Azarkon

Eh, it's been done: hentai games. The truth is, the joys of action/combat are somewhat easier to simulate in a interactive visual and audio medium than sex. Yes, the porn industry is gigantic, but that's because they are meant to passively arouse, and whereas arousal can be naturally translated through visual and audio stimulus, sexual fulfillment cannot. Interactivity in sex (the "gimmick" of sex games), as opposed to interactivity in action/combat, is by definition physical. Combat, at least many aspects of combat, can be simulated viscerally - and in some sense that's what we want, because we don't want to actually hurt like hell when we get slashed by a sword or become fatigued after running a few miles on the battlefield. When it comes down to sex, however, we *do* want the physical sensations - that's in fact the most important aspect of sexual interaction. As such, the gaming medium as it is now is fundamentally limited in sex appeal. We can arouse, but we can't fulfill - hence we're probably never going to be as interested in sex games as we are in action games, though culture does play into that. This does not mean, on a fundamental level, that we like simulated violence more than sex - far from it. Yes, at the present time the romantics smugly state that they'd rather have sex with real women than fictional characters, but that's because they *can't* have it in the first place. Come the day when full body simulation becomes possible, and you will see that the human desire for simulated sex is at least as great as the human desire for simulated violence.

It's quite patronizing for the author to claim that Western civilization = the modern world, given that the sects he claims to be against Western civilization are also, *gasp*, contemporary. If Western civilization is indeed in decline (and it probably is, given the cycles of history), its technologies will not go out of fashion and, therefore, neither will modernity. What the author is right about is that the demographics of Europe are likely to change, as American demographics have been changing for the past three decades. This article seems, then, a classic reactionary ethnic backlash: "Oh my God! The Muslims/Mexicans/Asians are taking over! We're doomed!"

From a gameplay perspective, controlled - it simply adds that element of squad combat that I enjoy. From an immersive perspective, still controlled - AI break the immersion more often than not by running into walls and doing stupid things. Until that can be fixed, controlled all the way.

Here's the thing with fishing: I hear the argument made often that catching your own fish is as morally ethical as buying fish from stores. That maybe the case. But a fish caught in the sea was alive when you took it; a fish in a store is likely already dead, or going to die (ie its death sentence is signed). If you're the kind to moralize over the ethics of preserving life unless your life depended on it, fishing is far worse than buying fish because you're ending the life of what did not need to die. That's the best justification I'd have for *not* fishing/hunting, because the animals you kill would not be dead if it were not for you, and therefore their blood is on your hands. Given that, I find the philosophy that all life is on equal footing difficult to swallow. First, it's intentionally ambiguous because by "all life" we clearly don't mean "plant life" or else vegetarians would starve themselves. Likewise, since we kill bacteria, fungus, protists, and insects all the time with or without noticing, their lives are obviously not important enough for even sensitive people to care. So all life, which sounds great, really just means animal life. Alright, so is all animal life on equal footing? Because if that were so, then that means if a fish were dying and a person were dying you'd go save the fish if it were closer to you. If a rat was croaking alongside an endangered panda, you'd go save the rat since it's easier. This philosophy is highly problematic in my view: yes, it sounds nice when it's phrased as "we should respect all life equally and treat them like we treat each other," but in practice it's ethically horrid. No system of morality will ever fly in which we treat the killer of a rat or a frog as we treat a murderer, and would you really rather save a tadpole than a child? No other animal seems to think so - predators and prey alike have no respect for the lives that they destroy - so if we adopted the view does it really make us better or stupid? Assume a world in which humans respected ALL animals as equals: how would the animals respond? Would they respond in kind by respecting humans? Certainly not! And obviously they can't be depended on to fulfill any of the duties of a human being, nor would they be better off, necessarily, because we stopped killing them - cause then their populations would have to be controlled by nature through disease and predators. I, personally, fish. It *is* inevitably for sport (and I challenge anyone who fish/hunt and own a computer to argue that their practice is not about sport), even though I eat the fish I catch - because if it were not at all about sport, not at all about the pleasure of fishing, I'd just buy fish from a store or net them from a boat since both of those techniques are far more efficient. To me, fishing is the satisfaction of a basic hunter instinct and the pleasure I derive is inexplicable in a purely rational sense. I don't enjoy watching the fish die - in fact that's one of the worst things about fishing for keeps, since you get to see life flickering away in a bucket, but to throw the fish back into the sea makes the entire endeavor worthless (not to mention haphazard since the same fish will likely bite again). I'm not sure why, but it's the knowledge that I'm taking home a day's catch (even if it's about giving the catch away) that makes the activity enjoyable, and I *do* think that this is like trophy hunting except that it's not about the pride or the macho feeling but a more elemental instinct. It doesn't surprise me that most fishermen are guys - there's something about the male psyche that makes the practice of catching and keeping pleasurable, and which is imbedded in the memory of the primordial hunter. We are not at all beyond our instincts. We've never been - the reality has always been a conflict between our moral-rationality and our intrinsic desires. Progress is about stifling the basic instincts for the sake of higher values, a process of self-improvement lodged in the faith of ideological superiority. Thus, modern man does not murder his fellows in the same way the cave man did because modern man is able to conquer his murderous impulses through moral values. In this respect, I wonder whether the desire to hunt/fish should be conquered in a similar fashion - whether I should abide by a higher sense of ideological purpose over more basic instincts. However, each time I muse at this I contend that the rationale behind *not* hunting/fishing has never been quite convincing. I imagine a world without murder and think that such a world is a potential paradise. I can't imagine a world where we all eat plants and live harmoniously with animals - this seems ridiculous, given that animals are prone to prey on each other and human survival depends on maintaining an edge in those relationships. To wit - if I judged a lion as a cruel, evil creature because he preys on the defenseless deer, I would be committing the equivalent of Ahab's mad rage against Moby ****. Yet that is exactly what is demanded of a world in which all life stands on equal footing - because I *have* to judge the lion if I am to judge myself for taking animal lives, since all life is on equal footing. Yes, the lion don't have a choice, but then omnivores do - and are omnivores therefore fundamentally evil when they take animal lives rather than plant lives? Am I to feel better about myself in an ethical sense because I resisted a turtle's impulse to eat fish, thereby condemning the turtle morally? That seems an utterly ridiculous point of view, as is any view that believes in the sanctity of all life while maintaining that predators have the right to destroy lives. Its only excuse, that animals do not think and therefore can't be judged, is contradictory to its original impulse - if animals do not think and therefore can't be judged, why then are they equally alive? Anyhow, I think I've rambled on long enough. I don't particularly enjoy taking a fish's life (no more than I enjoy taking any life, for that matter), but I do enjoy catching them - and what would be really good is if there were a way to keep them alive while not detracting from the element of bringing home a day's catch. But even then, I don't believe for a moment that a fish's life is equivalent to a human life, and I hesitate to even attribute such a concept as value to life. Life is priceless - but trying to preserve all life is not respecting life as much as it is detesting death. We all, I think, see our own mortality through the deaths of other creatures, as human sympathy is an odd thing that can cross the borders between species - but the solution to that is not to thereby strive to protect all life forms from death, but to hold it in a deep awe that never strives to squander life itself. We may take from the land and the sea as all predators do, but we should not become nihilists who take lives because we hate life itself, or because of some ideological purpose that is anti-life. That, I think, is my stance on the "life is sacred" idea.

All of those are charted territories in other media forms and gaming genres. Challenge with integrating them into RPGs: how to create a interesting way of representing combat and stats?

The frenzied land grab of space exploration will lead to another age of manifest destiny followed by imperial exploitation, inevitably resulting in multiple devastating wars eventually leading to the establishment of a loosely held, corporate-controlled federation of planets. At least, that's what sci-fi novels tell me, and they're gospel! Seriously though, I can't imagine how space colonization would begin. I have a hard time imaginining space colonies of any real caliber any time soon - sure, countries will have some form of planet-based stations up there sooner or later, but they'll be more sources of scientific study and national pride than real colonies. In some sense, I don't think human beings as a species is ready for the final frontier. Our societies cannot handle the scale of resources and manpower that would be required for a large-scale colonization of any planet, and research in the area has been largely halted as a result of strategic disinterest (until recently, when China's space program has apparently served as a good motivator for the US and Japan into another space race). I think it'll be quite a while, barring major incidents and incentives, before we'll go from being short-sighted introverts to taking another solid shot at space. Perhaps it won't happen at all until we as a species decided to work cooperatively towards a single goal, directing the bulk of our nations' resources into a vast, momentous project. Anything less than that, and I fear that we're still very far technologically from being able to risk an endeavor such as space colonization with all the problems at home.

Peace is passing. War, eternal.

Gromnir loves to criticize Tolkien's works in his efforts to make a point about game writing (come now, Gromnir, aren't you just a tad guilty of the same fanatic beef with Tolkien you accuse Hades of having with Bio?). For the sake of not derailing the thread, I will do the same. But let me first dispute his contention: Character is not the essence of all literature (or even all "good" literature), but the focus of a particular type - one potentially alien to the genres games have traditionally chosen to undertake. The Novel, which is one form of literature and the most popular of our time, revolves around character. But it is not the Novel that fantasy and science fiction originally attempted to imitate (or reinvent), but the Myth, in the case of fantasy, and the Essay, in the case of sci-fi. Thus Tolkien did not look to Dickens or Austen for his inspiration, but to Beowulf and Celtic mythology. Thus Clarke and Heinlein did not see characters as the pivots of science fiction, but ideas and politics. All of them produced the equivalent of novels, but their sensibilities were vastly different from that of their contemporary novelists: that of a Woolf or a Joyce, or even that of a classical characterist - Shakespeare. Consequently, Myth and Essay are not devoid of literary value. They, too, are forms of literature - thus Beowulf is studied in universities alongside Swift, and the canon is filled with works of philosophy and poetry that had little to do with creating believable, or even identifiable, characters. That which makes Tolkien literary is his sense of scope in intersecting culture, history, and the imagination: his world building, long taken as a staple of imaginative literature, was in line or in excess of the greats that have since then been done. We might recall that Milton's gift was similar - for though he created a fascinating Satan, the rest of his characters were rather forgettable if not for his poetry of heaven and earth. By the same token, the ideas of science fiction forwarded by people like Heinlein, Clarke, Verne, and Wells constituted their literary and cultural worth, and the testament to that is how society has come to match their prophetic writings. If we do not call them literary, it is only because we have too narrowly defined what constitutes as literature - a rather recent phenomenon. Yet, just because Tolkien and Clarke represent worthwhile literature does not make them the best inspirations for RPGs. Unlike Gromnir, who appears to liken the failings of RPG characterization with the "crappiness" of Tolkien's writing, I tend to think of the former as a generational conflict. The fantasy (and sci-fi) RPG is the child of theatre on the one hand and sci-fi/fantasy literature on the other. These two parents did not traditionally agree, as they might have in the case of a strategy games or MMORPGs (for which Tolkien's style of mythology would be excellent). More specifically, roleplaying games are, by their very name, character studies. Both Western and JRPGs approach it as such, but developed differently (until, arguably, recently). Western RPGs tended to focus on the attributes of the character, ascribing to a role class, race, skills, and statistics. JRPGs take the same basis, but focus on personality, to the extreme where characters have to be predefined - because the player cannot be trusted to develop their own personalities. At its apex, JRPGs challenged the very notion that "character" can be developed through any means wherein the player's input is not periphery - and did so to great success. Born out of societies obsessed with individualism, Western RPGs, starting with games like Fallout, accepted the challenge. But putting aside the differences between the two geocultural-based genres for a moment, we see that they both undertook the same *literary* genre: that is, fantasy (and later, science fiction). Both were spawns, in some sense, of D&D, which is classic Western fantasy directly influenced by Tolkien. But Tolkien did not care for character studies. We do not think of RPGs as arising from the visceral personality studies of 20th century novelists concerned with exploring the psyche, but from the visions of fantasy world builders who didn't give a damn about whether Aragorn suffered the equivalent of existentialist angst. Despite the proximity of roleplaying to the thematic aspects of Shakespeare or Woolf, RPGS did not begin by playing on the drama of MacBeth or Mrs. Dalloway (and in the latter case, they still don't). Surprised? Not at all. After all, games are escapist entertainment in a way that novels no longer were after the rise of academic literary criticism. You studied Woolf and Joyce; you played in the world of Tolkien. But what is play? Before postmodernism overtook the mainstream, play was defined as something easy, something of no intrinsic value. Tolkien took his work quite seriously - he did not think of it (excepting perhaps the Hobbit) as mere play. By way of influence, his work also had tremendous value (though to some this "value" is actually a detriment). In these aspects he mirrored the literary greats, and with the growing popularity of his work, the academics could not ignore him forever. Fantasy and science fiction, as genres, grew in parallel to their respective "literary" counterparts. For the longest time, their non-novelsque (and by implication escapist) sensibility was taken as a sign of literary inferiority, and promptly led to the ostracizing of sci-fi and fantasy writers from the literary canon. However, the definition of literature, posed by Gromnir as centrifugal in the study of character, changed as New Criticism dominated American academia and then slowly eroded under the advent of literary theory. We no longer live in an age that assumes literary quality on the basis of set rules, not even on the basis of something seemingly as fundamental as good characterization. While many (like Harold Bloom) continue to believe in the permanency of literary value, nowadays academics increasingly look to the sidelined genres - such as minority literature and genre literature - for their own respective voices. In the same fashion, writers that traditionally avoided genre writing for its equivalent of a career deadend now turn to fantasy and science fiction to rebel against the classical notions of worth. Their voices can be heard all across the globe, and especially in popular entertainment. But science fiction and fantasy under these writers are not the same - character study has taken its place alongside the traditions of world building and idea formation, and with it comes all the visceral qualities of literary fiction. This addition did not come at the detriment of Myth or Essay, after all - for the modern writer, fantasy/sci-fi is capable simultaneously of deep characters, brilliant ideas, and marvelous worlds. If so, then the question must be posed: how is that RPGs, which grew out of the same tradition, did not adapt to changing trends? Why are we still mostly mimicking Tolkien, when the likes of Mieville, Wolfe, Martin, and Ryman (who issued the Mundane Science-Fiction Manifesto) have come to dominate the imaginative genres? This, I think, has more to do with the industry and society at large than with any indication of "nefarious" influences from Tolkien or other early sci-fi/fantasy writers. In particular, it seems to me that games are among the last bastions of a traditional outlook in terms of writing and theme. This claim appears perplexing, given how new the genre is, but consider this: when was the last time a good film or book took cliches at face value? Even better: when was the last time a good game demonstrated the postmodernist crisis of identity and simulacra with any sense of depth (that is, beyond the level of violence for violence's sake)? Even the best of games paint a world view decades, at times centuries, older than the same view put forth by the best films and books. In games we still hold fast to notions of straight forward sexual identity, clear racial distinctions, and Manichean conflicts between good and evil; in games alone we still glorify war and militarism. It's no surprise that games have become popular in this age backtracking towards fundamentalist roots: they represent, even moreso than those 70's action films and 50's Christian allegories, escapist idealism in the most accurate sense of the word. In the junction of time we find ourselves, the genres which inspired the first RPGs have ceased to be Myth and Essay - they have become Novels. The traditional distinction between high literature and popular entertainment has similarly eroded, and academics are more than ever ready to embrace new notions of value. The time, then, is right for a revolution of the interactive media; but the forces arrayed against that revolution are also significant, because in some sense society *needs* the kind of simple, black-and-white worldviews offered by games (and which is no longer offered by critically acclaimed films/books), and will play - and pay - to see it continue. Thus EA can continue churning out mindless military and sports games. Thus the World of Warcraft and its Manichean conflict takes precedence over the likes of more complicated worlds. Since games require much more resources to create than books, since game companies are run by marketers, and because there is as of yet no independent game movement as there has been for films, games will be the stage for the next great battle between tradition and innovation. In some sense, that battle has already begun, and in some sense we have already chosen sides simply by being on this forum and posting in this thread.

The difference between Bush and Clinton is that one acts like an idiot and the other acts like a pimp. But who knows what goes on behind the masks of these politicians, if they're even the ones in power. In some sense, that's the trick with democracies - one guy at the helm takes all the blame while the rest cruise along (and they're never far from power, as the great families in America demonstrate). How convenient. Dictators never had it so good when they screwed up. Maybe those who voted for Bush ought to shoulder some of the blame themselves... Or maybe they just didn't have a good alternative.

The greatest weapon of them all: Cue telepath jokes.

A society's ability to perpetuate itself lies in its relationship to progressivism. Decadent societies do not survive because their cultures tend towards pessimism. Sooner or later, self-interest becomes the order of the day over self-improvement, and what naturally follows is vulnerability and weakness because self-interest does not hold a nation together. Military might can protect a land, but it can't protect a society or a culture. Once the core principles of your society no longer represent progress there is nothing you can do but be conquered - whether economically, culturally, or militarily - by other, more progressive societies. Thus it is that American culture has become, as of late, dominated by other cultures whereas its traditions of disciplined, frugal self-improvement (forwarded by the likes of Benjamin Franklin) have been all but forgotten. Thus it is that traditional European values have evaporated in the face of secularism. To deny the ebb and flow of history is to deny its interpretation. To you, history is history. To me, history, like the natural world, is full of patterns and rules. Victory in war did not save Britain from taking a backseat. Defeat in war did not prevent Japan from overtaking Asia economically and now, culturally the US.

It's national fervor to say that you are an exception to all of history, Eldar, not to notice that you are the best now. Many civilizations have been exceptional at points in time by the same definition of economic and military superiority relative to the rest of the world. That is simply a fact of life - someone always has to be at the top. American exceptionalism, like European exceptionalism during the Age of Imperialism, is a product of circumstance and is merely passing. Europe, as we all know, became decadent and is now fading from world politics. America will likewise follow suit. This understanding of ephemerality, beyond any other understanding, drives my view because once you accept the fact that every civilization will rise and fall in its time, you begin looking beyond nationalism and into the greater picture. It is the priviledge - nay, the duty - of civilizations to advance humanity as a whole. Progressivism, in this sense, is the only good that's ever come out of nationalistic endeavors. Without it, we are certainly doomed. The nation of the United States is doomed. The land and the culture that is America, perhaps, is not. I make a distinction between the two: the US is the very representation of an unilateral empire at the beginning of its decline. If we reinvent ourselves, then we certainly won't be the US anymore. In the same sense, no one calls China under the Tang Dynasty the same China as it is now. Ebbs and flows in history do not occur to lands, they occur to nations and societies. US society is in decline, but another society in the same land is perhaps waiting to be born. Regardless, the very essence of my argument lies in progressivism, which typically follows decadence. Once a civilization has grown sufficiently decadent, it collapses and a new civilization rises to the challenge - rising, so to speak, in the embrace of progress. If there is one thing that I am faithful of it is the inevitability of change and the unfailing ability of people, not nations, to become greater than they are if they so choose. Americans are not doomed; our future lies in whether we can shake off the decadency of modern society and reinvent ourselves for progress.

Yes, because we all know Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that he were going to use on the US... Really now, this is just an excuse. If it were as simple as taking out Saddam's WMD's no one would argue about Bush's tactics. But then why are we still there, if no WMD's were found? It's not about hitting those who are about to hit you. It's about profiteering, imperialism, and taking revenge at the same time. Now that the Iraqis have rejected the US's "guiding hand," it'll be interesting to see what happens next.

I'm sorry, but I must laugh. Italy the most advanced civilization in the world until recently? (w00t) Learn a bit of history, please. Through the ages, various civilizations have been the most advanced in the world. Western civilization is simply the most recent of these. There is hardly continuation between Greco-Roman power and the rise of Europe - you do remember the Dark Ages in-between, yes?

If it's so obvious then why do people deny it? Numerous posters in this thread have railed on about American exceptionalism as if it were a God given right instead of something obtained through tremendous efforts in self-improvement. Once you accept the latter instead of the former, then you must necessarily accept the proposition that the US has become decadent because its society has lost faith in progress. No one questions the US's right to defend its homeland and even its holding overseas (despite the fact that those holdings may or may not belong to the US). You might want to consider how "defensive" the War in Iraq was, however. Preemptive strikes are always "justified" as self-defense, but then what great war in the history of the world didn't have such an excuse? Rule by commitee is indeed a joke. That's why the US should follow up on its vision of worldwide democracy by supporting a new world government based on democratic institutions. One president, popularly elected through countries in the UN, supported by existing commitees that would be made into the equivalent of a worldwide congress. Ah, but this wouldn't happen, would it? The US's vision for the world is itself ontop and everyone else a follower. It's not democracy, it's dictatorship.

Progressivism is an attitude, not a matter of how much really changes. US narcissism lies in its gratuitous self-aggrandizing nature devoid of humility and desire for change. When a society becomes so certain of its superiority, it's basically setting itself up for failure. It's like the race between the rabbit and the turtle: the US is the rabbit so ahead in the game that he decides he no longer needs to run anymore. In this fashion, the turtle will exceed him, and win.

Like I said, the postmodernist sense of despair has overwhelmed Western progressivism, which has all but shriveled under the shadow of its own hypocrisy. Without belief in progress, it's only a matter of time before things get worse - but not necessarily for the entire world. After all, there are nations out there that even now believe in progress and advancement, and see the next century as their time to shine. Power does indeed belong to those who seek to improve themselves. This has always been the case. No single civilization has ever held the reins of power for long because all of them, inevitably, become narcissistic and thus weak. You may think that this is ideal, but in truth it more closely resembles reality than the brand of intrinsic exceptionalism forwarded by Eldar. No people is inherently exceptional - they become this way through self-improvement.

By that one statement I can infer an indicator of US decadency. The rhetoric of self-improvement simply does not tell people to "get over it." If the West adhered to such a notion the Scientific Revolution would've never happened, as people would've just been told to "get over it" when they attempted to improve on what's already there. It doesn't matter whether there are limits to human achievement. What matters is whether you believe in change or stagnancy. Now, change is not always good, and stagnancy is not always bad, but the belief in change is what marks a society's vitality (or rebirth), while the loss of faith in progress is what marks a society's decay.

To begin on such a premise means you've already foregone any alternative view, so I'm not sure how you would like me to respond except to shake my head at such patriotic fervor. In terms of objectivity, you might just wanna remember that dozens of civilizations have been, at some point or another, the most powerful and influential civilizations in the world. Relatively speaking, since historical trend seems to tend towards increasing globalization, there is no surprise that the US is more "powerful" today relative to the rest of the world than any past civilization has been. Even so, this is a recent phenomenon (after all, it was only after the Cold War ended that US hegemony began). And it is passing, as well, as in the next fifty years other superpowers such as China and the EU will surely challenge US unilateralism. I simply hope that the US will not resort to nuclear warfare in attempting to prevent such inevitabilities.

Hardly. All wars, when it comes down to it, are about economics. National security was a convenient issue to justify the war, but like you said, it's a crap premise. Not true. Ask any victim of colonialism, and they'll tell you that the first thing they learned from Western imperialism was that it's a conquer-or-be-conquered world. You can't isolate yourself. You can't drive out the invaders. You can't defend your resources. Not unless you were modernized and on par with the foreign powers. Keep doing what you were doing is the equivalent of national suicide, as the fatal victims of Western imperialism - those nations and peoples that disappeared right off the map altogether - will attest to. Of course. And this is what gets me each time the Bush administration, with typical hypocrisy, accuses so-and-so nation for possessing weapons of mass destruction or spending more money into military goods. Come now. They're doing it because they know that in a world dominated by the US, if one cannot defend oneself, then one had better become a servant of America asap. The sad thing is, the arguments put forth by places like Iran makes perfect sense: the Americans have nukes, why shouldn't we have them? Sure, they're more likely to use nukes for nefarious purposes than the US, but until the US disarms its entire arsenal, what fairness is there in proclaiming the virtues of non-proliferation? Bull****. Third worlds are poor today for the same reason people are poor today: because the opportunity passed them by, and now the gates of luxury are welded shut by those who have great stakes in maintaining their present wealth. You can't become rich in a world where wealth is already concentrated in the hands of a few. Take the corporations, for example: who can really compete with Microsoft in the OS department nowadays? Doesn't really matter if your OS is superior - they control the resources and the markets, and you'll be damned if you were ever going to get access to those sources of wealth. Like you said, if third world countries weren't able to offer cheap labor, they would be bankrupt. Why is this? Unless we abide by some twisted notion of Eugenic ethnocentrism that suggests anyone but Caucasians are incapable of modern civilization, it makes little sense that the rest of the world is "incapable of advancing." Unless, of course, they were kept from advancing by those who were already advanced. I need only name a few examples in support (and they are: corporate penetration displacing local economies, exclusive resource contracts on foreign soil, WTO trade policies); this argument's well-supported if you do a bit of research. Yes, everyone who's rich was poor once. That's more chance than anything else - the luck of the draw, so to speak, of whether you were there when the opportunity struck. That doesn't mean, however, that just because you got lucky, the rest of the world must bow to your dominance. The rich should not become richer; the poor should not get poorer. Effort, not heritage, not nation, not legacy, should be the end determinant of wealth. Kinda like how Hitler justified the destruction of other races on the basis of evolution - all to the benefit of the master race. Yeah, they can either choose to starve under US sanctions, or borrow cash from the US and become an indentured servant. What a great choice.

There will come a day when the US will no longer be able to maintain its influence in those countries. It's already happening, really. South Korea's ties with the US are weakening. Israel is increasingly confronted with a hostile and armed Middle-East. Taiwan (not Tiwan) cannot declare independence lest both the US and China turn against the island (the US has pledged to China that Taiwan will not declare independence, in return it obtains the guarantee that China will not force the issue... But that's only a temporary solution).

The benefits of American commerce has little to do with Iraq, unless you're suggesting that in order to maintain our commerce, we must continue to invade other countries. Last I checked, the Iraqi invasion did not improve US commerce. Quite the opposite, really. I mean, we certainly tried to churn a profit by selling oil contracts, but that didn't work out, did it? Last I checked, before Western imperialism the rest of the world got along just fine. In many cases, the West *did* simply come in, demolish the native society through colonialism, corrupt its economy through the introduction of drugs like opium, exploit its resources, and then force said society into labor. Doesn't operate like that on the surface nowadays, but tell me this: what came first - the world's dependency on the dollar or imperialism, which caused said dependency? It's more complicated than that, but the term "third world" exists only relative to the presence of "first worlds." First worlds exist because of two things: 1) the scientific revolution and 2) imperialism. If you want to trace things back to the source, the reason many nations are poor today has less to do with the fact that they were poor to begin with and more to do with the fact that they are measured by a system that predetermines their poverty. The very system of capitalism favors those who already have control over the wealth of the world - ie the US - and forces everyone else into servitude for scraps. This is the essence of economic imperialism.

There's a difference between good interference and bad interference. We've already established that the US interferes for its own interests (and therefore the argument that the US invades with "good" intentions is blatantly false). What needs to be established is whether those interests correspond to the interests of the native people. That must be done on a case by case basis and, unfortunately, can only be understood in hindsight. In the case of WW2, I'd say that US interference was a good thing, because in this case non-interference would've led to the deaths of many more millions. In the case of Iraq, removing Saddam was initally a good thing for pretty much the same reason. Unfortunately, we overstayed our welcome in a futile attempt to establish a pro-US secular government. That failed, as the election results indicate. Besides, even if the US succeeded in establishing a pro-US regime in Iraq, how long before it turns against us? Saddam was our responsibility since we, in many ways, put him in power - and if the next government, very likely dominated by Shi'ites this time around, institutes its own version of Saddam's terror? The blood will be, once again, on our hands. It's hard to say whether the US should adopt an isolationist policy. My thought in this is that an isolationist US would be like throwing the baby out with the bathwater: we remove US aggression, it is true, but in the same breath prevent US interference in cases where interference is truly justified. This does not suggest, however, that the US should maintain its current foreign policy, which is overly aggressive, essentially self-serving, and gratuitously meddlesome. If the US wants to be the police man of the world, fine - but good cops don't act in their self-interest, they act for the betterment of society and uphold the laws. If the US can't fill these shoes, then it doesn't deserve to be a cop at all.

Do not confuse countries with empires. Countries respect one another's sovereignty, empires do not.

Calax: And really, we're going about the wrong way to achieve that dominance. It's clear, from both history and human relationships, that those who rule through force are eventually overthrown. Instead of trying to keep others from becoming as good as you, strive to become better than yourself: that is the key to being a progressive and respected leader. No one is going to listen to a US billions of dollars in debt presided over by a dumbass of a president. I know that if I were China or any other rising power I'd certainly not want to follow US example in either politics or economy, because the US simply isn't a shining example of the future. But perhaps that is, in some sense, impossible in the economic arena. Resources are limited, and a nation's dominance has always come at the expense of other nations. Modern society has made that more apparent than ever. Here then, the US must concede to maintaining the status quo, as ALL dominant empires must, because when you're at the top, the only way to stay there may just be to keep others down. That doesn't mean, though, that the US cannot lead in other areas through example, and so it's very much a pity that American society has become reactionary rather than progressive.