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Comment by pmarreck | Hacker News Reader

If you consider war as (among other things) "a contest" (albeit a very grim one), do any of you think there'd ever be any traction in settling disputes via something more sportsmanlike and without such fatality and waste of human life on both sides? I am reminded of the pistol duels of ages ago (although those were often fatal). Something that could test the "will and skill" of opponents who agree to settle it in such a fashion...

I'm also reminded of the flavor of the Olympic Games during the Cold War as almost a "proxy war" between the Soviets and the U.S.

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No, because a symbolic contest is not final in the way that the physical imposition of force is: a country who loses a symbolic contest has limited incentive to abide by the symbolic outcome if they believe they can nevertheless impose their will on the other country by force. Wars end when contestants lose the will or the ability to resist the will of the opponent.

There can and should be other options to settle differences, but in the end, people and groups who have gone through all the other options will still always have the choice to simply physically resist the outcome, and there is no other counter to that than sufficient physical force to overcome the resistance. War is the final arbiter, stupid as it is.

> War is the final arbiter, stupid as it is.

Perhaps when it comes to sovereign states, but with individuals you have things like tort law, instead of simply killing the person you have a dispute with. Why couldn't there be something like that on the international level?

What incentivises individuals to obey the decisions of courts? In the end, again, it's force, as monopolized by the state. If you don't abide by the court's decision, the state will take measures against you: it will impose fines, garnish wages, take away various privileges, and ultimately imprison you. If there were no such unpleasant and inevitable consequences, many people would simply ignore a tort judgment against them.

Was this the original idea of the UN? (Which has since oft been criticized for "having no teeth")

There are examples of this principle[1], where each side would send a representative or representatives to fight on their behalf. Perhaps the most well known example of this is (at least in my cultural context) is David and Goliath in the Old Testament

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_combat

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