Fundamentalism (General)

by David Turell , Wednesday, November 05, 2008, 00:40 (5861 days ago) @ dhw

As one of the west's mistakes, I cited the Iraq war. How do you "correct" the loss of civilian life (estimates vary wildly between 90,000 and 650,000 plus), the hundreds of thousands of people injured and orphaned, over 4 million refugees? - 
You have raised a question of international ethics. Should Saddam have been allowed to continue his career of arranging for death? Seven years of fighting with Iran, for what purpose? At what cost in lives, his soldiers and theirs. Killing hundreds of thousands of his own citizens. The invasion of Kuwait, and the continuing threat of developing the WMD's. If there is a mass killer in a shopping mall do you gun him down, or turn the other cheek and get shot yourself? Are we our brother's keeper? - After WWII we had a UN that had some teeth. But quickly with the addition of a zillion third world countries, we now have a paper tiger. Should a consortum of the most powerful states act as a world policeman? On their own? Or invited? Are individual ethics different than sovereign national ethics? - We are only 8-10,000 years from being savages, not enough time for evolution to calm our brains. The hunter-gatherer society was small groups up to 30-40 individuals gathered together from self protection. We all still have the tendency to live with our own kind, to protect our own kind more, to favor our own kind more. It comes from the h-g stage of civil development. Now societal rules control those terrible individual urges that may appear. This is at the individual level, and it works fairly well, but there is no precedent for a nation level. The League of Nations was a total disaster. I view the UN as not being far behind. - What do we do about Darfur? The civil war in the Congo? Let them fight and wipe themselves out? - I think you are wrong about Iraq. What do you do when you see a rape in progess? Save the lady or run away? I think it is time for the greater powers to police the world when a criminal level of activity is going on. What does everyone else think?