That appears to you to be a self-evident proposition? Why?
If we did that, we would cut off our nose to spite our face. International trade and a healthy world banking system is necessary for our well being. Gone are the days of total self sufficiency. We need markets for our products and we need raw materials and manufactured goods that we do not make. We also need foreign buyers of our government bonds. Why would we be so stupid as to eliminate all that?
I can’t prove it. But I think it’s naïve to regard countries as charitable or otherwise generous entities. Remember that the U.S. only fought in WWII when it realized that the outcome of the war would affect America as well.
I don’t type things just because I like to hear myself talk. If you read what I wrote more carefully, I specified that the U.S. would only do so if it brought no harm upon itself. I even mentioned in the same post that one of the reasons the U.S doesn’t eliminate its rivals is because of foreign trade.
I don’t know the extent of foreign aid in the 1930’s, but I have a hunch that it was almost non-existent. One may think of foreign aid as charitable contributions, and of course our foreign aid today is humongous.
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We agree that animals have a right to life but you seem to think the U.S. doesn’t believe the rest of the world has any rights at all!
Love doesn’t exist as far as science is concerned!You mean that emotions don’t exist in science? How come economists, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists all study fear? How come biologists study it when they do their behavior of animals research?
I suspect that fear becomes the subject of these sciences because it is so often evidence of illness of the psyche or the desire of some to instill fear in others for the sake of controlling them. That is what science is all about … control of the world around us. And that is why science is so little interested in love, because love is not control. It is the setting free of the spirit and the desire to do good unto others as you would have them do good unto you. Certainly the inventors of atomic weapons were not thinking of that maxim when they set about their work.
When I say “U.S.”, I am referring to the political entity, not the citizens. Countries don’t care about human lives any more than corporations do. They only care to the extent that it benefits them, and any rival who fails to serve their ends will be squashed.
Neither countries nor corporations care about anything because they are collectives, not real people who do care.
But why do you think the Germans initiated WWII in the first place? Again, it was for economic reasons. So as I said, the war was motivated by economics, not morality.
You’ve just made my case. It was Hitler, not the country of Germany, who dragged the world into a universal holocaust. There were many Germans who opposed Hitler, just not enough to stop him. The people who stopped him (Americans included) were not the people who went to war with Germany for economic gain, but to stop his insane attempt at world conquest. If we had gone to war with Germany for economic gain only, we would have crushed Germany as a world power. Instead, we did what we could to help Germany get restored to its riughtful plafce among the world powers, and it was finally by Reagan telling Gorbachov to take down the Berlin Wall that Germany was finally re-united and is now more prosperous than most European nations and very much and ally of the U.S.
I would agree with that. I suppose I shouldn’t have referred to countries, as that’s ambiguous. As I said before, I was not referring to the citizenry of these countries, but rather the powers that be–the people who have the power to make things happen.
I think that, just as individuals can be motivated by their ideals-- including ideals that most of us would find abhorrent, such as the ideal of a racially pure society – so too can the leaders of nations have idealistic considerations that override sheerly pragmatic ones (i.e., true fanatics do exist). The expulsion of the Jews from Spain, for example, is believed to have been driven largely by an ideology of maintaining a purity of the faith – and, by some accounts, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain proved to be economically disastrous.
Most wars do start for economic reasons.
Well, altogether too many people discovered, to their horror, that Hitler was not only not a devout Christian, but the devil himself.
The American Civil War was fought for a number of reasons.
To an extent some dirtying is inevitable, but you keep working to limit the damage that we cause in order to support our species. I do see that as progress, although I would definitely like to see a great deal more.