6 ms·

I feel like my eventual children, or maybe my children's children, will see a world where Americans don't go to was physically (or at least in large numbers).

I feel like my eventual children, or maybe my children's children, will see a world where Americans don't go to was physically (or at least in large numbers). This whole war thing is going to be really weighted against the poorer countries who have to leave real people to die. I see terrorist tactics (blowing up buildings, schools, etc.) as dominating their efforts. That said, I think that if I were to do a defense startup now, it'd be towards detecting explosives, guns, etc. in large groups of people. If that technology falls behind, war's about to get a whole lot uglier.

rms 17y ago
I see my children's children living in a world without war. Articles like this are interesting, but a little sickening in that they assume that continually increasing defense spending is actually a good idea. I'd work for Swoopo long before I would work for a defense startup.
- pmorici 17y ago
  "I see my children's children living in a world without war." Do you honestly believe that? I don't see how it's even possible unless we sedate everyone in some kind of matrix like false utopian state. It's good to dream though.
  - pg 17y ago
    Doesn't seem impossible. Within Western Europe that is close to a reality now, after endless centuries of war.
    - ericd 17y ago
      True, but the environment in Western Europe is very different from that of the rest of the world, and it's not clear that we can scale up the conditions of Western Europe to 6 billion people, at least with present tech, and especially if we're nearing peak oil. If peak oil is true, I would predict quite the opposite.
    - ryanwaggoner 17y ago
      Western Europe is a pretty small slice of the world, and they've had peace for half a century, which on the scale of multiple centuries, is hardly cause to celebrate the dawning of the age of aquarius. I'm sure this isn't the first 50-year period without war in Western Europe.
      - berntb 17y ago
        >>I'm sure this isn't the first 50-year period without war in Western Europe. I really doubt that. (Well, as long as we limit ourselves to times when there were Homo Sapiens in Europe.) Also, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_peace_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_peace_theory
      - pg 17y ago
        I'm sure this isn't the first 50-year period without war in Western Europe. Name one.
        rms 17y ago
        A search for "period without war in Western Europe" goes to this thread.
        apsec112 17y ago
        100-150 AD.
        pg 17y ago
        The society Tacitus describes in the Germania in 98 is one constantly at war. See e.g. chapters 13 and 14: http://www.unrv.com/tacitus/tacitus-germania-3.php http://www.unrv.com/tacitus/tacitus-germania-3.php
    - jimmybot 17y ago
      Alliances can easily decrease the risk of small scale war, but this is at the cost of systematic risk (alliance vs alliance war or world wars). Perhaps we've only managed to decrease the risk of medium-sized wars at the cost of increased risk for that very rare, very big one. It wouldn't be too different from the recent financial crisis or power distribution networks in the US.
    - DanielBMarkham 17y ago
      Western Europe has lived for decades under the U.S. Strategic Umbrella. Once (if) that goes away, Western Europe will either have to pony up for it's own defense, or be held hostage to outside powers with their own agendas (like Russia blackmailing Europe with gas supplies) I don't see the struggle between national interests going anyway anytime unless and until the nation-state itself is rendered obsolete. People need stuff, and that creates conflict. Different groups of people will need different stuff. And let's not forget ideological problems -- Western Europe isn't exactly a model of social integration. It only takes one bad actor to make all participants gear up for the potential to use force, and we've found that once geared up, the actual use of force is not far behind. It's a prisoner's dilemma played out on a global stage. But you'd find the same situation with three thousand guys living in caves somewhere. War is a natural consequence of groups of unique and intelligent humans.
      - rms 17y ago
        The struggle between national interests does not require war. War is counter-productive to national interests. A great conflict is currently playing out between the USA and China in Africa but not a shot has been fired and there is no reason for a shot to be fired.
        DanielBMarkham 17y ago
        Well it's worse than that -- all armed conflict requires is a group of armed people determined to use violence. What terrorism has shown us is that it doesn't even require nation-states. So your nation can be so inept as to not be able to control things inside it's borders (many nations fit this bill). If armed camps build up inside them and attack other countries, guess what? You're at war -- or something so close to war as to be indistinguishable from it. If you'd like the world to work like some super-big version of your local country, where most conflicts are solved by some civil system, then you're going to have to have popular choice of representatives, mixed local, national, and world control, an independent court system built on something besides treaties, etc. The UN is nowhere near any of that. There is the theory that democracies only compete via commerce. If you buy into that, then perhaps a world full of democracies would be the most peaceful. But I don't see that happening either any time soon. It's just a long-shot. A real long-shot. I'd argue that in order to do away with war you would have to do away with 99.999% of the impetus for using violence under any circumstances. It'd be a world of extreme pacifists. Would that be such a great thing? Doesn't chaos -- whether war, sickness, disasters, etc -- contribute to evolution and growth? Do we really want to live in stasis? Or -- to put it in religious terms -- is heaven really such a great thing?
    - nir 17y ago
      Not if you count the London bombings of 2007 or Madrid in 2004. The perpetrators were at least in part European citizens. In any case, it is one thing to have stability in an affluent, post-religion area like Western Europe, quite another to have it worldwide. Many nations in the Mid East, for example, are comparable to medieval Europe - except that if the current regimes fall (as they might well, if oil loses its value) their subjects are more likely to create a Muslim Brotherhood-type regime than a liberal republic.
  - gcheong 17y ago
    Capitalism and free markets.
    - lolcraft 17y ago
      It worked for western europe: Great Britain and Portugal claiming rights to trade with Spanish colonies in America motivated a lot of wars; the USA independence war from GB was motivated by economic reasons, etc. But it is not enough. I would also add the end of nationalism and colonialism to the requirements for world peace. Although you could say that without the former there isn't the latter.
  - abossy 17y ago
    Violence had been on the decline since the beginning of time. If it's not our children's children, then it will be their children. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_...
- pbhjpbhj 17y ago
  How do you protect your ideology of freedom and [pseudo?] democracy then from those bent on violent oppression. From what I can see a nation of absolute pacifists can be subdued by a single violent person - there has to be some point at which you'd make a physical stand? I can see the courageous absolutism of Gandhi working well on a small scale inspiring others to rebel against the status quo - but against a nation bent on destruction of your own people, say, what then. What I find intriguing is that in a situation of combat between computer-piloted UAV it is purely technological advance that gives the advantage. That then is dissociating war from direct violence and making technology the battleground rather than military aggression and effective killing. Sadly I don't believe, for now, that we can end human warring in favour of "robot wars".
  - gaius 17y ago
    I can see the courageous absolutism of Gandhi working well on a small scale You can't extrapolate from Gandhi to a generalized theory of resistance. His strategy worked well against the British Empire at a time that it had already decided that empires were more trouble than they're worth, and besides, we only came here to play cricket anyway. Any other imperial power would simply have shot him.
    - rikthevik 17y ago
      Yeah, I don't think Ghandi's strategy would have worked against Stalin. In the purges he had people murdered in broad daylight pretty regularly and it didn't even ruffle his mustache.
    - pbhjpbhj 17y ago
      You can't extrapolate from Gandhi to a generalized theory of resist That's what I said. Worked small scale but won't work large scale = can't extrapolate. Did I miss something?
  - troels 17y ago
    > From what I can see a nation of absolute pacifists can be subdued by a single violent person - there has to be some point at which you'd make a physical stand? Policing will probably always be needed, but that is different. The police are not at war with criminals.
- bokonist 17y ago
  The reason wars between countries are so rare is that the U.S. has military bases in 132 countries. Countries with U.S. military bases do not fight each other. If you dream of world peace, you should be supporting the American Defense Department and Pax Americana.
  - ciupicri 17y ago
    While I agree with the fact that there are many US military bases around the world and they contribute to the equilibrium, your statement sounds a bit like slaves won't fight between them because they serve only one master.
  - rms 17y ago
    Cecil Rhodes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Rhodes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Rhodes) had the same idea about Pax Britannica. The problem is that a lot of countries don't like having foreign invaders based on their soil.
  - nl 17y ago
    Counter examples of conflicts between US allies: 1) Falkland's war between Argentina and Great Britain in 1982. 2) Greco-Turkish war in Cypress. 3) Indian-Pakistani wars (although this example is stretching it, as US influence in India is quite low) 4) The First and Second Cod War 5) The Turbot War
- Dove 17y ago
  There will be war for as long as there are debates on the internet: until everyone agrees about everything important enough to fight over. World peace could arise as the result of some extremely democratic/libertarian/scientific worldwide monoculture that agreed on everything but what they were willing to settle with words. I think that an unlikely end to the story, though. The easiest road to world peace is for someone to win. And that's not a happy ending in my book. I'll take war over that. It's nasty, but nowhere near as bad as tyranny. Put another way, there will be war as long as there is crime. I hope that's forever. Living in a society that had actually done what it takes to eliminate crime completely would not be worth it to me. I feel the same way about a world without war.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    If you're in to reading old science fiction have a look at This Perfect Day by Ira Levin.
fauigerzigerk 17y ago
What's not entirely clear is which countries will be poor and which ones will be rich two generations down the road. What if it's your children's children who are left to die? It think we do have a chance to end wars once and for all as economies get more interconnected. Traditional geostrategic thinking is obsolete.

rms 17y ago

I see my children's children living in a world without war. Articles like this are interesting, but a little sickening in that they assume that continually increasing defense spending is actually a good idea. I'd work for Swoopo long before I would work for a defense startup.

pmorici 17y ago
"I see my children's children living in a world without war." Do you honestly believe that? I don't see how it's even possible unless we sedate everyone in some kind of matrix like false utopian state. It's good to dream though.
- pg 17y ago
  Doesn't seem impossible. Within Western Europe that is close to a reality now, after endless centuries of war.
  - ericd 17y ago
    True, but the environment in Western Europe is very different from that of the rest of the world, and it's not clear that we can scale up the conditions of Western Europe to 6 billion people, at least with present tech, and especially if we're nearing peak oil. If peak oil is true, I would predict quite the opposite.
  - ryanwaggoner 17y ago
    Western Europe is a pretty small slice of the world, and they've had peace for half a century, which on the scale of multiple centuries, is hardly cause to celebrate the dawning of the age of aquarius. I'm sure this isn't the first 50-year period without war in Western Europe.
    - berntb 17y ago
      >>I'm sure this isn't the first 50-year period without war in Western Europe. I really doubt that. (Well, as long as we limit ourselves to times when there were Homo Sapiens in Europe.) Also, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_peace_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_peace_theory
    - pg 17y ago
      I'm sure this isn't the first 50-year period without war in Western Europe. Name one.
      - rms 17y ago
        A search for "period without war in Western Europe" goes to this thread.
      - apsec112 17y ago
        100-150 AD.
        pg 17y ago
        The society Tacitus describes in the Germania in 98 is one constantly at war. See e.g. chapters 13 and 14: http://www.unrv.com/tacitus/tacitus-germania-3.php http://www.unrv.com/tacitus/tacitus-germania-3.php
  - jimmybot 17y ago
    Alliances can easily decrease the risk of small scale war, but this is at the cost of systematic risk (alliance vs alliance war or world wars). Perhaps we've only managed to decrease the risk of medium-sized wars at the cost of increased risk for that very rare, very big one. It wouldn't be too different from the recent financial crisis or power distribution networks in the US.
  - DanielBMarkham 17y ago
    Western Europe has lived for decades under the U.S. Strategic Umbrella. Once (if) that goes away, Western Europe will either have to pony up for it's own defense, or be held hostage to outside powers with their own agendas (like Russia blackmailing Europe with gas supplies) I don't see the struggle between national interests going anyway anytime unless and until the nation-state itself is rendered obsolete. People need stuff, and that creates conflict. Different groups of people will need different stuff. And let's not forget ideological problems -- Western Europe isn't exactly a model of social integration. It only takes one bad actor to make all participants gear up for the potential to use force, and we've found that once geared up, the actual use of force is not far behind. It's a prisoner's dilemma played out on a global stage. But you'd find the same situation with three thousand guys living in caves somewhere. War is a natural consequence of groups of unique and intelligent humans.
    - rms 17y ago
      The struggle between national interests does not require war. War is counter-productive to national interests. A great conflict is currently playing out between the USA and China in Africa but not a shot has been fired and there is no reason for a shot to be fired.
      - DanielBMarkham 17y ago
        Well it's worse than that -- all armed conflict requires is a group of armed people determined to use violence. What terrorism has shown us is that it doesn't even require nation-states. So your nation can be so inept as to not be able to control things inside it's borders (many nations fit this bill). If armed camps build up inside them and attack other countries, guess what? You're at war -- or something so close to war as to be indistinguishable from it. If you'd like the world to work like some super-big version of your local country, where most conflicts are solved by some civil system, then you're going to have to have popular choice of representatives, mixed local, national, and world control, an independent court system built on something besides treaties, etc. The UN is nowhere near any of that. There is the theory that democracies only compete via commerce. If you buy into that, then perhaps a world full of democracies would be the most peaceful. But I don't see that happening either any time soon. It's just a long-shot. A real long-shot. I'd argue that in order to do away with war you would have to do away with 99.999% of the impetus for using violence under any circumstances. It'd be a world of extreme pacifists. Would that be such a great thing? Doesn't chaos -- whether war, sickness, disasters, etc -- contribute to evolution and growth? Do we really want to live in stasis? Or -- to put it in religious terms -- is heaven really such a great thing?
  - nir 17y ago
    Not if you count the London bombings of 2007 or Madrid in 2004. The perpetrators were at least in part European citizens. In any case, it is one thing to have stability in an affluent, post-religion area like Western Europe, quite another to have it worldwide. Many nations in the Mid East, for example, are comparable to medieval Europe - except that if the current regimes fall (as they might well, if oil loses its value) their subjects are more likely to create a Muslim Brotherhood-type regime than a liberal republic.
- gcheong 17y ago
  Capitalism and free markets.
  - lolcraft 17y ago
    It worked for western europe: Great Britain and Portugal claiming rights to trade with Spanish colonies in America motivated a lot of wars; the USA independence war from GB was motivated by economic reasons, etc. But it is not enough. I would also add the end of nationalism and colonialism to the requirements for world peace. Although you could say that without the former there isn't the latter.
- abossy 17y ago
  Violence had been on the decline since the beginning of time. If it's not our children's children, then it will be their children. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_...
pbhjpbhj 17y ago
How do you protect your ideology of freedom and [pseudo?] democracy then from those bent on violent oppression. From what I can see a nation of absolute pacifists can be subdued by a single violent person - there has to be some point at which you'd make a physical stand? I can see the courageous absolutism of Gandhi working well on a small scale inspiring others to rebel against the status quo - but against a nation bent on destruction of your own people, say, what then. What I find intriguing is that in a situation of combat between computer-piloted UAV it is purely technological advance that gives the advantage. That then is dissociating war from direct violence and making technology the battleground rather than military aggression and effective killing. Sadly I don't believe, for now, that we can end human warring in favour of "robot wars".
- gaius 17y ago
  I can see the courageous absolutism of Gandhi working well on a small scale You can't extrapolate from Gandhi to a generalized theory of resistance. His strategy worked well against the British Empire at a time that it had already decided that empires were more trouble than they're worth, and besides, we only came here to play cricket anyway. Any other imperial power would simply have shot him.
  - rikthevik 17y ago
    Yeah, I don't think Ghandi's strategy would have worked against Stalin. In the purges he had people murdered in broad daylight pretty regularly and it didn't even ruffle his mustache.
  - pbhjpbhj 17y ago
    You can't extrapolate from Gandhi to a generalized theory of resist That's what I said. Worked small scale but won't work large scale = can't extrapolate. Did I miss something?
- troels 17y ago
  > From what I can see a nation of absolute pacifists can be subdued by a single violent person - there has to be some point at which you'd make a physical stand? Policing will probably always be needed, but that is different. The police are not at war with criminals.
bokonist 17y ago
The reason wars between countries are so rare is that the U.S. has military bases in 132 countries. Countries with U.S. military bases do not fight each other. If you dream of world peace, you should be supporting the American Defense Department and Pax Americana.
- ciupicri 17y ago
  While I agree with the fact that there are many US military bases around the world and they contribute to the equilibrium, your statement sounds a bit like slaves won't fight between them because they serve only one master.
- rms 17y ago
  Cecil Rhodes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Rhodes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Rhodes) had the same idea about Pax Britannica. The problem is that a lot of countries don't like having foreign invaders based on their soil.
- nl 17y ago
  Counter examples of conflicts between US allies: 1) Falkland's war between Argentina and Great Britain in 1982. 2) Greco-Turkish war in Cypress. 3) Indian-Pakistani wars (although this example is stretching it, as US influence in India is quite low) 4) The First and Second Cod War 5) The Turbot War
Dove 17y ago
There will be war for as long as there are debates on the internet: until everyone agrees about everything important enough to fight over. World peace could arise as the result of some extremely democratic/libertarian/scientific worldwide monoculture that agreed on everything but what they were willing to settle with words. I think that an unlikely end to the story, though. The easiest road to world peace is for someone to win. And that's not a happy ending in my book. I'll take war over that. It's nasty, but nowhere near as bad as tyranny. Put another way, there will be war as long as there is crime. I hope that's forever. Living in a society that had actually done what it takes to eliminate crime completely would not be worth it to me. I feel the same way about a world without war.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  If you're in to reading old science fiction have a look at This Perfect Day by Ira Levin.

fauigerzigerk 17y ago

What's not entirely clear is which countries will be poor and which ones will be rich two generations down the road. What if it's your children's children who are left to die? It think we do have a chance to end wars once and for all as economies get more interconnected. Traditional geostrategic thinking is obsolete.