Sure, inflation has occured, but salaries in IT have certainly risen much faster than any market basket measure of inflation. In selecting real estate and gasoline, you have chose the two components of typical market basket inflations measures that have risen the most. Selecting the price of a home is also unreasonable since the price you pay is paid once, at the moment of sale, and is not paid again. If you sell a home and buy a new one, you realize the capital gains on the first home (and now you don't even pay taxes on that in the US) and put that back into the home. A home is not consumed, so its the wrong thing to use in price comparisons.
I haven't run the numbers, but I know damned well I'm making a lot more now in real buying power than I was in 1987. I also know that I would likely have to take a lower salary if I changed jobs right now, and even though inflation is still practically non-existent, prices are NOT falling.
Perhaps (when I'm off work) I'll take a look at some economic statistics to see what my $25,000 1987 salary would be in 2000-2003 dollars (depending on how recent the stats are). For now, I can tell you anecdotally that I can afford many more things today than I could in 1987.
Ultimately, my point was that there is a generation of technology workers with less than 10 years experience who have only seen rising salaries and economic growth. Those of us who have been through a sustained recession are a little more tolerant of this pain, because it is not yet anything like the late 80's and early 90's.
This is hardly a revelation. When the supply of some good (labor) exceeds demand (jobs), the price of the good (labor) falls. Big shock. Having been a programmer in the 1980s, I well remember when you were lucky to get $25,000 for a programming job. When the number of jobs increases (when we stop insisting the world admire our mighty power and get back to real work), labor prices will rise again.
Let's not forget that the biggest problems with using solar PV for much of our electricity is:
1) The sun doesn't shine on the earth's surface all the time and:
2) Batteries are inefficient and toxic as hell.
Hydrogen is likely to be a much more efficient way to store power than electrochemical batteries (although I've hardly researched the engineering required -- I certainly could be wrong if it much harder to compress and store hydrogen than I think).
Oh, and your sig? 0, 1 are not your two bits. That's one bit.;-)
Don't forget "whose." An even more confusing possessive.
But this can be simplified to a general rule: When an apostrophe-S could mean both posession and a contraction of the word with "is," the contraction takes precedence and there is some other way to indicate possession. Look for it.
The weird pronouns we are listing exist because of English's inflected past. They evolved (devoloved?) from gender/case markers that used to hang on every noun in the Old English (pre-Norman) days.
I don't think this disagrees with me at all. I was never arguing for icompatible alternatives (KDE and Gnome are only incompatible at the level of the API and IPC mechanisms; many X applications don't know and don't care, so while there are incompatiblities, these tend to exist only in platform specific applications that are duplicated in the other suite, and furthermore, the incompatibilities tend only to disable certain features, not prevent the whole app from running -- I have run Konqueror under Gnome for example).
That said, I do agree that diversity is good and standards are good. As for standards, I much prefer those made by consensus or selected through a free market to those imposed by a sigle dominant player.
I agree, and I would go even further. Diversity in technology and infrastrcuture is, in general, good. The internet worms and viruses should teach us this. This is why One Microsoft Way is not a good thing, even if you do not subscribe to the GNU philosophy of Free Software (although I happen to do so).
Diversity is good even within the Free Software world. We don't all use sendmail and that is good. We don't all use Gnome and that is good. We don't all use Mozilla, and that is good. There should be three, four, five choices for every major category of software.
A lot of people seem to think this is a bad thing. It is "confusing." I dont think so. You select by feature, fit, or whim (depending on necessity) and you limit failure by design, failure from malicious interference, and failure from excessive lawyering.
I'd like to see diversity in all infrastructure technology. (Like combining the present grid with neighborhood wind/solar energy).
Sure, I can be a loudmouthed bigot about my favorite technologies, but even though I don't happen to use FreeBSD, I am glad to know it is there (and I have an ISO of it at hand if need be).
I use more than one Linux distro at home (Debian, RedHat, and SuSE). I use OpenBSD for my firewall machine.
Diversity, redundacy. These are the basis of true reliability. Sure, Microsoft (for example) can try to secure the shit out of their next OS, but if everybody uses that one product, one mistake takes everyone out.
The *nix world hasn't (as a rule) been much more systematic about security than has Microsoft, but its diversity has been its saving grace.
The biggest failures of *nix security have occurred in those few places where one package has indeed been dominant. Sendmail is one. BIND is another (BTW, what alteratives to BIND exist for Linux and *BSD? I actually don't know and would like to know.)
Oh, and selective service is NOT the same as the draft. During the Vietnam era, people were called up from the pool of Selective Service registrants by lottery.
No one has been drafted since Carter reactivated the Selective Service system. (Actually, since Nixon ended the draft and halted Selective Service registration).
You merely tell them where you live so they can find you if a draft is started.
If you point was to say something about which political party has called yound men to die, yes, Bush the Younger is breaking the pattern. Our major 20th Century wars have been mostly started under Democratic administrations.
Uh, Selective Service was reinstated by Carter, not Clinton. It was a response to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. We also pulled out of the Olympics. That showed 'em.
Hm. And I already flamed you right back. Let's end this before things get uglier. If you flame back my flame, I promise not to reply. Thanks for the answer to my question. Let's not talk again;-)
My God. You have to be the single most arrogant person I have ever encountered on Slashdot, and that is saying something.
If I may paraphrase Merle Kessler, there is a fine line between ignorance and arrogance, and you are helping to erase that line. My post was perfectly logical. It was simply off the point, as I stated in a perfectly apologetic post I made mere minutes after my original post when I realized that you were responding to someone else, and not to me. Believe me, I now regret my apology far more than I regret my erroneous flame.
Please, carry on with your life, certain in your absolute command of facts, logic, and sense. Qualities which you clearly believe exist in exactly one person. How fortunate that it is you.
You were not disagreeing with me, and you had more information than I did about the long term licensing plans for Qt. My flame isn't "wrong" (the GPL does grant the rights it grants and it is a theortically enforcable instrument), but you were coming down on the person who claimed the existing license plan didn't include a BSD license. I wrote a "kick his ass" reply to you that didn't connect up to your statement. Please disregard the flamage, and please explain something to me instead:
Why is the BSD license plan necessary if Qt is already under the GPL, or is the "Free Edition" (which is under the GPL) not the full library used by KDE? (In other words, does KDE use Qt Public License features?)
Again, sorry for stomping on statements you weren't even trying to make./me, red faced, looks for rock to hide under...
TrollTech has released Qt under the GNU Public License. Go read THAT license. That license grants anyone, ANYONE, ALL THE RIGHTS ENUMERATED IN THE GPL WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF REVOCATION. Sure, TrollTech can decide to "close" a future version, but they cannot EVER in ANY WAY remove your right to reuse, modify, and distribute a version that was released under the GPL.
Don't tell me that I don't know what a license is. I know full well what a license is. It is specific contract granting use rights given under the onwership rights created by copyright law. What TrollTech cannot do is decide to exit that contract unilaterally.
If they do, persons (anyone using a GPL'ed copy of Qt) have the right to sue.
There ownership of the copyright doesn't permit them to exit a legally binding agreement just because they want to do do. "Please check your facts before you post bullshit next time."
Once rights are granted under the GPL, they cannot EVER be taken away. Yes, a development group would have "take over" Qt development on an open path. So what?
Can you say "OpenSSH?" Can you say "GnuPG?"
Other companies have tried to make a business by closing what was open, by enslaving what was free. It has not worked. Ever. The free version is the one that has thrived, consistently. In the few cases where a closed version persists, it has moved along just fine with a parallel product.
The single major Qt "application" of consequence in the Linux market is KDE and all of its apps. If TrollTech closed the next version of Qt, KDE would continue with the present version. And, in all likelyhood, will take over development of "FreeQt" or "OpenQt" or whatever. No, they cannot relicense it under the BSD, but why would this be appealing? It would remain under the GPL, where it would continue to be useable by all. There is nothing to fear here. At all.
The patent encumberance issue is a bigger deal.
The paranoid part of me thinks Sun might have put SCO up to this to create FUD and sell some Solaris.
The more realisitic part of me says this is a desparation move by SCO to get someone interested in buying out their IP so they can pay off some investors before dying. This is a bleeding corporate carcass, writhing in its death throes. Nothing more.
I suspect there is no merit to their case (the filing contains no facts), but their hope is to make it easier for IBM to buy them than to fight them.
I was not attempting to put words in your mouth by implication. I apologize if you perceived me as such. I was not saying that you held a particular position, but rather that there are extremists on both sides.
As to "national guilt," it is obvious that we do not agree about this. That's okay, we don't have to.
The Zilog Z80 exceeded my expectations. It is still used in embedded systems that just don't have to be that smart or that fast. It was a brilliant CPU architecture that extended and expanded intelligently the Intel 8080 architecture and instruction set. The register set and prime register set made "two thread" programming easy and fast.
To this day I use a z80 emulator to maintain code that runs an amateur radio repeater. Its just a great chip.
Everybody hauls this example out, and it isn't a good one. The woman who spilled coffee on herself was permanently maimed by it. The coffee machine's heating element was set far too high (just below boiling). It had been noted in an inspection and the store had been ordered to fix it. They did not. Then the moron put the coffee between her legs and drove off.
McDonald's was sued and paid because of their willful negligence in disregarding an order from a health and saftey inspector.
But it is so much more fun to use a fragment of fact to make the court system look insane.
In a related story, "/. copy have been proofread."
Sorry, this grammar police moment was inspired by the disabled comments when this story was first posted.
On to business. If IBM has been giving away code that was under copyright and they did so in violation of the terms of license they had with SCO, then this suit has merit.
Of course, my humble opinion (not knowing what they think IBM "shared") is that the same problem will inspire a similar solution in any two groups of competent programmers. Independent discovery is more likely IMHO than theft of copyrighted material. There are only so many sensible ways to page memory or write a circular buffer.
There will, no doubt, be a small number of Arab people who would not accept any settlement that didn't include the slaying of the Israelis to the last child. Likewise I'm sure there are Israeli militants who believe that every Palestinian should be expelled from Israel's borders and any who enter be shot on sight. This doesn't make either position an example of justice.
As a white man in North America, I can sympathize with the argument of "Hey, my (grand and great grand)parents did this. It's not my fault." But I profit by a crime. I don't think a generation washes away guilt. I don't think I'm criminally liable, but some part of the blood of the Trail of Tears is on my hands. I don't think I'm responsible for slavery, but the whole of American society struggles to this day with echoes and consequences of that monsterous wrong.
Justice doesn't mean a return to the status quo ante. It means that each side is asked to give up things of value in exchange for peace. It means that the bitterness and hatred and the thirst for vengeance not be confused with justice.
I'm not saying this will be easy. If it were easy, it would have been solved by now. But what I am saying is that it will not be solved by Palestinian suicide bombs, by Israeli tanks in Gaza, or by American tanks in Baghdad. It will only be solved by an honestly negotiated peace, honestly brokered, and honestly administered.
I am sure that a Palestinian would express an opinion that Israel is vehemently opposed to justice.
All I know for certain is that we are already killing each other in numbers that are more than sufficient. We do not need to keep on killing. Much is made of the fact the Muslims, Jews, and Christians are all "sons of Abraham." What part of "Thou Shalt Not Kill" do we not understand?
Oh, I agree with you. My previous post is definitely a bit of pie-eyed optomism. But I think it helps to put the positive ideas out there. You never know when someone might read them and not know that it is impossible and then go out and DO it.
The question is should we persue a "Wilsonian" foreign policy, where the morally correct guides our policy, or a "Kissingerian" foreign policy where balance of power alone dictates action. My heart is with Wilson, but the weight of history seems to be with Kissinger. It seems to me that as social creatures, we have developed rituals and rules that serve us well in most situations. We have decided collectively to not be brutes, and when one of us insists on being a brute, we take him or her out of society. But at the level of the nation-state, we are still completely knuckle-dragging brutes. Power is the only value in international relations. Despite the realtively successful emergence of multi-cultural democracies, we still do not want to give up autonomy to those "foreigners." So, without supranational institutions to act on nation states as courts of justice act on indivduals, nation-states continue to settle disputes as brutes.
The only hope I have is that nation-states do seem finally to have come to fear themselves. WWII was so destructive and the emergence of the A-bomb and later the H-bomb seems to have finally frightened the nation states away from open warfare.
The problem now seems to be that with the collapse of Soviet Communism, there is no nation-state that really puts that fear into the United States, so the United States acts now without that check on its use of force. My fear is that by so doing, we will drive other nations into alliance against us (the United States) and that we will create a new cold war enemy. I just don't think our starting a war for peace is going to be positive in the long run.
None of this is to argue for the Hussein regime in Iraq. Even though I think we have insufficient justification to mount an invasion, there is no doubt about the brutality of his regime or of his unbridled ambitions. I just wish we had the moral high-ground, and I don't think we do.
And as I said before, the present mess is a result of situations left behind by the colonial powers, exacerbated by the disappearence of the polarizing (but also stabilizing) Cold War alignments. I simply fear that in the long view our present plan of action will make all future action more difficult. I fear we are expending all of our diplomatic capital to clean up one mess at the expense of future influence, and at the risk of increasing the mistrust and hatred of the people of the region.
Another serious problem is the disjunction I spoke of before between the governments in the region and the populace in the region. Even if we work things out with the governments, we may be really damaging our reputation with the populace. To pick a simplistic example, everything was fine between the US and the government of Iran until the populace became sufficiently unhappy.
Our Declcaration of Independence says that our government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. Until the whole world votes for the President of the US, where does our authority come from?
Power.
Is that the best the human race has to show after all this time? Maybe. That's rather sad.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. But entry level salaries have doubled, whereas prices certainly have not.
Sure, inflation has occured, but salaries in IT have certainly risen much faster than any market basket measure of inflation. In selecting real estate and gasoline, you have chose the two components of typical market basket inflations measures that have risen the most. Selecting the price of a home is also unreasonable since the price you pay is paid once, at the moment of sale, and is not paid again. If you sell a home and buy a new one, you realize the capital gains on the first home (and now you don't even pay taxes on that in the US) and put that back into the home. A home is not consumed, so its the wrong thing to use in price comparisons.
I haven't run the numbers, but I know damned well I'm making a lot more now in real buying power than I was in 1987. I also know that I would likely have to take a lower salary if I changed jobs right now, and even though inflation is still practically non-existent, prices are NOT falling.
Perhaps (when I'm off work) I'll take a look at some economic statistics to see what my $25,000 1987 salary would be in 2000-2003 dollars (depending on how recent the stats are). For now, I can tell you anecdotally that I can afford many more things today than I could in 1987.
Ultimately, my point was that there is a generation of technology workers with less than 10 years experience who have only seen rising salaries and economic growth. Those of us who have been through a sustained recession are a little more tolerant of this pain, because it is not yet anything like the late 80's and early 90's.
This is hardly a revelation. When the supply of some good (labor) exceeds demand (jobs), the price of the good (labor) falls. Big shock. Having been a programmer in the 1980s, I well remember when you were lucky to get $25,000 for a programming job. When the number of jobs increases (when we stop insisting the world admire our mighty power and get back to real work), labor prices will rise again.
Let's not forget that the biggest problems with using solar PV for much of our electricity is:
;-)
1) The sun doesn't shine on the earth's surface all the time and:
2) Batteries are inefficient and toxic as hell.
Hydrogen is likely to be a much more efficient way to store power than electrochemical batteries (although I've hardly researched the engineering required -- I certainly could be wrong if it much harder to compress and store hydrogen than I think).
Oh, and your sig? 0, 1 are not your two bits. That's one bit.
Indeed. Your superior intellects are no match for our puny weapons!
If a middle aged white guy from the suburbs can be mistaken for Cuban revolutionary, then why is there a Republican in the White House? ;-)
Don't forget "whose." An even more confusing possessive.
But this can be simplified to a general rule: When an apostrophe-S could mean both posession and a contraction of the word with "is," the contraction takes precedence and there is some other way to indicate possession. Look for it.
The weird pronouns we are listing exist because of English's inflected past. They evolved (devoloved?) from gender/case markers that used to hang on every noun in the Old English (pre-Norman) days.
I don't think this disagrees with me at all. I was never arguing for icompatible alternatives (KDE and Gnome are only incompatible at the level of the API and IPC mechanisms; many X applications don't know and don't care, so while there are incompatiblities, these tend to exist only in platform specific applications that are duplicated in the other suite, and furthermore, the incompatibilities tend only to disable certain features, not prevent the whole app from running -- I have run Konqueror under Gnome for example).
That said, I do agree that diversity is good and standards are good. As for standards, I much prefer those made by consensus or selected through a free market to those imposed by a sigle dominant player.
I agree, and I would go even further. Diversity in technology and infrastrcuture is, in general, good. The internet worms and viruses should teach us this. This is why One Microsoft Way is not a good thing, even if you do not subscribe to the GNU philosophy of Free Software (although I happen to do so).
Diversity is good even within the Free Software world. We don't all use sendmail and that is good. We don't all use Gnome and that is good. We don't all use Mozilla, and that is good. There should be three, four, five choices for every major category of software.
A lot of people seem to think this is a bad thing. It is "confusing." I dont think so. You select by feature, fit, or whim (depending on necessity) and you limit failure by design, failure from malicious interference, and failure from excessive lawyering.
I'd like to see diversity in all infrastructure technology. (Like combining the present grid with neighborhood wind/solar energy).
Sure, I can be a loudmouthed bigot about my favorite technologies, but even though I don't happen to use FreeBSD, I am glad to know it is there (and I have an ISO of it at hand if need be).
I use more than one Linux distro at home (Debian, RedHat, and SuSE). I use OpenBSD for my firewall machine.
Diversity, redundacy. These are the basis of true reliability. Sure, Microsoft (for example) can try to secure the shit out of their next OS, but if everybody uses that one product, one mistake takes everyone out.
The *nix world hasn't (as a rule) been much more systematic about security than has Microsoft, but its diversity has been its saving grace.
The biggest failures of *nix security have occurred in those few places where one package has indeed been dominant. Sendmail is one. BIND is another (BTW, what alteratives to BIND exist for Linux and *BSD? I actually don't know and would like to know.)
Oh, and selective service is NOT the same as the draft. During the Vietnam era, people were called up from the pool of Selective Service registrants by lottery.
No one has been drafted since Carter reactivated the Selective Service system. (Actually, since Nixon ended the draft and halted Selective Service registration).
You merely tell them where you live so they can find you if a draft is started.
If you point was to say something about which political party has called yound men to die, yes, Bush the Younger is breaking the pattern. Our major 20th Century wars have been mostly started under Democratic administrations.
Uh, Selective Service was reinstated by Carter, not Clinton. It was a response to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. We also pulled out of the Olympics. That showed 'em.
Hm. And I already flamed you right back. Let's end this before things get uglier. If you flame back my flame, I promise not to reply. Thanks for the answer to my question. Let's not talk again ;-)
My God. You have to be the single most arrogant person I have ever encountered on Slashdot, and that is saying something.
If I may paraphrase Merle Kessler, there is a fine line between ignorance and arrogance, and you are helping to erase that line. My post was perfectly logical. It was simply off the point, as I stated in a perfectly apologetic post I made mere minutes after my original post when I realized that you were responding to someone else, and not to me. Believe me, I now regret my apology far more than I regret my erroneous flame.
Please, carry on with your life, certain in your absolute command of facts, logic, and sense. Qualities which you clearly believe exist in exactly one person. How fortunate that it is you.
Uh. I flamed you for no reason.
/me, red faced, looks for rock to hide under...
You were not disagreeing with me, and you had more information than I did about the long term licensing plans for Qt. My flame isn't "wrong" (the GPL does grant the rights it grants and it is a theortically enforcable instrument), but you were coming down on the person who claimed the existing license plan didn't include a BSD license. I wrote a "kick his ass" reply to you that didn't connect up to your statement. Please disregard the flamage, and please explain something to me instead:
Why is the BSD license plan necessary if Qt is already under the GPL, or is the "Free Edition" (which is under the GPL) not the full library used by KDE? (In other words, does KDE use Qt Public License features?)
Again, sorry for stomping on statements you weren't even trying to make.
Wait, wait, wait!
TrollTech has released Qt under the GNU Public License. Go read THAT license. That license grants anyone, ANYONE, ALL THE RIGHTS ENUMERATED IN THE GPL WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF REVOCATION. Sure, TrollTech can decide to "close" a future version, but they cannot EVER in ANY WAY remove your right to reuse, modify, and distribute a version that was released under the GPL.
Don't tell me that I don't know what a license is. I know full well what a license is. It is specific contract granting use rights given under the onwership rights created by copyright law. What TrollTech cannot do is decide to exit that contract unilaterally.
If they do, persons (anyone using a GPL'ed copy of Qt) have the right to sue.
There ownership of the copyright doesn't permit them to exit a legally binding agreement just because they want to do do. "Please check your facts before you post bullshit next time."
Once rights are granted under the GPL, they cannot EVER be taken away. Yes, a development group would have "take over" Qt development on an open path. So what?
Can you say "OpenSSH?" Can you say "GnuPG?"
Other companies have tried to make a business by closing what was open, by enslaving what was free. It has not worked. Ever. The free version is the one that has thrived, consistently. In the few cases where a closed version persists, it has moved along just fine with a parallel product.
The single major Qt "application" of consequence in the Linux market is KDE and all of its apps. If TrollTech closed the next version of Qt, KDE would continue with the present version. And, in all likelyhood, will take over development of "FreeQt" or "OpenQt" or whatever. No, they cannot relicense it under the BSD, but why would this be appealing? It would remain under the GPL, where it would continue to be useable by all. There is nothing to fear here. At all.
The patent encumberance issue is a bigger deal.
The paranoid part of me thinks Sun might have put SCO up to this to create FUD and sell some Solaris.
The more realisitic part of me says this is a desparation move by SCO to get someone interested in buying out their IP so they can pay off some investors before dying. This is a bleeding corporate carcass, writhing in its death throes. Nothing more.
I suspect there is no merit to their case (the filing contains no facts), but their hope is to make it easier for IBM to buy them than to fight them.
I was not attempting to put words in your mouth by implication. I apologize if you perceived me as such. I was not saying that you held a particular position, but rather that there are extremists on both sides.
As to "national guilt," it is obvious that we do not agree about this. That's okay, we don't have to.
The Zilog Z80 exceeded my expectations. It is still used in embedded systems that just don't have to be that smart or that fast. It was a brilliant CPU architecture that extended and expanded intelligently the Intel 8080 architecture and instruction set. The register set and prime register set made "two thread" programming easy and fast.
To this day I use a z80 emulator to maintain code that runs an amateur radio repeater. Its just a great chip.
Yes, I posted my own follow-up to myself pointing out the same error (and a few others), but thanks.
Actually, I don't quite have my facts straight either (someone on /. with a casual approach to the facts? Can't be!).
This site gives a slightly more accurate version. The gist of what I said above is correct, but follow the links for actual facts.
Everybody hauls this example out, and it isn't a good one. The woman who spilled coffee on herself was permanently maimed by it. The coffee machine's heating element was set far too high (just below boiling). It had been noted in an inspection and the store had been ordered to fix it. They did not. Then the moron put the coffee between her legs and drove off.
McDonald's was sued and paid because of their willful negligence in disregarding an order from a health and saftey inspector.
But it is so much more fun to use a fragment of fact to make the court system look insane.
"expected lawsuits...has been filed."
In a related story, "/. copy have been proofread."
Sorry, this grammar police moment was inspired by the disabled comments when this story was first posted.
On to business. If IBM has been giving away code that was under copyright and they did so in violation of the terms of license they had with SCO, then this suit has merit.
Of course, my humble opinion (not knowing what they think IBM "shared") is that the same problem will inspire a similar solution in any two groups of competent programmers. Independent discovery is more likely IMHO than theft of copyrighted material. There are only so many sensible ways to page memory or write a circular buffer.
There will, no doubt, be a small number of Arab people who would not accept any settlement that didn't include the slaying of the Israelis to the last child. Likewise I'm sure there are Israeli militants who believe that every Palestinian should be expelled from Israel's borders and any who enter be shot on sight. This doesn't make either position an example of justice.
As a white man in North America, I can sympathize with the argument of "Hey, my (grand and great grand)parents did this. It's not my fault." But I profit by a crime. I don't think a generation washes away guilt. I don't think I'm criminally liable, but some part of the blood of the Trail of Tears is on my hands. I don't think I'm responsible for slavery, but the whole of American society struggles to this day with echoes and consequences of that monsterous wrong.
Justice doesn't mean a return to the status quo ante. It means that each side is asked to give up things of value in exchange for peace. It means that the bitterness and hatred and the thirst for vengeance not be confused with justice.
I'm not saying this will be easy. If it were easy, it would have been solved by now. But what I am saying is that it will not be solved by Palestinian suicide bombs, by Israeli tanks in Gaza, or by American tanks in Baghdad. It will only be solved by an honestly negotiated peace, honestly brokered, and honestly administered.
I am sure that a Palestinian would express an opinion that Israel is vehemently opposed to justice.
All I know for certain is that we are already killing each other in numbers that are more than sufficient. We do not need to keep on killing. Much is made of the fact the Muslims, Jews, and Christians are all "sons of Abraham." What part of "Thou Shalt Not Kill" do we not understand?
facilatate: (adj.) Easy to milk.
/. errors would make great new words. Although, I suppose it realy should be "facilactate."
Some of the worst
Oh, I agree with you. My previous post is definitely a bit of pie-eyed optomism. But I think it helps to put the positive ideas out there. You never know when someone might read them and not know that it is impossible and then go out and DO it.
The question is should we persue a "Wilsonian" foreign policy, where the morally correct guides our policy, or a "Kissingerian" foreign policy where balance of power alone dictates action. My heart is with Wilson, but the weight of history seems to be with Kissinger. It seems to me that as social creatures, we have developed rituals and rules that serve us well in most situations. We have decided collectively to not be brutes, and when one of us insists on being a brute, we take him or her out of society. But at the level of the nation-state, we are still completely knuckle-dragging brutes. Power is the only value in international relations. Despite the realtively successful emergence of multi-cultural democracies, we still do not want to give up autonomy to those "foreigners." So, without supranational institutions to act on nation states as courts of justice act on indivduals, nation-states continue to settle disputes as brutes.
The only hope I have is that nation-states do seem finally to have come to fear themselves. WWII was so destructive and the emergence of the A-bomb and later the H-bomb seems to have finally frightened the nation states away from open warfare.
The problem now seems to be that with the collapse of Soviet Communism, there is no nation-state that really puts that fear into the United States, so the United States acts now without that check on its use of force. My fear is that by so doing, we will drive other nations into alliance against us (the United States) and that we will create a new cold war enemy. I just don't think our starting a war for peace is going to be positive in the long run.
None of this is to argue for the Hussein regime in Iraq. Even though I think we have insufficient justification to mount an invasion, there is no doubt about the brutality of his regime or of his unbridled ambitions. I just wish we had the moral high-ground, and I don't think we do.
And as I said before, the present mess is a result of situations left behind by the colonial powers, exacerbated by the disappearence of the polarizing (but also stabilizing) Cold War alignments. I simply fear that in the long view our present plan of action will make all future action more difficult. I fear we are expending all of our diplomatic capital to clean up one mess at the expense of future influence, and at the risk of increasing the mistrust and hatred of the people of the region.
Another serious problem is the disjunction I spoke of before between the governments in the region and the populace in the region. Even if we work things out with the governments, we may be really damaging our reputation with the populace. To pick a simplistic example, everything was fine between the US and the government of Iran until the populace became sufficiently unhappy.
Our Declcaration of Independence says that our government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. Until the whole world votes for the President of the US, where does our authority come from?
Power.
Is that the best the human race has to show after all this time? Maybe. That's rather sad.