Look, I just started because of the quality of research, obvious background knowledge, and fluid style of the writing of the one article I read. However, with this survey I already feel the outcast. You asked: Am I a liberal or a progressive? I laughed. No, I am a die in the wool Republican . . . short for liberal, oriented toward the values of the Enlightenment. Also, a fiscal conservative, for the smallest government we can agree to; a cultural traditionalist --- for instance, pro-life (but not enforced with criminal penalties). So am I a neo-liberal, a hybrid, or an outcast from your domain? I ask because I view government as the necessary evil, easily corruptable to meet whatever ideas are fashionable to the elites of the day. List the major themes on any imbecilic Fox news broadcast and I will agree with them 90% of the time. Enemy or potential friend?
Haha you are welcome here! I mainly titled it that way to find out who is a social progressive as opposed to a liberal. But conservatives are alright to subscribe & follow my substack! If you like immigration and demographics, you'll like the european immigration piece i mentioned above.
Something I would really like to read your thoughts about is about the following 3 topics:
1) Make a dual comparation of Madagascar vs eastern/southern africa and Madagascar vs the Malay World/philippines/indochina and which comparison is more apt in which levels.
2) I have not yet completed your ethiopia series but I would like to know if the pre-Saleise ethiopia was closer economically to medieval europe or to islamic arabic world. The slavery part pushes towards an arabic similarity while the peseant and central monarchy path pushes towards christian europe.
3) A South Africa-Brasil or South Africa-Argentina comparison could be interesting
Regarding your questions: your article about corruption as low-middle income issue changed totally my perspective. And I believe your bias is a "modernity is here, development is more or less obligatory and we are in a single highway towards the future" which is very economist of you (I say that as a fellow economist), like I don´t know if Iran or Saudi Arabia are in the same highway, or Japan, or Belarus. Worst war of the century was GWOT but of the decade Ethiopia-Sudan are tied.
I’d like to continue to see your thoughts about the best way forward for African states. What’s working and why? What’s not? What do various countries in Africa need to thrive? Should/can colonial borders be redrawn if they are clearly not working? Is there a place for a pan-continental currency something like the CFR?
1. Many African states need to improve their farming yields above subsistence levels.
2. Redrawing colonial borders is not most likely not happening. Even if they could be redrawn, where one country ends and begins would cause wars.
Example 1: Let's say Nigeria was split into 20+ countries and one of them was the pre-colonial state of Oyo, would Dahomey be independent? Or would it be part of Oyo? Dahomey would want independence, as it was initially an independent kingdom before Oyo vassalized it. However, Oyo would want a coastline and it wouldn't want Dahomey to be independent. There are so many examples of intracolonialism within Africa, that would make this so messy.
Example 2: Djibouti and Eritrea were at different points part of Ethiopia. Ethiopia would love both of them if it could. But both nations value their sovereignty.
Example 3: Morocco, post-independence claimed Western Algeria, Western Sahara, all of Mauritania, and Northern Mali (including Gao, Jenne, and Timbuktu) since at certain points in time they were all part of Morocco. Morocco will definitely get Western Sahara at this point. Mauritania does not want to be part of Mali. Algeria fought Morocco when Morocco invaded Western Algeria. They don't like each other. Mali is dealing with Tuaregs and Jihadists trying to take Jenne, Gao, and Timbuktu.
I can give 1000 more examples of why border redrawing would be incredibly painful. I will definitely right about this.
3. Do you mean CFA franc? There's talks of the AU on a continental currency, but they are the slowest implementers of any bureaucracy, maybe the Mercosur and ASEAN are more of a talkshop than the AU.
The stat that is most interesting to me is religion. 60% of your readers are atheists! Atheists are a tiny fraction of the population even in the west! And it’s not like your blog is about atheism in the slightest
Reading your blog with a lot of interest, from Haiti!
What economics topic do you really enjoy me writing about the most? -> development story of different countries, industrial policy, etc.
What do you think is the worst war this decade? -> I am biased, being from and living in Haiti. But I have to say the wars in Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, Gaza all look worse to me than what I am living through here.
What do you think I should write about? -> keep doing what you're doing!
I believe in deep structural change, but not merely to “correct” the histories of exclusion and oppression; rather because I believe that they are all symptoms of the root evil of zero-sum competition.
Broadly speaking, the direction of progress is in the direction of making more systems and institutions that are positive-sum.
You have a great discussion site - keep going as you are! Disappointed you didn't define "conservative" as normally I'd classify myself as that. Also, you included mass-murdering, fascistic, extremist categories such as Marxism, communism and "socialism" but not their bastard fascist twin son Nazism - why not? They are morally equivalent.
I'd be interested in an analysis of Botswana, which I routinely see as a rare jewel in African progress.
It is a success by African standards but calling it a jewel is pushing it. Botswana basically rode off diamonds when it made a joint venture with the diamond monopoly DeBeers. But now that Chinese synthetic diamonds have hit the market, Botswana has been struggling since it has failed to diversify.
Conservatives are classical liberals of 18th century western thought.
Modern liberals just take classical liberalism and update it with 1960s ideas.
I didnt include nazism because it isnt an economic system. Hitler privatized Deutsche bank & Commerzbank and United Steamship Company. At the same time, he made government owned enterprises like Volkswagen and Reichsautobahn.
He crushed unions and strikes while farmers had set quotas to meet for production and the government controlled prices.
He nationalized & privatized, he weakened unions and set prices. Nazism had left and right wing stuff so it didnt make sense to label it as a economic system.
Wow, thanks for responding so quickly, but I disagree, it's incredibly important globally. The Nazi economic model was adopted in large part by China after Mao's death, and it allowed China to boom almost miraculously. By adopting a fascist economic model (highly-oversighted free market system for supply of consumer goods allied with tightly State controlled heavy industry, military, press, social order, etc), China has dragged hectomillions out of communist misery and poverty. Like it or not (and I loathe it) fascism in Germany (up to 1939) and China (80s-current) caused huge economic gains. In my opinion, many socialists also adhere to this model, so I think it is well worth including!
I'll look at your Botswana article. The "jewel" ref was a hidden pun, sorry.
Definitely going to "paid" in future. The African articles have been a revelation (this gets no coverage in European circles).
Another factor that I would like to see covered is the intractability of borders in Africa. Sure, countries don't like to cede territory, but countries and borders are a coloniser artifact! Why is it so difficult to reshape borders to match ethnic groups as per centuries ago? Is it all about oil and gold?
Thanks! And good question, and I have your answer. I will definitely write about this in the future as well:
Redrawing colonial borders is almost certainly not happening. At independence, the African countries formed the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1964 (itself a compromised entity, but that’s another story). The vast majority of countries decided to keep colonial borders as they were. Remember: outside of a few literate states like Ethiopia, Egypt, or the Sahelian empires like Kanem-Bornu or the Hausa city-states, most African polities did not have maps for where their countries started or ended. Too many overlapping claims. Even if they could be redrawn, deciding where one country ends and another begins would cause wars. Here are 4 examples:
Example 1: If Nigeria were split into 20+ countries and one of them was the pre-colonial state of Oyo, would Dahomey be independent, or part of Oyo? Dahomey would want independence, since it was originally its own kingdom before Oyo vassalized it in the 1700s. But Oyo would want a coastline, and would not want Dahomey to be independent.
Example 2: Djibouti and Eritrea were once part of Ethiopia. Ethiopia would reclaim them if it could (as it hints today with calls for a coastline), but both nations fiercely value their sovereignty.
Example 3: Morocco, after independence, claimed Western Algeria, Western Sahara, Mauritania, and Northern Mali (including Gao, Jenne, and Timbuktu), since they had all been part of Morocco at various times. The only territory Morocco is still fighting for is Western Sahara, but Mauritania does not want to join, and neither does northern Mali. Algeria already fought Morocco when it invaded Western Algeria. Meanwhile, Mali is busy fighting Tuaregs and jihadists for control of Gao, Jenne, and Timbuktu.
Example 4: Somalia’s mission was to reunite all Somali territories — that’s literally what the five-star flag represents (Italian Somaliland, British Somaliland, French Somaliland/Djibouti, the Somali-inhabited Ogaden in Ethiopia, and northern Kenya). But there was never one unified Somali state; pan-Somalism was a post-independence project. In the 1800s there were separate Somali entities — Isaaq, Warsangali, Majeerteen, Hobyo, Geledi (and earlier Ajuran) — that traded and fought each other. In the colonial era, France, Britain, Italy, and Ethiopia carved up Somali-inhabited lands. Since independence, Somalia backed insurgencies in Kenya and invaded Ethiopia to claim Ogaden, but failed both times. After 1991, Somalia collapsed into state failure, while Somaliland seeks independence.
There are countless more examples. The idea of redrawing africa into pre-colonial borders doesnt really make sense since african states didnt really have defined borders before colonialism. Before colonialism, africans werent just Nobel savages living in piece these were african polities expanding too as I described in previous examples.
The only "border redrawing" we would see is more succession as we saw in Eritrea leaving Ethiopia in 1991, South Sudan leaving Sudan in 2011, and soon the recognition of Somaliland leaving Somalia as Trump has signaled to do.
Nikki Haley, Ben Shapiro, Mitt Romney aren't classical liberals they are old school pre-trump conservatives. Classical liberals are libertarians. Steven Pinker is far more of a classical liberals than the names you put on there. Support for war alone is one reason those three can't even be described as classical liberals/libertarians. The name libertarians came about so as not to be confused with Bill Clinton style liberals or today's progressive just because we agreed on some things with them.
I see where you’re coming from, but I’d actually push back on a few points:
1. I would say pre-Trump, Ronald Reagan conservative IS rooted in classical liberalism. It is liberalism before the 1960s movements. Hence why all three of those people don't care for 3rd wave feminism, affirmative action, and race-based hiring. Post-1960s liberalism is what modern liberalism is.
2. I’d push back that war itself is irrelevant to whether someone is a classical liberal. Plenty of classical liberals supported intervention if the cause was liberty or self-defense. John Stuart Mill wrote directly about this — he opposed wars of conquest but defended wars of national defense and even humanitarian intervention if they advanced liberty. William Gladstone, another liberal icon, oversaw interventions like the naval campaign against the slave trade. Even Richard Cobden and John Bright, usually the most anti-war of the “Manchester liberals,” made exceptions for suppressing the Atlantic slave trade. The Bombardment of Lagos in 1851 to crush Nigerian slavers from selling people to Brazilians is just like invading Afghanistan for harboring Al-Qaeda or invading Somalia to end the anarchy post-Siad Barre.
3. Libertarianism is basically classic liberalism + no regulation of drugs and foreign intervention. If you look at the history of classic liberalism and classic liberals in the British Empire you'll see plenty of foreign intervention over the guise of spreading British liberal values. Libertarians don't believe in spreading values through war.
4. As for Pinker, I’d still place him more in modern, post-1960s liberalism — he’s closer to Rawls than to Mill or Cobden. He aligns with Rawlsian fairness and welfare-state liberalism (accepting redistribution, post 1960s civil rights, and social modernity), not just the Enlightenment-era laissez-faire baseline. That’s different from classic liberals who reject the state as a guarantor of fairness.
Did not answer the "worst war" question because of vagueness in the question: worst in what sense? Worst humanitarian impact? (Sudan, probably, but we lack accurate information to compare the humanitarian impact of Sudan vs DRC vs Gaza vs Syria, for example. And on what basis do we compare? Absolute numbers of civilian deaths or percentage of total population? Percentage of population displaced? Percentage of civilian infrastructure destroyed?). Worst threat to sustaining a broadly peaceful international system? Ukraine-Russia, though a case can be made for Gaza. Worst self-destruction of a society? Syria.
But if we're going to try to rank wars from worst to least bad we should define some criteria.
Thats not even counting the 9M+ million displaced.
Some people will choose Gaza because they think Israel is an illegitimate state and that is the most widely reported war. Some will choose Sudan, Syria,or Yemen based off frankly what they are aware of in the war based on death count. They are all very comparable. Sudan (500K dead), Syria (650K dead, plus some druze were massacred recently since Al Sharaa has some bloodlustful people providing security since Israel destroyed his military equipment once he took over from Assad), Yemen (377K dead) with Houthis basically controlling Yemen now.
The BBC article you cite doesn't actually say that, but to me it just highlights the difficulty of trying to define which conflict is "the worst." It depends on your criteria and our ability to make such comparisons with any objectivity depends on having relatively accurate statistics, which in many areas (like the DRC) don't exist.
My personal feelings about which conflicts are worse than others really don't matter.
What do you mean? This is what I said. Scroll down to where it says "The UN estimated that by the start of 2022, the conflict in Yemen had caused over 377,000 deaths, with 60% the result of hunger, lack of healthcare and unsafe water" i rounded that up to 400K....
If you had said, 400k had died from all causes, no problem. But you said, "400K starved to death by 2021." According to the article, the UN said, "377,000 deaths, with 60% the result of hunger, lack of healthcare and unsafe water." Sixty percent would be around 230K. I assume the other 147K were combatants, or died from violence, but the article doesn't say. There's no specific number for victims of starvation (or of any other cause).
Again, my point here is just to note the difficulty (or futility?) of making comparisons in the absence of any criteria or reasonably accurate numbers. If we're trying to determine which conflict is worst, to me it would make sense to look at metrics like:
- total deaths from all war-related causes as a percentage of total population;
- percentage of key infrastructure like health facilities, schools, and power plants destroyed or damaged;
- percentage of the population displaced from their homes.
UN and other agencies try to track these metrics in order to plan their relief efforts, so for most conflicts there are at least reasonable guesstimates.
1)Ah sorry, I should have just said died. Yes you are correct. Usually i am very particular with my language and dont make errors like that but you got me. Thank you.
2) the poll is to help me ascertain a few things: A) how good the diet is of my audience. For example, I have very educated friends who have no idea what is going on in other countries and think what israel is doing to Gaza is the worst thing since the holocaust and could not name another atrocity in the middle east or point to syria or Yemen on a map. Nor could they name a conflict in Africa even though that friend is an african. B) see how strongly my audience feels about palestine by making that the first option.
There is nothing wrong with your choice of not choosing any. But this is a subjective question. There's so much we are still learning even about the Syrian conflict.
I hope you get something useful from your poll. My years spent in diplomacy and intelligence have made me somewhat pedantic about what sources say and don't say.
Look, I just started because of the quality of research, obvious background knowledge, and fluid style of the writing of the one article I read. However, with this survey I already feel the outcast. You asked: Am I a liberal or a progressive? I laughed. No, I am a die in the wool Republican . . . short for liberal, oriented toward the values of the Enlightenment. Also, a fiscal conservative, for the smallest government we can agree to; a cultural traditionalist --- for instance, pro-life (but not enforced with criminal penalties). So am I a neo-liberal, a hybrid, or an outcast from your domain? I ask because I view government as the necessary evil, easily corruptable to meet whatever ideas are fashionable to the elites of the day. List the major themes on any imbecilic Fox news broadcast and I will agree with them 90% of the time. Enemy or potential friend?
Haha you are welcome here! I mainly titled it that way to find out who is a social progressive as opposed to a liberal. But conservatives are alright to subscribe & follow my substack! If you like immigration and demographics, you'll like the european immigration piece i mentioned above.
Something I would really like to read your thoughts about is about the following 3 topics:
1) Make a dual comparation of Madagascar vs eastern/southern africa and Madagascar vs the Malay World/philippines/indochina and which comparison is more apt in which levels.
2) I have not yet completed your ethiopia series but I would like to know if the pre-Saleise ethiopia was closer economically to medieval europe or to islamic arabic world. The slavery part pushes towards an arabic similarity while the peseant and central monarchy path pushes towards christian europe.
3) A South Africa-Brasil or South Africa-Argentina comparison could be interesting
Regarding your questions: your article about corruption as low-middle income issue changed totally my perspective. And I believe your bias is a "modernity is here, development is more or less obligatory and we are in a single highway towards the future" which is very economist of you (I say that as a fellow economist), like I don´t know if Iran or Saudi Arabia are in the same highway, or Japan, or Belarus. Worst war of the century was GWOT but of the decade Ethiopia-Sudan are tied.
Greetings from bolivia
Appreciate the comment that my corruption article changed your mind!
I am going to redo my Ethiopia series. I felt like I got better at writing post-Sudan.
The other three are very interesting but i'll need time on those
I’d like to continue to see your thoughts about the best way forward for African states. What’s working and why? What’s not? What do various countries in Africa need to thrive? Should/can colonial borders be redrawn if they are clearly not working? Is there a place for a pan-continental currency something like the CFR?
As a brief preview:
1. Many African states need to improve their farming yields above subsistence levels.
2. Redrawing colonial borders is not most likely not happening. Even if they could be redrawn, where one country ends and begins would cause wars.
Example 1: Let's say Nigeria was split into 20+ countries and one of them was the pre-colonial state of Oyo, would Dahomey be independent? Or would it be part of Oyo? Dahomey would want independence, as it was initially an independent kingdom before Oyo vassalized it. However, Oyo would want a coastline and it wouldn't want Dahomey to be independent. There are so many examples of intracolonialism within Africa, that would make this so messy.
Example 2: Djibouti and Eritrea were at different points part of Ethiopia. Ethiopia would love both of them if it could. But both nations value their sovereignty.
Example 3: Morocco, post-independence claimed Western Algeria, Western Sahara, all of Mauritania, and Northern Mali (including Gao, Jenne, and Timbuktu) since at certain points in time they were all part of Morocco. Morocco will definitely get Western Sahara at this point. Mauritania does not want to be part of Mali. Algeria fought Morocco when Morocco invaded Western Algeria. They don't like each other. Mali is dealing with Tuaregs and Jihadists trying to take Jenne, Gao, and Timbuktu.
I can give 1000 more examples of why border redrawing would be incredibly painful. I will definitely right about this.
3. Do you mean CFA franc? There's talks of the AU on a continental currency, but they are the slowest implementers of any bureaucracy, maybe the Mercosur and ASEAN are more of a talkshop than the AU.
Excellent idea! Will be in the backlog
The stat that is most interesting to me is religion. 60% of your readers are atheists! Atheists are a tiny fraction of the population even in the west! And it’s not like your blog is about atheism in the slightest
Yea I found that surprising lol. I believe in God myself so its interesting many of my subscribers arent religious.
I'm an atheist myself. A blog like this would naturally select for education which is correlated with lack of religious belief, but 60% is a lot!
Maybe a big blog that did have something to do with religion referred you to their followers or something!
Astral Codex Ten!
Mystery solved!
Reading your blog with a lot of interest, from Haiti!
What economics topic do you really enjoy me writing about the most? -> development story of different countries, industrial policy, etc.
What do you think is the worst war this decade? -> I am biased, being from and living in Haiti. But I have to say the wars in Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, Gaza all look worse to me than what I am living through here.
What do you think I should write about? -> keep doing what you're doing!
I believe in deep structural change, but not merely to “correct” the histories of exclusion and oppression; rather because I believe that they are all symptoms of the root evil of zero-sum competition.
Broadly speaking, the direction of progress is in the direction of making more systems and institutions that are positive-sum.
You have a great discussion site - keep going as you are! Disappointed you didn't define "conservative" as normally I'd classify myself as that. Also, you included mass-murdering, fascistic, extremist categories such as Marxism, communism and "socialism" but not their bastard fascist twin son Nazism - why not? They are morally equivalent.
I'd be interested in an analysis of Botswana, which I routinely see as a rare jewel in African progress.
I wrote on Botswana years ago here. It was one of my first articles. But I am going to redo it.
https://open.substack.com/pub/yawboadu/p/botswanas-economy-in-nine-minutes?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=garki
It is a success by African standards but calling it a jewel is pushing it. Botswana basically rode off diamonds when it made a joint venture with the diamond monopoly DeBeers. But now that Chinese synthetic diamonds have hit the market, Botswana has been struggling since it has failed to diversify.
I did though!
Conservatives are classical liberals of 18th century western thought.
Modern liberals just take classical liberalism and update it with 1960s ideas.
I didnt include nazism because it isnt an economic system. Hitler privatized Deutsche bank & Commerzbank and United Steamship Company. At the same time, he made government owned enterprises like Volkswagen and Reichsautobahn.
He crushed unions and strikes while farmers had set quotas to meet for production and the government controlled prices.
He nationalized & privatized, he weakened unions and set prices. Nazism had left and right wing stuff so it didnt make sense to label it as a economic system.
Wow, thanks for responding so quickly, but I disagree, it's incredibly important globally. The Nazi economic model was adopted in large part by China after Mao's death, and it allowed China to boom almost miraculously. By adopting a fascist economic model (highly-oversighted free market system for supply of consumer goods allied with tightly State controlled heavy industry, military, press, social order, etc), China has dragged hectomillions out of communist misery and poverty. Like it or not (and I loathe it) fascism in Germany (up to 1939) and China (80s-current) caused huge economic gains. In my opinion, many socialists also adhere to this model, so I think it is well worth including!
If that is what you define as nazi economics is that I covered that in "market economy + strategic state firms" option
Sweet, all good. Thanks for the insights.
I'll look at your Botswana article. The "jewel" ref was a hidden pun, sorry.
Definitely going to "paid" in future. The African articles have been a revelation (this gets no coverage in European circles).
Another factor that I would like to see covered is the intractability of borders in Africa. Sure, countries don't like to cede territory, but countries and borders are a coloniser artifact! Why is it so difficult to reshape borders to match ethnic groups as per centuries ago? Is it all about oil and gold?
Thanks! And good question, and I have your answer. I will definitely write about this in the future as well:
Redrawing colonial borders is almost certainly not happening. At independence, the African countries formed the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1964 (itself a compromised entity, but that’s another story). The vast majority of countries decided to keep colonial borders as they were. Remember: outside of a few literate states like Ethiopia, Egypt, or the Sahelian empires like Kanem-Bornu or the Hausa city-states, most African polities did not have maps for where their countries started or ended. Too many overlapping claims. Even if they could be redrawn, deciding where one country ends and another begins would cause wars. Here are 4 examples:
Example 1: If Nigeria were split into 20+ countries and one of them was the pre-colonial state of Oyo, would Dahomey be independent, or part of Oyo? Dahomey would want independence, since it was originally its own kingdom before Oyo vassalized it in the 1700s. But Oyo would want a coastline, and would not want Dahomey to be independent.
Example 2: Djibouti and Eritrea were once part of Ethiopia. Ethiopia would reclaim them if it could (as it hints today with calls for a coastline), but both nations fiercely value their sovereignty.
Example 3: Morocco, after independence, claimed Western Algeria, Western Sahara, Mauritania, and Northern Mali (including Gao, Jenne, and Timbuktu), since they had all been part of Morocco at various times. The only territory Morocco is still fighting for is Western Sahara, but Mauritania does not want to join, and neither does northern Mali. Algeria already fought Morocco when it invaded Western Algeria. Meanwhile, Mali is busy fighting Tuaregs and jihadists for control of Gao, Jenne, and Timbuktu.
Example 4: Somalia’s mission was to reunite all Somali territories — that’s literally what the five-star flag represents (Italian Somaliland, British Somaliland, French Somaliland/Djibouti, the Somali-inhabited Ogaden in Ethiopia, and northern Kenya). But there was never one unified Somali state; pan-Somalism was a post-independence project. In the 1800s there were separate Somali entities — Isaaq, Warsangali, Majeerteen, Hobyo, Geledi (and earlier Ajuran) — that traded and fought each other. In the colonial era, France, Britain, Italy, and Ethiopia carved up Somali-inhabited lands. Since independence, Somalia backed insurgencies in Kenya and invaded Ethiopia to claim Ogaden, but failed both times. After 1991, Somalia collapsed into state failure, while Somaliland seeks independence.
There are countless more examples. The idea of redrawing africa into pre-colonial borders doesnt really make sense since african states didnt really have defined borders before colonialism. Before colonialism, africans werent just Nobel savages living in piece these were african polities expanding too as I described in previous examples.
The only "border redrawing" we would see is more succession as we saw in Eritrea leaving Ethiopia in 1991, South Sudan leaving Sudan in 2011, and soon the recognition of Somaliland leaving Somalia as Trump has signaled to do.
Hi there,
Nikki Haley, Ben Shapiro, Mitt Romney aren't classical liberals they are old school pre-trump conservatives. Classical liberals are libertarians. Steven Pinker is far more of a classical liberals than the names you put on there. Support for war alone is one reason those three can't even be described as classical liberals/libertarians. The name libertarians came about so as not to be confused with Bill Clinton style liberals or today's progressive just because we agreed on some things with them.
I see where you’re coming from, but I’d actually push back on a few points:
1. I would say pre-Trump, Ronald Reagan conservative IS rooted in classical liberalism. It is liberalism before the 1960s movements. Hence why all three of those people don't care for 3rd wave feminism, affirmative action, and race-based hiring. Post-1960s liberalism is what modern liberalism is.
2. I’d push back that war itself is irrelevant to whether someone is a classical liberal. Plenty of classical liberals supported intervention if the cause was liberty or self-defense. John Stuart Mill wrote directly about this — he opposed wars of conquest but defended wars of national defense and even humanitarian intervention if they advanced liberty. William Gladstone, another liberal icon, oversaw interventions like the naval campaign against the slave trade. Even Richard Cobden and John Bright, usually the most anti-war of the “Manchester liberals,” made exceptions for suppressing the Atlantic slave trade. The Bombardment of Lagos in 1851 to crush Nigerian slavers from selling people to Brazilians is just like invading Afghanistan for harboring Al-Qaeda or invading Somalia to end the anarchy post-Siad Barre.
3. Libertarianism is basically classic liberalism + no regulation of drugs and foreign intervention. If you look at the history of classic liberalism and classic liberals in the British Empire you'll see plenty of foreign intervention over the guise of spreading British liberal values. Libertarians don't believe in spreading values through war.
4. As for Pinker, I’d still place him more in modern, post-1960s liberalism — he’s closer to Rawls than to Mill or Cobden. He aligns with Rawlsian fairness and welfare-state liberalism (accepting redistribution, post 1960s civil rights, and social modernity), not just the Enlightenment-era laissez-faire baseline. That’s different from classic liberals who reject the state as a guarantor of fairness.
Did not answer the "worst war" question because of vagueness in the question: worst in what sense? Worst humanitarian impact? (Sudan, probably, but we lack accurate information to compare the humanitarian impact of Sudan vs DRC vs Gaza vs Syria, for example. And on what basis do we compare? Absolute numbers of civilian deaths or percentage of total population? Percentage of population displaced? Percentage of civilian infrastructure destroyed?). Worst threat to sustaining a broadly peaceful international system? Ukraine-Russia, though a case can be made for Gaza. Worst self-destruction of a society? Syria.
But if we're going to try to rank wars from worst to least bad we should define some criteria.
We do have info on Sudan. According to the Preparatory Committee of the Sudanese Doctors Syndicate, over half a million babies starved to death. https://sudantribune.net/article296185/#google_vignette
Thats not even counting the 9M+ million displaced.
Some people will choose Gaza because they think Israel is an illegitimate state and that is the most widely reported war. Some will choose Sudan, Syria,or Yemen based off frankly what they are aware of in the war based on death count. They are all very comparable. Sudan (500K dead), Syria (650K dead, plus some druze were massacred recently since Al Sharaa has some bloodlustful people providing security since Israel destroyed his military equipment once he took over from Assad), Yemen (377K dead) with Houthis basically controlling Yemen now.
Good question! But thats up to you to decide when you vote. I am surprised you didnt put Yemen in there since 400K starved to death by 2021.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-29319423
The BBC article you cite doesn't actually say that, but to me it just highlights the difficulty of trying to define which conflict is "the worst." It depends on your criteria and our ability to make such comparisons with any objectivity depends on having relatively accurate statistics, which in many areas (like the DRC) don't exist.
My personal feelings about which conflicts are worse than others really don't matter.
What do you mean? This is what I said. Scroll down to where it says "The UN estimated that by the start of 2022, the conflict in Yemen had caused over 377,000 deaths, with 60% the result of hunger, lack of healthcare and unsafe water" i rounded that up to 400K....
If you had said, 400k had died from all causes, no problem. But you said, "400K starved to death by 2021." According to the article, the UN said, "377,000 deaths, with 60% the result of hunger, lack of healthcare and unsafe water." Sixty percent would be around 230K. I assume the other 147K were combatants, or died from violence, but the article doesn't say. There's no specific number for victims of starvation (or of any other cause).
Again, my point here is just to note the difficulty (or futility?) of making comparisons in the absence of any criteria or reasonably accurate numbers. If we're trying to determine which conflict is worst, to me it would make sense to look at metrics like:
- total deaths from all war-related causes as a percentage of total population;
- percentage of key infrastructure like health facilities, schools, and power plants destroyed or damaged;
- percentage of the population displaced from their homes.
UN and other agencies try to track these metrics in order to plan their relief efforts, so for most conflicts there are at least reasonable guesstimates.
1)Ah sorry, I should have just said died. Yes you are correct. Usually i am very particular with my language and dont make errors like that but you got me. Thank you.
2) the poll is to help me ascertain a few things: A) how good the diet is of my audience. For example, I have very educated friends who have no idea what is going on in other countries and think what israel is doing to Gaza is the worst thing since the holocaust and could not name another atrocity in the middle east or point to syria or Yemen on a map. Nor could they name a conflict in Africa even though that friend is an african. B) see how strongly my audience feels about palestine by making that the first option.
There is nothing wrong with your choice of not choosing any. But this is a subjective question. There's so much we are still learning even about the Syrian conflict.
I hope you get something useful from your poll. My years spent in diplomacy and intelligence have made me somewhat pedantic about what sources say and don't say.