(05-13-2020, 12:33 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(05-12-2020, 06:35 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: The basic proposal is that cultures who have lived under threat of instant nuclear destruction are traumatized, more rationally committed to not support leaders likely to commit to a crisis war, or both.
You may have noted the difference between above making a decision emotionally, or rationally. Some people make decisions more emotionally. These are called Feelers in the Myers Briggs system. Others are more rational. These would be the Thinkers. I’m just leaving room for both to make the decision to avoid nuclear war. Both might make the decision to embrace a crisis war, assuming they haven’t lived through one, as the reasons for such a conflict may seem important if you had not lived through a previous such war.
Making a decision to risk a nuclear exchange would be unlikely. I don’t care if one is emotional or rational at core. It is just a bad decision.
And if a guy comes along that insists that you have not made that decision, that you would support such a war, well, it is not surprising that you cut him out of your social circle. The fault would belong to the prophet, not to the man being irrationally preached to. It would be the prophet who had made the mistake.
As Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek (or one of his writers) put into the mouth of a Klingon:
Only fools fight in a burning building.
COVID-19 is a burning building, and if plagues can happen with wars or be consequences of wars, they seem to make the waging of war, especially Crisis war, difficult. So if we Americans end up with a leader (Trump) who could never wage an effective war -- Obama was in contrast the mailed-fist-in-a-velvet-glove sort of leader who could be the worst sort of leader that any foreign leader could provoke.
Beginning about 1985, when Gorbachev charmed such staunch right-wingers as Reagan and Thatcher into accepting that the Soviet Union wasn't going to use its nuclear weapons unless someone did something incredibly stupid, and indeed too stupid for a conservative who wants his economic system to remain intact so that it could reward that leader's constituents, nuclear war has become less scary. Add to this, too many Americans have commercial ties to China to risk those. An executive of GM doesn't want a GM plant in Shanghai nuked any more than he wants a GM plant in Detroit nuked.
At one point there was talk of the neutron bomb, an atomic bomb that gives off huge amounts of radiation but little blast or heat by contrast. Such a bomb would kill humans, wildlife, and livestock but leave infrastructure intact for those who would occupy and resettle it. So if the Soviet Union placed a few neutron-bomb explosions in the Ruhr Valley and the Netherlands, then what was Germany would still remain -- except that the people living in Амстерда́м and До́ртмунд a few years after the war would be using the Cyrillic alphabet that the Russians use. They would largely be Russians settling in depopulated, but not especially ruined places.
COVID-19 has something of the effect of a neutron bomb on a personal level. Assets remain intact for inheritance or creditors' confiscation, but those who die of COVID-19 are of course dead. .
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
