"You can't say that civilization don't advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way." - Will Rogers

***

How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room

"China's strategy was simple: block the open negotiations for two weeks, and then ensure that the closed-door deal made it look as if the west had failed the world's poor once again. And sure enough, the aid agencies, civil society movements and environmental groups all took the bait... Sudan behaves at the talks as a puppet of China...

China, backed at times by India, then proceeded to take out all the numbers that mattered... I am certain that had the Chinese not been in the room, we would have left Copenhagen with a deal that had environmentalists popping champagne corks popping in every corner of the world...

Campaign groups never blame developing countries for failure; this is an iron rule that is never broken. The Indians, in particular, have become past masters at co-opting the language of equity ("equal rights to the atmosphere") in the service of planetary suicide – and leftish campaigners and commentators are hoist with their own petard...

I left Copenhagen more despondent than I have felt in a long time. After all the hope and all the hype, the mobilisation of thousands, a wave of optimism crashed against the rock of global power politics, fell back, and drained away."


Recently, I commented that "Injustice which is spatially and/or temporally removed from the present is no indication of present cruelties".

This and another ("perceived oppressors can equally be victims of discrimination and injustice - even at the hands of the perceived victims") were labelled as "Confucian axioms - who can say they are wrong?"

Yet, clearly, people do claim a sort of infinite path dependence for past injustice (at least those committed by certain parties, while those by others are glibly elided), where past wrongs are some form of Original Sin that can never be erased.