(One might think this line of reasoning that some people apply is a coping mechanism to ignore the reality, but that might be a different conversation)
If I fall 100 feet once, I won't.
1m people dying in 1 day is not the same as 1M people dying over a decade.
Also. People generally dont fear death itself. This is expressed by people in pallitative care. Its the chaos and uncertainty preceding death that is really feared
Mitigation of bike and pedestrian deaths is cheap. Just reform land use, advantage people over vehicles. Oops, now you're into culture and values.
Mitigation of cancer deaths is very expensive. Though we didn't invent cancer, we feel the moral imperative to "cure" it. And yet, while we're mitigating it, we're also making it worse. Cross purposes. What's your balance sheet for this conundrum?
Drugs kill lots of people. We own that one, right? How's the War on Drugs working out?
In conclusion, I wish I could wave away these dilemmas with a cute nominator and denominator. But I can barely reason about them before my head explodes. So I'm not buying what you're selling. Life's a bit more complicated, a bit more empirical, a bit less rational, than your tidy equations.
"Worrying is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you anywhere. Write that down." - Van Wilder
It demonstrably does. Nuclear arms reduction treaties have been enacted in the past and it is hard to believe that it would have happened without the popular support it enjoyed.
Just because we are at a time in history where many of those treatise have been weakened or left by the wayside shouldn't be a reason for us to forget them and the good they did.
> Our mental stacks can only run so deep & I'd wager for most of us, the things that are in our sphere of influence simply take priority.
It's a challenge to look beyond ourselves, but we must have the courage to do so. Many people here have the resources to act in the interest of their family, their neighborhood, their community, and their country. It's hard not to be selfish. We can't all afford not to be. Most of us can, however.
It's also important, however, not to equivocate between totalitarian regimes like Russia and (albeit imperfectly) open democracies like the USA in instances like this. Just because no government is without sin does not mean they are all the same.
Humans love telling stories about the superiority of this or that. Humans hate wondering if these stories are true. Most cannot even try.
A better comparison would be climate change vs nukes. If you have the time to worry about the former, you should also worry about the latter since if the nukes go off, we won't even get a chance to get killed by the environment.
Some of the hammers such as the hammer representing nuclear weapons - are caused by people and can be solved by people. There's a big game theoretic hill to climb over, but social pressure and advocacy have been effective at making progress. Others, like cancer and general senescence, are more of a looming threat that's a fundamental characteristic of biology, we can (and should) worry at them to make incremental progress but we're unlikely to suddenly eliminate them. The murder rate is enormously dependent on individual location and individual relationships. Traffic/bicycle/pedestrian accidents are enormously dependent on individual behavior.
Of those threats, addressing the problem of nuclear weapons - especially for a member of Nihon Hidankyo, with a personal and persuasive story of the damages these weapons caused - is probably near the top of the list for actions which can have the greatest positive change.
Until you have children and future generations to worry about. Then it suddenly seems quite a bit more pressing that their world could be obliterated at a moment's notice by a small handful of decision makers.
Living in the future is a silly affair. There’s only one moment and it’s the present.
Gee, I hope the people in charge don't think "the nuclear threat isn't worth worrying about"
"So now I carry my own!"
It just so happens that most people in the West are comfortable, are completely insulated from the consequences of war, and can't even imagine a regular war happening to them.
And nuclear war is so much more horrifying and its consequences are so much beyond the pale, that people can't even think of what it would mean.
One of my great disappointments after 9/11 was that U.S. citizens were not, by and large, asked/expected to make any sacrifices (other than our liberties). It felt that if we were at war, we should all be contributing, but it seemed to me that our value as consumers was more important than as citizens.
I don't understand this. Between Iran and the Russia/Ukraine conflict, they seem to be very top of mind for many.
(Considering what's been happening in Ukraine and Palestine I would like for the Netherlands to obtain nukes. If we ever get invaded we can at least take out 50 million of the enemy with us to hell).
Definitely false. They were never the slam dunk that they were supposed to be, and it's true to say their effect has been significantly blunted. But that's not the same as "no effect". It's just turned out to be a comparatively mild one (but important nonetheless).
I really don't know what the F* they are thinking but they keep pushing further and further and hope there is no elastic snap. It's like they forgot about diplomacy with enemies --at the height of the cold war, at its Apex in the Cuba Missile Crisis, we had communication with the enemy --it was inconceivable we would not have communications with them but now it's a wild west of bluster and provocation. I'm not saying were not right in tamping down aggression, but you have to be cognizant of the perils that exist.
Quite striking is strident opponents of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki decision have few qualms about the prospects of current escalation. It's insane.
- a geographical misconception - for example, India is part of the Northern Hemisphere and a lot of Western aligned countries are in the Southern Hemisphere like Australia, New Zealand, Argentina;
- a population size misconception, where the propaganda states the majority of the world population is in the south - 850 million people live in the southern hemisphere;
- It's a sign of imperialism - no countries from the actual Southern Hemisphere elected Russia as their representatives and to speak for them about their ideas, grievances, or ideology.
But there’s still a number of things about this situation that make the comparison flimsy. The relationship between the west and Russia was - and actually still is - significantly less tense than the relationship between the Soviets and the west during the Cold War, for one.
But moreover, the way everything went down was very different.
In the CMC, the Soviets installed their missiles, the US caught wind of this, and pursued a diplomatic solution. The public was, generally, made aware of what was going on and what was at stake.
Ukraine was not made a member of NATO - it hadn’t even applied. At no point did Russia even rattle any sabres, offer red lines, or pursue diplomacy. Russia built up its forces along the border in secret and launched a surprise invasion. From the jump they’ve been offering shifting explanations for the “special military operation” - is it about NATO expansion or “de-Nazification”? - which is one reason why we shouldn’t take any of those explanations especially seriously.
I don't think you're paying attention. Bush's invite of Ukraine and Georgia into NATO in 2007 (against the opinion of France and Germany) was probably a cause of Russian invasion into South Ossetia.
And just about recently a newly chosen top NATO chief has been promoting path for Ukraine to enter NATO (and so-called "West Germany model"), despite that Putin clearly demanded Ukraine neutrality and NATO's own rule about not admitting members with an ongoing territorial disputes.
I can hardly imagine how could Russians be clearer about opposing NATO expansion.
That's a very confusing statement because Russia signed agreements, charters and memorandums that clearly stated that every country is entitled to their own economic and defensive alliances.
So it's not clear at all - and even if it was clear, then it should become imperative to have Ukraine join NATO as soon as possible to make it blatantly clear that Russia can't dictate what other sovereign nations choose for their economic and defensive alliances.
The real question is: why aren't Russians questioning and making their government accountable for not following their agreements and destroying decades of diplomacy for the sake of one man?
Bush did not "invite" those countries to join NATO. Only NATO can do that, and it famously chose not to do that at the Bucharest Summit the following year (and to explicitly deny those countries invites), precisely because of France and Germany's objections. I'm not sure what you think you can gain here by attempting to spin the situation into the opposite of what it was.
Regardless - the "cause" of what Russian armed forces did in Georgia in 2008 was Putin's ordering them to. Nothing the West did made or "caused" him to do anything.
I can hardly imagine how could Russians be clearer about opposing NATO expansion.
Post-2022 the discussion is entirely moot, and I don't see why the world should begin to care what the current Russian regime thinks about NATO at this point.
NATO expansion was never the real reason for that invasion - but once Putin chose to go in, he completely extinguished whatever moral capital Russia may have had that issue.
To be fair, without saying that their position is a defensible one- they've been pretty vocal about Ukraine not becoming aligned with the West for almost 20 years now if not longer, and politicians in the West have been vocal about the exact opposite for at least as long. I see people saying online that what's happening now was completely irrational and unexpected but that's not really true. We know it's a sore point for them and have been goading them with a "will we won't we" over a clear red line they've drawn for a long while now. https://www.rferl.org/a/1079726.html
> NATO expansion?
You seem to have forgotten all the agreements, charters, and memorandums the Soviet Union and Russia signed stating that Sovereign Countries are entitled to their own alliances and strategic partnerships. You also seem to have forgotten that even Putin hinted at Clinton the idea of Russia joining NATO. Regarding Ukraine, the population only started to care to join NATO after 2014, but started to trend since the invasion of Georgia.
Even Gorbachev himself - the man who was allegedly involved in that so-called "no NATO expansion" myth said it was a lie and a myth[0]. I didn't even make logical sense to have such a red line.
> Alleged discrimination against the Russian majority in Eastern Ukraine?
So you invaded and annex a country in a genocidal war based on "alleged discrimination"? Who did something similar to this... ah yeah... Nazi Germany also made up some discrimination stories about ethnic germans being under threat by polish people.
> Alleged foreign interference in the Maidan revolution?
Another conspiracy theory and lie... God forbid Ukrainians having the capacity to revolt against a president who turned his back on Ukrainians will to join the EU, in exchange for a deal under the table with Russia that no one knew the terms of.
Oh and by the way, the US wanted Yanukovich to remain president - it was the overwhelming majority of the parliament that didn't want the corrupt fellow in power any longer.
At least get your facts straight, with a little bit of research you can get access to this information.
Briefly summarized: Power is being able to say something false, that the audience knows is false, that the speaker knows the audience knows is false, and that the audience knows that the speaker knows the audience knows is false -- but the audience can't/wont speak up.
I predict that future history books will observe a certain amount of care and diplomatic engagement in our era that isn't visible from the press releases and the ways in which politicians want to be seen.
That leaves China and Russia. We learned during the Cold War that a policy of aggressive containment is effective and this should continue. Don't give them an inch.