What are our national goals? What about the international rules of the road? And who are "we", anyway?
POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Monday, August 31, 2026 20:17
VIEWED: 6222
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One of the interesting things about the recent necroposting (which I really enjoy BTW - thanks Jayneztown!) is the long-term perspective that it offers on the discussions here. While the actual topic have changed - or not! in some cases, as old topics become relevant again - the underlying discussion has obdurately remained.
The actual topic, of course - the one that's been rolling from thread to thread and decade to decade - is, what SHOULD we, as a nation, be doing? What CAN we do? Who is "we", anyway? How do we fit in with everyone else?
Here are some examples of how this underlying argument works:
SGG (sorry SGG, I know you're pissed off at me because I don't like Obama but this is a clear example) believes that the USA should be welcoming to immigrants, no matter how they cross our borders. He believes that because he believes it's the American ideal: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free..." That this ideal is what "makes America great" ... different than other nations ... and that there's no potential conflict between that American ideal and American future prospects or internal stability, it will always somehow work out in the end because it always has in the past, in some fashion. SGG's view of America and "Americans" is that our responsibility extends, not just to our current citizens but to EVERYBODY, that inclusiveness is the path to greatness (prosperity? security?) Clearly, SGG's definition of America and its responsibilities extends to more than just those living here. So, who or what is "America"?
In terms of foreign policy, there are the perennial arguments about American military intervention. Can you actually reach objectives like "freedom" and "democracy" via the military? Should we even be trying to extend "our way of life" to other nations, especially at the point of a gun? And are those the real objectives of our leadership, or just the hooks used to get the populace to "buy into" a military intervention? If our leadership HAS other goals, what are they?
How do we reach prosperity? With more, less, or a different government? Should prosperity be a goal in the fist place?
One of the reasons why this comes up as a question is that there seems to be a profound disunity between Americans. Not only do people not seem to be agreeing on HOW to achieve certain goals, we seem not to be agreeing on the goals themselves, and we even disagree on whether agreement is even necessary.
In fact, scanning across various (American) websites, it's as if we live in five or six very different worlds!
MANY years ago, when my employer actually believed in training, they had a short training course in ethics. Best as I recall, there were three different systems:
Canonical- the kinds that refers to the Bible, the Q'uran, or some other list of rules
Synthetic (or syncretic) - the kind that attempts to understand the underlying areas of agreement between different systems, and synthesize them into one system
??? - I forget the name of the third, but I remember it as "Whatever floats your boat" .... I won't look into YOUR system of morals if you won't look over the back fence at mine. Even then, more than half of the USA believed in the "Whatever floats your boat" system of ethics. More people than not believed that you DON'T need a common set of ethics to have a "successful" nation.
So should we even attempt to outline "our" underlying beliefs? Do we (as a nation) need some underlying, commonly-held morals anyway? Or can we just roll along without them?
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Okay, not trick questions, but I want to flesh out some of this and possibly stimulate some discussion:
When BUSH said he was going in to Iraq to prevent the use/ deployment/ development (variously described) of WMD, I knew it was a feckless war. THe reason is because there were NO credible WMD in Iraq.
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When he said that Iraq would become a unified, secular, democratic state .... it took me a bit to figure out whether that would work or not, but eventually I figures NOT, because:
The Sunnis (Baathists) who were relatively secular were in the minority, but they were Saddam's ethnic group and so they tended to run roughshod over the Kurds and Shiites. DEMOCRACY was the LAST thing they wanted!
The Shiites are a majority, but they tend to be pretty religious. SECULAR was never going to fly with them!
The Kurds and both linguistically and ethnically separate from the other two, AND they had their own source of oil and proto-government. UNIFIED (ie sharing oil revenue) was NOT in their list of acceptable outcomes!
By including all three points on his list of objectives, Bush made its achievement completely impossible.
So, the first thing you have to do is decide if the goals (as stated) are even achievable.
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You can't build a nation with bombs. You can't create a society with guns.
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In science, in economics, in military, in production these other countries are leading now, or moving closer to the American lead and the USA is not so far ahead of everyone in this world anymore. Back when I first came on this forum it was an Andromeda site, not a Firefly site with Joss shows and Joss movies but a site showing the writing of the tv show Andromeda, the actors like Kevin Sorbo as High Guard Captain Dylan Hunt and its crew of aliens and a robo-hologram affectionately named as 'Rommie'...Firefly had just started, and Joss and other scifi writers started to see a future, a frontier in space vision, the wild west around dusty planets like Mars and terraforming, a strange vision where the USA wasn't always number 1 and nations like China would rise....I thought some of it was good, a cowboys in space scifi with elements of Chinese culture but I didn't think so many predictions by scifi writers would start to come true. Bush Jnr was in power and the USA was still ahead, still great but he was so bad, such a moron with his neocon cronie friends that many of us belived even a leftist pot smoking fool like Obama might be the answer, the elites picked Obama, they paid for his planes, his fancy banquet dinners, they paid for his posters, elitist bankers and elites from Bilderberg global government inc bought his tv ads because they thought a black man with a muslim middle name 'hussein'would be able to fly over to the middle east, hold hands with the wacky muslims, sing happy songs and dance around the sand dunes with a bong, weed and flowers in hand and chill all this radical muslims out...you don't think the globalist elites Dutch, Saudis, Jews and British secret elites....you don't think they own Obama....ask youself who owns the Fed? did you know the Fed is a privaite bank and not a bank owned by the American people? the fake Federal Reserve with its phony dollar owned borrower or debtor money clocking up trillions in national debts, making profit from mistakes in war and possibly making money future wars and future corruption and they will add trillions more on the US national debt...Bush was a disaster and we were told Obama was the answer, elites picked this black dude with a 'hussein' name as a mark of friendship to the wacko muslims and boy did the elites get it wrong....especially now with members of the Senate and the Congress making moves that would formally designate the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization
After all my rants I am still a non-interventionist, I belive the USA or France or Russia or whatever country should only invade/attack, only respond with destructive warplanes & military violence only if it is an absolute must and sadly with radical muslims establishing the so called islamic state of ISIS that option may have become a 'must' and is it possible to win this war, saving the innocent without wiping the 'ISIS Capital City' of Raqqa off the face of this Earth? 
On the positive side I think Muslims are slowly changing, not all but some are changing.... you have Muslims looking to Atheists or Apostates like Ali Hirsi and recently a young French Muslim call out his own people for their BS and calling for a war against raidical islam, not form the outside but from within Islam itself
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=66d_1447941216
his passion is interesting
America also needs to re-stablish its own culture and stop follwing hedonism, war and military industrial profits, out of control cronie banker capitalism, fake money, drugs and being ashamed of itself...Americ aneeds to be great again, not just in stats or numbers but as an American culture. I have lived in many nations across the world and what impressed me was how some of the strong national people or island people have an insanely strong culture, the smaller communities, the people in big cities who still have that small town rural culture, the island peoples...Iceland, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea...t
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Quote:
...JAYNZTOWN
On the positive side I think Muslims are slowly changing, not all but some are changing.... you have Muslims looking to Atheists or Apostates like Ali Hirsi and recently a young French Muslim call out his own people for their BS and calling for a war against raidical islam, not form the outside but from within Islam itself
You are an atheist, so am I. Well I don't believe in god. Here is why I see you as radicalized. There are more than 1.5 billion Muslims in the world. You apparently no longer see them as mostly honest and hard working like you did in 2004. Unless they have renounced religion entirely like the ones you mention, who "are looking to Atheists or Apostates". A person who renounces a religious or political belief or principle.
I wonder, does that hold for Catholic's, Jews and so on? Are they to be distrusted as well for believing in god?
By the way, I have posted your defense of Muslims in many threads now by reposting your 2004 post. I am hoping to solicit a response. What's the problem, don't have an answer as to why you taking an opposite today?
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Quote:
...JAYNZTOWN
Hedonism is a school of thought that argues that pleasure is the primary or most important intrinsic good. In very simple terms, a hedonist strives to maximize net pleasure
Explain to me how you plan on changing human nature before humans decide it is necessary to do so. Look at us a thousand years ago and then now. We are slowly getting there and America is by far leading the way. Problems, many but the desire for better and not for self is still way out in our future if at all.
This is why integrating Muslims into modern society is crucial. Keeping them confined and backwards only delays our advancement. We need to send more into space and let that message permeate the Muslim world. Let them ask themselves, live in a hut sitting on a dirt floor, or fly to the stars?
Do this and watch what happens.
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One of the interesting points about these necroposts is that it does give me a chance to look back.
I think it's pretty easy (for me, anyway) to notice when the USA does something WRONG, stupid-headed and short-sighted...
For example, the first and second invasions of Iraq and the destruction of Libya and attempted destruction of Syria are based on such blatantly obvious lies that I'm left casting about, in a kind of WTF? fugue, looking for ANY reason that makes sense because clearly the "Saddam's WMD", "R2P/Qaddafi is massacring his own people" and "Assad created ISIL" are so so much nonsense. Since the stated reasons for action are so specious, the actual reasons probably are too. If the real reason can't stand the light of day, it's probably not anything we collectively want.
It's pretty easy to decide NOT to do certain things ... and overall I think the USA and the world would be in far better shaped if the USA had simply canceled something like 99.9% of its' military actions since WWII. But it's much more difficult to figure out the RIGHT thing to do.
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I've come to the following tentative conclusions.
Over time, I've become something of an isolationist. There are a few reasons for this:
I've come to realize that durability and efficiency are opposing evolutionary elements. Having ONE plant in Japan that manufactures the special plastic used for capacitors, relying on "just in time" delivery, etc may be very EFFICIENT, but it's extremely fragile. Durability requires redundant production pathways and storage capacity. If your daily life depends on 1000 uniquely-and-immediately-available resources or parts, you have just built in 1000 critical points of failure.
I've become something of a nationalist. Given the choice of being subject to international corporations/banks versus my nation-state, I choose my nation-state. The reason is that while a nation can always be reformed by its citizens, an international "anything" - CAN'T. Any organization needs feedback to guide its actions. International corporations and banks have no feedback from the billions that they affect. There has to be a way of devolving authority down to lower levels.
Along those lines, each nation should be self-reliant on the basics: Food, water, energy, basic manufacturing. And to the extent possible, each state, county, and city should be as self-reliant as possible too. We are all subject to hurricanes, blizzards, drought, earthquakes, or other disasters of various magnitudes. Relying on instant communication and instant delivery is a death-knell in the case of disaster.
Nations need to be more than just groups of people stuck in the same place- they need to have a common language and a basic set of common ethics.
As you may have noticed (!) I'm very much against unrestricted immigration into the USA. In this very crowded world, I'm a big fan of in-place problem solving. But my stance requires, among other things, that we stop messing up other nations. We would be in a much more defensible ethical structure if we stopped making life unbearable for so many in so many other places.
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But OTOH, assuming that we've battened up our hatches and solved our internal problems and restrained ourselves from destroying other governments ... what do we do when confronted with a nation whose ethics are truly offensive? I don't mean ... a nation that insists on attacking us and sending suicide bombers and terrorists onto our shores because that would invoke self-defense (and no, I don't mean defending our soldiers 8000 miles away). But what do we do about a nation that's just truly abhorrent internally - Say, holds 90% of its population in abject slavery? Are we required to offer refuge? Are any other nations? If so, how many people do we need to accept? And how do we decide which ones?
OR what if there is some large non-state actor which is extracting large sum
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All your subjective posting SIG falls flat on its face because you have zero credibility in these threads. It's like listening to a record constantly skipping and saying the same thing.
You and JAYNZTOWN are one side of a coin SIG and blind to what is on the other side. You don't see how easy that is recognizable in what you guys post, but hey, you wouldn't.
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Quote:
Originally posted by THGRRI:
All your subjective posting SIG falls flat on its face because you have zero credibility in these threads. It's like listening to a record constantly skipping and saying the same thing.
You and JAYNZTOWN are one side of a coin SIG and blind to what is on the other side. You don't see how easy that is recognizable in what you guys post, but hey, you wouldn't.
You might have noticed that nearly every sentence in my post ends with a ? That means I'm asking questions ... what about this situation? What do you think about that wrinkle?
This forum used to be a place where one could engage in spirited but reasoned discussion. You can't manage a single thoughtful counterpoint.
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You can't build a nation with bombs. You can't create a society with guns.
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SIG
You might have noticed that nearly every sentence in my post ends with a ? That means I'm asking questions ... what about this situation? What do you think about that wrinkle?
My response
You asking a question is how you think you can get people to believe this is a viable thought. What it is, is mostly subjective crap
SIG
This forum used to be a place where one could engage in spirited but reasoned discussion. You can't manage a single thoughtful counterpoint.
My response
You need to be engaged with an honest broker of the truth for that. Something you and some others here are not.
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I was asking very general questions about our nation's responsibilities to the world in general when we see injustice ... something that does NOT involve bombing and killing. How do we not promote injustice in our trade deals? How do we react to the desires of regions to break away from their home states? How many refugees are we morally obligated to take in? All of them? None? Some? How do we decide?
There are very open-ended questions designed to stimulate thought and discussion. I would be very interested in hearing what other people have to say, as I'm sure there are as many ideas as posters ... probably more!
I'd love to be able to really pursue some of these questions very deeply:
Why do you think ...?
What do you mean by ...?
How do you decide ...?
Perhaps somebody wants to ask me the same questions!
Everybody's got their views, it would be nice to discuss them in depth without all of the rancor and infighting.
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You can't build a nation with bombs. You can't create a society with guns.
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