Status Updates From Can War be Eliminated?

“We call it the human condition. We must accept that though we are animals we are unlike every other species because we are unfinished animals at our birth.”

It gets progressively better. "Technology" is the best chapter so far with zingers like "We are human only to the extent that others recognise their humanity in us" and "Hatred is the projection of our own identity onto others who are deemed to threaten it, or who (at best) are deemed to be 'different'." I do like that he constantly harks back to the place of war in fiction as an extension of how we see it.

I very much appreciate his deconstruction of the warrior ideal and the role it has played and continues to play in our personal and cultural construction of what war means to us - lowkey a potential topic for my masters lol. I was a little unconvinced by some of the logic used to interpret data on women in the armed forces, even if I found the general argument to be somewhat fair.

Initial thoughts: prose is fairly highbrow and contrary to other reviews I find it does assume some knowledge of the subject (which I thankfully have, but what of those who don't?). I'm also finding the cogency of his arguments lacking just a bit, probably in large part owing to the broad brush strokes with which he paints most of his examples (is "reductionist" too strong a word to use?" maybe).