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I agree. I think it may be naivety. There even was a thread here on HN about how saying that the world is fallen is just religious and therefore should be avoid

I agree. I think it may be naivety. There even was a thread here on HN about how saying that the world is fallen is just religious and therefore should be avoided [1] These people might think human beings are fundamentally good and war is just evil people doing evil things to each other. But evil is just a reality. People band together to kill others to get what they want unless you kill them or raise a credible threat to kill them in return. This is what war ultimately is. If men were angels, no government would be necessary [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19210351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19210351

dnautics 8y ago
You could have made the same argument about slavery in the 19th century. And today, it's nearly universally accepted as wrong and almost completely eradicated.
- sturgill 8y ago
  With an important caveat: it’s almost completely eradicated _for now_. Civilizations come and go. Perpetual human progress is only possible if that’s what the strongest group of people want and are willing to fight for it. “Live free or die” wasn’t a cute mantra; it was a rallying cry and a warning. In the US, slavery was eradicated literally by the sword. The real genius of the Founding Fathers of the US was their distrust of human nature (and consequent aversion to centralized power).
  - creato 8y ago
    > With an important caveat: it’s almost completely eradicated _for now_. That's not even close to true. There are ~30 million slaves worldwide today [1]. I can't find a concise worldwide total for around the time most people imagine is the peak of slavery, at least in the US (1860?), but that was "only" less than 4 million [2]. Whatever point was being made about slavery as an example in this conversation IMO points exactly the opposite way the GP intended: that slavery is a "natural" state for humans to end up in, and it requires continuous effort to prevent it. Just like war. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century#Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century#St... 2. https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/slavery/timeline/1860.html https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/slavery/timeline/1860.html
    - dnautics 8y ago
      Are you normalizing to the total human population? So currently 30 million slaves out of a 7 billion population is under a half a percent, compared to 4 million slaves in the us out of a US population of 30 million is almost 7 percent. I'd say that's an improvement
      - creato 8y ago
        It seems that ~60 million people are affected by war [1], "only" ~2x as many. So I think that the original point I was making stands: neither slavery nor war are things that humans "grew out of". They both need significant, active effort by people to avoid/contain/resist. 1. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/jun/18/59m-people-displaced-war-violence-persecution-says-un https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/jun/18/5...
- refurb 8y ago
  Not sure I see the connection. People who disagreed with slavery just didn't have slaves. At any rate, what ended slavery in the US? War!
  - dnautics 8y ago
    That's true for the us and Haiti and where else?
- adventured 8y ago
  > And today, it's nearly universally accepted as wrong and almost completely eradicated. It's nowhere close to eradicated. The broadest measure of slavery today includes roughly 50 million people. A more narrow figure, that would be similar to the slavery you're referring to, is closer to 10-20 million people. There are an estimated 7.5 million people in forced labor slavery in fields like construction and mining; 1.7 million in agriculture labor slavery; there are several million women held in sexual slavery, in the sex trafficking trade, across the world. https://www.humanrightsfirst.org/resource/human-trafficking-numbers https://www.humanrightsfirst.org/resource/human-trafficking-...
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - dnautics 8y ago
    As a proportion of the world population the enslaved is still on a downtrend. How many years (which is what I mean by 'almost') do you suppose it will take us to get from 1% or so to 0.01%?
- tw04 8y ago
  And exactly what do you think will happen if one of the countries that doesn't care about slavery overtakes the collective "west" in military might? Do you think China bats an eye at slavery in Africa? Do you think they bat an eye at slavery in North Korea? Just because it's universally accepted as wrong in the West doesn't mean the rest of the world agrees.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
panic 8y ago
I think this is an oversimplification of the reasons people could have for protesting. The military is not just about resolving conflict through material power. It supervises a massive industrial machine which twists our entire country around its values. Dwight D. Eisenhower described the situation in 1961: > Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea. > Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. > This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. Stopping this "total influence" from affecting the values of your employer is a separate goal from ending war altogether.
rjf72 8y ago
Another important issue here is that 'evil' and 'good' are very much subjective notions. Most people, including some of the most 'evil' throughout history, were the benevolent heroes of the world from their perspective who, in turn, were doing what was necessary to purge the world of 'evil' and bring in what they'd see as a utopia. You don't even need to resort to extreme examples that I think go without saying. Things such as China today are a perfect 'moderate' example. Their government, and most people, value a system that 'we' generally consider to be wrong. By contrast they consider our system wrong. Both sides have valid arguments for and against each system. Yet this lack of clarity notwithstanding, both sides would also happily have the entire world embrace their personal interpretation of what ought be done, given the opportunity. The primary reason that this does not happen in modern times anymore is not because we've become somehow better, more ethical, or inherently more peaceful. In large part it's quite the opposite - we just became too capable of killing one another. Unrestrained war between nuclear nations is a non-starter simply because a single nuclear weapon would be enough to catastrophically damage a country. The nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed hundreds of thousands. By the 1960s Russia had already tested 'Tsar Bomba' [1], a nuke that was on the order of 5,000 times more powerful. And that was testing done at half power simply because full power posed too great a risk of nuclear fallout as well as being impossible to detonate without killing the pilots. Just to emphasize, that was tech developed nearly 60 years ago. We haven't just been twiddling our thumbs since. Compare our actions in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We destroyed the Afghanistan government and engaged in a lengthy occupation that continues, to a lesser degree, to this very day. This was done because we suspected they might be harboring Bin Laden. They were not. By contrast when we had such suspicions in Pakistan we staged fake vaccinations drives [2] to engage in a mass DNA collection to try to pinpoint Bin Laden's location by collecting DNA of his children. Once his location was confirmed, and he was housed right next to a government training academy, we did a rapid pin-point in and out strike completed in a matter of hours, completely pulled out, and then continued to pay billions to Pakistan in aid. Pakistan has nukes, Afghanistan does not. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poliomyelitis_in_Pakistan#Connection_to_the_Assassination_of_Osama_Bin_Laden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poliomyelitis_in_Pakistan#Conn...
- 8note 8y ago

dnautics 8y ago

You could have made the same argument about slavery in the 19th century. And today, it's nearly universally accepted as wrong and almost completely eradicated.

sturgill 8y ago
With an important caveat: it’s almost completely eradicated _for now_. Civilizations come and go. Perpetual human progress is only possible if that’s what the strongest group of people want and are willing to fight for it. “Live free or die” wasn’t a cute mantra; it was a rallying cry and a warning. In the US, slavery was eradicated literally by the sword. The real genius of the Founding Fathers of the US was their distrust of human nature (and consequent aversion to centralized power).
- creato 8y ago
  > With an important caveat: it’s almost completely eradicated _for now_. That's not even close to true. There are ~30 million slaves worldwide today [1]. I can't find a concise worldwide total for around the time most people imagine is the peak of slavery, at least in the US (1860?), but that was "only" less than 4 million [2]. Whatever point was being made about slavery as an example in this conversation IMO points exactly the opposite way the GP intended: that slavery is a "natural" state for humans to end up in, and it requires continuous effort to prevent it. Just like war. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century#Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century#St... 2. https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/slavery/timeline/1860.html https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/slavery/timeline/1860.html
  - dnautics 8y ago
    Are you normalizing to the total human population? So currently 30 million slaves out of a 7 billion population is under a half a percent, compared to 4 million slaves in the us out of a US population of 30 million is almost 7 percent. I'd say that's an improvement
    - creato 8y ago
      It seems that ~60 million people are affected by war [1], "only" ~2x as many. So I think that the original point I was making stands: neither slavery nor war are things that humans "grew out of". They both need significant, active effort by people to avoid/contain/resist. 1. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/jun/18/59m-people-displaced-war-violence-persecution-says-un https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/jun/18/5...
refurb 8y ago
Not sure I see the connection. People who disagreed with slavery just didn't have slaves. At any rate, what ended slavery in the US? War!
- dnautics 8y ago
  That's true for the us and Haiti and where else?
adventured 8y ago
> And today, it's nearly universally accepted as wrong and almost completely eradicated. It's nowhere close to eradicated. The broadest measure of slavery today includes roughly 50 million people. A more narrow figure, that would be similar to the slavery you're referring to, is closer to 10-20 million people. There are an estimated 7.5 million people in forced labor slavery in fields like construction and mining; 1.7 million in agriculture labor slavery; there are several million women held in sexual slavery, in the sex trafficking trade, across the world. https://www.humanrightsfirst.org/resource/human-trafficking-numbers https://www.humanrightsfirst.org/resource/human-trafficking-...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- dnautics 8y ago
  As a proportion of the world population the enslaved is still on a downtrend. How many years (which is what I mean by 'almost') do you suppose it will take us to get from 1% or so to 0.01%?
tw04 8y ago
And exactly what do you think will happen if one of the countries that doesn't care about slavery overtakes the collective "west" in military might? Do you think China bats an eye at slavery in Africa? Do you think they bat an eye at slavery in North Korea? Just because it's universally accepted as wrong in the West doesn't mean the rest of the world agrees.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

panic 8y ago

I think this is an oversimplification of the reasons people could have for protesting. The military is not just about resolving conflict through material power. It supervises a massive industrial machine which twists our entire country around its values. Dwight D. Eisenhower described the situation in 1961: > Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea. > Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. > This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. Stopping this "total influence" from affecting the values of your employer is a separate goal from ending war altogether.

rjf72 8y ago

Another important issue here is that 'evil' and 'good' are very much subjective notions. Most people, including some of the most 'evil' throughout history, were the benevolent heroes of the world from their perspective who, in turn, were doing what was necessary to purge the world of 'evil' and bring in what they'd see as a utopia. You don't even need to resort to extreme examples that I think go without saying. Things such as China today are a perfect 'moderate' example. Their government, and most people, value a system that 'we' generally consider to be wrong. By contrast they consider our system wrong. Both sides have valid arguments for and against each system. Yet this lack of clarity notwithstanding, both sides would also happily have the entire world embrace their personal interpretation of what ought be done, given the opportunity. The primary reason that this does not happen in modern times anymore is not because we've become somehow better, more ethical, or inherently more peaceful. In large part it's quite the opposite - we just became too capable of killing one another. Unrestrained war between nuclear nations is a non-starter simply because a single nuclear weapon would be enough to catastrophically damage a country. The nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed hundreds of thousands. By the 1960s Russia had already tested 'Tsar Bomba' [1], a nuke that was on the order of 5,000 times more powerful. And that was testing done at half power simply because full power posed too great a risk of nuclear fallout as well as being impossible to detonate without killing the pilots. Just to emphasize, that was tech developed nearly 60 years ago. We haven't just been twiddling our thumbs since. Compare our actions in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We destroyed the Afghanistan government and engaged in a lengthy occupation that continues, to a lesser degree, to this very day. This was done because we suspected they might be harboring Bin Laden. They were not. By contrast when we had such suspicions in Pakistan we staged fake vaccinations drives [2] to engage in a mass DNA collection to try to pinpoint Bin Laden's location by collecting DNA of his children. Once his location was confirmed, and he was housed right next to a government training academy, we did a rapid pin-point in and out strike completed in a matter of hours, completely pulled out, and then continued to pay billions to Pakistan in aid. Pakistan has nukes, Afghanistan does not. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poliomyelitis_in_Pakistan#Connection_to_the_Assassination_of_Osama_Bin_Laden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poliomyelitis_in_Pakistan#Conn...

8note 8y ago