[extropy-chat] JAMES HUGHES SHOULD RESIGN

[BillK]

On 1/12/06, Alan Brooks wrote:
> Do you know what Danila told me? He said there was some justification for
> the USSR's invasion of Afghanistan, for national security purposes. This is
> the same sort of justification Americans use to condone the Vietnam War.
> There was/is nothing extropian concerning the USSR's invasion.
> Jose, do you find the ongoing wars in Latin America extropian?
>

But remember human security is better now than it has ever been.
<http://www.humansecurityreport.info/>
The full report can be downloaded as a series of pdf files, plus many
tables and figures.

Quotes:

The first Human Security Report documents a dramatic, but largely
unknown, decline in the number of wars, genocides and human rights
abuse over the past decade. Published by Oxford University Press, the
Report argues that the single most compelling explanation for these
changes is found in the unprecedented upsurge of international
activism, spearheaded by the UN, which took place in the wake of the
Cold War.


What is Human Security?

Human security is a relatively new concept, but one that is now widely
used to describe the complex of interrelated threats associated with
civil war, genocide and the displacement of populations. The
distinction between human security and national security is an
important one.

While national security focuses on the defence of the state from
external attack, human security is about protecting individuals and
communities from any form of political violence.

Human security and national security should be—and often are—mutually
reinforcing. But secure states do not automatically mean secure
peoples. Protecting citizens from foreign attack may be a necessary
condition for the security of individuals, but it is not a sufficient
one. Indeed, during the last 100 years far more people have been
killed by their own governments than by foreign armies.

All proponents of human security agree that its primary goal is the
protection of individuals. But consensus breaks down over what threats
individuals should be protected from. Proponents of the 'narrow'
concept of human security, which underpins the Human Security Report,
focus on violent threats to individuals, while recognizing that these
threats are strongly associated with poverty, lack of state capacity
and various forms of socio-economic and political inequity,
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BillK