Where extraordinary becomes eccentric

The Freakonomic’s author takes a look at the great idea that is currently the key marketing feature of Chrysler. If you buy their car, they’ll lock your gas price at $2.99 per gallon.

NYT today published an Opinion back from 1990 that is based on observations of the columnist who researched the Burmese politics in the aftermath of the 1988 revolts led by students and monks. The core of the article deals with a hypothetical option of invading a country that is denying the basic human rights to its citizen, and its justification. By the 1990 perspective, just a simple demonstration of superpower’s military superiority could bring the regime to its fall, yet in some cases we ought to opt for more.

In reporting on the 1988 revolt, I came to understand that the smallest gesture of U.S. military support -perhaps nothing more than a couple of battleships off the Burmese coast and a few warplanes over its skies -could have won the day for the Burmese people. [...]

In such clear-cut cases, would military intervention on human rights grounds be morally justified? If it is, a second question must be posed: How could the principle of big-power intervention on behalf of human rights be established without a future American or Soviet government perverting it to prop up, as in the past, repressive dictatorships? Could some effective international control mechanism be worked out - a Helsinki Accord with teeth?

I would very much support such action, just as I do acknowledge the beneficial (and the detrimental too) outcomes of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which regrettably go unnoticed by the blinded general public. The regime in Burma, just as other tenuous military dictatorships, are alive only because of brutal handling of their citizens who alone can’t make a difference. The democratic countries should take advantage of the weakness and take them down to start the process of improving the human lives that is now in hiatus. While in the short term the situation might seem confusing, dangerous and even deteriorating, in the long term the freedoms, the value every country must inevitably achieve or fall, will be achieved more quickly.