News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Bill Gates: Capitalism means male baldness gets more funding than malaria. Parent comment

Re:Bill Gates: Capitalism means male baldness gets more fund... by EthanHeilman on Thursday March 14, 2013 @12:36PM (#5375995)
The scale and ambitions of wars today are much smaller which is in essence what you are saying and it is a really important point. We are living in a time of extremely limited war that in comparison with the mid 20th Century is a time of relative peace (the mid 20th Century being one of the most bloody in human history). This graph makes this point better than I:

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/war-1900.htm

>think some of this talk about ideologies is throwing the baby out with the bath water. Abstracting your worldview so that you can better explain yourself to others should not be looked down upon.

Agreed, and for the record I'm not against ideology or story telling in general. It is what humans do to make sense of their role in the world. It is interesting to me that we live in a time of old dying ideologies and it skews our perspective about the future since long term these treads have never lasted. For example the The_End_of_History(tm) claim that was getting some traction in the 1990s. What will come next?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Bill Gates: Capitalism means male baldness gets more fund... by lmickh on Thursday March 14, 2013 @02:24PM (#5376744)
Yes, the scale of wars has not been on the multinational "total war" level the last half century, but it is hardly been peaceful. Just more along historical norms pre-World Wars. That is normally true of wars following more encompassing conflicts.

Ideology played just as large of a driving force during the second half of the 20th Century yet the bloodshed was less. It is hard to say that withdraw from Ideology equals greater peace.

[ Parent | on HN ]