Wednesday, September 26, 2007

New Direction

This blog has been sitting dormant now for over a year. There are two main problems with its central theme of a learning process concerning global geo-politics, and one lesser one (which might be a much bigger question, really).

1. My Time & Interest

My time is a resource that I'm beginning to value more and more. The kind of research I was hoping to do for this blog takes a lot of time, and I don't have that to spare. It's also the case that an awful lot of the research I was having to do didn't interest me. This came to the fore as I tried, again and again, to read The Right Nation. I couldn't do it; I kept losing track of events, and very nearly every single political figure in it was using some bizarre form of thought that bore no resemblance to logic. So that made it even more difficult to get things done here.

2. Neutral Sources & Neutral Writing

My main discovery here has been: There are no neutral sources in history or politics. If someone says they're neutral, they're lying. Human use of language does not allow for neutrality. A statement as bald as "The operation was a success" can be slanted in favour of many different sides. "Napoleon went to Elba" is true, and sounds neutral, but "Napoleon was sent to Elba" is also true, gives a better indication of events, but has a different slant.

Equally, my efforts to write neutral accounts of my findings have been stymied by my own biases. Try as I might, I cannot see American neo-conservatives as anything other than wilfully short-sighted and selfish. This taints almost anything I can research in the modern world. Likewise, I don't see communism as a bad concept, and anything I try to research in the latter half of the twentieth century gets seen through that lens.

3. GEO-politics?

Finally, I've been trying to look at geo-politics, and I'm beginning to wonder if this still exists. The whole notion is the interaction between states, and a great many of the significant events are now happening at a non-state level. The WTO and the World Bank are non-state entities that control a great deal of the movement of money. The EU is a non-state entity that controls a great deal of law in member states and, crucially, in prospective member states. I'm not sure if geo-politics is a working label anymore; you need to stand back and look at global events.

So, rather than let this blog languish, I'm going to change direction a bit, and use it as a dumping ground for political and/or global thoughts. A chunk of my thinking lately has been on the evolution of the nation state, and you might see some of that here, and there's a good level of background anger at the Irish political situation as well. I won't promise to write a lot here, but I'll try to write more.

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