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Politics : Foreign Policy Discussion Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (7851)	12/21/2006 1:14:46 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 15987

It's all very interesting = the democratic process and the synergies of globalisation and the pyschological aspects of it all. As you can see from the Haj, and Catholicism, both spread around the world, irrespective of borders, people line up like iron filings in a magnetic field, pointing to Mecca or Saint Peters [literally in the case of Moslems kneeling towards Mecca], and Moslems travel to Mecca to all circle the big rock. People like that stuff. Nationalism is fun, but supranationalism is fun too and perhaps even more fun if you believe the adherents or even if you don't, but judge them by their actions not their words. An interesting thing about humans and "inertia" is that there really isn't "momentum" in minds. They are more like states and they can change state at the drop of a hat. Most ideas do take time to propagate, but some don't. Some can travel at the speed of light and everyone could change in an instant. The Rapture fan club members say that's what will happen when the second coming arrives. So, you have a conventional theory here: <Any major change in international organization would have to deal with a lot of inertia. That inertia can only be overcome by either 1 - A shock to the system like WWII, 2 - Powerful countries forcing it on the weak, or 3 - Determined effort to achieve a new consensus over a long period of time. > But I disagree with all three. Ideas don't necessarily take shocks. Tamagochi pets spread like wildfire without shock. Fashions change in a season. The baby boomers made major changes in cultural norms - the global baby bust has left demographers scratching their heads and putting away their Malthusian catastrophe charts. There was no shock that made people around the world cut their baby output. China enforced such a policy, but it would have happened anyway. On item 2, the powerful forcing it on the weak, on the contrary, I think the poweful [the USA] has been going in the opposite direction. The weak, Al Qaeda and other insurgents, have forced IEDs on the powerful. Who are now looking around thinking this is getting annoying. The weak have traditionally ganged up in revolution. That's all they can do. Being weak. The samizdat runs hot, the bush telegraph goes into overdrive and the powerful are removed, and sometimes executed. Ironically, the powerful are better off having their megalomania moderated by democratic process. It's annoying for them, but Saddam would have been better to have invited the NUN to form a constitutional conference in Baghdad, provided all services, a couple of palaces, funded the whole deal and he could have remained in power. He didn't do that because the megalomaniacs can't help themselves but go for maximum power. Which, as the USA is finding, can be problematic. Now, the USA is bleating about how they need help to stabilize things in Iraq. Well, if they, or Saddam, had listened to your resident geopolitical soothsayer international analyst, the whole mess could have been sorted out 3 years ago and actually prevented. Uday and Qusay could have been alive. Iraqis enjoying peace and profits and NUN members not paying parking tickets in Baghdad [which is annoying but not as bad as having RPGs and Specters firing around the neighbourhood]. It's better if the powerful lead, but the small countries could do so [if they had India, Germany and Japan backing them - and those big countries are poorly represented in the current WWII Victor's Club]. "Powerful" is an interesting concept these days. The USA is powerful, but can't seem to deal with a few "dead-enders". So the power is pointless. This is simply a matter of constitution: < Also the stronger the organization is the more likely it would eventually become an organization of bossy bureaucrats that you say it will not become.> One doesn't hand an open chequebook. Of course, given an inch they'll take over, like any garden variety megalomaniac. That's why you don't just say "Do anything you like". They could be like parking wardens - giving out tickets for bad parking. They would not be authorized to issue building permits or check under your bed for illicit girlfriends. The danger is that humans are prone to such sheep-like thinking [as evidenced by the Haj, and Christian masses, and marching en masse off to the Somme, or chanting Mao's mantras]. I see around the world that democratic votes are for a LOT of control. Americans, who purportedly like freedom, vote themselves very little of it. Check out the Libertarian vote - it's tiny. People prefer to vote Democrat and confiscation or Republican and more of the same. Almost none of them vote for freedom. Americans don't like freedom. They say they do, but they don't. But they are in good company. Nobody else does either. So yes, I agree I'm likely to end up with sheople voting for a suffocatocracy. Maybe it would be better to have separate countries and have Libertarians take over one and migrate to it, like emigrants escaping the olde worlde. There was a project to do just that in New Hampshire "Live Free or Die" = giggle... yeah right... Mqurice