f13.net

http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/07/01/cosby.comments.ap/index.html

I read through Cosby's comments and I must say, the things that he says are probably the most effective ways for the black community to move past the problems that they have. In Georgia, its very common to see black groups pointing the finger at discrimination and policy that keeps them down, yet they rarely turn the finger to themselves. Cosby is making the stand that needs to be made, change starts in the home. The black community has suffered for years because a culture of ignorance and machismo has become igrained in their homes. Black men love their mothers and hate their fathers, or don't even know them at all in many cases. They look for male role models in places that lead them into gangs, drugs, and ultimately poverty. No emphasis is placed on getting through school when the guy on the corner slinging dope is making the big bucks.

All these behaviors started with parenting, or the lack thereof. Strong fathers breed stronger men, and caring mothers instill their values into better daughters. One parent can't fill those shoes. Also, education is the key to success, but parents have to be the ones helping their kids succeed. No child can realize their potential without a personal drive, but it takes a good family to develop that drive. All in all, I think Cosby is on the right track, but it is a hard track. Ultimately, it will be ignored in the short run for the easy way out, but I hope as time goes on, more and more people will begin to take similar stands for change.

There's a really good book about this issue that came out a couple of years ago called Betraying the Race, by James McWorton (sp?) if I remember correctly.

He's a linguistics professor that sort of got into black issues during the ebonics faze.  He was really the only black professor of linguistics around, so the media were hounding him about this topic.  He's a conservative, but a fairly lowkey one, not of the raving right loony variety.  Anyhow, he expounds on this kind of thing really well.

Seeking academic success is considered, at best, "white."  And as we know from pop culture, thats worse than death.  At worst, its a complete betrayal of the African American culture.  

Once you start applying severe peer pressure on a teenager to blow off school, you're doomed.  Kids that age can't fight that kind of persistent pressure off, and the result is that he / she ends up being a 20-something with no options.

I probably messed that up horribly. I'll fix it when I see the "I KNOW BLACK PEOPLE" episode again.

Agreed, its cooler to be an ebonic speaking banger than a first class student. That is until the bangers are dead or in jail and the students are making the big bucks or working for social change. The problem isn't as much peer pressure, as I consider that only a symptom of the larger issue. Peer pressure to blow off school starts because kids don't have parents that care, or even have time to care. The black community role models are not rocket scientists, they are pro athletes and music stars. Most of them only perpetuate this thug life culture by being complete jackasses in real life.

It's all about starting with your role models at home.

The silly part is that white kid are trying to emulate the thug lifestyle and be all cool, as if it's cool to be ignorant and speak pidgen english. But hey, it sure pisses the parents off, if you don't mind throwing your life down the toilet.

I fucking hate people who butcher English. They should be tied up and shot, am i rite? fo'rizzle my nizzles - fo'shizzle.

FUCK.

The problem isn't for those who can turn it off and on to be cool because they realize what they are doing and can change it.  The problem is with those who don't realize what they are doing and won't ever have the skills to speak or write correctly.  Sad to see, but a very common issue in the South where many people are limited in the job market by their inadequate language skills.

I ain'ts got no idea what yall be talking about. Youghto know that we here in the deep south know how to talk right.

The problem in Mississippi is much the same as in Georgia.

I applaud Bill Cosby for speaking this way. All too often, the "black community leaders" I hear talking do nothing but infantilize the black community, treating them as perpetual victims of the "white man's oppression." Al Fucking Sharpton is the most high-profile (Tawana Brawley anyone?). Worthless piece of shit that he is.

Yes, there is racism, and discrimination and oppression. But discrimination is illegal, and is becoming less systemic with every generation. You CAN succeed in life, whether white, black, Puerto Rican or Martian, but you have to try, and you have to work for it. It isn't going to be handed to you. Some have to try harder; for blacks, that's overcoming peer pressure to be a little gangsta, and not letting it get you down when some dumbass cracker won't hire you because you're black. It may HURT, but don't let the pain hold you down.

However, as a white middle-class surburban kid, to say that kind of thing to a group of black people would get me labeled a fucking racist bigot.

I think Cosby is solidly half right.

I think Dave Chapelle, in general, is a good 90% right.

For a host of reasons, black culture has a shitload of negative influences within it. Some of these are holdovers of necessary responses to explicit white racism. Others are elements of various vicious cycles.

Buti t's not so easy to simply renounce culture. The real challenge is finding a healthy relationship to a culture with destructive elements. And that's a challenge that faces a lot more ethnic minorities than just blacks.

Personally, I blame rap music and the extremists (Farrakhan, Sharpton, etc) for perpetuating the hate. While many of you may not agree with the rap music part. I truly believe it influences young black men (and women) to be fucking idiots.

Edit: Before I get pinned as a racist, you should listen to some of the ass-nasty shit that gets labeled as music. And you tell me if you don't stupider by the minute. "Rubberband Man, Wild as the Taliban."

Rap music, or at least gangsta rap music, needs to share part of the blame. In the beginning, it wasn't about aggrandizing the thug lifestyle so much as it was about writing about the lives of the rappers involved. Their lives just happened to be filled with violence and drugs and poverty.

Once it got popular, once there was shittons of money to be made, the image was all that was important. Hell, Snoop Dogg still raps about bitches and hos and the gangsta life, but that isn't his life. He's a father, a husband (soon to be divorced), and isn't "rolling down the streets" looking to flap-blast somebody. The newer artists just take the image and run with it, and as long as they "get theirs" it don't matter what effect it has.

That said, an individual can choose to ignore the stereotypes and raise themselves beyond it. But as I said above, IT TAKES HARD WORK. And since the shining prize for the impoverished is becoming the rich people they see on TV, it's easier to imagine oneself a famous rapper than a doctor.

What's ironic about gangsta rap and it's role in all of this is that the shitton of money to be made wasn't within the black community. It's in marketing the black community to suburban white boys. This entire self-destructive culture solidified, roughly, when "The Chronic" was a breakthrough success.

You can blame Chronic. I NWA. But anyway, black media has been exploiting black teenagers and young adults for as long as I've been alive. From stupid ass looking giant sweaters with Looney Tunes on them, to asinine multicolored stone washed jeans. It's all about creating the new fad, and charging a shitton of money so black kids spend all their cash on it. The number of white kids who indulge in black music and don't indulge in the purchasing side of clothing/music/etc far outweigh the number of white kids buying FUBU, or whatever the latest shizzle is - which I believe is lil' Romeo's line of jackass-ware.

I think blaming the music itself is reactionary....it fails to address the root of the problem.

Gangsta rap is the musical equivalent to the Godfather, Scarface, or the Sopranos. It's all about the dream of wealth, respect, and power.

The problem came in when the role models stopped taking any responsibility for the example they set for others. Charles Barkley missed the point about role models entirely...you don't get to choose whether you are a role model or not. If people see you as a role model, you are one.

So now you've got these role models making ridiculous amounts of money by singing, rapping, acting, playing sports, and dealing drugs....none of which require an education. Why study when the guy on the corner is pulling down $100k a year selling meth? Or when you can impress enough basketball scouts to get a $90 million dollar shoe deal and an NBA contract before you graduate from high school?

They don't see people making it the "right way", and they see the people who made it the "wrong way" living a much better lifestyle.

Bring the noise.
Cheers...........

Bill Cosby is right, but he also misses another element of the problem: Democratic advocacy of extreme multiculturalism and diversity.

By encouraging minority groups to maintain a "seperate yet equal" identity, it inevitably leads them to value things that the mainstream culture does not, which means some of those things are actually going to be negative to the national as a whole.  Now, I'm not saying everyone should be forced into a 50s whitebread nuclear family world, but come on, we don't even expect minorities to learn ENGLISH.  We teach them in their native languages, local, state, and national government communicates with them in their languages, etc. and we are too afraid to ask for them to meet even a minimum set of standards because that would be racist.

It's sickening.

Bruce

Because nothing in the world is worse than a stupid old person. Nothing.

Oh and I agree with Bruce, only to a more extreme extent.

Live in America? Speak English or Die.

Because the first thing that immigrants coming to America would do is learn to speak perfect english.

It's a generational thing, the parents speak their native tongue and their kids learn english.  I'm not seeing how bilingual education and multi-language government forms are related to the black community's problems of unemployment and crime.

Harlem and Chinatown have very little in common.

You are correct that their kids learn english, because they learn it at public schools that teach english. When you don't even bother to make that a requirment like some schools in California are doing, then they never bother with it at all. I can understand coming to a country and not knowing the language, but I can't understand not trying to learn it. God forbid if I moved to a European nation or something that I wouldn't try to learn German or French or Italian. I don't expect to hole myself up with other English speakers and pretend the rest of the country is nuts.

Bah. A non-English speaking class is important to the American economy. Quite frankly, we need people to flip burgers and clean houses. Having immigrants only qualified to work those jobs is not a bad thing. It means they're not competing for real and good paying jobs.

The problem is that self-improvement isn't something that generally happens in a single generation. Immigrant life sucks dick. Second and third generation immigrant life sucks less dick. By fourth generation, you've more or less got assimilation. Give or take.

The goal shouldn't be to have everybody speak American anymore than it should be to have every poor black kid go to Harvard. Those are unmanagable goals, and were they realized, all hell would break loose. American society is such that we need the lower class to function. Without being a dramatic revolutionary, the best goals you can hope for are things like "Get the black people to graduate high school, and maybe get a degree at a community college, so that their children are in enough of a state to get a degree from a state university, and then maybe their children will get a degree from a respectable place."

But that's much less satisfying than the alternatives of revolutionary gusto or hopeless dreaming.

Ya know, it's gotten to the point where enough people in Africa, Asia, Europe and America speak english that It should just be the world language. I'm sick of these thousands of language. It's like fricking crypto to me. Some of the Languages out there make about as much sense to me as the ballots did to the geriatrics in FL.

The problem is that you're crazy enough that it's impossible to tell when you're being sarcastic.

Because you failed to understand the issues are linked together.  Language is NOT just a generational thing.  Yes, it is true third-generations tend to speak better English and less of their grandparent's language.  That's not the point.  The point is that regardless of generation, they are ENCOURAGED by the left to maintain their own language and culture within the USA and CODDLED by the government to facilitate that, through multilingual education and services.

This same mentality comes into play with black urban culture, only the outward manifestations are different.  The point isn't language per se; it's a mentality to values diversity to such an extent that basic pre-existing cultural norms are ignored.  In some cases, this is good for social progress; i.e. racial/religious/sexual/orientatin non-discrimination.  In other cases, it isn't, such as inhibiting language assimilation, not valuing education, blaming others for not having what you think you should have, etc.

Unfortunately, it's very hard to get serious discussion on this "culture war" issue.  The left values diversity so much that they refuse to even acknowledge that some "alternatives" should NOT be supported as valid, and the right can't talk about such issues without referencing the religious ideal of the Judeo-Christian tradition as the standard to which we should aspire.

Bruce

That is a good point.  The left loves the notion of the "salad bowl", but in reality you cannot have a group of people voluntarily segregating themselves within a culture and not expect there to be some nasty ramifications arising from it.  People have to merge, they have to assimilate one way or another, and while remaining a distinct culture may sound good on paper, really it's just Balkanization dressed up in fruity PC-speak.

And if you want to know why Balkanization is bad, just look at the root of the word.

I think that the reason that certain cultural groups don't seem to be assimilating into American culture is due to the constant influx of new immigrants from the same ethnic group.  More new immigrants enter the community than move out of the community due to assimilation, that doesn't mean assimilation isn't happening, it just means it's harder to see.  Bilingual services allow immigrants access to the government services (like 911) that we take for granted, and bilingual education helps deal with the large percentage of immigrant children that are in some schools.

My grandmother had the Finnish beaten out of her in grade school, I don't consider trying a different teaching method to be a bad thing.

This attitude, sarcastic or not, is why people bomb our buildings.

Actually, most people who bomb our buildings do so because they were taught to hate Jews, and we support Jews.

Bruce

This is awful. I have to pick between agreeing with Sky or SirBruce. :(

/sigh

Sky is right. :(

And while we're on the subject, it completely annoys me that black people today associate Republicans with the enemy rather than Democrats.

Democrats were anti-black from 1790 - 1930.  They made a slow transition away from discrimination starting with FDR and Harry Truman, but even as late as the 1964 there were many southern democrats opposed to racial integration and equality.  Did you know that in the House of Representatives only 61 percent of the Democrats voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act as compared to 80 percent of Republicans, and in the Senate only 69 percent of the Democrats voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, compared to 82 percent of the Republicans?

Meanwhile, the Republicans STARTED as the anti-slavery party in 1854, and were really only see as anti-black due to their opposition to some of the integration policies from about 1930-1964.  Ever since, racism hasn't been advocated by Republicans; they just disagree on affirmative action.

Chief Justice Earl Warren, who headed the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision?  Appointed by a Republican, Eisenhower.

Meanwhile it has been the Republicans who have put forth the first black Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State (Colin Powell), National Security Advisor (Condaleeza Rice), and  Supreme Court Justice (Clarence Thomas).  Also, after the Civil War, the first black judge was a Republican, the first black full-term Senator was a Republican, etc.

The Democrats are late-comers to racial equality.  Republicans were there first, and yeah, they had a sticky patch there for about 40 years, but it was a reaction to the perception that some of the Democrats were going too far, not that there shouldn't be equality.  Meanwhile, many of the Democrat leaders of the day were also opposed to civil rights, like Al Gore, Sr. and Robert Byrd.

Bruce

First and last time I'll probably ever do this, based solely on principal. But -

Bruce is right.

It's not just about Jews, though. It's about everything America stands for, particularly religious freedom and our abuse of capitalism and pseudo-imperialism (i.e. Israel). It has nothing to do with the fact I fucking hate having to talk slowly to order a carnitas fajita at Chipotle. This isn't to say I don't respect people of all creeds, I do, but I also expect them to speak my native togue when in my native country. Just like the French do when I'm in Paris. It's not my fault our forefathers didn't see it fit to declare a national language. And it's the oversensitivity of people who don't want to be pinned racist that other languages are being offered in elementary schools. Immersion is how people learn languages, not being babied along because we take special care to provide education in their native tongue when they're six years old.

I do have a bottle of hate for the city of Paris, but that's an entirely different story.

I agree that there's more in their motives than JUST the Israeli issue.  But support for Israel is pretty much at the root of it... without that, a lot of the other anti-American issues could be forgiven or minimalized, and in any case, would have been far less likely to motivate them to violence.  I can certainly understand why some people who've analyzed the issue think the US should simply abandon support of Israel; I don't agree with that solution but the cost of not doing so is quite high.  Of course, now that beliefs are institutionalized, it would not solve the problem if tomorrow Israel ceased to exist.

Bruce

I didn't say our arrogance was the only reason some folks hate us. But it's a big one. We think we should be running the world. We think we are the best country in the world. If you aren't living here, I can see how that would get annoying.

It's more than the Jews, though. Jihad is called against infidels, which includes some mulsims, as well.

House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger is a disturbing book, but I think everyone should read it (also the Bob Woodward books). It's like the new Moore movie without the sensationalism, just the facts (Moore contributes a lot of his movie to the book).

Well, "running the world" is basically our de facto role now.  There has to be a nation that can ensure the smooth flow of the global economy, and can put out fires around the world.  After WWII that task fell to us with the dissolution of the British Empire.  We're really only continuing their legacy (they kept the global economy moving, protected the sea lanes, etc), and particularly now that the Soviets are history, there's simply nobody left to perform that role.  Europe could theoretically do it, but frankly they're too in love with socialism and easy living to effectively exert global power.  They'd rather take the course of hectoring us every chance they get to fall in line with their way of thinking.  We've basically been keeping them on a form of national welfare by not forcing them to foot their own defense bills for the past 50 years.  

We're living in a period of Pax Americana, much like Pax Britannia and Pax Romana.  Trust me, the west would be well advised to suck it up and make the best of things, because whomever else eventually takes up the role of global guardian is going to be a hell of lot less lenient than we've been.  Even worse is a world where there is no global power to ensure the peace, that's a Hobbesian nightmare.

I'm sorry, Big Gulp, did you just basically say we needed to take up the White Man's burden?

I'm saying that whether or not it's done consciously, the task is going to fall to someone.  Whomever the big dog is is going to do what they can to further their goals.  Consider it fortunate that the goals of the US are largely benign, because I'll guarantee you that the goals of Communists and Islamic fundamentalists aren't to give everyone a pony and sing kumbaya with a group of multiculturally balanced children.

And as I said, the side effects of there not being a global cop aren't good to think about, and no, the UN does not provide that role, considering that they're already been coopted by third world dictatorships and socialists.

And here you've captured exactly why "they" (Whatever you want "they" to mean today) hate us. Because we're so absurdly egotistical as to think that anyone other than us would think or should think we're improving their life. I mean, even if I granted that the goals of the US are largely benign, the methods we've been trying to use are not benign.

I dunno. I just find it desperately ironic that we're increasingly giving the world freedom whether they want it or not.

Or that you're celebrating the British Empire on July 4th.

When is bombing people and occupying territory ever a benign experience?  Yet, they're often necessary.  The left doesn't like to think of things like the 40 days and nights bombing of Serbia as a war, but I'll fucking guarantee you that the Serbs saw it that way.  How else does one stop things like genocide?  By bombing the shit out of people, killing the troublemakers, and slapping martial law down on the populace.

What's the greater evil, letting the Hutus slaughter the Tutsis in Rwanda, the Arab Muslims slaughter black Christians in Sudan or bombing the ever-loving shit out of the slaughterers to get them to stop?  From a moral viewpoint, I know which one I side with.



It's in our national security to do so, because the fact is that these oppressive regimes are making trouble far beyond the scope of their nations.  When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and started his sabre rattling towards Saudi Arabia he was directly threatening the world economy.  This entire world exists only through the flow of oil.  We use it for transport, power, plastics, etc.  Letting one guy take such a huge chunk of the world's oil supply is a direct threat to the American and indeed the global way of life, and economy.

We're now in a situation where fascist dictatorships and theocracies are directly threatening us through their support of and ties to terrorism.  Are the methods used to oust Hussein or take the war to terrorist groups and their host nations benign?  Nope, but they're necessary.


Sorry, 200 years after the revolution, and after 100 years of staunch friendship I just don't have too much venom towards the Brits.  You might not like what they did historically, but it's my firm belief that the British Empire was nowhere near the great evil many people would have us believe.  We're really the only "empire" (and no, I don't think we're an empire in the classical definition, if anything we could be considered a capitalist/commercial empire) who has been more benign than the Brits, and I'd argue that many of their former colonies are now better off for having had Britain nursemaid them than if they'd just been left to their own devices.

Thurgood Marshall.  Just a nit pick.

I wasn't even talking about the bombing. I was talking about, say, ritual abuse of prisoners.



I suppose it would just spoil your day to point out that there wasn't actually any pressing national security issue requiring the invasion of Iraq?



The British Empire was founded on the belief that European people - not European civilization, but the people themselves - were better than everybody else. As for the idea that the colonies are better off... I think you'd get some sharp disagreement on that from the colonies themselves. Who, it seems, would be in some position to know.

A tempest in a teacup.  There's just no comparison between a naked human pyramid, scaring people with dogs, or putting a sandbag on someone's head and cutting someone's head off in a sick little piece of terrorist theatre.

Let's compare and contrast Gitmo with N. Korea's lovely set up of reeducation camps, or the Soviet Union's gulag, shall we?


That's your opinion, I think you're foolish and naive, but that's your prerogative.


Funny, I can point to any number of Indian historians who'll agree that their country is currently more modern, and better capable of global economic competition because of British colonization.  Where else would they have gotten their communications systems, railroad infrastructure, and educational system?  Hell, the British were instrumental in discrediting the caste system.

They did some nasty things in the process of the their colonization, but I'd say that in the long run the empire was probably beneficial for those colonized nations.

Scale? The fact that Abu Ghraib was covered up by the US government at large, institutionalized, and done to far, far more people? Whereas the terrorist beheadings, while also horrifying, appear to be an isolated group of fanatics, and not the government itself?

Who covered it up, again?  The entire affair was brought about due to a DoD investigation, conducted by Gen. Takuba.  As to it being institutionalized, that's a matter of debate.  Personally, yeah, I have no problem with us turning the screws on these people (to a certain extent) for information.  In my opinion, Abu Ghraib does not constitute torture, and furthermore, people we grab who are not uniformed combatants for a foreign sovereignty do not get to have the Geneva conventions applied to them.  Now was the Abu Ghraib situation ordered from the top down?  I doubt it, or at least it wasn't spelled out explicitly.  I think military intelligence had marching orders to be aggressive in obtaining information and they ran with it.

I'm not for physical torture, but humiliation, intimidation, and sleep deprivation are all fair game as far as I'm concerned.  Really, the only reason this is as big of a scandal as it is is due to media overreporting.  The New York Times has run 48 front page stories about this.  Do you know how many times they've run a front page story about the UN Oil for Food scam?  Once.

The entire affair was brought about because the pictures got leaked. the DoD knew what was going on months before the entire affair was brought about, and they fucking sat on it.



You know, if it were just torture for information, that would be one thing. I would just shrug my shoulders and, honestly, figure that, hell, if you're going to kill people, why not torture them for good measure. It's the sadistic glee the pictures showed. The smiling soldiers finding the humiliation and, in some cases, deaths of the prisoners to be nothing but fun. That's the part that appalls me. The fact that this clearly went beyond necessity, beyond being a dirty job that someone had to do, and into fun.



The prison scandal is far more bizzare, and, let's be honest, visceral. It's the same reason they lept on Monica Lewinsky instead of Whitewater - nice and easy to understand. Also, with Abu Ghraib, you get the wonderful spectacle of the people in some of the soldiers' hometowns defending them, because what they did was "no different than shooting a turkey," and that "they ought to just blow up the whole of Iraq."

You didn't get that level of insanity with the Oil for Food scam, sadly.

And how does that equal "OMG!!!1!!1  THEY CUVERED IT UP!!!1!", genius?  They had the report and had done an investigation months before 60 Minutes ran the piece.  Of course they're not going to call up the AP and say, "Hey!  Got some great prisoner abuse photos for ya!" but a cover-up actually implies attempting to stop information from going public through illicit means.  That never happened, the information was out there, it simply wasn't advertised.

Pull your head out of your ass, mongo.

And I didn't say you said it was the only reason... we're talking about "most" people who ...



Yes, but the Israeli issue is the prime motivator.  I've never seen a suicide bomber who said they did it because America wants everyone to learn English.  They may have multiple reasons, bu Israel is usually at the top of the list.



The facts aren't disturbing at all... at least not to me.  It's the innuendo people draw from it that disturbs them, but they are predisposed to believing such things anyway.

Bruce

Good catch.  Not sure what I was thinking.

Bruce

OK, fine, I'll back down from "cover up" to "Deliberately kept the information quiet instead of displaying the slightest amount of openness in government." Which is still pretty fucking shady.

No there hasn't. Thats the core fault in your thinking. Its true that the global economy has to be flowing (but not necessarily the most convenient way for one particular economic system) and fires around the word are put out (but again, not one country should decide for itself what a fire is). It doesn't get more easy than one country doing that, but is it a prerequisitve for anything? No. Thats the unilaterismus that gets you hated. Because nobody trusts the motives of others over their own motives. Everybody wants to control things themself, and if that is not possible, doesn't want other people to control things. Thats why international gremiums are necessary. They take the control away from identifyable "specific people we don't trust". Thats an advantage for everyone, except the people who trust those specific people.

And only idiots trust governments they don't have direct control over.


Pax Britannia and Pax Romana fell to their own hubris and inflated images of self worth. Two examples you don't really want to emulate.


Indeed, one gobal guardian is always a bad thing, just like dicatorship is a bad thing for a country. Even if there ARE benevolent dictatorships which work just great for a country, there might be benevolent global guardians. The system is still rotten at the core, though.

One global guardian is the logical way to run a planet and the safest for the majority of it's population.  If Europe rises to challenge the power of America (unlikey in my view) then we will risk going back to the bad old days of 1962.

As someone who speaks English which therefore puts me at an advantage in such a world, I have to say it wouldn't really bother me if the U.S.A. just came out into the open and declared themselves world rulers.

The danger in the long term to all of us is allowing more power factions to obtain nukes, eventually someone somewhere is going to start letting them off.

The reason America is unliked by a lot is a mixture of envy, religion, language and morality.  I think they could learn a lot from the British Empire of old on how to deal with other cultures.

But when national pride overtakes me, I always try to remember that the largest uk aircraft carrier can fit into the cargo hold of an American aircraft carrier.

And what's your alternative?  There will always, always, always be one nation that outstrips the others and seeks to influence things their way.  It's just the nature of nationhood, and humanity.  The question isn't whether or not "global guardianship" is a bad thing (I'd agree, that from a purely egalitarian viewpoint, it is), but that it's most likely an inevitable thing.

United Nations, not the clusterfuck that it currently is, but the idea behind it. The idea is a sound one, the actual implemenation sucks in more ways than I can count.

Only possible after much education in many countries.

Of course, until then we need a benevolent world dictator that actually works toward educating the world about democracy with the ultimate goal of replacing himself with a system where he has less control. Snowballs chance in hell that any single entity is that selfless.

So of course the big boss likes it that way, his sidekicks agree, everybody else either grudingly follows or disagrees quietly, until a new big boss replaces the old one and the cycle continues.

And yes, even with the changes in the USA since Bush, I'd rather have you as World Guardian than a Pax Arabica or a Pax Asia. At least in democratic countries there is a chance for changes to the better.

Life is easy as a D.  You wouldn't want to be an A.  It's hard being an A.

Actually, most people who bomb our buildings do so because they are educated middle eastern men who have found the lack of jobs discouraging, and have become disenfranchised in their homelands due to their governments who are generally regarded as money-grubbing bastards, to include our pals the Saudis.  We should be well aware now from history that educated, disenfranchised young men tend to cause a good deal of trouble, and in this case, they decided that their government sucks.  Unfortunately for us, their government is strongly backed by the US government - and worse, the US government backs the Isralei government, whom they don't much care for.  Since Israel is full of Jews, and the US is viewed as Christian, we make much more tempting targets than Muslem leadership, although they have been targets too.  Hence, people like Bin Ladin have been able to play on religion to give purpose to this youth.  They are disenfranchised no longer - now they are "freedom fighters", or whatever phase they like that fits the same western notion.  Most of their terrorist activities occur in their homelands, and many of their targets are Muslem (it's hard to get a one way ticket to the US for the modern terrorist-minded Muslem) - but now their targets are corrupted by the west, so it makes the whole deal a bit easier to stomach.  

And why do we meddle with these Middle Eastern governments so?  Oil.  That's an easy one - forget the propoganda about peace.  Wars break out all the time, and we don't pay them as much mind as we do in this area of the world.  We do want to prevent warlords from getting too strong, and getting access to too much power elsewhere, but nothing like here.  Why did we back Saddam?  His government was seccular - a stark contrast to the highly conservative Islamic Iran.

That's a ridiculous assertion....by not calling public attention to it, they are deliberately keeping it quiet? Give me a break, Snow. If they wanted to keep it quiet, the story never would have been leaked to the press.

They did an investigation, found the problem, and began the internal processes to correct the matter before the thing ever went public. Now you're suggesting the military should have said "HEY EVERYBODY, LOOK AT HOW OUR BOYS FUCKED UP!! BTW, PLEASE SUPPORT THE TROOPS!" before the press broke the story?

Next time you make a mistake at work, even if you correct it right away, please go around and tell everyone about it. Hey, don't stop there....call up your company's clients and tell them too. Because doing anything less would be shady, right?

Bring the noise.
Cheers.............