Our country no long has any Neutron bombs left of course, our last was dismantled under Bush II, but we do have plenty of other nukes, much to my delight, and the dismay of many others out there (I say, no nukes, no Dr. Strangelove or Hiroshima Mon Amour, and I will take the bombs if it means art of that caliber any day).
My wife and I were unfortunately in Starbucks the other day because I needed some caffeine in order to make the drive home without crashing my car. Starbucks is very good for bad coffee and spectacular bathrooms. Starbucks sees their bathrooms as 'experience points' (or whatever consultation jargon they use) and part of their customer service, so their bathrooms are nearly always immaculate (barring going in during an after middle-schol rush). In most cases, I'd go simply for the bathroom, with the coffee as an ancillary task. The interesting thing, is you cannot go to the bathroom at Starbucks without entering into a polemic debate about Economic and Social Justice and morality. Their bathroom posters take the form of Free Trade proselytization and if the other posters about their carbon footprint don't make you aware of their environmental friendliness, their toilet paper and paper towels certainly will. I can only imagine the debate that raged in the Starbucks bathroom department asto how much of the bathroom experience of their customers they should sacrifice in the name of their environmental image. I'm just glad I'm not the member of the bathroom department team that had to try out and rank all the toilet paper to find the right fulcrum between post-consumer waste sandpaper and Charmin Ultra Soft.
As far as the other elements of the sensory experience at Starbucks, their de rigor morality seems to have wholly won out over any pretense at Epicureanism. What I find interesting is how orthodox the ideas of "Fair Trade" and global Justice are, without any intellectual thinking behind it. Rawles' ideas work on the level of a polis, and he clearly was a pillar that the Left utilized to support its social programs, but where in the hell did Bill Gates and his wife come up with the idea that everyone has the right to live a healthy life? It would certainly come as a surprise to 3/4 of the world that they have that right, and plenty of them wouldn't want that right even if it was given to them. What a fantastic exporting of our ignoble obsession with healthfulness to make everyone have a right to be healthy. Similarly, why exactly trade should be (made) fair is beyond me, but what is equally beyond me is how anyone came up with the idea that it should be. It is slightly ironic that a country with a fleet of stealth F-22 fighter jets sitting on a floating, nuclear powered city that can be driven around to within 10 miles of any country's coast is the country that wants trade fair. Shouldn't we want trade to be unfair, I mean what exactly are all these nukes and F-22's buying us? The Romans knew how to shear their sheep with just a couple legions at their disposal, and we have the finest fighting machine the world has ever known. One can only imagine what a man like Caesar would do with it. Livy said that his people made a desert and called in peace, give that we have been stuck in the desert (literally) for 20 years, on and off, some peace would be nice.
In the Republic, Thrasymachus sees justice as the strong ruling over the weak, gets tired of Socrates' ridiculous questions, and leaves. Socrates has to spend the rest of the dialogue trying to refute this claim as it is re-interpreted into the Ring of Gyges; if you can act with total impunity, if you are strong and others are weak, why not act? Thrasymachus' idea about justice is so strong and in accord with Natural Right that he does not even need to be present to argue it; Socrates even needs to turn to mythos, creating a story about the afterlife to prove why you shouldn't steal if you can. We seem to have re-interpreted Thrasymachus: the strong shouldn't rule over the weak, but act like them.
Overall, we live in an era with hollow idols that cannot bear even the slightest touch of a tuning fork. Justice, global, universal justice, is simply the most modern of these hollow idols. Animals apparently have rights to, though I have never talked to my cats about why they think entering into the Social Compact is superior to existing in the state of nature. Personally, I am fine with all of this, I just wish the coffee at Starbucks was palatable sensually instead of morally. And I wish our F-22's got us a little more sway, but apparently we live in a 'soft power' era where force isn't the acceptable means of manifesting change, though tell that to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan and I imagine they might come up with a more Natural answer. We seem to have conflated our regimes softness and vulnerability into an absolute softness. I know if I was harder, I could drink more over-roasted Starbucks coffee, but we are where we grow up I suppose, and I wouldn't trade the sterilized cleanliness of their bathrooms for all hard power in the world.
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