We are in the middle of multiple world conflicts, through regional proxies. People are experiencing the consequences of those conflicts, even dying. They are afraid of the continuing effects. Others are scared of possible future conflicts. Your question was probably meant for a specific group of people. When you say "we", who is that? If you mean something that affects the U.K., like the setting of Threads, then it's just a matter of distance and scale. Most people in the U.K. aren't exposed to a direct threat of kinetic conflict, but that doesn't mean the rest of the world is not in physical danger of some kind.
To answer your question directly though, I think we have multiple generations that have grown up believing that anything they see on the internet is not actually real or is happening to somebody else. That includes war. The idea of a global conflict is just a Netflix plot or something, not anything that could actually happen. Few people have met a combat veteran or war refugee, but lots of people have played Call of Duty. That's their reference point. It's just not real.
Consider this, even with all the condemnation of Russia over the invasion of Ukraine, the sanctions, the shipment of arms. We are still using Soyuz spacecraft launched from Russia to go to the space station. We still share resources for all of that, including lots of money. That means there is a limit to the outrage, when it comes to economic and structural needs.
Military victory has been a precondition to military punishment for all of human history. You had to disable the enemy’s forces before you used the threat of further violence to enact your political will. In fact for all of recorded warfare, it was expected that the victors would be able to commit what we today call war crimes with impunity. The default consequence of defeat was all of your men being killed, all of your women being raped, and all of your children being enslaved.
The advent of nuclear weapons and ICBMs flips this precondition on its head. We no longer need to defeat enemy forces to inflict shocking and monstrous pain upon our enemies, nor upon any nation of the world, nor upon even the entire world. America and Russia both have the hair-trigger capability to launch thermonuclear weapons to any point on the globe. It takes 60 seconds to launch an ICBM, about 10 minutes for SLBMs, and a few hours for strategic bombers to reach their targets. 3,000 thermonuclear weapons can be detonated in anger in the time it takes to commute to work.
Our psychology did not evolve for this environment, and in fact it had not evolved from the previous state of affairs at all because there are still people alive who witnessed the first detonations of nuclear weapons! A single generation!
We don’t know if we can survive this state of affairs. Our time is marked by “for the first time in history” and “unprecedented.”
I always have trouble with claims that our time is unique,because I can quickly construct arguments for just about any other time. So yes, our era is unique, but is it uniquely unique?
We do have the unique ability for a very small number of decision makers (theoretically one, but in practice maybe a few more) to completely eradicate all life on earth, or at a minimum vast swaths of it, within minutes.
Nuclear weapons are uniquely unique. We manage to avoid self-extermination through having relatively cool heads in charge of these decisions, but that is a cultural norm, not a universal guarantee.
If you assume there any chance at all that someone willing to use these ever ends up in control of this capability, on a long enough timeline that is essentially guaranteed to happen.
The thing is, I no longer trust any news source. They all exist to serve their agenda, while rarely providing the real picture. So there is no way for me, as a regular citizen, to truly know what happens in the world or a particular regional conflict.
So while I do worry that there might be a bigger war, I also realize that the picture painted by the news, or the "promises" that different country leaders make, are meant to serve two goals: (1) keeping the general public in constant fear, and (2) making them (the leader) appear strong/decisive in a regional/international arena.
> The thing is, I no longer trust any news source. They all exist to serve their agenda, while rarely providing the real picture. So there is no way for me, as a regular citizen, to truly know what happens in the world or a particular regional conflict.
This is what the authoritarians want. It’s not actually hard to understand the major trends are in the world, with accurate information available, but that’s bad for their interests and so they spread the message you’re repeating now to make people more likely to support them. We saw this dramatically in the United States where the ability to answer basic factual questions correctly inversely correlated with supporting the winning candidate, or earlier support for Brexit, but it’s been a staple of living in countries like Russia or Hungary, and a key part of the fossil fuel industry’s effort not to get stuck with the bill for climate change.
There’s plenty of legitimate criticism of organizations like the NYT or BBC, but if you follow them you’ll have a much more accurate understanding of the world than someone who consumes Murdoch media or, worse, whatever’s floating around social media. There is objective truth in the world, and every study shows a significant gradient here.
I find statement like "there is objective truth" - dangerous.
The objective truth in the 70s was, "smoking is good for you". Since then, the narrative changed. Politics, and even s̶c̶i̶e̶n̶c̶e̶ scientific research (to a degree) -- are subjective, despite what world leaders or politicians want you to believe. You can manipulate the data in a way that suits you or your agenda, you can buy scientific researches, etc. It's happening right now in all major, and minor conflicts.
Statements like "objective truth" tend to remind me of the grumpy old engineer who thinks that his way of doing things "is the only correct way", and rejects any modern approach to software engineering.
Now, I don't say you should ignore all statements, or news source. You should be informed enough to a degree you think is relevant for you, while understanding that there will be no objective truth, and unless you have a motivation (be it power, money, or something else) to continue to believe in your established world view, you need to be willing to revisit your "objective truth" every once in a while.
> The objective truth in the 70s was, "smoking is good for you". Since then, the narrative changed.
Your misunderstanding of the history doesn’t mean it was ever good for you. People didn’t call cigarettes “coffin nails” because they thought it was good for you and e.g. the specific lung cancer link was known at least as far back as the 1920s. The reason why it wasn’t named earlier is the same reason you’re wrong about it today: it was an enormously profitable industry and they were able to produce the ads you’re remembering which got far more attention than those pesky scientists who had been correct for half a century by that time – and many smokers blamed people for not telling them earlier, even though they had downplayed the warnings given at the time. A very similar story unfolded with climate change where people like to say that it was confused or contradictory for a long time when it was settled by the late 1970s because they didn’t want to admit having given equal weight to the fossil fuel lobbyists as they did climate scientists.
That’s the key distinction here: we have processes for verifying and testing theories. Yes, scientific research has had fraud but we know about those because their work has been critically examined. We should expect that everywhere rather than giving up on the concept.
I would say it differently. Even using your example, "smoking is good for you" is objectively less true than "smoking is bad for you". We know that now.
The problem is that 1) we don't always have enough data to know what is true, and 2) we have a lot of people working as hard as they can to obscure the truth in order to push their own agenda.
All those post-modernist philosophers that I scoffed at were on to something: If we cannot determine the truth from the data available to us, then in practice, there is no truth. That may not have been the point they were trying to make, but for us who are living in it, it works out the same.
As a strong emotion, creating fear is an effective means to an end, but rarely/never an ultimate goal. If you really want to understand what's going on, don't stop at "they just want to scare me".
As far as the news are concerned, they just want viewers / advertising customers / money in most cases.
I doubt you can "really understand" what's going on without you being directly involved in said conflict, either as a tool for executing a particular agenda, or as a decision maker.
Yes there is. For example there is war in Ukraine and in Gaza and you can find more information on those digging deeper. Not trusting any news source and never combining news to "unbias" them is same thinking that leads to " maybe they are lying to us and the earth is flat". There is always a solution.
You can find information, that's true. But for an ordinary citizen, this is usually where it ends. All kinds of feelings such as "being afraid of world conflict", is your interpretation of the found information, either because you've reached this conclusion yourself, or because you live in an echo chamber where this conclusion is the accepted one (see: Russia being anti-west).
While I don't discourage people to seek information, and reach conclusions, in today's world, unless you are directly involved in the conflict/decision-making, the chance for you to get accurate information is an extremely hard task. News either take things out of context, or simply lack professionalism due to poor journalism, lack of time and or desire to perform thorough deep dives, etc. Social media is filled with fake information, both as a tool in the information war, as well as by "influencers" who keep reposting everything that brings them views.
And in the end, the saying "history is written by the victors", was, is, and forever will be - true.
> in today's world, unless you are directly involved in the conflict/decision-making, the chance for you to get accurate information is an extremely hard task
Any time in history it was like that, this hasn't changed in "today's world". Today's world just has a lot more, and much faster paced information. There's a bombardment of it at all times if you don't shield yourself from it.
It's this bombardment that creates the exhaustion stated in the GP comment "I don't trust any news", it takes a lot of effort to receive information, parse it through opaque biases, filter it with knowledge about the bigger picture, balance it out between conflicting incentives/motives, and extract some kind of useful piece of information.
Accelerate that with the advent of social media, and bullshit/disinformation/misinformation is drowning us everywhere. Some people retreat to their bubbles, others keep treading water trying to make sense of what they read/hear knowing that the "truth" is probably not reachable, and others simply give up because it's overwhelming.
> News either take things out of context, or simply lack professionalism due to poor journalism, lack of time and or desire to perform thorough deep dives, etc.
All of these issues also boil down to: there's no money in news, even less for deep dives, the media who was responsible for that in earlier decades has lost its readership and with it the only major funding they had: selling eyeballs. A few vehicles managed to ride the storm but now are so fragile in their funding that they can't investigate the hands that feed them, it's quite dire...
Right. "Nothing is true anyway" is how the truth is buried in Russia with a sophisticated media control operation, and look at the consequences. There is a truth, and it's neither particularly hidden nor extraordinary in most cases.
Nothing had happened so far, so odds are diminishing with time, not growing up. At least for most people. Alert fatigue, if you want to call it somehow.
The potential is there. If it can happen, given enough time, it surely will. But the odds of happening in a specific moment, at least while tensions are not higher than when it didn't happened anything in the past, may be seen as lower.
Reality is different than what it used to be in the 60-70's. But that also means that new factors can be in play, for good and bad.
In any case, I think is more sure to be afraid of climate change. It won't blow up tomorrow, but is something that is escalating up, and it may be trigger for more negative things, including, but not limited to, world conflicts.
I try to keep some food at home (probably 2 weeks), it's just the normal food so it's rotating naturally. It's also helpful for weird local events that are very rare, but not unheard. (Hi from Argentina!)
I should keep more water, but I'm too lazy. I have only probably only two days that is too few.
If I had time, I'd pick some iodine pills. They are small and have a long shelf life.
Anything else is too difficult or too far from my control.
Que haces che! Two of us from Argentina; it seems like a traditional thing with inflation that my father taught me a long time ago to keep food for at least 2 weeks.
I'll try to do the same with the pills, sounds reasonable and low-effort
Because a lot of people are still in denial, not believing this is a plausible scenario, just like they were in denial that a large war might break out in eastern Europe "because we don't really do wars anymore".
Worst part is, apparently, lots of politicians at the wheel also believe "it won't come to this".
The everyday problems are already overwhelming enough, I don't have the mental and emotional capacity to add an another, hypothetical problem to the mix.
russia is currently invading ukraine using russian and north korean soldiers with the aide of iranian and chinese weapons. russia has supported pro russian candidates in elections using social media propaganda through chinese apps like tiktok helping people like hungary’s viktor orban or 2016s donald trump get elected. they also likely will get an unknown romanian pro russian leader elected as well. russia has supported houthi rebels and has promoted the war in syria. russia has put in place and supported the pro russian break away state of transnistria that has disrupted moldova.
we are in a world conflict. the west has used it for war profiteering as they send all their old weapons to ukraine so they can buy new ones from their friendly local defense contractor.
It doesn't matter what Russia is fighting with. The war is not about winning, it is about war profiteering. Both for Putin and the West. While the West gives out fat new contracts to build new weapons, Putin has stolen much of the grain produced in Ukraine and launders it through ship to ship transfers then sells to Egypt and other countries. This has made billions for Putin in the last year alone.
Putin wins if the war ends and he wins if it continues. The only way he doesn't win if he no longer gets to play the game.
On the highest level it is the war for the world order between democracies and autocracies.
On the level below it is a war for the spheres of influence between China and US.
Next, it is Russian war for the control of the Europe and middle east.
Below it is the wars by Iranian/Russian/Chinese proxies to help with the goals mentioned above.
In all ongoing conflicts the parties are aligned with the China on top of the chain in one side of the conflict and the US on the other.
Profits from stealing goods, people, or territories are just a means to ease the path to the goal or to improve the strategic position, but not the source of the conflict itself.
I don't disagree with most of this. My point is only that if the West is not sending Ukraine SOTA across the board, it's not a serious handicap AFAICT.
if the PATRIOT missile systems that were promised were actually delivered ukraine would already be in a better position to defend against the countrywide missile attacks that have been going on. the problem i have with this is that the goal is not to end the conflict as much as it is to maintain the status quo.
Patriots are ridiculously expensive (a cool billion per battery), and best kept for certain missile threats. There are other cheaper weapons for other missile threats.
But yeah, Western assistance is more of a slow drip than a proper flow.
Short term, this war is costing Putin dearly - both inflation and rates in Russia are very high, there's a state of technological collapse (trains derailing etc.) due to sanctions and lack of access to advanced Western technology. Ultimately, he may only benefit if he's allowed to keep the territory he conquered and gets to absorb it into Russia. It may (or may not) be worth the cost he's paying for it right now.
This may sound weird but being afraid or worrying about something that I don't have much influence on is a waste of time and energy.
Yes, I do vote and are engaged in local politics, but ultimately it is up to the leaders we elect to make the decisions. But in critical situations it may be actions that does not favor me at all.
And I am fine with that, I go on with my life, while preparing as best as I can to handle whatever the future throws in my way.
I grew up with this kind of stuff being in the news all the time. I tend to try to avoid the news now or only visit it quite sporadically. It's good not to worry about things you have no control over. Of course your world could come to an end at anytime in multiple ways. Try and keep a healthy body and mind and develop yourself and your relationships, what else can you do? Maybe investigate meditation and mindfulness.
Not scared but acknowledge that the world in which there were long periods of peace and short wars is over.
There will be long wars and short peace from now on for undefined time.
Whether it will be wars on the periphery or a global war depends on which stage western democracies will wake up and collectively realise the reality of the situation.
No. But there's an attempt to make us scared (terrorism).
Yet you need to acknowledge, that the risk of nuclear exchange isn't 0%, just for the fact that the weapons exist, and that is completely out of our control.
Russia is doing what it wants, and they've been escalating this war since the invasion started in 2014, so it's not like they don't have agency and a mind of their own.
No one is trying to annex Russia, there's no external existential threat to them. Could they use nukes still? Yes, they could. Will they choose to seize to exist, and lose 100% of their territory, by nuking the US to try to get a fraction of that land? Doubtfully, and if they choose to do so, it would be out of our control anyway and would be a matter of time.
It seems like there's a difference between the discourse online and IRL. Whenever I talk to people online, I get this picture of people not really caring and, depending on the bubble, even being excited for conflict. However, when talking to people IRL, they are much more "conservative" in their opinions, and also more afraid.
What's closer to the truth? Tweets or real life conversations? I mean on one hand, there's less of a filter online and anonymity makes people dare say things they would otherwise not. It creates an interesting dynamic where other people hear those utterances and think just what you think: Why are people not afraid anymore? On the other hand, there's also a HUGE amount of bots and third parties influencing online discourse. I think it will only become apparent after say ~10-20 more years, on which scale online manipulation is actually taking place. It's insane.
My question: after having survived the Cold War without actually blowing each other up (and wintering everyone else out), why were people so scared of "terrorism" at the turn of the century?
No, avoiding blowing ourselves up (or summering ourselves out?) means we had much bigger things to be afraid of than capital-t Terrorism.
For what it's worth, I believe that instead of starting a war and an occupation, when the Taliban said they were ready to give ObL up on condition the US provide some evidence he was behind WTC, they could've simply been taken up on their offer. (Similar goes for "WMD")
I could make some arguments about economics, world order, and devastating weapons, but i think this above all: governments barely got their people to go along with covid measures.
There are several possible reasons, but it may be because the strategic goals changed since WWI and WWII.
Those two worldwide wars were quasi-colonial wars. Powers of the time were competing to become as powerful economically and militarily as possible.
However, the war didn't end with WWII, since at any time there were around 20/30 wars in a quickly changing landscape. It's just that were not done in the Western world (except in the Balkans in the 1990').
Since that time there have been mostly two types of military conflicts by regional actors:
* Low-intensity conflicts (the multiple "liberation" armies, religious wars or warlords as in central Africa)
People can feel scared (paying attention) only for so long. War in Ukraine or climate change, it is happening in a too slow pace for people to keep attention next to their daily life, while they can't influence those events in any way.
Can Putin end the world if he will be afraid enough of losing? Maybe. Can you stop it? No. Then why would you care?
Honestly, people in real life are petrified about interest rates going up and losing their job. They don’t give a shit about global conflict. Not one person I’ve come across has even mentioned it in the last year.
TL;DR people don't understand the dangers. They grossly underestimate the complexity and fragility of our current global supply chain and they especially underestimate their dependence on it. A major world conflict would make it difficult even to feed my cat. COVID should have been a wake-up call, but that has receded safely into the past as the "normal" ppl craved has resumed.
I don't think there's much to be afraid of, for one simple if nonobvious reason: Russia has already won. There's no point in fighting a war if you can turn the enemy into a satellite without firing a single shot.
They did so by deploying an incredible hybrid and cyber warfare machine, outsmarting what little defenses the West put up. They turned our democracies against us, weaponizing hundreds of millions of simpletons. In the 90s we dreamt that the Internet would galvanize democracy. It became an amazing weapon of subversion instead.
Russia leveraged kooky franchisees on the extremes of the political spectrum. Aware that they did not belong in politics otherwise, they were all too happy to cooperate.
In 2000 Trump sought the nomination of the Reform party and lost [1]. He was unable to leverage his money and Russian support into securing a primary win of a 2% party. Fifteen years and billions of rubles later, the Russian hype machine had been fully built out. He was guided to the 2016 Republican nomination with the precision of a hypersonic missile.
A similar story played itself out in virtually all other Western countries. Beware of the usual exceptionalist apologies - Trump, Orban, Le Pen, Farage are all cookie-cutter stories.
100%, our leaders are playing with fire at this point. Their reasoning is also not rational. If you cannot use diplomacy with Putin because he is crazy, then why do you expect Putin to back down when you try to escalate to deescalate?
Again, I see no reason why Putin would back down. Instead it reinforces his worldview that the West is the enemy and not interested in any kind of fair balance of power.
As for who understands diplomacy, one wonders if the US/EU understand diplomacy. China seems to have no problem dealing with Russia. Somehow the US/EU with their combined might cannot manage it.
He will back down when the war becomes too expensive, economically and politically. It's a war of attrition after all.
As to China, Russia's beefs with China were always marginal (Russian Far East is not a very important part of the country), so no wonder China have no problem dealing with Russia. They have no major points of contention, while sharing a common enemy.
As per the geopolitical game in Europe between the US and Russia, the problem is that Russia wants eastern and central europe to again become their "sphere of influence", without any regard for what those countries want. Those countries know that being in US' sphere of influence means prosperity and peace for them, while being in Russian sphere of influence means poverty, political oppression, corruption, rule of stupidity, and potentially wars (forced to send recruits to help Russia). That's the major problem here - Russia wants to force on a bunch of its neighbors something they never said they wanted. In turn, they go to US for defence against their abusive neighbor. It's not US forcing itself onto Central and Eastern Europe, it's those countries practically begging to be protected (Poland's foreign minister was once recorded saying that "we'll suck America's dick for peanuts as usual", because that's Poland's only play).
We've banned the other account, but you also broke the site guidelines badly in this thread and that's also not cool.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. We don't want this kind of flamewar or political/national/ideological battle here.
Russia was always the weird case of a country with a cruel, Asian steppe mentality (early in the days of the Dutchy of Moscow, they were conquered and thoroughly subjugated by the Mongols, the Mongol mark of cruelty and disdain for human life is still there in XXI century) that is also Christian. The Christianity has confused Western leaders throught the ages, who thought Russia is like any other European country, and can be reasoned with.
Right. The English, the French, the Germans, the Dutch, the Swedish, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Romans, the Greeks, the Austrians, the Belgians, ..., the Cossacks ... none of those ever did anything to show any kind of "cruel mentality". Right.
This kind of completely unhinged dehumanizing nonsense is bordering hate speech.
I am not dehumanising Russians, merely their political culture and political traditions. A country can have a lot of decent people and, at the same time, be a hate and death-monger - just see the Nazi Germany. All depends on current leadership and their policies, which in large part depends on country's political culture and history (e.g. Putin wouldn't really fly as a leader of Canada, and Trudeau would get murdered in no time if he somehow became a leader of Russia).
NATO as it exists today is a welfare program where US taxpayers subsidize the defense budgets of European countries so they can afford lavish social benefits programs for their citizens while the US drowns in both personal and federal debt. You were never going to come help us, and the exploitative relationship between our countries is now over. Good luck.
NATO needs the US a lot more than the US needs NATO. It wasn't always this way, but today we really don't get anything out of being allied with a deindustrialized and demilitarized Europe that is currently doing its absolute best to provoke an irrational and unstable neighboring world power.
I might be mistaken, but as far as I remember, there were NATO troops (that were not US troops) in Afghanistan, for decades, not because any European country declared war to Afghanistan.
I am not expert in history, but I cannot recall Europeans using US troops in an active war since creation of NATO. The opposite can be said in this century, though.
I do not deny that having the back of US, that has possibly the biggest military in the world, is favourable for European countries.
But I am absolutely tired of this discourse that NATO only benefits the others, and that USA doesn't get any benefit from it.
It is beneficial for all parts, and that is the reason it is an alliance. And USA has used it for its benefit for quite long; thus, it is not unreasonable that allies might rely on its help.
Besides, it is beneficial for USA to keep Europe stable and in peace — most clearly, for macro-economic reasons.
In the last ten years, USA more than doubled the imports from EU [1], mostly machinery and vehicles, as well as other manufactured (i.e., industrialised) products such as chemicals.
In average, there is 200 billion USD/year [2]unbalance between imports from and exports to EU.
Now, imagine a war breaking in Europe, and overnight medicine and machinery [3] lacking in USA.
And those are products that need know-how, it is not something that any government can solve soon. Besides the 800 billion USD suddenly removed from the economy.
For better or for worse, we are all interdependent. And no matter how much we want to believe we can simply show a middle finger to our allies when it is convenient for us, the reality is that the interdependence in the real world, not in the demagogic one of political nonsense discourses, is a fact.
Fair point, although the way things are currently shaping up with his administration, I'm expecting there to be some serious consequences for the spooks that orchestrated all of this.
We are in the middle of multiple world conflicts, through regional proxies. People are experiencing the consequences of those conflicts, even dying. They are afraid of the continuing effects. Others are scared of possible future conflicts. Your question was probably meant for a specific group of people. When you say "we", who is that? If you mean something that affects the U.K., like the setting of Threads, then it's just a matter of distance and scale. Most people in the U.K. aren't exposed to a direct threat of kinetic conflict, but that doesn't mean the rest of the world is not in physical danger of some kind.
To answer your question directly though, I think we have multiple generations that have grown up believing that anything they see on the internet is not actually real or is happening to somebody else. That includes war. The idea of a global conflict is just a Netflix plot or something, not anything that could actually happen. Few people have met a combat veteran or war refugee, but lots of people have played Call of Duty. That's their reference point. It's just not real.
Consider this, even with all the condemnation of Russia over the invasion of Ukraine, the sanctions, the shipment of arms. We are still using Soyuz spacecraft launched from Russia to go to the space station. We still share resources for all of that, including lots of money. That means there is a limit to the outrage, when it comes to economic and structural needs.
Military victory has been a precondition to military punishment for all of human history. You had to disable the enemy’s forces before you used the threat of further violence to enact your political will. In fact for all of recorded warfare, it was expected that the victors would be able to commit what we today call war crimes with impunity. The default consequence of defeat was all of your men being killed, all of your women being raped, and all of your children being enslaved.
The advent of nuclear weapons and ICBMs flips this precondition on its head. We no longer need to defeat enemy forces to inflict shocking and monstrous pain upon our enemies, nor upon any nation of the world, nor upon even the entire world. America and Russia both have the hair-trigger capability to launch thermonuclear weapons to any point on the globe. It takes 60 seconds to launch an ICBM, about 10 minutes for SLBMs, and a few hours for strategic bombers to reach their targets. 3,000 thermonuclear weapons can be detonated in anger in the time it takes to commute to work.
Our psychology did not evolve for this environment, and in fact it had not evolved from the previous state of affairs at all because there are still people alive who witnessed the first detonations of nuclear weapons! A single generation!
We don’t know if we can survive this state of affairs. Our time is marked by “for the first time in history” and “unprecedented.”
I always have trouble with claims that our time is unique,because I can quickly construct arguments for just about any other time. So yes, our era is unique, but is it uniquely unique?
We do have the unique ability for a very small number of decision makers (theoretically one, but in practice maybe a few more) to completely eradicate all life on earth, or at a minimum vast swaths of it, within minutes.
Nuclear weapons are uniquely unique. We manage to avoid self-extermination through having relatively cool heads in charge of these decisions, but that is a cultural norm, not a universal guarantee.
If you assume there any chance at all that someone willing to use these ever ends up in control of this capability, on a long enough timeline that is essentially guaranteed to happen.
It depends on who you are. Peasent? nothing different until 1750, Aristocrat? unique pretty much any time humanity invented something.
The thing is, I no longer trust any news source. They all exist to serve their agenda, while rarely providing the real picture. So there is no way for me, as a regular citizen, to truly know what happens in the world or a particular regional conflict.
So while I do worry that there might be a bigger war, I also realize that the picture painted by the news, or the "promises" that different country leaders make, are meant to serve two goals: (1) keeping the general public in constant fear, and (2) making them (the leader) appear strong/decisive in a regional/international arena.
> The thing is, I no longer trust any news source. They all exist to serve their agenda, while rarely providing the real picture. So there is no way for me, as a regular citizen, to truly know what happens in the world or a particular regional conflict.
This is what the authoritarians want. It’s not actually hard to understand the major trends are in the world, with accurate information available, but that’s bad for their interests and so they spread the message you’re repeating now to make people more likely to support them. We saw this dramatically in the United States where the ability to answer basic factual questions correctly inversely correlated with supporting the winning candidate, or earlier support for Brexit, but it’s been a staple of living in countries like Russia or Hungary, and a key part of the fossil fuel industry’s effort not to get stuck with the bill for climate change.
There’s plenty of legitimate criticism of organizations like the NYT or BBC, but if you follow them you’ll have a much more accurate understanding of the world than someone who consumes Murdoch media or, worse, whatever’s floating around social media. There is objective truth in the world, and every study shows a significant gradient here.
I find statement like "there is objective truth" - dangerous.
The objective truth in the 70s was, "smoking is good for you". Since then, the narrative changed. Politics, and even s̶c̶i̶e̶n̶c̶e̶ scientific research (to a degree) -- are subjective, despite what world leaders or politicians want you to believe. You can manipulate the data in a way that suits you or your agenda, you can buy scientific researches, etc. It's happening right now in all major, and minor conflicts.
Statements like "objective truth" tend to remind me of the grumpy old engineer who thinks that his way of doing things "is the only correct way", and rejects any modern approach to software engineering.
Now, I don't say you should ignore all statements, or news source. You should be informed enough to a degree you think is relevant for you, while understanding that there will be no objective truth, and unless you have a motivation (be it power, money, or something else) to continue to believe in your established world view, you need to be willing to revisit your "objective truth" every once in a while.
> The objective truth in the 70s was, "smoking is good for you". Since then, the narrative changed.
Your misunderstanding of the history doesn’t mean it was ever good for you. People didn’t call cigarettes “coffin nails” because they thought it was good for you and e.g. the specific lung cancer link was known at least as far back as the 1920s. The reason why it wasn’t named earlier is the same reason you’re wrong about it today: it was an enormously profitable industry and they were able to produce the ads you’re remembering which got far more attention than those pesky scientists who had been correct for half a century by that time – and many smokers blamed people for not telling them earlier, even though they had downplayed the warnings given at the time. A very similar story unfolded with climate change where people like to say that it was confused or contradictory for a long time when it was settled by the late 1970s because they didn’t want to admit having given equal weight to the fossil fuel lobbyists as they did climate scientists.
That’s the key distinction here: we have processes for verifying and testing theories. Yes, scientific research has had fraud but we know about those because their work has been critically examined. We should expect that everywhere rather than giving up on the concept.
I would say it differently. Even using your example, "smoking is good for you" is objectively less true than "smoking is bad for you". We know that now.
The problem is that 1) we don't always have enough data to know what is true, and 2) we have a lot of people working as hard as they can to obscure the truth in order to push their own agenda.
All those post-modernist philosophers that I scoffed at were on to something: If we cannot determine the truth from the data available to us, then in practice, there is no truth. That may not have been the point they were trying to make, but for us who are living in it, it works out the same.
As a strong emotion, creating fear is an effective means to an end, but rarely/never an ultimate goal. If you really want to understand what's going on, don't stop at "they just want to scare me".
As far as the news are concerned, they just want viewers / advertising customers / money in most cases.
I doubt you can "really understand" what's going on without you being directly involved in said conflict, either as a tool for executing a particular agenda, or as a decision maker.
Sure, you can't understand everything, but it's not like you can't understand anything.
Yes there is. For example there is war in Ukraine and in Gaza and you can find more information on those digging deeper. Not trusting any news source and never combining news to "unbias" them is same thinking that leads to " maybe they are lying to us and the earth is flat". There is always a solution.
You can find information, that's true. But for an ordinary citizen, this is usually where it ends. All kinds of feelings such as "being afraid of world conflict", is your interpretation of the found information, either because you've reached this conclusion yourself, or because you live in an echo chamber where this conclusion is the accepted one (see: Russia being anti-west).
While I don't discourage people to seek information, and reach conclusions, in today's world, unless you are directly involved in the conflict/decision-making, the chance for you to get accurate information is an extremely hard task. News either take things out of context, or simply lack professionalism due to poor journalism, lack of time and or desire to perform thorough deep dives, etc. Social media is filled with fake information, both as a tool in the information war, as well as by "influencers" who keep reposting everything that brings them views.
And in the end, the saying "history is written by the victors", was, is, and forever will be - true.
> in today's world, unless you are directly involved in the conflict/decision-making, the chance for you to get accurate information is an extremely hard task
Any time in history it was like that, this hasn't changed in "today's world". Today's world just has a lot more, and much faster paced information. There's a bombardment of it at all times if you don't shield yourself from it.
It's this bombardment that creates the exhaustion stated in the GP comment "I don't trust any news", it takes a lot of effort to receive information, parse it through opaque biases, filter it with knowledge about the bigger picture, balance it out between conflicting incentives/motives, and extract some kind of useful piece of information.
Accelerate that with the advent of social media, and bullshit/disinformation/misinformation is drowning us everywhere. Some people retreat to their bubbles, others keep treading water trying to make sense of what they read/hear knowing that the "truth" is probably not reachable, and others simply give up because it's overwhelming.
> News either take things out of context, or simply lack professionalism due to poor journalism, lack of time and or desire to perform thorough deep dives, etc.
All of these issues also boil down to: there's no money in news, even less for deep dives, the media who was responsible for that in earlier decades has lost its readership and with it the only major funding they had: selling eyeballs. A few vehicles managed to ride the storm but now are so fragile in their funding that they can't investigate the hands that feed them, it's quite dire...
Right. "Nothing is true anyway" is how the truth is buried in Russia with a sophisticated media control operation, and look at the consequences. There is a truth, and it's neither particularly hidden nor extraordinary in most cases.
Nothing had happened so far, so odds are diminishing with time, not growing up. At least for most people. Alert fatigue, if you want to call it somehow.
The potential is there. If it can happen, given enough time, it surely will. But the odds of happening in a specific moment, at least while tensions are not higher than when it didn't happened anything in the past, may be seen as lower.
Reality is different than what it used to be in the 60-70's. But that also means that new factors can be in play, for good and bad.
In any case, I think is more sure to be afraid of climate change. It won't blow up tomorrow, but is something that is escalating up, and it may be trigger for more negative things, including, but not limited to, world conflicts.
I try not to worry about things that are not up to me. I will die at some point anyway.
I try to keep some food at home (probably 2 weeks), it's just the normal food so it's rotating naturally. It's also helpful for weird local events that are very rare, but not unheard. (Hi from Argentina!)
I should keep more water, but I'm too lazy. I have only probably only two days that is too few.
If I had time, I'd pick some iodine pills. They are small and have a long shelf life.
Anything else is too difficult or too far from my control.
Que haces che! Two of us from Argentina; it seems like a traditional thing with inflation that my father taught me a long time ago to keep food for at least 2 weeks.
I'll try to do the same with the pills, sounds reasonable and low-effort
Because a lot of people are still in denial, not believing this is a plausible scenario, just like they were in denial that a large war might break out in eastern Europe "because we don't really do wars anymore".
Worst part is, apparently, lots of politicians at the wheel also believe "it won't come to this".
Reality is going to hit like a truck.
The everyday problems are already overwhelming enough, I don't have the mental and emotional capacity to add an another, hypothetical problem to the mix.
russia is currently invading ukraine using russian and north korean soldiers with the aide of iranian and chinese weapons. russia has supported pro russian candidates in elections using social media propaganda through chinese apps like tiktok helping people like hungary’s viktor orban or 2016s donald trump get elected. they also likely will get an unknown romanian pro russian leader elected as well. russia has supported houthi rebels and has promoted the war in syria. russia has put in place and supported the pro russian break away state of transnistria that has disrupted moldova.
we are in a world conflict. the west has used it for war profiteering as they send all their old weapons to ukraine so they can buy new ones from their friendly local defense contractor.
> old weapons to ukraine
AFAICT this is not a serious problem. Russia is in many cases fighting with junkyard scrapings. https://x.com/Jonpy99/status/1860694569102258607
It doesn't matter what Russia is fighting with. The war is not about winning, it is about war profiteering. Both for Putin and the West. While the West gives out fat new contracts to build new weapons, Putin has stolen much of the grain produced in Ukraine and launders it through ship to ship transfers then sells to Egypt and other countries. This has made billions for Putin in the last year alone.
Putin wins if the war ends and he wins if it continues. The only way he doesn't win if he no longer gets to play the game.
> war profiteering
As with anything, there will be the ones who profits from it. Always has been, always will be.
But the overall description is a ridiculous oversimplification of what is happening.
feel free to add details you think are missing.
On the highest level it is the war for the world order between democracies and autocracies.
On the level below it is a war for the spheres of influence between China and US.
Next, it is Russian war for the control of the Europe and middle east.
Below it is the wars by Iranian/Russian/Chinese proxies to help with the goals mentioned above.
In all ongoing conflicts the parties are aligned with the China on top of the chain in one side of the conflict and the US on the other.
Profits from stealing goods, people, or territories are just a means to ease the path to the goal or to improve the strategic position, but not the source of the conflict itself.
I don't disagree with most of this. My point is only that if the West is not sending Ukraine SOTA across the board, it's not a serious handicap AFAICT.
if the PATRIOT missile systems that were promised were actually delivered ukraine would already be in a better position to defend against the countrywide missile attacks that have been going on. the problem i have with this is that the goal is not to end the conflict as much as it is to maintain the status quo.
Patriots are ridiculously expensive (a cool billion per battery), and best kept for certain missile threats. There are other cheaper weapons for other missile threats.
But yeah, Western assistance is more of a slow drip than a proper flow.
Short term, this war is costing Putin dearly - both inflation and rates in Russia are very high, there's a state of technological collapse (trains derailing etc.) due to sanctions and lack of access to advanced Western technology. Ultimately, he may only benefit if he's allowed to keep the territory he conquered and gets to absorb it into Russia. It may (or may not) be worth the cost he's paying for it right now.
he is currently making billions of dollars selling stolen ukrainian grain on the open market. why should he stop?
No.
This may sound weird but being afraid or worrying about something that I don't have much influence on is a waste of time and energy.
Yes, I do vote and are engaged in local politics, but ultimately it is up to the leaders we elect to make the decisions. But in critical situations it may be actions that does not favor me at all.
And I am fine with that, I go on with my life, while preparing as best as I can to handle whatever the future throws in my way.
Watching threads is always a mistake lol. Next you need to avoid watching this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Wind_Blows_(comics).
I grew up with this kind of stuff being in the news all the time. I tend to try to avoid the news now or only visit it quite sporadically. It's good not to worry about things you have no control over. Of course your world could come to an end at anytime in multiple ways. Try and keep a healthy body and mind and develop yourself and your relationships, what else can you do? Maybe investigate meditation and mindfulness.
You know what? Last night I watched Threads.
No kidding
No. The elites in neither side would win in this particular conflict if it becomes much bigger. Because of that, it won't happen.
However, the status quo of a frequent limited conflicts has significant profit potential, so you'll still see these happening.
Should we be scared? [asked in all seriousness, not as a quip.]
Since no amount of us being scared is going to make any difference whatsoever, I'd say no.
Its crazy how individuals can't decide if they just want to be left alone to live in peace.
I hope someday if life becomes multi planetary, there will be a way to just step away from any fight and just go live wherever you want to.
Not scared but acknowledge that the world in which there were long periods of peace and short wars is over.
There will be long wars and short peace from now on for undefined time.
Whether it will be wars on the periphery or a global war depends on which stage western democracies will wake up and collectively realise the reality of the situation.
No. But there's an attempt to make us scared (terrorism).
Yet you need to acknowledge, that the risk of nuclear exchange isn't 0%, just for the fact that the weapons exist, and that is completely out of our control.
Russia is doing what it wants, and they've been escalating this war since the invasion started in 2014, so it's not like they don't have agency and a mind of their own.
No one is trying to annex Russia, there's no external existential threat to them. Could they use nukes still? Yes, they could. Will they choose to seize to exist, and lose 100% of their territory, by nuking the US to try to get a fraction of that land? Doubtfully, and if they choose to do so, it would be out of our control anyway and would be a matter of time.
Because everyone thinks they are the good guys. And good guys always win. ;)
It seems like there's a difference between the discourse online and IRL. Whenever I talk to people online, I get this picture of people not really caring and, depending on the bubble, even being excited for conflict. However, when talking to people IRL, they are much more "conservative" in their opinions, and also more afraid.
What's closer to the truth? Tweets or real life conversations? I mean on one hand, there's less of a filter online and anonymity makes people dare say things they would otherwise not. It creates an interesting dynamic where other people hear those utterances and think just what you think: Why are people not afraid anymore? On the other hand, there's also a HUGE amount of bots and third parties influencing online discourse. I think it will only become apparent after say ~10-20 more years, on which scale online manipulation is actually taking place. It's insane.
> What's closer to the truth? Tweets or real life conversations?
Why do you think either is close to the truth?
My question: after having survived the Cold War without actually blowing each other up (and wintering everyone else out), why were people so scared of "terrorism" at the turn of the century?
So not blowing ourselves up , up to now means that we will never do ? Strange logic fallacy but I've heard it before.
No, avoiding blowing ourselves up (or summering ourselves out?) means we had much bigger things to be afraid of than capital-t Terrorism.
For what it's worth, I believe that instead of starting a war and an occupation, when the Taliban said they were ready to give ObL up on condition the US provide some evidence he was behind WTC, they could've simply been taken up on their offer. (Similar goes for "WMD")
I could make some arguments about economics, world order, and devastating weapons, but i think this above all: governments barely got their people to go along with covid measures.
There are several possible reasons, but it may be because the strategic goals changed since WWI and WWII.
Those two worldwide wars were quasi-colonial wars. Powers of the time were competing to become as powerful economically and militarily as possible.
However, the war didn't end with WWII, since at any time there were around 20/30 wars in a quickly changing landscape. It's just that were not done in the Western world (except in the Balkans in the 1990').
Since that time there have been mostly two types of military conflicts by regional actors:
* Low-intensity conflicts (the multiple "liberation" armies, religious wars or warlords as in central Africa)
* Conflict between main powers via proxy.
People can feel scared (paying attention) only for so long. War in Ukraine or climate change, it is happening in a too slow pace for people to keep attention next to their daily life, while they can't influence those events in any way.
Can Putin end the world if he will be afraid enough of losing? Maybe. Can you stop it? No. Then why would you care?
I am but what can I do about it.
Honestly, people in real life are petrified about interest rates going up and losing their job. They don’t give a shit about global conflict. Not one person I’ve come across has even mentioned it in the last year.
I don't worry about things that beyond my control
TL;DR people don't understand the dangers. They grossly underestimate the complexity and fragility of our current global supply chain and they especially underestimate their dependence on it. A major world conflict would make it difficult even to feed my cat. COVID should have been a wake-up call, but that has receded safely into the past as the "normal" ppl craved has resumed.
I don't think there's much to be afraid of, for one simple if nonobvious reason: Russia has already won. There's no point in fighting a war if you can turn the enemy into a satellite without firing a single shot.
They did so by deploying an incredible hybrid and cyber warfare machine, outsmarting what little defenses the West put up. They turned our democracies against us, weaponizing hundreds of millions of simpletons. In the 90s we dreamt that the Internet would galvanize democracy. It became an amazing weapon of subversion instead.
Russia leveraged kooky franchisees on the extremes of the political spectrum. Aware that they did not belong in politics otherwise, they were all too happy to cooperate.
In 2000 Trump sought the nomination of the Reform party and lost [1]. He was unable to leverage his money and Russian support into securing a primary win of a 2% party. Fifteen years and billions of rubles later, the Russian hype machine had been fully built out. He was guided to the 2016 Republican nomination with the precision of a hypersonic missile.
A similar story played itself out in virtually all other Western countries. Beware of the usual exceptionalist apologies - Trump, Orban, Le Pen, Farage are all cookie-cutter stories.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_2000_presidential...
100%, our leaders are playing with fire at this point. Their reasoning is also not rational. If you cannot use diplomacy with Putin because he is crazy, then why do you expect Putin to back down when you try to escalate to deescalate?
Escalation is using force, not diplomacy. Force is something that Putin understands very well.
Again, I see no reason why Putin would back down. Instead it reinforces his worldview that the West is the enemy and not interested in any kind of fair balance of power. As for who understands diplomacy, one wonders if the US/EU understand diplomacy. China seems to have no problem dealing with Russia. Somehow the US/EU with their combined might cannot manage it.
He will back down when the war becomes too expensive, economically and politically. It's a war of attrition after all.
As to China, Russia's beefs with China were always marginal (Russian Far East is not a very important part of the country), so no wonder China have no problem dealing with Russia. They have no major points of contention, while sharing a common enemy.
As per the geopolitical game in Europe between the US and Russia, the problem is that Russia wants eastern and central europe to again become their "sphere of influence", without any regard for what those countries want. Those countries know that being in US' sphere of influence means prosperity and peace for them, while being in Russian sphere of influence means poverty, political oppression, corruption, rule of stupidity, and potentially wars (forced to send recruits to help Russia). That's the major problem here - Russia wants to force on a bunch of its neighbors something they never said they wanted. In turn, they go to US for defence against their abusive neighbor. It's not US forcing itself onto Central and Eastern Europe, it's those countries practically begging to be protected (Poland's foreign minister was once recorded saying that "we'll suck America's dick for peanuts as usual", because that's Poland's only play).
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Besides that being a propagandized lie and an iteration that fell off because it didn't stick, you could at least make an effort and provide a source.
But I did forget about this Russian propaganda point, thank you for pointing it out.
Also, I should add the:
- USA is building bioweapons labs in Ukraine;
- There are CIA bases in Ukraine;
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So again, no source.
Just spamming propaganda posing as a US Citizen.
We've banned the other account, but you also broke the site guidelines badly in this thread and that's also not cool.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. We don't want this kind of flamewar or political/national/ideological battle here.
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No, because I voted for Trump. Europe gets to take responsibility for the wars they start and escalate now. Not my problem.
Are you counting russia as part of Eurasia here? Because to me it's looking more like becoming part of Eastasia instead.
Russia was always the weird case of a country with a cruel, Asian steppe mentality (early in the days of the Dutchy of Moscow, they were conquered and thoroughly subjugated by the Mongols, the Mongol mark of cruelty and disdain for human life is still there in XXI century) that is also Christian. The Christianity has confused Western leaders throught the ages, who thought Russia is like any other European country, and can be reasoned with.
Right. The English, the French, the Germans, the Dutch, the Swedish, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Romans, the Greeks, the Austrians, the Belgians, ..., the Cossacks ... none of those ever did anything to show any kind of "cruel mentality". Right.
This kind of completely unhinged dehumanizing nonsense is bordering hate speech.
The English, the French, the Germans, the Dutch, the Swedish, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Romans, the Greeks, the Austrians, the Belgians, ...,
All gave up their psychotic empire-building games (or at least sublimated into forms not involving large-scale military conflict) long ago.
Russia's current regime, for some reason, has not.
I am not dehumanising Russians, merely their political culture and political traditions. A country can have a lot of decent people and, at the same time, be a hate and death-monger - just see the Nazi Germany. All depends on current leadership and their policies, which in large part depends on country's political culture and history (e.g. Putin wouldn't really fly as a leader of Canada, and Trudeau would get murdered in no time if he somehow became a leader of Russia).
Gotta love the manichaeism here, makes everything so much simpler.
Name a war that was recently started by Europe
World War 3.
So you are ok with if nobody will come to help you when your life is in danger because your life is not anyone else's problem.
NATO as it exists today is a welfare program where US taxpayers subsidize the defense budgets of European countries so they can afford lavish social benefits programs for their citizens while the US drowns in both personal and federal debt. You were never going to come help us, and the exploitative relationship between our countries is now over. Good luck.
This is a fascinating perspective. Because a lot of people would rather say that NATO is a US-led project intended to protect US hegemony.
NATO needs the US a lot more than the US needs NATO. It wasn't always this way, but today we really don't get anything out of being allied with a deindustrialized and demilitarized Europe that is currently doing its absolute best to provoke an irrational and unstable neighboring world power.
I might be mistaken, but as far as I remember, there were NATO troops (that were not US troops) in Afghanistan, for decades, not because any European country declared war to Afghanistan.
I am not expert in history, but I cannot recall Europeans using US troops in an active war since creation of NATO. The opposite can be said in this century, though.
I do not deny that having the back of US, that has possibly the biggest military in the world, is favourable for European countries.
But I am absolutely tired of this discourse that NATO only benefits the others, and that USA doesn't get any benefit from it.
It is beneficial for all parts, and that is the reason it is an alliance. And USA has used it for its benefit for quite long; thus, it is not unreasonable that allies might rely on its help.
Besides, it is beneficial for USA to keep Europe stable and in peace — most clearly, for macro-economic reasons.
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In the last ten years, USA more than doubled the imports from EU [1], mostly machinery and vehicles, as well as other manufactured (i.e., industrialised) products such as chemicals.
In average, there is 200 billion USD/year [2]unbalance between imports from and exports to EU.
Now, imagine a war breaking in Europe, and overnight medicine and machinery [3] lacking in USA.
And those are products that need know-how, it is not something that any government can solve soon. Besides the 800 billion USD suddenly removed from the economy.
For better or for worse, we are all interdependent. And no matter how much we want to believe we can simply show a middle finger to our allies when it is convenient for us, the reality is that the interdependence in the real world, not in the demagogic one of political nonsense discourses, is a fact.
[1]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
[2]: https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c0003.html
[3]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
In volume, maybe, not in % though. https://i.abcnewsfe.com/a/8b366e9a-5353-4a83-9510-bad111a54d...
Which should still leave plenty for lavish social benefits programs, since other places can afford it.
Genuinely looking forward seeing the US folks get a better coverage soon.
I think Trump has the best chance of ending the war, but I don't think America and the CIA gets to dodge responsibility for helping to start it.
Fair point, although the way things are currently shaping up with his administration, I'm expecting there to be some serious consequences for the spooks that orchestrated all of this.
I think there does need to be a review of the "Neo-Con" world view, whether that is nation building via invasion or by "colour revolutions".
I think the CIA is doing in Eastern Europe all the things that they used to do in Latin America in the 60's.
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