The topics we discussed in class this week gave me a good bit to chew on. I find Machiavelli's The Prince ao be overly cold for my taste, but I reluctantly agree with some points. Reading The Prince was rather like reading an economics textbook, but with human livelihoods and power in place of goods and profit. Machiavelli makes it plain that he believes that people can be manipulated to do whatever you want them to, if you know the proper way to go about doing it. Almost the entire book would be useless if that wasn't true. My US Government teacher from high school would always say, "You'll never go broke in America telling people what they want to hear." This really applies to the entire world. You can get away with almost anything when you tell people what they want to hear. The obvious example of this is Hitler pulling the wool over the eyes of the entire German population by handing them a scapegoat (the Jews) to blame their economic troubles on. But what about the USA PATRIOT Act? [I'm not using all capitals to simulate yelling here. It's really an acronym- Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act- lame, right? Not making this up!] They told us what we wanted to hear- that we were gonna catch some terrorists! And poof- suddenly enough of us were ok with a massive violation of privacy to make it an act of Congress.
And now, for a fantastic dose of comic relief, here's Eddie Izzard on sovereignty, international relations, and the like.
Warning: contains foul language, massive political incorrectness, cross dressing, and some other stuff.
For the record, Colin Wick found this video first, and he fully analyzed this video in his blog post here.
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