International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.
Where the stakes are the highest in the war on terror we cannot possibly succeed without extraordinary international cooperation. Effective international police actions require the highest degree of intelligence sharing planning and collaborative enforcement.
The hope of Internet anarchists was that repressive governments would have only two options: accept the Internet with its limitless possibilities of spreading information or restrict Internet access to the ruling elite and turn your back on the 21st century as North Korea has done.
I hope that Facebook and other Internet technologies were able to help people just like we hope that we help them communicate and organize and do whatever they want to every single day but I don't pretend that if Facebook didn't exist that this wouldn't even be possible. Of course it would have.
I think the advent of the Internet gave us all a big boost because by the time the Internet became mainstream and you could get it in your home a lot of us were used to dealing in fan culture writing to magazines or anything at the back of comic books.
There's an internal battle. I need to work I need to work I need to work and I need to be home with my kids and the kids win.
Like most citizens of popular and international urban centres I don't take advantage of the cultural opportunities. Perhaps this comes from growing up in suburbia. Home is where you eat sleep read watch television and ignore your parents. It is not where you go to the ballet and then attend a heated panel discussion about it afterwards.
My wife and I had decided not to let anybody take pictures of our home because it was just the last place on earth we had that was unscathed. But people have climbed over the fence they've taken aerial shots. They've gotten my address and put it on the Internet.
People internalize from the jail to student loan debt to credit card debt to unemployment to the whole collective. It manifests itself in many ways in people's home lives domestic stuff.
For example I was a White House intern the summer before I dropped out of law school. Everybody knew about it. I'd come home and go to church and everybody would say 'Oh my God. Demetri you're working at the White House.'
The Internet is just bringing all kinds of information into the home. There's just a lot of distraction a lot of competition for the parent's voice to resonate in the children's ears.
I never come back home with the same moral character I went out with something or other becomes unsettled where I had achieved internal peace some one or other of the things I had put to flight reappears on the scene.
Everybody knows they're on the Obama team: There isn't vice presidential vs. presidential division there's not a generational pull. People have internalized that this is a real moment in history.
The president led us into the Iraq war on the basis of unproven assertions without evidence he embraced a radical doctrine of pre-emptive war unprecedented in our history and he failed to build a true international coalition.
History is filled with tragic examples of wars that result from diplomatic impasse. Whether in our local communities or in international relations the skillful use of our communicative capacities to negotiate and resolve differences is the first evidence of human wisdom.
The Carter Center has the only existing international taskforce on disease eradication. Which means a total elimination of a disease on the face of the Earth. In the history of the world there's only been one disease eradicated: smallpox. The second disease I think is gonna be guinea worm.
Terrorism takes us back to ages we thought were long gone if we allow it a free hand to corrupt democratic societies and destroy the basic rules of international life.