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Comment by hitarpetar | Hacker News Reader

just so you know this means you are pro-Cheney. the untold human suffering caused by those wars was in service of the system you are glad he didn't "blow up"

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When I was younger I used to make the mistake that others had the same bit of humanity as me even if it wasn't obvious, that it must of existed somewhere within them. Then I learnt to accept that some people just suck and there isn't anything you can do about it. The only thing you can do is distance yourself from them.

If you must reduce the argument so far, then sure.

Khan and Caesar brought peace to millions. Life is complicated. But some worlds are worse than others, and Dick Cheney's actions sit solidly in the middle of the pack. They're part of the universe of discourse and action that the rest of us can live with and recover from. Not all leaders fit that mold.

"Just so you know", as it were.

> Khan and Caesar brought peace to millions

They make a desolation, and call it peace

Not to nerd out too much, but this is HN so it's probably OK. The Pax Romana/Mongolica concepts have wide support in academia. Unified government under despotic colonial powers was indeed the source of the immense social progress, and we simply have to treat with that. In fact, the rapid expansion of cross-eurasian trade under Mongol rule is arguably the proximate cause of the European renaissance, concentrating wealth in Italian trade centers designed to exploit the availability of those goods.

As always, wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Romana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Mongolica

Does that make them good people or me a Yuan dynasty apologist? No. But it makes the world complicated and not well suited to the kind of quips that you're flinging at Cheney.

Again, we could do a lot worse. We may already have.

so, the wikipedia articles you shared show that pax romana and pax mongolica fostered trade. is increased trade worth genocide and mass slavery? I would lean to no but actually, you're comparing apples and oranges. why are you doing that?

nice job slipping "social progress" into your argument. I wonder what your sources actually say?

> Romans regarded peace not as an absence of war, but as a rare situation which existed when all opponents had been beaten down and lost the ability to resist

yay social progress!

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