Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How We Learned to Kill

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 154 posts

Re: How We Learned to Kill

#121

Post by dredmorbius »

Kiro wrote: post #113
dredmorbius wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not directly. Indirectly, we all kill, all the time. It's an inevitability of life.

> Indirectly, we all kill, all the time. How?

Resource deprivation. Competition. For a number of major nations, foreign wars.

For those in any of the member states of the "Coalition of the Willing", the illegal and unjustified war of aggression against Iraq has resulted in as many as 600,000 deaths (Lancet). That's one for every 512 Americans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War#Ove...

And that's merely human deaths. If you include animals slaughtered or killed in the name of humans (for food or as a consequence of human activity) it's tremendous.

It's about 35 million cattle.

116 millon pigs.

9 billion chickens.

271 million turkeys.

http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Practical/FactoryFarm/U...

And that's for food production.

If you look at wild birds, the numbers are pretty crazy.

100 - 120 million by hunters.

175 million by power transmission lines.

365 million to 1 billion by windows and buildings.

Again: hundreds of millions to a billion creatures killed by what is effectively static structures.

200 million to 3.7 billion by domestic cats.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_wind_p...

I'm not condemning this, actually. As I said, it's a fact of life.

But yes, we kill. All the time.

Re: How We Learned to Kill

#122

Post by gambiting »

vacri wrote: post #116
Scramblejams wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very hard to do if the other side won't agree to sing campfire songs with us too. Especially if they'd rather violently impose Sharia through a worldwide caliphate, to use one contemporary example. Gotta pay the Dhimmi before we can forgive and flourish. Yes, there are a lot of reasonable people on the other side of the line. But the leadership of those reasonable people can, depending on who you're talking abou…

Especially if they'd rather violently impose Sharia through a worldwide caliphate, to use one contemporary example. What a weird example. ISIS wouldn't exist today if it weren't for the US destroying Iraq as a regional power.

But maybe something else would. You don't know that. And there were and are people who want to impose Sharia violently even without ISIS.

Re: How We Learned to Kill

#123

Post by maxerickson »

dredmorbius wrote: post #121
Kiro wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Indirectly, we all kill, all the time. How?

Resource deprivation. Competition. For a number of major nations, foreign wars. For those in any of the member states of the "Coalition of the Willing", the illegal and unjustified war of aggression against Iraq has resulted in as many as 600,000 deaths (Lancet). That's one for every 512 Americans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War#Ove... And that's merely human deaths. If you include animals s…

If we are going to discard the contextual meaning from above (people killing people) we should include the billions of yeast I baked alive the other day. And all the microorganisms I'm digesting incidentally.

Re: How We Learned to Kill

#124

Post by [deleted] »

universaltest wrote: post #96
TeMPOraL wrote: post #37

A very good and honest article. Here's one gem I noticed, right at the end: > I don’t blame Presidents George W. Bush or Barack Obama for these wars. Our elected leaders, after all, are just following orders, no different from the Marine who asks if he can kill a man digging by the side of the road. Exactly. Some people seem to think that the President is the one with the most power, and that he can wield it arbitrar…

While I agree that the President is not really able to shake things up any more than his political allies will allow, the quoted statement does beg the question: Who is handing out the orders? Who is it that we blame for putting soldiers in a position to kill innocents for reasons of such dubious morality?

[deleted]

Re: How We Learned to Kill

#125

Post by gonvaled »

gambiting wrote: post #122
vacri wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially if they'd rather violently impose Sharia through a worldwide caliphate, to use one contemporary example. What a weird example. ISIS wouldn't exist today if it weren't for the US destroying Iraq as a regional power.

But maybe something else would. You don't know that. And there were and are people who want to impose Sharia violently even without ISIS.

If I shoot you and you die, I have killed you. If I hadn't shot you, you would have not died (by my shot).

You would have (maybe) still died by somebody else's shot. You don't know that.

Re: How We Learned to Kill

#126

Post by dredmorbius »

maxerickson wrote: post #123
dredmorbius wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Resource deprivation. Competition. For a number of major nations, foreign wars. For those in any of the member states of the "Coalition of the Willing", the illegal and unjustified war of aggression against Iraq has resulted in as many as 600,000 deaths (Lancet). That's one for every 512 Americans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War#Ove... And that's merely human deaths. If you include animals s…

If we are going to discard the contextual meaning from above (people killing people) we should include the billions of yeast I baked alive the other day. And all the microorganisms I'm digesting incidentally.

Yes, I'd include those.

Life inevitably kills and destroys. Eventually itself.

Re: How We Learned to Kill

#127

Post by maxerickson »

dredmorbius wrote: post #126
maxerickson wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we are going to discard the contextual meaning from above (people killing people) we should include the billions of yeast I baked alive the other day. And all the microorganisms I'm digesting incidentally.

Yes, I'd include those. Life inevitably kills and destroys. Eventually itself.

Under the umbrella of "anyone"?

Re: How We Learned to Kill

#128

Post by jacquesm »

woodman wrote: post #119
vacri wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you volunteer as a soldier to be deployed to a war zone and kill people (or directly support other soldiers killing), you have a special moral responsibility for what happens during a war. and to do what their nation thought necessary and just. The US did not think that invading Iraq was 'just'. Iraq was a defeatable foe, and the war in Afghanistan wasn't producing results. There was nothing 'just' about the inv…

> When you volunteer ... you have a special moral responsibility for what happens during a war. A responsibility for your actions, or everything that happens during the war? What if your voluntary enlistment was due to false information, or steady conditioning by the state since childhood? Does intent play no role? Do you extend that line of thinking to the justice system where manslaughter and murder are treated dif…

You can't really push that sort of responsibility up. You own it.

I'm a conscientious objector because of that, not because I'm a pacifist (far from it). Reduced to the simplest of arguments: if everybody thought that way the only people that would end up pushing for a fight would be the politicians but they never ever want to get their hands dirty, problem solved. Don't be someone else's tool.

As for the 'righteousness of the invasion': I'm not sure if we lived in the same world at the time but from a legal perspective it was - and is - a total sham and UN buy-in hinged on the UN not being lied to which is something that we know for a fact happened.

Colin Powell's stature never recovered after that ill fated speech.

> Because the majority of people, not just Americans, don't deeply consider the morality of things like that.

That's not entirely true either. Flag worshipping, supporting the troops and other nationalistic elements are not equally present in all countries, America has these in spades. Very few countries in the world are so gung-ho about going to war as the US is.

> How about not reelecting a president to a second term when he started the war in the first term?

That's one of the problems right there, America likes to see itself at war against overseas foes, nothing brings out support for the sitting president as a war does. See the Bush quote: "I'm a war president". That made all the difference in getting him re-elected in the first place, critical thinking does not enter into it.

> There is an obligation to refuse illegal orders, this gets back to my point about the majority of people not deeply considering the morality of actions, and deferring to the state.

I've decided that the buck stops with me.

If someone ever invades the country where I live I'll be more than happy to do my bit but in the meantime I won't allow myself to be used as a tool for political ends whose murky origins (business, empire building, posturing, political careerism) are purposefully obscured.

Re: How We Learned to Kill

#129

Post by meric »

bjelkeman-again wrote: post #29
dragonwriter wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We are certainly living in the most peaceful period since the start of the 20th century. Well, no. We're living in a period with less frequent very-high-casualty battles than WWI, WWII, and the Chinese Civil War, to be sure, but that's true of all the parts of the 20th century before, between, and after those wars, as well.

Some research shows that we live in an unusually non-violent time period. "Violence has been in decline over long stretches of time", says Harvard professor Steven Pinker, "and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence" There are a bunch of nice graphs showing this here: http://ourworldindata.org/VisualHistoryOf/Violence.html#/tit...

If that's true, I'd mark the start date for such a period at the end of the Cultural Revolution.

List of conflicts with over 1 million deaths:

        1850-1864 Taiping Rebellion: 20 million deaths.
        1914-1918 World War 1: 37 million deaths.
        1917-1922 Russian Civil war: 9 million deaths.
        1928-1936 Chinese Civil War: 2 million deaths
        1937-1945 Second Sino-Japanese War: ~25 million deaths.
        1939-1945 World War 2: 60 million deaths.
        1945-1949 Chinese Civil War: 6 million deaths.
        1950-1953 Korean War: 4 million deaths.
        1966-1971 Chinese Cultural Revolution: 30 million deaths.
        1955-1975 Vietnam War: 3 million deaths.
        1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War: 1 million deaths.
        1998-2003 Second Congo War 1-5 million deaths.
Defining a non-violent period as "a period in which there are no conflicts with more than 1 million deaths",

The previous violent period lasted from 1914 to 1971. The current non-violent period has lasted 54 years since 1971. The previous non-violent period close to this long lasted from 1864 to 1914, which is 50 years.

Sure, as the world population grew, the size of conflicts haven't been growing to match, but in absolute terms I think there is good chance there will be at least several million+ deaths conflicts upcoming in the current century.

Re: How We Learned to Kill

#130

Post by [deleted] »

bjelkeman-again wrote: post #29
dragonwriter wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We are certainly living in the most peaceful period since the start of the 20th century. Well, no. We're living in a period with less frequent very-high-casualty battles than WWI, WWII, and the Chinese Civil War, to be sure, but that's true of all the parts of the 20th century before, between, and after those wars, as well.

Some research shows that we live in an unusually non-violent time period. "Violence has been in decline over long stretches of time", says Harvard professor Steven Pinker, "and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence" There are a bunch of nice graphs showing this here: http://ourworldindata.org/VisualHistoryOf/Violence.html#/tit...

[deleted]
Post reply on HN