People who say stuff like this forget that Europe nearly destroyed itself through war twice in just the last hundred years— and followed it up with an arms race that put the entire planet at risk of extinction. It was only the threat of nuclear annihilation that stopped Europeans from murdering each other on an industrial scale.

You are badly mixing up sides in nuclear race a bit, we europeans were bystanders compared to US-Russia race and never really caught up with neither of them.

France and the UK both built nuclear weapons. They didn’t have the resources to build more than they did or they would have. But that wasn’t really my point. I was merely pointing out that the so called civilized west is responsible for far more misery and death than any nation in the developing world could even aspire to at this point.

It’s not that the Europeans are uniquely horrible people, only that the current era of peace and cooperation in the west is a historical aberration.

How bad is Al Shabab compared to obesity and car accidenty? (Or other luxury deaths/ills)

> can all come tumbling down with the next disputed election or sectarian genocide.

Will it though? I mean sure it might look like that, but the US just had a Gov shutdown, whereas India and China had none in the previous decades. [Even if the US system is better IMHO.] (Of course there is an index for that: https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/India/wb_political_stabilit... and let's say vs Syria https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/Syria/wb_political_stabilit... )