A fundamental cause of the war, according to the author, is that Germany and England had conflicting views of security. In general, England's policy was to play European powers off each other, always supporting the second-strongest power against the strongest power to ensure that no one country would dominate the continent and thus be in a position to challenge Britain. In the early 1900s, that meant supporting France in opposition to Germany. Germany's idea of peace, on the other hand, was precisely to dominate and unify the continent under German rule, thus ensuring that they would have no problems on the continent.
I would not say that this was the major cause of the conflict. There are much more fundamental reasons. Let's go through some of them:
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Demographics: after unification of Germany in 1871 it had population of 41 million people. By 1913 the population increased by 65% to 68 million. Population of France was 36,1 million in 1871 without Alsace-Moselle they ceded in the war, and in 1911 it increased only marginally to 39 million. French were scared of rapidly industrializing and growing Germany. But in turn Germany was scared of Russian Empire which increased from around 85 million in 1870 to around 160 million in 1910, and it also industrialized very rapidly.
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The change in foreign policy of Russia and it's turn from the principle of Holy Alliance since 1815, where three Emperors of Russia, Austria and Prussia formed a coalition on monarchic principle against revolutionaries and other threats. This alliance got steadily weakened despite Russia supporting Austria in 1848 against Hungarian rebels only to be betrayed during Crimean War in 1853. Then with unification of Germany this soured further until Russia formed Franco-Russian Alliance in 1894.
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Britain was in a bit of a pickle. You are right that they wanted to play continental powers one against another, but at the same time they were terrified of Russian expansionism. They had valid fears of Russia influencing Central Asia in so called Great Game - the primary concern was Russia expanding into India via Afghanistan, but also establishing Warm water port in East Asia. Brits viewed Russia with suspicion.
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One of the key moments where situation changed was when Russia lost war in 1905 to Japan, which turned its focus more on to the west in Balkans while negotiating alliance with Great Britain in 1907. This put Russia more directly onto collision course against Austria which also wanted influence in Balkans. There were some precursors such as Russia supporting Serbia in Balkan Wars at the expense of Austria. This solidified two competing blocks in Europe.
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There were some crisis situations also concerning Germany, France and UK such as Agadir Affair. The conflict was brewing for some time.
I of course omitted many other things such as German naval rearmament, which however stalled before WW1 with Germans focusing more on the army, and thus it was not a direct cause of it, but it contributed to tensions. I still think WW1 was not inevitable. The collision course was there, but with a little bit more luck and/or more diplomatic skill or at least not outright incompetence during the July crisis, the world could have survived this period of tensions.
georgioz
9mo ago
Yes, it is easy to steelman it from the standpoint of virtue ethics, which puts a lot of weight onto acting virtuously. In fact it is your duty to be virtuous, even if there is nobody to observe it or if it may seem futile, virtuous act has its own value independent on direct or observable result. From this standpoint things like "human rights" or prosperous society is not some accident or some result of Machiavellian planning of philosopher kings. It is result of ordinary citizens accepting their duties and acting virtuously.
It's trivially true that the current war in Ukraine could've been avoided had the Kievan Russ welcomed Moscow as liberators and acquiesced to their rule instead of choosing to fight.
It absolutely is not trivially true, in fact it is trivial to prove the opposite. People in Donetsk and Luhansk and Crimea welcomed their Moscow liberators in 2014 and ended up being conscripted as cannon fodder for Moscow's new war with Ukraine in 2022. If Ukraine welcomed their liberators in 2022 then who knows, maybe Ukrainians would end up in meat wave assaults against Poland or Baltics in 2025.
Recently there was an article in Czech media loosely titled Russian Border Ends Where it Recieves a Beating. There is large grain of truth in that, not only for Russia but also for other expansive empires.
Do rationalists believe that there are moral commitments that are more rational than others? My assumption would be that rationalists would consider moral commitments to be axioms and therefore a requirement to even discuss morality, and that to be morally rational would be to derive positions from your moral axioms in a consistent way.
Rationalists subscribe to utilitarianism, which in and of itself is incoherent moral philosophy. It has two main problems:
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Inability to define utils. Utils are mired with inconsistencies, it is hard to put against each other suffering vs pleasure. Many rationalists evade this as principle of minimizing suffering, but even then there is a problem of comparison: is sand grain in an eye of 1,000 people worse than broken arm of one person?
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Time inconsistency of utils. Actions that decrease utils today may increase them tomorrow. Existential comics has a good example for trolley problem in that vein.
To be rational is to rationally extend ones moral principles rationally. Why would it be irrational to behave in line with ones moral principles?
The word "rationally" does a lot of heavy lifting here, as it assumes utilitarianism. Let's say I subscribe to virtue ethics, which says that I cannot commit murder. But then a rationalist comes and says "hey, if you kill Hitler in his crib, you will prevent countless murders in the future". Wrong, this is not going rationally about my moral assumptions, it is assuming completely different moral system.
georgioz
9mo ago
Saving lives was used as an underlying assumption, I freely admit it. But in the end this intuition was equated - or if you will sublimated into the form of serving the healthcare system. Then it took life of its own, the discussion revolved around what was good or bad for the system, human life was subtracted and extrapolated from in these discussions. That is why we got into the monstrous results of lockdowns.
georgioz
9mo ago
Sure, but this makes my point - it was an analogy. We do not legalize murder just looking at what murderers have to go through in prison. We look on societal impact and other things. So the question is again: what good will legalizing and normalizing weed bring to the country? To me there are no upsides and only downsides, like Scott and others now also admit.
It is a slogan as it just steers the discussion into what is crime, if it has to have some violent or social impact component, what is victim and all that. Plus I am unwilling to accept the premise of your slogan before we even begin the discussion.
I put it into GPT and apparently trespassing, prostitution, gambling, public intoxication, loitering, public nudity, vagrancy, unlicensed hunting or jaywalking are all examples of "victimless crimes". So yeah, I will bite the bullet and just admit that actually victimless crimes should be crimes. Because I do not want to have a society where intoxicated nude vagrants trespass and loiter on streets outside of pedestrian crossings, hunt local birds and sell their gambling scams and their bodies for everybody else to see. Go bark your slogan up somebody else's tree.
I don't see any upsides of legalizing weed, there may be only hidden downsides. Exactly how Scott Alexander now realized.
georgioz
9mo ago
Victimless crimes that harm no one should not be crimes.
This is just a slogan, not an argument. It is exactly what I mentioned with the first principles thinking. Plus it is interesting that you say this right after you talk about how jury can convict somebody who did something criminal under influence. Victimless crime, right?
georgioz
9mo ago
It's not such an easy to do thing as with breathalyzer, in fact legalization of marihuana makes drug testing for manufacturers very hard, as they can no longer have zero tolerance policy as it is hard to analyze if you had a dose an hour or a day ago.
But again, this is even besides the point. What are those incredible positives this legalization brings to the society?
georgioz
9mo ago
I asked you before, what concrete actions are you taking when you strongly believe that we will have utopia/apocalypse in 10 years? Do you have any bonds with longer than 10 year maturity? Do you find it stupid to invest in any new whisky with a plan for aging it for more than 10 years? Along the line with your demographics skepticism - do you consider people stupid for having kids now, if they won't matter in 10 years? A this point I am really curious.
georgioz
9mo ago
Legalization of marihuana brought into my view something that I myself have not seen before. And that is the fact, that many people just support it from first principles, you have these liberal or libertarian assumptions about the world and legalization of marihuana is just part of it. It is first principles thinking - people should be able to do what they want and therefore legalization of marihuana is good. That's it.
Since then I had some discussions with pro-legalization people and they are kind of stumped by a simple question: what good will legalization of marihuana bring to the country? What benefit will you have if your plumbers and doctors and teachers can go about their lives high as kites without any legal repercussion or stigma? What I found was that they do not even think about it this way. Weed should be legalized, because legalization of weed is "good". Smoking weed is just some apriori human right, no matter what. At best, they can point out to a good caused by people not being fined/jailed for making it illegal. Which is generalized argument for legalization of anything: if you legalize murder, then murderers would not have to suffer in jail. That is an argument I guess, but what good will legalization of murder bring to the rest of the society besides people engaging in this activity?
As for what I was wrong about, count me into weed legalization as well as many other liberal causes. I thought I was the enlightened one, smashing old superstitions and bringing new light to humanity as some avatar of Prometheus. I was wrong, I did not realize that I was implicitly holding religious adjacent beliefs, and that I used semantic stoppers such as "X is human right" without actually understanding where I am coming from. I thought I was above mere mortal faults, while I was the most gullible of all the people, because I did not even stop to think where my moral premises such as "human rights" and myriads of slogans such as "taxation is theft" come from and how are they grounded.
I’m having trouble distinguishing your responses from just garden variety selfishness to be honest.
Of course you would have such a trouble, you worship the system. And now we are back to 2020 shaming, the modus operandi during lockdowns: "no, going to funeral of your grandmother and meeting with three or more people is selfish, we are now saving human life medical system". The point is, I don't care about monsters trying to shame me anymore. That is what I realized. Some people just have different moral assumptions. I am sure that there were people in some Aztec village shaming their neighbors, who refused to offer their children to rain god Tlaloc. Do they wish drought and calamity upon good people of the village? We are trying to save lives here! Sacrifice to the system at once! It is a small price to pay.
Me behaving slightly differently for a few weeks during a triage event in the local hospital is a pretty small price
Oh, your moral highness deems it a small price to pay, so everybody should do the same. Please talk more about selfishness. I will not even comment on "for a few weeks" part, yeah the famous two weeks to stop the spread lie to drop-feed the measures .
georgioz
9mo ago
Yeah, the whole "flattening the curve" slogan by measures such as social distancing and lockdowns was based on not overburdening the healthcare system as the primary argument. Were you living under the rock? Elective surgeries were cancelled, medical screenings were postponed and more - all in the name of "the system". I had a friend working in a hospital during lockdowns, when self-isolated people were beating on pots from their balconies, giving praise to heroic doctors, while she was sitting in empty hospital doing nothing. She thought it was stupid. And I really think that the system was the primary concern, stupid halfway-thinking people just substituted "human life" with "healthcare system" and then went from there.
So yes, I do think that "saving the system" was the primary concern, with some vague nod to "human life" to justify it. And as I said, this thinking is now pervasive and it will get worse.
georgioz
9mo ago
See, for me the human life is about enjoying life, meeting your family and friends, being able to grieve for your lost parents or even putting yourself through some tough events subtracting some supposed utils to achieve one of the myriad of goals you may have. Medical system is down there on the chain of what human life represents to me. I thought most people implicitly understand it, but that is apparently not the case.
You get it, if you reduce and equate “human life” with medical system in your assumption, then the rest of the stuff follows. You treat the system as human life, so everyones perogative is to serve the human life medical system. I refuse this equivalency to begin with.
But I am not surprised that for instance utilitarians think this way, it is the same idea to sublimate/identify values into something else like utils, and then just follow the calculation to its inevitable and logically sound monstrosity.
georgioz
9mo ago
I observe that skiing is not actually banned. Neither is smoking or being fat.
One of those things was banned during COVID lockdowns, the other two were exempt. Maybe somebody thought through it stupidly, stopping halfway through and other stupid people ate it.
Sure, but there is more to the life than just your pulse. Should we ban kids skating, because they can break their bone and thus be the burden on the system? What I found more scary is how readily this thing was accepted without question. Ask not what the healthcare system can do for you, ask what you can do for the healthcare system. And again, this is nothing new, I just realized it at that point. For instance in the UK there is heated debate if immigration is good or bad thing for their National Health Service. The NHS is like a sacred cow, people accept it without thinking and put such an importance on it, that it is almost as if NHS has agency of its own, and we need to think what will harm NHS. It is just weird.
This idea is just fundamentally incompatible with my morals. Where does this lead?
This idea is ubiquitous. One of the point I realized this, was COVID era argument: we have to lock people down in order not to overburden healthcare system. It was one of the most stupid arguments I have heard - my purpose and governing principle in my life is now supposed to be not to overburden healthcare system? This amorphous system is actually more valuable than human life as it is embodied in my daily activities and pleasures. I exist for the benefit of this system - not the other way around. No more dangerous activities such as skiing or anything else. By the way the same goes for other similar arguments: smoking and being fat and chronically ill is terrible for the healthcare system, so you should stop doing it.
It reminded me of the old Monty Python skit.
georgioz
9mo ago
As you said, contraception only lowers the risk of unplanned pregnancy while increasing sexual promiscuity. Additionally presence of both options also decreases willingness of men to marry their pregnant girlfriends, no more shotgun weddings. The logic is simple - men did not want the child and it was woman's decision to not take pills properly and to keep the child when abortion is such an easy and accessible "healthcare" option. Which on average increases abortions while also increasing single parenthood.
But constantly talking about it on the national stage does not help. It is just virtue signaling. What would help is to win some fucking elections.
This is such an incomprehensive take to me. Pro-life movement had one of the biggest victories recently with repeal of Roe v. Wade, even leftists tacitly admitted that
This decision is the culmination of a deliberate effort over decades to upset the balance of our law. It’s a realization of an extreme ideology and a tragic error by the Supreme Court,” President Joe Biden said. But he added: “This is not over.”
As for "winning elections" this to me seems as a strange thing, what do you need to win elections for? Presumably to pursue your preferred policies. If your candidate "wins elections" but then he goes against your deepest held values, does it even make sense to call him your candidate anymore? And it is not such a small number of people - according to Gallup the number of people who say abortions should be illegal under all circumstances ranges from 10%-20% since 1975.
One thing I also noted, is how right and left differs in treating their ideological fringes. Leftist mainstream people have no problem tolerating or celebrating even the most unhinged leftist radicals. Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers can get a cushy job at public University and get praise from Wall Street Journal columnist as a model citizen. Marxist radicals such as Angela Davis can be popular champions of police reform movement no problem. Democrats nurture and take care of their radical fringes, they defend them and propagandize in their favor, and then they use their vigor and energy to replenish their ranks and to push Overton window in favor of their policies. Kamala can have the most insane takes like taxing unrealized capital gains or transitioning children of illegal immigrants for free - and you see the ranks closing and defending her exactly on the grounds of pragmatism: it's only a rhetoric to mobilize more radical voter base, nothing to see here. She is still our joyful momala.
While the right absolutely shits not only on "far fringes" like J6ers, who have nothing on leftist radicals like Kathy Boudin - the mother of Chesa Boudin and professor at Columbia after being released from prison in 2003 - bombing the senate building. That would be absurd, but the right also shits on anybody who is not moderate like pro-life activists. They even shit on people who go against mainstream leftist narrative, it is "moderate" right who will be the first to execute their up-and-coming talent for racism, sexism, being pro-life - exactly like you do now. The rightist moderates completely adopt leftist versions of morality and sins, and push it on fellow rightists, moving the Overton window. It would be absolutely inconceivable, that some right-wing version of Bill Ayers such as some former abortion clinic terrorist would be a chair of charity organization, a university professor at state university and could ever be called as "model citizen" by WSJ or similar media.
So yeah, the right will not win elections with castrated elite, with no semblance of balls or spine, which tone-polices and cancels their own people in accordance to leftist sensibilities. And even if they win, they won't do shit with that victory. Or maybe even worse, they will take their victory and cave to leftist preferences as we saw it in UK with immigration, because supposed conservatives are terrified of being called as racists or booed if they go take their kids from private school/university. Who needs enemies with wussy wankers as allies.
During WW1 shell crisis in Britain, the government was able to ramp up production from 500,000 shells in first few months of the War (since August-December) to 16 million shells in 1915.
During shell crisis the reasons were similar - UK was missing some key chemicals like acetone, now Europe and to some extent US have shortages of guncotton and other basic materials. By the way during WW1 Dupont was able to produce 500 tons of guncotton a day. We are now two years into a conflict where Western powers know they are draining their munition reserves and they still cannot produce near the volume of munitions that countries were able to produce 100 years ago. In fact US and EU is reliant on guncotton production from China
You may say that it is problem of state orders, but that itself is a problem of state capacity or to better say incapacity. No decision can be straigthtforward and is mired in endless internal battles due to incompetence and other reasons.
georgioz
10mo ago
most Christians I've known are content to live and let live
I have no problem with live and let live, but they should keep their heresies outside of Catholic church. Catholics acknowledge three pillars of their faith: Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition and Sacred Magisterium as opposed to protestant sola scriptura. Catholics accept the authority of the church, this free-for-all shit that is happening in constantly fracturing protestant churches so they can just vibe with Jesus on personal level does not fly.
I would not say that let's say kaiser Franz Joseph or tzar Nicholas II or kaiser Wilhelm II or president Raymond Poincaré or prime minister David Lloyd George were "abnormal" leaders for their times and yet they are all co-responsible for WW1, which should put them into 0.01% of abnormal leaders according to your criteria - right?
Also I was assessing Hitler pre-war, of course once you have total World War, then all comparisons are off. In fact related to the topic of Darryl Cooper vs Churchill - and we can throw Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman into the bunch - grounding to dust millions of houses full of civilians during air raids on cities in Germany and Japan, including dropping atomic bombs is up there on the scale of atrocities committed on civilian population by any leader in the history of the world. Vietnam war caused around 2 million civilian deaths in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos - which makes JFK and Johnson and Nixon also pretty high on the abnormal list. What percentile of abnormality are those figures in your eyes?
And I see why you do not want to discuss these things, because exactly as Cooper points out, the WW2 is prime example of hyperreality event, it has high place as a national myth in very many countries, which makes any assessment immediately mired in controversy. The thing is that as the time goes this pressure is lessened - not many people are riled up if one assesses pros and cons of Napolen or Emperor Ferdinand II or if they talk about how Gengis Khan can be praised for bringing hundred years long Pax Mongolica, which enabled Europe to reach to orient with explorers like Marco Polo and spurred them toward modernity in its own way. We already see WW1 in rearview mirror and you can finally have reasonable discussions about the events leading to the war as well as if the treaty o Versailles. It is inevitable that the same will happen with WW2 some time, Cooper is just one of the early birds in this sense.
I guess my gripe is with the definition of "normal". Let's think of today - I think Putin is a "normal" leader. Not dissimilar to Xi Jinping or range of various leaders in Africa or Middle East etc. Hitler espoused especially virulent version of fascism, but then Germany was also facing unique challenges. If let's say Germany won WW1 and carved out Lotharingia/Burgundy out of France/Benelux as a new puppet state populated by Dutch and German and French and Flemish people, I would not expect rump France to have your cookie-cutter milquetoast leaders just accepting that.
You have interesting observations, but I think they are far from trivial. A lot of arguments from incredulity and building up some intricate narratives about which country really thinks what.
While on my side I have facts: Russia annexed Crimea and Luhansk and Donetsk. And they definitely are using LDR and DPR troops as cannon fodder in their latest war, so in fact welcoming Russians did not bring them peace.
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