let the arguing begin.
Brave new world here we come. :roll:
All this talk about kids really cracks me up though - everyone is so obsessed with squeezing every little bit out of 'em but no one actually wants to HAVE them. Russia, Japan, most of western Europe all in serious population decline, Canada barely breaking even etc.
quality, not quantity jason. Write that down.
Quantity has a quality of its own and western social paradigms simply do not work well with shrinking populations. You need larger subsequent generations to foot the pension and tax bills under inflation, you need more people to generate wealth and sell product to. Hell things like the housing fall apart because property becomes less and less valuable subsequent generations instead of at best keeping on par.
Demographic death is real and its serious.
I guess at one point, you won’t even be able to choose the field you’re studying in… the genes will decide for you…why did they crack the DNA code… I remember now, because there’s a market for “perfect child”… all the other can be thrown away, because mommy won’t be able to be prood of him/her when she’s gonna discuss with other perfect parents about their perfect kids…
science should have stopped with the invention of the bicycle…in carbon
[quote=“Jason_L”]
Demographic death is real and its serious.[/quote]
the obvious remedy is creating more shit so we can work faster, so we can take a holiday quicker, live in a big house and die estranged from jesus while watching tv.
If only our elders had chosen to spend $2 trillion instead of only $1 trillion /year on weapons, the world would have been blown up by now and there’d be nobody to bitch about inflation.
I prefer the Japanese solution:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/28/japan-sexual-health
Strictly speaking unilateral weapons development is the best way to avoid nations going to war. Nuclear deterrent, for all its demonisation by the hippy, tree hugging ilk, has prove itself effective. Likewise spiralling weapons development costs and complexity has made any sort of sustained fighting pretty impossible - modern war stocks are too expensive to maintain in large quantity, or replace as warheads age and are expended as the west trades off is industrial base overseas and focuses on service to keep up that artificial growth index. The US is faced with shrinking airframe numbers for 5th gen fighter/bomber aircraft and is going to be keeping most of its ground combat equipment until 2030.
I do have a grudging respect for the Russians who have all sorts of oil packed mothballed postwar and early cold war stock ready to pull out once the modern stuff runs out during the next big one - although they are currently selling some of that off to collectors and with the way their population is going they won’t have enough people to crew them in a few generations.
sure, let America develop its stock and whatever is thereby rendered “obsolete” sent to S. America, Africa, Asia. It’s a good war deterrent. But last time i checked : civil war in Congo and Angola, overthrow in Somalia, Genocide in Rwanda, Ouganda and Sudan; the middle East is enjoying the crimes against humanity at the hands of Israel with the toys America supplies it; Vietnam had fun with Russia’s weapons, trying to resist everything in America’s arsenal except nuclear, as did Cambodia; Indonesia massacred 700,000 in East Timor with the active connivance of America, and last but not least, S. America, as the U.S.'s personal little fiefdom, enjoyed all the virtues of American peace and good governance. Millions and millions and millions have died in elementary and relatively cheap sustained fighting since the advent of nuclear weapons, but as long as western countries aren’t directly targeted, we my consider the world at peace, and justify proliferation. It is good for business after all, makes people work who will contribute to the pension plan, like proud and patriotic citizens.
I forgot to mention Iraq and Afghanistan. I’m still undecided to which i will retire. 8)
good article though. Poor Ben, he chose the wrong country as exchange destination! :lol:
Holy crap guys, I know these Everything Else threads tend to get off topic, but this one really takes the cake!
Nick, none of that disproves the fact that there is a certain level of unilateral armament that precludes armed conflict between nations - especially given that that level of armament requires a credible nuclear deterrent on the part of both parties
As for specific examples. African infrastructure is by and large incapable of supporting any advanced weapon systems - they’ve got handfuls of tanks and much of the robust ex soviet bloc small arms. Either way they are perfectly capable of effecting genocide via machete. The tragedy of the whole affair is that the ideologies, methodologies and means that drive those conflicts are disgustingly robust.
Vietnam was for a very distinct purpose - fighting communism. I suppose it takes an actual background from behind the iron curtain to really understand the motivation of fighting by any means including some pretty nefarious bedfellows. Although I have strong suspicions both South Korea and the ROC are fairly happy about the way their situations turned out.
As for Israel, its exceptionally tempting to ignore the 50 years of conventional war since the state’s formation - most of which was fought with little quarter. Its also exceptional how easily people dismiss the gross human rights violations from the other side (including mistreatment of the Palestinians by their supposed arab brethren) but then vilification of the US and its interests has been terribly in vogue today despite the massive elephant in the very small room.
If you want to lay the blame for afghanistan I suppose you could lay it at the feet of the US for not pouring money into infrastructure after the soviet invasion (its common wisdom that it is the US’s responsibility to fund worldwide infrastructure afterall :roll: ) or you could blame Pakistan who funded, trained and armed a fundamentalist army that ultimately set up governance in the region and supporting things like ideologies whose sole raison d’etre was war against the west.
Latin America has proven exceptionally capable of procuring arms all by itself - the great socialist dictator in the south has filled up a veritable shopping cart of SSKs, modern jet fighters, tanks, and a few divisions worth of small arms - I hardly think its a simple case of funnelling weapons. These guys buy the stuff to prop up their cults of personality.
As for East Timor, I’d love to see how you can put that one at the US’s feet.
and while all those wars we’re going on we never saw a Fulda Gap ( near misses like the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and 1983’s Able Archer aside), never saw a full blown Sino-Soviet war and never saw an Indo-pakistan war once deterrence was established (despite tension and mild conflict in the region with some extremely tragic consequences for both sides). Those are pretty hard to dispute cases.
Ultimately blaming western arms dealings for world conflict is also pretty damn arrogant - it really presumes that these societies are children who cannot play nice with the toys we own in peace and prosperity all the while stretching notions of cultural equality to the point of absurdity.
I don’t know how to solve all the world’s problems - but I certainly do know that lobbying for world peace and disarmament is about as effective at stopping violence as abstinence programs are for stopping people from having sex.
Yeah, and while Japan is a poor destination I won’t be having any fun in russia either:
that was not my point. My point was precisely what you reaffirm in your first paragraph. It’s difficult to promote the arms industry by invoking a cessation of hostilities due to unilateral development. Maybe you make a point that it’s good for you and i, North America and Europe haven’t seen real war since WWII; we get other people to fight our wars. However, more people have died in wars since the advent of nuclear weapons than during the WWII.
When you say they are children who cannot play nice with our toys, i apprehend that we play nice with our own?
As for the other usual arguments i was expecting, i’ll reply as soon as i have regained time for procrastination. Meanwhile, if you want to be in fashion :
Actually not at all, once you realize that unilateral armament is the basis for lasting peace and maintain your deterrent with that in mind. There are certain weapon systems better suited to that than others.
I’m not just pulling this out of my ass either - its been the basis for the defence policy of enough nations who hopefully have think tanks full of people as intelligent if not moreso than the two of us.
That is neither here nor there. Far more people died through the direct enactment of communist policy under various regimes too - death tolls are thus a pretty poor barometer.
The strategy of outpacing Soviet armament should be seen as one of the more bloodless (proportionally anyway) defeats in history - even if you add all of the unfortunate side conflicts.
We’ve also faught at least in an advisor’s capacity in every conflict we’ve had “fought for us”. Furthermore the assumption that we merely get others to do our bidding really over simplifies the fact that said parties were ultimately acting out of self interest on their own part. Whether they got ultimately manipulated to serve our ends doesn’t get rid of the fact that people variously WANT to fight - yet another point against all that peace and good will. I’ll stick with deterrence thank you.
Considering the vast capabilities we have for destruction we’ve been playing with kid gloves for a long time.
[quote]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=249JaIaubVw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDe65-nF3FQ[/quote]
Both of which still completely ignore the entire history of the Arab Israeli wars prior to the arabs becoming the underdogs. Its not an excuse or a justification of what the Israelis are doing, its merely a statement of the context in which it is done - ie a royally shitty situation.
p.s. i’ve never read a verse in the Coran that says : “make war upon the west.” Perhaps it has more to do with your prophet Kissinger than with the prophet Mohammed.
From the newly released Nixon material last week :
Nor have I, but are do we really even need to state that fringe religious factions can push ideologies otherwise unsupported by their canon? I mean really…
Besides, I can’t even fathom that we’d need to have a discussion about the morale value of a group like the Taliban (and the organisastions they sanctioned), they certainly don’t fit into even the most absurd views of a peaceful world with human rights.
I don’t have to have read the Koran but lets just say I’ve variously come across enough of their “technical” lit to know the ideology pretty well or at least the pointy end of it.
Seems like a pretty standard military document to me? Nice to know so much went into what would eventually become Linebacker :roll:
Although to inject a bit of humor, here is the logical conclusion to unilaterial dis-armament :lol:
I really don’t want to jump in the middle of this argument, and I’m not going to. However, I have been kind of enjoying it, so I’ll throw one thing in. Maybe it will fuel the fire a little bit.
You can actually blame Canada for India’s first nuclear bomb - we supplied them with a Cirus reactor that provided them with the fuel necessary to detonate their first nuclear device in '74.
Like every other boogeyman article it fails to actually cite any concrete reason why the things are bad. The only out of context problem WRT deterrence is the acquisition and detonation of a rogue nuclear device. For a variety of reasons thats a comparatively remote possibility (mainly technical but also the obvious fact no nation state would risk the paper trail).
The global scientific community also does an extremely good job of keeping so called mercenary scientists well funded and thus busy enough to keep out of trouble.
I have nothing against the progress of science which enhance’s someones life though I do have concerns on the execution method and the side effects of it all both on the body and the surrounding enviorment (nature). I believe that currently we don’t pay enough attention to the effects on a long term scale and how badly it can effect us (society as a whole).
Personally I wouldn’t be suprised if they started testing drugs on people that enhanced x & y traits, that person would be followed and regulated etc… to ensure that things remain controlled.
It does sound like “brave new world” and I love that book though one thing that we shouldn’t lose is the freedom to chose what kind of life we want for ourselves and the fredom to act as indviduals no matter how advanced we are.
…
As for the population and the economy, to be honnest I stopped careing as much because I feel like we are always at a loss
I would like to say that I know my kids will be climbers.