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Comment by yibg | Hacker News Reader

Probably more fluid details than today where someone can push a button and level a building 1000 miles away without seeing the faces of any of the people torn to shreds. Maybe there would be less appetite for war if people had to still physically hack up their enemies with a sword or axe.

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There was an idea that the key to the nuclear launch codes should be surgically implanted adjacent to the heart of the president’s assistant. If the president should desire to launch the nukes, they would have to personally cut down a man and pull the key from the man’s entrails.

It was essentially not done because it would be too effective.

It’s John von Neumann’s idea, at least from the biography I read. Before too much praise is heaped upon him, he also strongly argued for a nuclear first strike on Soviet Union before they got their own nuclear weapons because it was best strategy from game theory POV.

I think there is a general distance to a lot of things in today's society. Very few of us have to farm or hunt for our own food, or clean an animal carcass. I don't have a strong view on the moral aspects of eating animals (I'm not a vegetarian or vegan), but I think it'll probably do some good if anyone that eats meat at some point slaughters, cleans and butchers one of the animals they eat.

I agree, a society shielded from blood either grows callous to it as long as the blood is somebody else's or becomes too traumatised to even defend itself even if the aggressor is perfectly fine killing them

"It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it." - Robert E. Lee

I think it was Call of Duty 2 (when the franchise was still WW2-based) when they would show, in my recollection, an anti-war message including this one every time your character died. I think this was absent from later incarnations of the franchise.

Cod 4, World at War, and MW2(?) also did this to my memory. At least one of them did for sure. Not always necessarily anti-war, but historical quotes related to war.

Thanks, I didn’t recall

And the quotes showed up longer, like 5 seconds, so you could read them in full. Later games would display the quote for 1-2 seconds, which often wouldn’t be enough time to process the full text

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