Comments on: “Moral Values” http://www.cjc.org/blog/archives/2004/11/06/moral-issues-and-cooperative-games/ Sun, 26 Sep 2010 03:06:45 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.8 By: Cheng http://www.cjc.org/blog/archives/2004/11/06/moral-issues-and-cooperative-games/comment-page-1/#comment-195 Fri, 03 Dec 2004 14:04:31 +0000 /?p=128920#comment-195 Wow, I actually hadn’t expected a Chomsky/Zinn/Ramsey type of response.

]]>
By: Dennis the Unix Admin Hidary http://www.cjc.org/blog/archives/2004/11/06/moral-issues-and-cooperative-games/comment-page-1/#comment-194 Thu, 02 Dec 2004 13:13:37 +0000 /?p=128920#comment-194 If Kerry would have gotten tough in the war on terra I’m glad he lost. I voted for Nader anyway. I don’t really pay much attention to the Kerry/Bush debate on how to best prosecute the war on terra. To me it’s like listening to a Southern Baptist and Pentecostal debating some theological point. Both sound wrong to me.

In my view, the US needs to be in a permanent state of war. The upper class of the colonies plan was to kill their way to the West Coast, then started on Hawaii, the Philippines, then after WWII it got really ugly. The Cold War was a good excuse but this war on terra idea started even before that ended. So a decades long Cold War ends, a short hiatus and the war on terra starts, which from what I can see so far is a war on Arab nationalists. Bin Laden was actually more-or-less created by the US and Pakistan’s ISI to drive the USSR out of Afghanistan by what I guess we’d nowadays call terrorism. When the US entered his country (Saudi Arabia) in the early 1990s, he soon after turned on us, as did other prominent Saudis. His main demand was for the US to withdraw from Saudi Arabia, which didn’t happen, but 9/11 was the perfect catalyst to get his main demand granted, which was, the US army announced its leaving Saudi Arabia less than two years after 9/11. So 9/11 worked, as it got him what he has wanted all along, US troops out of Saudi Arabia. Paul Wolfowitz alluded to this last year.

http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030509-depsecdef0223.html

I’m not sure what the war on terror is, although it looks like a war on any Arab nationalist who doesn’t like the US ruling class controlling Arab oil (which means US troops in the Persian Gulf of course). The US is sending $1 billion a year to Colombia to kill off anyone opposed to us messing with their oil as well. And trying to overthrow Hugo Chavez. Because Colombia and Venezuela have a lot of oil as well. Actually the US elite have been wacking Colombia ever since it invaded Northern Colombia a century ago and renamed it Panama.

Just as I’m happy the US idle class lost the war in Vietnam (which was won by the Vietnamese and the American people), I hope for the day when the US has a similar helicopter on the roof of the embassy later pushed off an aircraft carrier moment where the US loses the war on terror and the Arabs get rid of outside interference. That is, if the white mans burden can be cast off and those savages can figure out how to run their own countries.

]]>
By: Cheng http://www.cjc.org/blog/archives/2004/11/06/moral-issues-and-cooperative-games/comment-page-1/#comment-190 Sun, 07 Nov 2004 21:22:46 +0000 /?p=128920#comment-190 I think I’m as much grumpy about some of the post-election reaction as anything else, especially from a party that claims to represent the interests of the common man and whose elites subsequently dismiss broad swaths of the country populated by the common man. This is not the actions of a national party. My complaints are a hope for a better Democratic party in 2008; I would rather vote for a Democrat, but felt that I couldn’t do so this year because I give higher priority to the handling of the war.

Liberalization of the Middle East is the only thing I can see in dealing, long term, with jihadist terrorism. Someone once observed that war between, say, France and Germany is now unthinkable, not because of the terribleness of war, but in a literal sense of war not being thought of as a policy option. This is despite a century of brutal warfare between these two countries. If this can happen there, I believe it can happen elsewhere, at least to the point that apocalyptic terrorism isn’t cheered on (and supported) by large segments of the population. It doesn’t have to involve turning the Middle East into New England. Note that this is also the work of decades, and month-to-month results in Iraq can’t be judged until later.

In terms of the Iraq being a first step, take a look at Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism, some of the more recent Bernard Lewis books, and the reasoning (WMD aside, as it was written in 2002) behind Kenneth Pollack’s The Threatening Storm.

]]>
By: Jacob Haller http://www.cjc.org/blog/archives/2004/11/06/moral-issues-and-cooperative-games/comment-page-1/#comment-189 Sun, 07 Nov 2004 16:21:36 +0000 /?p=128920#comment-189 The argument about the Democrats not being a national party cuts both ways, doesn’t it?

I think both arguments are overstated, though. The current method of electing the President really emphasizes regional differences even where they don’t necessarily exist — one place can be labeled red and another blue even when the difference in the popular vote is only 2% or less. I’m sure you’ve seen maps like .

I agree that ranting about how stupid people who voted for the victorious party isn’t particularly productive, but it’s not clear to me that Democrats are the only ones who do it. I admittedly don’t remember too well what happened twelve years ago.

I hope that you are right about the invasion of Iraq being a necessary master-stroke in the war against terrorism, although I have a great deal of difficulty in thinking that the goal is possible, that these steps could actually take us to that goal, and that (even if my first two concerns are not well-founded) the way the administration has chosen to approach the steps has been at all competent and likely to result in much progress towards the ultimate goal.

I am very interested in seeing what will happen in the next few years in the aftermath of Arafat’s death.

]]>