It makes no logical sense to say that an innate quality of the human body can be removed.
This is the fundamental fallacy of the doctrine of innate rights. Any actual part of the human body can be removed. People can be born without them, they can become defective and degrade over time. None of those properties apply to rights (as you're conceiving them), which means they're non-corporeal. In fact, there's no objective way to demonstrate that they exist at all. If I make the claim that every man has a Y chromosome, there is objective proof, with some edge cases that don't apply. If I make the claim that every man has the right of free speech & access to information, there can be no objective proof.
There is no reliable basis upon which to determine that a "natural right" exists as an objective property of nature. As a demonstration, try to disprove the existence of a right you do not believe in, such as the right of every man to have three wives if he wishes.
The only way "natural rights" make sense is if we understand the term "natural right" to mean "a legal right to which I think every person should be entitled." There is no way to remove the subjectivity from that statement, and that's okay. At the end of the day, we make our decisions based on what rights we, subjectively, think people should have. It's just better not to give them grand airs as some universal property of nature, rather than reflecting part our system of preferences (which we're ready to defend by force of arms).
The first ~$40,000 is not yours. It belongs to the government and while you are earning that first $40K you are a slave to Uncle Sam.
Hogwash. You can quit your $100,000-a-year job if you choose, and the government can do nothing to stop you. This is not true of a slave. In fact, if you quit after earning only $30,000, you will owe (using the average rate blah blah blah) $12,000. Taxes are neither slavery nor corvee labor. They are a sliding-scale fee for access to the services which government provides.
Describing taxation as even partial slavery makes about as much sense as saying that if you make $10,000 a year and pay $200 to take your family to the amusement park, you're the slave of Six Flags for 2% of the year.
You are incorrect. Most American bases now are no longer built directly by the military, but on cost-plus contracts by companies like KBR and Bechtel, who also provide the administrative personnel (who do things like cook and clean). This is war profiteering (as is the very idea of a cost-plus contract). Our soldiers are grossly underpaid for what they go through, and I've never met one who suggests that military action helps his own bottom line.
You are also under the misapprehension that we spend much money on things like "welfare" (do you include social security? medicare? WIC, which feeds poor children, is probably the closest thing that actually exists to what you probably mean, and its line item is around $4 billion, which is money paid to American farmers) or on unions. Setting aside your ignorance of the importance of unions, they do not actually receive money from the government. The closest thing you could point to is the bailout of GM, which helps GM's do-nothing douchebag fatcat managerial staff and shareholders more than anything else. (Most of the union expenditures at GM are actually going to provide medical care for retirees. You want to take away grandpa's health care?)
By contrast, Iraq and Afghanistan alone will cost over $1 trillion by 2010. (source) That doesn't take into account the Pentagon's normal operating budget, and it'd pay for about 250 years' worth of WIC...
I don't usually respond to ACs -- mostly because they're usually trolls, and they rarely respond for an actual conversation -- but this raises some interesting points.
If you deny that democratisation, liberalisation and economic development are objectively good, then of course there's no basis for saying any society is better than any other...If you accept that economic development is objectively good, then you can't ignore the analysis carried out by PT Bauer some decades ago,
What you're implying is that economic development and democratization are the correct measures of "quality" or "rightness" in a country. This is a false premise. Something can be objectively good without being unconditionally good. For instance, if we agree that industrialization is objectively good, we can still agree that a country or a people is not better off if it moves from an agrarian society to a heavily industrialized one in which the majority of the people are enslaved; if economic development is objectively good, full stop, then Stalin was objectively good for Russia. Nyet, tovarishch; these things are, if anything, conditionally good, and must be placed into the surrounding cultural and historic context to be meaningful measures. I suspect that significantly weakens Bauer's analysis (though my exposure to it is through your argument only).
Moreover, I would argue that liberalization, democratization, and economic development are good only in so far as they serve as proxies for the happiness and well-being of the individuals in a society, and moreover that one has to consider the distribution of the relevant goods (average standard of living instead of 'economic development', and average individual political power in place of 'democracy'). Perhaps Bauer deals with these points.
I also suspect that Bauer's analysis is confounding British colonial presence with infrastructural investment. Colonialism brought exposure to capital, which was good for the countries when the infrastructure was fixed and could be nationalized or otherwise seized at liberation, but that's not specifically colonialism; it's not earth-shaking that capital investment in infrastructure leads to economic development.
Similarly, appeals to British exceptionalism as a source of democracy are questionable to me. After all, the Indians under the Raj couldn't vote. If anything, it's remarkable that these countries have developed functional democracies, in spite of the long-term lessons in having an entrenched, aristocratic ruling class...
I'm not a big fan of sales taxes; like you say, they're regressive. One just has to be careful going around slashing taxes willy-nilly, and it's always harder to raise taxes on the rich, since they have the lobbying money.
Probably the fairest taxes around are inheritance taxes; after all, the person getting taxed sure didn't earn any of what s/he is getting. But we've seen how that argument went a few years back...
Unfortunately they also pay for a buttload of useless waste.
I hear that a lot but I never see people being very precise about what they mean by it.
What do you mean by it? Personally I'm not jazzed about hundreds of billions of dollars going to drop bombs on foreign countries and pay war profiteers to run military bases, but other than that, most of the big-ticket expenditures are phenomenally useful things...
Yeah, and where my grandmother lives in Oregon, that lack of sales taxes resulted in the end of library service. For the whole county! The nearest fire department for many county residents is fifty miles away!
Taxes pay for very important things. It'd be a disaster if we didn't have them.
On the other hand, the list of societies that have been irreparably damaged by westerners who thought they knew better trying to 'civilise the barbarians' is long.
Yeah. Thank god Westerners didn't go into South Africa, Rhodesia, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, India, North America, Mexico, or Honk Kong. Those places are much better off right now, not having had our terrible influence.
Well, let's see. South Africa -- umm, apartheid? Rhodesia resulted in a race war that has devolved into the current situation of child warfare, heavily armed strife between western-created ethnic groups, and general brutality, plus the rise of Mugabe. Australia -- nowhere near the current population levels prior to the arrival of the white man, but go watch Rabbit-Proof Fence sometime if you're wondering how well the native population got along. New Zealand -- the Maori are now extinct as a pure racial group, but thanks to western rifles, they managed to exterminate each other in unprecedented numbers first. Brazil -- Eh, I can't be bothered on this one. Suffice it to say that there's a lot fewer tribal groups living their lives undisturbed in the rain forest than without us. India -- oh come on. You really want to make a "White Man's Burden" argument? North America -- Yeah, the Native Americans are SURE glad the Europeans showed up. Mexico -- The Maya people were displeased. Not to mention the whole "Montezuma" thing further north. "Honk" Kong -- okay, true, the British did build the city from pretty much nothing. That said is it really any better off right now than anywhere else in China?
The native populations of all the places you've listed have suffered terribly as a result of colonialism. I mean, in a lot of cases they were displaced and rendered irrelevant, but that's not exactly to their benefit.
None of this means that the ways of life of the people who lived there were inherently better than our western one, but the argument you're making here is a non-starter. Particularly when you consider the way that westernization has happened quite effectively without colonialism, like say in Turkey under Ataturk.
I don't think this analysis is accurate to the 2000 election. That election was so close because Bush was intentionally misrepresenting his views and running as the moderate, technocratic, sensible guy that his opponent actually was.
Well, it's more that in postmodern thought, there is no such thing as absolute, uncontingent truth. It's not a world of anything-goes; it's just a world without absolutes.
I'm not a postmodernist myself, but I think that the more moderate forms of pomo have made some valuable contributions to how we think about things. For instance, the original assertion "All nations and cultures have equal value" is a misconception; it's more that "There are no impartial grounds from which to judge which culture is right, when two cultures are different." That doesn't prevent almost everyone from making not-so-impartial judgments in those cases. But it's valuable to acknowledge that those judgments are conditioned by the cultures we grew up in and by our own preferences, not something handed down from the heavens as a received truth. Oh, sure, we come up with plenty of rationalizations for why our way is better than the other guy's, but so does the other guy; we just find our rationalizations more convincing because they agree with what we've already decided.
Personally, I think the notion that men are "created" or are given anything by their "Creator" is a historical conception that does not accord with a modern or accurate understanding of the way of the universe. That doesn't mean I'm unwilling to fight for the freedoms I think all people deserve; just that I base that set of ideas on an entirely different basis.
Yeah, because half a million people having money to do things like eat, buy stuff, and pay their mortgages is obviously not in the best interests of the economy.
Tracking is a two-edged sword. If tracking isn't reviewed, frequently, you risk taking a bright student who had a bad day on test day, and shuffling her into a class that's far below her abilities, for the rest of middle and high school.
What you really need are small classes with tightly focused goals, so that teachers can address all kids equally and really push them to do the best they can.
Of course, what you really really need is a society that will provide jobs requiring high-skill education, rather than an educational system that (at the political level) is mainly intended to babysit most kids, and let the ones who are intended to get ahead in the world go through private schools and magnet schools and otherwise avoid the holding pen...
Class sizes, class sizes, class sizes. Smaller classes mean the ability to teach actual same-level students with individual focused instruction. It's been my mantra for years, and I suspect you wouldn't disagree...
Regarding those tests, btw, don't blame the test authors -- blame the ridiculous standards-creating bodies that would rather find out if the student "Recognizes key factors influencing the geological development of the Great Lakes region" rather than "has a basic understanding of the scientific method." I'd rather write the latter, but I'm far too often called on to write the former. Multiple-choice tests--particularly ones with less than six or seven choices--are far, far better at testing snippets of trivia than they are at testing procedural skills. Even if the students were motivated to care, or if the fox weren't guarding the henhouse (in terms of the school board being the ones who commission and approve the tests, and frequently exert pressure on test-writers to make sure all kids can pass)...
This is because they've been screwing up for years. Their marketing efforts have all been directed towards "Want our $FOO!" Only now are they realizing, no, they really meant "BUY our $FOO!" That's a much harder sell, because people naturally have an inclination to want things, and don't naturally have an inclination to pay for them.
you'd probably just be buying the original researchers PostDocs a new car apiece
Actually, that sounds like a pretty good way to encourage more people to study science. Then we'll at least change culture today and have a bunch more scientists 20 years from now.
You are the exception that proves the rule. There are a few very select areas, such as some parts of New York, which have high enough population density that it might eventually be profitable for a company to lay new infrastructure. So you are one of the happy few who can get a tiny modicum of competition. (And this FIOS push couldn't have anything to do with Verizon's desperate bid for continued relevance, now that Time Warner is offering digital phone plans over their cable lines, no sir.) Tell me, how's the FIOS price compare to TWC?
I live on Manhattan too, but FIOS is never coming to my neighborhood. (And no RCN, neither.) I'd love to patronize either one, but the population density (and the rent) is too low, so it will never pay off, and thus it will never happen. I can get Verizon if I want to pay for a phone line, or I can get Time Warner, and that's that.
Oh, and I used to live downtown where I could also get SpeakEasy, if I wanted to pay the full Verizon price, plus the cost of the third-party provider, since Verizon is quite happy to leverage its control over the lines it rents...
Arrogant tech nerds (myself included) are often suspicious of change. There's something just so satisfying about being able to say "Nuh uh, you're wrong!" or otherwise indulge in world-weary cynicism.
Besides, I like to think of Slashdot as being populated almost entirely by Andy Rooney.
I'd argue that mutually assured destruction is dumber than what we're seeing here.
You'd be wrong. There's some very sound game-theoretic reasons that MAD is a stable state for international relations. Certainly much more stable (especially if you like living under a free society) than the alternative of only one side having the Bomb -- and if you need a real-world example, just look at all the countries (e.g. Iran) which have nuclear-armed neighbors and want the increased security of MAD.
For that matter, you could read Daniel Abraham's Long Price Quartet (that's book 1 of 4), which among other things is basically about what happens under non-MAD conditions when there's a nuclear hegemon, and how other nations react to that reality. (If you're actually considering this and aren't a fantasy reader generally, you can probably just start with book 3.)
And, anyway, MAD so far has a 100% success rate of preventing nuclear war. In fact, a lot more people have died from asymmetric warfare from a non-nuclear-enabled player (e.g. US-al Qaeda relations) than from MAD...
Slashdot Mirror
It makes no logical sense to say that an innate quality of the human body can be removed.
This is the fundamental fallacy of the doctrine of innate rights.
Any actual part of the human body can be removed. People can be born without them, they can become defective and degrade over time. None of those properties apply to rights (as you're conceiving them), which means they're non-corporeal. In fact, there's no objective way to demonstrate that they exist at all. If I make the claim that every man has a Y chromosome, there is objective proof, with some edge cases that don't apply. If I make the claim that every man has the right of free speech & access to information, there can be no objective proof.
There is no reliable basis upon which to determine that a "natural right" exists as an objective property of nature. As a demonstration, try to disprove the existence of a right you do not believe in, such as the right of every man to have three wives if he wishes.
The only way "natural rights" make sense is if we understand the term "natural right" to mean "a legal right to which I think every person should be entitled." There is no way to remove the subjectivity from that statement, and that's okay. At the end of the day, we make our decisions based on what rights we, subjectively, think people should have. It's just better not to give them grand airs as some universal property of nature, rather than reflecting part our system of preferences (which we're ready to defend by force of arms).
The first ~$40,000 is not yours. It belongs to the government and while you are earning that first $40K you are a slave to Uncle Sam.
Hogwash.
You can quit your $100,000-a-year job if you choose, and the government can do nothing to stop you. This is not true of a slave. In fact, if you quit after earning only $30,000, you will owe (using the average rate blah blah blah) $12,000.
Taxes are neither slavery nor corvee labor. They are a sliding-scale fee for access to the services which government provides.
Describing taxation as even partial slavery makes about as much sense as saying that if you make $10,000 a year and pay $200 to take your family to the amusement park, you're the slave of Six Flags for 2% of the year.
You are incorrect. Most American bases now are no longer built directly by the military, but on cost-plus contracts by companies like KBR and Bechtel, who also provide the administrative personnel (who do things like cook and clean). This is war profiteering (as is the very idea of a cost-plus contract). Our soldiers are grossly underpaid for what they go through, and I've never met one who suggests that military action helps his own bottom line.
You are also under the misapprehension that we spend much money on things like "welfare" (do you include social security? medicare? WIC, which feeds poor children, is probably the closest thing that actually exists to what you probably mean, and its line item is around $4 billion, which is money paid to American farmers) or on unions. Setting aside your ignorance of the importance of unions, they do not actually receive money from the government. The closest thing you could point to is the bailout of GM, which helps GM's do-nothing douchebag fatcat managerial staff and shareholders more than anything else. (Most of the union expenditures at GM are actually going to provide medical care for retirees. You want to take away grandpa's health care?)
By contrast, Iraq and Afghanistan alone will cost over $1 trillion by 2010. (source) That doesn't take into account the Pentagon's normal operating budget, and it'd pay for about 250 years' worth of WIC...
I don't usually respond to ACs -- mostly because they're usually trolls, and they rarely respond for an actual conversation -- but this raises some interesting points.
If you deny that democratisation, liberalisation and economic development are objectively good, then of course there's no basis for saying any society is better than any other...If you accept that economic development is objectively good, then you can't ignore the analysis carried out by PT Bauer some decades ago,
What you're implying is that economic development and democratization are the correct measures of "quality" or "rightness" in a country. This is a false premise. Something can be objectively good without being unconditionally good. For instance, if we agree that industrialization is objectively good, we can still agree that a country or a people is not better off if it moves from an agrarian society to a heavily industrialized one in which the majority of the people are enslaved; if economic development is objectively good, full stop, then Stalin was objectively good for Russia. Nyet, tovarishch; these things are, if anything, conditionally good, and must be placed into the surrounding cultural and historic context to be meaningful measures. I suspect that significantly weakens Bauer's analysis (though my exposure to it is through your argument only).
Moreover, I would argue that liberalization, democratization, and economic development are good only in so far as they serve as proxies for the happiness and well-being of the individuals in a society, and moreover that one has to consider the distribution of the relevant goods (average standard of living instead of 'economic development', and average individual political power in place of 'democracy'). Perhaps Bauer deals with these points.
I also suspect that Bauer's analysis is confounding British colonial presence with infrastructural investment. Colonialism brought exposure to capital, which was good for the countries when the infrastructure was fixed and could be nationalized or otherwise seized at liberation, but that's not specifically colonialism; it's not earth-shaking that capital investment in infrastructure leads to economic development.
Similarly, appeals to British exceptionalism as a source of democracy are questionable to me. After all, the Indians under the Raj couldn't vote. If anything, it's remarkable that these countries have developed functional democracies, in spite of the long-term lessons in having an entrenched, aristocratic ruling class...
I'm not a big fan of sales taxes; like you say, they're regressive. One just has to be careful going around slashing taxes willy-nilly, and it's always harder to raise taxes on the rich, since they have the lobbying money.
Probably the fairest taxes around are inheritance taxes; after all, the person getting taxed sure didn't earn any of what s/he is getting. But we've seen how that argument went a few years back...
Unfortunately they also pay for a buttload of useless waste.
I hear that a lot but I never see people being very precise about what they mean by it.
What do you mean by it? Personally I'm not jazzed about hundreds of billions of dollars going to drop bombs on foreign countries and pay war profiteers to run military bases, but other than that, most of the big-ticket expenditures are phenomenally useful things...
Yeah, and where my grandmother lives in Oregon, that lack of sales taxes resulted in the end of library service. For the whole county! The nearest fire department for many county residents is fifty miles away!
Taxes pay for very important things. It'd be a disaster if we didn't have them.
On the other hand, the list of societies that have been irreparably damaged by westerners who thought they knew better trying to 'civilise the barbarians' is long.
Yeah. Thank god Westerners didn't go into South Africa, Rhodesia, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, India, North America, Mexico, or Honk Kong. Those places are much better off right now, not having had our terrible influence.
Well, let's see. South Africa -- umm, apartheid?
Rhodesia resulted in a race war that has devolved into the current situation of child warfare, heavily armed strife between western-created ethnic groups, and general brutality, plus the rise of Mugabe.
Australia -- nowhere near the current population levels prior to the arrival of the white man, but go watch Rabbit-Proof Fence sometime if you're wondering how well the native population got along.
New Zealand -- the Maori are now extinct as a pure racial group, but thanks to western rifles, they managed to exterminate each other in unprecedented numbers first.
Brazil -- Eh, I can't be bothered on this one. Suffice it to say that there's a lot fewer tribal groups living their lives undisturbed in the rain forest than without us.
India -- oh come on. You really want to make a "White Man's Burden" argument?
North America -- Yeah, the Native Americans are SURE glad the Europeans showed up.
Mexico -- The Maya people were displeased. Not to mention the whole "Montezuma" thing further north.
"Honk" Kong -- okay, true, the British did build the city from pretty much nothing. That said is it really any better off right now than anywhere else in China?
The native populations of all the places you've listed have suffered terribly as a result of colonialism. I mean, in a lot of cases they were displaced and rendered irrelevant, but that's not exactly to their benefit.
None of this means that the ways of life of the people who lived there were inherently better than our western one, but the argument you're making here is a non-starter. Particularly when you consider the way that westernization has happened quite effectively without colonialism, like say in Turkey under Ataturk.
I don't think this analysis is accurate to the 2000 election. That election was so close because Bush was intentionally misrepresenting his views and running as the moderate, technocratic, sensible guy that his opponent actually was.
Well, it's more that in postmodern thought, there is no such thing as absolute, uncontingent truth. It's not a world of anything-goes; it's just a world without absolutes.
I'm not a postmodernist myself, but I think that the more moderate forms of pomo have made some valuable contributions to how we think about things. For instance, the original assertion "All nations and cultures have equal value" is a misconception; it's more that "There are no impartial grounds from which to judge which culture is right, when two cultures are different." That doesn't prevent almost everyone from making not-so-impartial judgments in those cases. But it's valuable to acknowledge that those judgments are conditioned by the cultures we grew up in and by our own preferences, not something handed down from the heavens as a received truth. Oh, sure, we come up with plenty of rationalizations for why our way is better than the other guy's, but so does the other guy; we just find our rationalizations more convincing because they agree with what we've already decided.
Personally, I think the notion that men are "created" or are given anything by their "Creator" is a historical conception that does not accord with a modern or accurate understanding of the way of the universe. That doesn't mean I'm unwilling to fight for the freedoms I think all people deserve; just that I base that set of ideas on an entirely different basis.
You don't say anything to embarrass government officials, and you get to keep your job.
Which is why nobody was even remotely critical of Jean Sarkozy's would-be appointment to head EPAD?
Had they been more accommodating, they probably wouldn't be in bankruptcy.
Er, no. Had the company been able to design, market, and sell automobiles that people actually wanted to buy, the companies wouldn't be in bankruptcy.
The union's not at fault here. And the abuses that you're talking about -- well, they get talked about a lot. But where's the evidence?
Yeah, because half a million people having money to do things like eat, buy stuff, and pay their mortgages is obviously not in the best interests of the economy.
Tracking is a two-edged sword. If tracking isn't reviewed, frequently, you risk taking a bright student who had a bad day on test day, and shuffling her into a class that's far below her abilities, for the rest of middle and high school.
What you really need are small classes with tightly focused goals, so that teachers can address all kids equally and really push them to do the best they can.
Of course, what you really really need is a society that will provide jobs requiring high-skill education, rather than an educational system that (at the political level) is mainly intended to babysit most kids, and let the ones who are intended to get ahead in the world go through private schools and magnet schools and otherwise avoid the holding pen...
Class sizes, class sizes, class sizes. Smaller classes mean the ability to teach actual same-level students with individual focused instruction. It's been my mantra for years, and I suspect you wouldn't disagree...
Regarding those tests, btw, don't blame the test authors -- blame the ridiculous standards-creating bodies that would rather find out if the student "Recognizes key factors influencing the geological development of the Great Lakes region" rather than "has a basic understanding of the scientific method." I'd rather write the latter, but I'm far too often called on to write the former. Multiple-choice tests--particularly ones with less than six or seven choices--are far, far better at testing snippets of trivia than they are at testing procedural skills. Even if the students were motivated to care, or if the fox weren't guarding the henhouse (in terms of the school board being the ones who commission and approve the tests, and frequently exert pressure on test-writers to make sure all kids can pass)...
Finally, someone who got the joke!
Well, this is /. All the commenters above you probably didn't read the article, the summary, or even the commenters above *them*.
Is there still a problem?
Depends... how attached are you to really crappy episodes of Heroes? Or *shudder* Survivor LXIV?
This is because they've been screwing up for years.
Their marketing efforts have all been directed towards "Want our $FOO!"
Only now are they realizing, no, they really meant "BUY our $FOO!" That's a much harder sell, because people naturally have an inclination to want things, and don't naturally have an inclination to pay for them.
you'd probably just be buying the original researchers PostDocs a new car apiece
Actually, that sounds like a pretty good way to encourage more people to study science. Then we'll at least change culture today and have a bunch more scientists 20 years from now.
What, because nobody in the real world gets affected with spinal cord injuries?
Oh, wow, sarcasm! I am undone!
You are the exception that proves the rule. There are a few very select areas, such as some parts of New York, which have high enough population density that it might eventually be profitable for a company to lay new infrastructure. So you are one of the happy few who can get a tiny modicum of competition. (And this FIOS push couldn't have anything to do with Verizon's desperate bid for continued relevance, now that Time Warner is offering digital phone plans over their cable lines, no sir.) Tell me, how's the FIOS price compare to TWC?
I live on Manhattan too, but FIOS is never coming to my neighborhood. (And no RCN, neither.) I'd love to patronize either one, but the population density (and the rent) is too low, so it will never pay off, and thus it will never happen. I can get Verizon if I want to pay for a phone line, or I can get Time Warner, and that's that.
Oh, and I used to live downtown where I could also get SpeakEasy, if I wanted to pay the full Verizon price, plus the cost of the third-party provider, since Verizon is quite happy to leverage its control over the lines it rents...
Not to mention that if you're beaming power, you can always make the target a good bit wider than the beam.
Just sayin.
This system will probably pay for itself fairly quickly just by removing the cost of putting the stickers on.
Lasers take quite a bit of power to run, though...
Arrogant tech nerds (myself included) are often suspicious of change. There's something just so satisfying about being able to say "Nuh uh, you're wrong!" or otherwise indulge in world-weary cynicism.
Besides, I like to think of Slashdot as being populated almost entirely by Andy Rooney.
I'd argue that mutually assured destruction is dumber than what we're seeing here.
You'd be wrong. There's some very sound game-theoretic reasons that MAD is a stable state for international relations. Certainly much more stable (especially if you like living under a free society) than the alternative of only one side having the Bomb -- and if you need a real-world example, just look at all the countries (e.g. Iran) which have nuclear-armed neighbors and want the increased security of MAD.
For that matter, you could read Daniel Abraham's Long Price Quartet (that's book 1 of 4), which among other things is basically about what happens under non-MAD conditions when there's a nuclear hegemon, and how other nations react to that reality. (If you're actually considering this and aren't a fantasy reader generally, you can probably just start with book 3.)
And, anyway, MAD so far has a 100% success rate of preventing nuclear war. In fact, a lot more people have died from asymmetric warfare from a non-nuclear-enabled player (e.g. US-al Qaeda relations) than from MAD...