Yes you did, you're just to slow-footed and to hypocritical to know.
The first principle of respect between independent nations is that no nation has the right to sit in judgment on another. You appear to want to jettison that principle.
A government that doesn't respect the unalienable rights of its citizens deserves no respect from anybody. There is no unalienable right for a tyrannical government to exist. That is the first principle of individual rights.
But if you jettison that principle, we are back to square one, in a hideously presumptive world.
A hideously persumptuous POV according to "ohioan":A government that doesn't respect the unalienable rights of its citizens deserves no respect from anybody. There is no unalienable right for a tyrannical government to exist.That is the first principle of individual rights.
Indeed, your rationalization justifies every thing that has been deleterious in world affairs over the past three generations.
A rationalization according to ohioan: A government that doesn't respect the unalienable rights of its citizens deserves no respect from anybody. There is no unalienable right for a tyrannical government to exist. That is the first principle of individual rights.
Your "respect" for tyrannical governments around the world is everything that has been deleterious in world affairs.
are not the only one who thinks that you have the inside track to a new order for the world. Both the Communists and Nazis tried to justify their assaults on other peoples as "liberation" movements.
You compare my POV and the president's POV where we dare advocate that the people of a nation should govern themselves -- you compare that to Communists and Nazis. Your moral relativism is sickening. It's everything the statists of the world preach and you soak it like a milksop.
What you propose is indeed international anarchy. But you are too focused on your own "virtue," to see it.
Governments that respect unalienable rights deserve respect. Governments that. don't respect unalienable rights don't. I don't propose anarchy between nations. The president doesn't propose anarchy between nations. I do propose alliances with and I do advocate that we respect, the nations that do recognize and protect unalienable rights.
But you think thats anarchy, presumptuousness, Nazi-like Communist-like and the root of all evil in the world.
You "ohioan" are a nut!
Argument ad hominem, back at you.
I got one of those, as well. (#84 above.)
But, I am in good company. Just so happened that as this thread began, I finished reading Joseph Ellis' His Excellency George Washington (Knopf 2004). Checking for differences, additions, omissions, disagreements, I had at the same time reread James Flexner's Washington The Indispensable Man (Mentor 1974).
I recommend both biographies to anyone interested in Washington. Both are well written, meaning the narrative is easy to read and follow. Flexner, though, provides more detail.
It's a common mistake that people make, that because some evil is done in the name of good, then everything that is done in the name of good is in fact, evil.
For example, since the islamofascists do what they do in the name of god and religion, all people who are religious and believe in god (i.e. the Christians in the U.S.) are all equivalent to the islamofascists.
The mistake these people make is thinking that evil and good are polar opposites, and look nothing alike, so if one thing bears resemblence to something that was evil, it also, must in fact be evil. When in reality, evil is far from the opposite of good, but the corruption of good. What makes evil so, for the lack of a better word, evil, is that it is often very hard to distinguish from good. Most of the evil that is done in this world, are done in the name of good.
The only thing I would agree with Ohioan is that a certain level of healthy skepticism toward those who want to "do good" and "liberate the world", is warranted. However, when skepticism turns into cynicism, and the person believes that doing good is no longer possible or even be a goal and should be pursued, that all we are left with is doing nothing, then evil would have triumphed, because as someone once said "the only thing required for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
What precisely is wrong with your claimed right to trample on other nations' sovereignty, based upon your judgment? Well, let me get very specific:
1. No one has appointed or annointed either you or President Bush as the keeper of the honor of other Governments. The premise that no sovereign nation has the right to judge another is not based upon the idea that governments are not accountable, or that they are not duty bound to protect their own peoples. It is premised upon the concepts of independence, honor and responsibility.
2. I do not know about your personal analysis of particular Governments, but I do know--as the debate in my feature makes very clear--that President Bush does not even have a clear concept of what the function of a Government, any Government is. He uses conflicting senses of Freedom in his speech; and that hardly qualifies him as a judge of the rectitude of any nation.
3. Their are very few--probably none--Governments that perfectly relate to all their peoples. In the West today, human freedom is generally on the retreat. Even apart from the absurdity of adopting universal suffrage, without any other qualification--which appears to be what Mr. Bush is trying to sell in Asia--from the standpoint that it is absolutely stupid to appoint decision makers without any sense of their qualifications to make decisions; there is no Government with a heterogeneous population, and never has been, which perfectly protects all its subjects or citizens in their pursuit of happiness. Almost any decision made is going to impact someone negatively. And I am not referring to the enforcement of reasonable criminal laws; but to the enforcement of regulations of conduct that find temporary favor, etc..
4. It is arrogant, in the extreme, to think that your or my particular theories for how a society ought to operate, have universal applicability. Generally, the cultures of any people will definitely influence their forms of government; and the cultures of any people will reflect their nature and past experience.
The particular institutions of America--the fine, sound, institutions that the Founding Fathers gave us, which we are gradually losing to Leftwing politicians and overreaching Courts--reflect the population here in the last three decades of the 18th Century: A hearty settler stock, drawn here with a sense of adventure, bent upon acquiring land, and space; a stock selected from the general populations of the Mother countries, for their more independent spirit, greater self-reliance, etc..
I could go on. But it should be obvious that most of the world do not have those same priorities. And Americans who seek to instill systems devised to further those settler priorities among people with other priorities, have a terrible track record--even as any more objective observer would have predicted--in creating havoc across several contintents. (Dean Rusk was saying the same things that Bush is saying now--albeit a bit more precisely--in the 1960s, and ruined a number of nations in the process.)
It is not a benign mindset that keeps trying to justify such really contemptible experiments.
William Flax