I did meant litterally.....So thanks .....Mills harm principal did make sense and I agree.
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
LOL...sitting on fence I need to remember that one- It will save me from spelling ambigious(?) :guffaw::guffaw::guffaw:
hehe, very true! sometimes colloquial versions of phrases just sound better as well
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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?
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!
