8 ms·
Who cleans up after war?
- madengr 11y agoThe cleanup contracts probably go to the same ones who profit from the war to begin with.
- RooBadley 11y agoHaliburton comes to mind, their subsidiary, KBR (Cheney's old haunt) made 39.5 billion USD on Iraq War v2.0. Fluor, a Texas based engineering firm, made 1.5 billion USD on logistics and reconstruction. Security (Dyncorp 4.1 billion USD), transport (Combat Support Associates 3.8 billion USD), and food services (Agility 7.4 billion USD), were all needed for the above operations. 138 billion USD went to private contractors during and after the war in Iraq.
- kitwalker12 11y agoI recently saw Daniel Craig on the Late Show. He's the "United Nations Global Advocate for the Elimination of Mines and Explosive Hazards" UNMAS (http://www.mineaction.org/unmas http://www.mineaction.org/unmas) helps with war clean-up in the few cases where peace eventually breaks out as apart from the dead-bodies, mines & IEDs are also painful remnants
- samstave 11y agoThe countries and companies that make mines found in war zones should be required to clean them up.
- dragontamer 11y agoHow do you plan to force them to do that clean up work? In particular, Iraqi Insurgents were planting roadside bombs and land-mines throughout the totality of the 2000 through 2010 decade. We can't even get them to surrender properly (they just transformed into ISIS). How do you expect us to "force" them to stop planting IEDs?
- vacri 11y agoIraqi IEDs are a tiny drop in the bucket that is 'deployed landmines'. Most landmines are mass-produced by munitions companies. Start there.
- dragontamer 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Treaty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Treaty It has already started. But not everyone is on board with this. So now what? We go to war about it?
- vacri 11y agoYou're totally right, it's too hard. And companies in first world countries are completely unaffected by law, so lobbying your representative would have zero effect. As would public awareness campaigns to help push the issue politically. And god knows that countries should only pressure each other for important things, like forcing extensions to copyrights for movies and music. Let's just give up and go home, since apparently the only option is war.
- huragok 11y ago"Well everything is fucked so we might as well not bother."
- dragontamer 11y agoOh we do "something" about it. But I just gotta point out that "forcing other people to do something" is typically a non-scalable solution. As soon as someone disagrees with you, you become deadlocked. Its not enough to just say "force those other guys to clean it up". If you actually want to say that, you need an action plan (ie: how you plan to force those other guys to do stuff). If you're saying "pass a law", we can pass a law of course, but its not going to affect other countries. This is a United Nations issue, and it needs to be solved globally.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- silentplummet 11y agoWho cleans up after anything we do, really? Our economic systems lubricate the exchange of work and capital by abstracting away the cost of cleanup, which is rarely well understood to begin with, from view. Observe any abandoned or unused commercial structure in your town, such as the old building Walmart vacated to build a bigger Walmart 1000 feet down the road. Did the price of building either structure include the cost of cleaning them up? Thermodynamics guarantees that literally everything we might try to do makes a mess (a net entropic gain), and that includes cleanup efforts. Cleaning up is really just shifting messes around. We spend a little extra energy to make a neat pile but at the cost of producing a little extra poop and carbon dioxide. We kick the entropy can down the road a thousand different ways every day. And then we do things like shipping cotton across the whole god-#@%^ Pacific ocean, so Chinese slave^H sweatshop laborers can assemble them into clothes, so we can ship them back across the ocean again and buy shirts. The ludicrous inefficiency of our corporate masters sacrificing both natural resources and our country's prosperity to save a buck is conveniently abstracted out of sight by the glorious global capitalism. Make no attempt to look at the man behind the curtain.
- mkaziz 11y agoWhat do you propose is the alternative to capitalism? It's the only system that seems to have reasonably worked.
- wonderlust 11y agoDepends, what is your definition of "worked". Mercantalism was actually successful in many ways.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- paulojreis 11y agoSlightly off topic, but I don't think that the argument "capitalism is the system which worked better) is valid. It's not that it's wrong, per se, but I think it's an implication of mankind evolution and not the capitalist system itself. In more concrete terms: if you pick any given point in time, you'd probably be able to say the same without being wrong. At date X, the social system in practice is/was the one which worked better up until that X point; it's because we've been evolving somewhat continuously, not because the system per se.
- guelo 11y agoReminded me of this article about how Gaza is still just rubble after Israel bombed the crap out of it last year. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3120272/Living-rubble-Gaza-nearly-one-year-Thousands-Palestinians-suffering-international-aid-promised-six-months-ago-arrive.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3120272/Living-rubbl...
- Animats 11y agoFrance is still cleaning up explosives from World War I. About 900 tons a year are collected.
- percept 11y agoAnother example is Laos. The US dropped a couple million tons worth of bombs there, leaving a third or more of the country contaminated. The use of cluster bombs in particular, left unexploded bomblets embedded in trees or under soft earth, where they're detonated all too frequently. (The US has slowly begun sending some money over to assist with cleanup.)