My personal take for a long time has been that the primary driver of most war today is boredom. War today is undertaken for entertainment. It's a special kind of entertainment that taps into deep brain stem circuits and provides a false but deeply resonating sense of purpose and meaning. When you hear that "people don't have a sense of meaning," it means their brain stem is not feeling the tribal loyalty emotions connected to warfare.

It would be cheaper to solve resource shortages in almost any other way. I don't really buy that explanation, at least for most wars. I think most wars today have roots that are far less rational.

Note that this applies IMO to all participants on all sides insofar as they had any role in starting or sustaining the war.

I think the primary drivers of war come from the top--powerful people motivated by greed and ego. Those are the spark that starts wars.

Boredom works from the bottom, providing fuel for wars in the form of soldiers. More specifically, young men in particular are easily appealed to by offering them a part in some great heroic endeavor, and a promise to mold them into someone whose manhood and courage may never again be questioned.

Of course, as many former soldiers have found out, you usually receive none of those things. The endeavor was bullshit, you were only a cog, and there is no badge of honor in the world that exempts you from the human experience of being made to feel small.

Wildly disagree with that. I think the overwhelming majority of people want simple, peaceful existence, and that the 'lack of meaning' can be solved through deeper shared community goals and aspirations.

More prominent figures like Trump, Putin or al-Assad don't wage war out of boredom, but out of ego, or visions of a glorious future that only they can impart (which I guess is still ego).

I also think that the various regional conflicts in Africa are in no way driven by the fact that the various political groups are just sitting there with nothing to do.

That said, I do think that a 'common enemy' provides a great deal of focus to communities, as we're wired for it... but the definition of community (who is 'us') is largely malleable and entirely flexible. But it's only one way of providing that meaning.

I also think conflict is largely glorified through American media, which is aggressively pushed on a lot of the English speaking world. The videos of the SF soldiers talking about killing people in Iraq and Afghanistan, and how cool it was with no remorse for the taking of life in a conflict that none of the local population asked for. Of the people I've talked to that have been through armed conflict (specifically Angola, and Serbia), and so strongly against conflict that the reactions are almost scary.

So no, I don't think conflicts are started or sustained out of a sense of boredom.

"deeper shared community goals and aspirations"

When one communities deeply shared goals and aspirations conflict with another's (or subgroups) is when you get war and violence. The eras of relative peace is when you have one empire imposing its will.

> but out of ego, or visions of a glorious future that only they can impart..

Obviously. Why would any one do anything at all if not for this very reason, let alone world leaders...

For world leaders, that is their whole point of their authority.

> My personal take for a long time has been that the primary driver of most war today is boredom. War today is undertaken for entertainment.

incredible claim, any research or evidence behind this?

To be fair, when you paired callout culture (a better name than cancel culture) with the toxic herd dynamics of Twitter as a platform (IMO Twitter has always been toxic), the result could be very brutal and unfair.

Someone decides you committed a faux pas, and people pile on, and this gets attention, which means the algorithm pushes it, and pushes the most inflammatory discourse around it. This creates a feedback loop that pushes things to maximum toxicity because, well, this keeps people on the app and seeing ads.

It worked with the nascent new right and Gamergate, and it worked for "woke" callout culture. The algorithm doesn't care about the angle. It just "likes" toxicity and lynch mobs because it drives engagement.

Algorithmic social media is a disease. It's an unmitigated net negative value for humanity, far more than even trash TV or tabloid journalism (due to addiction dynamics). It's like the fentanyl of the mind and the social discourse. If you work on it, you might be doing more overall harm than someone working on weapons. At least a weapon only attacks a small number of people at once, while this mass-lobotomizes the entire human race.

The best thing to do when targeted by such things is tell them to fuck off and close the browser or delete the app. If you engage, this drives the algorithmic feedback cycle. But all these guys are social media (esp Twitter) addicts.

The New Left / Marxist to neocon or hard right pipeline is a thing. A bunch of the Bush-era neocons were former Marxists. There's a few notable present-day neoreactionaries and other hard-right types that were former Marxists.

Backing up a bit, I've long observed that a decent number of highly educated and intelligent folks tend to gravitate toward authoritarian politics. That's because, being smart and educated, they obviously know how everything should work and can centrally plan society with their superior intellect. Obviously.

Marxism/Leninism delivers that. So does hard-right nationalism and neoreactionary ideology. It's not a big jump. Basically it's a jump you make when you're either tired of losing (Marxism is not popular in the West) or you abandon nominal egalitarianism.

I said nominal egalitarianism because all authoritarian systems and political ideologies are inherently elitist. All authoritarian ideologies disregard the opinions of "lesser" people, who either don't matter (right-wing) or aren't smart enough to know what's good for them (left-wing).

I think this is the real basis of the "horseshoe theory." The horseshoe meets at the extremes because the extremes of the left/right axis are authoritarian and they have that in common. If you end up at one of those poles you've already decided you know better than most people and this gives a kind of "divine right" to boss them around. For the left it's "smart man's burden" and for the right it's "divine right of kings" type stuff.

Oh yeah. I've said for years: smart dumb is much worse than dumb dumb.

Dumb dumb is just dumb and ineffective. Smart dumb can do real damage.

People don't understand the exponential function.

Let's say you start adding water to a fish tank drop by drop, and double the number of drops each time. One drop, two, four, eight, and so on. When is the fish tank half full? When it's like 1/16 of the way full, or something like that.

"Users" is a large set of people. Many don't care about privacy, but some do. There's also a difference between where you post random social media stuff vs what you run with something like OpenClaw and give access to your machine.

Google Cloud's bandwidth pricing is much more reasonable. That's one thing I see. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon still charge the standard big cloud absolutely ludicrous bandwidth markup, stuff like $0.08/gig.

If you know what bandwidth actually costs, that's like $500/gallon gasoline.

Oracle is still expensive relative to wholesale bandwidth but it's at least not absolutely insane.

If it’s truly brainless then I don’t see a major ethical problem. But I also don’t see people being allowed to do this because it’s much too far past the “yuck” threshold. It’s gross and disturbing even if technically it is ethical.

I also think it would be way harder to do this than it sounds. The body would not develop properly past the fetal stage without some kind of artificial stimulation.

Printing organs is probably both more likely to work and more likely to be accepted.

Birds are evolutionarily optimized for low mass.

The basic competence of elected officials and they people they appoint matters.

Not your storage, not your data (unless it's encrypted with keys you control).