What I find even more troubling is how certain people seem to pop up whenever someone points out that the Chinese government is a repressive regime decrying statements with preplanned rhetoric.
This is a particularly vile case of argumentum ad hominem. Go see Good Night and Good Luck and repeat until you understand the point about McCarthyism to do penitence.
When China does something, the US complains. When the US does something, everyone in Europe complains. When Europe does something... Well, I guess that's probably the US complaining again.
In Europe your neighbours complain, and when the former colonial powers in Europe do something their former colonies complain...
Exactly. And to expand up this with regards to questioning the Chinese government's viability, let's apply an extra layer as put forth by the US' founding fathers writings and readings...
"Question your government at all times."
So essentially, assuming the worst of your government, is a duty of its citizens.
Question YOUR government at all times (emphasis mine).
Assume the worst of your government: that it is spinning the news about states it doesn't like. Democracies should respect the sovereignty of other nations: the democratic mandate does not extend to other nations.
With all due respect, communism is not high on the chart of things that get the benefit of the doubt.
Where is the western media on that chart? If they get caught with their pants down this time, why should I believe what it says about China in other cases?
My dad - yes yes he does NOT live in China - has an even stronger opinion than I have. He firmly believes that people are getting paid by the US government to bash the Chinese government.
Some people probably do get paid to bash selected foreign governments. I don't have strong evidence for this. I am just biased. It's a good thing I don't run a newspaper.
No one is going to use this password scheme they are too hard. You don't use passwords. They really aren't secure, you need a "something you have, something you know, something you are". For the "are" control access to the machines. For the password use a have and the password changes in a scheduled way every-time its used. Then for know use something much harder than a phrase -- what was the name of that cute girl in 3rd grade? -- what was your favorite restaurant in high school -- What do you get mom for her birthday
The same question doesn't get reused for 180 days or so.
Are you proposing a fixed list of questions? Some problems:
- Answering the questions is an unacceptable invasion of my privacy. Hacking into my computer is bad enough, thank you. - I don't want to give people an incentive for collecting information about me. - Some questions may be unanswerable. Who says I went to something called a high school, and why do you assume there were girls? All girls looked the same to me in that burkha. How do I know which one was cute? In my culture we don't celebrate birthdays. My mother is dead, you insensitive clod!
A user-defined list of questions doesn't work either. What is the number following 1? Et cetera ad infinitum.
The Byzantines, the Muslims and the American fundametalists were all wrong. What wins in the long run is openess to new ideas, economic expansion and not resting on your former glory.
Are Byzantium and China not great examples of winning in the long run? What state that exists today can match their record?
If there is a lesson to be learned from past empires, it is that they cannot go on in expansive mode forever. When Rome was celebrating its victories and building its greatest monuments, the economic base of the empire was slowly collapsing and the population of Europe shrinking. New ideas make even greater empires possible, but the fundamental dynamic stays the same: preservation of the structures of the empire as it was when it was expanding is unsustainable.
Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire were very successful empires. I don't think it makes sense to search for any failures in their government to explain why the stagnant, late empire is only a shadow of the expanding, early empire. It is only natural. For an empire the only solution to stagnation is falling apart.
Empires can choose to face this fact and fall apart voluntarily. The Roman empire did, to some extent, succesfully giving birth to Byzantium. The decolonization after WWII is partly a consequence of the realization of this fact. Many of the participants of the world wars were in no shape to defend themselves because of 'imperial overstretch'.
The reason we tend to attribute the collapse of great empires to internal mismanagement is for a reason you hinted at: empires tend to produce a lot of literature, and in stagnant empires you will see tracts in the historical record representing the ideas of movements that believed they knew how to regain the former glory of the empire by going "back to its roots". They are all wrong: in the end nothing can save the empire.
First of all his explanation of the orbits of the planets was much simpler than existing theories, but given that Occam's Razor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_Razor) might not have been very convincing to them yet it might be better to point out that Kepler was the first to be able to explain the orbit of other stellar bodies (like Venus), so it seems his theory was arguably better than the ones of his contemporaries.
It is a superior theory from a science dynamics point of view, but you still have to fit actual measurements on an abstract mathematical model. The existing model was initially a slightly better fit to the observations, because it had been in use longer. The empirical data was in some points in favor of the old theory.
+ For reasons that I don't understand, the Christian and Muslim worlds seem to have flip-flopped regarding the dominance of religion vs. rational thought somewhere in the past 200-500 years.
Whereas Christianity leaves "Ceasar's to Ceasar" thus separating itself from government, Islam prescribes particular social and governmental order via Sharia.
I.a. Jacques Barzun pointed out that the most important development leading to the separation of church and state is the mass production of books and the resulting loss of control by the Catholic Church over the distribution of ideas and knowledge. It's not that they didn't try to be oppressive in the 16th and 17th century. Maybe they lost control because they were too oppressive.
Another important development is the demographic explosion in Europe while growth stagnated in the Middle East and Africa (mostly due to crippling epidemics). This is also one of the reasons why it was so easy to colonize these areas in the 19th century.
The fact that the Earth was round (contrary to popular belief) was not big news in the 9th century. The ancient Greeks knew very well that the Earth was a sphere, and they too had calculated the circumference with surprising accuracy several centuries B.C. (not to mention before Mohammed). Also Galileo wasn't controversial because he claimed the Earth was round - it was because he claimed that the Earth revolved around the sun, and not vice versa. Sigh.
For people for whom this information is new, please read the wikipedia entry on 'flat earth'. The dark age is largely a Romantic invention. Before the development of the printing press, most inventions and exciting new theories simply never spread beyond a select group of individuals.
Some other points: - The university of Salamanca was correct in judging the theories of Columbus as wrong. They are wrong. No sane venture capitalist would ever give money to Columbus. - Existing earth-centric models of the universe produced better predictions than the immature ideas of Kepler, Galileo, etc.
1) The entire house being a Faraday Cage would be very nice. I'm not sure how hard it would be to build it perfectly without doing silly things like getting rid of windows, but it shoud be possible to get one that is substantially intact. With the prevalance of wireless *everything* nowdays, I enjoy being able to keep it all on the outside. Probably do good things for my risk of getting cancer and whatnot too. (and becomes an eternal cellphone black-out zone as an added bonus...)
I used to live in such a house. It was built in the 17th century. The trick with the windows is too use metal to colour the glass. My windows were just slightly bluish in tint, but completely blocked mobile phone signal. On the walls and doors you can use lead paint like in the old days, but there are safer (and legal) alternatives nowadays.
The problem for energy efficiency is that the water is a significant heat drain in the winter (at least here in the Netherlands). And in the summer there are mosquitoes.
As I have always understood it, power potentially interferes with the quality of signal. If it doesn't now, it might in the future. I always separate them.
I agree to this in principle. The problem is that there is more than one government you can choose from and most wealth is in the hands of people that are not tied to land or a job. The first countries to do this will see their tax base collapse.
Ireland is a notable case: it used to be one of the poorest EU countries, but its predatory flat 10% corporate tax rate for profits from 'overseas firms' made it one of the richest (virtually speaking) in just a decade. But the difference between GDP and GNP is suspiciously high.
Also 'modal' incomes in northwestern Europe and the US are for instance roughly equal, but when you have progressive tax rates up to 70% (as some European countries do) and high corporate tax rates, people on the Forbes list will declare their taxes somewhere else and you get a 30% gap in GDP and 'average' incomes. Think of Monaco, Luxemburg, Switzerland, etc. This gap is virtual from a comparative point of view but very real from a tax-collecting point of view.
The wages of Joe Average is the only stable tax base if you allow people to move around freely. The alternative is collecting taxes on land, and tolls at gates and bridges at the same time as medieval rulers did, but that is very harmful to trade.
I used to live in a 17th century 240 sqft apartment in the center of Amsterdam with my wife. A kitchen (with two high and narrow windows), a small connecting hallway, and a living room (with two high and narrow windows) with a two person bedcloset, builtin storage nearly everywhere, and a crawlspace under the bedcloset for extra storage. Very efficient and you hardly need any furniture. The storage space in the walls also isolates the house and the bedcloset is in the center of the house (near the chimney) between kitchen and living room.
The only minor problem is that the toilet and shower were outside, and shared.
I have never since complained about houses being "too small". The real problem is that post-18th century houses have been designed inefficiently.
I just checked it. Computer screen workplaces without direct daylight are not allowed here in the Netherlands (see Stcrt. 1999, nr. 247/pag. 11 for readers of Dutch).
Exceptions (submarine, photolab etc.): - worker spends less than two hours a day at the workplace - the nature of the work forbids daylight. - the function of the room forbids daylight.
There are medical reasons: eye strain caused by lack of horizon and vitamin D deficiency from shortage of midday sunlight.
The existence of the Pentagon is no excuse for cubicles (just like the existence of Burkina Faso is no excuse for paying people a dollar a day). Putting workers in a crate is antisocial.
Yes, but hotels try for the most appealing use of their land space, not the most efficent. You could give everyone a window office, but it'll cost you. I imagine the price per day per square foot is much higher in a hotel than an office building.
I think it is the other way around. Hotels are appealing if they are on cheap land. You only find tiny rooms with no view in very expensive places.
Most hotel rooms I visit for work -- usually in inner cities -- are smaller than my office and I also have a better view. I do share the room with someone. I am not privileged: every room has a window. Workplaces without direct daylight are illegal in this country afaik. I don't think I have ever seen one here.
This isn't about cubicles. It's about intensive human farming practices. Why should office space be cheaper than hotel space? You spend more time in your office, and the boss expects more loyalty from you than the hotel expects from its visitors. I don't care at all about the quality of hotel rooms (except on holidays when I want a separate kitchen, at least two rooms, a fullsize bath, and a balcony): I just sleep there.
To bid is also an English verb, in some senses still synonymous with pray and beg. To pray is from old French. I don't believe in a relation with amen.
Which is precisely why it's better for no one. There will never be lasting peace as long as one side feels they've gotten the raw end of the deal. We have to focus on finding solutions that satisfy everyone equally and fairly.
We are getting into a repetition of moves. It's a nice idea, but somebody somewhere will always feel they have gotten the raw end of the deal. That doesn't mean that lasting peace is impossible, but it does mean that the costs of war must be high enough to discourage people. Therefore people should defend themselves against aggressors.
You have a point there, but I think you're bending it too much to your own ends. You can say that the war itself was not the issue, but that the conditions imposed by the victors afterwards lead to further war. However, other economic and international issues lead to the first World War, so where does that end? All it proves is that war was a temporary insanity in the midst of trying to find real, lasting social and economic stability. The wars certainly did not CREATE any peace; the peace was there before and after, so they were a distraction from it.
The peace at the other side of the war is sometimes better and sometimes worse. Very often it is better for some people and worse for others. For some people even the war itself is better than the peace before or after. Only the people who profit from the present peace want to see it continued indefinitely. The trick to a lasting peace is to distribute the benefits of the peace to as many people as possible.
Not at all. If one war destablises international relations, then it only increases the need for future fear. On the other hand, if economic ties are forged, and social interaction and cohesion is developed, security is much more tangible.
Not necessarily. Interaction creates envy and causes for war. Economic ties only help if they are at your expense or equally to the benefit of everyone. The Anglo-Dutch Wars are a good example of wars between countries with close economic ties, and also of the fact that a bit of limited warfare for economic purposes can make you rich and powerful at the expense of others. It is also a reminder that you shouldn't try being richer than your more populous neighbours. Not without an even bigger one protecting you anyway. Being Dutch myself I obviously don't think of these wars as 'good wars', but they were profitable to the British even taking the costs of war into account.
We now have the 'Pax Americana' protecting small countries (like Kuwait) from predation by bigger ones (like Iraq), but this will only last as long as the Americans believe they are the economically most successful people in the world. If the Americans themselves become prone to violent fits of jealousy Pax Americana will be over. We will recognize it when it has happened.
But it did. The problem was, Nazis were too strong.
The Czechs were strong, but fought alone. The Poles were strong, but fought alone. The French, British, Dutch, and Belgiums matched the Germans (reinforced with Czech tanks) but they didn't trust eachother, feared a repetition of WWI, and the Brits fought halfheartedly. Later the Yugoslavians and Greeks fought alone. The Russians fought alone, until the Americans and Brits started to help.
No, that's short-sighted. No one actually fights over concepts like sovereignty. If you look a little deeper, you'll see that human, personal issues like fear and disrespect are at work. THAT is what needs to be solved, and that is precisely what war will not solve.
The average Joe will fight to retain sovereignty (the freedom of "his group" to arrange the conditions in which they live) if he fears the alternative. In many cases (like the Nazi attack in 1940) this fear is wellfounded, and one should be fearful as long as the other guys insist on being fearsome. The problem of the defender is that sovereignty is threatened, and when defence is successful that problem is solved. Therefore war did solve something.
In other cases people feel ambivalent about being attacked because they fear their own government more than the enemy, and in that case people will not defend the country very well. In that case war also solves a problem.
The problem is that since you don't know the outcome upfront, people -- even the winning side -- can be unhappy about the costs afterwards. The problem is also that the causes of the war usually could have been avoided: an important cause of WWII was not WWI but the unjust peace in between. Still many wars do create a better peace.
I don't believe in solutions to this problem that require a mentality change with the other side to work. If you don't defend yourselves against aggressors, you will get more misery, not less, because you rewarded aggression. By denying the land you take away one cause of war: the belief among the aggressors that it can solve their problem with low costs.
This is silly. One of the sides in a war usually achieves the main objective the war was fought for (defending one's sovereignty, for instance). Given the costs of the war this may not seem very much to many of its victims, but it is simply untrue that it "never solved anything".
Every war has its roots in previous hostility and violence and disrespect for others. World War II for instance, was largely a result of World War 1.
True. And the griefs of the German people at their treatment after WWI were reasonable. But what does that mean? The trauma of WWI -- the belief that loss of freedom was better than a repetition of the slaughter in WWI -- contributed significantly to *causing* the collapse of continental Europe in the face of Nazi aggression in 1939-'40. Looking back we know that dozens of millions less would have been killed if continental Europe would have ganged up against the Nazis in time.
It's time we started working towards peace rather than war.
All wars are started to achieve another peace: peace on the terms of the aggressor. The objectives of the aggressor often sound quite reasonable to the impartial referee (but are obviously misrepresented in later history if the aggressor loses the war).
Let's work towards international justice: "working towards peace" is meaningless.
Right. I just thought this was a good occasion to celebrate my right to make fun of the dominant religion here *without* causing riots. In fact, a Christian riot because of this joke would seriously spoil the irony and make the post insightful.
Slashdot Mirror
So who the hell needs censorship if you have so much misinformation out there?
Or is it that mis information is the only allowed informatioon?
There is indeed no need to disallow truthful information in this forum. Nobody can tell the difference anyway. But this is not the case everywhere.
What I find even more troubling is how certain people seem to pop up whenever someone points out that the Chinese government is a repressive regime decrying statements with preplanned rhetoric.
This is a particularly vile case of argumentum ad hominem. Go see Good Night and Good Luck and repeat until you understand the point about McCarthyism to do penitence.
When China does something, the US complains. When the US does something, everyone in Europe complains. When Europe does something... Well, I guess that's probably the US complaining again.
In Europe your neighbours complain, and when the former colonial powers in Europe do something their former colonies complain...
Exactly. And to expand up this with regards to questioning the Chinese government's viability, let's apply an extra layer as put forth by the US' founding fathers writings and readings...
"Question your government at all times."
So essentially, assuming the worst of your government, is a duty of its citizens.
Question YOUR government at all times (emphasis mine).
Assume the worst of your government: that it is spinning the news about states it doesn't like. Democracies should respect the sovereignty of other nations: the democratic mandate does not extend to other nations.
With all due respect, communism is not high on the chart of things that get the benefit of the doubt.
Where is the western media on that chart? If they get caught with their pants down this time, why should I believe what it says about China in other cases?
My dad - yes yes he does NOT live in China - has an even stronger opinion than I have. He firmly believes that people are getting paid by the US government to bash the Chinese government.
Some people probably do get paid to bash selected foreign governments. I don't have strong evidence for this. I am just biased. It's a good thing I don't run a newspaper.
No one is going to use this password scheme they are too hard. You don't use passwords. They really aren't secure, you need a "something you have, something you know, something you are". For the "are" control access to the machines. For the password use a have and the password changes in a scheduled way every-time its used. Then for know use something much harder than a phrase
-- what was the name of that cute girl in 3rd grade?
-- what was your favorite restaurant in high school
-- What do you get mom for her birthday
The same question doesn't get reused for 180 days or so.
Are you proposing a fixed list of questions? Some problems:
- Answering the questions is an unacceptable invasion of my privacy. Hacking into my computer is bad enough, thank you.
- I don't want to give people an incentive for collecting information about me.
- Some questions may be unanswerable. Who says I went to something called a high school, and why do you assume there were girls? All girls looked the same to me in that burkha. How do I know which one was cute? In my culture we don't celebrate birthdays. My mother is dead, you insensitive clod!
A user-defined list of questions doesn't work either. What is the number following 1? Et cetera ad infinitum.
The Byzantines, the Muslims and the American fundametalists were all wrong. What wins in the long run is openess to new ideas, economic expansion and not resting on your former glory.
Are Byzantium and China not great examples of winning in the long run? What state that exists today can match their record?
If there is a lesson to be learned from past empires, it is that they cannot go on in expansive mode forever. When Rome was celebrating its victories and building its greatest monuments, the economic base of the empire was slowly collapsing and the population of Europe shrinking. New ideas make even greater empires possible, but the fundamental dynamic stays the same: preservation of the structures of the empire as it was when it was expanding is unsustainable.
Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire were very successful empires. I don't think it makes sense to search for any failures in their government to explain why the stagnant, late empire is only a shadow of the expanding, early empire. It is only natural. For an empire the only solution to stagnation is falling apart.
Empires can choose to face this fact and fall apart voluntarily. The Roman empire did, to some extent, succesfully giving birth to Byzantium. The decolonization after WWII is partly a consequence of the realization of this fact. Many of the participants of the world wars were in no shape to defend themselves because of 'imperial overstretch'.
The reason we tend to attribute the collapse of great empires to internal mismanagement is for a reason you hinted at: empires tend to produce a lot of literature, and in stagnant empires you will see tracts in the historical record representing the ideas of movements that believed they knew how to regain the former glory of the empire by going "back to its roots". They are all wrong: in the end nothing can save the empire.
First of all his explanation of the orbits of the planets was much simpler than existing theories, but given that Occam's Razor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_Razor) might not have been very convincing to them yet it might be better to point out that Kepler was the first to be able to explain the orbit of other stellar bodies (like Venus), so it seems his theory was arguably better than the ones of his contemporaries.
It is a superior theory from a science dynamics point of view, but you still have to fit actual measurements on an abstract mathematical model. The existing model was initially a slightly better fit to the observations, because it had been in use longer. The empirical data was in some points in favor of the old theory.
+ For reasons that I don't understand, the Christian and Muslim worlds seem to have flip-flopped regarding the dominance of religion vs. rational thought somewhere in the past 200-500 years.
Whereas Christianity leaves "Ceasar's to Ceasar" thus separating itself from government, Islam prescribes particular social and governmental order via Sharia.
I.a. Jacques Barzun pointed out that the most important development leading to the separation of church and state is the mass production of books and the resulting loss of control by the Catholic Church over the distribution of ideas and knowledge. It's not that they didn't try to be oppressive in the 16th and 17th century. Maybe they lost control because they were too oppressive.
Another important development is the demographic explosion in Europe while growth stagnated in the Middle East and Africa (mostly due to crippling epidemics). This is also one of the reasons why it was so easy to colonize these areas in the 19th century.
The fact that the Earth was round (contrary to popular belief) was not big news in the 9th century. The ancient Greeks knew very well that the Earth was a sphere, and they too had calculated the circumference with surprising accuracy several centuries B.C. (not to mention before Mohammed). Also Galileo wasn't controversial because he claimed the Earth was round - it was because he claimed that the Earth revolved around the sun, and not vice versa. Sigh.
For people for whom this information is new, please read the wikipedia entry on 'flat earth'. The dark age is largely a Romantic invention. Before the development of the printing press, most inventions and exciting new theories simply never spread beyond a select group of individuals.
Some other points:
- The university of Salamanca was correct in judging the theories of Columbus as wrong. They are wrong. No sane venture capitalist would ever give money to Columbus.
- Existing earth-centric models of the universe produced better predictions than the immature ideas of Kepler, Galileo, etc.
1) The entire house being a Faraday Cage would be very nice. I'm not sure how hard it would be to build it perfectly without doing silly things like getting rid of windows, but it shoud be possible to get one that is substantially intact. With the prevalance of wireless *everything* nowdays, I enjoy being able to keep it all on the outside. Probably do good things for my risk of getting cancer and whatnot too. (and becomes an eternal cellphone black-out zone as an added bonus...)
I used to live in such a house. It was built in the 17th century. The trick with the windows is too use metal to colour the glass. My windows were just slightly bluish in tint, but completely blocked mobile phone signal. On the walls and doors you can use lead paint like in the old days, but there are safer (and legal) alternatives nowadays.
The problem for energy efficiency is that the water is a significant heat drain in the winter (at least here in the Netherlands). And in the summer there are mosquitoes.
As I have always understood it, power potentially interferes with the quality of signal. If it doesn't now, it might in the future. I always separate them.
I agree to this in principle. The problem is that there is more than one government you can choose from and most wealth is in the hands of people that are not tied to land or a job. The first countries to do this will see their tax base collapse.
Ireland is a notable case: it used to be one of the poorest EU countries, but its predatory flat 10% corporate tax rate for profits from 'overseas firms' made it one of the richest (virtually speaking) in just a decade. But the difference between GDP and GNP is suspiciously high.
Also 'modal' incomes in northwestern Europe and the US are for instance roughly equal, but when you have progressive tax rates up to 70% (as some European countries do) and high corporate tax rates, people on the Forbes list will declare their taxes somewhere else and you get a 30% gap in GDP and 'average' incomes. Think of Monaco, Luxemburg, Switzerland, etc. This gap is virtual from a comparative point of view but very real from a tax-collecting point of view.
The wages of Joe Average is the only stable tax base if you allow people to move around freely. The alternative is collecting taxes on land, and tolls at gates and bridges at the same time as medieval rulers did, but that is very harmful to trade.
I used to live in a 17th century 240 sqft apartment in the center of Amsterdam with my wife. A kitchen (with two high and narrow windows), a small connecting hallway, and a living room (with two high and narrow windows) with a two person bedcloset, builtin storage nearly everywhere, and a crawlspace under the bedcloset for extra storage. Very efficient and you hardly need any furniture. The storage space in the walls also isolates the house and the bedcloset is in the center of the house (near the chimney) between kitchen and living room.
The only minor problem is that the toilet and shower were outside, and shared.
I have never since complained about houses being "too small". The real problem is that post-18th century houses have been designed inefficiently.
I just checked it. Computer screen workplaces without direct daylight are not allowed here in the Netherlands (see Stcrt. 1999, nr. 247/pag. 11 for readers of Dutch).
Exceptions (submarine, photolab etc.):
- worker spends less than two hours a day at the workplace
- the nature of the work forbids daylight.
- the function of the room forbids daylight.
There are medical reasons: eye strain caused by lack of horizon and vitamin D deficiency from shortage of midday sunlight.
The existence of the Pentagon is no excuse for cubicles (just like the existence of Burkina Faso is no excuse for paying people a dollar a day). Putting workers in a crate is antisocial.
Yes, but hotels try for the most appealing use of their land space, not the most efficent. You could give everyone a window office, but it'll cost you. I imagine the price per day per square foot is much higher in a hotel than an office building.
I think it is the other way around. Hotels are appealing if they are on cheap land. You only find tiny rooms with no view in very expensive places.
Most hotel rooms I visit for work -- usually in inner cities -- are smaller than my office and I also have a better view. I do share the room with someone. I am not privileged: every room has a window. Workplaces without direct daylight are illegal in this country afaik. I don't think I have ever seen one here.
This isn't about cubicles. It's about intensive human farming practices. Why should office space be cheaper than hotel space? You spend more time in your office, and the boss expects more loyalty from you than the hotel expects from its visitors. I don't care at all about the quality of hotel rooms (except on holidays when I want a separate kitchen, at least two rooms, a fullsize bath, and a balcony): I just sleep there.
To bid is also an English verb, in some senses still synonymous with pray and beg. To pray is from old French. I don't believe in a relation with amen.
Which is precisely why it's better for no one. There will never be lasting peace as long as one side feels they've gotten the raw end of the deal. We have to focus on finding solutions that satisfy everyone equally and fairly.
We are getting into a repetition of moves. It's a nice idea, but somebody somewhere will always feel they have gotten the raw end of the deal. That doesn't mean that lasting peace is impossible, but it does mean that the costs of war must be high enough to discourage people. Therefore people should defend themselves against aggressors.
You have a point there, but I think you're bending it too much to your own ends. You can say that the war itself was not the issue, but that the conditions imposed by the victors afterwards lead to further war. However, other economic and international issues lead to the first World War, so where does that end? All it proves is that war was a temporary insanity in the midst of trying to find real, lasting social and economic stability. The wars certainly did not CREATE any peace; the peace was there before and after, so they were a distraction from it.
The peace at the other side of the war is sometimes better and sometimes worse. Very often it is better for some people and worse for others. For some people even the war itself is better than the peace before or after. Only the people who profit from the present peace want to see it continued indefinitely. The trick to a lasting peace is to distribute the benefits of the peace to as many people as possible.
Not at all. If one war destablises international relations, then it only increases the need for future fear. On the other hand, if economic ties are forged, and social interaction and cohesion is developed, security is much more tangible.
Not necessarily. Interaction creates envy and causes for war. Economic ties only help if they are at your expense or equally to the benefit of everyone. The Anglo-Dutch Wars are a good example of wars between countries with close economic ties, and also of the fact that a bit of limited warfare for economic purposes can make you rich and powerful at the expense of others. It is also a reminder that you shouldn't try being richer than your more populous neighbours. Not without an even bigger one protecting you anyway. Being Dutch myself I obviously don't think of these wars as 'good wars', but they were profitable to the British even taking the costs of war into account.
We now have the 'Pax Americana' protecting small countries (like Kuwait) from predation by bigger ones (like Iraq), but this will only last as long as the Americans believe they are the economically most successful people in the world. If the Americans themselves become prone to violent fits of jealousy Pax Americana will be over. We will recognize it when it has happened.
But it did. The problem was, Nazis were too strong.
The Czechs were strong, but fought alone. The Poles were strong, but fought alone. The French, British, Dutch, and Belgiums matched the Germans (reinforced with Czech tanks) but they didn't trust eachother, feared a repetition of WWI, and the Brits fought halfheartedly. Later the Yugoslavians and Greeks fought alone. The Russians fought alone, until the Americans and Brits started to help.
No, that's short-sighted. No one actually fights over concepts like sovereignty. If you look a little deeper, you'll see that human, personal issues like fear and disrespect are at work. THAT is what needs to be solved, and that is precisely what war will not solve.
The average Joe will fight to retain sovereignty (the freedom of "his group" to arrange the conditions in which they live) if he fears the alternative. In many cases (like the Nazi attack in 1940) this fear is wellfounded, and one should be fearful as long as the other guys insist on being fearsome. The problem of the defender is that sovereignty is threatened, and when defence is successful that problem is solved. Therefore war did solve something.
In other cases people feel ambivalent about being attacked because they fear their own government more than the enemy, and in that case people will not defend the country very well. In that case war also solves a problem.
The problem is that since you don't know the outcome upfront, people -- even the winning side -- can be unhappy about the costs afterwards. The problem is also that the causes of the war usually could have been avoided: an important cause of WWII was not WWI but the unjust peace in between. Still many wars do create a better peace.
I don't believe in solutions to this problem that require a mentality change with the other side to work. If you don't defend yourselves against aggressors, you will get more misery, not less, because you rewarded aggression. By denying the land you take away one cause of war: the belief among the aggressors that it can solve their problem with low costs.
War never solved anything.
This is silly. One of the sides in a war usually achieves the main objective the war was fought for (defending one's sovereignty, for instance). Given the costs of the war this may not seem very much to many of its victims, but it is simply untrue that it "never solved anything".
Every war has its roots in previous hostility and violence and disrespect for others. World War II for instance, was largely a result of World War 1.
True. And the griefs of the German people at their treatment after WWI were reasonable. But what does that mean? The trauma of WWI -- the belief that loss of freedom was better than a repetition of the slaughter in WWI -- contributed significantly to *causing* the collapse of continental Europe in the face of Nazi aggression in 1939-'40. Looking back we know that dozens of millions less would have been killed if continental Europe would have ganged up against the Nazis in time.
It's time we started working towards peace rather than war.
All wars are started to achieve another peace: peace on the terms of the aggressor. The objectives of the aggressor often sound quite reasonable to the impartial referee (but are obviously misrepresented in later history if the aggressor loses the war).
Let's work towards international justice: "working towards peace" is meaningless.
Right. I just thought this was a good occasion to celebrate my right to make fun of the dominant religion here *without* causing riots. In fact, a Christian riot because of this joke would seriously spoil the irony and make the post insightful.