81–90 of 237 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quite an odd comment to make in the midst of the Ukraine war, another war between Israel and Palestine, and the ongoing civil wars in Sudan and Burma.
it's all relative. the order of operations is M&A, diplomacy, warfare.
The thing is without force your stuff gets taken. We haven't got a good way around this. Our current peace is heavily based on nuclear weapons and the implied threat of force. Don't like the status quo? Use force to try to change it. Do like the status quo? Use force to try to keep it that way. We don't have a stable equiliubrium where no force exists in the system. Many in this thread effectively say "You can do wha…
Consider it an economic problem. War costs money, therefore war will be conducted when its benefits exceed its costs. What makes war profitable? For that you need to know the benefits of war. The most obvious benefit is the changing of borders and conquering of new land. Now you might say that it always makes sense for a country to try to conquer the enire world, because having the land grants you access to its riche…
Internal strife shows this. In Africa where farms were taken with force with no planning on what happened next the agricultural economy collapsed.
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You have a nice theory there, would be a shame if something happened to it. I played this older computer civilization-like space game. In it, there was an hyperaggressive race that always went to war with everybody. They always died out first. I think conflict will always exist, but violence? I am not sure. I think it comes down to availability of information. People don't like a*holes. Once world becomes a global vi…
If Rebel Moon and the Demolition Man taught us anything, is that even when 8bn people will be spied upon, there will be some that will object this and fight it tooth and nail. (Oh and History teaches that)
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1945 gave us a way out of this equilibrium. Not the nukes. The Bretton Woods principles. It was not a kumbayah exchange of platitudes. It was an agreement to let things be settled in the free market. Want more oil from Nigeria? Offer them more money than the other buyers. Want to fish the waters around Tuvalu? Radio them and offer more money. Want Congolese cobalt? Same idea. This was the brainchild of John Maynard K…
That doesn't make sense. > Want more oil from Nigeria? Offer them more money than the other buyers. How about I offer them some lead to sweeten the deal? As in, take my lower offer or else ? > Want to fish the waters around Tuvalu? Radio them and offer more money. Or I'll just go fishing because what ever Tuvalu can do to me? > Want Congolese cobalt? Same idea. The idea works when the players have no better choice th…
The problem with MAD is that it is human nature not to assume that your own destruction will occur. Which ends up meaning that these gentlemen's agreements like open skies and free inspections are more necessary than you'd intuitively assume. MAD only works if the human on the other side truly believes that he will be destroyed.
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half of those are not proxy wars in any way shape or form.
In the era of the atomic bomb, conventional war no longer takes place directly between tier 1 (nuclear) powers because the rulers can’t have that. The rulers on both sides ultimately want to enjoy their wealth and power. They want to go to the brothel at the end of the day. So they won’t risk getting into a nuclear war. This is even truer in the era of Globalism where enjoying wealth and power generally means enjoyin…
The whole thing is assuming that men drive progress and war drives progress, and both of those things are debatable.
A few examples: - Germany rose to power in the 1800s, with a culmination at Sedan in 1870, driven by the humiliation Napoleon inflected on 60 years earlier. In 1870, Germany was a behemoth of technology (especially chemistry) & industry - France won WW1 with such heavy losses that its people said “never again” (they called WW1 the “Great War” or the “last war”). War left an indelible mark (one wished it had left the same mark on the German).
Many such examples. Countries compete and war is a great impetus to modernize the Nation.
The thing is without force your stuff gets taken. We haven't got a good way around this. Our current peace is heavily based on nuclear weapons and the implied threat of force. Don't like the status quo? Use force to try to change it. Do like the status quo? Use force to try to keep it that way. We don't have a stable equiliubrium where no force exists in the system. Many in this thread effectively say "You can do wha…
1945 gave us a way out of this equilibrium. Not the nukes. The Bretton Woods principles. It was not a kumbayah exchange of platitudes. It was an agreement to let things be settled in the free market. Want more oil from Nigeria? Offer them more money than the other buyers. Want to fish the waters around Tuvalu? Radio them and offer more money. Want Congolese cobalt? Same idea. This was the brainchild of John Maynard K…
You need a hegemon for peace. Are you familiar with Japanese history? It was not until unification that the wars stopped. Finally there was a hegemon who brought peace by acting as the ultimate arbiter of power. The same thing happened to the "first world". A dominant hegemon emerged in the form of the US. This hegemon set the rules and made it so nobody needed to worry about their neighbors. A hegemon is the only way you can get peace in an environment that is otherwise anarchic.
In an ideal future, firearms would be banned worldwide. A body like interpol would investigate the entire world, to surveil if anybody is trying to make firearms. People would make bows and spears, but it would be more difficult to conduct war. It would not make war and violence impossible, but it would certainly be a better world. EDIT: lots of pedants: obviously there would be an joint army answering to an internat…
And that body would need firearms.
Firearms aren't the problem. It's states because states use firearms to get resources with which to conduct war. But states are unavoidable because without states we'd have caudillos -- warlords, heads of tiny states that will in due time coalesce into large states, and we're back at square one.
A single world state wouldn't be a solution for the same reason that larger states have at times fallen apart into smaller states: there will be resentments and tyranny. Indeed, a single world state would have to be tyrannical just in order to stay together, and its government would be highly non-representative for natural reasons, namely that having it be highly-representative would mean it having -impractically- hundreds of thousands of representatives.
You're not the first to think that extreme violence could bring peace, but it's an illusion. Huge majorities of humans must know internal peace and have tremendous wisdom for us to enjoy peace on Earth.
In an ideal future, firearms would be banned worldwide. A body like interpol would investigate the entire world, to surveil if anybody is trying to make firearms. People would make bows and spears, but it would be more difficult to conduct war. It would not make war and violence impossible, but it would certainly be a better world. EDIT: lots of pedants: obviously there would be an joint army answering to an internat…
i have a really small machine shop and some scrap steel. i could make a functional but probably unsafe gun, and with some practice make useful weapons. are you going to audit all the use of carbide cutting inserts in the world? make sure you understand where every last pound of steel goes? the genie left that bottle more than a hundred years ago
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How exactly would we eliminate the scarcity of land?
Terraforming or depopulation. I prefer the former.
I presume land ownership is according to a power law (~money). Perhaps just need to "depopulate" extremely large land owners?