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?

>>40

No. I don't know how to argue with this other than to point you to the wikipedia articles on satisficing, pareto optimality, and kaldor-hicks efficiency. Those represent some of the jewels of modern socio-economic analysis, and they're all based around the idea that you can give without taking. There are indeed some schools of economic theory that believe what you say... but they're predominantly pre-modern. Everyone else accepts the ideology of compensation.

>>39

I find your point compelling. Are you suggesting that a few brief decades of war in which tens of millions die is preferable to the continuation of a pattern of hundreds of thousands dying in infancy since time immemorial? Perhaps!

I'm tempted to say "but notice that the African unrest has led to tens of millions more dying of AIDS; fundamental issues of social behavior are the cause for disease, and you can't cure them all", but that's a bit of a low-blow. There are only a limited number of plagues, and curing one doesn't necessitate the creation of another.

Yet if you gave me the choice of killing 40% of my children in the first year of their life, or subjecting my ethnic group to something like the Biafra genocide, where 80% of people were killed or had an immediate family member killed, I think I'd choose the former. But a hell of a choice it is! I suppose it comes down to personal preference... and I suppose you'd choose the genocide, hmm?

As an aside, while your point is clever, you are misusing the word "logic". My point is logical because it is a series of premises followed by a conclusion, what you mean is that it isn't "rational", or "well-thought out".