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Do you believe world peace is attainable?

Discussion in 'BBS Hangout: Debate & Discussion' started by London'sBurning, Oct 19, 2019.

  1. KingLeoric

    KingLeoric Member

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    If there is only 1 village left on earth, people will still manage to find reasons to kill each other.
     
    #21 KingLeoric, Oct 20, 2019
    Last edited: Oct 20, 2019
  2. Andre0087

    Andre0087 Member

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    Governments get us into war, if it were up to the people I think long term peace would be obtainable in the near future.
     
  3. Invisible Fan

    Invisible Fan Contributing Member

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    It took WW3 and aliens for everyone in Star Trek to love each other. It seems easier for everyone to make a new system when everything gets blown up. No need to talk about property rights or whose territory is who's.

    The insight I remember the most in history classes is that even when technology happens in a flash, it takes a good generation or three for people to understand and adjust to it. 1800s industrialization made London to be known for its coal fueled fog. Before cars, there were piles of horse crap hundreds of feet high in major cities. That's just the living side. Things like guns and dynamite took the application of killing people to another level. Now the US can flatten towns through a joystick without having a living soldier on the ground confirm everything.

    I read some headline where Elon Musk and Alibaba's Jack Ma were claiming the growing problem in 50 years is a shrinking population. It makes sense that as the world industrializes, women retain more rights and have less babies to start their careers. Something like this and its effects totally flip the status quo upside down. What if the population slims down to 5 billion by 2100? Or is it like airbags and ABS in a car and people decide to go wild with less? Ofc, that's assuming climate change doesn't displace hundreds of millions of people into stateless refugees because their ancestral homeland has turned into worthless unlivable sand.

    All this leads me to wonder what world peace really means. One government? What about trillion dollar corporations fighting like nationstates? Are hunger and poverty solved, or do we still retain a system of greed in order to accelerate and reward progress by numbers? There should be no doubt that with todays means and technology, no person on earth should be chronically malnourished or starving, but we rationalize against this with concerns of sustainability and affordability.

    What if we define peace as universal comfort? It's life unlike many middle class Americans who could live and settle for a little less if not for the nagging feeling they're falling behind. But is a comfortable life and meaningful life? Without hardships, how do we know what we're made of and whether we can handle the unknown unknowns? An earthquake or tsunami is still not a trivial thing.

    Maybe peace is temporary and the only thing universally agreed upon is to not destroy each other with WMDs. When the Berlin Wall fell, some historians wanted to declare an End to History. Fat chance. That'll only happen when there are shitloads of planets to live in and we can all find our own corners so the other jerks can leave us alone.
     
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  4. rocketsjudoka

    rocketsjudoka Contributing Member
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    Whether there is the possibility of world peace I'm more worried about the opposite. I was talking to my dad this morning and he asked me how much I was following things in HK. I answered him that I'm trying to follow it but it's hard keeping up with what's going on there with what's happening in the UK over Brexit and here in the US. Now there's a return of tension in Catalon, Kashmir is again violent, Venezuela continues to be in crisis, of course most of the Middle East. Even places like Canada and Australia things are tense. I know the World has never been completely at peace and there's always been trouble somewhere. It's hard though for me to think of a time that we've seen so much global instability short of World Wars and where so much of the global instability is from within countries themselves.

    The one time I can think of that might've been similar is in the 1930's when the World was buffeted by the Great Depression and there was the rise of nationalistic strongmen. From reading history it seems like there were serious questions whether liberal (emphasis on small 'l') democracy would survive or whether the forces of Fascism and Stalinism would dominate human civilization. I can't help feeling that we might be at such a point again.
     
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  5. heypartner

    heypartner Contributing Member

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    Weird that the most peaceful place in our tiny world of ClutchFans is a forum called "Unsorted"

    A place that was supposed to be obliterated, but survived with one simple rule to restrict growth and individualism.
     
  6. body slam

    body slam Member

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    Nope. Because no matter how great things might get. You always have one a-hole that will mess it up for everyone else.
     
  7. Severe Rockets Fan

    Severe Rockets Fan Takin it one stage at a time...

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    Because other species don't fight each other or among themselves? Cmon...our ability to join with own kind (homo sapiens) and kill other kinds has helped us be the dominant species on this planet (probably similar to others species...it certainly isn't uncommon). Unfortunately we've moved the goalposts of 'our own kind' (probably to help us feel more unique/better/worthy...especially when you realize there are billions of 'us' that are out there) more and more over the past tens of thousands of years to where we are now. Now this instinct that has helped us be so dominant and helped us come together in our close knit society against common foes is evil/racist/bigoted/xenophobic. Many times it is.
     
  8. amaru

    amaru Member

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    What other species has caused as much destruction to the planet, and its own members, as ours?
     
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  9. Severe Rockets Fan

    Severe Rockets Fan Takin it one stage at a time...

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    You think war will end with our species end? That's naive...and basically ignoring the history of the world.
     
  10. amaru

    amaru Member

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    let’s agree to disagree
     
  11. JuanValdez

    JuanValdez Contributing Member

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    I'm going to go with a hard no. Even if our resource and space scarcity is solved, we still have racism and xenophobia.
     
  12. DaDakota

    DaDakota If you want to know, just ask!

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    Not with the current governments.

    Unless a powerful Alien species came down and demanded it.

    DD
     
  13. Invisible Fan

    Invisible Fan Contributing Member

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    When dinos ruled the earth, their 100 ft farts leveled the ground around them and caused the first case of dinopomorphic warming .
     
  14. amaru

    amaru Member

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    lol
     
  15. Haymitch

    Haymitch Custom Title
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    This is why I support anarchy
     
  16. pirc1

    pirc1 Contributing Member

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    If you think anarchy would bring peace, you are sadly mistaken.
     
  17. Haymitch

    Haymitch Custom Title
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    If you're suggesting that having the foundations of all my beliefs be based on the dynamics of CF is unwise then we will just have to agree to disagree.
     
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  18. justtxyank

    justtxyank Contributing Member

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    Governments are formed by people seeking power. If you dissolved all of the world governments tomorrow, new "governments" would be formed pretty quickly by people who had the means to assert control over others.

    I generally agree with your point that wars are normally waged by governments and that people don't really want to be involved in them. Hell, WW1 was a war that killed millions of people and was largely waged over things of little consequence to most of the people fighting.

    During the lead in to WW2, "Why die for Danzig?" was a popular anti war slogan in France emphasizing the fact that many French people felt they were going to be asked to die in a conflict they didn't care about and that didn't impact them. Chamberlain's "Peace for our time" argument was built around this notion that war with Germany would be waged over lands and people that meant nothing to the British people. So I get it.

    However, war would always come to people even without government unless the subjected themselves. Eradicate governments and strongmen will rise. If you submit then sure, war would be limited.

    Anarchists tend to have this anti-government myth they push that "Man in nature is peaceful, it is government that brings war" or some version of that. This totally dismisses all of human history though.
     
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  19. Haymitch

    Haymitch Custom Title
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    (This whole post of mine below can be viewed as a chicken-**** cop-out because I care only enough to state my case but not enough to provide the sauces or stick around for a full-on discussion, but....)

    This is not really what I have read when reading texts from anti-State, anti-war people. If I had to grossly oversimplify it, it would be "only the existence of the State allows for the large scale destruction brought about in war" and not "humans minus State are 100% peaceful."

    Often in these books/essays, the terms "government" and "State" (and "society") are defined as not being one in the same. Doing so clarifies a few things about their position - whether or not the reader buys in.

    Franz Oppenheimer's The State was influential for me when I first read it. Albert J Nock's Our Enemy, The State is a condensed, simpler, USA-specific version of that, which I would highly recommend. Randolph Bourne's unfinished essay War Is the Health of the State is also good. There are plenty more but those are the first 3 that come to mind, and all 3 available online for free.
     
  20. TheresTheDagger

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    Don't bust his bubble.
     

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