On July 5, 2003 at 18:18 dcrocker(_at_)brandenburg(_dot_)com (Dave Crocker)
wrote:
Barry,
BS> The idea of charging isn't all that difficult, you just have to find
BS> an amenable model.
Forgive me, Barry, but the idea of world peace isn't all that difficult
either. You just have to find an amenable model.
I'm not sure sarcasm adds a lot to the knowledge base.
Effective real change to complex, existing human social systems is
always difficult, and frequently has proved impossible.
I said always.
Feel free to cite large-scale examples to the contrary.
Yeah well this is just spam not world peace.
Besides, we've had relative world peace since WWII and most skirmishes
have been quite localized (no fun for the locals caught in the middle,
but no world wars either, and the cold war wasn't a war it was a
metaphor for diplomatic tension.)
And there's a reason for that, I'm not pursuing this without purpose.
Towards the end of WWII some of the larger nations who were allies at
the time sat down (e.g., at the Bretton Woods meetings, also the IMF)
and came up with a game theoretic way to make large scale war at least
among major industrialized nations less likely.
What they did was agree to become interdependent in the manufacture of
major weapons components.
So, a jet fighter might be built in the US (Lockheed), but its engines
or crucial navigational parts etc might be built by the UK
(Rolls-Royce) or Sweden (Volvo), etc.
Which makes it that much more difficult for the US to go to war
against the UK or Sweden or any of the other nations mutually
participating in this.
For example, there'd be quite a bit of warning that something was up
when the nation which planned to become belligerent started building
parts of war machinery it had agreed to rely on other countries for.
It's certainly not the only thing which keeps the US and UK out of war
with each other, obviously some pairings are highly unlikely anyhow,
but there are a lot of other nations involved who are more likely to
have fall-outs.
Thus we've seen war shift more and more to the "outsiders" who
generally don't fit into this rather clever scheme (and can't be made
to easily fit, they need another solution entirely.)
But at least we keep many of the nations who really could conduct
massive, destructive, widespread, warfare with each other as we saw in
WWII, in a position where that's likely to be inconvenient or at least
would force them to tip their hands early as they violated the terms
of the alliance.
The big problem today is that weapons of mass destruction (NBC) seem
capable of letting nations which are industrially, technologically,
and economically incapable of conducting widespread warfare in the
usual model cause the kind of destruction we had hoped was contained
to local skirmishing.
But, as I said, you have to find the right model.
So, yes, even world peace is amenable to such things.
--
-Barry Shein
Software Tool & Die | bzs(_at_)TheWorld(_dot_)com |
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