For those wanting more information on the Georgia-Russia conflict, the NY Times has an interesting article on the history of the situation.
It’s really sad that people kill each other over border disputes. I can see the appeal of a one-world government — imagine if the entire world was allied like the United States. We don’t go to war with different states, and I hope we never do.
I doubt a one-world government is possible — patriotism is too strong, fundamentalist Christians would oppose such a “beast,” and fundamentalist Muslims would only want it if was a theocracy and they were in charge.
Maybe it wouldn’t even solve things, but it could. What’s the other alternative? Certainly not everyone in the world is going to convert to Christianity or Islam and create a theocracy. We need a real-world, secular solution that people of all faiths and nations can support.
The struggle against Islamic-based terrorism will be not simply a military campaign but a battle for public opinion in the Islamic world, among our allies, and in the United States. Osama bin Laden understands that he cannot defeat or even incapacitate the United States in a conventional war.
What he and his allies can do is inflict enough pain to provoke a reaction of the sort we’ve seen in Iraq—a botched and ill-advised U.S. military incursion into a Muslim country, which in turn spurs on insurgencies based on religious sentiment and nationalist pride, which in turn leads to an escalating death toll on the part of U.S. troops and the local civilian population. All of this fans anti-American sentiment among Muslims, increases the pool of potential terrorist recruits, and prompts the American public to question not only the war but also those policies that project us into the Islamic world in the first place.
That’s the plan for winning a war from a cave, and so far, at least, we are playing to script.
I don’t know what kind of weapons will be used in the third world war, assuming there will be a third world war. But I can tell you what the fourth world war will be fought with—stone clubs.
There is little possibility of our having a cold war with an Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons. A cold war requires that the parties be mutually deterred by the threat of death. Notions of martyrdom and jihad run roughshod over the logic that allowed the United States and the Soviet Union to pass half a century perched, more or less stably, on the brink of Armageddon. What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-ranged nuclear weaponry?….
In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime—as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day—but it may be the only course of action against us, given what Islamists believe. How would such an unconscionable act of self-defense be perceived by the rest of the Muslim world? It would likely be seen as the first incursion of a genocidal crusade. The horrible irony here is that seeing it could make it so: this very perception could plunge us into a state of hot war with any Muslim state that had the capacity to pose a nuclear threat of its own. All this is perfectly insane, of course.
—Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (W. W. Norton, 2004), pp. 128-129.
Give people divergent, irreconcilable, and untestable notions about what happens after death, and then oblige them to live together with limited resources. The result is just what we see: an unending cycle of murder and cease-fire. If history reveals any categorical truth, it is that an insufficient taste for evidence regularly brings out the worst in us. Add weapons of mass destruction to this diabolical clockwork, and you have found a recipe for the fall of civilization.
—Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (W. W. Norton, 2004), p. 26.
Our world is fast succumbing to the activities of men and women who would stake the future of our species on beliefs that should not survive an elementary school education. That so many of us are still dying on account of ancient myths is as bewildering as it is horrible, and our own attachment to these myths, whether moderate or extreme, has kept us silent in the face of developments that could ultimately destroy us.
—Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (W. W. Norton, 2004), p. 26.
The law of competition implies that many competitors, competing on the “free market” without restraint, will ultimately and inevitably reduce the number of competitors to one. The law of competition, in short, is the law of war.
[Berry is rhetorically winsome here, but I disagree with him. The law of competition is at work in nature, yet it rarely reduces the number of competitors to one. (And when it does, the winner loses.) It rarely reduces competitors to one in a free market, either. This may change with large technological companies because of the tremendous start-up costs and knowledge involved (notice that there are really only two big CPU manufacturers, Intel and AMD), but so far the American free market has not reduced all competitors to one, and it's been going on for quite a while now.
What's the alternative, anyway? Socialism isn't any better – see any economic analysis on the Soviet Union. It was horrible. A free market lets scarce resources get to the most needed places at the right prices very quickly. I'm not aware of any other economic system that is comparably efficient.]
The more I hear Ron Paul speak, the more I like him. He’s for small government, wants to bring our troops home and stop policing the world, believes strongly in a free market, wants to get rid of the IRS, cut income taxes, get out of national debt, supports homeschooling and many other great things. He’s been in congress for many years. He’s also a doctor and obviously intelligent. I’m not sure what’s not to like about him, so if I’m missing something, please enlighten me.
Here’s a short interview of Ron Paul on Jay Leno, which I found very interesting:
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