Should we respect all traditional, cultural and religious norms?

Yes, but very few agree with me about that, so we need an algorithm that has some chance of being accepted in the real world. Waiting to judge something until after we see its results is, at least, a bit more sensible than judging it before we have any idea how it will work out in practice.

At some point the powerful will simply assume authority, so let's give them some tools that allow them to at least do a slightly better job of it when it comes down to that.

Sure. But the larger and more diverse the consensus group, the more likely they are to come closer to objective truth--if indeed there is such a thing in the realm of sociology.

After all, we are all the same species. We've only had a paltry few hundred generations to mutate from the more-or-less homogeneous ancestral African population, and that's not long enough to result in major changes in the archetypes and other components of our psychology. (Unlike dogs, who in the same time span have gone through many thousands of generations and now indeed have instincts quite different from wolves.)

In other words, we're all wired pretty much the same way. If you mix us in a bowl to blend out the accretions that arose after separation into distinct communities with their own traditions, you'll get something close to "objective truth," as the term can be appropriated to apply to our Inner Caveman. The major difference from our I.C. is that nearly all of us now live in much larger communities than he did, and we've had to negotiate with him to stop him from going all Paleolithic on us too often.

I've often noted that if only a few Inner Cavemen act up, the institutions of civilization will minimize the damage. Give him a pizza, a recliner, a TV and a domesticated wolf at his feet who thinks he's god, and he'll settle back down. But when an entire community goes Paleolithic all at once, we have a war.

It's the classic quarrel between your Inner Caveman and the civilized person with the reasoned and learned overlay that redefines his "tribe" as tens or hundreds of millions of people, most of whom are mere abstractions to him, yet nonetheless work in harmony and cooperation because the past 12,000 years have consistently proven (with a few backslides along the way) that this give us all a better life.

Making your neighbors suffer makes your own life worse, because you need their cooperation to keep the community clean, watch out for the safety of unmonitored children, mow their lawn to keep your property value high, etc. In other words, it's in your own selfish interest to be civilized.

I could phone 100 people right this moment--all intelligent and well-educated--who would assure you that it's not.

It wasn't just drugs and racism that we were right about!

Excuse me??? I don't even need to rely on friends to back that up. I've read historians and political analysts who said the same thing. The Treaty of Versailles humiliated the Germans, and the Germans are not a people who accept humiliation lying down. It also impoverished them in myriad ways, such as declaring their trademarks void, for example nearly destroying Bayer A.G.'s income from aspirin.

It was that humiliation that made them ready to elect a bad-ass Führer who was going to pay back the rest of the world--starting with the Jews, Mesopotamian civilization's whipping-boys since before the advent of Christianity.

The Great Depression knocked Germany's already-fragile postwar economy into chaos, with annual inflation rates that seem mathematically impossible today. This too was blamed on the victors of WWI, especially the Americans who, it was rather reasonably felt in the Third Reich, should have had no problem staying on prosperous footing since the war was not fought on our soil and we had nothing to rebuild. By German reasoning we should A) have entered the war on the German side and B) kept our financiers on a tighter leash so that the Depression could not have happened.

My parents assured me that a great many Americans felt the same way, insisting that the British sank the Lusitania in order to shame us into entering on their side--this was disproven only after they died. And also that the may-they-rot-in-hell WCTU subversively campaigned for solidarity with the Brits because most of our breweries were founded by Germans and this would make it easier to outlaw beer. As for the Depression, well yeah, we simply weren't doing a very good job of managing our economy, sorta like today.

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Sure. But the mishandling of the Treaty of Versailles played a big part in simply getting him into office. BTW, he was shrewder than people give him credit for. He quickly understood the power of electronic technology, and embraced radio as a way to brainwash his people with his passionate rhetoric and well-composed speeches.

All our government has managed to do with today's hot new electronic technology (the internet) is embarrass itself!

Sorry, the Quote window doesn't retain a nested quote so I don't know what you're referring to.

But if individual nations decide to cooperate and establish international law, then each of them has sworn to uphold it. Duh?

Indeed. I didn't advocate intervention, merely noted that if it happens it's "fair" according to the rules by which all involved parties have agreed to play. Again, I don't have my original passage to quote from, so forgive me if I gave the wrong impression. There are no absolutes in real life so obviously situations may occasionally occur in which ganging up is the only rational response, but I'm not convinced that this is one of those.

Sorry, again I may have not expressed myself clearly. Or perhaps with a day to digest this I've reached a better position on the matter which I feel more comfortable defending. The West may indeed do something that causes war in Syria, especially given our track record in the past few decades. That doesn't mean that The Last Hippie is going to put a fucking yellow ribbon on his door.

A handful??? How about a consistent pattern since at least Vietnam, and arguably Korea??? Some people think meddling in the breakup of Yugoslavia was okay, but the last time I picked up a newspaper those people are still shooting at each other.

I disagree with both statements.

Perhaps. But by setting ourselves up as the nation who is going to restart the Crusades and make war on Muslims anyplace we can find them (this is inevitable when we keep blundering into conflicts where both sides are Muslim!), we're slowly alienating all of the world's one billion Muslims, which just doesn't seem like a good idea. Even in "moderate" Muslim countries like Malaysia and Bangladesh, people are sending money to organizations whose avowed goal is to destroy us. All one of them has to do is bribe (or blackmail) the right bunch of Pakistani officials and they might be pretty close to getting their hands on a couple of nukes. If you've seen the reports on the sad state of security at America's ports, it will be no big problem for them to get those nukes into the country and detonate them in one of our densely populated cities, by purely low-tech means.

Which Muslim capital will we nuke in retaliation first? Right now might not be too early to emigrate to Australia.

So we would have had the new instability in the Middle East, and the availability of a new Shiite country as Iran's ally, 25 years earlier? With one of the stupidest men who has ever occupied the White House in charge? That would not be a mistake???

Well gee. In my paradigm, the most "bad thing" that comes from war is the killing of human beings. How do you justify that?

Huh??? Until the 16th century, Western culture was almost completely shaped by Christian doctrine. For another 300 years after the Reformation, Christianity and Christian leaders continued to play an enormous role in the development of the West. Even the United States Declaration of Independence and our Constitution have passages that are clearly inspired by the Bible.