look at it. The solution involves stomping on the Terrorists like Roaches when they appear, and helping the rest of the Muslim world to enter the 21st Century so that the Roaches no longer have a place to hide. We stopped Communism by holding the fanatics among them back and building a better world that their people wanted. Something similar is now going to happen in the ME. As David Brooks put it, Iraq is WWIII's "Midway." It is a key turning point. The Deficit? We never did get out from under it during Clinton. It kept going up each year even while it was claimed we were balancing the budget. 911 is a major part of it now. The Tax cuts were to accomplish two things. Give the economy a boost was one. But the main reason was to give Congress less money to spend. We are seeing that now, when the Democratic Candidates can't pay for all the welfare programs they want without increasing taxes. Really ticks them off. :>) The concept is that we can grow our way out of the deficit. We seem to be starting to. We have people on this thread who can post columns of numbers either way. Makes my head hurt. Immigration? Mexico is moving in, and saying, "Whats for Breakfast, Amigo?" I don't see any reason to believe we can stop it. On the other hand, we want the people. Can't get our kids to clean the sewers. Stem Cell? I'm with you. But that is the price paid for being on the right with the Social Conservatives. The things I have to hold my nose on if the Liberals are in charge are much worse, IMO. The two things done that really made me mad were the Steel Tariff and the Agricultural subsidy. Good exchange, Karen. Now if we could only get the rest of the country to argue as peaceably.