the world is collapsing around our ears, i turned up the radio but i can't hear it

a weird series of days of late. i am in the final throes of my dissertation- finishing my last chapter which will leave only my edits before i submit june 4th. it seems amazing that this project is finally wrapping up but yet i am so lacking in the motivation to finish it. i'm still suffering from post-ball exhaustion- i'm doing a lot of socialising, a fair bit of social drinking and a lot of faffing. take this morning, where i should be wrapping up this chapter but instead am reading the globe and generally scouring the internet for tidbits of fun...

however, the world continues to shuffle on without any clear or directed goal and i wonder whether we ever really will know what the fuck we're doing. there's a fantastic piece in today's globe about michael ignatieff and his quest to reconcile his belief in humanitarian intervention and even the possible need to suspend civil liberties to humanely end terror with the current stuff going on in iraq. how can we build a moral case for intervention to rescue human dignity and end torture only to erode human dignity and increase torture upon our entry? however, i found the last lines of the piece particularly chilling:

"If you have to wait for angelic intentions in this world, you'll have to wait for hell to freeze over. The besetting sin of Canadian foreign-policy thinking is a kind of airy and empty moral perfectionism that just doesn't deal with the world that we live in. It's the pathos of the middle power that doesn't actually have hard choices to make. I love my country, but I'm impatient with this thinking."

how long can we sit back and stay morally superior while watching suffering, torture and the complete degradation of the notions of human rights we supposedly stand behind? i feel closer than ever to adopting this hawkish leftish position...

more soon on what's really going on with me

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