hint: check the skin colour :-) imho "the west" is code for "whitefolks countries," and I guess Israel gets to be a member since Anglo elites, sometime in the mid 60's, grudgingly allowed as how Jews can be white people too (as long as they're not too Sephardic which confuses everybody). it's basically like an exclusive gated community, only larger scale...
heard recently that there's talk of inviting Israel into NATO which as I commented elsewhere should have a destabilising effect on the acronym, at least. NASMRSTO? hard to pronounce :-) The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
absolutely. the guaranteed minimum, the standard of decency -- but it isn't decent if it isn't generalised. "common environmental regs" within the EU or N Am don't do diddly if "the rest of the world" is made a sacrifice zone for industrial vandalism... and this point is not "merely" moral, but pragmatic: it's a small planet, and the destruction being wrought in "lesser nations" will, and does, impact health and happiness worldwide. the world is one, the climate is one, the oceans are one. the wind doesn't stop blowing at an arbitrary human property line.
the gated-community model is guaranteed to exacerbate, outside its boundary, whatever miseries or abuses its inhabitants seek to escape. or so I believe, having watched the model in action. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
NATO: An Alliance for Freedom.
This was published in 2006 by Spain's Fundacion por el Analisis y los Estudios Sociales (FAES, English Foundation for the Analysis and Study of Social Studies), I suspect that the Heritage Foundation played some real here.
I like this here. First, Letonia is the Spanish for Lithuania. And apparently someone doesn't know the difference between India and Sri Lanka. And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg
Just color the map to put Sakhalin in NATO, and surely those Russian airbases will happily take their orders from NORAD!
;) The Fates are kind.
Africa = 30m sq. km Greenland = 2.2m sq.km In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
Note also the inclusion of Sakhalin island in the area corresponding to Japan. And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg
Sorting people out works better in the UK, as many know. While some of my Russian friends living in the UK were filling in the application for a medical job (the part funnily called the Equal Opportunities or summat like that), they have realised with a shock that there's a lot of 'whites' exist in the world - e.g. Welsh, English, Other white. On the other hand, French, Spanish, Greek, Italian are definitely not white at all - they are Mediterranean whatever that'd mean (suspisiously brown but have great food and don't preach Islam?). Again, if judging by skin colour, one just would have to to push at least 80 per cent of nasty russkies into that exclusive gated community and kick off both slavonic but rather Greek... er... Mediterranean=Not white-looking Bulgarians and all ex-Ugoslavians and non-slavonic Turkish looking Hungarians. And who on earth will a decent Brit find in this gated community - nasty but whiter than snow russkies, no doubt all alcoholics and thugs who don't give a shit either they're in the West or not? Nightmire eh?
