World Forums

russian général Vyachislav Borisov said Moscow have asked israel to stop selling weapons to Georgia, if not Moscow will keep suplying weapons to hezbollahs & hamas.......


pabs, what are you talking about ?

LOL.....beautiful

Pabs

I have no idea of what you are talking about.

tronche & mate

an earlier post said that the UN is telling Russia to control it's racism. And I'm saying that if people feel they are being mis-treated in a certain country, then they should not be going there and bitching about it.

Just like people are criticising Berlusconi lately for his heavy-handed policies towards gypsy's (Roma)

Pabs wrote:tronche & mate

an earlier post said that the UN is telling Russia to control it's racism. And I'm saying that if people feel they are being mis-treated in a certain country, then they should not be going there and bitching about it.

Just like people are criticising Berlusconi lately for his heavy-handed policies towards gypsy's (Roma)

Exactly;

Why were the jews moaning and complaining about being gassed in Germany? Why didn't the jews just leave Germany? I mean the nerve of these jews....

Good Question

I mean I would never complain about racism in Africa towards whites because I would never go to that shit continent.

See how easy this is ?

Pabs

Russia is a country that deserves to be criticized for what it is doing right now, all of which is being driven by xenophobic hubris. Trying to justify any of this on the basis of your views on issues of race is senseless.

And Pabs, you need to lose the racism thing. Sure, I too defend the United States when people call it a racist nation and when minorities and immigrants take things too far in demanding entitlements that are unreasonable. But, racism is a real and hurtful force and never an acceptable retort to any of this. For God's sake, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians are on the whole a productive and deserving part of the mosaic of peoples in the North America.

There are losers of every strip. Just look at Russia. I am ashamed to be white because of them!

pabs,

the un are not talking about african immrigrants but rather people living within the russian federation.All "russians" are not blond with blue eyes if you see what I mean.I bet a Sicilian with his dark skin could get into trouble in some part of Russia.....

I bet a Sicilian with his dark skin could get into trouble in some part of Russia.....

You're right tronche. I have a nice tan this summer, so I'll consider myself warned and stay away from Russia (even my 1/2 Russian ex-wife).

sorry, i couldn't find better exemple

hehehe

How about this guy?

LOL @ Surnami.


Yeah, those damn blacks in the back of the bus lynched by Southern rednecks shoud have just let them white folks alone and left their land quicklike. Damn fools!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Have a safe and good weekend Laborers.

And Palo, you have a good weekend too.

I'm a laborer. I make my own coffee.

Safe holiday to all.


Even Falc, the extremist.

Social workers are not laborers, even if they make their own coffee.

I am only a social worker by occupation. I was trained as a family therapist.

Happy Labor Day.

Not to be confused with Worker's Day.

All kidding aside, have a good weekend. Enjoy your coffee too.

You too.

Be safe.

So.

In India, Hindu's are killing Christians and burning church's. Yet, in the West are are continually FORCED to be tolerant towards them.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/31/india.religion

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=67878&sectionid=351020602

excerpt: "Churkin, however, hit back by referring to the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.

"I would like to ask the distinguished representative of the United States about....Weapons of Mass Destruction. Have you found them in Iraq yet or are you still looking for them"? Churkin said.

Churkin, however, said the international community had failed to act in response to Georgia's invasion of South Ossetia earlier this month."

The Wall Street Journal

Power Play
The nature of nations, like people, never changes. Today's political realists say economics rather than military might has become the guiding principle of countries, but the conflict in Georgia shows otherwise, argues Robert Kagan.

August 30, 2008


Where are the realists? When Russian tanks rolled into Georgia, it ought to have been their moment. Here was Vladimir Putin, a cold-eyed realist if ever there was one, taking advantage of a favorable opportunity to shift the European balance of power in his favor -- a 21st century Frederick the Great or Bismarck, launching a small but decisive war on a weaker neighbor while a surprised and dumbfounded world looked on helplessly. Here was a man and a nation pursuing "interest defined as power," to use the famous phrase of Hans Morgenthau, acting in obedience to what Mr. Morgenthau called the "objective law" of international power politics. Yet where are Mr. Morgenthau's disciples to remind us that Russia's latest military action is neither extraordinary nor unexpected nor aberrant but entirely normal and natural, that it is but a harbinger of what is yet to come because the behavior of nations, like human nature, is unchanging?

Today's "realists," who we're told are locked in some titanic struggle with "neoconservatives" on issues ranging from Iraq, Iran and the Middle East to China and North Korea, would be almost unrecognizable to their forebears. Rather than talk about power, they talk about the United Nations, world opinion and international law. They propose vast new international conferences, a la Woodrow Wilson, to solve intractable, decades-old problems. They argue that the United States should negotiate with adversaries not because America is strong but because it is weak. Power is no answer to the vast majority of the challenges we face, they insist, and, indeed, is counterproductive because it undermines the possibility of international consensus.

They are fond of citing Dean Acheson, Reinhold Niebuhr and George Kennan as their intellectual forebears, but those gentlemen would have found most of their prescriptions naive. Mr. Acheson, as Harry Truman's Secretary of State, had nothing but disdain for the United Nations and for most international efforts to solve world problems. As his biographer, Robert L. Beisner, has shown, he considered such efforts evidence of the naive hopefulness of "people who could not face the truth about human nature" and "preferred to preserve their illusions intact." He strongly supported the NATO alliance but ultimately put his faith not in international institutions but in "the continued moral, military and economic power of the United States." He aimed to build a "preponderance of power" and to create "situations of strength" around the world. Until the United States acquired this predominant power, he believed, negotiations and international conferences with adversaries such as the Soviet Union were worthless. He opposed talks with Moscow throughout his entire time in office.

Those early realists had little faith in the persuasive influence of the community of nations or world opinion. "The prestige of the international community," Mr. Niebuhr argued, was "not great enough...to achieve a communal spirit sufficiently unified, to discipline recalcitrant nations." The great mid-century theologian warned against "a too uncritical glorification of co-operation and mutuality" between powerful nations with opposing interests.

Yet it is precisely the prospect of cooperation and mutuality that present-day realists glorify. They revere President George H. W. Bush, who spoke of a "new world order" in which "the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony," where "the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle," where nations "recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice." Today the elder Bush is hailed by realists because he went to the United Nations Security Council, while the younger George W. Bush is condemned because he treated the U.N. as the delusion Dean Acheson said it was. Realism has pulled itself inside out.

Leading realists today see the world not as Mr. Morgenthau did, as an anarchic system in which nations consistently pursue "interest defined as power," but as a world of converging interests, in which economics, not power, is the primary driving force. Thus Russia and China are not interested in expanding their power so much as in enhancing their economic well-being and security. If they use force against their neighbors, or engage in arms buildups, it is not because this is in the nature of great powers. It is because the United States or the West has provoked them. The natural state of the world is harmonious; only aggressive behavior by the United States disturbs the harmony.

In such a world, the task of the United States is not to check the rising powers but to steer them gently along the path that the realists insist they are already on, toward the embrace of an international community with laws and rules to govern their behavior in ways that benefit all. As the self-described realist Fareed Zakaria explains, "The single largest strategic challenge facing the United States in the decades ahead is to draw in the world's new rising powers and make them stakeholders in the global economic and political order." China and Russia, along with India and Brazil, are "embracing markets, democratic government...and greater openness and transparency." America's job "is to push these progressive forces forward, using soft power more than hard, and to try to get the world's major powers to solve the world's major problems." The world, after all, "is going the United States' way."

The original realists had no patience for such Candide-like optimism about the inevitable upward progress of mankind. "Whoever thinks the future is going to be easier than the past is certainly mad," wrote Mr. Kennan in 1951, six years after the most destructive war in history, five years into the Cold War, and one year into what was widely seen at the time as disastrous and seemingly hopeless American intervention in Korea. Mr. Kennan's provocative assertion aimed to jolt Americans out of their yearning to believe that the future would be different. But now it is leading realists who embrace The End of History, with an unshakable faith in the inevitable convergence of humanity around shared values and common interests. These were exactly the hopes and dreams Mr. Morgenthau set out to vanquish decades ago.

The original realists were not without their flaws, some of them fatal. Mr. Morgenthau's insistence that ideology and regime type are irrelevant to a nation's behavior was a terrible blind spot for realism, then and now. Mr. Putin's turn toward autocratic rule at home and his revival of old imperial pretensions abroad are intimately related. Mr. Putin himself argues that strength and control at home allow Russia to be strong abroad. He and his ruling clique clearly believe that avenging the demise of the Soviet Union will help keep them in power. And who but a Russian autocrat would have regarded the "color revolutions" in Georgia and Ukraine as intolerable provocations? Alexander I took quite the same view of liberal rumblings in Poland and Spain in the early 19th century. To ignore ideology and regime today is to misunderstand gravely the motives of autocratic leaders, whether in Moscow or in Beijing.

Nor is the realists' own hostility to democracy, including American democracy, particularly edifying. Mr. Kennan and the columnist Walter Lippmann flaunted their disgust at what they regarded as the stupidity and ignorance of the American public -- Mr. Kennan likened American democracy to "one of those prehistoric monsters with a body as long as [a] room and a brain the size of a pin." Mr. Acheson was the great exception because he harbored no antidemocratic prejudices and actually believed the messy American democracy would nevertheless prove stronger in the long run. But most realists throughout the decades, including today, have complained bitterly about the influence of domestic political constituencies and the various ethnic groups that allegedly distort America's understanding of its "true" interests.

Even so we could use a little dose of the old realism now, at least the part that would recognize a great grab for power like Mr. Putin's and understand that it will take more than offers of cooperation and benevolent tutelage to address Russia's revived appetites. Perhaps a bit of realism can challenge the widespread belief that a liberal international order rests on the triumph of ideas alone or on the natural unfolding of human progress. This deterministic conviction that Francis Fukuyama popularized is an immensely attractive notion, deeply rooted in the enlightenment worldview of which all of us in the liberal world are the product. Many in Europe still believe the Cold War ended the way it did simply because the better worldview triumphed, as it had to, and that the international order that exists today is but the next stage in humanity's march from strife and aggression toward a peaceful and prosperous coexistence.

It is a testament to the vitality of this enlightenment vision that hopes for a brand-new era in human history took hold with such force after the fall of Soviet communism. But a little more skepticism, and realism, was in order. After all, had mankind truly progressed so far? The most destructive century in all the millennia of human history was only just concluding. Our modern, supposedly enlightened era produced the greatest of horrors -- the massive aggressions, the "total wars," the famines and the genocides -- and the perpetrators of these horrors were among the world's most advanced and enlightened nations. Recognition of this terrible reality -- that modernity had produced not greater good but only worse forms of evil -- was a staple of philosophical discussion in the 20th century. It was the great problem that Mr. Niebuhr wrestled with and which led him to conclude that for moral men to do good, they would sometimes have to play by the same rules as immoral men -- and yes, he believed he could tell the difference. What reason was there to imagine that after 1989 humankind was suddenly on the cusp of a brand-new order?

The focus on the dazzling pageant of progress at the end of the Cold War ignored the wires and the beams and the scaffolding that had made such progress possible. The global shift toward liberal democracy coincided with the historical shift in the balance of power toward those nations and peoples who favored the liberal democratic idea, a shift that began with the triumph of the democratic powers over fascism in World War II and that was followed by a second triumph of the democracies over communism in the Cold War. The liberal international order that emerged after these two victories reflected the new overwhelming global balance in favor of liberal forces. But those victories were not inevitable, and they need not be lasting.

After the Second World War, another moment in history when hopes for a new kind of international order were rampant, Mr. Morgenthau warned idealists against imagining that at some point "the final curtain would fall and the game of power politics would no longer be played." Moscow's invasion of Georgia has opened a new act in the endless drama. The only question now is whether the United States will play its part, and with the appropriate blend of realism about the world as it exists and idealism about what a strong and determined democratic community can do to shape it. As Mr. Niebuhr put it six decades ago, "the world problem cannot be solved if America does not accept its full share of responsibility in solving it."


Robert Kagan is Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an informal adviser to the McCain campaign. His most recent book is "The Return of History and the End of Dreams."

ZZZzzzZZZ®

Leo

Russia screwed up here and went too far. For all our stupidity of the last 8 years, this is an act of even greater stupidity that might do what no amount of current American lobbying can: drive nations under the American security umbrella.

Georgia screwed up first. Russia overreacted. But guess what, don't you think others nations what were part of the old Soviet bloc are on notice?

That's why I think this is a strategic win for the US in the long run.

What security umbrella can we offer Georgia right now? None, except the pathetic pair of our homegrown idiots - George and Condi.

P.S. Georgia screwed up nothing. Read as little as possible Russia's useful idiots in the NYT and the Guardian.

I didn't mean Georgia. But countries all over the world that might be impacted by Russia are taking note. Rice openly stated that we would go to war to defend Poland over Russian encroachment. Sounds eerily familiar to some somewhat distant historical event, does it not?

The point is that NATO and Europe in general have been given a cold Russian bath. When push comes to shove, when there is a perceived threat, they all come running to us.

It is ironic, as Europeans seem to fear a resurgent Russia more than an ascendant Islam.

Russia has certainly made Sammy Fukuyama's "end of history" claim look ridiculous. Back to the power politics as it has been practiced by the human race for centuries. Welcome to the Cold War II.

Yup. We're back in business.

The Baby Mama will be at the convection with her man, Daddy Redneck.

who ?

you mean Palin's daughter & BF or someone else ?

The daughter and the hockey playing, whiskey drinking, sign throwing, rednecking boy friend.

Damn

I didn't think the GOP would go this route. Well. I guess they want to put on a mask that they are not that much of a dysfunctional family. You just know this kid doesn't want to do it. He's just dreading that plane ride down there.

And her ? She now realises that people are looking at her like a slut. She realised in just 48 hours that this is not that small Alaskan tight-snit town that she grew up in. She'll probably end up hating her mom for putting her through this.

Wrong move, IMO. They shouldn't hide the oldest daughter in a hotel room the rest of the campaign either though.

Well, what do you expect from the Party of the High Moral Ground?

A TV pundit brought up the scenario where the pregnant girl in question couldhave been Chelsea Clinton back in the day. What would the Grand Old Pooh wowuld have done with it?

"Ronaldo has said he wants to play for the biggest club in the world, so we will see in January if he is serious."

Dr Sulaiman Al Fahim, front man for Manchester City's new Middle East owners the Abu Dhabi United Group, stirs things up by suggesting City will make a £135m bid for Manchester United winger Cristiano Ronaldo.

So what happened to the invisible hand?

Stocks mostly higher following government bailout of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac

The theory of the Invisible Hand states that if each consumer is allowed to choose freely what to buy and each producer is allowed to choose freely what to sell and how to produce it, the market will settle on a product distribution and prices that are beneficial to all the individual members of a community, and hence to the community as a whole. The reason for this is that greed will drive actors to beneficial behavior. Efficient methods of production will be adopted in order to maximize profits. Low prices will be charged in order to undercut competitors. Investors will invest in those industries that are most urgently needed to maximize returns, and withdraw capital from those that are less efficient in creating value.