The British leadership has acknowledged that it only became possible to end the violence in North Ireland when it stopped thinking of the [Irish Republican Army] as "a terrorist organization" and began treating it as a political actor with genuine grievances that deserved to be addressed.

Our [American] leaders are so socialized as to address militarized threats by acting on the basis of a militarized mentality that the deep roots of problems are ignored.

I think it is less the limited amount of information than the filters that information about the Middle East must pass through before being fairly addressed in the mainstream media. In more intellectual and geopolitical terms, the perceptions of the region are distorted by a combination of Orientalism and the priorities of the state of Israel, including the refusal to discuss the relevance of Israel's nuclear weapons arsenal in the context of addressing Iran on its nuclear program.

Capitalism is in crisis both morally, due to widening disparities of income and wealth and disclosures of abusive practices, and ecologically, due to its refusal to make business adjustments in accounting procedures that pass the consequences of emissions to the public and the future.

As matters now stand, the veto seems inappropriate, given the absence of any deep ideological split between major states, and definitely constrains the war-prevention mission of the UN. Similarly, the present permanent five are out of touch with geopolitical realities, and constitute a remnant of a West-centric world order, casting a shadow of illegitimacy across the activities of the most important organ of global policymaking in the UN System.

Doing something, however pathetic, is psychologically better than doing nothing. In the current political environment - that is, with no more Cold War tensions - the tendency is to counteract the feelings of fear and vulnerability with a variety of military, paramilitary and police measures, despite the reality that this kind of excessive reliance on force in many ways intensifies the very problem it is purporting to solve.

To be a hegemon is inherently ambiguous, usually implying some mixture of dominance and legitimacy, that is, being seen as contributing global leadership in a generally benevolent manner.