War, what is it good for? Buying property for cheap on the Mediterranean aparently

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.

How much is a cup of coffee when you have a neutron bomb in your back pocket?

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.