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Fritz Haber: A Monster Who Fed the World

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Re: Fritz Haber: A Monster Who Fed the World

#121

Post by bzbarsky »

jessaustin wrote: post #115
bzbarsky wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That has never happened in my lifetime or that of my parents. Unless your parents are really young, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War is an obvious counterexample. There was a reasonably clear goal and the goal was accomplished. I will grant that this is the only example I can think of right now, though.

I was in high school then, and unlike others I actually remember the bullshit I hear on the news. We were told that it wasn't like Korea, because the troops would come home immediately. To the contrary, the continued presence (to the present day!) of USA military in Kuwait, Iraq, and especially Saudi destabilized the Middle East and was the primary motivator for the author of 9/11. If evicting Iraqis from Kuwait was…

I think listening to the news to figure out what goals anyone has is a pretty lost cause. The news anchors will say things that have no bearing on reality. People they interview will say things that have only slightly more bearing on reality, maybe.

I agree that keeping troops in place after the war was a bit questionable. Though one does need to answer the "OK, we kick Iraq out, what keeps them from coming back?" question. Which was answered in a ham-handed way, if at all. Keeping troops in Kuwait maybe made sense. Keeping troops in Saudi... one of the ostensible goals was in fact to prevent an Iraqi invasion of Saudi, not just to kick Iraq out of Kuwait. I do think in retrospect this was a bad idea. It's harder to tell how it looked at the time, and in particular what the Saudi government was telling the US government.

Re: Fritz Haber: A Monster Who Fed the World

#122

Post by ribs »

soneca wrote: post #17

"Billions of people would not exist without him. And yet without him, World War I would have ended years earlier" The article is very interesting, but there is this Hollywood simplistic approach where one man is responsible for all things. The text even mention the Allies developing a poison gas, why not other German chemic? No one other person would be able to discover how to produce amonia? I don't subscribe to thi…

The story isn’t about ammonia; it’s about Haber.

Re: Fritz Haber: A Monster Who Fed the World

#123

Post by Symmetry »

zeveb wrote: post #87

Wow, the article is full of just enough half-truths that I wonder what its real intent was. You get the impression from it that Germany was the first to use chemical weapons in the Great War — but it wasn't: France started, with the use of tear gas. Use of gas projectors did not violate the 1899 Hague Declaration against use of gas-filled projectiles. Use of irritants like chlorine arguably didn't violate the 1904 Ha…

The Germans argued at the time that their use of poison gas didn't violate the Hague Convention because they released it from dispensers on the ground rather than from gas-filled projectiles. But that was seen as a technicality by the Allies and the whole convention quickly went out the window.

Re: Fritz Haber: A Monster Who Fed the World

#126

Post by jessaustin »

bzbarsky wrote: post #121
jessaustin wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in high school then, and unlike others I actually remember the bullshit I hear on the news. We were told that it wasn't like Korea, because the troops would come home immediately. To the contrary, the continued presence (to the present day!) of USA military in Kuwait, Iraq, and especially Saudi destabilized the Middle East and was the primary motivator for the author of 9/11. If evicting Iraqis from Kuwait was…

I think listening to the news to figure out what goals anyone has is a pretty lost cause. The news anchors will say things that have no bearing on reality. People they interview will say things that have only slightly more bearing on reality, maybe. I agree that keeping troops in place after the war was a bit questionable. Though one does need to answer the "OK, we kick Iraq out, what keeps them from coming back?" qu…

Kuwait's position, of a rich weak nation with no military alliances bordering a hungry strong one, was somewhat untenable. It is folly to fight a war for a short-term benefit. If spanking Saddam and then leaving would so obviously result in his invading Kuwait again, then the decision to deploy was effectively a decision to deploy indefinitely [0]. That was also folly. One can forgive impermanent mistakes, however. In retrospect, withdrawing troops soon after they repelled Iraq and then encouraging fracking in USA would have been a better decision. It was certainly discussed at the time, and Korea was certainly mentioned in those discussions. The reason we didn't "choose" to do that, is that military-industrial complex would have made much less money in that case. That's always true, however. An ineffective military that is always fighting is an eternal fountain of money for them.

[0] One supposes that another option would have been to disrupt the governance of Iraq such that it would stop invading Kuwait, but later experience suggests that could also have had its drawbacks...

Re: Fritz Haber: A Monster Who Fed the World

#127

Post by logfromblammo »

jessaustin wrote: post #112
arca_vorago wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, without going to deep down the rabbit hole, I think I'll put it like this: At best, wars are primarily a tool of the bankers and the international elite in a path towards control of all countries economic and physical resources. They finance and play both sides, and no matter the victor, they win. This is essentially the John Perkins position. Even John Perkins claims there is no "grand conspiracy" though... an…

Thanks for the pointers. Haha "Hanlon's Fallacy" I love it! I'll definitely be repeating that one. I agree that the first step is taking stock of all the lies. There are some obvious untruths that most Americans physically can't even consider, let alone disagree with, because they've been lied to from childhood. My current favorite is, "USA military is powerful and effective". Historians to come will puzzle over how…

The US military is powerful and effective, just not in the way you might think.

First, discard any notions you may have regarding "winning" wars or "mission accomplished". The military hasn't been at war in a de jure legal sense since 1945. But it has been involved nearly continuously in de facto wars ever since then.

Is the world really such a dangerous place? Or is there another hypothesis that might explain it?

Here's one: the US military is an instrument for moving public funds from the Treasury into private hands with little or no public oversight, designed to work equally well when popular opinions swing in favor of the military or against it. To this end, media channels and public relations outlets are controlled through the use of financial incentives and proactively crafted narratives.

Milo Minderbinder is in charge. The US military spends $600 billion every year. Powerful means of moving money. Only $150 billion goes to personnel. Effective? Depends on what you think the intent may be.

Re: Fritz Haber: A Monster Who Fed the World

#128

Post by soneca »

aje403 wrote: post #109
icebraining wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a non-sequitur; you just hadn't claimed that we needed to overstate the credit. I'm skeptical. What leads you to conclude that we need to pretend that people did more than what they did, or otherwise we wouldn't have computers and governments? I'd say we have plenty of inventions more important than computers whose authors were never really recognized, at least in their lifetimes. Were the inventors of the t…

Choosing the word "overstate" was extremely poor word choice on my part, given my argument. The "statedness" of the success is subjective, regardless. If we, as a society, did not assign degrees of greatness to accomplishments, there would not really be any. You're free to disagree, but to me, this is an obvious conclusion of human nature and history. Do famous politicians deserve their place in history, given that t…

Not sure what "inalienably correct" means, but I guess it means you are not open to change your mind or open to debate, so I will just stand my point of view to justify my initial comment.

I didnt imply causation to Hollywood, I just used it as an adjective. I agree that storytelling with heroes personification is very common in humankind since always (since there is written documents at least). It happens that Hollywood became a thing by replicating this phenomena in fiction, so I think is very fit to use it as a qualifier.

But I disagree that this human characteristic is the cause behind human progress.

Collaboration was a human evolutionary advantage, so I think human are more naturally colaborative that competitive, at least intra tribe size levels.

I also think that humans seek recognition among peers - and a peer has a very broad and flexible definition, not necessarily recognition from history. So I disagree that highly focused scientists motivation is to be like historical figures. They want that recognition in life, from peers, not historians.

Still, I also think recognition from others is not the sole motivation for all human endeavors, not even the biggest factor.

Re: Fritz Haber: A Monster Who Fed the World

#129

Post by oh_sigh »

groby_b wrote: post #75
loorinm wrote: post #2

What an insane and fascinating read. Two things occured to me: I don’t really understand how and why war happens. Like, it starts out as two parties both wanting the same resource, and then somebody says “over my dead body” or something and then a million other people decide to also join in this fight? I do not get it. The other thing is : The “inherent harm of technology”. Every single advancement will 100% hurt som…

Well, good thing is we're all getting an object lesson right now. Watch North Korea and the U.S. interact. That is how war happens. Leaders who for various reasons taunt and provoke each other, implementing what to either populace seems a reasonable policy. (NK would like to be able to defend against the US, so they get nukes. The US would like to not be nuked, so they agitate strongly against them). Alas, these poli…

Except this isn't really how wars happen, because the US and NK have been trading barbs since ... the 1950s, even though we are technically still at war with them, there is nothing akin to a hot war, or anything radically different from the status quo, anywhere on the horizon

Re: Fritz Haber: A Monster Who Fed the World

#130

Post by mannykannot »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #119
mannykannot wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no doubt that if he had not solved the nitrogen-fixing problem, someone else would have, and it is certainly possible that someone else would have pushed the use of poison gas into practice. It is also generally simplistic to claim that any one thing greatly prolonged the war. 'Great men' and 'pivotal event' historiography is a simplistic way of looking at the past, but nevertheless, it is a simple historica…

I think people take special people for granted. You can't say, for certain, that anyone would have figured out the nitrogen fixing problem _in a period of time when it would have been effective to have done so_. The entire world could have been blown up before someone came along to figure it out. The world has yet to churn out another mind quite like Einstein's, that flips convention on its head, or opens up humankin…

You are right; I cannot say for certain that someone else would have solved the nitrogen fixing problem in time to save humanity from global starvation, but for it not to happen, it would have required a lot of chemists to all not perform the sort of experiments that chemists are trained, employed and choose to do.

Having read somewhat widely, as a kid, about the history of technology, I was struck by how often several people were working independently on the same ideas at the same time, but that is not so surprising once you realize that the timing is often determined by when some prerequisite knowledge became available, or some prerequisite capability was mastered. Einstein stands among the most original thinkers of all time, but even he was standing on the shoulders of people like Heaviside, Fitzgerald and Lorentz (and Maxwell, of course) - yet the first three, at least, are invisible in popular historiography.

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