you wouldn't sound so ignorant in front of such a wide audience.
/. is not a wide audiance. I like/. but to see it as a wide audiance is uhmm, ignorant. btw you seem to be crippled by a desperate need to look good, maybe you're sterotypic view of the Chinese is comically tied to the "antideluvian" image of saving face. Sad really.
And as far as the Japanese economy after WWII, they did produce crap. It took them decades to make quality goods for export.
After World War II, MacArthur served as Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP). His first responsibility was overseeing the reconstruction in Japan. Though it was officially an effort of the Allies, the US was firmly in control, and MacArthur was effectively the dictator of Japan during this period." If, as you post, Japan took decades to make quality goods, then the decades must amount to no more than two. And those two decades may amount to no more than overcoming the Overlordship of el Supremo MacArthur.
Maybe if you knocked off the knee-jerk slurs against Americans and either did some exporting or read some history...
Actually, as it applies to you, it's a bitch slapping of you as an American.
I ran an export company that dealt exclusively with Japan (I'm Canadian). It wasn't a big company (we did about a million dollars a week), but I did it all, with the help of a secretary and the connections of the owner a descendent relative of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. I happily was able to visit Japan and travel while writting the costs off.
One of my undergrad majors was economics. I like to think I can still stay with an elementary discussion of economics and business (extensive commerce courses and business law plus 2/3 years general accounting).
Prior to shifting my major I studied the humanities. I've read widely in the history of Japan. I had an onging interest in a comparative study of the Britan and Japan, given their both island states.
In terms of the economic history of Japan my readings rely primarily on the Cambridge Economic History; although I did read more widely on the Meiji Revolution.
Culturally I rely extensively on George Samson's 3-volume History of Japan. In terms of Literature I've read everything I could find from the Tale of the Genji on up.
So bitch, there you have it. Now do ya wanna play who knows more?
The Comments laughing at the idea of the Chinese being innovative reverberate with the jibes thrown at the japanese economy after WWII. The japanese were seen as copiers, inept as engineers, and suited to making cupie dolls and other knock offs.
Now, in America, it's the Chinese who are seen to be a bungling satellite economy dependent upon American management and good old American know how. And how did that turn out last time around with the japanese?
Or, perhaps the rise and fall of civilizations is a cyclic process,
Reads ominously like a post from someone who has actually read O. Spengler's Decline of the West. I own a copy, very old, but I've never been able to read it (it's not as inacessible as Joyces' Finnegan's Wake but it's "all Greek to me"). The only comparable experience, in terms of flurid prose, I've had was reading H. Bergson.
I read and liked A. Toynbee but I just can't see that an idea such as you've suggested could ever be substatiated or refuted.
... particularly when that character is Socrates, who is known to be purposefully misleading.
There's so little to go on concerning the true character of Socrates. AFAIK there's Plato and Xenophon. I can't remember reading Aristophanes The Clouds wherein Socrates was caricatured.
Burnet (as I read in Russell's History of Wester Philosophy) wrote: 'Xenophon's defense of Socrates is too successful. He would never have been put to death if he had been like that.' Personally I like the bit on Socrates attributed to the prosecution: Socrates is an evil-doer and a curious person, searching into things under the earth and above the heaven; and making the worse appear the better cause, and teaching all this to others. The, perhaps apocryphal, report that near death he asked a friend to pay a debt owed, a cock to Asclepius, is cool, as such a debt was paid when the debtor recovered from an illness.
I think Plato did history a disservice in his fictional representation of Socrates. Given you're posts I think you're better read in terms of Plato than I am (not a difficult feat);) so I'll defer to your characterization. I can't immediately recall the Classical Greek concept of history but I seem to remember their concept of history was radically different than ours.
Both quotes are from a text file I've kept for some time. I'll try to get a source.
I've read Plato and the neoPlatonists (especially Plotinus) but can't recall a source for the quotes. Having read The Republic I've little doubt Plato would have spoken in the quoted terms. The ideas he set out in The Repulic in terms of the training and power of the Guardians seems to me to jive with someone who would see any impropriety as unacceptable; but, it's worth keeping in mind, that he was an aristocrat who saw the destruction of his kind's power base. That he seems to have adopted the "ideals" of Sparta as the underpinnings for his Utopia is suggestive of someone who subscribes to power as a sort of "Dieu et mon Droit" principle. Personally I find his views repugnant the more so for having read K. Popper's Open Society and It's Enemies
You're right in thinking the odds on favourite would be his having put the words into one of his quasi fictional characters. B. Russell characterizes Plato as, above all, a writer of inventive genius.
"The Greek philosopher Plato studied under Socrates. Plato complained
about the youth of the day, also. "What is happening to our young
people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They
ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions.
Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?"
and from another time
"I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on
frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond
words... When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and
respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise
[disrespectful] and impatient of restraint" (Hesiod, 8th century BC).
When you're too old to know what it is to be young, it seems, you'll inevitably subscribe to an orthodoxy that sees children as wild and at risk of being irrevocably corrupted.
Kids are leaky hormone sacs. What you see them up to in public is nothing compared to what they do in private.
Fantasy, the more lurid the better, ate up great chunks of my childhood. Clark Ashton Smith should be remembered with Lovecraft. C A Smith and Lovecraft had a good friendship. From the above site: "The friendship of Clark Ashton Smith and Howard Phillips Lovecraft began in letters in 1922 and progressed over the years as each became famous to the readers of Weird Tales and other pulps of the 1920s and '30s
Closed Source Software sellers' fear of Open Standards and Open Source being adopted by governments and government agencies isn't simply the loss of some customers. There is a multiplier effect when governments adopt Open Standards/Source because every contractor that wants to do business with the government adopters of Open Standards/Source will likely adopt Open Standards and Open Source. Contractors know to kowtow to their buyers by using the standards for submission favoured by the repspective government agencies.
It's encumbent upon most governments to adopt standards that are readily available and open to their constituents. I suspect their might be legal principles at play that would allow suits to be launched forcing governments and their agencies to adopt Open Standards and, hopefully, Open Source.
Closed source proprietory software developers are right to fear what's happening in Mass. and elsewhere around the globe. It's the tip of the iceberg and closed source is booked on the Titanic.
Daily Planet has a video on making a smarter dummy. It's basically the same idea. Sadly when I saw the show the first thing that came to mind was when does the hot chick version come out.
Ya, I've read that too. It may have been the whale attacking the squid and, I, as a child interpreted it to be other way around. IIRC my dad may not have depicted it as the squid attacking the whale. By way of his training he tends to be very exact in his reporting of things.
My step Dad, a naval officer (pilot), now retired, saw a whale surface with a giant squid engulfing it's head. The whale breached a couple of times with the giant squid unrelentingly attached, attacking and maybe feeding.
I've read that during WWII giant squid would attack red life boats filled with sailors from sunk ships. Apparently the red colour attracts them.
By all accounts they are extremely aggresive, suggesting they don't see themselves as prey and know no predators.
I think I'll keep my exposure to them second hand.
I can't remember the name of the bankrobber, but I do remember a bankrobber responding to the question: "Why do you rob banks?" The robber responded: "Because that's where the money is?"
So where's the money in this festering mess? Is it possibly in the tax base? Expanded IP expands the tax base at a loss to the public interest. IP marks a clear paper trail as to who owns what and what can be expected in terms of revenue and, in turn, tax revenue.
Big government requires big tax revenues and what better to "sell off" than the cultural and intellectual heritage of it's constituents. The infrastructure to oversee IP is minimal while the tax gain is substantial. Basically it's a big tax grab. Maybe it'll be pay raises all around for our elected representatives.
"Will this technology trigger an across-the-board adoption of DRM for Windows software?"
I've no doubt DRM will come on strong and dominate the marketplace. I don't think the geek crowd will deter the onslaught of DRM. Much of our western culture is based on conspicuous consumption. People like to have their purchases imprinted with some sign of authenticity and, strangely, high price. While I've difficulty finding the time to read/., the Reg and my mailing lists, there are many people who love junk mail and spam, the more so if it's personalized, so having their every move online sprout offers to buy this and that may be flattering to them.
"How will it affect the distribution of free and open-source software?"
I've pretty much said my goodbyes to Windows, my multimedia, web box runs XP, but I'm moving onto AMD 64 and freeBSD for everything else. Windows was grating enough to run but recently MS seems to totally own my web box, needing to authenticate every patch and update, (it's like a security firm that promises to protect your premises then has a break-in and theft at their headquarters and, follows up with a notice to its customers that it will be rummaging through each customer's house looking for its stolen gear).
Free Open source software will continue to grow by leaps and bounds, with more government agencies signing on. It's sometimes difficult to see the growth in FOSS adoption, but when I first bought Mandrake6 the brick and mortar places Linux could be found were few and far between, now it's readily avialable and every computer book store has aisles of books on FOSS.
I'd question whether there is a need for more math & science teachers in the 1st world. My experience at school was that there were few who took an active interest in maths & sciences and those who did where called nerds, who thrived by their own initiative.
It may well be that those who can manage grade school sciences will do so no matter the number of teachers available.
As a society we may benefit more by making math & science teachers available to those few who show the ability and willingness to jump the hurdles necessary to gaining the knowledge. Under democracy there is a tendency, now not as strong as it was a few decades ago, to belief that give an equal chance all participants are as likely to excell in any give arena. This is a Romantic belief.
It may be we'd better benefit from underwriting math & science teaching in postsecondary education where ample and good teachers might pay off in a bigger dividend; rather than pumping resources into grade school education in the mistaken belief that the reason there are fewer students doing well in the maths & sciences is that society is not providing the basic opportunity.
"Computer technology is basically ephemeral. But Biotech leads to medicines and other discoveries that are both difficult to discover and inherently valuable."
"Function: adjective
Etymology: Greek ephEmeros lasting a day, daily, from epi- + hEmera day
1 : lasting one day only
2 : lasting a very short time
synonym see TRANSIENT
How do you come to term computer technology ephemeral?
Computer technology encompasses concrete inventions and abstract inventions.
Speaking to abstractions, it's likely some computer algorithms will be around much longer than some of the hardware.
"Biotech leads to medicines and other discoveries that are both difficult to discover and inherently valuable"
Do you think sound algorithms are somehow less difficult to discover?
As to "...inherently valuable... I'm schooled in Economics and Commerce, along with other areas. I've read deeply in the subject of value from Aristotle on up, and, to say biotech discoveries are inherently valuable is to state the trivial. Any discovery is "inherently valuable". It is the nature of information that it is valuable, to speak of it as "inherently" valuable is some kind of voodoo.
"Hidden in Parker's observation is the awareness that hacking is a social problem."
Crime as a problem of context is studied in Gregory Bateson's seminal book Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. Bateson addresses two flaws in our court system. One is to treat a crime as something isolated and somehow measurable in penal terms. Taking a crime out of context, i.e., the makeup of the criminal, is blind to the forces that generate criminal actions.
Bateson speaks of (crime) "...as not the name of an act or action; it is the name of a frame for action....( he suggests)... we look for integrations of behavior which a) do not define the actions which are their content; and b) do not obey ordinary reinforcement rules." In this context he suggests play, crime and exploration fit the description. As long as we are only able to punish according to some sort of arbitrary eye for an eye method of bookkeeping we will be unable to root out crime.
Bateson's second criticism of our judicial system addresses it's adversarial nature. He writes... "adversarial systems are notoriously subject to irrelevant determinism. The relative 'strength' of the adversaries is likely to rule the decision regardless of the relative strength of their arguments.
Bateson's second
He further goes on to a brilliant analysis of the Pavlovian study of dogs in terms of the dog's view of the context; and, how the dog's context is violated when the dog's view of a "game" of distinction is morphed into a game of guessing without there being any markers to tell the dog the context of the game has been changed. This switch in context drives neurotic and violent behaviour in the dog. I suspect much anti social behaviour is driven by the criminal's inability to read society's context markers.
It seems old to me to introduce Karl von Clausewitz, but I think the introduction to his seminal works is necessary.
Karl von Clausewitz is perhaps best known from his statement: "War is merely the continuation of policy by other means." This oft quoted statement was part of a dialectic argument set forth in Hegelian terms to examine the properties of war. IIRC von Clausewitz also was the first to characterize an oppresive, desparate state as insidiously furthering their power by pointing to an enemy without. Declaring war on the enemy without allowed a state to cast blame on the enemy for the shortcomings of the state within. In our present case the war on terrorism allows the state to truncate our civil liberties.
The interplay between the rights of the individual and the security of the collective is an ancient argument. In the west Jeremy Bentham presented the struggle in terms of Utilitarianism, "the greatest good for the greatest number". (I've had a fondness for Bentham since, as a schoolboy, reading he was stuffed and sat at the entrance to his club.) At the other end of the stick were the Romantics, best known, perhaps, in the writings of Jean-Jacuees Rousseau, a Calvin in Rebellion (and in my opinion a second rater), and F. Nietzsche.
The argument is ancient and each of us has to reexamine it to find our own place.Good luck with that.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Some of these, especailly the "Aki", ranks among the all time greats of things fashioned by repeatedly being beaten by the stupid stick.
There were mood rings; and, one of my favs, pet rocks (I keep mine in my shoe). Then there was/is the virtual pet.
Stupid though they be ya gotta admire the chutzpa to market this stuff. Somewhere in a virtual heaven Willy Loman is smiling down on Nokia.
/. is not a wide audiance. I like /. but to see it as a wide audiance is uhmm, ignorant. btw you seem to be crippled by a desperate need to look good, maybe you're sterotypic view of the Chinese is comically tied to the "antideluvian" image of saving face.
Sad really.
And as far as the Japanese economy after WWII, they did produce crap. It took them decades to make quality goods for export.
After World War II, MacArthur served as Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP). His first responsibility was overseeing the reconstruction in Japan. Though it was officially an effort of the Allies, the US was firmly in control, and MacArthur was effectively the dictator of Japan during this period." If, as you post, Japan took decades to make quality goods, then the decades must amount to no more than two. And those two decades may amount to no more than overcoming the Overlordship of el Supremo MacArthur.
Maybe if you knocked off the knee-jerk slurs against Americans and either did some exporting or read some history...
Actually, as it applies to you, it's a bitch slapping of you as an American.
I ran an export company that dealt exclusively with Japan (I'm Canadian). It wasn't a big company (we did about a million dollars a week), but I did it all, with the help of a secretary and the connections of the owner a descendent relative of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. I happily was able to visit Japan and travel while writting the costs off.
One of my undergrad majors was economics. I like to think I can still stay with an elementary discussion of economics and business (extensive commerce courses and business law plus 2/3 years general accounting).
Prior to shifting my major I studied the humanities. I've read widely in the history of Japan. I had an onging interest in a comparative study of the Britan and Japan, given their both island states.
In terms of the economic history of Japan my readings rely primarily on the Cambridge Economic History; although I did read more widely on the Meiji Revolution.
Culturally I rely extensively on George Samson's 3-volume History of Japan. In terms of Literature I've read everything I could find from the Tale of the Genji on up.
So bitch, there you have it. Now do ya wanna play who knows more?
Now, in America, it's the Chinese who are seen to be a bungling satellite economy dependent upon American management and good old American know how. And how did that turn out last time around with the japanese?
Don't get caught.
Guy should do time for posing as a security guru then getting busted.
Reads ominously like a post from someone who has actually read O. Spengler's Decline of the West. I own a copy, very old, but I've never been able to read it (it's not as inacessible as Joyces' Finnegan's Wake but it's "all Greek to me"). The only comparable experience, in terms of flurid prose, I've had was reading H. Bergson.
I read and liked A. Toynbee but I just can't see that an idea such as you've suggested could ever be substatiated or refuted.
There's so little to go on concerning the true character of Socrates. AFAIK there's Plato and Xenophon. I can't remember reading Aristophanes The Clouds wherein Socrates was caricatured.
Burnet (as I read in Russell's History of Wester Philosophy) wrote: 'Xenophon's defense of Socrates is too successful. He would never have been put to death if he had been like that.' Personally I like the bit on Socrates attributed to the prosecution: Socrates is an evil-doer and a curious person, searching into things under the earth and above the heaven; and making the worse appear the better cause, and teaching all this to others. The, perhaps apocryphal, report that near death he asked a friend to pay a debt owed, a cock to Asclepius, is cool, as such a debt was paid when the debtor recovered from an illness.
I think Plato did history a disservice in his fictional representation of Socrates. Given you're posts I think you're better read in terms of Plato than I am (not a difficult feat);) so I'll defer to your characterization. I can't immediately recall the Classical Greek concept of history but I seem to remember their concept of history was radically different than ours.
Both quotes are from a text file I've kept for some time. I'll try to get a source.
I've read Plato and the neoPlatonists (especially Plotinus) but can't recall a source for the quotes. Having read The Republic I've little doubt Plato would have spoken in the quoted terms. The ideas he set out in The Repulic in terms of the training and power of the Guardians seems to me to jive with someone who would see any impropriety as unacceptable; but, it's worth keeping in mind, that he was an aristocrat who saw the destruction of his kind's power base. That he seems to have adopted the "ideals" of Sparta as the underpinnings for his Utopia is suggestive of someone who subscribes to power as a sort of "Dieu et mon Droit" principle. Personally I find his views repugnant the more so for having read K. Popper's Open Society and It's Enemies
You're right in thinking the odds on favourite would be his having put the words into one of his quasi fictional characters. B. Russell characterizes Plato as, above all, a writer of inventive genius.
cheers
and from another time
"I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words... When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise [disrespectful] and impatient of restraint" (Hesiod, 8th century BC).
When you're too old to know what it is to be young, it seems, you'll inevitably subscribe to an orthodoxy that sees children as wild and at risk of being irrevocably corrupted.
Kids are leaky hormone sacs. What you see them up to in public is nothing compared to what they do in private.
Another great of the field was L. Sprague De Camp
The Elric Saga by M Moorcock remains my all time favourite.
and
beer
Please, let's not ruin one of my life's greatest joys by bringing intelligence to bear
It's encumbent upon most governments to adopt standards that are readily available and open to their constituents. I suspect their might be legal principles at play that would allow suits to be launched forcing governments and their agencies to adopt Open Standards and, hopefully, Open Source.
Closed source proprietory software developers are right to fear what's happening in Mass. and elsewhere around the globe. It's the tip of the iceberg and closed source is booked on the Titanic.
Daily Planet has a video on making a smarter dummy. It's basically the same idea. Sadly when I saw the show the first thing that came to mind was when does the hot chick version come out.
Ya, I've read that too. It may have been the whale attacking the squid and, I, as a child interpreted it to be other way around. IIRC my dad may not have depicted it as the squid attacking the whale. By way of his training he tends to be very exact in his reporting of things.
I ran a search and came up with a few comments on message boards, e.g. http://glorantha.temppeli.org/digest/gd6/1998.11/2 850.html. The stuff I read was probably from the library at home in hard copy.
I've read that during WWII giant squid would attack red life boats filled with sailors from sunk ships. Apparently the red colour attracts them.
By all accounts they are extremely aggresive, suggesting they don't see themselves as prey and know no predators.
I think I'll keep my exposure to them second hand.
So where's the money in this festering mess? Is it possibly in the tax base? Expanded IP expands the tax base at a loss to the public interest. IP marks a clear paper trail as to who owns what and what can be expected in terms of revenue and, in turn, tax revenue.
Big government requires big tax revenues and what better to "sell off" than the cultural and intellectual heritage of it's constituents. The infrastructure to oversee IP is minimal while the tax gain is substantial. Basically it's a big tax grab. Maybe it'll be pay raises all around for our elected representatives.
I've no doubt DRM will come on strong and dominate the marketplace. I don't think the geek crowd will deter the onslaught of DRM. Much of our western culture is based on conspicuous consumption. People like to have their purchases imprinted with some sign of authenticity and, strangely, high price. While I've difficulty finding the time to read /., the Reg and my mailing lists, there are many people who love junk mail and spam, the more so if it's personalized, so having their every move online sprout offers to buy this and that may be flattering to them.
"How will it affect the distribution of free and open-source software?"
I've pretty much said my goodbyes to Windows, my multimedia, web box runs XP, but I'm moving onto AMD 64 and freeBSD for everything else. Windows was grating enough to run but recently MS seems to totally own my web box, needing to authenticate every patch and update, (it's like a security firm that promises to protect your premises then has a break-in and theft at their headquarters and, follows up with a notice to its customers that it will be rummaging through each customer's house looking for its stolen gear).
Free Open source software will continue to grow by leaps and bounds, with more government agencies signing on. It's sometimes difficult to see the growth in FOSS adoption, but when I first bought Mandrake6 the brick and mortar places Linux could be found were few and far between, now it's readily avialable and every computer book store has aisles of books on FOSS.
General "Buck" Turgidson:" Mr. President, we cannot allow a mineshaft gap!"
General "Buck" Turgidson: "Gee, I wish we had one of them doomsday machines."
Memorable Quotes from Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
It may well be that those who can manage grade school sciences will do so no matter the number of teachers available.
As a society we may benefit more by making math & science teachers available to those few who show the ability and willingness to jump the hurdles necessary to gaining the knowledge. Under democracy there is a tendency, now not as strong as it was a few decades ago, to belief that give an equal chance all participants are as likely to excell in any give arena. This is a Romantic belief.
It may be we'd better benefit from underwriting math & science teaching in postsecondary education where ample and good teachers might pay off in a bigger dividend; rather than pumping resources into grade school education in the mistaken belief that the reason there are fewer students doing well in the maths & sciences is that society is not providing the basic opportunity.
Do you know the definition of ephemeral?
"Function: adjective
Etymology: Greek ephEmeros lasting a day, daily, from epi- + hEmera day
1 : lasting one day only
2 : lasting a very short time
synonym see TRANSIENT
How do you come to term computer technology ephemeral?
Computer technology encompasses concrete inventions and abstract inventions.
Speaking to abstractions, it's likely some computer algorithms will be around much longer than some of the hardware.
"Biotech leads to medicines and other discoveries that are both difficult to discover and inherently valuable"
Do you think sound algorithms are somehow less difficult to discover?
As to "...inherently valuable... I'm schooled in Economics and Commerce, along with other areas. I've read deeply in the subject of value from Aristotle on up, and, to say biotech discoveries are inherently valuable is to state the trivial. Any discovery is "inherently valuable". It is the nature of information that it is valuable, to speak of it as "inherently" valuable is some kind of voodoo.
"Cloth to wear
Cooked meat to eat
Beer to drink"
The important things never change.
Crime as a problem of context is studied in Gregory Bateson's seminal book Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. Bateson addresses two flaws in our court system. One is to treat a crime as something isolated and somehow measurable in penal terms. Taking a crime out of context, i.e., the makeup of the criminal, is blind to the forces that generate criminal actions.
Bateson speaks of (crime) "...as not the name of an act or action; it is the name of a frame for action. ...( he suggests)... we look for integrations of behavior which a) do not define the actions which are their content; and b) do not obey ordinary reinforcement rules." In this context he suggests play, crime and exploration fit the description. As long as we are only able to punish according to some sort of arbitrary eye for an eye method of bookkeeping we will be unable to root out crime.
Bateson's second criticism of our judicial system addresses it's adversarial nature. He writes... "adversarial systems are notoriously subject to irrelevant determinism. The relative 'strength' of the adversaries is likely to rule the decision regardless of the relative strength of their arguments. Bateson's second
He further goes on to a brilliant analysis of the Pavlovian study of dogs in terms of the dog's view of the context; and, how the dog's context is violated when the dog's view of a "game" of distinction is morphed into a game of guessing without there being any markers to tell the dog the context of the game has been changed. This switch in context drives neurotic and violent behaviour in the dog. I suspect much anti social behaviour is driven by the criminal's inability to read society's context markers.
Cow mutilations are obviously the result of partying Titans down here huffing cows. Their parents probably don't have a clue what their up to.
If you like the idea you've pitched then don't miss A Boy and His Dog.
Karl von Clausewitz is perhaps best known from his statement: "War is merely the continuation of policy by other means." This oft quoted statement was part of a dialectic argument set forth in Hegelian terms to examine the properties of war. IIRC von Clausewitz also was the first to characterize an oppresive, desparate state as insidiously furthering their power by pointing to an enemy without. Declaring war on the enemy without allowed a state to cast blame on the enemy for the shortcomings of the state within. In our present case the war on terrorism allows the state to truncate our civil liberties.
The interplay between the rights of the individual and the security of the collective is an ancient argument. In the west Jeremy Bentham presented the struggle in terms of Utilitarianism, "the greatest good for the greatest number". (I've had a fondness for Bentham since, as a schoolboy, reading he was stuffed and sat at the entrance to his club.) At the other end of the stick were the Romantics, best known, perhaps, in the writings of Jean-Jacuees Rousseau, a Calvin in Rebellion (and in my opinion a second rater), and F. Nietzsche.
The argument is ancient and each of us has to reexamine it to find our own place.Good luck with that.:)