Sometimes I Really like America

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
101

[quote]Varqanir wrote:
Oh? Did Lysander expend more capital than he gained?

Did Philip and Alexander?

Did Caesar?

Did Genghis and Kublai and Attila?

Did Washington and Jefferson?

[/quote]

But how much wealth could they have amassed without destroying anything? No one will know. But we know from mathematics that multiplying is faster than subtracting and then adding again.

Yes, I could steal and add to my collections but what do I risk in attaining that and how much future wealth would I be giving up by living a life of deceit? Who likes to do business with tyrants?

It’s easy to count what is seen. Not so easy to count the stuff that never came to be.

102

Lifticus, I think you’re getting confused by similar-sounding words.

Someone may conserve electricity without being a “conservative.”

Someone may love liberty without being a “liberal.”

Someone may be gentle without being a member of the “gentry”.

Similarly, someone may behaves in (what a civilized person would consider) a civil manner without being a member of a “civilization.”

The !Kung San tribe of the Kalahari were Paleolithic nomadic hunter-gatherers since, well, Paleolithic times, with no indication that they were headed to anything resembling civilization. They only started farming in the 1950s, because the (civilized) government forced them to. And yet, their society has always been extremely cordial, genial, affable, and polite. Civil, you might say. But not really interested in a “better” quality of life than that enjoyed by their predecessors for a thousand generations. If they didn’t develop a civilization after that amount of time in peaceful cooperation with one another, it’s likely that, left to their own devices, they never would.

And by the way, !Kung San have developed a very distinctive language. As they are some of the most accomplished trackers in the world, rest assured that they understand the word “animal.”

103

[quote]LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
Varqanir wrote:
Oh? Did Lysander expend more capital than he gained?

Did Philip and Alexander?

Did Caesar?

Did Genghis and Kublai and Attila?

Did Washington and Jefferson?

But how much wealth could they have amassed without destroying anything? No one will know. But we know from mathematics that multiplying is faster than subtracting and then adding again.

Yes, I could steal and add to my collections but what do I risk in attaining that and how much future wealth would I be giving up by living a life of deceit? Who likes to do business with tyrants?

It’s easy to count what is seen. Not so easy to count the stuff that never came to be.[/quote]

Lifticus, take a deep breath, and tell me honestly that you believe Alexander of Macedon could have amassed more capital had he stayed in Macedonia and never invaded Persia.

That Genghis could have become richer if he had remained in Mongolia herding horses and sheep with his grandson Kublai.

That the United States of America would have been richer and more powerful if had it never “acquired” the land west of the Appalachian Mountains.

Who likes to do business with tyrants? Everybody. Especially other tyrants.

104

[quote]Varqanir wrote:
Who likes to do business with tyrants? Everybody. Especially other tyrants.[/quote]

Yes, and the masses eventually try to kill them. Always and forever.

And no, I am not confusing words. Civilization has everything to do with peaceful cooperation and nothing more. It is a philosophical concept. And yes we are arguing over the proper philosophical meaning of the word “civilization”. It is the totality of human cooperation. Society can not be brought about ab ovo with out cooperation. Civilization is society and the distinct features within it including culture.

So while a few tyrants might be able to amass wealth via warfare it does not benefit civilization one bit. It benefits tyrants only. And that is what you see. What is unseen is the alternative that could have otherwise happened – creation of more wealth for society as a whole – which the tyrants would have had to partake in the division of labor to obtain. Don’t get me wrong, I know perfectly well why they (and others) didn’t do it that way. It is easier for physically strong and intelligent people to be wicked than work hard like slaves.

You’ll never get me to agree that destruction benefits civilization. It stops it by definition.

105

[quote]LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:

Society can not be brought about ab ovo with out cooperation. [/quote]

Society cannot be brought about without breaking an ovum or two. Particularly when certain members of society prefer omelets now to chickens later.

Actually, a successful military conquest pays immediate dividends to everyone in the civilization, particularly the upper and middle classes through increase in living space, resources, and cheap labor.

Well, one alternative to the American Revolution might have been that the colonists could have learned to resolve their differences with their sovereign through peaceful cooperation. Probably would have resulted in mutually profitable trade agreements, and a higher standing of living for the colonies. We’ll never know.

Here’s an experiment. Find a strong, intelligent man with an assertive personality. Give him twenty strong, less intelligent men armed with sharp sticks. Present him with one hundred weaker, unarmed men and their families, living peacefully on five hundred acres of land. Tell the man he has two options.

  1. He may either organize a community around peaceful cooperation, working hard himself, and delegating to the strong men with sticks the tasks of helping the weaker people and their families to build houses, plow and plant, to provide food and shelter for everyone, after which they may all trade peacefully among themselves.

or…

  1. He may order the strong men to confiscate the land, force the people to work the land and build houses to provide food and shelter for him and his twenty soldiers, and kidnap the nubile young women, to be divided up among his twenty soldiers as payment for their services, after he gets first pick of the most attractive ones.

How many men would choose option 1, do you think? Throughout history, how many men have chosen option 1, when they realized that option 2 was also available to them?

Do you mean that civilization stops destruction? Or that destruction stops civilization? Neither is true. Lifticus, look at history. You have claimed that our current civilization is more “advanced” than our previous civilizations, and more advanced than other previous civilizations no longer extant.

Assuming you are correct, that we are in fact more “civilized” than we used to be, and more “civilized” than other people in previous civilizations, then it would have to follow that we would have become less, not more, destructive. Is this the case?

No.

All wars are destructive. Wars between civilized folk using civilized tactics and civilized technology, exponentially more so.

It’s sad, perhaps, but it is the way it is.

106

Here’s a good reason to carry at these protests:

mike

107

[quote]Varqanir wrote:
LIFTICVSMAXIMVS wrote:
Civilization is a product of peaceful cooperation. Is the state required to maintain peace or can not it be maintained by free people committed to their own defense?

I think we need to first agree on what war is. It is not self defense. War is the initiation of violence by one or more states against other states.

We agree about the definition of war.

What we don’t agree on is the definition of civilization. Yours seems to be “the stage of human social development and organization that is considered most advanced,” whereas mine is “the comfort and convenience of modern life, regarded as available only in towns and cities.”

Both are acceptable definitions of the word, but with different implications. While it may be possible (albeit improbable) for a group of intelligent, enlightened individuals to inaugurate an advanced social organization through peaceful cooperation, I don’t think it’s possible for them to go out and build and maintain a city without initiating violence on somebody. The city-states of Greece are, I think, a good example of this.

As for self-defense, when was the last time a war broke out between a purely aggressive nation and another completely blameless nation who was just minding its own business? And don’t say Pearl Harbor or 9/11, because I know you don’t believe it. [/quote]

Poland 1939!

108

[quote]Varqanir wrote:
I like what Jeff Cooper had to say about the whole peace business:

“Peace is a nice thing, but it is not overly impressive. All you need to do to achieve peace is to give up, and as to that, we will all have all the peace we need, all too soon.”[/quote]

that’s the kind of peace, MR.HUSSEIN wants with the muslems

109

[quote]Varqanir wrote:
ephrem wrote:
…peace that needs defending is not peace, but a very slow waging war. That should satisfy you, shouldn’t it?

It should, shouldn’t it. Except that such an animal doesn’t exist on this planet.

I would be interested in seeing an example of any period in human history (post-agricultural revolution, preferably), in which ANY civilization enjoyed a prolonged (let’s say, longer than five years) period of your definition of “peace,” that is to say, without needing defending through force of arms.

Pax Romana doesn’t count (defended by most powerful army in the world), nor Pax Britannia (most powerful navy), nor Swiss neutrality (the entire country is a fortress), nor Pax Americana (see Rome and Britain above).[/quote]

Costa Rica?

110

[quote]kodiak82 wrote:
Varqanir wrote:
I like what Jeff Cooper had to say about the whole peace business:

“Peace is a nice thing, but it is not overly impressive. All you need to do to achieve peace is to give up, and as to that, we will all have all the peace we need, all too soon.”

that’s the kind of peace, MR.HUSSEIN wants with the muslems[/quote]

Well if by that kind of peace you mean stop bombing them by the thousand, well yes, that would be swell.

I know that 3000 AMERICANS died, but that really only retroactively justifies the death of hundreds of thousands human beings in the mind of some very special Americans.

I refer you to the original German national anthem, rarely used today:

Deutschland, Deutschland ueber alles, ueber alles in der Welt.