Justice Matters

Posted on August 2, 2008
Filed Under Philosophy, Politics |

Are justice & peace incompatible values? Certainly, they compete, but in terms of contemporary atrocities, justice seems pretty often to pave the way for peace. Aryeh Neier, one of the founders of Human Rights Watch, offers some recent examples. What, I wonder, would be the pragmatic effect of bringing George W. Bush & Dick Cheney to justice. Just a little historical thought experiment.

Comments

One Response to “Justice Matters”

  1. edward mycue on August 24th, 2008 12:17 am

    I WONDER WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN
    TO THE WORLD WHEN WE DIE

    Gone will be the natural world perhaps but old nature tv reels will remain?
    Whistle clean. To forget is to abet. Cost Price Value
    Explore Explain Examine Experiment — Most pretentious: least alive
    Trapped in the melting pot beyond the source muddy on the horizon
    Root Route and Range: will song never return/ muddy on horizons
    Then comes the pong, the pong is strong, festering lilies and dreams
    To some the stench of peanuts and/or of old banana skins in
    a garbage pail is sickening as days old pong of an unwashed person
    (Tourmaline, jasper and opal are the stones of the living
    Obsidian, chalcedony, flint are the stones of the dead
    Herbs of the dead are pepper, oregano, and tar—wrote the poet
    Howard McCord p.113, Selected Poems, 1978,Crossing Press)
    “Still and all” a phrase I used means now and then maybe again
    Allene was from Arkansas or Oklahoma and worked in schools
    in San Francisco as a janitor loved by all the teachers she helped
    This writing is an art of appropriation “a series of refined filtering
    systems” said Robert Rauschenberg—part core sample of an era
    and part personal diary—of his 1970 drawings; also “combines”
    said the painter & scholar Richard Steger whose sense of connection
    made me realize we all live in an assisted living society if lucky
    “Oblieux” wrote Ned Rorem in Wings of Friendship about a great
    composer we gays referred to as “Aunt Aaron” Copeland saying he
    was “very, very famous, and happy, but a wee bit ‘oblieux’”
    We must keep watch over absent meaning said Maurice Blanchot
    Chateau Graville-Lacoste a Pujols sur Caron, Gironde, France
    Albert Ellis, Provoker of Change in Psychotherapy is dead at 93
    said the obituary headline in The New York Times July 25, 2007
    (most therapy makes you feel better, but you don’t get better: you
    have to back it up with action; & neurosis is high-class for whining)
    Oyvind aka Irving Molbach wrote at his end “I believe in a future
    life. I’m ready for my next job. It’s goodbye-time (to his cave)
    Dr Albert Ellis believed people sabotage a need for happiness
    Ellis developed “rational emotive behavioral therapy” concentrating
    on irrational ideas leading to self-destructive feeling and behavior
    Wonder what happens to the world & if reduced when we die?

    Edward Mycue