(I did find myself cringing a bit at the parts about how you're "supposed to believe" a thing that it seems is different from what you actually believe. but "here's what I think is valuable and important about this stance that I do also have some disagreements with" is a framing that makes sense to me and that I see a lot of value in.)
I wonder if another way to take away the occasion for wars is - not just to refuse to condone solving problems with violence, but also to identify the problems that violence is sometimes believed to solve, and to find other solutions to those problems. this need not look peaceful in its vibes. like, possibly international sports is anti-war in this sense in giving people a non-war outlet for nationalistic fervor. possibly getting angry young men into boxing is anti-war in giving *them* an outlet for their anger. possibly as you mentioned effective policing is anti-war even if it sometimes involves violence, bc it prevents other violence AND it prevents the anti-crime electorate from getting so frustrated they vote in really repressive governments. probably making democracy work well is anti-war in that it gives people a justified belief that they can make their lives and society better without taking drastic action.
Oh sure, video games are probably playing a role in the lack of violent revolt. When I was a kid (80s) liberals would argue violent games and comic books, etc. were training for war, but now if I had to guess I'd say Call of Duty plays a substitutive role.
It's not very PC, but: lots of young men like to fight, it paid off evolutionarily speaking. Better to give them a chance to do it without anyone actually getting hurt.
The emphasis on the feelings of ordinary citizens about personally participating in war, both in this comment and in Ozy's post, feels weird to me. I don't get the impression that wars get started because young men like to fight, or decide to choose fear and anger over love and forgiveness, and somehow advocate their government into starting a war? Rather the government decides that war is desirable or necessary, and then tries to instill these emotions in their population so that the population doesn't advocate for peace. Maybe the government is like this because the population actively voted for someone who promised them war, but I don't know how often this is the root cause.
Of course it is conceivable that in a world where the population had much stronger feelings about war being bad/peace being good it would be much harder for the government to convince the population that *their* war is actually good/necessary.
Also, who in Ozy's life talks about war as "glorious or heroic"? That's quite surprising to me.
There absolutely is a huge top-down component to it. I personally had no desire to go to war and was terrified of the draft (I was born in 1979 so it was a bit more of a live issue historically). Propaganda, manufacturing consent, the old cowboy movies, all of it. It's true.
But, I have to recognize, the other boys were always getting into fights, loved to watch sports or geek stuff like Star *Wars* or comic books about very muscular guys punching each other, and a lot of guys are really into the macho thing. I don't get most of the manosphere stuff--the Zyns, the MMA, the alpha male boot camps. Like, I have to spend 9-10 hours a day submitting to my boss, why do I want to do it to someone who can actually beat me up? Sounds like jail. What can I say? They like this stuff!
I definitely think if more people felt war was bad we'd have fewer of them, and I think that would be a very good thing.
I think Ozy (as said in the post on disagreeing) talks to a much wider range of viewpoints than most people, and I have definitely seen people talk like that on Substack.
I am inclined to agree with everything you said, but...
(I'm sorry, there's always a but...)
World War One was a product of not enough pacifism, not enough willingness to say "but maybe they have a point," too much eagerness to fight and die just to settle the problem.
World War Two was a product of too *much* pacifism, too much willingness to say "but maybe they have a point," not enough willingness to fight and die to settle the problem. We let Hitler take out two countries before we intervened because he sort of kind of had rights, Mussolini one, and we never did intervene to stop Stalin even when he hit... eight and a half? Something like that? We did not go in to stop warmongering tyrants because what if they had a point, and mostly other people paid the price.
After World War One, we learned the lesson too well. And that's not to say we can't be wrong in the other direction! Korea and Vietnam and Iraq were all, ultimately, a result of us learning that intervention worked and pacifism didn't, and it looks to me as though exactly one of them worked out. If we learn that pacifism works and interventionism doesn't, we may avoid the mistake of Vietnam and make the mistake of Czechoslovakia.
That's kind of the problem, right? You might not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. The only way to stop a guy with a gun is to have a gun yourself, and the only way to stop 10 million guys with guns is 10 million guys with guns of your own.
And nobody talks about it in our era, but war was historically a great opportunity (if you won, of course). You could take the loser's property--farms, animals, etc.. You could take the loser's women. You could move up in life. We talk about it like some aberration, but animals have teeth and claws for a reason. But ours, of course, are so much more destructive.
This might be right, but the opposite way to think about it is maybe Hitler came to power in the first place because Germany wasn't pacifist enough
That is, a lot of people were willing to support fascists who constantly talked about how great war and violence are and loved military parades and wanted to devote the whole economy into military spending so they could conquer land from their neighbor
Maybe the allies were too pacifist, but the fact that fascists took power in the first place was partly because of how the "war is cool machine turns everyone evil" like this essay argues.
I'll disagree about this. I think the fascists took power in the first place for four reasons.
First and most important, the Great Depression wrecking the world economy and taking moderates and establishment parties down with it.
Second, the fact that the existing German military establishment elite were bitterly anticommunist to the point of being unable to work with the social-democratic SPD, even though the SPD were also anticommunist. This limited the possible groups that could form a government without a revolution to the moderate right and far-right.
Third, angry Communist groups were marching around the streets threatening people and beating them up and attempting coups, the police couldn't stop them, and the Fascists organized people to go beat them up. (This description does indeed sidestep the multiple right-wing groups who had been marching around the streets threatening people and beating them up and attempting coups; they mostly bullied different groups and, you know, if your neighbor's house catches fire, that's unfortunate, if your house catches fire, that's a tragedy.) This Fascist knack for street-fighting made them stand out among far-right parties, leading them to get support from people who otherwise would never have tolerated them.
Fourth, the moderate right couldn't fix problems (see "the Great Depression") and so lost elections, meaning the only options for the establishment other than the SPD were on the far right.
I'm not disagreeing particularly with your claim that the fascists used the "war is cool" machine to get voters, but every country had parties that tried to get voters with the "war is cool" machine. I don't think Germany being more "war is cool" than everyone else was a key causal factor in putting the fascists in power. Most countries had "war is cool" as one of many subgroups in a healthy establishment party (e.g. Churchill was a Conservative MP), and I think the key causal factors were, I think, the ones I listed above. Remove one of those and you don't get someone crazy and evil in power, but keep all those and you certainly get someone crazy and almost certainly get someone evil.
I though this was rewarding to read and caused me to consider some perspectives on war and pacifism I hadn't thought much about. Also, it has caused me to move Quakerism up higher on my list of religions that I would consider if I wanted to become religious.
You know, I think like any religion, it's irrational. But most people need some degree of that. And people don't always follow their religion, but it tends to drag them at least a little bit in the direction of whatever the religion says--there's a reason so many charities are religious, going back to Jesus's ministry to the poor.
And war does more damage and causes more human misery than anything else I can think of.
Few scattered thoughts, from someone who is definitely not a pacifist (but alarmed and horrified by how unrestrained many people are about taking life):
1. By the time you say that some level of interventionism is hard not to defend, I do think you're on the spectrum of just war concepts that have been involved in so much recent rage-filled crashout-inducing controversy. I think the real challenge there is then more one of moral integrity and avoiding temptation and slippery slopes. I however would not normally call any position on that spectrum pacifist.
2. An underappreciated issue IMO: the overall pattern of romance of certain martial-adjacent virtues and loving the bright sword for its sharpness. This today includes things like aerospace and ground vehicles, horseback swashbuckling, human physical strength, traditional tools-that-are-also-weapons like machetes and kukris, etc. I think history of the 21st century and the effect of various modern "liberal technocratic" tendencies (like self-driving cars) has been to erode peaceful applications for such things.
3. I've always found the attitude that leads to the sack of cities *deeply* unsympathetic, in so much as that it seems to me like in most cases it *shouldn't even occur to people as an option* that they could take. And as such the mass murders by Hamas were shocking and absurdly repugnant to me. I'm not sure what this says about me, given that really bad sacks have happened a lot even by people ostensibly sharing my moral sense.
4. Related to that, I think that often one must grapple with the fact that often the enemy and their children *have* been awfully inhuman and yet they are human and retain the right to life. What is a child who is raised on heroic stories of the ultramurderers of whofreakingever to me? A human being and not a very sympathetic one, and yet I must save them if I can.
5. There's still always the problem of the people who actually legitimately just have the opposite values and for whom war really is glorious and really is the path by which the surviving boys become men. Lately I've tended to be more concerned about this kind of mentality than about people who discuss war in anodyne "pragmatic" terms far from the fighting.
The thing that is hardest for me is the point that was set aside - when violence is done because it appears to be the best solution for another violence that was done or is being done. Consider when someone's insulin prescription is denied and they will die because of it. It seems so clear that this was violence done to them and they they are justified in proportionately responding to defend themself.
Of course one might question whether an assassination of an health insurance executive achieves anything, but then you also read reports of people whose life-saving claims that had been denied and were approved after the killing of Brian Thompson. Perhaps dozens of lives were saved by the killing of one. (Though of course you can come up with other just-so stories - perhaps this made people cold hearted and made health reform less likely.)
I want to say that I should turn the other cheek. But it's hard for me to say that others should turn their cheeks.
i agree with your thesis here but individual reports of reversed claims (which I've only come across when they were recommended by social media algorithms! IDK about with you though.) are hardly evidence of whether the assassination was effective or not.
(If i were some sorta person who oversaw claims adjusters, and i did not want the next CEO to be assassinated, I think I would probably instruct the claims adjusters to not deny claims any less than usual, so as to not "reward" the assassination!)
Denying more claims gives you a higher profit margin, which means you can return more dividends to your stockholders. Thompson was likely promoted for his ability to do just that. UHC famously rejected more people than other companies; I'd bet they either had higher profit margins or were able to charge less for their services to the big companies that use them for health insurance.
Health insurance is one of those things where I think the financial incentives to do immoral things to make money are so huge that it really should just be run by the government. Thompson and UHC were responding quite rationally to the system that was set up (not that I felt any sorrow at his passing). The insurance company's profit (some fraction of which no doubt winds up in the dividends that appear in my Vanguard account every year) is essentially a deadweight loss on the system that makes healthcare more expensive than it should be. Just because the government shouldn't run railroads or ChatGPT doesn't mean it shouldn't run *anything*.
On the same day that Brian Thompson was murdered, after it happened, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield reversed a policy change that would have increased the number of people being denied coverage. (That sentence comes with a complete lack of numbers, and it's quite possible the timing was a coincidence.)
On social media I saw a huge number of people taking the reversal as evidence that the murder had scared insurance companies into killing less people, and they were cheering on the murderer for making that happen.
I enjoyed the piece but I really don't understand -- especially in this context -- the implicit assumption that it is worse to kill civilians or even children than enemy soldiers. They are all unfortunate deaths and the only thing that is morally relevant is whether those deaths are or aren't an effective way to end the war [1]. Indeed, I'd argue that the corrupting nature of war stems from the pressure to stop seeing the deaths of the enemy as an unfortunate necessity but as a triumph to be celebrated. One way we do this is by telling ourselves 'no no, I don't celebrate killing civilians only lawful combatants' and I think that has disturbing implications.
And yes, we decided to adopt various 'laws of war' but those aren't even intended to reflect fundamental moral distinctions -- it's a war crime to use an aerosolized opiate that sends people off into a warm sleep (even at non-lethal levels) but not to send shrapnel piercing through their body. Rather, these mostly reflect practical judgements about rules that both parties might have enough incentive to mutually follow in hope we could reduce the total suffering.
Having said that, I guess in practice it's very hard to not celebrate the deaths of people trying to kill you so at least making distinctions limits the damage.
---
1: You don't become more morally responsible for the war because you get drafted into the war at 18, probably less so than the 40 year old civilian whose had the chance to take political action or leave and whose work supports the economy.
There was a line in the old War Nerd blog I wish I could find now, saying something like, "Take an 18-year-old boy away from his family and friends and give him a gun, make him march for a month on a broken ankle, chronically sleep deprive him and shoot at him a few times, and see what you get."
But the enemy soldier's trying to kill you. So, you know, kill or be killed. It is one of the most depressing things about war--you're going to spend all your time trying to kill a bunch of men who would probably, deep down inside, like to run away and go home to their families.
I really liked this essay, and I also liked how many links there were, both to other essays of yours and the wider web. altho maybe there are normally this many links and I'm only seeing them now
Something like a quarter of the population died, I think it was a record.
You've got the War of the Triple Alliance in the 19th century in Latin America that wiped out something like 90% of the male Paraguayan population...but wars are in a different category, as we're discussing.
one of the things that really annoy me in various war discussions is unawareness, and active avoidance of awareness, of the facts you describe. people that say that side-in-way is bad because they are doing war-crime that is not locally valid, because everyone or almost everyone did that. because they agree that WWII is justified, and it definitely happened there.
i get the feeling from a lot of war crime inflation that people believe things that lead to the obvious conclusion that war is evil, but then avoid reaching it. instead, they use it to have weapon they always use to say the side they dislike is evil. i rarely get the feeling they actually believe war is evil, they somehow doublethink themselves to not notice that the conclusion fro,m their premise is that war is always wrong.
you very much avoided that, and followed this logic to it's obvious conclusion.
then, it turned out, it's only one half of the things people do in those discussions that annoy me. the second one is to give alternative. and that, you didn't do.
it's to answer - what is the alternative. i get the feeling from a lot of those people that the only way the side they dislike can be in the right morally, is to be good victim and die. there is no acceptable way to defend yourself without committing atrocities, so be good martyr and die.
but they do not own this sentence. they do not say "Israel can't defend itself in moral way, so it should accept that form time to time, some thousand people will get murdered." they don't say "the Palestinian will not get their state without murdering some thousands people, so they should accept that they will not have a state and not murder".
they can't say that, they stuck in a situation where all choices are unacceptable, unthinkable, so they reach for Fabricated Option.
and you do this too. you see clearly the price of war, but you acknowledge yourself, at the beginning, that there is no other way.
so what is the lesser evil? what people should do? some people, when facing Trolley Problems, doesn't choose because of right and wrong, the don't choose because they can't bear the wight of life lost. and this is what this post look like to me.
the price is too high, so you refuse to choose.
but not choosing is a choice, too. sometimes al alternatives sucks, but we still must chose. "do nothing" is a choice, too.
if you think people should die and avoid doing X, as X is too evil, say that!
say that, and we will be able to discuss. i could ask if when big mob attacking one innocent, is good or bad if the innocent kill them all, in self defense. Rule-Utilitarianism and Utilitarianism diverge here, and i think this is the crux of a lot of disagreement.
but you avoid the trade-off, and call this who chose a side as evil. and we can have the discussion about when it is worth to go to war, and what are the downsides of having dictators like Putin winning without fight. because the alternative to war is not peace, but slaughter, as wrote Emme Bull, in her book War For The Oaks.
and you, yet again, condemn something without alternative. that is invalid, not when the alternative is worse then what you condemn. you must look on the options and choose the best, and not refuse to accept all options as too bad, as that way lead to the Fabricated Options, when refusing to choose lead to the worse of all option.
and the nice Quaker lives exists only because other people accept War to defend them. and so i will end with one of my favorite citations:
Eddi studied him. "It takes two to fight a battle." "Indeed." His eyes were hooded and cool. "Did we not oppose our enemies, then surely there would be no war. Only slaughter, and darkness." "Is that it? Two options, either make war, or lie down and be walked on?" His pale skin flushed—with anger, Eddi suspected. But his tone was perfectly polite. "Ah, have I been too long away from the Half-World? Have mortal men found the remedy for war at last? Tell it me, quickly, that I may never again suffer the sight of a comrade dead in battle."
defensive weapons. I think particularly of things like CWIS turrets that can shoot down incoming missiles and bombs or more generally short range anti-air weapons. One of the very grim things is that these are massively harder to build than offensive weapons and more or less require full mastery of the offensive technological stack. Hamas can launch those stupid artillery rockets at Israel but the Palestinians can't defend themselves against the Israeli Air Force even a little bit.
Interestingly in a visual sense using this kind of defenses is one of the strongest "loving the bright sword for its sharpness" things.
good post. made me tear up at one point.
(I did find myself cringing a bit at the parts about how you're "supposed to believe" a thing that it seems is different from what you actually believe. but "here's what I think is valuable and important about this stance that I do also have some disagreements with" is a framing that makes sense to me and that I see a lot of value in.)
I wonder if another way to take away the occasion for wars is - not just to refuse to condone solving problems with violence, but also to identify the problems that violence is sometimes believed to solve, and to find other solutions to those problems. this need not look peaceful in its vibes. like, possibly international sports is anti-war in this sense in giving people a non-war outlet for nationalistic fervor. possibly getting angry young men into boxing is anti-war in giving *them* an outlet for their anger. possibly as you mentioned effective policing is anti-war even if it sometimes involves violence, bc it prevents other violence AND it prevents the anti-crime electorate from getting so frustrated they vote in really repressive governments. probably making democracy work well is anti-war in that it gives people a justified belief that they can make their lives and society better without taking drastic action.
Oh sure, video games are probably playing a role in the lack of violent revolt. When I was a kid (80s) liberals would argue violent games and comic books, etc. were training for war, but now if I had to guess I'd say Call of Duty plays a substitutive role.
It's not very PC, but: lots of young men like to fight, it paid off evolutionarily speaking. Better to give them a chance to do it without anyone actually getting hurt.
I agree with the rest of this.
The emphasis on the feelings of ordinary citizens about personally participating in war, both in this comment and in Ozy's post, feels weird to me. I don't get the impression that wars get started because young men like to fight, or decide to choose fear and anger over love and forgiveness, and somehow advocate their government into starting a war? Rather the government decides that war is desirable or necessary, and then tries to instill these emotions in their population so that the population doesn't advocate for peace. Maybe the government is like this because the population actively voted for someone who promised them war, but I don't know how often this is the root cause.
Of course it is conceivable that in a world where the population had much stronger feelings about war being bad/peace being good it would be much harder for the government to convince the population that *their* war is actually good/necessary.
Also, who in Ozy's life talks about war as "glorious or heroic"? That's quite surprising to me.
There absolutely is a huge top-down component to it. I personally had no desire to go to war and was terrified of the draft (I was born in 1979 so it was a bit more of a live issue historically). Propaganda, manufacturing consent, the old cowboy movies, all of it. It's true.
But, I have to recognize, the other boys were always getting into fights, loved to watch sports or geek stuff like Star *Wars* or comic books about very muscular guys punching each other, and a lot of guys are really into the macho thing. I don't get most of the manosphere stuff--the Zyns, the MMA, the alpha male boot camps. Like, I have to spend 9-10 hours a day submitting to my boss, why do I want to do it to someone who can actually beat me up? Sounds like jail. What can I say? They like this stuff!
I definitely think if more people felt war was bad we'd have fewer of them, and I think that would be a very good thing.
I think Ozy (as said in the post on disagreeing) talks to a much wider range of viewpoints than most people, and I have definitely seen people talk like that on Substack.
I am inclined to agree with everything you said, but...
(I'm sorry, there's always a but...)
World War One was a product of not enough pacifism, not enough willingness to say "but maybe they have a point," too much eagerness to fight and die just to settle the problem.
World War Two was a product of too *much* pacifism, too much willingness to say "but maybe they have a point," not enough willingness to fight and die to settle the problem. We let Hitler take out two countries before we intervened because he sort of kind of had rights, Mussolini one, and we never did intervene to stop Stalin even when he hit... eight and a half? Something like that? We did not go in to stop warmongering tyrants because what if they had a point, and mostly other people paid the price.
After World War One, we learned the lesson too well. And that's not to say we can't be wrong in the other direction! Korea and Vietnam and Iraq were all, ultimately, a result of us learning that intervention worked and pacifism didn't, and it looks to me as though exactly one of them worked out. If we learn that pacifism works and interventionism doesn't, we may avoid the mistake of Vietnam and make the mistake of Czechoslovakia.
I'm not confident you're wrong. Just...
That's kind of the problem, right? You might not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. The only way to stop a guy with a gun is to have a gun yourself, and the only way to stop 10 million guys with guns is 10 million guys with guns of your own.
And nobody talks about it in our era, but war was historically a great opportunity (if you won, of course). You could take the loser's property--farms, animals, etc.. You could take the loser's women. You could move up in life. We talk about it like some aberration, but animals have teeth and claws for a reason. But ours, of course, are so much more destructive.
War stopped being profitable for the winner some time around World War 1. This is actually a pretty big deal...
Right, 'The Great Illusion' said as much in 1909. Of course, Angell took that to mean it wouldn't *happen*, and boy was he wrong.
This might be right, but the opposite way to think about it is maybe Hitler came to power in the first place because Germany wasn't pacifist enough
That is, a lot of people were willing to support fascists who constantly talked about how great war and violence are and loved military parades and wanted to devote the whole economy into military spending so they could conquer land from their neighbor
Maybe the allies were too pacifist, but the fact that fascists took power in the first place was partly because of how the "war is cool machine turns everyone evil" like this essay argues.
I'll disagree about this. I think the fascists took power in the first place for four reasons.
First and most important, the Great Depression wrecking the world economy and taking moderates and establishment parties down with it.
Second, the fact that the existing German military establishment elite were bitterly anticommunist to the point of being unable to work with the social-democratic SPD, even though the SPD were also anticommunist. This limited the possible groups that could form a government without a revolution to the moderate right and far-right.
Third, angry Communist groups were marching around the streets threatening people and beating them up and attempting coups, the police couldn't stop them, and the Fascists organized people to go beat them up. (This description does indeed sidestep the multiple right-wing groups who had been marching around the streets threatening people and beating them up and attempting coups; they mostly bullied different groups and, you know, if your neighbor's house catches fire, that's unfortunate, if your house catches fire, that's a tragedy.) This Fascist knack for street-fighting made them stand out among far-right parties, leading them to get support from people who otherwise would never have tolerated them.
Fourth, the moderate right couldn't fix problems (see "the Great Depression") and so lost elections, meaning the only options for the establishment other than the SPD were on the far right.
I'm not disagreeing particularly with your claim that the fascists used the "war is cool" machine to get voters, but every country had parties that tried to get voters with the "war is cool" machine. I don't think Germany being more "war is cool" than everyone else was a key causal factor in putting the fascists in power. Most countries had "war is cool" as one of many subgroups in a healthy establishment party (e.g. Churchill was a Conservative MP), and I think the key causal factors were, I think, the ones I listed above. Remove one of those and you don't get someone crazy and evil in power, but keep all those and you certainly get someone crazy and almost certainly get someone evil.
I though this was rewarding to read and caused me to consider some perspectives on war and pacifism I hadn't thought much about. Also, it has caused me to move Quakerism up higher on my list of religions that I would consider if I wanted to become religious.
You know, I think like any religion, it's irrational. But most people need some degree of that. And people don't always follow their religion, but it tends to drag them at least a little bit in the direction of whatever the religion says--there's a reason so many charities are religious, going back to Jesus's ministry to the poor.
And war does more damage and causes more human misery than anything else I can think of.
So there's your EA case for promoting Quakerism.
Few scattered thoughts, from someone who is definitely not a pacifist (but alarmed and horrified by how unrestrained many people are about taking life):
1. By the time you say that some level of interventionism is hard not to defend, I do think you're on the spectrum of just war concepts that have been involved in so much recent rage-filled crashout-inducing controversy. I think the real challenge there is then more one of moral integrity and avoiding temptation and slippery slopes. I however would not normally call any position on that spectrum pacifist.
2. An underappreciated issue IMO: the overall pattern of romance of certain martial-adjacent virtues and loving the bright sword for its sharpness. This today includes things like aerospace and ground vehicles, horseback swashbuckling, human physical strength, traditional tools-that-are-also-weapons like machetes and kukris, etc. I think history of the 21st century and the effect of various modern "liberal technocratic" tendencies (like self-driving cars) has been to erode peaceful applications for such things.
3. I've always found the attitude that leads to the sack of cities *deeply* unsympathetic, in so much as that it seems to me like in most cases it *shouldn't even occur to people as an option* that they could take. And as such the mass murders by Hamas were shocking and absurdly repugnant to me. I'm not sure what this says about me, given that really bad sacks have happened a lot even by people ostensibly sharing my moral sense.
4. Related to that, I think that often one must grapple with the fact that often the enemy and their children *have* been awfully inhuman and yet they are human and retain the right to life. What is a child who is raised on heroic stories of the ultramurderers of whofreakingever to me? A human being and not a very sympathetic one, and yet I must save them if I can.
5. There's still always the problem of the people who actually legitimately just have the opposite values and for whom war really is glorious and really is the path by which the surviving boys become men. Lately I've tended to be more concerned about this kind of mentality than about people who discuss war in anodyne "pragmatic" terms far from the fighting.
The thing that is hardest for me is the point that was set aside - when violence is done because it appears to be the best solution for another violence that was done or is being done. Consider when someone's insulin prescription is denied and they will die because of it. It seems so clear that this was violence done to them and they they are justified in proportionately responding to defend themself.
Of course one might question whether an assassination of an health insurance executive achieves anything, but then you also read reports of people whose life-saving claims that had been denied and were approved after the killing of Brian Thompson. Perhaps dozens of lives were saved by the killing of one. (Though of course you can come up with other just-so stories - perhaps this made people cold hearted and made health reform less likely.)
I want to say that I should turn the other cheek. But it's hard for me to say that others should turn their cheeks.
Pacifism is hard.
i agree with your thesis here but individual reports of reversed claims (which I've only come across when they were recommended by social media algorithms! IDK about with you though.) are hardly evidence of whether the assassination was effective or not.
(If i were some sorta person who oversaw claims adjusters, and i did not want the next CEO to be assassinated, I think I would probably instruct the claims adjusters to not deny claims any less than usual, so as to not "reward" the assassination!)
Is there a graph of denials over time somewhere?
Denying more claims gives you a higher profit margin, which means you can return more dividends to your stockholders. Thompson was likely promoted for his ability to do just that. UHC famously rejected more people than other companies; I'd bet they either had higher profit margins or were able to charge less for their services to the big companies that use them for health insurance.
Health insurance is one of those things where I think the financial incentives to do immoral things to make money are so huge that it really should just be run by the government. Thompson and UHC were responding quite rationally to the system that was set up (not that I felt any sorrow at his passing). The insurance company's profit (some fraction of which no doubt winds up in the dividends that appear in my Vanguard account every year) is essentially a deadweight loss on the system that makes healthcare more expensive than it should be. Just because the government shouldn't run railroads or ChatGPT doesn't mean it shouldn't run *anything*.
Indeed. The US didn't always have socialized firefighting...
On the same day that Brian Thompson was murdered, after it happened, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield reversed a policy change that would have increased the number of people being denied coverage. (That sentence comes with a complete lack of numbers, and it's quite possible the timing was a coincidence.)
On social media I saw a huge number of people taking the reversal as evidence that the murder had scared insurance companies into killing less people, and they were cheering on the murderer for making that happen.
I saw that chart and it made me wonder what happened in 1994 that made it an outlier. Turns out that was the year the Rwandan genocide happened.
I enjoyed the piece but I really don't understand -- especially in this context -- the implicit assumption that it is worse to kill civilians or even children than enemy soldiers. They are all unfortunate deaths and the only thing that is morally relevant is whether those deaths are or aren't an effective way to end the war [1]. Indeed, I'd argue that the corrupting nature of war stems from the pressure to stop seeing the deaths of the enemy as an unfortunate necessity but as a triumph to be celebrated. One way we do this is by telling ourselves 'no no, I don't celebrate killing civilians only lawful combatants' and I think that has disturbing implications.
And yes, we decided to adopt various 'laws of war' but those aren't even intended to reflect fundamental moral distinctions -- it's a war crime to use an aerosolized opiate that sends people off into a warm sleep (even at non-lethal levels) but not to send shrapnel piercing through their body. Rather, these mostly reflect practical judgements about rules that both parties might have enough incentive to mutually follow in hope we could reduce the total suffering.
Having said that, I guess in practice it's very hard to not celebrate the deaths of people trying to kill you so at least making distinctions limits the damage.
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1: You don't become more morally responsible for the war because you get drafted into the war at 18, probably less so than the 40 year old civilian whose had the chance to take political action or leave and whose work supports the economy.
There was a line in the old War Nerd blog I wish I could find now, saying something like, "Take an 18-year-old boy away from his family and friends and give him a gun, make him march for a month on a broken ankle, chronically sleep deprive him and shoot at him a few times, and see what you get."
But the enemy soldier's trying to kill you. So, you know, kill or be killed. It is one of the most depressing things about war--you're going to spend all your time trying to kill a bunch of men who would probably, deep down inside, like to run away and go home to their families.
I really liked this essay, and I also liked how many links there were, both to other essays of yours and the wider web. altho maybe there are normally this many links and I'm only seeing them now
Yeah, I know I shouldn't be here or post this much, but Ozy always has interesting stuff to say and lots of interesting links.
I know this is hardly the point, but if it wasn't the genocide, what were the five worst things pol pot did?
Causing mass famines etc. by destroying Cambodia's economy and all the mass killings that weren't genocides.
Something like a quarter of the population died, I think it was a record.
You've got the War of the Triple Alliance in the 19th century in Latin America that wiped out something like 90% of the male Paraguayan population...but wars are in a different category, as we're discussing.
one of the things that really annoy me in various war discussions is unawareness, and active avoidance of awareness, of the facts you describe. people that say that side-in-way is bad because they are doing war-crime that is not locally valid, because everyone or almost everyone did that. because they agree that WWII is justified, and it definitely happened there.
i get the feeling from a lot of war crime inflation that people believe things that lead to the obvious conclusion that war is evil, but then avoid reaching it. instead, they use it to have weapon they always use to say the side they dislike is evil. i rarely get the feeling they actually believe war is evil, they somehow doublethink themselves to not notice that the conclusion fro,m their premise is that war is always wrong.
you very much avoided that, and followed this logic to it's obvious conclusion.
then, it turned out, it's only one half of the things people do in those discussions that annoy me. the second one is to give alternative. and that, you didn't do.
it's to answer - what is the alternative. i get the feeling from a lot of those people that the only way the side they dislike can be in the right morally, is to be good victim and die. there is no acceptable way to defend yourself without committing atrocities, so be good martyr and die.
but they do not own this sentence. they do not say "Israel can't defend itself in moral way, so it should accept that form time to time, some thousand people will get murdered." they don't say "the Palestinian will not get their state without murdering some thousands people, so they should accept that they will not have a state and not murder".
they can't say that, they stuck in a situation where all choices are unacceptable, unthinkable, so they reach for Fabricated Option.
and you do this too. you see clearly the price of war, but you acknowledge yourself, at the beginning, that there is no other way.
so what is the lesser evil? what people should do? some people, when facing Trolley Problems, doesn't choose because of right and wrong, the don't choose because they can't bear the wight of life lost. and this is what this post look like to me.
the price is too high, so you refuse to choose.
but not choosing is a choice, too. sometimes al alternatives sucks, but we still must chose. "do nothing" is a choice, too.
if you think people should die and avoid doing X, as X is too evil, say that!
say that, and we will be able to discuss. i could ask if when big mob attacking one innocent, is good or bad if the innocent kill them all, in self defense. Rule-Utilitarianism and Utilitarianism diverge here, and i think this is the crux of a lot of disagreement.
but you avoid the trade-off, and call this who chose a side as evil. and we can have the discussion about when it is worth to go to war, and what are the downsides of having dictators like Putin winning without fight. because the alternative to war is not peace, but slaughter, as wrote Emme Bull, in her book War For The Oaks.
and you, yet again, condemn something without alternative. that is invalid, not when the alternative is worse then what you condemn. you must look on the options and choose the best, and not refuse to accept all options as too bad, as that way lead to the Fabricated Options, when refusing to choose lead to the worse of all option.
and the nice Quaker lives exists only because other people accept War to defend them. and so i will end with one of my favorite citations:
Eddi studied him. "It takes two to fight a battle." "Indeed." His eyes were hooded and cool. "Did we not oppose our enemies, then surely there would be no war. Only slaughter, and darkness." "Is that it? Two options, either make war, or lie down and be walked on?" His pale skin flushed—with anger, Eddi suspected. But his tone was perfectly polite. "Ah, have I been too long away from the Half-World? Have mortal men found the remedy for war at last? Tell it me, quickly, that I may never again suffer the sight of a comrade dead in battle."
War For The Oaks, Emma Bull
One more scattered thought:
There are a rare few truly entirely
defensive weapons. I think particularly of things like CWIS turrets that can shoot down incoming missiles and bombs or more generally short range anti-air weapons. One of the very grim things is that these are massively harder to build than offensive weapons and more or less require full mastery of the offensive technological stack. Hamas can launch those stupid artillery rockets at Israel but the Palestinians can't defend themselves against the Israeli Air Force even a little bit.
Interestingly in a visual sense using this kind of defenses is one of the strongest "loving the bright sword for its sharpness" things.
In the olden days, one of the best primarily defensive weapons were city walls. Artillery of various kinds eventually made them obsolete...