6 ms·

Life is one big war. Just because you live in a pleasant neighbourhood, doesn't mean there are no malevolent people in the world...

blunte 6y ago
I believe that many malevolent people, or at least their followers, would be much less malevolent or active if they had their basic needs met plus a little bit of cushion to enjoy life. To be more specific, many of the worst people have lived through some truly horrible childhoods (often experiencing war and poverty as a child). Stop the cycle of war and poverty, and then see how naturally malevolent people are. We have the productivity to afford that; we just have chosen to consolidate it to a relative few.
- nwienert 6y ago
  I think the only reason you have all your needs met is due to war, and now you sit on a pile of blood-stained surplus with clean gloves and make faces as though better. It’s all pointless moralizing. Sure, prosperity may reduce war. I tend to think MAD and global trade have done most of the reducing. But just dismissing war as if you have some superior moral compass to anyone with absolutely no sign of any insight to reduce it, or understanding of why it happens, just reeks of privilege and cheap moralizing that I’d prefer stay on Twitter and Reddit.
- xd 6y ago
  "their basic needs met plus a little bit of cushion to enjoy life" Who's responsibility is it to meet these needs?
  - Shacklz 6y ago
    Irrelevant of the answer, it helps in general if your efforts & hard work towards a better life aren't bombed into oblivion
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- rtx 6y ago
  This is half true, today religion is the primary driver of conflict.
  - kleer001 6y ago
    tribalism is the primary driver of conflict and has always been
- hutzlibu 6y ago
  " Stop the cycle of war and poverty, and then see how naturally malevolent people are." So far it is only a hypothesis, that war can be avoided if people just would not starve anymore. (I don't think there was really hunger in europe pre WW1 for example) Also, assuming we would distribute ressources equally (nevermind the political means to achieve that for a moment): It no doubt would be enough for everyone today. But the world population is already going steeply up - with people starving. So if it would go even much more up, if no one would be starving - would it then also be enough for 10 billion people? 20 billion? How much more roundup can the fields take? So don't get me wrong. A world with no wars and where no one has to starve is definitely a noble cause I agree to. I just thinkt it is not so easy, if it is possible at all, since there was never a time in human history without. We don't know whether it can work out at all.
  - InitialLastName 6y ago
    > (I don't think there was really hunger in europe pre WW1 for example) IIRC gaining and ensuring continued access to food production centers in central Europe was one of Germany's primary motivating factors leading into WWI.
    - hutzlibu 6y ago
      I learned it a bit different, but in either case - you don't have to starve if you can buy food. And the market was working in europe. So it was more about hunger for power. Because sure, owning something is better than having to buy something.
      - munk-a 6y ago
        Pre-WWI gets a lot of rose-tinted views due to fact that a lot of our accounts of living from that time come from well off folks - there isn't much literature and art that came out of the working classes - there were certainly a few good examples but it would become much more prominent when the great depression equalized classes and forced well educated folks to endure the same life the poor had been enduring. I would still consider WWI the last hurrah of prestige wars (where an essentially divine monarch instigated war for personal reasons and had the authority to enforce his will over the entire nation) but the hardships were real going into it. Content people tend to lean away from conflict - the marshall plan in europe seems to bear that out pretty clearly in my eyes. I think it's a rather successful demonstration of the fact that stability breeds peace and, honestly, the US military agrees with me... a decent chunk of money in Iraqi Freedom was invested into infrastructure repair and, especially, education. To achieve peace you need to make life worth more than death.
- trentnix 6y ago
  > We have the productivity to afford that; we just have chosen to consolidate it to a relative few. And absent the threat of violent force, how do you suppose we take that productivity from this relative few? My government threatens me with penalties and imprisonment if I don't give up my "fair share" via various taxes. And if I resist that, they use weapons to force me to comply. Are you not just trading one definition of war for another?
  - wavefunction 6y ago
    I can't speak for your country but at least in the US the government is "We the People" or at least those of us interested enough to get involved whether by voting or running for office. If my democratic society has decided through an open and fair democratic process to require certain levels of taxation then it's my responsibility to society to meet those regulations. If I disagree with what has been collectively decided then my recourse is to convince enough of my fellow citizens to change the regulations. I don't see how that has anything to do with war. It seems like a very hyperbolic claim to make to me.
    - trentnix 6y ago
      my responsibility to society That's the rub. Your responsibility is determined by the mob. If you resist, the mob, via the justice system, forces you to comply with the threat of physical violence. If I resist with force, is that not war? If two of us resist with force, is that not war? If 10000 of us resist with force, is that not war? Was the Civil War not war? Is it really any more poetic when it's done by large groups of people than when it's done by a few?
trentnix 6y ago
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. - commonly attributed to Orwell
- savanaly 6y ago
  ...But only because there are other rough men ready to violence against them. What was proposed was getting rid of rough men willing to do violence, not rough men willing to do violence on our side only.
  - trentnix 6y ago
    What was proposed was wealth distribution. Wealth distribution necessarily requires taking from one person and giving their wealth to others. If history is any indicator, this can only be accomplished through the threats or administration of violence. How much violence is necessary to create your violence-free utopia?
- intrepidhero 6y ago
  I strongly disagree. If some level of violence is necessary to ensure peace, the people entrusted with the power to inflict said violence should be compassionate and wise humans not, "rough men". And at the same time we should be putting our resources to work at lowering that necessary level of violence.
  - moolcool 6y ago
    Beware "rough men" who project themselves be "compassionate and wise", lest you end up with a John McCain-type who says all the right things at home, but then wants to kill people overseas for profit.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      For a lot of us, what McCain said (and even more, concretely acted on) at home for the bulk of his political career wasn't any better than his position on foreign adventures.
darepublic 6y ago
You can't handle the truth!!!
- octopoc 6y ago
  To be clear this is a reference to this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FnO3igOkOk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FnO3igOkOk edit: it's a scene where this exact conversation is playing out.
glitchc 6y ago
Give people something to lose and they'll stop fighting.
- tartoran 6y ago
  Or give people something to do and they will stop fighting. (something that brings some meaning to their lives).
moolcool 6y ago
The last time the US went into a war because there were malevolent people in the world who posed a direct threat to the nation was in the 1940s
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- exclusiv 6y ago
  Depends how you define direct threat. The threats changed after WW2 for technological, industrial and economic reasons. Also, I don't follow the spirit of your comment. The United Nations came out of WW2. And the US is a key member of those coalitions against any malevolent regimes. Just how it works. A direct threat isn't a thing anymore of relevance when you're a member of a coalition.
- ativzzz 6y ago
  How about the Korean and Vietnam wars? Iraq? Afghanistan? Maybe they weren't officially declared wars like WW1/2 but if sending troops to a country to fight doesn't constitute wars I don't know what does.
  - moolcool 6y ago
    The implication of my post is that those wars were not "because there were malevolent people in the world who posed a direct threat to the nation". The US could just as well not have not gone to war in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan.
    - ativzzz 6y ago
      Pretty sure the rationale for Korea/Vietnam was exactly "because there were malevolent people in the world who posed a direct threat to the nation", just targeted towards the USSR/communism
  - bromuro 6y ago
    and what about latin america. there’s no end to the abuses of the US military around the world, and MS is helping these killers in exchange of money.
HNewsInfosec 6y ago
Only because you live in a pleasant neighbourhood, doesn't mean you are not living in the neighbourhood that is causing tremendous suffering to the rest of the world.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
atoav 6y ago
Even if we assume military is not only necessary, but actually good, wouldn't there still be a point where a society spends too much on it's military and everything goes to shables because of it? Let's assume the US would reach this point — how would it look from the inside? Would the downfall happen fast or would it spawn decades? What if we are already in it? The US could spend half of what it currently spends on the military and still be twice as powerful in terms of military force as the rest of the world combined. I'd argue investing a chunk of that money in domestic infrastructure, healthcare, poverty and a chunk of it in diplomacy would give you a more powerful US in two decades than if you would raise military spending even more.
- bhupy 6y ago
  > The US could spend half of what it currently spends on the military and still be twice as powerful in terms of military force as the rest of the world combined. I'd argue investing a chunk of that money in domestic infrastructure, healthcare, poverty and a chunk of it in diplomacy would give you a more powerful US in two decades than if you would raise military spending even more. I broadly agree that we should spend less on our military, but this is untrue on a couple major counts. Firstly, the US doesn't outspend the rest of the world combined. This is a talking point that started going viral some time in the early 2010's (I think it was on some TV show?), but the statistic is misleading because it compares nominal dollar amounts rather than PPP adjusted dollars. When you do that adjustment, the next 2 countries combined outspend the US[1]. This is important because (1) the personnel in each country are paid in the wages commensurate the cost-of-living of the home country (e.g. the wage for a Chinese soldier is 1/10 the wage of an American soldier in nominal dollars), and (2) military goods aren't global commodities; the US can't procure its equipment from China like it does every other good, it has to procure them either domestically or from allies which are typically high purchasing power countries. A single nominal US dollar goes a lot further in China's or India's military than it does in the US's, and that needs to be accounted for in these comparisons. PPP adjustment isn't perfect in this context, but it's much less wrong and vulnerable to low hanging fruit criticism than simply using nominal amounts. Secondly, I think the percentage of the Federal budget that's spent on the military is overstated. It's not even close to being the biggest line item; it accounts for 15% of the Federal budget[2], and much much lower than that (about 8%) when you look at military spending as a percentage of total government expenditure across all levels of government. The lion's share of spending today is already healthcare and welfare. Thirdly, I think that the actual cost of healthcare et al are understated; in FY2019 the US government spent $676 billion on Defense, while the cost of healthcare every year by most estimates amounts to $3 trillion per year. Even if you were to divert the entire military budget to healthcare, you'd have to find $2T somewhere. While I agree that we should spend less on fighting and war (because I dislike fighting and war), military spending is a convenient scapegoat for other problems, the solutions for which are not so simple. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/gijt81/oc_the_top_5_military_spenders_in_2019_nominal_vs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/gijt81/oc_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/media/File:2019_Federal_Budget_Infographic.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/...
akudha 6y ago
It is not a question of spending money on military, it is a question of how much. Last I checked, the US military budget is around 700B, while healthcare, education etc account for a tenth of that amount. Another question is, how much of this eye popping amount is wasted?
void_mint 6y ago
> Just because you live in a pleasant neighbourhood, doesn't mean there are no malevolent people in the world... is so extremely far from > Life is one big war. It's an interesting idea to see them in the same post. "Bad people exist; better prepare for all of humanity to be bad"
munk-a 6y ago
It isn't general human nature to fight - it's the survival instinct kicked in by desperation. Some people are naturally unbalanced and society needs to deal with that, but most people just want to live and let live. The military is important as a show of force to crazies, but if we diverted a good chunk of the cash that goes to it to raise the standard of living here and abroad then the need for conflict could be minimized.
KorematsuFred 6y ago
Sure but then the US military and its associated establishment surely seems like one of those malevolent people in the world. US taxpayer money is being spent in protecting Saudi Arabia and Pakistan two largest sponsors of all kind of Salafi terrorism all around the world. Most of the terrorists were funded and armed by USA. Entire south american political instability has USA behind it.

blunte 6y ago

I believe that many malevolent people, or at least their followers, would be much less malevolent or active if they had their basic needs met plus a little bit of cushion to enjoy life. To be more specific, many of the worst people have lived through some truly horrible childhoods (often experiencing war and poverty as a child). Stop the cycle of war and poverty, and then see how naturally malevolent people are. We have the productivity to afford that; we just have chosen to consolidate it to a relative few.

nwienert 6y ago
I think the only reason you have all your needs met is due to war, and now you sit on a pile of blood-stained surplus with clean gloves and make faces as though better. It’s all pointless moralizing. Sure, prosperity may reduce war. I tend to think MAD and global trade have done most of the reducing. But just dismissing war as if you have some superior moral compass to anyone with absolutely no sign of any insight to reduce it, or understanding of why it happens, just reeks of privilege and cheap moralizing that I’d prefer stay on Twitter and Reddit.
xd 6y ago
"their basic needs met plus a little bit of cushion to enjoy life" Who's responsibility is it to meet these needs?
- Shacklz 6y ago
  Irrelevant of the answer, it helps in general if your efforts & hard work towards a better life aren't bombed into oblivion
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
rtx 6y ago
This is half true, today religion is the primary driver of conflict.
- kleer001 6y ago
  tribalism is the primary driver of conflict and has always been
hutzlibu 6y ago
" Stop the cycle of war and poverty, and then see how naturally malevolent people are." So far it is only a hypothesis, that war can be avoided if people just would not starve anymore. (I don't think there was really hunger in europe pre WW1 for example) Also, assuming we would distribute ressources equally (nevermind the political means to achieve that for a moment): It no doubt would be enough for everyone today. But the world population is already going steeply up - with people starving. So if it would go even much more up, if no one would be starving - would it then also be enough for 10 billion people? 20 billion? How much more roundup can the fields take? So don't get me wrong. A world with no wars and where no one has to starve is definitely a noble cause I agree to. I just thinkt it is not so easy, if it is possible at all, since there was never a time in human history without. We don't know whether it can work out at all.
- InitialLastName 6y ago
  > (I don't think there was really hunger in europe pre WW1 for example) IIRC gaining and ensuring continued access to food production centers in central Europe was one of Germany's primary motivating factors leading into WWI.
  - hutzlibu 6y ago
    I learned it a bit different, but in either case - you don't have to starve if you can buy food. And the market was working in europe. So it was more about hunger for power. Because sure, owning something is better than having to buy something.
    - munk-a 6y ago
      Pre-WWI gets a lot of rose-tinted views due to fact that a lot of our accounts of living from that time come from well off folks - there isn't much literature and art that came out of the working classes - there were certainly a few good examples but it would become much more prominent when the great depression equalized classes and forced well educated folks to endure the same life the poor had been enduring. I would still consider WWI the last hurrah of prestige wars (where an essentially divine monarch instigated war for personal reasons and had the authority to enforce his will over the entire nation) but the hardships were real going into it. Content people tend to lean away from conflict - the marshall plan in europe seems to bear that out pretty clearly in my eyes. I think it's a rather successful demonstration of the fact that stability breeds peace and, honestly, the US military agrees with me... a decent chunk of money in Iraqi Freedom was invested into infrastructure repair and, especially, education. To achieve peace you need to make life worth more than death.
trentnix 6y ago
> We have the productivity to afford that; we just have chosen to consolidate it to a relative few. And absent the threat of violent force, how do you suppose we take that productivity from this relative few? My government threatens me with penalties and imprisonment if I don't give up my "fair share" via various taxes. And if I resist that, they use weapons to force me to comply. Are you not just trading one definition of war for another?
- wavefunction 6y ago
  I can't speak for your country but at least in the US the government is "We the People" or at least those of us interested enough to get involved whether by voting or running for office. If my democratic society has decided through an open and fair democratic process to require certain levels of taxation then it's my responsibility to society to meet those regulations. If I disagree with what has been collectively decided then my recourse is to convince enough of my fellow citizens to change the regulations. I don't see how that has anything to do with war. It seems like a very hyperbolic claim to make to me.
  - trentnix 6y ago
    my responsibility to society That's the rub. Your responsibility is determined by the mob. If you resist, the mob, via the justice system, forces you to comply with the threat of physical violence. If I resist with force, is that not war? If two of us resist with force, is that not war? If 10000 of us resist with force, is that not war? Was the Civil War not war? Is it really any more poetic when it's done by large groups of people than when it's done by a few?

trentnix 6y ago

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. - commonly attributed to Orwell

savanaly 6y ago
...But only because there are other rough men ready to violence against them. What was proposed was getting rid of rough men willing to do violence, not rough men willing to do violence on our side only.
- trentnix 6y ago
  What was proposed was wealth distribution. Wealth distribution necessarily requires taking from one person and giving their wealth to others. If history is any indicator, this can only be accomplished through the threats or administration of violence. How much violence is necessary to create your violence-free utopia?
intrepidhero 6y ago
I strongly disagree. If some level of violence is necessary to ensure peace, the people entrusted with the power to inflict said violence should be compassionate and wise humans not, "rough men". And at the same time we should be putting our resources to work at lowering that necessary level of violence.
- moolcool 6y ago
  Beware "rough men" who project themselves be "compassionate and wise", lest you end up with a John McCain-type who says all the right things at home, but then wants to kill people overseas for profit.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    For a lot of us, what McCain said (and even more, concretely acted on) at home for the bulk of his political career wasn't any better than his position on foreign adventures.

darepublic 6y ago

You can't handle the truth!!!

octopoc 6y ago
To be clear this is a reference to this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FnO3igOkOk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FnO3igOkOk edit: it's a scene where this exact conversation is playing out.

glitchc 6y ago

Give people something to lose and they'll stop fighting.

tartoran 6y ago
Or give people something to do and they will stop fighting. (something that brings some meaning to their lives).

moolcool 6y ago

The last time the US went into a war because there were malevolent people in the world who posed a direct threat to the nation was in the 1940s

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
exclusiv 6y ago
Depends how you define direct threat. The threats changed after WW2 for technological, industrial and economic reasons. Also, I don't follow the spirit of your comment. The United Nations came out of WW2. And the US is a key member of those coalitions against any malevolent regimes. Just how it works. A direct threat isn't a thing anymore of relevance when you're a member of a coalition.
ativzzz 6y ago
How about the Korean and Vietnam wars? Iraq? Afghanistan? Maybe they weren't officially declared wars like WW1/2 but if sending troops to a country to fight doesn't constitute wars I don't know what does.
- moolcool 6y ago
  The implication of my post is that those wars were not "because there were malevolent people in the world who posed a direct threat to the nation". The US could just as well not have not gone to war in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan.
  - ativzzz 6y ago
    Pretty sure the rationale for Korea/Vietnam was exactly "because there were malevolent people in the world who posed a direct threat to the nation", just targeted towards the USSR/communism
- bromuro 6y ago
  and what about latin america. there’s no end to the abuses of the US military around the world, and MS is helping these killers in exchange of money.

HNewsInfosec 6y ago

Only because you live in a pleasant neighbourhood, doesn't mean you are not living in the neighbourhood that is causing tremendous suffering to the rest of the world.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

atoav 6y ago

Even if we assume military is not only necessary, but actually good, wouldn't there still be a point where a society spends too much on it's military and everything goes to shables because of it? Let's assume the US would reach this point — how would it look from the inside? Would the downfall happen fast or would it spawn decades? What if we are already in it? The US could spend half of what it currently spends on the military and still be twice as powerful in terms of military force as the rest of the world combined. I'd argue investing a chunk of that money in domestic infrastructure, healthcare, poverty and a chunk of it in diplomacy would give you a more powerful US in two decades than if you would raise military spending even more.

bhupy 6y ago
> The US could spend half of what it currently spends on the military and still be twice as powerful in terms of military force as the rest of the world combined. I'd argue investing a chunk of that money in domestic infrastructure, healthcare, poverty and a chunk of it in diplomacy would give you a more powerful US in two decades than if you would raise military spending even more. I broadly agree that we should spend less on our military, but this is untrue on a couple major counts. Firstly, the US doesn't outspend the rest of the world combined. This is a talking point that started going viral some time in the early 2010's (I think it was on some TV show?), but the statistic is misleading because it compares nominal dollar amounts rather than PPP adjusted dollars. When you do that adjustment, the next 2 countries combined outspend the US[1]. This is important because (1) the personnel in each country are paid in the wages commensurate the cost-of-living of the home country (e.g. the wage for a Chinese soldier is 1/10 the wage of an American soldier in nominal dollars), and (2) military goods aren't global commodities; the US can't procure its equipment from China like it does every other good, it has to procure them either domestically or from allies which are typically high purchasing power countries. A single nominal US dollar goes a lot further in China's or India's military than it does in the US's, and that needs to be accounted for in these comparisons. PPP adjustment isn't perfect in this context, but it's much less wrong and vulnerable to low hanging fruit criticism than simply using nominal amounts. Secondly, I think the percentage of the Federal budget that's spent on the military is overstated. It's not even close to being the biggest line item; it accounts for 15% of the Federal budget[2], and much much lower than that (about 8%) when you look at military spending as a percentage of total government expenditure across all levels of government. The lion's share of spending today is already healthcare and welfare. Thirdly, I think that the actual cost of healthcare et al are understated; in FY2019 the US government spent $676 billion on Defense, while the cost of healthcare every year by most estimates amounts to $3 trillion per year. Even if you were to divert the entire military budget to healthcare, you'd have to find $2T somewhere. While I agree that we should spend less on fighting and war (because I dislike fighting and war), military spending is a convenient scapegoat for other problems, the solutions for which are not so simple. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/gijt81/oc_the_top_5_military_spenders_in_2019_nominal_vs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/gijt81/oc_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/media/File:2019_Federal_Budget_Infographic.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/...

akudha 6y ago

It is not a question of spending money on military, it is a question of how much. Last I checked, the US military budget is around 700B, while healthcare, education etc account for a tenth of that amount. Another question is, how much of this eye popping amount is wasted?

void_mint 6y ago

> Just because you live in a pleasant neighbourhood, doesn't mean there are no malevolent people in the world... is so extremely far from > Life is one big war. It's an interesting idea to see them in the same post. "Bad people exist; better prepare for all of humanity to be bad"

munk-a 6y ago

It isn't general human nature to fight - it's the survival instinct kicked in by desperation. Some people are naturally unbalanced and society needs to deal with that, but most people just want to live and let live. The military is important as a show of force to crazies, but if we diverted a good chunk of the cash that goes to it to raise the standard of living here and abroad then the need for conflict could be minimized.

KorematsuFred 6y ago

Sure but then the US military and its associated establishment surely seems like one of those malevolent people in the world. US taxpayer money is being spent in protecting Saudi Arabia and Pakistan two largest sponsors of all kind of Salafi terrorism all around the world. Most of the terrorists were funded and armed by USA. Entire south american political instability has USA behind it.