To paraphrase Sun Tzu the diffrence between an Individual and an Army is organization.
fair enough, but that's not a meaningless difference.
But you are talking about "lunch" money.
more like seed money. lunch money is given to a child by a parent. the bullied child probably won't starve to death. still, i have to commend you on a good point, so let's stick with the schoolyard metaphor, for the sake of argument.
are we, the U. S. of A., the poor bullied child? not by the way we talk about ourselves bringing democracy to poor, oppressed peoples of the world. no, in this metaphor we set ourselves up as the school authorities, settling others' disputes. a school authority doesn't beat up the offending bully. ideally, he or she tries to counsel him, investigates potential problems at home, etc. even if the bully blows up the authority's office, the authority reacts through bureaucratic channels. no, we're like the kid who takes karate for revenge and ignores all the lessons about judicious use and balanced mind.
The Amish are inside of the United States and they have been able to keep their children in their fields. I don t hear Amish folk going around and killing in a war-like fashion.
you reversed the order of what i was saying. kids go off to work in enormous factories ('export processing zones', they're often called). it might not be the worst thing in the world if their labor was completely voluntary. but at best they're in a form of indentured servitude, and quite often they're detained by armed guards. if that were to happen here (and when it does) people are outraged, and rightly so. labor rights have to be fundamental in a society where paid labor is the primary, if not only, means of survival.
let's take another point. let's also imagine that tables were turned, and suddenly when you turn on the tube here in the U.S., on 9 out of 10 channels all you see is muslim religious preaching poorly dubbed into broken english. i'm sure you can imagine the raction, since we can already see a muted form of it in many places where spanish broadcasting has proliferated - and the social values of that programming isn't even any different than mainstream english stuff.
you're right again, the extremists grown in conditions such as these are fighting to take away choice in their own societies. we have the luxury of such overwhelming economic power that we don't need to fight to take away their choices; we can just purchase them away. no, they don't need to sell them off, but it's not like anyone else ever stood a chance at making a counter offer. and, we don't need to make an offer in the first place; if nothing else, we could at least apply a bit more conscience in our economic imperialism. we penalize tobacco companies for selling a product they know is bad for the target consumers, but we don't do anything at all similar to companies selling things aborad that are bad for cultures.
is that our responsibility? as a political state? no. as a democracy? if we vote it so. as human beings? i think most definately so.
