= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
ChristianKl comments on The Craigslist Revolution: a real-world application of torture vs. dust specks OR How I learned to stop worrying and create one billion dollars out of nothing - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Comments (219)
I just had a fun idea: take this premise, and the demonstrated difficulty of improving Africa, and the idea that the development vs. likeliness-to-screw-everybody-over-with-WMDs curve would be an inverted U, and calculate the point at which it would be better to cut off all aid & begin bombing Africa into (or within) the Stone Age.
There a high moral cost to beginning bombing Africa. It would create opposition in the Western world that would likely increase the chance of homegrown terrorism.
There is no moral cost by definition; at the point at which we would want to start bombing, the immoral thing is to not bomb. We've bombed many countries for far less than existential threats (arguably, every US bombing campaign back to WWII).
Further, I think you drastically overestimate the chances of homegrown terrorism. Vietnam was long ago. Reports like millions of Iraqi refugees or hundreds of thousands of excess Iraqi deaths merely spark muted partisan arguments about whether the Lancet's statistics are right or not. It's a long way to Tipperary.
The UK had homegrown terrorism that it probably wouldn't have had without the Iraq and Afghanistan war.
Additionally mosts of the deaths in Iraq are in the West considered to be collateral damage. The Western reaction would be different when we would believe that the death toll is intentional and is supposed to bomb Iraq into the stone age.