Thinker Revolution. (Response)

[Czar]

Note that the following paragraphs have little linking them. It's more or less random thoughts...

"The impossible will take a longer time doing."
It is possible to do what we need to do, which is to find a peaceful way to solve our problems, but it is not the time for that yet. It needs time to mature and time to be learned and time to be refined. To be a pacifist today is good, but in the end, useless. Strive instead to ensure that what you want to see today is considered as a serious option tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. Pacifism must be a long term goal of any rational human being.

Always remember though, that while a thinking man sits and thinks for the perfect way to solve a problem, an acting man will rise up and solve the problem quickly and decisively, and often without considering the consequences fully. If we choose to ignore a problem of this scale someone will solve it for us, but not in a way we are guaranteed to like nor in a way that is guaranteed to work in a long term.
Once a solution has been found, however, it needs your full support or it will die before time, and people will think that solving the problem when it does arise again is futile, for it was not solved last time.

And in war, you must remember that a warrior has little choise once deployed. You see, it's not about killing another man, it's about hitting him before he has a chance to hit you. If you don't you will be hit, possibly killed. And if you don't hit him with intent to kill, chances are he'll still be able to kill you. It's all about staying alive and doing your job. And an officers job is to ensure that the job is done and that the men who do it survive to do the next job. To abort a mission because a soldier gets killed is to rob an army of its credibility. To abort a mission because a soldier shoots an innocent in a stressful situation where the enemy is attempting to fit in amongst the civilian population, is demoralising for any army. Both cases tells them they cannot do their job, which they have been trained to do. Innocent civilian causalities are to be avoided, but that is not always possible.

The problem with war on terrorism is that it is not only assymetrical warfare, it is completely non-symmetrical warfare. They, being the terrorists, do not only lack the means to fight us on the battlefields of our choosing, they are not only actively avoiding it, they are actively choosing battlefields where we are not cabable of fighting back. And they are avoiding our defences to strike were we are undefended. They do not care about the importance of the target, what is important is that they can strike at us at all. And they will.
You cannot defend yourself from a man who does not care if he dies as long as he or one of his allies achieves their objectives. Especially not if their objectives are to cause destruction with no specific other requirements.
To fight them only brings more willing recruits to their cause, and them fighting us makes us more willing to fight them. It is a circle of perpetual violence and it must be broken.
Seek not to destroy the terrorrists of today, seek to befreind the potential terrorrists of tomorrow. Do not scare them away, scaring them is not a reliable tactic. It will make more of them turn on us than ignoring them would.
Seek to convince them through other means, motivate why it does not work, motivate how they could do something instead. We are democratic nations, if they can not affect us through those channels what else do you expect them to do?

Today, we need an army in place down there to protect other assets.
Tomorrow, we need our assets down there to ensure we end this. We need to destroy the enemy base of recruitment, which is the dissatisfied population, and we must destroy them by satisfying them.
And if we are to do that, we must be able to protect those who do that work.

To strike, like anywhere says, is an effective way to get an immediate response. But it is not a long term solution. It will create a larger base of recruits for the enemy, while leaving their organisation mostly intact. It spells for further acts in the future.

...Does this make sense?

(Fun fact: The first letter bomb ever was sent by one (mad scientist of a sort) swede to another swede.)

[RemusShepherd]

I sure am, war solves nothing and violence only causes pain. Why is it that our world leaders think fighting and shooting others is where the answer is, the solution. Everyday people, innocent people are dying left and right. What have we acquired in these murders? Nothing.

You're asking what we have gained, when you should be asking what we have wrought.

We have a world -- a species -- where 'good' leaders commit evil acts, and 'evil' men fight for righteous beliefs. When good and evil are easily confused, chaos results. This isn't a metaphysical statement, it's a sociological mechanism of humanity. When a populace can no longer tell the good guys from the bad guys, that populace seeks to destroy them *both*, in hopes that what arises from the ashes will be a purer, just world.

We are in the process of violently converting our flawed world into ashes, and hopefully a benevolent rebirth. That's all. Think of it as recycling by bloodshed. It's a natural thing.

Damnit, all these themes will be explored in my comic eventually. Shame nobody reads it. :/

[TheGoobla]

What you have to understand is that the issues of today are basically about a clash of cultures.

Western civilization on the one hand, is a glorious triumph of pacifism and civility. We're secular and democratic and virtuous and all that. Just look at us and our history for proof. This is why European civilization conquered the world, while slaughtering millions of people in their way, for all that glorious land, gold and labour so cheap that sometimes its free! ...Because we're so moral and civilized and democratic, you see.

The rest of the world can't help but envy our murdering, robbing and enslaving them for the past 500 years. Now, of course, when I say that, it really exaggerates what was going on. It wasn't all that bad. It was really just what we call today might call "structural readjustment", or in the case of armed conflict, "regime change". Not bad at all. Just like when settlers performed "regime change" in the Americas.

Now what about the enemies of Western civilization? Today they basically come from the Middle East. Arabs, Muslims, you know, those kinds of people. What you have to understand is that they're basically mongrels. They have absolutely no respect for human life. Completely barbarous people. They totally hate freedom, democracy, this that and the other thing. They're primitivistic too. I mean, while Europe was basically enjoying the wonders of the Dark Ages and killing witches, some of the Middle East was so backwards it was actually talking about Greek philosophy! Don't those mongrels understand the iron laws of progress?

Well, anyways... sometime ago you see, there came along the rising stature of oil. Today in fact, it just happens to be pretty well the most important asset in the global economy. Now as it happens, the Middle Eastern countries happened to be sitting on a whole lot of it. Look, they were ignorant barbarians. They had no use for it. So we thought we'd just take it. Like everything else we ever wanted. What were they going to do with it anyways? Sure enough, just like we'd turned other places into our productive servants, we had done pretty much the same over there.

But there was a problem, as you sometimes get with colonials. Namely that they started getting upset. Talking crazy things, like "freedom". Didn't want to be dominated by the West they says. They wanted to control and enjoy the wealth of their own natural resources themselves. Which is just plain wrongheaded! What are they, Communists? They were threatening our way of life; benevolent economic domination of the world.

Thus arises the clash of cultures. Basically, the West was doing the only sane thing it could in order to maintain its position of power and wealth; preventing development and democracy from taking hold. So any popular movement toward those ends that arose, any threatening move for commercial independence more specifically; they needed to be neutralized. In fact, that's usually applicable to most of colonial history. The threat of independent development, though not particularly about oil, is the reason Vietnam had to be destroyed for instance.

In any case, regimes in the Middle Eastern region that didn't threaten the status quo and were friendly to business, regardless of what else they were doing, they were the West's buddies. Still are. Nice moral folks like the House of Saud. Or Israel. They don't rock the boat. Lots of love for them. Except in the Middle East. Most of the filthy mongrels in the region apparently don't enjoy despotism and oppression, and apparently their love of the West is somewhat dampened when its crucially supporting such oppression.

Somehow the stupid mongrels have caught on. And, like the stupid mongrels they are, they just don't appreciate the virtue of this sort of Western intervention. Not to mention, of course, their stupid religion. iPod or something. Something about Bob being great. It's all rather dumb. So irrational in fact, that when the U.S., for instance, is building military bases in a region considered to be holy, to ensure "stability", they get upset. What a bunch of fundies.

Or, for example, when the glorious leader Bill Clinton commits mass murder and ends up killing half a million Iraqi children. I guess the little tykes were guilty of working for Saddam or something. But nonetheless these sorts of things for some reason explode them with indignation. They get so upset in fact, that some of the more active elements even start throwing planes around at innocent people in a disgusting and brazen contempt for innocent life. That's because they don't value innocent life nor do they understand the great value the West places on human life. But moreso, they're a bunch of whiney babies.

So basically, what I'm saying is that we can't have peace. Not while irrational freedom hating barbarians are on the loose. Not while these primitivistic ignorants and their ludicrous religion threaten our peaceful and gentle way of life. We need to defend ourselves and our interests.

It's about the clash of cultures.

[Rkolter]

Eventually, we'll piss off the Earth enough that it'll tragedize us all.


Tragedize - the act of causing a tragedy to occur to someone. This word is copywritten. You just read it twice. You owe me a dollar for 'tragedize'. There! Just now! A buck fifty. C'mon you...

[Pikhq]

But what about "tragedise"?
I've got you! I can spell tragedise in a way that doesn't require me to pay you! w00t!

[Nightgaunt]

*stuff*

Wow, you're waaaaay out there. Well that's ok. Let me just point out though that a nice chunk of the stuff you mentioned is reminicent of Dependency Theory - the notion that a lot of nations are poor and messed up becuse the colonial powers of old made them that way. Dependency Theory has been given up on by a lot of the original thinkers, largely because it's negative thinking that paradoxically reinforces the problem. I'm not trying to build a straw man here, this is just something related that came to mind that I thought was interesting.



As for the rest...

After reading Kris X's original message and Fagin's reply it became immediately apparent to me that the two could not have a good debate on this. Why? Because international relations theories boil down to what your basic assumption on human nature is. Kris has a much more positive view of human nature then Fagin, so it's almost like comparing apples and oranges.

Anywhere does present some pretty valid points, which some of us like to call "peace through superior firepower." It can work, but the question is weather or not the society is willing to put in what is necessary to achieve that (the answer for Western society, like he said, is no).

mcDuffies, on an unrelated note, I've heard some disturbing stuff from people who've been deployed to Kosovo. From where you're at do you get the sense that once the peacekeepers leave it'll start all over again?

Czar is pretty much on the money with one exception: he mentions that we shouldn't fight the terrorists of today, because that just further advances their cause and helps their recruitment. I disagree there. I think we do need to fight back, partly to serve as a deterrent in some capacity (yeah I know it's not much, but it's better then nothing), but also to ensure stability in the region so that we can do the stuff to take away their recruitment base (which odly you do kind of mention too... maybe I just didn't get your argument).



Now for where I stand in the international relations spectrum/theory/thingie (warning, attempt to cram a sh*t-ton of IR theory into a short space follows):

I tend to go with the more negative view of human nature. Hobbes was right that life is short, nasty and brutish, so you need a leviathan (government/guy with a big stick) to keep the peace. These are my basic assumptions. Note that the international system doesn't have a laviathan so there is conflict (fun side note: Neo-Realists, like the current U.S. administration, believe you can have a really powerful nation play the role of global Leviathan)

However, I really like and agree with a lot of stuff Thomas Barnett writes about in his book The Pentagon's New Map, though I think he's way too optimistic and some of his solutions are impractical. Anyways, the world can be devided into a Functioning Core, and a Non-integrating Gap, with a few seam states in between. The Core nations are the globalized ones - they engage in trade, free flow of money, ideas, people. Core nations essentially all play by the same rules. These rule-sets take the place of the leviathan, and consequently Core states don't pose a threat to one another, and don't go to war with each other.

Gap nations are the ones not part of the global community. They are isolated, don't have a free flow of money, ideas, people, and goods, sometimes have authoritarian governments, opress their own people, and generally don't play by the same rules as everyone else (think rogue nations, or nations with little to no effective government). These are the places where problems arise, where people are left behind as the rest of the world prospers, where lives suck and they join terrorist groups, hate the rest of the world, whatever, I'm getting tired now.

So where am I going with all this? Well, what this Core-Gap theory leads to is that yes Kris, killing and war suck, a lot. I mean a whole lot. But there may be instaces where it is necessary in order to bring more nations into the core, thus making life better for them and safer for everyone else. Back during the Ukraine elections one U.S. congressman was asked why should we care about what happens in Ukraine. His response was that we need to expand the stable core of the world.

[[AlmightyPyro]]

I didn't read most of this so I'm sure some one has said this:

No matter how 'moral' every one is, there will always be a difference in thinkg. weather it be Religion or a dictator that he thinks is God.

And when people feel so strongly about a cause that they'd die for it, then that's what'll happen.
No matter how many peace talks are given no matter how many protestors protest, there will always be conflict. Even the people who protest War and killing, get killed to support their cause.

If you ask me, there's no reason in complaining about it because there will never be a resolve. The only thing you can do about it is just not do it. you do not have to support or participate in what the 'world leaders' are doing.



EDIT: but it's ok because super smart aliens that have been watching us see us as a threat because of our conflicts, so they're about to destroy us all anyway!

[The Neko]

But to say a man cannot live without killing is a complete and utter lie, because it has been done already by tons of people who did not kill and were content not killing. It's called being passive to violence.

Stepping on insects (even by accident), eating plant-based products... that's all killing of some sort.

Individual ≠ everyone
You can't apply your own values to everyone else. Just because you don't kill people doesn't mean everyone else can live that way. In some countries, it is either kill or be killed. Their societies don't give them any other options.

It isn't our place to change the world. If it was, we'd be leaders.

[Yeahduff]

Anywhere's theory can't work because:

a- Terrorists are not conventional soldiers who fight for a recognized state. We don't have the capabilities to effectively fight terrorism, at least not in a long projected campaign, which is why we find ourselves in Iraq right now.

b- Point (a) leaves only the possibility of flattening the entire Middle East, which would make outside forces (Europe, Asia) and inside forces take up arms against the US government, which would result in much more warfare and an incredibly less stable world. Even if the US wins out in the end, it wouldn't be winning, and I for one would not want to live in it (though it's likely that won't be a problem by then).

Basically we have to use force when necessary and play nice and diplomatic when we can and hope that everyone can change their attitudes before nuclear weapons get involved. Basically we lose no matter what.

[McDuffies]

mcDuffies, on an unrelated note, I've heard some disturbing stuff from people who've been deployed to Kosovo. From where you're at do you get the sense that once the peacekeepers leave it'll start all over again?

I'm from Serbia although I lived in Bosnia before 1992.
Yes, it seems pretty obvious that once KFOR leaves Kosovo, war might start all over again. In fact, it is very unstabile situation as it is, as every now and then there are sudden bursts of violence.
I can talk about Bosnia more precise as I go there often, tension is now, after ten years, still very strong, specially since peacemakers insist on mixing populations to make illusion of how it was before the war, which is a very reckless move in my opinion: those three nations now have each their own territory and they should be three different states.
I might be wrong about whether it is possible to do, but I believe that the same should be done with Kosovo: divide it to two ethnically clean regions (because, due to circumstances, those territories are very ethnically clean as it is) and make two different states with the strong borderline between them. Instead of that, peacemakers now support the fragile balance that is crushing while they're still there. And it costs you guys a lot of money so it's a question how long they're gonna be there at all.

[RemusShepherd]

You can't apply your own values to everyone else. Just because you don't kill people doesn't mean everyone else can live that way. In some countries, it is either kill or be killed. Their societies don't give them any other options.

Because we are all human beings, there are some objective values that apply to everyone. Killing wantonly is, in my opinion, one of those things that is objectively wrong.

It isn't our place to change the world. If it was, we'd be leaders.

If we aren't leaders, it is because of one of two things -- either we chose not to lead, or we tried to lead and failed. Being a leader isn't something you're born with, it only takes will and skill, and any of us could have those things if we chose.

[Kris X]

If you thought and replied to this post:

Welcome to the Revolution.

You may not have agreed with my words and I am pretty sure you had at least one consideration on my opinion in the pros, but you could very well have your own thoughts. No one is stopping you from believing what you wish to believe, and everyone's opinion has merit.

The key to the Thinker Revolution is not to force people to believe what I think, but to stop acting first and try to understand where everyone comes from before you act.

If you open up your ears and listen to people you can hear where everyone is coming from and understand them, instead of ignoring what they say and taking actions first.

My purpose is to listen and to think before I do anything, to be open-minded to the possibility that someone else may have a better reasoning or someone else might think differently.

In order to work together in a Thinker Revolution you must think. Set aside actions and talk, get a cup of tea instead of yell and listen to the world around you before you try to shove in.

Thank you for your time.