Re your concerns about US global domination

Come on now, enough with the hyperbole. The US has been a superpower for 60 years, the beginning of which was marked with rebuilding Europe and Japan insead of enjoying the spoils of war, then turned to creating international organizations like NATO and the UN as a response to Soviet expansion, and then worked to clean up hotspots like Yugoslavia, Kuwait, and Bosnia.

I can't say I approve every US action in that span of time (particularly in South America and Southeast Asia), but the basis of comparison is the Europeans. This is a group of people who, when they had the power to, raped and pillaged the rest of the planet for 500 years, before just about destroying themselves in two wars. Now suddenly they're the moral compass for the rest of the planet?

>>19

Not exactly. Not "at each other's throats". I think that by keeping them filling out extensive paperwork allows us to live a peaceful normal life. Strangled in the red tape of bureaucratic largesse. Something like that. Who are they struggling against? Byzantine bureaucracy. Who are "they"? People who think anything anywhere needs to change.

What I honestly believe is that change usually hurts more people than it helps. The destruction of childhood diseases in Africa in the early 20th century led to the overpopulation and famines of the African mid-century, which led to the civil wars and genocides that are still going on.

In "Adventures of Ideas", Whitehead says (and I'm paraphrasing, I don't have it with me), that by the 20th century all of the lessons of history and most of the mechanisms of social intercourse were rendered invalid. Why? Because throughout human history, life was essentially stagnant; one could expect that no matter what happened, one's children would inherit the same Earth that they themselves had been born into. This is no longer the case. The force-multiplying abilities of modern technology have allowed anyone who wants it bad enough with a real possibilty to affect their environment.

This is a horrific thing.

Your average human being is using playground morality in his decision making processes. Perhaps this is fine at the microlevel, but we are too strong to use the rationale of children. It is a mind-boggling tragedy that human moral science (if there is a thing even worthy of that term) hasn't made almost any progress since Zoroaster, but our natural science has undergone an incalculable number of revolutions. This is not a comparison between Newtonian models and Relativisitic models. Our ethics are so antiquated that if our technological model was  equivalent, we'd be reading Heraclitus and musing about whether or not everything really is principally fire. :P

tl;dr? TAKE THE GUN AWAY FROM THE BABY!