Armed Stupidity and the Darwinian Ratchet
Some scholars argue that asymmetric war is like a Darwinian Ratchet. When an army “culls” the “slow and stupid” guerillas, “better” guerillas take their place, eventually creating a race of super guerillas. Okay, Boomer.
The Darwinian Ratchet is a real biological concept but trying to apply it to war is foolish. What’s wrong with the Darwinian Ratchet? For starters, it’s wrong. The DR is also extremely racist and the geniuses who crow the loudest about it don’t understand evolution. They don’t understand war either.
The racism of the DR immediately disproves the whole theory. It directly compares people to vermin or a disease. For example, generations of cockroaches can develop immunity to poison. According to the DR, this is exactly like shooting people. No, it’s not. Killing 90% of an army doesn’t make the surviving 10% better at their jobs. Anyone who claims that a battlefield has training value has never been on one.
Even DR advocates themselves don’t believe this. They exclusively apply their dumb idea to nonwhite human populations like in the Middle East and West Asia. What about partisan movements that sprang up across Europe during World War II? The Nazis murdered millions of people trying, and failing, to stamp out resistance. Did the survivors become super soldiers? No, they did not, and that’s a stupid thing to say.
Not only is the DR demonstrably false, it’s the opposite of the truth. A disease doesn’t mutate into a super strain because doctors were too good at treating it. Yes, diseases can develop resistance to antibiotics and antivirals, but that doesn’t make them more contagious, and definitely not more deadly. Failure to slow the spread of a disease is what causes it to rapidly mutate. The higher the number of infected hosts, the higher the odds of a deadly mutation occurring. The Spanish flu in 1918 is a prime example of an uncontrolled epidemic that mutated, sparking an even deadlier epidemic.
People who love the DR tend to be the same people who sneered at the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. That’s because people with an irrational fear of Muslims tend to also have an irrational fear of homosexuals. AIDS was the “gay virus” therefore it should have been ignored. I bet baby boomer conservatives wouldn’t be laughing if AIDS mutated and they all got it too. There is a reason that people keep saying stupid things and can’t be reasoned with. I address that in my following post.
12-year-old boys don’t read Batman comic books and say “oh, Joker must have appeared because the police are too good at fighting crime.” Gotham City is a horrible place to live that’s been plagued by violence and poverty for generations. That’s why criminals in Gotham are so much worse than everywhere else. Even children can understand this theme on their own.
Imagine if we applied the DR to partisans in World War II. Compare France and Ukraine. According to the DR, the insurgency in Ukraine was worse because the Nazis were killing a lot more partisans there. The Nazis were too brutal, surviving partisans got smarter, and other people got angry from collateral damage and also started fighting. Therefore, the Nazis should have won hearts and minds, killed fewer partisans so they couldn’t get smarter, and fewer people would have wanted to join the insurgency.
Victory would have been guaranteed, right? No, because that’s really stupid. This is the worst kind of stupid. It’s the kind of stupid answer that gives the same conclusion as a correct answer, except it won’t work because it’s stupid. The Ukrainian insurgency was in fact a lot worse than its French equivalent; that is a correct conclusion. But that had nothing to do with how many people the Nazis were killing and Ukrainian partisans weren’t smarter than their French equivalents. There were just a lot more of them.
On the surface, it might sound sensible for the Nazis to “win hearts and minds,” but that wouldn’t have worked. It is important to not make more people hate you, but you can’t make more people hate you if everyone already hates you. I know this is hard for us modern Americans to grasp. Conservatives and liberals have been working together for 50+ years to destroy any sense of social cohesion and we don’t even understand the concept anymore. Nowadays, war movies like The Patriot have to be personal revenge fantasies because we would get confused by someone defending his country for patriotic reasons.
Ian Kummer
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