Just how much are condos going for in Tripoli these days? Cheaper than they were a week or two ago, so if you are looking for beachfront property, Libya is looking like a good bet, Tripoli if you are cautious, but you can probably scoop up something on the real cheap in Banghazi right now, as long as you are willing to clean shrapnel and the remnants of white phosphorous bombs and carrier missiles. As much as I hate anything I write here to be the least bit relevant, this whole mini-war or stealing of someone else's toys does allow me to partially vindicate, or better elaborate the position I brought up in the posting on fair trade (I am wholly ok with talking about contemporary political things as long as it has to do with me and what I think and what I feel).
Probably because it was the most boring, or least funny, I got the most (a whole 2) comments about the role force and will plays in the concept of fair trade. One person, the best read and smartest I know (smart enough to know she could, if she wanted to, comprehend Finnegan's Wake. She's also read Being & Time, in Nazi I believe, and reads attic Greek) thought I was flirting with an odd sort of blend of Nietzsche and Ayn Rand, which I found extremely odd for simple gender reasons alone. Rand is like the female Nietzsche, or, she is to girls what Friderich is to boys (I once quipped, as an undergrad to a female classmate who was quite taken with John Galt and who was named Dagny after Dagny Taggart that the reason her mother loved Atlas Shrugged so much was it was the first time she thought. The obvious implication, which little Dagny did not appreciate at all, was that it was the first time she thought as well. It was a sufficiently chauvinist comment to rid the table of her presence which was generally to the enjoyment of everyone else at said table. Quite surprisingly, I actually had the reputation of being something of an asshole as an undergraduate, which was probably generally true, though I was a jovial, Fallstaff-ish ass(hole) in my own defense. I once, for example, got a classmate to leave a table after just sitting down after she had attended some multi-hour meeting about saving Tibet by asking her if she, "saved Tibet yet." Obviously, a whole bunch must have been in my tone, which my wife has almost always told me is often off. The girl who was trying to save Tibet would spend hours and hours on the phone with some Tibetan monk named Lop-Sang or something like that, where he would tell her how much he liked and loved her. It was always my point of view that little Lop-Sang really did love her, carnally, she contended that he took vows of celibacy so he wouldn't even think like that, but my point was that there really isn't much to do in Tibet, and that being a monk is like a default career, like becoming a lawyer for whitepeople. She would then recount his deep abiding 'spirituality', whatever that means, and I would point out that it is really easy to be celibate and spiritual in Tibet where the women are all 4" tall and don't really take any sort of care of themselves, but it gets a little harder in America when you have all these very well-kempt, attractive liberal Jewish girls svitzing over your 'spirituality.' I just hope old Loppy picked up the western habit of wearing underwear under his robes). I don't really see much difference than Ayn Rand and Nietzsche, except that one of her books adds up to all of his, and he had better facial hair. The other reader, equally smart, seemed to think I mischaracterized Thrasymachus in the Republic, and over-attributed the role his interpretation of justice plays.
Given that it has been a decade since I've read the Republic, and I was a stupid undergraduate reading too much Nietzsche when I did read it, the reader is probably correct, or, at the very least, the text is a little fresher in her mind as she is reading it now. That said, from my poor-ish memory, I do seem to recall that Thrasymachus is left un-answered by Socrates, and walks away seemingly annoying at all the sophistry/dialectic. He has an idea about justice, and even if he is willing to admit that sometimes the strong do not know what is good for them, any Socratic contention does not seem to be able to shake his basic idea. I connected Thrasymachus with the later challenge offered by the whole ring of Gyges problem, but even if they are not connected, Socrates answers neither of them. The entire dialogue seems to offer no reason to not act not good (awkward Socratic phrasing, I know), and seems to me to be more about the monstrosity of being made or compelled by the state to act good, or whatever that state says is the good. Nobody wants to live in that city of words.
My point about Fair Trade was not that force rules, which everyone from the Greeks onward readily recognized, Nietzsche just stripped it of anything but will to power, but that the West engages in this odd act of self-binding by using force to bring about what it sees as justice, often at its own expense. It was the slavish self-constraint that interested me, the world's super-power trying itself up because it sees it as 'right', and because who else could? So now, we have the same country that is forcing itself into fair-trade, or forcing itself and others into fair-trade, openly violating the sovereignty of another nation, waging warfare on it. Of course, some vague, unfounded idea of universal human rights (or universal dog rights, or universal tree rights) comes up, but lets get real, nobody follows the Geneva conventions for a reason; to the victors the spoils, or, as Curtis Le May put it when asked by a reporter if he thought he committed a war crime after firebombing Tokyo, burning a quarter of the city and killing over 100,000 civilians, "depends if we win the war or not."
When Aristotle talked about the law in his Politics, he said it was part force, part convention, and that within that convention, some portion of it was reason. He never qualified things because that would be boring, but the fact that the founding fathers found him too idealistic, and his regimes too weak should speak volumes about his formula of the law. So I don't know if it is Right (or right) to bomb whoever we want to bomb and make trade fair for whoever we want to make it fair for, but I know that we can and where there is a will, there is a way.
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