The article is actually somehow worse than the headline. It looks at things on a scale of thousands of years, and the argument is essentially "war happened, the conditions of humanity improved, ergo war is good". Then it's just filler, mostly name dropping events and famous works, literally distracting you from the fact that it's a dog shit argument by going "oh you think my argument is dumb? Well I'm smart so how could that be?"
a professor of classics
Yeah, as a professor of film I have to say that actually, kicking yourself in the balls is good in the long run
The quality of life of humans has greatly improved since the three Stooges made their first appearance, ergo we should poke eachother in the eyes more.
the quality of life sure has gone up since penicillin, obviously we should all be eating more moldy rotten food
If I had the last name Coffin, I would do so much more cool stuff than he does
"What about all the good things war has done for us? Why don't we ever hear speeches about that? Jobs, technology, a common purpose... All we're sayin' is... GIVE WAR A CHANCE!"
-Literally a Metal Gear Rising villain.
Wonder if this guy would be open to saying "over the last 30 years inequality has gone up while the welfare state has undergone crushing austerity and union participation has declined - ergo, neoliberalism has been bad for most people." Or if he has a bunch of different ad hoc explanations.
Well sure, he's thinking of it from his perspective. Elites don't go off and fight wars (any more), they send working class to do it for them. Sure, it benefits his class. It always has.
Well, except in the old, old days when elites led armies and would get captured in battle and beheaded by the other side's elites. Boy, I miss those days.
EDIT: wait a minute, this is from 2014, during the Obama drone murder spree. I bet it's defending him in the face of criticism that he said he wouldn't kill more children than all other Nobel Peace Prize winners put together.
"Us"
Doing a lot of heavy lifting with that one.
It looks at things on a scale of thousands of years, and the argument is essentially “war happened, the conditions of humanity improved, ergo war is good”.
I never would have become so good at hop-scotch if I hadn't had a leg sawed off at the knee when I was 13. Clearly, we live in the best of all possible worlds.
Really it's also saying "I never would have gotten taller and less pimply and angsty than I was when I was 13."
Hot take: anyone that says this should be forced to clear out minefields with their bare hands.
I hope that each and every one of these imperialist, war for profit assburps spends eternity in hell in the shoes of every innocent person they contribute to the suffering of. I want them to feel every bullet wound, chemical burn, and torturous act. I want them to see their country razed and their family ripped apart. For these people I wish hell was real.
I wonder if this dork has ever been to the site where a modern war happened. There's wealth beyond money and that cultural wealth perishes in modern wars like tears in the rain
Piketty's "Capitalism in the 21st Century" does a great job of racking up the mind-blowing totality of loss incurred during the late colonial and world war eras. Literally centuries of accumulated infrastructure obliterated in a couple of wars that totaled less than a decade.
That's before you discuss the human toll. Not just all the young people that the various state leaders tossed into a cynically contrived, callously operated meat grinder. But the millions upon millions of civilians who were killed or maimed or starved or sickened to an early demise. Then consider the spike in illiteracy, the rapid spread of disease, the industrial scale pollution of arable land and potable water, the proliferation of arms and armor throughout the world...
Just a nightmarish display of waste and an explosion in human misery, and we have people writing Op-Eds about how we need to get back to that. Jesus fucking Christ.
The world has become a better place since people started making their jaws fall off by drinking radium so we should go back to doing that
Turns out if you kill people and take their stuff you get richer
What an enlightenment
