Nevertheless, I think we have suffered too much from politics by simplistic slogans.

Well, minimalism is this idea of taking things and stripping them down, to hopefully make them a little better.

The facile Clausewitzian wisdom that military action ultimately leads to a political solution is no longer convincing.

I'm going to make a bunch of simplifying assumptions because we know that most of these don't hold for most of our genes, but it'll give us a little bit of sense of how to predict what might happen in future generations.

Burundi's cultural and linguistic homogeneity, rare in Africa, belies the simplistic view that the Hutu and Tutsi fight because they are so different.

Simplistic endorsement of democracy by George W. Bush s administration was costly both in Iraq and in Gaza, where elections gave rise to a hostile Hamas led government.

Simplistic ideologies got the world into the mess in which it now finds itself, and simplistic prescriptions (even of the tough love austerity form) will only compound the problems.

Gone is the simplistic view of a conflict pitting aspiring democrats against a grouchy dictator the familiar (though not entirely accurate) narrative of the Arab Spring. Would be democrats, freedom fighters, jihadists, Sunni extremists, and Al Qaeda elements all supported by Sunni Arab countries and groups, now man one side of the battle lines.

For there to be any genuine possibility of a lasting resolution to the conflict, all parties, including the international community, have to abandon the simplistic and one sided representations that have distorted the true reality, and recognize that no side has a monopoly on suffering and that the dreams of neither side can be fulfilled in full.