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United States22883 Posts
On September 09 2010 07:37 Hobot wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2010 07:17 Railz wrote:
The amount of women in government didn't seem a bit arbitrary to you (Just as example of what he meant by arbitrary) ? Besides it is all subjective. To someone living inside the US it is peaceful, but we don't try to hide the fact that we'll protect interests abroad. The US is far too large, as is China and India to rate it as such. The list doesn't go into detail if it means peaceful to others or ourselves. Did you read the report? It'll answer a lot of your questions. No, the number of women in government does not seem entirely arbitrary to me. An equal and egalitarian society tends to be peaceful, women in government is an indication of that (a small indication yes, but it doesn't have a large impact on the rating anyway). A country that respects women and treats them as equals is more peaceful for women. Maybe you remember the Taliban and how they treated women? According to what? Sex population imbalances such as in China and India cause instability, but you've made no direct tie to egalitarian principles. How are you defining peace? The Taliban were a proxy government that never really bothered anyone outside their borders. Afghanistan is a terrible place to live, but had they not allowed AQ camps to operate, would they really be considered a detriment to world peace?
And I don't know if I agree that someone living in the US will find it more peaceful than someone living in New Zealand for example. There is a lot more crime in the US, you're more likely to be murdered in the US than in New Zealand. The US government also doesn't respect its citizens' rights as much as in a country like New Zealand. Warrantless wiretapping ring a bell? How about selling out your Social Security? Now you've defined Social Security as a right, which is fine, except you've given no such justification for doing so. How do things such as crime and instability factor into peace? Saudi Arabia has nearly zero domestic instability. They damn well better not given there's a military and a paramilitary, and loads of "free" money to keep Saudi tribal citizens happy. Does that qualify Saudi internals as peaceful?
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On September 09 2010 07:50 Jibba wrote:
The Taliban were a proxy government that never really bothered anyone outside their borders. that is not the absolute criterium for peacefulness. they still committed plenty violent acts within "their" borders.
i think youre confusing something here. this is not merely an index covering the relations between nations, but rather an indicator of the peacefulness of the nation in its entirety, even inwards, as shown by the criteria they have used. i thought thats plenty obvious, but apparently you managed to escape that notion somehow. world peace is understood differently from just peace, but doesnt the population inside a country also count towards 'world'?
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On September 09 2010 06:43 Hobot wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2010 06:04 Jibba wrote:
Because the people who made the index don't know very much. There's a lot of arbitrary values given, and I'm sure they're simply unaware of the dealings of the powerful countries. Show nested quote +On September 09 2010 06:04 DannyJ wrote:On September 09 2010 05:58 orgolove wrote:
China more peaceful than US? rofl this is a joke It's obviously a retarded list. These are very sweeping judgments. Just because you don't agree with their conclusions, they're automatically ignorant/retarded? They have a 63 page report on their methodology and results, did you happen to go through any of it? Do you have any specific criticism of their metrics beyond "obviously it's retarded"? I agree that any time you try to rate countries by something as complex and ambiguous as "peace" or the like you're automatically oversimplifying, but it doesn't mean that the information is totally useless or wrong. The US really isn't a very peaceful country, and it shouldn't be surprising to learn that. Starting unprovoked wars in other countries does not make you a peaceful country. When you spend as much on defense as the rest of the world does (or 9 times China's military budget) you're not a peaceful country. When you have 5% of the world's population but 23% of the world's prison population then you're not a peaceful country. When you have one of the highest homicide rates in the industrialized world (5.4 per 100k in the US, 2.36 in China) then you're not a peaceful country.
No, it is obviously a retarded list, as i said. Any list that tries to equate "peace" to many different, odd variables, is obviously amazingly flawed and biased. The word peace, what it means and how it is achieved, can have a million different definitions.
And no shit America isn't a peaceful nation, no super power possibly can be.
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United States22883 Posts
On September 09 2010 07:49 Hobot wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2010 07:32 Jibba wrote:No, because international relations and security is what I specialize in and looking at their criteria and the questionable rankings for certain countries in certain categories, I've judged they don't know what they're talking about. Occasionally people on TL are more than just SC players.
Don't think I made that judgment simply because I'm an American. I understand much of our place in international security and I'm well aware that more death and destruction comes by way of our presence across the globe than anyone else (Russia isn't far behind.) It's still bullshit to take an abstraction such as peace and attain values to figures like prison populations or number members in the armed forces or donations to the UN, as if there is a formula for attaining peace.
Following UN protocol, following the wills of every country in 1-10, plenty of horrible, "unpeaceful" things have happened in the world.
I understand people here are more than just SC players, but I can't tell why you made a judgement or what intellectual background you have. You didn't back up your assertion with any kind of reason except to accuse them of being ignorant. You still haven't definitively shown that the study's authors don't know what they're talking about. I don't think you can even do that since any judgement about what country is more peaceful will be somewhat subjective. How can you say what pieces of data are more important or what should be included and what shouldn't? Anyway you look at it, something will seem arbitrary, but that doesn't totally invalidate everything else. My point is that it's subjective. It doesn't invalidate their data, but it does invalidate the metrics. After that, there's really no further reason to pursue which sets of data in the report are weak and which aren't. I did look at the discussion paper, though.
Your concern about ranking countries according to a rather nebulous concept like peace is addressed in the report itself. They explain their motives and attempts to quantify a qualitative assessment. Yes, I'm looking at the discussion paper now. I can't question their motives, but the attempts to quantify qualitative studies is immediately flawed, and the papers they've based their methodology are laughable. At the moment I'm reading that an extra 28 trillion dollars would have been placed back into the global economy if we had peace. Someone with a PhD wrote it, so it must be true.
This paper is slanted entirely towards the UN loving crowd, which is precisely why it will have the same fate as the UN itself. $1 to NATO contributes far more to global peace and security than $1 to the UN ever has, but only the UN metrics are included. And as I said before, treating every nation independently ignores the relations part of international relations. The US could easily improve its peaceful rating by removing the entire USFK (United States Forces Korea) and decommissioning those troops. Will that make the world more peaceful?
Imagine you're doing a 2v2 and the plan is that your partner will focus on protecting you early game while you expand and build a strong, teched army for midgame. In the post-game battle report, your numbers will be much better than theirs but it doesn't mean you contributed to the win any more than they did.
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United States22883 Posts
On September 09 2010 07:56 enzym wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2010 07:50 Jibba wrote:
The Taliban were a proxy government that never really bothered anyone outside their borders. that is not the absolute criterium for peacefulness. they still committed plenty violent acts within "their" borders. i think youre confusing something here. this is not merely an index covering the relations between nations, but rather an indicator of the peacefulness of the nation in its entirety, even inwards, as shown by the criteria they have used. i thought thats plenty obvious, but apparently you managed to escape that notion somehow. world peace is understood differently from just peace, but doesnt the population inside a country also count towards 'world'? If every other country were peaceful except for Afghanistan, would you care? Are you willing to sacrifice your own country's equilibrium to fix another's?
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On September 09 2010 08:00 DannyJ wrote:Not, it is obviously a retarded list, as i said. Any list that tries to equate "peace" to many different, odd variables, is obviously amazingly flawed and biased. The word peace, what it means and how it is achieved, can have a million different definitions.
You're strawmanning. You're assuming that they're saying "THIS IS WHAT PEACE IS, THIS IS A DEFINITIVE STUDY ABOUT WHO IS PEACEFUL AND WHO ISN'T" except they're not. This is an attempt to try and make a quantitative study of peace. Most reasonable people will understand that this a way of looking at peace, not the way.
So yes, it's retarded to look at this as the only way to measure peace, but that isn't what the study's authors are saying.
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On September 09 2010 08:08 Hobot wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2010 08:00 DannyJ wrote:Not, it is obviously a retarded list, as i said. Any list that tries to equate "peace" to many different, odd variables, is obviously amazingly flawed and biased. The word peace, what it means and how it is achieved, can have a million different definitions. You're strawmanning. You're assuming that they're saying "THIS IS WHAT PEACE IS, THIS IS A DEFINITIVE STUDY ABOUT WHO IS PEACEFUL AND WHO ISN'T" except they're not. This is an attempt to try and make a quantitative study of peace. Most reasonable people will understand that this a way of looking at peace, not the way. So yes, it's retarded to look at this as the only way to measure peace, but that isn't what the study's authors are saying.
Yeah, it's one way of looking at it. Exactly. Thus it is pointless, because i could make another list with different variables that has the order completely switched. ANY list is stupid, and more of just a cute novelty than real insight.
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So am I to understand that the major complaint against this list is that because it isn't entirely objective (and when are the soft sciences every fully objective??) that it is useless and we should just ignore it in its entirety?
Is it just me, or is this a completely intractable and ridiculous viewpoint?
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On September 09 2010 08:09 ProudZionist wrote:
Thanks to the Palestinian terrorists we're ranked 144.
+ Show Spoiler +On September 01 2010 04:48 ProudZionist wrote:
Sorry, Israel IS and WILL BE for JEWS only.
People care about these 400 soon-to-be terrorists, yet don't care about the 6 million Jews who suffered in the Holocaust, and brave soldiers who fought for Israel.
User was temp banned for this post. On September 01 2010 05:12 ProudZionist wrote:
Palestinians voted Hamas (a terrorist organization) to power, what makes Palestinians NOT being terrorists, huh?
Terrorist population -> electing a terrorist government.
I'm beginning to see a pattern here.
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United States22883 Posts
FYI, a piece of artillery = -1 peace point
1 tank = -5 peace points
1 combat aircraft = -20 peace points
1 warship = -100 peace points
1 aircraft carrier/nuclear submarine = -1000 peace points
No wonder Germany is so low. It must be easy to be landlocked. You can have 200 tanks for every 1 of our submarines!
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On September 09 2010 08:09 ProudZionist wrote:
Thanks to the Palestinian terrorists we're ranked 144.
You are everything that is wrong with Israel.
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On September 09 2010 08:16 Hobot wrote:
So am I to understand that the major complaint against this list is that because it isn't entirely objective (and when are the soft sciences every fully objective??) that it is useless and we should just ignore it in its entirety?
Is it just me, or is this a completely intractable and ridiculous viewpoint?
Sure we can ignore it. What the hell does it show exactly? I don't get it. It's just a none objective interesting study, that you can take for what it's worth. I don't see why you are so defensive over it.
Is it some sort of shocking fact that Somalia isn't peaceful, or that Sweden is?
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United States22883 Posts
On September 09 2010 08:16 Hobot wrote:
So am I to understand that the major complaint against this list is that because it isn't entirely objective (and when are the soft sciences every fully objective??) that it is useless and we should just ignore it in its entirety?
Is it just me, or is this a completely intractable and ridiculous viewpoint?
No, that it's an absurd metric to have. It's meant to attract headlines for the organization and they probably have some desire and belief that they're truly convincing people by using rough academics to document which countries contribute/are a detriment to peace. But ultimately, they're missing the point on the academic side of things. Promoting peace and highlighting the terrible things that major powers do is wonderful, but one of the reasons qualitative studies are done is for the reason that some things are intangible and immeasurable, and thus the best way to analyze them is through a case study and not a data set. Then transforming that unquantifiable case study into a data set is what causes absurdity.
You can do it if you'd like, but it then ceases to have any real meaning or value in quantitative form.
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On September 09 2010 08:21 Mindcrime wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2010 08:09 ProudZionist wrote:
Thanks to the Palestinian terrorists we're ranked 144. + Show Spoiler +On September 01 2010 04:48 ProudZionist wrote:
Sorry, Israel IS and WILL BE for JEWS only.
People care about these 400 soon-to-be terrorists, yet don't care about the 6 million Jews who suffered in the Holocaust, and brave soldiers who fought for Israel.
User was temp banned for this post. On September 01 2010 05:12 ProudZionist wrote:
Palestinians voted Hamas (a terrorist organization) to power, what makes Palestinians NOT being terrorists, huh?
Terrorist population -> electing a terrorist government. I'm beginning to see a pattern here.
Yea his username is ProudZionist....
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On September 09 2010 08:22 Jibba wrote:
FYI, a piece of artillery = -1 peace point
1 tank = -5 peace points
1 combat aircraft = -20 peace points
1 warship = -100 peace points
1 aircraft carrier/nuclear submarine = -1000 peace points
No wonder Germany is so low. It must be easy to be landlocked. You can have 200 tanks for every 1 of our submarines!
200 tanks is not equal to 1 nuclear submarine, with the possibility to move all around the seas, strike any target with an ICBM?
On the actual list though - I find it hilarious that Iceland is number 2. There are what, 20 people in Iceland?
Edit: 300k roughly, but still 
Edit #2: Also lol @ Australia, 8.93/10 for "Functionality of Government" - It's not our fault we had no Prime Minister until yesterday!
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On September 09 2010 08:31 Duckvillelol wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2010 08:22 Jibba wrote:
FYI, a piece of artillery = -1 peace point
1 tank = -5 peace points
1 combat aircraft = -20 peace points
1 warship = -100 peace points
1 aircraft carrier/nuclear submarine = -1000 peace points
No wonder Germany is so low. It must be easy to be landlocked. You can have 200 tanks for every 1 of our submarines! 200 tanks is not equal to 1 nuclear submarine, with the possibility to move all around the seas, strike any target with an ICBM?
Well, tanks are kinda useful in waging real warfare. I don't see America patrolling the streets of Iraq with Nuclear submarines...
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Canada #14! Canada is highly regarded for its weapons development, but their exports are rather minimal.
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United States22883 Posts
On September 09 2010 08:31 Duckvillelol wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2010 08:22 Jibba wrote:
FYI, a piece of artillery = -1 peace point
1 tank = -5 peace points
1 combat aircraft = -20 peace points
1 warship = -100 peace points
1 aircraft carrier/nuclear submarine = -1000 peace points
No wonder Germany is so low. It must be easy to be landlocked. You can have 200 tanks for every 1 of our submarines! 200 tanks is not equal to 1 nuclear submarine
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=1000/5
Wrong.
Works cited:
Institute for Economics & Peace Discussion Paper 2010: Peace, Wealth and Human Potential. p. 88, Table 40.
Google
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EPT
