Very wise, you should reincarnate as a 2nd century Chinese warlord
Comment on Looking for answers
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 5 days ago
There are entire Game Theory textbooks dedicated to grappling with the question of when and how one engages in violence. Because broadly speaking, violence is bad. The destructive social forces inhibit socio-economic development, degrade global quality of life, propagate disease, and cause catastrophic shortfalls of critical goods and services.
Whether you’re working at the micro-scale of domestic abuse or the macro-scale of the bombing of Hiroshima, you’re talking about a gross net negative for everyone involved.
But if a detente is one-sided, or a violent actor is free to act uninhibited, there are huge immediate rewards for looting and pillaging your neighbors, pressing ganging people into forced labor, and seizing neighboring property at gunpoint.
OmegaLemmy@discuss.online 5 days ago
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 5 days ago
China’s a great example of the Peace Dividend in action. You get a generation or two of peace and the country explodes with riches - both physical infrastructure and flowering culture.
Then warlords start poaching the wealth of the nation and the country plunges down into poverty, famine, and epidemic, immolating decades of social process.
nooneescapesthelaw@mander.xyz 4 days ago
The US is a successful country and has almost always been at war.
Britain at its peak was holding 10s of countries at gunpoint.
Violence works best if you are much much stronger than the other party.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 4 days ago
The US is a successful country and has almost always been at war.
The areas of the US that are most successful are those most insulated from social conflict. Areas that are subjected to state violence through overpolicing or are left to flounder in the face of industrial abuse, mafia violence, or unchecked domestic violence do much worse. Comparing Ferguson, MO to neighboring St. Louis illustrates this dynamic. One neighborhood is alternately brutalized by the city police and left exposed to domestic crime, dragging its socio-economic state into the gutter. The other is judiciously policed and socially supported by state and private largess, resulting in a far healthier and happier population.
Britain at its peak was holding 10s of countries at gunpoint.
And those countries suffered immensely. Meanwhile, Britain itself endured pockets of chronic crime and substance abuse specifically in areas that hosted military bases and other enclaves. The country saw an explosion in wealth inequality during its economic peak. Victorian England was a hellhole for the Dickensian proletariat.
Fredthefishlord@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
Areas that are subjected to state violence through overpolicing
Chicken, egg
Both of those are just chicken, egg
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Chicken, egg
The police trace their roots to military officers, cattle rustlers, and plantation overseers.
The conception of police-as-civil-servant intent on discouraging violence rather than initiating it is a very new one.
Track_Shovel@slrpnk.net 5 days ago
I really like your comment. Gave me lots to think about. I don’t have much to say in return, other than that, and that your comment is really well written. I don’t find many comments on here that are a pleasure to read; most long ones are incoherent rambling, or canned talking points.
Thanks for providing something for my brain to chew on and making it palatable.