[lit-ideas] Re: Max Boot

  • From: Andy Amago <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 5 Jan 2007 19:45:49 -0500 (GMT-05:00)

-----Original Message-----
>From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>Sent: Jan 5, 2007 2:20 PM
>To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Max Boot
>

>Understanding that most of the positive achievements of 
>"culture" -- such as the Hague Conference laying the 
>groundwork for the Geneva Convention -- are realized against 
>a backdrop of ceaseless amoral struggles for advantage ... 



More accurately, are realized against a backdrop of ceaseless amoral struggles 
for struggle.  Advantage comes from cooperation, unless the destruction of war 
is seen as an advantage.  War is expensive monetarily, as well as kills 
potential scientists, inventors, etc.  Of course, leveling Japan and Germany 
did bring those countries back as ultramodern, while we had no war on our soil, 
so we fell behind the times.  (See what you're missing? We could be modern too 
if our cities were leveled).  Seems, though, that unless one is really really 
uncreative, that there might have been an easier way to modernize Europe and 
Japan.  The problem is that humans love their ceaseless amoral struggles for 
struggle and they are in fact really really uncreative...   



>this would seem to be essential to any cultured person's 
>understanding of geopolitics.
>



A cultured person is just someone who knows some poetry and the like and that's 
it.  The Germans made it a point to rescue the paintings before destroying the 
museums as they struggled for "advantage".  Did that make them cultured?  And 
if it did, who cares?  All that money that went into the firepower and 
militaries could have gone into a lot of other things, but it didn't.  Likewise 
today all that money is being wasted by a Yale graduate and a country is being 
lost in the process.  A cultured person means nothing.




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