I did meant litterally.....So thanks .....Mills harm principal did make sense and I agree. LOL...sitting on fence I need to remember that one- It will save me from spelling ambigious(?) :guffaw::guffaw::guffaw: Well when I was younger I through "you" could blame all this conflict on inlightment / education. How could anyone think or do like that once they had been inlighted or read "stuff" about the world.....but I got wise. Saudi Arabias upper - classes often educates themself in Uk or USA and stlll pratise IMO an feudal(?) ( ruler and servant) country with an terrible view on women. Look at former Yugoslavia. After years of regretting the 2. world war and the holocust. We see concentration camps once again. So how do we come together and live side by side??? I think Suliman the great of Turkey had all living side by side in his reign. What happened there?
no worries and i really think it does - there aren't many principles in political philosophy that can be so widely applied i don't think. in fact the only other one that comes to mind is Rawls' original position principle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position - which i also like a lot). i studied philosophy - hated it mostly, but those two really stand out for me hehe, very true! sometimes colloquial versions of phrases just sound better as well haha, oh, me too! i guess everyone goes through that to an extent. i think that was the reason i did my last degree (politics, philosphy & history) - i thought maybe it would help me think more practically about fixing the world instead of just imagining it - but it didn't work. i hate studying philosophy now, and my interest in politics has dropped as well. i do love history though (ironic really as that was the one i didn't want to study in the first place, it was imposed on me!). then again, on the other hand, i've always been deeply cynical, mainly of humans in general. i'm not someone who subscribes to the idea that human beings are "good", especially not inherently. i tend to think we're a rather nasty species, and i think by looking deeper into history, politics and so on that gets confirmed. the world doesn't go round because of love or niceness, it's driven by greed, violence and anger. i always think thomas hobbes got it a little bit wrong - he said without the social contract, life would be "nasty, brutish and short" - well, we have a social contract (for the most part) and it is all those things anyway. "those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it" is what the saying says. well we repeat it regardless of learning. as i said, i don't think humans are remotely nice as a species. we're very good at saying we've learnt from previous actions, and then repeating them anyway. most western nations would denounce the kind of imperialism that happened in the late 19th/early 20th century, but we still do it, just in a slightly different way. there will always be conflict, usually brutal, partly because we're an angry, jealous, confrontational species, but partly because we live on a planet that is getting smaller, with resources getting used up incredibly fast, but with a booming population. it's inevitable. whether that conflict is done under the disguise of religious belief or economic belief or territorial belief or whatever isn't that relevant really, the fact is it'll keep happening, whatever label we put on it. we don't! i don't know too much about suleyman (i never did much ottoman history, only a little), but he was involved in quite a few military campaigns and wars during his time - he may have kept order within his empire but that must have come at the expense of waging war elsewhere. it's easy to get people within a nation/national identity to come together - either through benevolence (rarely) or through oppression (more common), but either there are threats to the nation from outside which necessitate war, or there is greed and imperial ambition which also necessitate war. i don't think humans ever will, or frankly, ever can, live peaceably, i just don't think it's in our nature, any more than it would be in a lion's nature to just sit and quietly ignore a nice juicy sheep or something. we are a nasty species, and although the fact that we are self aware and intellectual can bring some great things - like our ability to reason or negotiate or have fun, it can bring detrimental things too, if combined with our more instinctive traits, because it lets us scheme and come up with more and more ways of killing or landgrabbing or whatever. for instance, the sheer tragedy of WWI was the direct result of the enlightenment's ability to industrialise killing. and the holocaust was one of the most intellectually calculated events of the last century, not to mention the fact that without industrialisation and bureaucracy - both key features of so called civilised nations, especially if you go by what Max Weber said, it wouldn't have been possible. our ability to think is both our best asset and our downfall. people say i'm a pessimist, i don't think i am, i think i'm a realist with a very healthy dose of cynicism, mainly about humans and our capabilities. but quite often i do despair of the human race as a whole. hmm sorry that turned into a bit of a diatribe!
The top stories in the world of POLITICS in the U.S. Oil spill and more~ http://www.aolnews.com/category/politics/
PRESIDENT OBAMA GETS HIGH MARKS FOR HANDLING THE McCHRYSTAL MESS:bolian: good job~ http://www.aolnews.com/
^ Not sure why Obama would deserve high marks. McChrystal may have been (very) critical about the top functionaries and Obama himself, but how does it justify his resignation out of supposed free will? Being critical is necessary, for every nation, whether it's in Parliament or in Rolling Stone.
UH, one doesn't make derogatory remarks about the Commander and Chief, his boss, anymore than you would in the workplace, that's insubordination at the highest level. He slould have kept his comments to himself, so he paid the price. Obama said "It's a change in personnel, not a change in policy"~
yeah i'm inclined to agree - being critical is one thing but making derogatory remarks publicly is undermining as opposed to critical.
What's worse, is that he did this interview with the "Rolling Stone Magazine" knowing full on well, what he was saying, not good It's demeans, drags down & corrupts the moral of not only the military but the whole population of the U.S.~
^ it's funny, in general i'm all for criticism of government and indeed pretty much any authority figures, i think it's hugely important to question everything they do, hold them accountable at all times and generally not give them an easy ride. however, this wasn't about a member of the public airing a grievance - if top brass have issues with leaders, they should air them through the appropriate channels, on the whole (whistleblowers excepted, i think that's a different issue though) - i'm sure there were meetings and discussions with all involved where he could've said his piece and they could've sorted something out, done a press conference and that would be that. by doing it so publically and in a magazine that isn't part of the political arena generally, it just makes him look like a bit of a brat and undermines everyone else involved. i'm not saying he shouldn't have had his grievances, just that in public office there are ways and means of getting these points across, and that wasn't one of them.
I wholeheartedly agree lisa, bottom line McChrystal just didn't like this administration, and it's better he left, and he didn't resign he was fired:scream: and they sure have swept this nasty issue under the carpet...Gereral Patreaus, will do a better job in Afghanistan. I hope we all get out of there soon:thumbsup: and there's a really cute photo today of Obama and Cameron laughing it up in Toronto, look's like they have a good camraderie. More news about that and other poltical issues going on~ http://www.aolnews.com/category/politics/
i hope we get out of there soon too, we should never have been there in the first place. or iraq. actually at least there is *some* justification for being in afghanistan, which is more than can be said for iraq. i couldn't see the pic of cameron & obama - i'm not a cameron fan, but if he is good diplomatically then i might give him a break i guess they were about the only people feeling friendly in toronto yesterday....!
I do think that President Obama has a good connection with all the other countries, they all seem to really like them as he does them. A little excerpt from the G-20 summit~ The leaders endorsed a five year exit stragety for all foreign troops from Afghanistan, a timetable first proposed by Afghan President Hamid Karzai last year. In addition, both Obama and Cameron said the war must show progress this year. "This period that we are in is going to be critical", Obama said after he met with the British leader separately. Added Cameron "Making progress this year is vitally important". It was Obama's first private meeting with Cameron since the conservative took power last month with a coalition government, and the first since an undersea well sunk by the British oil company BP PLC began gushing oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The enviromental castastrophe has strained relations between the two historic allies. According to a Downing Street spokesman, speaking on customary condition of anonymity, the two leaders agreed BP should meet it's obligations to cap this leak, clean up the damage and pay legitimate compensation claims. The spokesman said Obama and Cameron also agreed that it was in the interest of both countries that BP remain "strong and stable" BP has lost more than $100 billion in market value since it's deep water drilling blew up. Economic issues were expected to be more prominent at the larger G-20 meeting, which started Saturday with a dinner~ NEWS SERVICES~
this kind of statement: has been causing serious hoohahs over here recently. because obama called BP british petroleum, a bunch of people decided that he was, in fact, blaming britain for the oil disaster. i mean, personally i think that's kind of silly, i know that officially they're not british petroleum any more but i think most people still think they are (i know i did!). but somehow, reading that article you just quoted, i found myself thinking "oi! they're not british any more! don't go blaming us!!!":lol::lol:
lisa nobody over here is blaming Britain, you don't have anything to do with this, it's the company BP that's responsible just like if it was owned by another country, whoever. They just haven't done their job, and it's horrible beyond comprehensive. People who've lost jobs, one man lost his fishing business that he'd had for years and was on a downward spiral about his plight and shot and killed him self. So many stories that are to devastating to even post about. Like if a U.S. company had this happen over there, who would be to blame? It just needs to get fixed. Nobody seems to know what to do. Have you all seem the oil soaked sea animals so sad
oh yeah, i know! that's why my kneejerk reaction to that quote annoyed and surprised me! i'm not even a patriotic person! weird....:lol: and yep, i've seen the pics, it's a real disaster and very very sad. if only we humans could wake up and realise what we do to our poor planet....