3. How does international law attempt to limit the propensity of sovereign states to go to war?

War is the purview of a sovereign state--sovereignty is fundamentally the right of a state to impose legitimate violence, which is defined as war (or more generally justice). Therefore the project of international law is to limit and eventually revoke sovereignty and impose a world government on the free Christian peoples--God's chosen--of America. The United Nations--which mocks through its very name the divinely-inspired sovereign righteousness of the United States of America--is obviously the most prominent actor in this conspiracy, a desperate but more successful revision of the failed Leage of Nations--brought down by the righteous refusal of the American people to bow down before such an obvious and overt attempt at external seizure of control despite the President's unlawful attempts to bypass their will--but there are far more actors working against sovereignty, some obvious and inept, like the International Courts, taking the names and symbols of holy justice but clearly missing the divine mandate that enables such proceedings to have any legitimacy, or a few more insidious entities, secret groups whose activities are closely guarded but nonetheless, like all agents of the Anti-Christ, occasionally make mistakes--groups like the Trilateral Commission or of course the Majestic Twelve, who are far greater threats to American sovereignty than any open international organization, infiltrating American society at its highest levels--no President of the last fifty years can be trusted, all puppets or pawns of one or another attempt to destroy the glorious American peoples foiled only by American ingenuity and of course God's will--and slowly gaining control of culture, media, the national consciousness, eating away at the average American's divinely innate sense of superiority and attempting to replace it with the mindless values of equality and unity that are of course the hallmarks of communism, another enemy of American sovereignty and explicitly, openly in the service of Satan but--or perhaps as a result--far less successful, the grand dream of a world socialist government, all individuals nothing more than automated cogs in the machine of production without purpose, never anything more than a mad dream of those Satanic idealists who poured out their dark hearts onto so many pages of texts no righteous American ever read, save for of course the purposes of educating himself about the enemy, studying as one might the ways which Satan attempts to corrupt the faithful so as to be better prepared against his true advances, that in their misdirected passion failed to actually accomplish anything short of blowing up a few buildings, which actions were, ironically, highly antagonistic of whatever public unity they sought to achieve--another sign of communism's clear and intrinsic failure as a true threat to sovereignty--and in its own perverse way more a reflection of the American holy values that protect we glorious chosen people against such threats to soveriegnty, by way of course of the Second Amendment, which decrees or more rightly reaffirms, for it did not establish God's will but merely stated it plainfly for those righteous souls who cannot sense it from birth, the right of all Americans to keep and bear arms as divinely-ordained defense against attacks on our sovereignty--even by our own American government, which as discussed can rarely be trusted to hold our best interests in mind, despite its positioning of itself as a physical incarnate of God's will (itself a blasphemous Catholic notion, as any true Christian understands the soveriegnty of the individual leaves no authority between himself and God), often being corrupted by those Satanic forces it was established to protect us from--and more importantly a symbol or better the physical means itself of our soveriegnty, which if as previously defined is the right to legimiate violence then is most incarnate in this Second Amendment, the most holy Amendment in those second Ten Commandments, the succesor to that which established God as the sole authority over any individual, as proclaimed to Moses upon Mount Sinai but inevitably misunderstood by those near but not completely within God's light and corrupted within that limited gap of misunderstanding by the ever-malevolent and lurking machinations of the Devil and his servants, who include not only communists, the United Nations, the Majestic Twelve and the Trilateral Commission but also of course more ancient evils like the Elders of Zion, that false of council of false chosen who have deluded so much of the world for so much time and orchestrated the most successful of efforts against American sovereignty, most notably the complete control of American government with regards to the illegitimate nation of Israel, which persists today solely through the power of American aid bought by the most heinous scheme in all of history, the intentional massacre of many of the weaker, less "useful" members (as if they were all but tools of the greater Zionist good rather than individuals whose only loyalty lay to God), sacrificed--if such a noble word can be applied to such a horrifically ignoble cause, perhaps the greatest crime in all of history from Adam to now--to achieve public approval for their first step towards revocation of sovereignty through immense guilt, unwarranted of course but inevitable given any good Christian values, an unfortunate consequence, allowing our enemies to exploit God's given goodness to further Satanic purposes, an irony that the Devil must deliciously appreciate even as he fails to realize that such a victory could only be achieved through taking advantage of true Christian values, for no American would ever willingly consort with Satan, and such a victory is achieved only through the utmost deception and fortunately (or not, as it is surely not fortune but simply an aspect of God's eternal plan) cannot be furthered, for any advancement against our sovereignty would require more open corruption, an attempt unhidden by the massive deceit that previously allowed such great evil to come to pass and thus doomed inevitably to failure, as all such schemes are when forced into the light of God by his faithful, those few who recognize the Devil's deceptions always and without failure due to our being chosen by God and ordered as shepherds to protect the chosen people from the great dangers of deception, deceit, and other such Satanic devices, weak of course but nonetheless dangerous, for while to remain righteous the faithful must be ever vigilant, the Devil is pleased with each and every minor success, every minor corruption or disruption in divine righteousness, a satisfaction that is both pathetic, for such minor offenses are small and insignificant in comparison to the totaility of good that is Creation, and misplaced, for God's forgiveness and grace means that all such minor victories are ultimately meaningless, forgotten, more, erased by the light of God's love, all of us imperfect beings transformed into the image and more importantly substance of perfection by God's will and according to God's plan, of which Satan's attempts to disrupt and minor disturbances that are from the total perspective variations upon the whole that add to the fundamental beauty of Creation rather than take away, so that in the end the Devil, ironically, is nothing more than another unknowing servant of God.

Yesterday the Oscar nomination were announced; to no surprise, Heath Ledger has a spot on the list of Best Supporting Actors (and will certainly win) for his performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight; to much outcry, The Dark Knight failed to recieve any other major nominations, such as Best Director or even Best Picture. I don't care, really. As much as I love it, I don't think it deserves Best Picture (though admittedly I haven't seen any of the actual nominees this year, to my failure). But the hullabaloo got me thinking about the film again, and why it's so problematic to me. Because as I addressed in my original essay on the film--the first piece written for this site--I have a lot of issues with The Dark Knight. I already explained what I think is wrong with it, with regards to the ethical position presented by the narrative; now I'd like to expand on that, a bit, but more importantly, explain how to do it right.

The Dark Knight is a film about the myth of the Hero. A cursory view might say that it is a film deconstructing the Hero: it emphasizes, after all, that Batman/Bruce Wayne is not a hero, and this is true, depending on how we define "hero". The film seems to mean the popular sense of an individual who acts ethically to eliminate injustice and preserve society's righteousness. I'm not going to dispute that definition too much; in fact, I want to look much closer at several parts of it and what they mean, and how they impact the status of Batman as a Hero.

I chose my eyes and my hair and my face. I chose where I'm from and what I've done. I chose my name.

Despite its cinematic presentation (and what cinematic presentation it is!), Mass Effect is rooted in the Western RPG tradition (whether or not it actually is a Western RPG first and not a third-person action game with elements of western RPGs ala Deus Ex), which means players have a significant influence on how their character acts within the game--after all, the game was developed by Bioware, best known for Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and Knights of the Old Republic, the epitome of Western RPG tradition. Mass Effect begins with a player choosing their name, physical appearance, and history. Before the opening cutscene finishes the player is already presented with their first choice: will they chastise a sarcastic crew member or listen to their concerns?

Those who have played Bioware's other games know the drill. The first two-thirds of Mass Effect play like a better, Star Wars-less version of Knights of the Old Republic. The plot is authored, and so are the menu of your character's responses, but you do have a menu of responses. You always have the choice: fight or negotiate. Kill or don't. Or, of course, don't do anything at all, for the myriad side quests. It may not be much of a choice, but combined with the custom appearance and custom "talents" (AKA skills, spells, whatever you level up when you level up in an RPG), most players come to feel a sense of authorship over their character, a sense that they are their character. That's (generally) the point of Western RPGs, in the way it is absolutely not in their Japanese counterparts.

At the conclusion of the introductory mission, the player's character is affected by an alien "beacon" and experiences a vision. A player only sees quick cuts of unintelligible images, but when approached by party members, the character starts talking about killer robots and mass extinction. It's a startling disconnect between player and character, but digestable: alright, so that's what it was, what now? But the disconnect doesn't go away; it grows. As the player continues through the game, the character expresses more and more certainty that the killer robots from the vision are the real threat, not the renegade special forces operative the character has been persuing, going so far as to demand action from the Council that rules most of the galaxy. The Council's response is predictable: you had a vision. We'll wait for a bit more evidence before starting a war.

The problem with this was that I thought the same thing. Following the "paragon" path (the "good" way, which also emphasizes cooperation), I wanted to agree with the Council, agree to look for further evidence first, agree to continue searching for the rogue operative. But the options presented to me were: demand the Council take action against the killer robot threat, or demand it nicely.

Battlestar Galactica has featured assassinations, coup d'etat, martial law, suicide bombing, torture, forced abortion, gang rape. It's a dark show. But to my mind, one of the most horrible moments of the show was not anything so conventionally terrible as the above, but a speech sometimes hailed as one of the triumphant turning points of the show:

In our civil war, we've seen death. We watched our people die. Gone forever. As terrible as it was, beyond the reach of the resurrection ships, something began to change. We could feel a sense of time. As if each moment held its own significance. We began to realize that for our existence to hold any value it must end. To live meaningful lives we must die, and not return. The one human flaw, that you spend your lifetimes distressing over - mortality - is the one thing . . . well, it's the one thing that makes you whole.

In "Guess What's Coming to Dinner", Natalie, the Six who leads the Cylon rebellion, gives this speech to the assembled Quroum, humanity's elected government, arguing in favor of a joint strike mission to permanently disable the Cylon's ability to resurrect themselves into new bodies following death. Later, in "The Hub", with the exploding resurrection hub in the background, Helo and the leader of the rebel Eights fly the last surviving Three back to the rebel base ship:

Three: And with a whimper, every Cylon in the universe begins to die.
Eight: Yes, that's right. And it's a good thing, D'Anna, because now there's no difference. We can all start trusting each other.

The first thing that follows this, of course, is Helo's betrayal of the Eight's trust by taking Three to President Roslin and denying the Cylons access (on the President's order). But there's a larger issue here than the Eights' pereptually foolish optimism. And that's the idea that the only way the Cylons can be "whole" is for there to be "no difference" between humans and Cylons.

A short note today. This isn't anything new for those who know me, but it's an important foundation of what I believe, so I figured it should be up here, especially for some pieces I want to write in the future.

Major Premise: All rational/logical structures/systems can be fundamentally represented mathematically.

Minor Premise: Gödel's incompleteness theorems, which collectively demonstrate that a mathematical system cannot be both consistent and complete (i.e., contain irreconcilable contradictions and/or errors).

Conclusion: All rational/logical structures/systems contain irreconcilable contradictions and/or errors.

Facile, perhaps. But the point is this: never forget that rationality, logic, structures, systems, order, et. al., are not ends to themselves. They are useful but dishonest; they are an attempt to bound, limit, define what is fundamentally unboundable, limitless, indefinable: physical reality and the human experience of it.