We should introduce a "walk away from your job"-kickstarter thing to encourage leaving those positions.
This has been used as a talking point pro smart bombs for some time now - and yet we have still bombings of weddings with a civilian hit rate of nearly 100%.
Killing is is still killing, no matter how smart the weapon is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing_during_World...
Not supporting/definding bombs: the right way.
Would you like your message to include the sound of the bomb explosion that killed your brother or should we leave that out?
The point people are trying to get you to understand is that there are hundreds (if not thousands) of years of human history that has shown that when two groups of people disagree and cannot come to an agreement: they war.
Even when they reach an agreement, it's possible that one group will backstab the other group. Or perhaps they interpreted a given part of an agreement in different ways and are now arguing over which is the proper interpretation (a naive understanding of the Shia-Sunni relations)?
So Group A decides they are correct and will force Group B to agree by force. They approach Group B with their army armed with bows and swords. Group B has to submit to Group A, die, or fight back. To fight back they need a better trained army with superior bows and superior swords.
Group A is fearful that Group B now has a superior army with superior weaponry. So Group A invents guns. The sword-armed troops of Group B no longer stand a fighting chance against Group A. Fearing they will have to submit to Group A or die - Group B invents explosives... and so on and so on.
Now we have nuclear weapons that devastate miles of land and kill anyone caught in the blast. Fearing that a war between Group A and Group B would kill both sides and a Group C might enforce their ways, Group A and Group B have decided against using such powerful weapons against each other.
Now imagine you have 250 groups. 248 don't believe in using bombs. Which 2 groups are in power? Hint: it's not one of the 248 "peaceful" groups.
Its incredible how people pretend deterrence isn't real or a social benefit. Nation state warfare follows pretty simple game theory rules. You'd think techies would understand this. We're living under the most peaceful time in human history thanks to major deterrence, including but not limited to nuclear arms.
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Dr. Steven Pinker, Pulitzer prize-winning author and Harvard psychology professor, writes, “Today we may be living in the most peaceful era in our species’ existence.” He acknowledges: “In a century that began with 9/11, Iraq, and Darfur, the claim that we are living in an unusually peaceful time may strike you as somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene.” Pinker points out, wars make headlines, but there are fewer conflicts today, and wars don’t kill as many people as they did in the Middle Ages, for instance. Also, global rates of violent crime have plummeted in the last few decades. Pinker notes that the reason for these advances are complex but certainly the rise of education, and a growing willingness to put ourselves in the shoes of others has played its part.
http://www.salon.com/2014/01/15/were_living_through_the_most...
It's incredible how people pretend deterrence is for social benefit. It brought us already once near a global atomic war. Remember?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis
We would live in a better world without nuclear arms, that I'm 100% sure of.
The idea that we have less dead when access to any kind of arms is heavily restricted, how about that?
Nominated for the new entry in Wikipedia to illustrate 'false dichotomy'.
Really, was that the best alternative to one kind of war that you could come up with, another kind of war?
The idea that peace happens when all you see is war is historically very much untrue.
I think we disagree on how important that 'almost' is as a result, and what the alternative was / is.
But the nuclear game theorist's argument has always been that while functionally more dangerous (i.e. life on this planet could be obliterated at any moment), a nuclear-tipped détente has greater stability than any alternative (i.e. it is least likely to lead to hostilities).
I see the argument for nuclear de-foresting a lot like the argument against nuclear power. Yes, at face value it seems an obvious best option. However, when compared to the realistic alternatives, other approaches may be preferable.
It also allows both sides to maintain a minimal standing army while maximizing the cost of an opponent initiating hostilities. Most of the West's strategic nuclear position has historically been to counter an overwhelming Warsaw Pact numerical advantage in European conventional forces.
China remembers what the US was thinking the last time it was yomping about near the Yalu River and certainly won't put up with anyone invading the DPRK, so they're safe at least from that quarter, but if I was Iran, having watched Iraq get invaded and then screwed over for a decade for essentially no reason whatsoever, I'd be really keen to have some kind of deterrence before the US decided to invade.