Life is one big war.
Just because you live in a pleasant neighbourhood, doesn't mean there are no malevolent people in the world...
To be more specific, many of the worst people have lived through some truly horrible childhoods (often experiencing war and poverty as a child). Stop the cycle of war and poverty, and then see how naturally malevolent people are.
We have the productivity to afford that; we just have chosen to consolidate it to a relative few.
It’s all pointless moralizing. Sure, prosperity may reduce war. I tend to think MAD and global trade have done most of the reducing. But just dismissing war as if you have some superior moral compass to anyone with absolutely no sign of any insight to reduce it, or understanding of why it happens, just reeks of privilege and cheap moralizing that I’d prefer stay on Twitter and Reddit.
Who's responsibility is it to meet these needs?
So far it is only a hypothesis, that war can be avoided if people just would not starve anymore.
(I don't think there was really hunger in europe pre WW1 for example)
Also, assuming we would distribute ressources equally (nevermind the political means to achieve that for a moment):
It no doubt would be enough for everyone today.
But the world population is already going steeply up - with people starving.
So if it would go even much more up, if no one would be starving - would it then also be enough for 10 billion people? 20 billion? How much more roundup can the fields take?
So don't get me wrong. A world with no wars and where no one has to starve is definitely a noble cause I agree to. I just thinkt it is not so easy, if it is possible at all, since there was never a time in human history without. We don't know whether it can work out at all.
IIRC gaining and ensuring continued access to food production centers in central Europe was one of Germany's primary motivating factors leading into WWI.
So it was more about hunger for power. Because sure, owning something is better than having to buy something.
I would still consider WWI the last hurrah of prestige wars (where an essentially divine monarch instigated war for personal reasons and had the authority to enforce his will over the entire nation) but the hardships were real going into it.
Content people tend to lean away from conflict - the marshall plan in europe seems to bear that out pretty clearly in my eyes. I think it's a rather successful demonstration of the fact that stability breeds peace and, honestly, the US military agrees with me... a decent chunk of money in Iraqi Freedom was invested into infrastructure repair and, especially, education.
To achieve peace you need to make life worth more than death.
I agree to that, but I would add, that the monarch did not had to enforce their will on the nation. At least germany was very willing to go cheering into war. And I believe england, too and france (without a monarch), too. In russia it was more enforced, but the tsar eventually lost his power and life over it.
It was a nationalistic war - each side fought for the glory and power of their nation (whether with a monarch, or not). And maybe yes, the last big hurah war - where war was welcomed by the majority of the population.
WW2 had to be presented as neccessary and forced upon from the outside. Even in Nazi-germany. Some youth went into the fight eagerly, but most of the elder generations had way too many memories of the last one, which was not so glorious alltoghether.
(Oh and I certainly do not have a rose tinted view of pre WW1.)
The interesting part is that it is only really going up in nations that have not yet the comfort-level of western civilizations. I don't have the exact numbers at hand but in most European countries, and I guess vast parts of the US too, the population is actually stagnant or even shrinking if immigration is not considered.
Meaning, if peoples culture does not change, but the avaiable food does - we get the "unwanted" result of the ugly word of overpopulation - or birth control. Which is ugly as hell, too.
Absolutely not. Fertility rates have been going down steadily for decades in every developed nation - when children are no longer a requirement to have someone that will care for you once you reach old age, fertility rates start to drop.
It happens. But not overnight. And being rich in children is not only viewed as retirement savings, there are other reasons too ... which might change with general development. But again, maybe not overnight. Which was the scenario I was talking about.
True, but the growth rate is on a steady decline and looks like it will be negative soon. https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/#growthrate
And absent the threat of violent force, how do you suppose we take that productivity from this relative few? My government threatens me with penalties and imprisonment if I don't give up my "fair share" via various taxes. And if I resist that, they use weapons to force me to comply.
Are you not just trading one definition of war for another?
That's the rub. Your responsibility is determined by the mob. If you resist, the mob, via the justice system, forces you to comply with the threat of physical violence.
If I resist with force, is that not war? If two of us resist with force, is that not war? If 10000 of us resist with force, is that not war? Was the Civil War not war?
Is it really any more poetic when it's done by large groups of people than when it's done by a few?
Let's assume the US would reach this point — how would it look from the inside? Would the downfall happen fast or would it spawn decades? What if we are already in it?
The US could spend half of what it currently spends on the military and still be twice as powerful in terms of military force as the rest of the world combined. I'd argue investing a chunk of that money in domestic infrastructure, healthcare, poverty and a chunk of it in diplomacy would give you a more powerful US in two decades than if you would raise military spending even more.
Do you have a source for that?
I broadly agree that we should spend less on our military, but this is untrue on a couple major counts.
Firstly, the US doesn't outspend the rest of the world combined. This is a talking point that started going viral some time in the early 2010's (I think it was on some TV show?), but the statistic is misleading because it compares nominal dollar amounts rather than PPP adjusted dollars. When you do that adjustment, the next 2 countries combined outspend the US[1]. This is important because (1) the personnel in each country are paid in the wages commensurate the cost-of-living of the home country (e.g. the wage for a Chinese soldier is 1/10 the wage of an American soldier in nominal dollars), and (2) military goods aren't global commodities; the US can't procure its equipment from China like it does every other good, it has to procure them either domestically or from allies which are typically high purchasing power countries. A single nominal US dollar goes a lot further in China's or India's military than it does in the US's, and that needs to be accounted for in these comparisons. PPP adjustment isn't perfect in this context, but it's much less wrong and vulnerable to low hanging fruit criticism than simply using nominal amounts.
Secondly, I think the percentage of the Federal budget that's spent on the military is overstated. It's not even close to being the biggest line item; it accounts for 15% of the Federal budget[2], and much much lower than that (about 8%) when you look at military spending as a percentage of total government expenditure across all levels of government. The lion's share of spending today is already healthcare and welfare.
Thirdly, I think that the actual cost of healthcare et al are understated; in FY2019 the US government spent $676 billion on Defense, while the cost of healthcare every year by most estimates amounts to $3 trillion per year. Even if you were to divert the entire military budget to healthcare, you'd have to find $2T somewhere.
While I agree that we should spend less on fighting and war (because I dislike fighting and war), military spending is a convenient scapegoat for other problems, the solutions for which are not so simple.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/gijt81/oc_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/...
How much violence is necessary to create your violence-free utopia?
If some level of violence is necessary to ensure peace, the people entrusted with the power to inflict said violence should be compassionate and wise humans not, "rough men".
And at the same time we should be putting our resources to work at lowering that necessary level of violence.
Maybe we don't need rough men, but men who won't let themselves be sold as fools for yet another geopolitical proxy war. A war with questionable (and arguably even negative!) results for our all safety. Because if we look at the last 3 decades of war, I am not too sure if the net result made the world a safer place. Yeah some geoplitical or monetary interests got defended, a lot of people made money, a lot of people lost their lives, many war crimes fuled a entirely new generation of terrorists, but if this would have been about saving lifes the money would have been better invested in healthcare or the prevention of future pandemics.
Also, I don't follow the spirit of your comment. The United Nations came out of WW2. And the US is a key member of those coalitions against any malevolent regimes.
Just how it works. A direct threat isn't a thing anymore of relevance when you're a member of a coalition.
there’s no end to the abuses of the US military around the world, and MS is helping these killers in exchange of money.
US taxpayer money is being spent in protecting Saudi Arabia and Pakistan two largest sponsors of all kind of Salafi terrorism all around the world. Most of the terrorists were funded and armed by USA.
Entire south american political instability has USA behind it.
The military is important as a show of force to crazies, but if we diverted a good chunk of the cash that goes to it to raise the standard of living here and abroad then the need for conflict could be minimized.
edit: it's a scene where this exact conversation is playing out.
is so extremely far from
> Life is one big war.
It's an interesting idea to see them in the same post.
"Bad people exist; better prepare for all of humanity to be bad"