“Perhaps he thinks that desperate, friendless people are actually nicer.”
Objectively speaking, I think that this comment could refer to either side of the Arab/Israeli conflict.
Tamerlane, you’re partly right.
I think the policies of the U.S. government should be neutrality and political isolationism, concerned solely with what goes on inside our borders. That’s because the U.S. government’s role, the reason we submit to it’s authority through the social contract of governance, is to protect the rights and liberties of U.S. citizens within our borders. So when talking about what actions our government should take, you’re right on about what I believe.
Individual Americans’ concerns with things and people outside our borders are no problem to my philosophy, I simply don’t think it’s the business of the U.S. government to meddle in such affairs. The people can have all sorts of goals and aims, however they choose them so long as they’re benign, but the government must have different priorities.
Pretty much what I was thinking - i.e. You might care personally, but don’t think the government should take any interest or in anyway intervene outside its borders, even as a mediator.
Like I said, I think it is an internally consistent tack to take, I just don’t happen to agree with that worldview.
Just out of curiosity, do you consider this a view all governments should take or do you think their is something unique to the U.S. that mandates this particular policy that might not apply elsewhere?
- Tamerlane
First of all, you’re misinterpreting the Constitution. The purpose of the government is to govern. As enumerated in the Constitution, that INCLUDES foreign affairs:
ARTICLE I, SECTION 7 (Enumerating the powers of Congress)
The job of the government of the United States is to “…to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” The government exists with the consent of the people to do those things. There is nothing in the Constitution that says the government is limited to actions within the borders of the united States to do those things.
Rex, it’s silly and nonsensical to believe that a government can protect the rights of its citizens WITHIN its borders without acting OUTSIDE those borders. That is absolute, sheer fantasy. You can’t put up a big wall an expect everyone else to stay on the other side.
What you continue insisting, contrary to all evidence, is that withdrawal from foreign affairs would somehow makes the United States safer. That is very obviously a stupid position to take. Neutrality in WWII, to use that example, would have quite obviously made the world more dangerous, since it would have assured German victory (the Soviets lose that war without Lend-Lease, folks, and anyone who says otherwise doesn’t know what they’re talking about) and Japanese victory to boot, thereby leaving the United States at the mercy of a fascist world. It was intervention in Europe that prevented the war from visiting American soil.
Similarly, imagine the scenario if the United States withdraws from foreign intervention today. Let us suppose Israel is invaded, a likely probability. Nuclear war would probably ensue, as a desperate and cornered Israel, its economy faltering and with no friends in the world, would use the only means at their disposal. The Middle East would be devastated and there would be a horrifying supply shock to the Western world as oil imports dried up. Europe and North America would be thrown into economic chaos; the humanitarian catastrophe would be unimaginable. What if Pakistan nuked Israel in response for its nuclear attacks and India used the chance to attack Pakistan? Do you really think the United States is safer in a world scarred by nuclear weapons? A world that might possibly devolve into global warfare? I mean, it might not happen, but there’s a good chance it would. WWII being a perfect example that occurred not long ago, historically speaking.
Your entire argument hinges on your unsupported and logically doubtful claim that the USA would be safer alone. I see not a shred of evidence that’s true. The United States would NOT have been safer alone in 1941. It would not have been safer alone during the Cold War - indeed, it would have been in grave danger without the buffer of democratic Europe and NATO. Why would it be safer today?
The laws of cause and effect do not stop and end at the border. It is absurd to believe that the United States government can be fully empowered to protect the liberties of its citizens if it is NOT empowered to act outside the borders of the country, or interact with foreign governments. The level of willful ignorance you’re displaying here is astounding.
If a foreign army of two million men were to mass in amphibious assault ships 13 miles off the U.S. coast, preparing for invasion, would you suggest the U.S. do nothing until they actually landed?
Ah, shoot. Mods?
Gee Rexdart, thanks for that enlightenment. I’m sure it occured to none of us that Stalin was a bad guy. From all evidence he’s sharing a flat in hell with Hitler, Pol Pot and Mao. No one has a problem conceding that point. Not sure where you’re getting your figures though. Famines from the failed agricuture programs killed many millions but I’d like to see a cite for that many directly killed in purges. Stalin killed a lot of people but he never had to build factories to do it. In any event all this was taking place completely within an isolated and secretive country.
No one said all choices were clean cut. We joined the allies to keep Europe and England from completely falling to the Germans. Russia came along with the package because Germany attacked them as well. Fat lot of good Stalin’s neutrality and non-aggression pact with Hitler did. Twenty to twenty-one million people in Russia died directly from invasion by the Germans. Unlike those who died in the purges we knew about them.
If we had not joined the war and perhaps if Hitler had waited until later to invade Russia things would be very different. German researchers would have been able to continue work on the V2 and nuclear weapons unimpeded by an allied invation and bombing campaign. Of course no worries here that Hitler might have had an ICBM capable of crossing the Atlantic if we were isolationist and neutral.
Plenty of Americans were isolationists in the thirties. That’s why the war in Europe went on for over two years before we got involved. Germany was forbidden from the massive military buildup of the thirties but no one bothered to stop it. How many lives could have been saved if something had been done sooner. History repeats itself too often.
Nonsense - hemp!
Regards,
Shodan
OK, I’m kidding. It’s just that the pot smokers - pardon me, hemp advocates - seem often to display the same one-size-fits-all solutional thinking that RexDart seems to advocate for our terrorism policy.
Rex,
So (and I’m draging out a bizarre hypothetical) let’s say you walk into a sawmill, and the damsel in distress is tied up on the conveyer, on her way to certain doom by way of saw blade. There’s a switch on the wall next to you which will turn off the dastardly contraption. Are you suggesting that when she dies you would own none of the responsibility?
See, I agree with you that:
… but who said morality had to be black and white? I mean, people have been struggling with it for thousands of years. That sentence and the following paragraph are, I agree, the problems with coming up with some sort of guideline for behaviour. There are always situations where tough decisions have to be made. No, you are not responsible if you don’t know about something, but who suggested you were?
Also, I really like RickJay’s post, aside from the attrocious coding.
RexDart,
You haven’t answered a question which, IMHO, is very important. I presented it earlier, but you seem to have missed it. I’ll restate it from two of my earlier posts (with vB coding fixed from the original).
And
Because once to start on the path to appeasement, you have to decide how far down it you will go. Please answer.
Zev Steinhardt
I know this is a horrible hijack, but I’ll just point out Padeye that famine was government induced. The reason people were starving was not lack of production so much as lack of distribution; the government was hording grain as people were dying of starvation. Don’t have my books with me here at work, but 20 million killed by the government ain’t that far off.
Don’t sweat the hijack, it really is a relevant question. I did say “I’d like to see a cite for that many directly killed in purges.” Empahsis mine. The farm collectivization and resulting famine goes way beyond mere poor planning but the starvation of millions was not a specific goal or at least a direct one. Perhaps it’s too fine a distinction for some but I don’t feel what happened to starving peasants in Russia was the same as what happened to the victims of the Shoah. Saying the two have no difference is to me like saying the Nazis had a program to collect clothing, jewelry, gold fillings and hair for blankets with the slaughter of millions just being incidental. There is a legal distinction between manslaughter and premeditated murder and I think something similar applies here.
Actually I think it was.
Stalin was quoted as saying that “The goal (of the collectivization) is the elimination of the kulaks as a class.” Kulaks were farmers who owned their own land.
The only distinction I can see is that Hitler wanted to eliminate an ethnic class; Stalin a socio-economic one. The goal in both cases was mass murder.
Regards,
Shodan
True, but from most of the sources I’ve found the kulkas were a fraction of the number killed by the resulting famine. Even then a majority were relocated from the farms. I still don’t equiate that with marching them into gas chambers.
OK zev I’ll take your two points. Hopefully I can make some sense with this response, but I’m running on no sleep and just finished final exams, so my brain is elsewhere. But I kept this thread going through exams, so I’ll keep plugging along…
Your first question, roughly “where do we stop”, with a 6 point list of incremental steps. I say stop after point one, because point 2 does not coincide with neutrality and points 3 through 6 are all huge violations of civil liberties within our borders. As I’ve stated, my feeling is that the terrorists will mostly be satisfied after point 1, so the following steps will not be needed…but that goes to your second question, so…
The path to further appeasement. In another thread a few weeks back, when I first suggested appeasement, my plan was to appease them without letting it look like we were appeasing them. We could certainly make it appear that our move to neutrality was of our own accord (not necessarily far from the truth, since some politicians agree with me that neutrality is preferable even without the special threats in the world today that make it even more necessary, IMO.) We responded already to Al Qaeda by bombing the crap out of them and their Taliban buddies. Good or ill, that part’s already done with. So we’ve had a show of force that we could spin into making it appear we’re not being appeasers. We may do this if we characterized our change in policy by saying “we have dealt with those who attacked us…with that problem in our past, now we announce a new American policy in the Mideast: neutrality.” The initial show of force which is behind us might be used to mask the appeasement.
Those who see through the mask will still face the challenge of motivating people towards further action. Apparently, we’ve reached an impasse of sorts in the discussion, because my opinion of the motivations of the average holy warrior in these groups is much different than others’ in this thread. I think even your hardcore Al Qaeda soldiers and operatives will balk at throwing their lives away as a price to accomplish vague goals half a world away. Others here think that most everyone who signs on to fight for OBL or someone like him is willing to go anywhere and do anything and die in the process for whatever goal the leader decides. Having read about the Nazi soldiers in Police Battalion 101 in Poland, I know the others’ view on soldiers following orders has some merit to it, but I think there’s a difference between killing for your leader and dying for him. The dying bit, I think that takes a special motivation beyond mere natural deference to authority figures.
That’s fine RexDart. I thank you for taking the time to answer the questions I put to you (and to do so on no sleep during exams!). We will simply have to agree to disagree on just how “hardcore” the average hardcore OBL-and-his-ilk follower is.
However, I’d like to just follow up with one last point:
You state above (concerning which policies not to adopt if OBLAHI push us):
.
Point three of the six points was about not allowing Jews (or pick your favorite ethnic/racial/religious/sexual orientation/sports team adoring group) run for elective office. That’s fine. But you pretty much advocated in the first post of this thread not voting for a Jew simply because he’s a Jew, regardless of any other qualifications she or he may have for the office. While true, advocating that no one vote for a person because of his e/r/r/si/sta grouping is not exactly the same as denying them the right to run, it still sounds like a bad contradiction on your part.
Zev Steinhardt
This is astoundingly naive. You’re expecting the U.S. government to pull out of all its trade agreements, yet you still expect American businessmen to be able to do business with those countries, without official trade agreements? It doesn’t work like that, bub. Trade agreements and treaties between countries are what spell out the rules for trade, the same way the Department of Transportation and the Department of Commerce and the FCC and the FDA and the USDA and the EPA and the SEC and the Federal Trade Commission all spell out the rules for trade within America.
Even if you just wanna market dog food in America, look at all the rules.
http://www.purina.com/cats/nutrition.asp?article=2
If you create a system for trade without rules, you will have taken a giant step backwards into the 19th century, when dog food manufacturers did exactly as they pleased.
No rules, no trade. It’s as simple as that.
Here’s an excellent example of how essential trade agreements are to the functioning of a healthy economy.
China officially joined the World Trade Organization last year.
http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/central/11/10/china.WTO/
Before that, the U.S. and China had a trade agreement.
http://agnews.tamu.edu/dailynews/stories/AGEC/Oct0500a.htm
Did you understand that? Because of that new trade agreement, China was enabled to buy U.S. products on credit to an extent they were never allowed to before. And extending credit is the whole basis of our entire world-wide economy. If you take away the extension of credit, you will have gone back to the straight barter economy of the Middle Ages, before the concept of “credit” was invented. Trade agreements are the backbone of the whole complicated web of high finance that keep the world from dissolving into economic anarchy.
But that wasn’t just any old trade agreement he was talking about that was going to enable China to buy more Texas cotton and soybeans–that was the historic 1999 “Market Opening” Agreement.
http://www.cnn.com/ASIANOW/east/9911/15/china.wto.03/
Here’s a summary of its provisions. Read some of this. Look at how complex it is.
http://clinton3.nara.gov/WH/New/WTO-Conf-1999/factsheets/fs-006.html
This is how business is done in the world, Rex. This is the way it works. If the United States stops doing business like this, then the United States is, quite simply, no longer a World Player. The United States becomes even less than a Third World nation, because even the most obscure Third World nations have trade agreements with other nations.
Gabon has been a member of the WTO since 1995. The Kyrgyz Republic, bless their hearts, the collapse of the Soviet Union left them without a pot to piss in, but hey, they’re in, since 1998. Togo is in, Gambia is in, tiny little island nations like Malta and St. Kitts are in, everybody’s in.
http://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/whatis_e/tif_e/org6_e.htm
Is that what you want for America? To be less than St. Kitts?
And what trade agreement did the U.S. and China have before November 1999?
In 1971, the U.S. lifted a 21-year trade embargo against China. From 1950 to 1971, they were Evil Commies and the U.S. wanted to do very little business with them. Chinese goods were permitted into the U.S. only in the same amount as other Communist Bloc goods were allowed in, which is to say, virtually none. Not many businessmen in America wanted to buy Evil Commie Russian cars or Evil Commie Chinese bicycles bad enough to lobby to get the embargo lifted, since they already had plenty of American cars and American bicycles. That pretty much limited the Communist Bloc to exporting specialty items like caviar, and green tea to supply Chinese restaurants.
And the trade embargo prohibited American businessmen from exporting most American goods to China, and since China has historically never been very interested in trading with the West anyway, they felt like, hey, if the Americans don’t wanna buy our goods, why should we buy theirs?
And Mao Tse Tung was hell-bent on turning China into Utopia, and was totally focused on his own country, and was completely uninterested in what the outside world thought, or whether they had any money to spend on Chinese goods. So there was very little trade between the U.S. and China, and in my experience, growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, you only saw “Made in China” on the occasional rather expensive exotic souvenir-type thing, that you’d buy in Chinatown. “Made in Japan” was what it said on the cheap stuff, and then later it was “Made in Taiwan”.
However, in 1971, this all started to change.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/flash/june/china71.htm
So things started to loosen up, trade-wise, and it took a trade agreement to do it. It didn’t happen because American manufacturers went over there and opened factories–they probably wouldn’t even have been allowed in the country.
Seven years later, in 1978, the Chinese economy and political situation had loosened up enough for Coca-Cola to enter the Chinese market. Before 1978, they’d only had bottling plants in China, which are a kind of franchise. The plant buys its syrup from Coca Cola Inc. But in 1978, Coke went whole hog–why should they be receiving only licensing fees from Chinese bottling plants when they could open their own factories, bottling plants, and distribution networks, right there in China?
http://www.tianjin.gov.cn/top500/Coca_Cola/index/china_E.htm
And this was only made possible by the 1971 trade agreement, not by Coca Cola going over there by themselves and trying to open their own factories.
And then the U.S. and China established normal diplomatic relations in 1979 (which meant a “treaty”), and it got even easier for American corporations to do business with China. China was, literally, opening up to the West, and it was the treaties and trade agreements that were making it possible.
The 1971 lifting of the embargo, the normalizing of diplomatic relations in 1979, the 1999 trade agreement, and China’s entry into the WTO are what’s responsible for the fact that practically everything you buy at Wal-Mart today says “Made in China” on it.
Without that series of trade agreements, starting in 1971, the Chinese economic boom could never have happened. For centuries China was isolationist to a fault–for centuries they had kept their country, and their markets, closed to foreigners, with the result that they were poor. As soon as they stopped being isolationist, however, and started making trade agreements, their economy took off, and it’s boom times in Beijing nowadays.
http://www.ncseonline.org/NLE/CRSreports/Economics/econ-35.cfm?&CFID=6171449&CFTOKEN=69335756
Look at all the treaties and agreements and “grants” and “relationships” that the U.S. and China have going on between them.
http://usinfo.state.gov/regional/ea/uschina/chtrade.htm
Again, this is how it works. This is how business is done in the world. If the U.S. stops doing this–if we dump all this and lock ourselves in–then China, and Russia, and Britain, and the rest of the world, will just shrug and carry on without us, and we’ll be relegated to the status of a backwater. Is that what you want for America?
**
**
I disagree totally with this statement. If I watched a man die and had any opportunity to save him and refused, that refusal would be one of the most immoral acts I ever undertook, and I would deserve a fate worse than the one that man endured.
:: applause ::
Well done, Duck Duck Goose.
Zev Steinhardt
Rex, I don’t think you have a clue about the motivations of Al Queda terrorists. They willingly give their lives to kill Americans beecause their leader has convinced them that they are doing God’s will. That’s not the same as someone fighting for the fatherland. These are not ordinary soldiers following orders but fanatics who aspire to martyr themselves if it will kill a few infidels. They aren’t willing to throw their lives away half a world away? Have you not been paying attention?
Once again I had to keep from typing what I feel to keep from getting banned from SDMB. I pray that your thinking does not repsresent the typical law student in this country. I’ll only echo what photopat said about your “moral inaction” statement. I find it contemptable.
Wow Duck Duck Goose, that’s what Great Debates is all about. Thank you.