Martin wrote:
> No, that's not a good idea because you can't disarm all the
> governments.  Governments are sovereigns.  The only way to disarm them
> is to make them not sovereign anymore, which implies creating a world
> government that would then be the *only* sovereign.  I'm in favor of
> that, because there can't be sustained world peace without a world
> government, a single sovereign.  But I'm not holding my breath
> waiting for it.

But governments aren't really sovereign, are they? There's at least two ends
to this - firstly, in any polis worthy of our support the people are
sovereign and government their instrument. As this is so rare it just lends
credence to Marx and Engels assertion that "modern state power is merely the
executive committee charged with managing the affairs of the bourgeoisie".
Despite this claim's crusty and unfashionable roots, there remains more than
a little truth in it. Secondly, if governments and people aren't sovereign
we are left with non-governmental loci of power and, distinctly, the 'logic'
of the dominant system or dynamic. It seems to me that far more power is
mobilised through the co-option of instruments - govt, organisations,
consumers - into tacit or explicit support of prevailing ideology, or even
into an adversarial relationship with said ideology. This dynamic, which no
one group owns, establishes the parametres within which ordinary conceptions
of sovereignty act, and in so far as this is true, it is the dynamic that is
sovereign.... all that to accuse the ideology of capitalism of primacy in
the sovereignty stakes.

<snip>

> In Norway, a variant of the system you call a police state has been in
> place for a long time.  It works just fine.  Norway has a vanishingly
> small number of criminal shootings.  The police are not armed.  Norway
> also has a high per capita gun ownership, since hunting and target
> shooting are both very popular here, and since many men are members of
> the national guard and are required to maintain a weapon.  If you mean
> Norway is a police state, then, yes, I think there should be more of
> them.

On the surface, at least, Norway is one of the most agreeable countries I
have ever visited. Everyone seems to smile (is it something in the water?).
I'll be back there in February 2k, Martin, and I'd offer to buy you a
coffee, but I'm not sure if I can afford it.

Cheers

b