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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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Given a realistic model of human behavior, that sounds somewhere between "massive" and "infinity" to me.

It wasn't "infinity" when it came to gas attacks in World War I. From the link:

The British expressed outrage at Germany's use of poison gas at Ypres and responded by developing their own gas warfare capability. The commander of II Corps, Lieutenant General Sir Charles Ferguson, said of gas:

It is a cowardly form of warfare which does not commend itself to me or other English soldiers ... We cannot win this war unless we kill or incapacitate more of our enemies than they do of us, and if this can only be done by our copying the enemy in his choice of weapons, we must not refuse to do so.

And I'd point out that blood feuds did end. Indeed, the development of "compensatory" law systems like weregild, or Somali xeer law, arose because people on all sides became tired of the costs of retaliation. Same with the European wars of religion giving rise to the Peace of Westphalia. The same with chemical weapons after WWI as mentioned above.

"Unilateral disarmament" is not a path to bilateral disarmament, and it is a path to peace only in that it's a recipe for the defeat of the side that adopts it. Indeed, the Left cancelling the Right would come to an end if the Right ceased to exist. But otherwise, as with the wars mentioned above, the only way out is through — the only way to get the side using these weapons to lay them down is when they're just as tired of being on the receiving end as the other guys.

All that said, I think that this current example is tactically unwise, and not something the right should be pursuing. It's too early, too weak, poorly aimed, and a diversion of effort best spent elsewhere.