In related themes

[unixronin]

jordan179 outs Amnesty International for supporting jihad.  All you have to do is claim, however unsupportably, that it's "in self defense", and Amnesty International will have no problem with it whatsoever, and will actually suspend any of its own personnel who have a problem with Amnesty International endorsing jihad.  And as pointed out in that thread, Islam has been making war on other peoples "for its own defense" since at least about the eighth century AD.

And, in another case where it's all about definitions, Strategic Forecasting points out that Mexico's having lost control of its northern states to drug cartels isn't necessarily a problem, for Mexico, if you look at it the right way.  Looked at from the perspective that drug smuggling into the US is America's problem, drug smuggling across the Mexican border brings Mexico forty billion dollars of hard (well ... OK, harder) foreign currency a year.  About thirty two billion dollars of this is profit, which would require about a third of a trillion dollars in conventional business to produce.  In other words, the drug trade pumps as much new money into the Mexican economy as does roughly a third of Mexico's GDP.  As has been pointed out before, it is not in Mexico's economic interest to stem the flow of illegal drugs from Mexico into the US, any more than it's in Mexico's interest to stem the flow of illegal immigrants.

Of course, to be fair, this knife — like many others — cuts both ways.  There are things the US could do fix the problem from the US side; principally, taking the profit out of smuggling through drug legalization.  But the US cannot bring itself to do that, and can't figure out how to reduce the demand for drugs while keeping them illegal.  So, short of massive military action against Mexico, here we stand.

Comments

Re: eh. generalizing a little here?

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

At bottom there's only one report (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article7026143.ece), from a woman named Gita Sahgal, in the voice-of-the-establishment Times of London, and it's not clear how accurate it is. So don't give up on Amnesty quite yet.

Re: eh. generalizing a little here?

[wyrdling.livejournal.com]

true enough. given that they refused to focus at all on US internal affairs until (at least) the late nineties they probably don't have all the kinks ironed out... but i expect more from them. to not let politics get in the way of the mission. we'll see.

Re: eh. generalizing a little here?

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

I was a member back in the 1980s, and I'm pretty sure I recall attention given to US affairs back when. You sure about that?

Re: eh. generalizing a little here?

[wyrdling.livejournal.com]

when i was writing letters in high school in the early nineties one of my classmates specifically asked if they addressed any internal US issues and the answer was no. it could have been that they were misinformed.

Re: eh. generalizing a little here?

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Perhaps it was just his local group. Or perhaps my memory is wrong. It would take some work to find out.