http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=MJC0G2CE4AM30CRBAEZSFEY?type=domesticNews&storyID=7626297
"President Bush's planned ballistic missile shield suffered another setback on Monday when an interceptor missile again failed to launch during a test of the U.S. missile defense system.
The Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency said it could not complete the planned $85 million repeat of a failed December test after the interceptor missile failed to launch from its base in the Pacific Ocean. "
Hmm... I can understand if the interceptor failed to hit its target, but when it won't even launch... Arg, the government should subcontract this or something.
They're trying to engineer a solution to a hard problem though. I'm not surprised they're having problems... even if it didn't leave the launchpad cough.
From what I gathered on browsing Slashdot, the research was far from complete but Bush and his goons ordered to get it into production anyway. That thing seems to be doomed to be a total failure.
Really? They should employ me then!
Here's my amazing program that can predict the future! It's not production-ready yet though:
print "Question: "
input $a
print "Processing..."
sleep 10
print "Answer: "
$b = random 2
if $b = 1 then print "Yes"
else print "No"Unfortunately, I doubt that predicting the future is on the Bonklers' agenda.
"It's clear that the program is being pushed ahead for political reasons regardless of its capability," [] "This interceptor has never been tested in an intercept test. Yet the Pentagon has already put eight of them in silos and is building at least another dozen before even knowing if they work."
"The New York Times reports that Mr. Bush's decision to make the system operational even though the testing phase is not completed, has drawn heavy criticism as well."
"the current system is designed to destroy the "more rudimentary missiles that Iran and North Korea are developing." But Russia has already developed a new missile, the SS-27, that makes the Star Wars system obsolete"
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0215/dailyUpdate.html
The general consensus by scientists for decades has been that a Star Wars program is ineffective and costly. There was a long piece in Scientific American (back when it was still a respectable scientific journal) around 1985 that lambasted the whole Star Wars scheme. There were plenty of reasons, but it essentially distilled to this: it's hard to make a shield, and easy to make countermeasures.
Lasers? Use reflective film or a shell that can burn off. Radar? Use decoys. Lots of them. Shrapnel? Throw more nukes their way. Fancy computer tracking? Also more nukes. These are all cheap countermeasures.
The shield has to be perfect, while just one nuke has to make it through. And that ignores shipping the nukes in. Sir, you've received a FedEx, express from the Kremlin.
Right.
It's "just" $1 trillion flushed down the toilet.
It's probably a waste, but that $1T is also buying experience. The US's greatest scientific military minds didn't become that way by twiddling their thumbs. Even if the shield becomes a waste like most of us suspect, there will be byproducts that will go into other endeavours.
I'm sure there are better ways to keep their minds busy though.
>I'm sure there are better ways to keep their minds busy though.
Yeah! Where is my flying car? I want research on antigravity and cosmos energy.
>>7
No, the shield doesn't have to be perfect, actually. It just has to make the enemy think that a first strike would not effectively destroy all the other side's nuclear arsenal.
You're thinking "Cold War," anyway. Such a system would not be intended for use against Russia. The Russians are our friends, more or less, at least for the moment. It'd sure make a lot of assholes pucker in Beijing, Pyongyang, and Tehran, though.
It doesn't even have to work, really. It could be cardboard mockups with tinfoil glued on them to make them look all ZOMG L33T SPACE AGE and if the enemy believed they were real and would work, that'd be good enough.
very agreed.
but thanks to things we cherish like democracy, liberty, and some transparency of government, unless it does work, everyone will know it doesn't work.
if i was tehran, pyongyang, or beijing, i wouldn't be the least bit afraid that americans could shoot down an incoming mirv nuclear-warheaded icbm coming down over l.a.
to be honest, i wouldn't expect them to be able to intercept a single mirv icbm in the next 10 years.
oh, and why is beijing in that list? don't they have dozens of nuclear icbms? i think they're effectively almost as much of a nuclear threat as russia ever was, aren't they?
not that i'm saying that china has as many nukes as russia did: but if china launched at us, they'd have more than enough to destroy every major city, wouldn't they?
>>11
For that argument to work you'd have to assume the enemy had enough nukes to destroy any retaliatory capability in the first place. If they have that, it's not hard for them to produce a few more nukes (or countermeasures) just to make sure.
Not that I misunderstand where you're coming from, but I think it's more likely for these smaller powers to attempt to ship the nuke in. Firing a single rocket at the US is plain retarded, with or without a working shield.
You guys obviously haven't heard of the Navy's SM3. It will actually directly hit a modern ballistic inbound. Yes, the AEGIS + SM3 system actually works today and can do hit-to-kill. The PAC-3 also works to some extent (not the original Patriot with the buggy software :P)
Of course, then we have this new fangled missile defence system full of buggy software (maybe it's being done in java!) being pushed forward when it's clearly not ready. Use the damn existing system that actually works you morons.
Or maybe they actually want a repeat of the Patriot catastrophe.
Oh, they go that route too.
"the Pentagon plans to add 16 interceptors for ballistic missiles -- five ground-based interceptors for a total of 21 and 11 SM3 interceptors for a total of 22, according to the budget plan."
"Despite doubts expressed by some experts about the effectiveness of the bigger [53-cm] SM3 interceptor, the U.S. Navy has pressed for building it, citing its longer range and higher interception capability."
http://asiangazette.blogspot.com/2005/02/japan-talks-with-us-on-developing.html
>>12
The Chinese have maybe twelve ICBMs capable of reaching North America. The USSR had maybe twelve thousand. That's three orders of magnitude difference.
What I like about the idea is that it seizes the initiative. With a nuclear missile defense system--even a phony one that doesn't exist in any form other than Photoshopped pictures--the US would be taking the initiative, making the enemy react to us instead of just reacting to whatever they do.
In strategy the initiative is all-powerful. If you have the initiative, you are choosing what will happen, where, and when. If you've lost the initiative, you're losing the war.
> If you've lost the initiative, you're losing the war.
Or starting the war. Our good friend Machiavelli gave some good reasons for starting wars when your enemy has the "initiative", whatever that's supposed to mean.
In warfare, there are nine unchanging principles. These are the Nine Principles of War, which hold as true today as they did in the Bronze Age.
Mass: Concentrate all available forces at the critical place and time to strike with maximum possible force and make a decisive difference in the outcome.
Objective: Every aspect of war planning and every operation must serve a clearly defined and achievable objective that advances the overall war effort.
Offensive: Seize the initiative and hold the initiative at all costs. Even when forced onto the defensive, carry out raids, patrol aggressively, make spoiling attacks to seize more favorable terrain in which to conduct the defense. Do everything within your power to keep the enemy off balance. Don't just react, be proactive and make the enemy react to you. If you can seize, hold, and exploit the initiative, it is you who will dictate what happens on the battlefield, when, and where. During the Second World War, the Germans lost the initiative when the Russians counterattacked in the winter of 1942 and never quite regained it; the Japanese lost the initiative when US troops made their first big amphibious assault of the war at Guadalcanal, and were never in control of the situation again.
Surprise: Attack the enemy in a place, manner, or time for which he is unprepared. Remember, as Pournelle said, surprise is an event that takes place in the mind of the enemy commander.
Economy of Force: at all points other than the decisive point, use the bare minimum of men and resources to hold the line, in order to build up the maximum possible mobile reserve to attack at the decisive place and time.
Maneuver: arrange your forces on the ground in a way that grants maximum advantage to you and imposes maximum disadvantage upon the enemy. Mobility grants the ability to redeploy suddenly in unexpected ways, and has the effect of multiplying the power of your forces. One example is the Russian encirclement of the Stalingrad pocket during World War II, trapping an entire German army group inside.
Unity of Command: at every level of command there must be one and only one person who has final ultimate command authority. War cannot be waged by a committee.
Security: Guard all information and feed false information to the enemy wherever possible. Never allow the enemy to gain an unexpected advantage. You must know more about the enemy than he knows about you if you are to have any chance at victory.
Simplicity: The simple plan is the flexible plan. Plans requiring units to carry out complex and precise maneuvers under enemy fire with a strict timetable are suicide because too many random events take place on the battlefield (as von Clausewitz said, "no battle plan has ever survived first contact with the enemy"). Keep every aspect of every plan as simple as possible in order to be able to deal with unexpected events as they arise.
Interesting reading, thank-you. But which nuclear power is the US at war with?
In legal terms? None. In practical terms? War could break out with Iran, North Korea, or both at once any day now.
Furthermore, China's state-run press has been saying since the late 1980s that all-out war with the US is "inevitable within five years." China is a genocidal Stalinist police state that seeks first regional, then global hegemony, and we ignore this at our peril.
Iran has no nuclear weapons, and won't for the foreseeable future. China won't risk a war for numerous reasons, partly military, partly economic.
North Korea is about the only option, and probably will not have any nuclear weapons for several years. Their wonderful leader won't use any nuke they might develop unless his back is against a wall either. He wants his kids to inherit a nation, not smoking rubble, and China will be pressuring him to keep any nukes firmly on the ground.
> partly military, partly economic.
nuclear war with the united states isn't a rational decision.
its completely 0-sum. there is no conceivable outcome in which anyone, anywhere, would benefit.
unless you disagree with that, you have to assume only irrational reasons for starting a war in which the usa would feel pressed to use nuclear weapons.
> all-out war with the US is "inevitable within five years."
you know, i just don't buy the idea of inevitable all-out war anymore. i know that people said that modern technology makes all-out war between nations unthinkable before ww1, but i really think its finally true.
if history is given a japanocentric reading, it was inevitable that japan would attack pearl harbor (or at least, the usa) because of what the american embargo did to them, especially as concerns oil.
now, move that situation up 50 years and change the players: china has no oil because of a successful usa led embargo (however implausible that is), their economy is sliding into preindustrial standards. china launches an invasion of russia or the usa or the middle east to capture oil.
to me, that sounds insanely implausible. i can't even imagine any one country making an early-20th century style resource grab. can any of you?
It's probably more a case that we'd rather not think about it. If a full-out war occurred with the US, it would obviously entail both sides being equipped with a large number of nuclear bombs and other nasties. Civilization as we know it come to an end?
Frankly, I think Kennedy and Kruschev were fucking retards par excellence to seriously play such a game.
>>22
The ayatollahs are not known for their rationality.
>>23
Remember that Japan's invasion of China made the American trade embargo inevitable; from the end of World War I on, the educated American elites were fascinated with Chinese culture and there were fads for Chinese food (note how popular Chinese cuisine is in the US even today) and Chinese games like mah-jong. These American elites viewed Japan's invasion of China with horror and rage. And many of them owned newspapers. The question is, what motivated the fascist military junta ruling Japan in the 1930s to invade China in the first place?
>>24
Ever read anything about games theory? Brinksmanship was a zero-sum game with tremendous stakes. It only took one player to initiate the game, and whoever backed down first, lost.
Yes, I know about game theory. However, you're working with a flawed model, and I don't think you fully comprehend what "zero-sum" game entails. Kennedy and Kruschev were close to the Prisoner's Dilemma. How about we put it in real-world terms to make it obvious?
Teenage dude A and teenage dude B decide to play a game of chicken. They get in their cars, rev up, and race towards each other at maximum velocity. Now, what do you think is the most rational outcome?
Of course, there are several pairs of people each year who don't blink. We bury them and privately think they're retards. Because they are.
Except that our fine friend Kennedy and Kruschev weren't just playing with their own lives. They were playing with millions, and potentially billions, of lives. The most reasonable scenario is that neither engage in this game at all. Next is one blinks, takes a loss.
If neither blinks, trying for a win, the worst-case scenario occurs, and we probably all die.
Got that?
Sorry for the scathing tone, BTW. Today has been hectic on my end.
what irrational thing has an iranian ayatollah done?
most the time they seem to be playing the awful hand they were dealt quite well.
kennedy and kruschev were idiots. what was there to lose in allowing the soviets to base missiles in cuba? yes they'd have guaranteed first nuclear strike, but the system is so distributed that mad would still be guaranteed.
if i was kennedy the soviets could have put a nuclear weapon under my desk and i wouldn't care. if nuclear war ever breaks out, proximity to the impact points won't matter much. god, one could only hope to die in the explosion!
What circumstances would have justified action, then, in your opinion?
Once we as a society believed that we have a moral obligation to oppose evil--and the Soviet Empire certainly qualified, as it was a brutal totalitarian state with publicly stated ambitions of global conquest, whose sole export was genocide--no matter the risk, no matter the cost, no matter the consequences. But something changed.
wow, i strongly disagree with your premise... by which i mean:
>no matter the cost
i can't imagine any culture that ever considered "destruction of the human race" an acceptable cost for anything. all good philosophy is inherently utilitarian; that is to say, one ought to have the greatest possible ratio of good to bad. the destruction of the human race negates all good, meaning that the ratio becomes 0/bad, where bad is a quantity of bad expressed by the untimely deaths of 6 billion people and everything they ever loved. it is the worst conceivable outcome, and therefore the epitome of evil.
> all good philosophy is inherently utilitarian
That isn't affecting the assertion (which could reasonably be made) that the political philosophy of a country is sometimes motivated by non-utilitarian, irrational and consequently very self-destructive motives. Entropy will do that to certain ideologies.
>>30
The Soviets were always rational enough to back down whenever the West confronted them resolutely. Evil usually is, though not always. The times of greatest danger to the world during the Protracted Struggle were not when the US stood firm, but rather when the West tried appeasement, which didn't work any better on the USSR than it did on Hitler.
a) If they hadn't backed down, we might not be here today to argue this. What is that supposed to prove?
b) The USSR wouldn't last forever. Extinction does.
c) Lack of direct confrontation is not appeasement.
d) "Evil"?
Yes. Evil. Evil is real and has always existed. When we confront it and do not back down from it, we can halt its advance, perhaps even push it back a little sometimes, though evil never dies.
Stalin alone killed thirty million Ukrainians. In all the lands under Soviet occupation, there was not one family left whole, not one family left intact, from the Elbe to the Pacific, from the Arctic Circle to the Himalayas. His successors were no more humanitarian than he was. Relatives of mine died in the Soviet extermination camps at Kolyma and Uglegorsk.
What is your solution to this scenario?
Soviet ambassador: "Surrender or we destroy the world." You can answer "yes" or "no." Choose one.
I cannot see any rational way to defend any answer other than "no," either "No, we're calling your bluff," or "No, we choose to die on our feet rather than on our knees."
>which could reasonably be made
no, i just disagree. show me a decision on the part of a nation which is both irrational and important.
when it comes down to it, if you get a couple dozen wealthy, powerful, and elderly men in a room together making all your decisions, you remove all humanity from the process, and you're left with economics and game theory.
there are 0 self-destructive decisions in the history of human nations... there are only short-sighted economic decisions. this isn't just my point, jared diamond wrote a whole book about it recently, called "collapse", if you're interested in the idea, and would like a couple of dozen examples of how what are commonly perceived to be irrational or hateful decisions are really just economic decisions forced by poverty and political expediency. his chapter on how the rwondan genocide had nothing to do with ethnic tensions in particular blew me away.
of course you'd say no. but not because its what john wayne would do. you'd say no because they know that they live in the world too. :P
and thats why your hypothetical never occured; because the soviets didn't want to die anymore than we did.
noone is advocating that the u.s. surrendered to the soviets, but extinction of the human race is not a reasonable response to the arming of a tiny island south of florida, especially when it wouldn't have changed the outcome of a nuclear war anyway.
unless you have some argument that cuba having nukes would have allowed nuclear war without mutually assured destruction, then i'd like to hear your argument about how a development which doesn't change the outcome of total nuclear war in the least is worth total nuclear war.
>>34
I find your labelling somewhat simplistic. Let's ignore that for a second though, and look at a-c) instead. You never gave a compelling reply to any of them. I'm particularly interested in what your counter to b) will be.
"No, we choose to die on our feet rather than on our knees," certainly makes for gallant propaganda, but when playing with nuclear bombs strikes me as misguided. National pride and dickflag-waving aside, brinksmanship and one-upmanship is exactly like the two retards racing towards their death.
Fortunately it was Kruschev that time, and not Stalin. Surrounded by his private army of paranoia-provoking denizens, who knows how he might have responded.
I stand by my statement that Kennedy and Kruschev were both idiots.
a) Appeasement is cowardice, and in the case of a totalitarian state as brutal and ambitious as the USSR or Nazi Germany, appeasement was treason to the human race. Appeasement only encourages an aggressor (on a smaller scale, the Israelis have spent the last fifteen years learning this lesson over and over on a daily basis). If Kennedy had backed down, we would likely be having this conversation in Russian, or in a death-camp in Alaska or Siberia.
b) The USSR lasted until President Reagan seized the initiative and began arming and funding anti-Soviet guerilla movements in the Third World, like the Contras in Nicaragua, the Mujhadin in Afghanistan, and UNITA in Angola. Had he not shown resolve and dared to confront the Soviets, the USSR would still exist and the world would still be under threat of nuclear war.
c) There exists a moral obligation to oppose totalitarianism by any and every means available--no matter the risk, no matter the cost, no matter the consequences. Against a Hitler or a Stalin, appeasement never works, only demonstrations of resolve. When we fail to oppose those who seek to do evil, we share the guilt for their crimes. Actions have consequences, and we are responsible for the results of the choices we make.
d) Thirty million dead Ukrainians, and perhaps twenty million others--Poles, Lithuanians, Finns, Rumanians, Hungarians, Russians, Czechs, and more, would certainly call the Soviet Empire evil. This does not even count the horror wrought in lands outside direct Soviet occupation by Soviet puppet regimes like those of Pol Pot, Robert Mugabe, and Muammar Qaddafi.
You keep talking about "extinction of the human race." This strikes me as ridiculously overblown rhetoric. During the Protracted Struggle, most of each side's nuclear arsenal was pointed at the other side's nuclear arsenal. Destroying every large city in the Northern Hemisphere would have been an unimaginable horror and it might well have sent the survivors of the human race back to the Iron Age for centuries or millenia, but it would certainly not have "exterminated humanity." A valid point requires no exaggeration.
> China is a genocidal Stalinist police
Bullshit that may have been true 50 years ago.
Extinction is when the last individual of the species dies. Genocide would be a better word.
Tho, exploding simultaneously many atomic bombs will have a bad effect on the Earth crust. Violent earthquakes, volcanic activity and tornadoes coupled with radioactive fallout and poisoned water and food, may end up killing the remaining surviving groups, actually resulting in a total extinction.
>39
Ask the Tibetans about the ongoing genocide against them. Ask the survivors of the massacre in Tianamen Square just a few years ago whether the bullets used on them were totalitarian or merely authoritarian.
> Actions have consequences, and we are responsible for the results of the choices we make.
i'm not arguing that you're wrong. i'm not arguing that kolyma and buchenwald weren't evil. i'm arguing that you're looking at a much smaller picture.
6 billion people dead is significantly more evil than 30 million people dead. can you not agree with that?
any action which results in total nuclear war has to be more evil than the holocaust by about a thousand times, because that is the increase in fatal magnitude. how do you disagree with that?
the only time when nuclear war is justified is when the other side does it first; the foreknowledge of this justification is what prevented nuclear war. how do you disagree with that?
> 6 billion people dead is significantly more evil than 30 million people dead. can you not agree with that?
That's a dumb thing to say. I know you did not mean this, but let's assume the 6 billion got killed by natural disasters and the 30 million by mass murder. Or the 6 billion were soldiers killed in a war and the 30 million people murdered in concentration camps. There is a différance in how and why the death of man is conducted.
> appeasement was treason to the human race
o rly?
> no matter the risk, no matter the cost, no matter the consequences
Even extinction?
You must be trolling.
i value all human life equally, and don't consider war to be an "unnatural" cause of death, therefore, 6 billion dead by natural disasters is 200 times less preferable than 30 million dead in concentration camps.
i don't see the dumbness. what is your rationale for valuing the lives of soldiers less than the lives of civilians?
> what is your rationale for valuing the lives of soldiers less than the lives of civilians?
I am not valuing them less. I am saying there is a différance. And thus it simply will be valued differently. Whether you died on the battleground you chose yourself to march on and perhaps even to die for the cause of the fatherland or whether you get exploited to death through work after having been abducted for a crime that amounted to nothing more but being born - this is just an example, of course, but it shows me at least that people have been dying in very different ways throughout history and that the suffering that accompanied them and the responsibilities that their actions produced are very differentiated and important and should not be neglected and ignored because of some simple math in which numbers are compared that no average man can even consider in their size.
i don't understand.
are you just saying that the way you die makes your death more valuable?
or are you saying that the word "value" shouldn't be used?
or are you suggesting that a soldier's death is vastly preferable to a death in a concentration camp? because i disagree. if what you think is more horrible about the camp is the lack of volition, well a soldier doesn't get to make any choices either. you think you have less freedom when told to go take a shower knowing it might be gas, than to be told its time for a counter-attack, knowing the enemy is emplaced in a machine gun nest? the only reason people become soldiers is because it pays well if you're a bachelor, and because they think they'll get to leave soon.
>>44
"You must be trolling" = "I have no answers to the points you raise."
What points? Those soundbites speak for themselves.
I could argue with the poster, but it's a waste of time for both of us. I cannot agree with such an extreme worldview, so there will be no meeting of minds.
> no matter the risk, no matter the cost, no matter the consequences
...is insane.
Ah, yes.
An old Jewish married couple in the Warsaw ghetto were rounded up by the Gestapo when the Germans came. They were shipped off to Auschwitz, where they were beaten and tortured because they were too old to work in the prison factories. Finally the guards decided to shoot them.
As they dragged the old couple out before the firing squad and tied them to the posts, the old man finally lost his temper and began screaming and cursing at the Germans.
And his wife said, "Sol! Don't make a scene! Stop trying to provoke them, you'll make them MAD!"
good parable, because in that equivalent situation, MAD (mutally assured destruction) would be guaranteed!
no american president, no matter how pacific in attitude (not even carter), would have done anything but a full retaliatory nuclear strike in the case that the safety of the territorial united states was threatened.
nor has anyone on this board advocated anything less.
you're not even answering our questions anymore, nor do you speak in points, just evasive aphorisms and sophistry.
What questions? I see only name-calling. "Troll!" "Insane!" and ridiculous overblown rhetoric about a nuclear war killing "six billion human beings."
I argue that against a rational opponent, evil though his intentions may be, brinksmanship is not only possible but mandatory.
Stalin and the other Soviet leaders wanted to conquer the world, but the prospect of being unquestioned master of a radioactive cinder holds little appeal to anyone who is not wholly insane. Therefore it was possible to deter them.
A bully senses fear and weakness, and the manner in which he behaves tomorrow will depend upon what consequences his actions have today. During the Protracted Struggle, brinksmanship was frequently the only possible choice for the West. Showing lack of resolve, with the whole world watching, would only have made the Soviet leadership that much more aggressive.
In the near future, a wholly new and unstable situation may arise. A nuclear-armed Moslem fundamentalist state (like Iran in two years, or perhaps France thirty years from now) would be less rational and therefore less deterrable. But we're not talking about that, are we?
It's true that not everyone would be killed in the initial detonations, but nuclear explosions pull radioactive crud high into the atmosphere. The radioactivity is short-lived (unless a nuclear reactor was hit) but extremely radioactive. This would then be blown for large distances. Add enough of these together, and it would be disingenious to claim that extinction within a decade wouldn't be a very real possibility.
I appreciate the clear statement of your argument, but point out that one premise is potentially incorrect: humans are not rational actors. If only they were.
Finally, while my "insanity" comment was harsh, it is a suitable reply for the "no matter the risk..." comment. It is insane, because it can be used to justify anything. This world is not a dichotomy: there is no pure evil or pure good. Using labels frees you from having to justify your stance, and gives you an inaccurate and unnuanced model to operate with.
Further, stopping the USSR was not the responsibility of the human race. Nor do you have a right to decide my life, especially if I'm in a neutral country. And so forth.
If you want less rhetoric, provide less rhetoric. You're slinging around grandiose statements which don't stand up under scruity. You seem intelligent, so you apparently you don't fully believe these statements, or have fully considered their ramifications. Or do you? In which case, you're insane. QED.
> no matter the risk, no matter the cost, no matter the consequences
Please explain how a rational actor can operate with such an evaluation method.
...so, name-calling is all you have left. Your surrender is noted.
And I note you didn't counter any of my arguments.
Troll.
for someone who sincerely believes "no matter the risk...", name-calling seems like an appropriate response. i can't imagine debating someone who really believes that any outcome is preferable to living under stalin.
do you have no imagination?
besides, i really don't think extinction is an unlikely prospect of total nuclear war. here's a question for you: why do you think that nuclear war with the soviet union between krushchev and kennedy wouldn't have destroyed the human race? also, why is your death, and the death of everyone you love, preferable to your possible death under stalin, and the possible death of everyone you love under stalin? say what you like about stalin, but he didn't kill every russian... "no matter the risk", would have killed every russian and everyone else too.
>6 billion people dead is significantly more evil than 30 million people dead. can you not agree with that?
I know I'm late here, but I just want to point out one thing: 6 billion people dead is NOT more evil than 30 million, because ~6 billion is the population of the world, and if all people in the world were dead, there would be no one to call it evil. =P
welcome!
and i disagree. evil can be construed before the fact, can be anticipated. hypothetically, if george w. bush. decided to round up all the muslims in the u.s. and put them in internment camps, that would be evil, correct? yet it has not happened yet, correct?
therefore, while you're correct that evil/good have no meaning without someone to judge them, all moral actions can be judged from the moment they're conceived, not just after they're completely finished.
I would argue that there is a difference between a hypothetically evil situation and an evil deed already done. For example, imagine that you tell a friend that sometimes you think about killing a bunch of people and cutting them up, and his reaction to that. Compare that with his reaction when you tell him you've already killed and dismembered sixteen people, and their remains are in your basement. In the first situation he'd probably call you crazy and buy you a drink. In the second, he'd run screaming, and probably turn you over to the cops. That's why attempted murder and murder are two different crimes.
As for the hypothetical situation of 30 million vs. 6 billion killed, I would say that before the fact, they both have the same 'evilness' (for lack of a better word), simply because both numbers are so high that the human mind can only conceive of them as an abstract "whoa, that's a lotta stiffs". No one has ever seen a field covered with 30 million, much less 6 billion, dead bodies. Sure, one can say that they're both bad, but seeing the actual result is what carries the impact.
"A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."
I'm not certain what this is supposed to say about how evil a genocide is though. While 30 million is a large number, and six billion is a larger number, you could also say that 200 times as many people are dying.
>> 60
i don't mean this as a personal attack, but i think what it comes down to is that you can't comprehend the difference between 30 million and 6 billion. i feel that i can, and i do so by the same method dmpk2k uses, orders of magnitude.
stalin's 30 million murdered is 5 times as bad as hitler's evil against the jews. that makes sense to me. i can feel that. maybe it's just because i'm a jew and a russian. but i know you and i share something in common: we're both human. how can you not feel that? think about the death of everyone you know, and the end of human science, art, and experience. isn't that the least preferable thing imaginable? isn't it less preferable than simply your own death, or even the death of your loved ones?
i think there are only two arguments against this: either a.) you simply can't imagine it or b.) you are a selfist, and see no value in existence after your own death.
Here's where moral relativism comes into play.
Sure, I can do the math and say 5x > x. But I feel that to take that as an absolute is purely intellectual and, well, disingenuous. What is x, the variable? Is it merely the number of bodies? Is it emotional involvement, personal expreience, cultural identity, the value of a human life? Or something completely different? Just for the sake of argument, if x = 0, the above equation is false.
>but i know you and i share something in common: we're both human. how can you not feel that?
I see this as a plea to your own set of morals, to which I may or may not subscribe. This statement assumes that I place the same value on human life as you, and that this value is absolute. But it's not that easy. To use a cliché example, samurai in ancient Japan believed that taking one's own life was the best way to restore one's honor. Does that mean that the Japanese place less value on human life than Westerners? (Incidentally, answering this question with an affirmative was a popular piece of propaganda during WW2.)
>>63 (Incidentally, answering this question with an affirmative was a popular piece of propaganda during WW2.)
Three words: rape of Nanking. Yes, propaganda is a tissue of lies, but sometimes it's based on truth. It is unfortunate that the ruling Japanese military junta of the time chose to make this one so easy for American propagandists. Then again, it's unfortunate that they started the war in the first place.
> is it merely the number of bodies?
yes, i think it is as simple as counting the corpses. emotional involvement, personal experience, and cultural identity are all incumbent in the moldering flesh before you at every funeral and in every grave. counting the bodies does count those other factors. just because you may not have liked a person does not make them valueless. many people loved hitler, for right or wrong. his death left as much of a negative emotional impact as yours or mine will.
> plea to your own set of morals
i consider it intellectual desperation. i could not imagine how you could not imagine that 30 million deaths was less preferable than 6 billion deaths. but lets talk about morals for a moment anyway.
first, i think suicide is always a defensible response to any situation. self-determination is very important to me, and if you want to kill yourself, it should be allowed.
second, i consider my set of ethics intellectually consistent (that is, i don't make a hypocrite of myself by evincing them), and actionable (that is, i could actually live by them). most ethical codes are not one or the other. i think japanese social mores has often failed both of these tests. if honor is the measure of how one meets one's own moral code, then i would say that there were probably more dishonorable feudal japanese than there are dishonorable modern japanese. when i read japanese myths and history, there is no end to people eschewing responsibilities and finding tricky ways to avoid what they must do... and for every dozen of those, there's one or two people who just do the non-preferable but honorable thing.
>yes, i think it is as simple as counting the corpses.
If it's that simple, then every day is a tragedy. Who knows how many people died in the time it took me to type this? Say five people in Indonesia just died of old age. But wait! In Sweden, 25 people just died in a bus accident. 5x > x. However, I don't know these people, never will, and their existence had no effect on mine whatsoever. x = 0.
>i could not imagine how you could not imagine that 30 million deaths was less preferable than 6 billion deaths.
I never said 30 million was less preferable; I said it would be les evil, as evil is a human concept. If 6 billion would die, there would be no humans to use this concept, no one left to care. In the end, it wouldn't matter.
>Say five people in Indonesia just died of old age. But wait! In Sweden, 25 people just died in a bus accident. 5x > x. However, I don't know these people, never will, and their existence had no effect on mine whatsoever. x = 0.
The five people who died of old age would have lived a full lifetime. They knew death was coming, they'd accepted it, they'd banished regret, and all that.
The 25 people who just died on a bus accident, however, had their lives summarily interrupted for no reason. It doesn't matter how they relate to me. There's no justice in sudden, pointless deaths. Now, if the bus was carrying 25 confirmed serial killers, things would be different...
x is a context-sensitive variable that measures entirely different things depending on the circumstances surrounding deaths of various natures. As such, I agree with >>62, but disagree with >>63's assessment of 5x > x.
> i don't know these people, never will, and their existence had no effect on mine whatsoever. x = 0
"x = 0", hmm? and what do you measure by x? earlier i'd said that x = the number of corpses. obviously you disagree. it seems like you're measuring impact on your life, is that it? so then, if you had lived at another time, would x have equalled 0 relative to the parents eating their children during the reign of stalin or for the soldiers drowning in their own blood during the gassings of world war i?
i refuse to say that any given human life is than another, because i'm not that wise. you are a very fortunate person i suppose, that the only time you get upset is when something bad happens to you or someone you depend on. i find it impossible to say likewise; i cannot say to you that it is less sad when your grandmother dies than when mine does...
also, since i don't believe in "evil", i just always interpret evil to mean "something very unpreferable". when i say that the extinction of the human race is the most evil thing, i mean that it is the least preferable outcome of any conceivable decision, because it ends choice. i'll try and be more clear in the future.
> i refuse to say that any given human life is more valuable than another
fixed
What happens when you fail to resist evil:
Litany for Dictatorships
A poem by Stephen Vincent Benet
For all those beaten, for the broken heads,
The fosterless, the simple, the oppressed,
The ghosts in the burning city of our time…
For those taken in rapid cars to the house and beaten
By the skillful boys with the rubber fists,
-Held down and beaten, the table cutting the loins
Or kicked in the groin and left, with the muscles jerking
Like a headless hen's on the floor of the slaughter-house
While they brought the next man in with his white eyes staring.
For those who still said "Red Front" or "God save the Crown!"
And for those who were not courageous
But were beaten nevertheless.
For those who spit out the bloody stumps of their teeth
Quietly in the hall,Sleep well on stone or iron, watch for the time
And kill the guard in the privy before they die,
Those with the deep-socketed eyes and the lamp burning.
For those who carry the scars, who walk lame - for those
Whose nameless graves are made in the prison-yard
And the earth smoothed back before the morning and the lime scattered.
For those slain at once.
For those living through the months and years
Enduring, watching, hoping, going each day
To the work or the queue for meat or the secret club,
Living meanwhile, begetting children, smuggling guns,
And found and killed at the end like rats in a drain.
For those escaping
Incredibly into exile and wandering there.
For those who live in the small rooms of foreign cities
And who yet think of the country, the long green grass,
The childhood voices, the language, the way wind smelt then,
The shape of rooms, the coffee drunk at the table,
The talk with friends, the loved city, the waiter's face,
The gravestones, with the name, where they will not lie
Nor in any of that earth.
Their children are strangers.
For those who planned and were leaders and were beaten
And for those, humble and stupid, who had no plan
But were denounced, but were angry, but told a joke,
But could not explain, but were sent away to the camp,
But had their bodies shipped back in the sealed coffins,
"Died of pneumonia." "Died trying to escape."
For those growers of wheat who were shot by their own wheat-stacks,
For those growers of bread who were sent to the ice-locked wastes.
And their flesh remembers the fields.
For those denounced by their smug, horrible children
For a peppermint-star and the praise of the Perfect State,
For all those strangled, gelded or merely starved
To make perfect states; for the priest hanged in his cassock,
The Jew with his chest crushed in and his eyes dying,
The revolutionist lynched by the private guards
To make perfect states, in the names of the perfect states.
For those betrayed by the neigbours they shook hands with
And for the traitors, sitting in the hard chair
With the loose sweat crawling their hair and their fingers restless
As they tell the street and the house and the man's name.
And for those sitting at the table in the house
With the lamp lit and the plates and the smell of food,
Talking so quietly; when they hear the cars
And the knock at the door, and they look at each other quickly
And the woman goes to the door with a stiff face,
Smoothing her dress."We are all good citizens here. We believe in the Perfect State."
And that was the last time Tony or Karl or Shorty came to the house
And the family was liquidated later.
It was the last time.
We heard the shots in the night
But nobody knew next day what the trouble was
And a man must go to his work.
So I didn't see him
For three days, then, and me near out of my mind
And all the patrols on the streets with their dirty guns
And when he came back, he looked drunk, and the blood was on him.
For the women who mourn their dead in the secret night,
For the children taught to keep quiet, the old children,
The children spat-on at school.
For the wrecked laboratory,
The gutted house, the dunged picture, the pissed-in well
The naked corpse of Knowledge flung in the square
And no man lifting a hand and no man speaking.
For the cold of the pistol-butt and the bullet's heat,
For the ropes that choke, the manacles that bind,
The huge voice, metal, that lies from a thousand tubes
And the stuttering machine-gun that answers all.
For the man crucified on the crossed machine guns
Without name, without ressurection, without stars,
His dark head heavy with death and his flesh long sour
With the smell of his many prisons - John Smith, John Doe,
John Nobody - oh, crack your mind for his name!
Faceless as water, naked as the dust,
Dishonored as the earth the gas-shells poison
And barbarous with portent.
This is he.This is the man they ate at the green table
Putting their gloves on ere they touched the meat.
This is the fruit of war, the fruit of peace,
The ripeness of invention, the new lamb,
The answer to the wisdom of the wise.
And still he hangs, and still he will not die
And still, on the steel city of our years
The light falls and the terrible blood streams down.
We thought we were done with these things but we were wrong.
We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.
We thought the long train would run to the end of Time.
We thought the light would increase.
Now the long train stands derailed and the bandits loot it.
Now the boar and the asp have power in our time.
Now the night rolls back on the West and the night is solid.
Our fathers and ourselves sowed dragon's teeth.
Our children know and suffer the armed men.
roses are red,
violets are blue,
debating through poetry is asinine.
Your surrender is noted.
please do note it.
i hereby surrender any and all debates to anyone employing obfuscating language, and other non-rational tactics of delay. if you're trying to get in my pants, please, speak to me in soliloquys. but if you're trying to change my mind, your effete preference for style over substance makes me think so little of you, that i'll never respond with anything but sarcasm.
"Eek! Thqueak! Don't provoke him, Martha! Someone might get hurt!" --last words of most of Richard Speck's victims
> isn't it less preferable than simply your own death, or even the death of your loved ones?
I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice
Except if everyone's dead, it doesn't matter either way.
yes. therefore, the choice to allow everyone to die is the worst choice, for the very reason that it is the last choice anyone will ever make.
Not that I disagree, >>76. I personally think allowing everyone to die is also the worst choice, at least from our perspective.
However, just for the sake of curiosity, why would a choice that makes itself the final choice be the worst choice?
>> 78
no sane person would choose to live without liberty. the enjoyment of liberty or the anticipation of the enjoyment of liberty is what keeps us all from killing ourselves. without choice you have no liberty. a person without liberty is a slave. therefore, to choose death is to choose eternal slavery.
Interesting argument. I don't think I'm convinced though...
Other than being a somewhat tenuous argument, it's also self-contradictory. Ie, how do you reconcile "no sane person would choose to live without liberty" with "to choose death is to choose eternal slavery."
By that logic it doesn't matter whether someone with no freedom is alive or dead, they're a slave either way. So why would that person choose to die? But that contradicts the first statement.
> are you just saying that the way you die makes your death more valuable?
The way you die is a part of how you lived; at least to others. So yes, I say that the way you die can make your death more valuable than others as it is a part of your life which you are able to determine to a certain extent (freedom et al).
> or are you saying that the word "value" shouldn't be used?
In its own context, pretty much everything is somehow assigned a specific value.
> the only reason people become soldiers is because it pays well if you're a bachelor, and because they think they'll get to leave soon.
I don't think you have been paying too much attention to the actual history of, say, World War I.
> doesn't mater whether someone with no freedom is alive or dead...so why would that person choose to die.
sorry, i didn't mean that they'd choose to die. when i say no liberty, i mean it. no liberty to choose whether they live or die at all. to me its not contradictory because there is no real state of non-choice equivalent to death.
> as it is a part of your life
human life is valueless to the individual. i know that sounds crazy, but imagine being locked in a 2 meter cube with nothing but food and water for 4 or 5 decades. i think you'd be ambivalent about whether you lived or died. your life is valueless to you outside of the things you do and the people you know.
the people you know mean something to you. when they die, it changes your life, and reduces the avenues available to you for the rest of it. you are less free with no friends and no loved ones than with them. you mean the same to them.
are you wise enough to quantify the value you, or i, or anyone else has to others? if you can't answer yes to that question, you have to act as if all human life is valued equally, even if you can't bring yourself to believe it so. i don't care what completely arbitrary value you give human life, it doesn't matter whether we're all worth a million points in your utilitarian ethics or six, as long as we're all worth the same.
> in its own context
agreed. everything is calculable, but not everything is quantifiable.
> history of, say, world war i.
you speak too briefly. i have no idea how this is a retort.
> are you wise enough to quantify the value you, or i, or anyone else has to others?
I take issue with the "anony else" as well as with the "wise enough". The harsh truth of this world is that you have to make decisions based on uncertainty. It is true that I know only so much as is known to me by more or less direct mediation. And independently from me taking pleasure from these sensations, I also have to make decisions that will consequently end strings of life in my universe. Food, exploitation, etc. are neccessary requirements of my own life. The only way to right this wrongness is by upholding ethical standards with which I judge, i.e. value my world - which will also affect the kinds of decisions I make. So yes, I am differentiating between the death of a willful murderer and sadist on the fields of war and the slaughtering of an innocent woman. The more I am familiar with the persons involved and the circumstances in which they existed, the firmer my opinion will be, but it will always be there, as theoretical as the issue is, since I do always have the ability (and the duty) to consider the theory of my ethics, too.
I am not Jesus Christ. I do not forgive all.
> everything is calculable, but not everything is quantifiable.
Contradictory, as numbers always represent quantities.
> i have no idea how this is a retort.
Read up on how people all over Europe were pretty excited over going to war in the beginning.
> decisions based on uncertainty
no, those decisions don't have to be made. and the people who usually make these decisions, the people throughout history who have taken it upon themselves to judge who is more important and who is less, are almost inevitably judged to be deplorable people.
i refuse to say that my death has a greater negative impact than hitler's death. there's a good talmudic commentary on the mishna "to kill one person is to murder a whole world, to save one person is to murder a whole world". you can never know the effect of removing the genetic and ideological individuality of any one person from the world. it will affect things after you die, and those effects can only be guessed at because once that person is dead they will never happen. all deaths change history, murders even more so.
and don't get any ideas about trying to conflate judging a persons importance with what a doctor does in triage or what a general does in deciding which sector of the front line to reinforce. those are questions of expediency and efficacy, not questions of individual worth.
> contradictory
yes they always represent quantities, but they can not always be quantified. how many x's do you have to sum together to reach 613, #46?
> read up
i've heard of that myth a couple of times. i've also heard it debunked over and over (to great length in the pity of war). i don't know which side to believe. i'm inclined to believe that during that war, like all wars i've been alive during, nearly noone was rushing to the front lines anxious to kill someone they didn't know, or die trying. i doubt you can convince me, and i doubt i can convince you, on this minor point.
> no, those decisions don't have to be made.
Yes, they do. At least by those who know they have to make decisions despite being conscious of almost not knowing anything at all. That is a statement on the factual basis of my ethics, not a programmatical declaration of divine justice.
There are philosophical arguments against these thoughts and their consequences, but I gladly leave those to the sceptics, anti-realists and solipsists out there who conjured them up to begin with.
> those are questions of expediency and efficacy, not questions of individual worth.
Same words, different sector of reference. 's all a bunch of sets of different kinds of logic.
> yes they always represent quantities, but they can not always be quantified.
What you mean is that they cannot always be precisely quantified (your example having the unknown variable x, for that matter). Precision, however, is generally lacking everywhere in this mortal world. Your statement is still meaningless.
> they have to make decisions
you do this over and over. i suppose its just your style, but could you please give a hypothetical example of a situation where one has to make a decision about the relative value to the social network of two people?
> same words
i disagree with the premise that there are "different kinds" of logic. when i studied logic, it seemed like a pretty unitary field. but that would be a long argument.
> precision...generally lacking
right, but you can do work with algebra, you can do work with unknown variables, if you know how they relate to other unknown variables. if you know that x=3y then you can state meaningful things about x and y.
> could you please give a hypothetical example of a situation where one has to make a decision about the relative value to the social network of two people?
Huh? Basically everything that has to do with society. Come up with something yourself!
> when i studied logic, it seemed like a pretty unitary field. but that would be a long argument.
Well, that would be kind of a breakthrough. Back when I studied it, there was no such unifying theory, although some people were speculating about set theory being able to win the price in the end.
> emotional involvement, personal experience, and cultural identity are all incumbent in the moldering flesh before you at every funeral and in every grave
I am tired of your continuous equalization of ethic phenomena.
> The five people who died of old age would have lived a full lifetime. They knew death was coming, they'd accepted it, they'd banished regret, and all that.
>
> The 25 people who just died on a bus accident, however, had their lives summarily interrupted for no reason. It doesn't matter how they relate to me. There's no justice in sudden, pointless deaths. Now, if the bus was carrying 25 confirmed serial killers, things would be different..
And things are different how now? Suddenly people do deserve to die?