thomas said
Quote:Fine. And I'm pessimistic this will work. I have X influence on how my government intervenes, with X small enough to be safely neglected. By contrast, I have 100% influence on how my NGO intervenes, because I'm the only one who decides who my NGO is. Lobbying governments to intevene on principle rather than out of greed, and to intervene on my principles rather than the other guy's, is a waste of time in my opinion. The opposite is true for my NGO. And that's the distinction that matters to me.
Of course you don't have 100% influence on how your NGO intervenes simply on the basis that you're the one doing the choosing. You have 100% influence on how your wife behaves because you picked her? Sophistry, thomas. And, at least arguably if not in fact, one wife ought to be rather easier to control than thousands of individuals you never meet. But more to the point, your same argument applies to choice of government or representative.
Governments, working with, or under pressure from NGOs, or on their own, can do very good things, eg. land mines treaty. You yourself have little real influence on your government, but organized, you can (see the religious right and the US presently). No one wants to waste their time, but spending one's days and resources switching from NGO to NGO to NGO simply to gain the illusion of influence seems wasteful to me.
Quote:I agree that's a nice principle. I also think it's a nice principle that Cameron Diaz's role ought to be to date me every week. But in the real world, alas, Cameron Diaz will never date me, and the governments of the world will always serve vested interests rather than the general good. We have a fundamental difference of outlook here. You take it for granted that governments are big and powerful, and conclude they should use their power for the general good rather than for vested interests. By contrast, I take it for granted that governments are greedy, violent and corrupt, so I conclude they should be small and weak so they have as little as possible to sell to vested interests.
Let's add a second 'nice principle'...that your apprehension of real states of affairs is always more dependable than another with whom you disagree.
I take for granted the following: that organized groups of humans, being groups of humans, will have propensities to behave in certain ways regardless of what name is attached to them - government, church, corporate entity, motorcycle gang, or NGO. But even within the constraints of innate propensity, the possible range of behavior is very wide. There are good motorcycle groups and bad ones. There are NGOs which funnel too much money into the pockets of their adminstrators and others that do not. There are corporate entities which produce more harm than good (tobacco, armaments) and corporate entities which aid the overall well-being of humans.
I don't take it for granted that governments ARE ncessarily big and powerful and good. Nor that they are necessarily big and powerful and bad.
We both, apparently, do take it for granted that government and big money (business) are regularly complicit if not nearly identical. Nothing new in that idea. Those who seek to maintain or gain wealth, power and control will attempt to gain control of governance, and have the means to do so at much greater advantage than you or I.
Where we seem to disagree is whether a "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" is even possible, whether state institutions realistically can have any function other than oppression or any incarnation other than handmaiden to vested interests.
And here, I charge you not with pragmatism, but with an ahistorical cynicism. We are the same creatures, biologically, that came down out of the steppes hacking for fun, or that pulled Irishmen apart with horses (hi george) to the cheers of the local townsfolk. All that keeps us as safe as we are are these fragile institutions of government. It wasn't Dow.
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