Ask HN: Aren't you afraid of a possible world conflict?
Yesterday I was watching Threads (1984) and an inherent question came to mind: why aren't we so scared anymore?
The advent of nuclear weapons and ICBMs flips this precondition on its head. We no longer need to defeat enemy forces to inflict shocking and monstrous pain upon our enemies, nor upon any nation of the world, nor upon even the entire world. America and Russia both have the hair-trigger capability to launch thermonuclear weapons to any point on the globe. It takes 60 seconds to launch an ICBM, about 10 minutes for SLBMs, and a few hours for strategic bombers to reach their targets. 3,000 thermonuclear weapons can be detonated in anger in the time it takes to commute to work.
Our psychology did not evolve for this environment, and in fact it had not evolved from the previous state of affairs at all because there are still people alive who witnessed the first detonations of nuclear weapons! A single generation!
We don’t know if we can survive this state of affairs. Our time is marked by “for the first time in history” and “unprecedented.”
Nuclear weapons are uniquely unique. We manage to avoid self-extermination through having relatively cool heads in charge of these decisions, but that is a cultural norm, not a universal guarantee.
If you assume there any chance at all that someone willing to use these ever ends up in control of this capability, on a long enough timeline that is essentially guaranteed to happen.
So while I do worry that there might be a bigger war, I also realize that the picture painted by the news, or the "promises" that different country leaders make, are meant to serve two goals: (1) keeping the general public in constant fear, and (2) making them (the leader) appear strong/decisive in a regional/international arena.
While I don't discourage people to seek information, and reach conclusions, in today's world, unless you are directly involved in the conflict/decision-making, the chance for you to get accurate information is an extremely hard task. News either take things out of context, or simply lack professionalism due to poor journalism, lack of time and or desire to perform thorough deep dives, etc. Social media is filled with fake information, both as a tool in the information war, as well as by "influencers" who keep reposting everything that brings them views.
And in the end, the saying "history is written by the victors", was, is, and forever will be - true.
Any time in history it was like that, this hasn't changed in "today's world". Today's world just has a lot more, and much faster paced information. There's a bombardment of it at all times if you don't shield yourself from it.
It's this bombardment that creates the exhaustion stated in the GP comment "I don't trust any news", it takes a lot of effort to receive information, parse it through opaque biases, filter it with knowledge about the bigger picture, balance it out between conflicting incentives/motives, and extract some kind of useful piece of information.
Accelerate that with the advent of social media, and bullshit/disinformation/misinformation is drowning us everywhere. Some people retreat to their bubbles, others keep treading water trying to make sense of what they read/hear knowing that the "truth" is probably not reachable, and others simply give up because it's overwhelming.
> News either take things out of context, or simply lack professionalism due to poor journalism, lack of time and or desire to perform thorough deep dives, etc.
All of these issues also boil down to: there's no money in news, even less for deep dives, the media who was responsible for that in earlier decades has lost its readership and with it the only major funding they had: selling eyeballs. A few vehicles managed to ride the storm but now are so fragile in their funding that they can't investigate the hands that feed them, it's quite dire...
As far as the news are concerned, they just want viewers / advertising customers / money in most cases.
This is what the authoritarians want. It’s not actually hard to understand the major trends are in the world, with accurate information available, but that’s bad for their interests and so they spread the message you’re repeating now to make people more likely to support them. We saw this dramatically in the United States where the ability to answer basic factual questions correctly inversely correlated with supporting the winning candidate, or earlier support for Brexit, but it’s been a staple of living in countries like Russia or Hungary, and a key part of the fossil fuel industry’s effort not to get stuck with the bill for climate change.
There’s plenty of legitimate criticism of organizations like the NYT or BBC, but if you follow them you’ll have a much more accurate understanding of the world than someone who consumes Murdoch media or, worse, whatever’s floating around social media. There is objective truth in the world, and every study shows a significant gradient here.
The objective truth in the 70s was, "smoking is good for you". Since then, the narrative changed. Politics, and even s̶c̶i̶e̶n̶c̶e̶ scientific research (to a degree) -- are subjective, despite what world leaders or politicians want you to believe. You can manipulate the data in a way that suits you or your agenda, you can buy scientific researches, etc. It's happening right now in all major, and minor conflicts.
Statements like "objective truth" tend to remind me of the grumpy old engineer who thinks that his way of doing things "is the only correct way", and rejects any modern approach to software engineering.
Now, I don't say you should ignore all statements, or news source. You should be informed enough to a degree you think is relevant for you, while understanding that there will be no objective truth, and unless you have a motivation (be it power, money, or something else) to continue to believe in your established world view, you need to be willing to revisit your "objective truth" every once in a while.
The problem is that 1) we don't always have enough data to know what is true, and 2) we have a lot of people working as hard as they can to obscure the truth in order to push their own agenda.
All those post-modernist philosophers that I scoffed at were on to something: If we cannot determine the truth from the data available to us, then in practice, there is no truth. That may not have been the point they were trying to make, but for us who are living in it, it works out the same.
Your misunderstanding of the history doesn’t mean it was ever good for you. People didn’t call cigarettes “coffin nails” because they thought it was good for you and e.g. the specific lung cancer link was known at least as far back as the 1920s. The reason why it wasn’t named earlier is the same reason you’re wrong about it today: it was an enormously profitable industry and they were able to produce the ads you’re remembering which got far more attention than those pesky scientists who had been correct for half a century by that time – and many smokers blamed people for not telling them earlier, even though they had downplayed the warnings given at the time. A very similar story unfolded with climate change where people like to say that it was confused or contradictory for a long time when it was settled by the late 1970s because they didn’t want to admit having given equal weight to the fossil fuel lobbyists as they did climate scientists.
That’s the key distinction here: we have processes for verifying and testing theories. Yes, scientific research has had fraud but we know about those because their work has been critically examined. We should expect that everywhere rather than giving up on the concept.
Bollocks. Even as early as the 1950s there was a widely known link between smoking and cancer, and a 1964 Surgeon General's report said, unequivocally, that smoking causes cancer.
Hell, even in the 1600s tobacco was regarded as potentially dangerous. King James the VI of Scotland and I of England wrote, in 1604, the ‘Counterblaste to Tobacco’, where he talked about its negative impacts.
The "objective truth" was that capitalism doesn't care about your health, and ad campaigns were able to squash every attempt at getting people to quit.
To answer your question directly though, I think we have multiple generations that have grown up believing that anything they see on the internet is not actually real or is happening to somebody else. That includes war. The idea of a global conflict is just a Netflix plot or something, not anything that could actually happen. Few people have met a combat veteran or war refugee, but lots of people have played Call of Duty. That's their reference point. It's just not real.
Consider this, even with all the condemnation of Russia over the invasion of Ukraine, the sanctions, the shipment of arms. We are still using Soyuz spacecraft launched from Russia to go to the space station. We still share resources for all of that, including lots of money. That means there is a limit to the outrage, when it comes to economic and structural needs.
Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.”
The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.”
The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.”
The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” Again, he said, “Maybe.”
The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad — because you never know what will be the consequence of the misfortune; or, you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.
— Alan Watts
Worst part is, apparently, lots of politicians at the wheel also believe "it won't come to this".
Reality is going to hit like a truck.
The potential is there. If it can happen, given enough time, it surely will. But the odds of happening in a specific moment, at least while tensions are not higher than when it didn't happened anything in the past, may be seen as lower.
Reality is different than what it used to be in the 60-70's. But that also means that new factors can be in play, for good and bad.
In any case, I think is more sure to be afraid of climate change. It won't blow up tomorrow, but is something that is escalating up, and it may be trigger for more negative things, including, but not limited to, world conflicts.
I grew up with this kind of stuff being in the news all the time. I tend to try to avoid the news now or only visit it quite sporadically. It's good not to worry about things you have no control over. Of course your world could come to an end at anytime in multiple ways. Try and keep a healthy body and mind and develop yourself and your relationships, what else can you do? Maybe investigate meditation and mindfulness.
No kidding
we are in a world conflict. the west has used it for war profiteering as they send all their old weapons to ukraine so they can buy new ones from their friendly local defense contractor.
AFAICT this is not a serious problem. Russia is in many cases fighting with junkyard scrapings. https://x.com/Jonpy99/status/1860694569102258607
Putin wins if the war ends and he wins if it continues. The only way he doesn't win if he no longer gets to play the game.
But yeah, Western assistance is more of a slow drip than a proper flow.
https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/2022/02/11/radar-interf...
As with anything, there will be the ones who profits from it. Always has been, always will be.
But the overall description is a ridiculous oversimplification of what is happening.
On the level below it is a war for the spheres of influence between China and US.
Next, it is Russian war for the control of the Europe and middle east.
Below it is the wars by Iranian/Russian/Chinese proxies to help with the goals mentioned above.
In all ongoing conflicts the parties are aligned with the China on top of the chain in one side of the conflict and the US on the other.
Profits from stealing goods, people, or territories are just a means to ease the path to the goal or to improve the strategic position, but not the source of the conflict itself.
For example, I predict that as long as western democracies will continue to depend on autocracies (there is no sign for that to stop), the existing wars will continue to expand and conflicts multiply.
And reddit, and twitter -- especially twitter
I should keep more water, but I'm too lazy. I have only probably only two days that is too few.
If I had time, I'd pick some iodine pills. They are small and have a long shelf life.
Anything else is too difficult or too far from my control.
I'll try to do the same with the pills, sounds reasonable and low-effort
For example, when we got the usual half extra salary in July, one year we used it to buy liquid laundry soap for the whole year instead of keeping the money in the bank. It has a good shelf life and high price to volume ratio.
This may sound weird but being afraid or worrying about something that I don't have much influence on is a waste of time and energy.
Yes, I do vote and are engaged in local politics, but ultimately it is up to the leaders we elect to make the decisions. But in critical situations it may be actions that does not favor me at all.
And I am fine with that, I go on with my life, while preparing as best as I can to handle whatever the future throws in my way.
What's closer to the truth? Tweets or real life conversations? I mean on one hand, there's less of a filter online and anonymity makes people dare say things they would otherwise not. It creates an interesting dynamic where other people hear those utterances and think just what you think: Why are people not afraid anymore? On the other hand, there's also a HUGE amount of bots and third parties influencing online discourse. I think it will only become apparent after say ~10-20 more years, on which scale online manipulation is actually taking place. It's insane.
Why do you think either is close to the truth?
I hope someday if life becomes multi planetary, there will be a way to just step away from any fight and just go live wherever you want to.
There will be long wars and short peace from now on for undefined time.
Whether it will be wars on the periphery or a global war depends on which stage western democracies will wake up and collectively realise the reality of the situation.
Both Hamas and Hezbollah are proxies of Iran - Russia - China alliance. They are going nowhere.
Disengagement in Ukraine is only possible if Russia decides that it needs time to regroup and heal. It is an existential conflict with no end in sight. If Ukraine falls, conflict will move on to the rest of eastern Europe after a short while, as Ukraine should have only been a first step of the plan for Russia to control Europe.
Yet you need to acknowledge, that the risk of nuclear exchange isn't 0%, just for the fact that the weapons exist, and that is completely out of our control.
Russia is doing what it wants, and they've been escalating this war since the invasion started in 2014, so it's not like they don't have agency and a mind of their own.
No one is trying to annex Russia, there's no external existential threat to them. Could they use nukes still? Yes, they could. Will they choose to seize to exist, and lose 100% of their territory, by nuking the US to try to get a fraction of that land? Doubtfully, and if they choose to do so, it would be out of our control anyway and would be a matter of time.
Those two worldwide wars were quasi-colonial wars. Powers of the time were competing to become as powerful economically and militarily as possible.
However, the war didn't end with WWII, since at any time there were around 20/30 wars in a quickly changing landscape. It's just that were not done in the Western world (except in the Balkans in the 1990').
Since that time there have been mostly two types of military conflicts by regional actors:
* Low-intensity conflicts (the multiple "liberation" armies, religious wars or warlords as in central Africa)
* Conflict between main powers via proxy.
For what it's worth, I believe that instead of starting a war and an occupation, when the Taliban said they were ready to give ObL up on condition the US provide some evidence he was behind WTC, they could've simply been taken up on their offer. (Similar goes for "WMD")
[Fwiw I have not Figured out the right orthography (including case, number of R's etc)]
("Shortening of the Way" was an epithet for the God-Emperor's father, implying the the Golden Path itself has zero extension?)
which implication specifically? (for me zero extension is that set about which all predicates, even normally contradictory ones, are true)
in space-time anyway the GP appears to have had quite a bit of geometric extension, even in eigentime.
Lagniappe: Joseph as sabra? https://64.media.tumblr.com/6d601f74ae9201df318403b8c7e25b32...
compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Temptation_of_Christ_... ?
* but maybe I'm insufficiently suspending disbelief, as in my world, female grad students in archaeology wind up more often in places like Ürümqi, not in places like "Wilson"?
I guess the question is how to remain content with the ordinary yet still seek out the extraordinary? Look at the stars but keep your feet on the ground? (观星步土?)
> A man's retch should exceed his grasp / Or what's a heaving for? —not RB
Because that's where the palatable politics lies waiting to be discovered! (And it's cheap and inflation controlled!)
Not sure about Europe.. politico-economic considerations may get there soon?
More at my web site (in profile, no sales and low stylistic ambition), if you click on "Things I want to say" (about 1/2-way down), then "On peace amid commotion" (also about 1/2-way down), then skim that page and click at least the last link. Then read the entire page and click the links that seem most interesting.
However, the status quo of a frequent limited conflicts has significant profit potential, so you'll still see these happening.
Back in the mid 90's my high school physics teacher made us watch it.
It is probably the most realistic depiction of what would happen if a nuclear war broke out.
They did so by deploying an incredible hybrid and cyber warfare machine, outsmarting what little defenses the West put up. They turned our democracies against us, weaponizing hundreds of millions of simpletons. In the 90s we dreamt that the Internet would galvanize democracy. It became an amazing weapon of subversion instead.
Russia leveraged kooky franchisees on the extremes of the political spectrum. Aware that they did not belong in politics otherwise, they were all too happy to cooperate.
In 2000 Trump sought the nomination of the Reform party and lost [1]. He was unable to leverage his money and Russian support into securing a primary win of a 2% party. Fifteen years and billions of rubles later, the Russian hype machine had been fully built out. He was guided to the 2016 Republican nomination with the precision of a hypersonic missile.
A similar story played itself out in virtually all other Western countries. Beware of the usual exceptionalist apologies - Trump, Orban, Le Pen, Farage are all cookie-cutter stories.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_2000_presidential...
Why bother being afraid if you can't do anything about? I have enough more immediate stressors to consume all my worry bandwidth that there's not enough left over for such things. Also, the inherent self preservation of people is always a factor. I mean, I have very deep concerns about the damage the second Trump administration will reek on US (and the rest of the world for that matter), but I am not afraid he'll press the red button. He'd have as much to lose as the rest of us. Same goes for Putin and Xi.
It was ingrained in my memory that there is a large chance of nuclear warfare in mainland Europe. But I witnessed how Europe fairly quickly tbh dismantled its self defence capabilities by incompetent leadership.
At the same time, Russia has attacked multiple of its neighbours over the years, and the USA has started multiple fraudulent wars to sustain its hegemony.
I guess I’m jaded?
Can Putin end the world if he will be afraid enough of losing? Maybe. Can you stop it? No. Then why would you care?
As to China, Russia's beefs with China were always marginal (Russian Far East is not a very important part of the country), so no wonder China have no problem dealing with Russia. They have no major points of contention, while sharing a common enemy.
As per the geopolitical game in Europe between the US and Russia, the problem is that Russia wants eastern and central europe to again become their "sphere of influence", without any regard for what those countries want. Those countries know that being in US' sphere of influence means prosperity and peace for them, while being in Russian sphere of influence means poverty, political oppression, corruption, rule of stupidity, and potentially wars (forced to send recruits to help Russia). That's the major problem here - Russia wants to force on a bunch of its neighbors something they never said they wanted. In turn, they go to US for defence against their abusive neighbor. It's not US forcing itself onto Central and Eastern Europe, it's those countries practically begging to be protected (Poland's foreign minister was once recorded saying that "we'll suck America's dick for peanuts as usual", because that's Poland's only play).
This kind of completely unhinged dehumanizing nonsense is bordering hate speech.
All gave up their psychotic empire-building games (or at least sublimated into forms not involving large-scale military conflict) long ago.
Russia's current regime, for some reason, has not.
They did not. They were subjugated by the current empire, the US and are all just fiefdoms nowadays, some of them are even occupied by military forces, called bases.
Russia isn't in that list.
Those countries are not "fiefdoms", by any stretch or interpretation.
Nor are they occupied, in any meaningful sense.
That's just delusional.
Russians, ironically, defeated the tartars when they managed to out-meritocrat the greatkhanless hordes somescore later,
-Then they basically reverted to divine right of kings*, aka the mandate of heaven..
-until the time of Lenin, when the cycle began anew..
*Apologies for ignoring the slight detour of Peter the Great** (known to be enlighteningly cruel) whose table of ranks could have been said to have set "his Excellency" (Prevoskhoditel’stvo) Ulyanov up for life
**but we should also pay attention to the current phenomenon of lionizing Catherine as a monarch more Christian than Peter
[Recall that the christians did not meritocracy until roughly... 1848 (again, ignoring the Glourious Revolution) over thence we had Weber retconning for his tribe]
(
...and that Goldstein basically writes about the meritocracy* of the Inner Party, as set out in the non-fictional The Managerial Revolution (1941).
* Smith is in the outer party precisely because he did poorly on his A-levels.
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUCs_c643qU
(not sure if the russian fleet really kept the royal navy away during the US Civil War; my impression had been that the Confederacy had waited too long to revolt, and the second-cheapest supplier of cotton [egypt?] for british mills was not much more expensive than the CSA would've been in any case)
I am not expert in history, but I cannot recall Europeans using US troops in an active war since creation of NATO. The opposite can be said in this century, though.
I do not deny that having the back of US, that has possibly the biggest military in the world, is favourable for European countries.
But I am absolutely tired of this discourse that NATO only benefits the others, and that USA doesn't get any benefit from it.
It is beneficial for all parts, and that is the reason it is an alliance. And USA has used it for its benefit for quite long; thus, it is not unreasonable that allies might rely on its help.
Besides, it is beneficial for USA to keep Europe stable and in peace — most clearly, for macro-economic reasons.
Which should still leave plenty for lavish social benefits programs, since other places can afford it.
Genuinely looking forward seeing the US folks get a better coverage soon.
I think the CIA is doing in Eastern Europe all the things that they used to do in Latin America in the 60's.