6,006 karma · joined August 19, 2014
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I think this is good to keep in mind but let's be real, humans have tended to make hierarchy be one of those things they push backwards in time. So yeah, it's best to be as impartial as possible but in this case, the authors are the ones contradicting the common anachronism.
But the war did solidify or make official many important features of 20th century Europe. Namely, Germany as a unified whole with a German speaking core that defines its contemporary borders, the centralization of the rivalry between France and Germany, Germany as the dominant military and economic power of Europe, the stabilization of French Republicanism sans monarchy, the relative irrelevance of the Austrians, the end of a common belief in great power stabilization as a long term objective in favor of a more manichean struggle for dominance, etc.
There should be things the state simply cannot touch not just things which it should not touch.
If you say, "well yes but only for legal purposes", then the jig is up. End-to-end encryption must die. You can fiddle here and there with what getting the warrants and the wiretaps and all that looks like but you have decided the fundamental question. From then on, between civil libertarians and law enforcement the issue becomes a skrimage. The courts will hash it out and subsequent legislation will ebb and flow the limits on both sides. But you have decided the fundamental question. Humans are not allowed to actually have secrets. Period. That is what happens the second you make this conditioned in any way.
Of course there are better and worse versions of this that can exist but ultimately I think it should be opposed as a state violation of human rights.
Today, in many places, even minor assault will result in consequences. In this way, the law redistributes power from the physically strong to those who may be weak but who have legal standing.
Of course, in an absolute sense, everything redounds to power. All law is in the end, enforced at the point of a gun. But this is an observation with very little practical utility IMO. It's like the saying which people employ when things are not going well, "it could be worse".
To be clear, I'm am here making a case for law as an insurance against indivual domination and warlordism which I think it can be. I am not making a case for the state in general though.
> Yeah completely agree that price is decoupled from quality nowadays
In the world of physic tools, price and quality are highly coupled.
To your other points, I honestly think fashion is very rewarding and healthy so long as you are focused on making yourself look good to you. And I agree, some fashion conformity is unavoidable. Especially depending upon your career field.
I would argue even more drastically that, a commander or doctrine is only as good as the war they are in. I mean that every conflict has the capacity of developing so differently that even a tested commander or strategy is suspect. Historically, conflict during a period was more homogenous. Having a war every 5 to 10 years would keep your officer corps relatively relevant. Only in large empires with a huge variety of martial interests would we see commanders succeed wildly in one engagement and utterly fail in another.
But modern wars swing suddenly from guerilla, to conventional, to insurgent, to cold with such rapidity that command experience is profoundly difficult to rely on as a predictor of success.
Probably the wisest way to promote in a modern military is to use all your standard expectations in peacetime. Who is organized, dutiful, etc. But maintain the knowledge that once shit hits the fan, you will be moving people around based largely on success. Which is what happens in real full blown conflicts. France in WWI is a good example.
The much harder question is how do you measure performance in non-conventional wars?
Interesting read but the above point is moot. History features many selfish leaders letting their kingdom, fief, colony, what have you fall into exactly that state of affairs. And when they were occupied, as often as not, the leadership was left intact so long as the tribute did flow. This is true from the ancient world up to through the 20th century.
> This is why, I’d argue, you see the proliferation of failed states globally: in the past it would be actively profitable for non-failed states to take advantage of them
Sure, there may be more independently standing "failed states" but occupation by a "more competent" power was rarely a corrective. These largely just became failed vassals. The little bit of bureaucratic support imposed by the occupier usually had the effect of depriving locals of the experience of self development and coordination and thus deepening and prolonging the crises within.
> I should note I find this version of the argument, based on incentives and interests more compelling than Steven Pinker’s version of the argument based on changing cultural mores.
> The value of the oil and other resources would be less than the cost of maintaining control of the country.
The reasons that managing such a country would be too costly now vs in the past are almost purely cultural. Treating an occupied place like a colony has diplomatic and internal consequences for the occupier (not enough in my opinion but much more than in the past). And much more importantly, the cultural inventions of nationalism and total insurgent warfare have made it much harder to maintain an occupation. Yes, there were insurgencies in the past but the cultural expectation that hundreds of thousands or even millions of people will live in craters, subsist on worms and rats, forgoe medicine, endure exposure, hunger, pain and trauma for years or decades or even generations to guarantee self rule.
The cultural invention of nationalistic mass resistance depends on technological innovations. You need modern small arms and explosives to make every cell of 20 or so fighters a threat which can't be ignored by an occupier. You need modern communication to coordinate these cells.
And of course the value of this cultural invention is in its ubiquity. So you need an era of sentimental propaganda that depends on modern mass media to disseminate it.
Ultimately technology and culture are not separate things. They shape each other as they develop and sometimes they are one in the same.
Obbiosl computing would be radically altered as well but I'm not actually sure how much that would matter. Other than during the 90s, there just simply isn't much evidence for all this extra computing having a significant effect on growth.
Uh, yup. That in no way contradicts what I said.
> Nevertheless, unlike with PFAS used in things like clothes, kitchenware or packing, when PFAS are used in industrial processes or in electronic equipment (as high-frequency electrical insulators or in optical devices) it is much easier to avoid any pollution.
Yeah, I'm not arguing for a ban. I'm arguing that from a historical perspective, civilization in no way hinges on plastics. They are ubiquitous so an abrupt end of plastics would obviously be very disruptive. But there was a pretty decent life to be had before they became so and I imagine we could figure out how to do that again.
Metal, wood, resins, etc were just far more ubiquitous, doing many of the jobs plastics do now. Lots of things were a bit more expensive because of this. But none the less, people lived pretty decent lives.
I think this is a failure of imagination. The modern world, largely as we appreciate it today, existed in 1940 in Europe and the U.S. That is well before the widespread deployment of plastics. It was a world in which everyone, including the very rich did with a little less but still, a fairly high quality of life.
The only question that separates then from today, is whether we can scale that kind of material to the much larger global middle class.
This has changed how I make notes as well. I have learned to make them searchable. I often think, "what will future me search in order to find this note" and this sprinkle in a few extra keywords.
I don't wish to spoil it or taint someone else's experience so I'll just say, many films have a plot twist at the end but I can't really think of another movie that manages that kind of an emotional turn. Not without something pretty hammy like a surprise betrayal or death. Andrei Rublev will always stick with me.
There are many wars where multiple sides are belligerent. There are wars where a side manages to profit or benefit from a conflict without appearing as a belligerent. And there are wars where it's not clear who the beligerent is.
In the French Revolutionary wars, France appears as the aggressor, as they declared war first. But they declared war as a pre-emptive to gain advantage in a conflict with Austria over Bourbon restoration that they felt sure would come. And judging by contemporary history (the partitions of Poland, the Hungarian rebellion, the Revolutions of 1848, etc), they were probably right.
There is the Franco-Prussian war, a war which was essentially desired by both sides.
Most civil wars rarely have a clear beligerent side with slow escalation of violence by multiple parties.
We are deep into the era of nationalistic propaganda so we are used to conceiving of wars as clear conflicts between two cohesive political units: one the aggressor and one the defender. But that is a concpetion mostly born out of our experiences in the 20th century and even then it is highly biased by the popular narrative of WWII.