<< to Keg bar>>

Not sure who is Keg bar in the picture...

So, what do you think of my picture?

Oceans

Hey, Duncan!

Naming Blair to any role in the Middle East is silly, of course. His
credibility went down the tubes a long time ago.

The Quartet itself is a separate problem. The concept was cobbled
together to create an appearance of multilateralism on the issue of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is an unworkable recipe of Oslo,
Madrid, the US "Peace process", AIPAC influence (the blind support of
the US for Israel), the EU (as if the EU had a coherent or relevant
'policy' toward that conflict, Russia, and the UN.

The UN is the only one of these entities that actually does anything
useful in the conflict, largely through its humanitarian efforts.
Initially, the UN also had an active envoy tackling the conflict, but
when the Quartet was formed any independence of action by the UN and the
envoy was subordinated to the workings of the Quartet generally and the
specific constraints imposed on it by the US. The political work of the
Envoy was essentially eliminated by the US in its service to Israel.

If anyone wants to know more about this, please let me know via email.
There is an important paper, by the last Envoy, that everyone interested
in this subject should read.

So....to appoint Blair to be the Quartet's envoy will simply be to
saddle a dysfunctional pseudo-organization with a dysfunctional and
pseudo-diplomat.... It won't do any harm, but it will give the political
cartoonists a field day.

The hope. always, is that the US will support some representative who
will actually be able to think for himself and make a difference. The
last who qualified was Paul Wolfensohn (not to be confused with Paul
Wolfowitz!!!) who did some good work against imposing odds during the
Israeli partial withdrawal from Gaza.

Like the recent UN Envoy to the Middle East, Wolfensohn ended up
disgusted at the willingness of the US government to subordinate the
interests of the US to those of Israel. I suppose the major worry about
Blair is that he might continue simply to be the de facto lapdog of
Israel.

Whew!

Thanks for bearing with me. Lots of detail here, I know, but this is a
question where the devil does indeed exist in the details.



Oceans

For fishing or for world building?

We can think of common law (or any other law 'code) in several different
ways.

1. It can be seen as a set of principles and processes that are then
acted on to produce the substance of the rules that govern human
behavior and provide for dealing with transgression.

Examples in common law of these principles and processes are: innocence
until proven guilty, habeas corpus, right to competent defense, public
accusation and public defense, stare decisis (use of precedent), etc.

2. It can be viewed as the rules themselves. Examples are: illegality of
theft, kidnapping etc.; enforceability of contracts; rules of
inheritAnce, etc.

As time goes by, all societies have to upgrade their rules, to reflect
new values, or to address problems that are the result of modern
developments, e.g. technology.

To get to Miguel's excellent questions:

Common Law has stood the test of time pretty well. It provides, in my
opinion, a flexible, pragmatic and sufficiently principled approach to
life and its conflicts. It offers a ground-up evolution of the rules of
society. It does depend on the wisdom of judges to interpret the legal
issues involved in new types of conflict, and to decide which common law
rules and precedents will guide their resolution. As long as our judges
are selected with a primary view to their legal and intellectual
capabilities, the common law system for enforcing laws and creating new
ones as needed works pretty well.

It is not a perfect situation -- far from it, and it is not hard to list
instances in which it has failed.

But the alternative, say, is a 'Napoleonic code' approach, where laws
are designed from the top down, and where it is assumed that legal
experts can design in advance a corpus of laws that can control the full
complexity of the human experience.

This is, of course, enormously hard to do, and when it is tried the
legal creationists inevitably try to simplify their impossible task by
issuing broad prohibitions, and in the end asserting that 'that which is
not explicitly allowed is prohibited.'

The common law approach arrives at a much different general formulation:
'that which is not explicitly prohibited, is allowed.'

In my opinion, then, the common law approach provides individuals with
greater freedom of decision-making and action.

The 'Napoleonic code' approach provides for greater social and
behavioral conformity.

Societies can choose whichever approach and whatever benefits they
prefer: the choice is pretty clear.

And then to come to Miguel's last question: IMO, the nature of this
choice hasn't changed much over the centuries.

You'd better get an "A", bro!



Oceans

Whew!!!

I worried that Kafka might have returned

No, I don't think it too late, but we will have to find the leadership
that this will require somewhere. Where and who is our Jean Monet? Our
Benjamin Franklin? Our U Thant?

The new generation weapons if they proliferate will make things very
unpleasnt for any oppressor. They probably won't make things much worse
for the opprressed, who are already overmatched. So the new generation
weapons may have as one of their effects to give those who oppress
pause.

If someone smuggles an 'old' suitcase nuke into Washington or Dallas or
Ithaca or San Diego and sets it off (not too hard to do), it will
certainly make the American people think twice about supporting the kind
of interventionist policies that the US has supported since the 1950s,
and that have now found their most arrogant and confused expression in
the Bush administration.

So while the new generation weapons up the ante in terms of
proliferation and destructiveness, they may also rein in the killer
government, in the same way that the USSR's nuclear arsenal offset that
of the US, and so imposed constraints on the activitites of both.

But that still leaves the enormous task of reorganizng the way our
species acts collectively. In an atmosphere of massive fear and panic,
this will be essentially impossible to do, I would guess.



Oceans

Alex, I was rereading your post and don't understand what you mean by
"why....to create employment? to expand a corrupt industry???"

Are you thinking that I am advocating the development of the next
generation of weaponry? I am not. I am just pointing out that it is
happening.

Are you thinking that I am advocating developing better weapons, or
expanding the arms industry? I am not -- on the contrary, I think these
new weapons make further weaponization of our species, at a minimum,
dysfunctional. Instead, our species has to conceive of and pursue an
entirely different way of handling the problem posed by weapons.

As our species struggles to come to the realization that we are all part
of a whole -- and not "Spaniards" or "Americans" or "Texans", or "New
Yorkers", or "black" or "white" or "Episcopalians", or "Tamils" or , or
,or....the kinds of structures Alex points to will almost certain emerge
-- unless we reduce the definition of "human being" to some primitive,
brutish and dysfunctional state before that.

Andrea -- I don't think that finding trustworthy people is hard at all.
For the most part, people want to be 'good', they want to do 'the right
thing', and it is only because they become oppressed in some way or have
a too-narrow view of themselves and the society around them that they
act or speak stupidly.

For example, a lot of good people are in various international NGOs, or
maybe they are running a company sympathetically, or maybe they advance
the causes of human progress through their writings, or maybe they are a
nurse working in the wards of the most destitute, or maybe they are just
'ordinary' people who are simply hoping and waiting for a chance to make
a contribution to the world.



Oceans

This thread began with a probing question from Alex: if there were no
guns, would people find other weapons?

I the last weeks I was asked to think a bit about a parallel question:
given the emergence of a new generation of weaponry, what political and
cultural shifts will be required to avoid the massive and unstoppable
destruction that these weapons will be able to inflict?

The traditional answers have been:
1. I'll build even better weapons
2. I will annihilate you if you attack me
3. I will annihilate you before you can annihilate me

In the face of the next generation of weapons, none of these strategies
will work. The next generation will be cheap, easy-to-hide, and mobile.
Some of the weapons will be technically difficult, some
not-so-difficult, and not-so-expensive.

In other words, anyone can have them, and anyone can use them, against
any target they wish.

So what kind of world do we need to create to respond to the challenges
posed by these weapons?



Oceans

Good morning, everyone!

Thank you so much for the Rumi treats, Alex.
Good morning, Duncan.
I do like the idea of a warm woman to greet one after a cold wet day,
Kater....
Morning, Transient, Andrea!



Oceans

Interesting dicussion!

Did the Sioux win because they were fighting on their own lands? Or was
there some sort of cognitive or personality weakness in Custer? Or was
he from a time and culture that just denigrated the people they were
attacking?

I guess I am asking what patterns lay behind the 'bad decisions'? What
were the root causes behind the bad decisions?

Oceans

Nah, he is just in training to become the first animal member of the
Bundestag....



Oceans

Hi, Walker. This is actually a well-known phenomenon. It comes from the
effect of working in an office on the functioning of the brain. If you
blink your eyes several times next time people seem to 'stop', you will
see that they actually keep moving.

Clothing can do it to, especially under flourescent lighting. Try
standing next to the window to get a more natural sunlight, and then
taking your clothes off. You will see that you can control people's
staring pretty successfully, this way.

I hope this helps.



Oceans

I'm not sure who you are addressing this to, Gardenforge, but I started
the thread and am quite happy to see people explore parallels between
Little Big Horn and Iraq or the Alamo, or whatever sparks their
imagination.

Forge, thanks for the info on Custer's actions. Can you specualte a bit
about what lay behind this set of mistakes? E.g. What led him to leave
behind his heavier weaponry? To split his forces, etc? Were these
actions the result of his thinking, or beliefs?

Forge, do you know if the memorial site at Little Big Horn includes
memorials to the Sioux who did there, or, I guess the village that was
also part of the attack?

I haven't see an Iraq thread for a while: maybe I'll start one up.

Regards,
Oceans

Hang in there, Dale....



Oceans

Good morning, Fallen!

Double espresso, if you have any left!



Oceans

That fits so well, JJ.

Thank you.



Oceans

Rumi fits us like a gentle, intimate glove....