A Question of Blame When Societies Fall
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Who or what is to blame when a once-powerful society collapses?
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The unity that followed the September 11 attacks five years ago was never going to last. But the nation has not merely returned to the messy family arguments of September 10. All wars bring a reckoning of means and ends, and the war on terrorism has long since lost its crisp moral lines. Americans may agree that terrorism is wicked, but they're still unsure about how to answer it.
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Analysis Fragmentation and US indifference
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When one considers the United States&#39; cold war preoccupation with containing or destroying socialism over the past 50 years, and Washington&#39;s exemplary record at destabilizing communism world-wide, it is a mystery that some cannot for a moment imagine
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Cape Verde Is. The disaster in Southeast Asia touches us all. Areas, which were already very poor has been affected by incomprehensible destruction.
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There's a lot you can blame on the baby boomers, the sumo demographic that has given us everything from bell bottoms to those obnoxious "baby on board" signs. But will you be able to blame us for taking the market down when we start to cash out of our retirement plans?
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I'm unsure what good will come out of this whole incident. The problem is that when emotions run high, as they did here, people tend to spend more time fortifying their own positions rather than exploring new ones.
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I was looking at what my friend Stephen Lewis wrote in HakPakSak a few days ago &#151; specifically newspapersâ roles as public trusts and cornerstones of our informational infrastructure &#151; i.e. sources of solid information and independent commentary essential to informed citizenry, democratic government, effective public policy, and well-functioning economies. What this brought up for me is the notion that human beings are themselves infrastructural;  especially when they are constuctive contributors to the structure we call civilization.
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The tragedy of the tsunami's child victims
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The New York Times has recently run a piece pondering the renowned nation of Canada, and whether it has fallen from its once lofty heights of international greatness.    "A country is not just a health system."  This is the sentiment of one of a few Canadian authors recently lamenting the decline of Canadian engagement around the world.  The question then becomes: what makes a nation great?  Why would Canadians resent the place of  their placid and peaceful country?  And, what does this say about the roles taken on by other influential nations around the world?
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Just as the cognoscenti in the 1950s once debated &quot;Who lost China?&quot;, the question of &quot;Who blew all our money&quot; has become one of the politically and culturally loaded questions to emerge in the wake of the 2000 fiasco on Wall Street.
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a situation for which everything from video games and junk food to the popularity of other sports like basketball is blamed â-ore
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Amazing, but even in this time of goodwill and cheer, some folks are always looking for a fight. A recent exchange with a regular reader got me thinking how divisive things can get.
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The Americans have run out of explanations, but not excuses.
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The problem with nationalism is that it will align itself with and act in the common good of humanity only when its own interests are also served. And of course, if its interests are served by stability, which might sometimes be served by propping up corrupt regimes, such as in Burma and its supply of natural gas to India and China, no action will come at all. Agitation then to get countries to do something is pointless. National governments exist to serve that country's citizens, not humanity. That fundamental structural defect means that nations are unreliable agents of the common good. They will never act for the common good of humanity on principle alone.  However, with the rise of the Internet, we have a wonderful new tool at our disposal for the advancement of justice. A means for all of humanity to coordinate and act on the name of the human good on its own, bypassing the morally compromised and ineffectual national governments.
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History suggests that South Asia's tsunami tragedy could engender regional political fallout.
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Can a state commit genocide? Should an entire nation &#151; not just its presidents, generals, and soldiers &#151; be held responsible for humanity's worst crime?