The more I look at international relations, the more I realize that the perfect model for it is the playground. Everything we need to know about dealing with other nations we learned there, and it’s just a matter of learning how to apply that knowledge.

If you give in to a bully, you only encourage the bully to push farther. We learned this with Hitler, with Stalin, and with Saddam Hussein. A bully must be confronted before he gets too confident and too comfortable with his ill-gotten gains, or the eventual confrontation will be much messier.

If a person is espousing a position that was not derived from reason, they cannot be reasoned away from it. “Blue is SO much cooler than green!” is about as rational an argument as “God says we have the one true faith, and it is our duty to bring that faith to all people, even if we have to kill them in the process.” Attempting to reasonably discuss things such as this is futile. The wisest course is to simply walk away. And if walking away isn’t an option – say, the proponent of the belief demands you accept it under threats of violence – the only appropriate response is violence. And it must be decisive violence – the unreasonable person must be shown that their attempts to force their views will not be tolerated.

The biggest kid will always have friends and enemies simply because he is the biggest. Some will admire him and wish to share in his bounties; others will see their own smallness in comparison and attempt to diminish him. And there is very little the big kid can do to sway his detractors.

Girls really do have cooties. Whoops, no they don’t. I dunno where that came from…

But there is one major difference between the playground and the real world is that the real world doesn’t have adult supervision. There are no grownups we can turn to when things get too ugly. We’re strictly on our own out there. And it’s a lot closer to “Lord Of The Flies” than “Sesame Street.”

J.