« Reply #4 on: October 04, 2011, 07:55:02 AM »
Good read. This section seems to sum up the situation:
The world is always a dangerous place; but in the last few years that danger seems to have spread. Equatorial and sub-Saharan Africa may be about to tip over into another hellish era of tribal warfare. China, when it isn’t being arrogantly expansionist seems to be dancing on thin demographic ice. As its hordes of men grow up without women, its thinkers now write about the value of ‘small’ wars.* In Russia, faced with economic collapse if oil prices slump, Vladimar Putin has made himself de facto Tsar – or worse. And in Europe, the aging population, trapped between rioting welfare junkies and unassimilated Muslim immigrants, fervently hopes (they don’t pray anymore) that they will die before their long vacation from economic reality ends.
As for the United States, the world’s military protector and economic backstop, there is not only the greatest philosophical schism since the Civil War, but a dangerous lack of leadership at the top. Even as it is crushing new business and new job creation at home with endless regulations and the corruption of corporatism, it is also projecting a self-righteous image of weakness abroad. The lesson of history is that vacuums in leadership are always filled, more often by the ambitious than the responsible. And that, at least in the short run, “soft” power is no defense against hard men. Right now there are some very hard men out there leading nations, loading their pistols and eyeing their neighbors and rivals.
I learned a long time ago that when things seem crazy, they usually are – no matter how much smart people try to convince you otherwise. There is a lot of crazy going around right now. . .and it won’t disappear just because we look away or tell ourselves it’s not as bad as it seems.
*Being the father of an adopted Chinese daughter, I've thought about this often. Aside from the obvious genocide of female children, the one child policy in China has robbed literally tens-of-millions of Chinese men of the potential to find a mate. The promise of women to an army of men who have little hope of finding one on their own would be a strong base-motivator to that army.
But first, we have to get from here to there in an overconnected world of angry people, and pray that no one accidentally – or purposefully – trips the switch that sends us back to August, 1914. There is no obvious path, and we seem chronically short of leaders to mark the way. Worst of all, he is out there. We don’t know who, or where, or when, and probably not even why, but our Princip, the little man with the little pistol, is waiting for us, hoping against hope that we stall once more and he gets his chance.
Someone like this?
Or this?
Or maybe even this...
Logged
"A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means."
- Thomas Jefferson
