Let me ask you this.

In the US, there are 828 motor vehicles* per 1000 people.

In China there are 37.

Can you honestly say that per capita measurements in this instance are a fair way judge the two countries?

* All figures include automobiles, SUVs, vans, and commercial vehicles; and exclude motorcycles and other motorized two-wheelers.

And the US didn’t compromise, did it? For whatever reason it displayed no ability to negotiate.

Can’t deny that, either.

This is a perfect demonstration of what I was talking about.

Note that China is putting out considerably more CO2 than the U.S.

I obviously think that’s “bad”, and think this post is simply reportage of a process which will have consequences affecting all mankind.

“DURBAN — Ministers fought to save U.N. climate talks from collapse on Saturday, searching to narrow differences between rich and poor nations over how quickly to fight global warming.”
http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/12/10/9350157-ministers-battle-to-save-un-climate-talks

The people who see the destruction of the WTC as unparalled terrorism and the destruction of a city of 300,000 as a necessary act of war, in order to free the remaining inhabitants from oppression.

Those are examples to which everyone who reads these boards can relate. America is white, pure, and innocent with the best motives while the enemy has the worst motives and is dirty, sneaky and unfair.

As with the atomic bomb, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have ordered each and every bomb to be dropped. And I’m sure with time I would be able to recognize each and every one of the firebombings to have been useless and terrorism in every sense.

Accountability and responsibility are the mark of every being which deserves respect, don’t you agree?

Certainly it can’t mean “inflexibility of thought.” Otherwise, those who lecture us on “black and white thinking” wouldn’t be writing so many posts dropping their own immutable judgments on things like collapsing concrete walls.

St. Paul is quoted as saying, “When I was a boy I did the things a boy would do, and now that I’m a man I do the things a man does.”

On many occasions I have attempted to direct the wrath of God upon those black-and-white thinkers, accusing them of every moral transgression I could dredge up. I was not in that post.

I tried to carefully point out that black and white thinking is a normal phase of development, quite useful in some conditions. We all went through that phase. What I did say was that it was young and immature, which is true. There’s no sense calling a larva a butterfly. That doesn’t mean the larva is bad or the butterfly is good.

And then I added as circumstances change it can be less and less useful, and then down right fatal.. Again, said without condemnation I can see.

I added, finally, that without a history of developing past that particular strategy it would be difficult to deal successfully with the rest of the world.

I’ll stand by every word. I do pity those thinkers, and at times worse than that. And I do believe they will lead the US down a primrose path to destruction. In that post I don’t think I said that was bad, or wrong, or that they were evil.

As a practical matter, I don’t regard the demise of mankind as a particularly tragic occasion in the Grand Scheme of things. In the sense of the bigger picture it would be a boon for most other species, and maybe something will develop with a better sense of it’s debt to world around it. We have not been good to each other or our world. Now that paragraph is judgmental.