stuffwhitepeoplelike

stuffwhitepeoplelike

I discovered this site a few months ago, with some amusement. But principally it comes up because there are social causes that are greatly involved in the larger political events of our day, with some seriousness or weight involved.
Darfur for example.

I ran through an interesting breakdown of our foreign policy driving factors. Generally our activity, our generally global view of American interests, comes from several internal sources.
1) Military industrial complex -- Supply creating it's own demand. We have the stuff, we buy the stuff, let's go use it somewhere.
2) People representing foreign interests (lobbyists usually, some intellectuals)
3) Ethnic groups with an axe to grind (Cubans, Jews, Armenians, to a lesser extent Arabs) Obviously these people tend to get us involved because they still directly integrate with the problems of their home country rather than the problems of America itself. (I myself don't always disagree that those other places have roughly correlated problems, but it does tie down our options).
(now the interesting two groups).
4) War Enthusiasts. The basic explanation of this group is as follows. Most competitive and influential people (men stereotypically) will find a cause to exercise their influence. The usual course for most is to become boosters for their alma maters and try to 'recruit' star athletes to boost the prestige and bragging rights in their circle of influence. Unfortunately for the rest of us, the relative importance of college athletics at the really influential schools (Ivy League for example) is considerably poorer, and as a result, the alumnus of these schools become boosters in the game of nations instead of college athletics. For all the complaining people do about college sports or sports in general, they do serve to draw away energies that would otherwise be invested in things like: violent actions, international competitions.. in other words, wars.
5) stuffwhitepeoplelike set. The general premise here being: something terrible is going on halfway around the world that I have no influence on, no understanding of, and no idea what to do about, but I DEMAND WE DO SOMETHING so I can feel better about myself and my country. The current crop of interests here are Myanmar, Tibet, and Darfur. Basically the reasoning is that since America has no invested national interest in these places, we would be demonstrating our good will to go in and fix the problems of these places. But the actuality is that since we generally have no idea what caused the problems in the first place or rather we attach rather different levels of cultural or social importance to different things than the conflicting sides do, we presume that we could dictate a solution without really presenting one, but in doing so we'd be resolving the crisis of the day.. until it eventually reverses itself and the cycle continues (ala Nigeria and the inevitable cycles of tribal conflicts between its northern tribes and southern)

So in a weird way, the internal cultural need to associate with some cause that presents itself as a cause in and of itself creates a demand for foreign interventionism. It might be better if we simply made Harvard's football team better and the rest of us (that is concerned white people) started complaining more about health care, soccer, or Harvard. At least until we get some people who have some capacity for inter-cultural thought on the scene who can communicate what the problems are and perhaps tell us how to resolve them rather than simply the desire to do something about the problem in the hopes that it will go away once we imposed the good old American way.

(and yes, if the crisis involves feeding people, providing medicines, we can and should help, that's easy to do and feel good about.. the real problem is resolving the source of famine and inadequate medical care, which is less easily bitten off)