Another Border Dispute Flares

[magerette]

In Pakistan, Serbia, Gaza, many African nations, and elsewhere some pretty virulent disputes over borders and internal party conflicts seem to be proliferating, and now Venezuela and Columbia are mixing it up:
Chavez sends tanks to Colombia border (http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080302/wl_nm/venezuela_colombia_dc)

Here's a brief quote:
Venezuela President Hugo Chavez ordered tank battalions to the Colombian border and mobilized warplanes on Sunday after Colombian troops struck inside Ecuador in an attack on rebels.

He also ordered the shutting of Venezuela's embassy in Colombia and the withdrawal of all diplomatic staff in the dispute, warning Colombia's actions could spark a war in South America.

A day doesn't seem to go by lately that some similar item isn't hitting the news. Is the world situation deteriorating at an alarming level, and if so why?--or is this just more of the same old-same old-- posturing and chest-thumping that ends with a few shots fired and no one really affected one way or the other but the dead?

I find it rather disheartening and somewhat scary myself.

[Prime Junta]

More of the same old, which doesn't mean that there won't be lots of dead people. The only real difference is that we in the rich world have a new sense of vulnerability that makes us sit up and take notice more than previously.

[dteowner]

Yep, what he said.

[magerette]

Yep, what he said.

Well, you don't have to get so long-winded about it. And you know you disrupt my world view every time you agree with Prime J...shape up.

Seriously, I find it hard to take all these incidents at face value alone. I'm a great believer in cycles and spirals in life and history as opposed to linear progression, but even allowing for what's going around to come around, it seems like the pot's about to boil over in a lot of places concurrently.

What cause a bit of trepidation is the idea that there's really nothing to stop any of these local disputes from getting as bloody and destructive as possible except whatever economic or idealogical limits may exist in the aggressor nation. It seems there's no balance of power, even the power of world opinion, to regulate the bloodshed, and it's coming from all sides at once. It's like watching a classroom slowly dissolve into anarchy when the teacher steps out.

[blatantninja]

I seriously doubt Chavez will do anything to Columbia. Columbia is a US ally, and as such, if he attacks them, we'll be obligated to attack him. We probably wouldn't invade, but we easily bomb him his military into the stone age. Sure, that would disrupt our flow of oil from there, but I doubt that would stop us. Heck, that might make an invasion MORE likely.

[dteowner]

We need us a good world war. All these regional conflicts are so unfulfilling since so few people get to get in on the killing. We can chain it all down via civilization, but eventually we'll give in to our instinctive violent and jealous ways. Release the inner monkey, as it were.

I take your "cycles and spirals" a little further. I see the world as an extremely large and extremely complex single system. Although I'm not a pagan, I tend to personify Mother Nature and I think she's a gamer. She's also a vindictive old bitch. Think of all those old games we used to play: Sim Earth, Populous, Sim City, Civilization.

Too much population? You've got all sorts of fun choices. Turn up the aggression and they kill each other off. Introduce a new killer virus. Crank up the global temperature and drown them out. Run a global drought and starve them.

Depleting natural resources? Open up a different menu. Kill off your users and let the insects rule while the "mana" recharges. Make oil ungodly expensive so the toons switch to something else. Drop a few pollution zones so they have to build recycling centers and mass transit.

It's spreadsheet gaming taken to the HUGELY MACRO level. And, no matter what the toons do, the system will adjust to return to a steady state position. Mother Nature holds every slot on the ranking ladder.

[Prime Junta]

I just read volume 4 of the "Lucifer" comic, published by Vertigo. It starts out rather nicely:

"God has seven thousand names. One of them is 'Bastard.'"

[magerette]

Well, thanks for cheering me up, guys :) I feel so much better now.

[Prime Junta]

If you really want to cheer yourself up, look up Kondratiev Long Waves (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave). If he's right, we are just entering a Kondratiev Winter, which is characterized by 25-30 years of rising inequality, strife, conflict and lowered living standards, culminating in a highly destructive world war.

The good news is that nobody knows for sure whether Kondratiev Long Waves are really real or just an example of seeing shapes in the clouds (patterns in random data).