Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Ethics Page 1 of 9

Is It Better To Be Raped Or Be A Rapist?

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On May 12, 2026

18 Comments

There are a lot of people who believe that in this world you either fuck other people, or get fucked. The world is full of predators, and if you aren’t victimizing someone, you’ll get victimized.

After all, if you hurt someone, that means you’re stronger than them, and mean, and others will be scared of you.

Pretty much how the US, indeed all Empires, operate.

Kill or be killed, this isn’t. If someone attacks you, or someone else, and you kill someone in self defense, well, that’s not the same thing.

Rape’s a good case, because there’s never justification for rape. It’s taking pleasure from someone else’s degradation, and it makes you, well, evil.

I’d argue the same is true of torture. (No, torture doesn’t work for extracting information.)

And then there’s murder. Not self defense, but say joining a military and going and killing a bunch of innocent people. Or, on your own behalf or the behalf of some church or belief or company, killing people. The purest example is certain types of draft: “you kill for us or we kill you.” Perhaps its less than that “kill for us or we throw you in prison” or “kill for us or we impoverish you.”

There are less pure versions. You work for a company which pollutes or poisons or makes products designed for murder. You know (or should know) that people will die because of the pollution. Working for cigarette companies, perhaps. Manufacturers who leach cancerous poisons into the air, water and land. Defense contractors for aggressive countries.

Or perhaps you’re just an abuser. A prison guard, say, in a nation where abuse and what amounts to torture of prisoners is routine.

A propagandist, who provides justification for war and war crimes.

We all make compromises, I think. We all do things to survive we’d rather not do.

But where’s the line?

What is there that you won’t do?

Is it murder? Is it mass murder for your nation? (Don’t pretend that America has had a war of self-defense in generations.) Is it producing harmful products because you need a job? Is it lying about evil to justify it? Is it looking the other way?

I think we all need to decide. Personally if a gun was on me and they said “you rape that person, or you get raped” I hope I’d choose to be raped. I’d rather be a victim than victimizer, at least when it comes to such an abominable act.

Would I join a draft to go kill Iranians and help kill Palestinians? No.

I admire Israelis who go to prison rather than join the IDF.

Muhammad Ali, refusing the draft for Vietnam:

My conscious won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father… Shoot them for what? …How can I shoot them, the little poor black people, poor little babies and children and women … Just take me to jail.

 

 

What’s your line? What would you refuse to do even if it meant you’d become a victim?

 

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Losing Patience With Moral & Intellectual Morons

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On April 22, 2026

9 Comments

Let me spell this out clearly: you can love someone and still hold them to account, including sending them to prison or even executing them. You can refuse to rape and torture and still put criminals in prison. You can treat people well and know that doing so brings out the best in most people, and that most people rise to meet your expectations while noting that it doesn’t work on everyone.

People who are so lost to cynicism that can no longer see the good, can no longer feel compassion for those they consider evil, and who think the only way to defeat evil is to do evil, are lost, stupid and as dangerous as the evil they think they’re fighting.

People who think violence or coercion are never justified (as opposed to being rarely justified), are also stupid, and allow much evil to be born or persist.

There are positions between these two extremes. This is not a binary.

Stop being fools.

Did Gen. Caine Defy A Presidential Order Saturday Night and Deny Trump the Nuclear Codes?

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On April 20, 2026

14 Comments

~by Sean Paul Kelley

Kerry Burgess on X is reporting this: “General Caine cited Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice on Saturday night, as he refused Trumps order to execute a nuclear strike on Iran.”

Gen. Caine is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and therefore not in the direct chain of command. Would Trump even know that? Probably not.

But this story is gaining traction, from Sky News, the Mirror, and the Daily Express.

I’m speechless.

Acknowledging the Human In Each Other

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On April 15, 2026

20 Comments

I’ve spent a lot of time around doctors and nurses and low level bureaucrats.

Way too much time.

I’ve learned a couple things as a result, however.

  • You get the best care from doctors or service from anyone else when they feel you as a human.
  • The best way to get them to feel you as human, is to feel, and act, as if they are human.

Ian’s rule of doctors is as follows: all the best doctors really care about their patients and are upset when their patients die or are hurting.

Obviously my experience is not “study wide” but it’s far more than most people and I have literally never had a good doctor who didn’t attach to me on a human level.

Now some people are just like this: they treat everyone as another human. When you do so, there’s a queer acknowledgement that the other person is like you: they have feelings, thoughts. They hurt sometimes. They matter.

But most people don’t, because that acknowledgment of others as human means you open yourself to care, and when you care you can be hurt thru the other person. (You can also, and people forget this, experience great joy and happiness thru other people. One of the four Buddhist emotions which are trained is “happiness for other people’ being happy.” After all, no matter how shit your life is there’s always someone whose life is going great.)

Jobs where you see tons of people in trouble going by, there is a temptation to shut down. To treat them as objects and simply do your job by the book. It’s self protection. But, again, in my experience, for whatever reason, if the care isn’t there, in most jobs where the real tasks is helping people, if you don’t care, you don’t do a good job. It shouldn’t be that way, maybe. If you do all the right things without giving a damn, it should be the same, right?

But it isn’t.

There’s a tactical level here. I made a connection with one doctor who injured himself by asking about it and following up. Of course, if I hadn’t actually cared that he was in pain, just asking would have meant nothing. In another case I had a doctor spill out his problems with his daughter. He was a good guy, and had always been a good doctor, but after that he took extra care of me.

But the tactical level isn’t important, it’s an outgrowth of the correct attitude. We’ve all met people who we know care about us the second we meet them. Some of them are the true Saints of the world: those who genuinely care for everyone. Others, we just made an instant connection.

But it’s this care that matters most. If you care about others, most of them (there are always exceptions) will be aware of it, even if only subconsciously, and they will reciprocate, again, often without even realizing they’re doing so.

Of course the best way to do this is to just care about everyone, at least somewhat. If I’m aware someone I don’t know well is unhappy, I’ll usually try and be kind to them even when I’ll never meet them again. Why not? I  take particular care with people like service workers, homeless people, janitors and so on. These people are regarded by most as human appliances (janitors, service workers) or as unpleasant human trash (the homeless.)

They don’t get a lot of kindness or care, so a little goes a long way.

We’re all human. We all can suffer. And we don’t have anything but each other. This is true between us and animals too, in a different way. Not human, no, but they feel pain, many of them feel love, and we are lesser if we do not see the bond of consciousness between us.

Generally, as I used to write a lot, the right thing to do is the right thing to do. For you, and for everyone around you.

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Is Virtue An Advantage Or Disadvantage For Societies?

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On February 24, 2026

47 Comments

There’s an idea going around that virtues are anti-competitive. That being loyal, honorable, honest, generous, kind, etc… puts you at a disadvantage.

It’s one of those half true statements. It’s true if your society is shit, but in a decent society it can be disadvantage, and if a society has predominantly virtueless people in charge, or as the majority of the population, then the society as a whole is at a disadvantage against virtuous societies.

In a society where everyone is out for themselves or a small group, and where any behaviour is acceptable as long as it “wins”, like the US (notice that even child rape is acceptable to US elites, if it wasn’t, they’d punish it) having morals will hold you back, no question. If you won’t make decisions which impoverish mass numbers of people, or kill them, if it’s in your self interest or the interest of your small group (bank, political party, corporation, family, whatever) then you’re at a disadvantage.

The problem is that such societies self-cannibalize. Instead of growing the pie they fight over who gets how much of a slice, and what they do makes the pie smaller than it otherwise would be. (Ignore every dipshit who tells you how rich the US is. It’s less rich in real terms than it was 60 years ago compared to its competitors and in many cases even to itself. A CT scan in China costs about $50, and you get it the same day.)

Whatever one thinks of China, the fact is that its elites concentrate on making the population more prosperous and the country stronger in real terms. They aren’t offshoring their steel production. They can build ships. They lift people out of poverty, they don’t shove people into it. There aren’t massive homeless encampments everywhere. They arrest senior party members and billionaires for corruption and even execute them for crimes.

They are better people than Americans. Doubtless that will outrage many, but if you think otherwise you’re engaged in special pleading. How many countries have they invaded and destroyed? How many people have they killed or impoverished, including their own people? They’re expanding education and healthcare, working hard to make housing cheaper, etc, etc…

This is an old observation. Societies which work for more people out-compete those that don’t. Lee Kuan Yee, the founder of Singapore was massively impressed with the Britain of the 30s and 40s because he saw, for example, that newspapers were simply left in a pile, people would take one and leave money and no one cheated. They dynamism of 50s thru 90s America (all a result of post-war government spending, by the way, the internet is a government creation all the way up and down) massively impressed him as well.

Good is stronger than evil. It always has been, because cooperative societies defeat societies which are competitive in the wrong ways. It’s alright to have some competition, but when it becomes existential and unbounded by ethics, it damages the host society. America can’t even ramp up weapons production any more because the firms in the business want to charge 10x what weapons cost. Russia and China, no problem increasing production if they choose.

None of this is to say that being evil doesn’t have advantages. Of course it does. But evil, as Tolkien observed, consumes itself over time: it is a war of all against all, with any alliances temporary and untrustworthy.

This is true even when dealing with “evil” societies. It isn’t the evil which makes them effective, it’s the parts they have that are good. Mongol loyalty and discipline and bravery, for example. Genghis Khan never had a single senior general or administrator turn on him. Not one. At the very least a nation needs to be good to more of its own members than than its opponents, but even this has problems, because what you do to external enemies eventually seems reasonable to do internally.

Good isn’t weak. Instead it’s hard. It’s easy to be evil, to betray, to hurt and to take advantage. But if you run your group or your society that way you will weaken it and in time that weakness will lead to destruction.

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The Amount Of Contempt Elites Have For Public Intelligence Is Breathtaking

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On February 4, 2026

33 Comments

The latest episode is an attempt to suggest Epstein was working for Russia:

This is ridiculous. Epstein was close friends with the Israeli Prime Ministers. Ghislaine Maxwell’s father Robert Maxwell might have been Israel’s most important spy. Israel’s fingerprints are all over the Epstein files, and there are almost no significant ties to Russia. There’s one email where Epstein tries to coach Trump on how to deal with Putin, and some trafficking ties, though more to Ukraine than to Russia, but they are dwarfed by Israeli ties.

Source

Elites think we’re morons. But hey, why not? I mean the “Trump is a Russian asset” lie worked (he massively increased sanctions on Russia). They lied over 80% of the time about Corbyn, including ridiculous anti-semitism smears, and it worked. They lied about WMD in Iraq, and Iraq ties to 9/11 and it worked. They lied about mass baby murders by Hamas and it worked. They lied about Gazan hospitals being Hamas bases and it worked.

They’re completely used to a plurality to a majority of the population believing their lies, so why not this time?

Are they right? Can they tell us the moon is made of blue cheese and get us to believe it? Perhaps so.

This is one of the reasons why, when I talk about war crimes tribunals I always include the media, who lied and lied and lied to enable genocide, child killing, rape and war. The media is almost entirely captured, certainly every corporate media outlet is little more than a source of propaganda. Truth only peaks out when one part of the elite disagrees with another part of the elite, but if the elites are united, as they were against Corbyn and are for mass murder of mostly children in Gaza, well, the media salutes and falls in line.

As I have said many times, the only way to fix the West and especially America is wholesale replacements of the elites and all their courtiers. No one with a conscience works at the top levels, because if someone has a conscience they can’t do the job.

They all have to go, and to ensure there’s no repeat, most of them need to be tried for their crimes, have everything they have beyond basic subsistence taken from them (they’re why so many people are homeless) and be thrown into prison.

This is is also a matter of simple self-respect from the rest of us. Enough pretending these people aren’t psychopaths who would kill or impoverish anyone if it would earn them a single bent nickel or, in many cases, even if it wouldn’t, because it’s how they get their rocks off.

It’s them or us, and so far it’s mostly been us.

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Some Thoughts on Epstein’s Non-moral Virtues

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On November 17, 2025

13 Comments

Obviously, Epstein was scum of the lowest order; a blackmailer, a pimp, a pedophile, and a traitor. (Working with Mossad to blackmail American politicians was surely treason. And given that Israel is a genocidal, religious ethno-state, possibly the most evil country in the world, well…)

But like many effective evil people, Epstein had his virtues. I found this mix of documents from Noam Chomsky particularly interesting:


And, as Glenn points out:

For what it’s worth, I very much doubt that Chomsky had sex with underage girls. And that’s the thing, Epstein was not a one-note pimp and blackmailer, he was a charismatic social chameleon. What Chomsky wanted was intellectual conversation, inside information on politics, and to meet and converse with interesting scientists and scholars (and money, everyone wants money).

So that’s what Epstein gave him. Among scholars, Epstein was scholarly. Among artists, an aesthete. And yet, he was best friends with Donald Trump, who is the philistine’s philistine, a man who is not just without culture, but whose taste can only be described as tacky. A man who thinks a golden shitter is classy and who has probably never read a book.

People of great evil have virtues. Those virtues are morally neutral but real. Epstein was extremely smart and charismatic, and he was able to read people like a book and give them what they wanted. They all thought he was their friend, even as he used them. (And who knows? He may well have actually felt friendly towards a few of them. Certainly, his relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell appears to have been genuinely affectionate.)

Hitler was extremely brave and, until he burnt out on amphetamines, intelligent. Genghis Khan was brave, a military and organizational genius, and routinely made his former enemies into his most important subordinates (Subotai, for example), and none of them ever betrayed him. He inspired an insane level of loyalty.

Bravery, intelligence, loyalty, energy, and even certain types of honor are all virtues, but they are morally neutral virtues; they amplify whatever you are, making you more effective. Without bravery and energy, being good or evil doesn’t matter: the person is ineffective. With them, they become saints or monsters.

Epstein appears to have had genuine charm and social ability, as well as a surfeit of brains. That’s what made him so effectively evil. The wealth and generosity with it didn’t hurt, of course, but he was so valuable to Mossad, and many others, exactly because of his gifts.

This lesson, that evil is often comes wrapped in an attractive and impressive package is one we regularly forget. Fair enough, in the Age of Trump — a dribbling idiot who was voted for despite his known leering at teenage girls, his “grab them by the pussy” comment, rape, and his long record of stiffing people who worked for him is the opposite. Any idiot should have known he was self-serving scum who would betray his followers repeatedly.

But we’ve also had plenty of attractive evil. Reagan. Bill Clinton (not his wife, she has the charisma of dead flounder), Obama — the purveyor of hopium. Clinton and Obama were energetic, smart, and charismatic. Reagan was stupid, but charismatic, with a folksy charm that made people think he cared about them, when all he wanted to do (other than an admirable hatred of nukes) was hurt everyone who wasn’t rich. (And then there’s Tony Blair, who now looks like Satan after a debauch, but once seemed so shiny.)

Evil is often attractive. Seductive. We are warned about that often in myth, but again, and again, we forget. Let Epstein remind us.

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The Solution to The USA’s Taiwan Dilemma

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On September 11, 2025

16 Comments

“The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.”

三国演义 ~by Luo Guangzhong

Earlier I promised to post my plan to prevent a war between the United States and China over Taiwan. I’ve traveled and met with Taiwanese diplomats. They are some of the most sophisticated operators I’ve ever encountered. Taiwan is a highly advanced technological country. Very wealthy, with a sophisticated full coverage heath care system and a vibrant democracy. Furthermore, based on the Shanghai Communique issued on February 27, 1972 by Nixon and Mao, both mainland China and the USA formally acknowledged that “all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China”.

The Communique goes on to state the US side does not accept a violent solution to the unification of the two parties and the Chinese side retains the option to violence if Taiwan ever declares independence, paraphrasing here, folks. It’s been a long time since reading my Kissinger.

Conversely, I have traveled seven times to China. Here is an idea most Americans will probably never understand. China’s potential to utilize enormous amounts of soft power is profound. This is based on China’s circular view of history and that China has been invaded and ruled by foreign powers many times in its history. In each and every case China has overcome said invaders very differently than the way the Russians have. Or anyone else for that matter. Where the Russians trade space for time to husband their resources for a great counter attack and push the invader out of the country, China seduces the invader, with its ancient, deep, amazing and incredibly seductive culture. I cannot emphasize enough the depth, breadth, and tantalizing sophistication of its culture, be it material, artistic, political or spiritual. I do, after all, practice Chinese Chan Buddhism in my own life. Every time China has been invaded and completely taken over by a foreign power this strategy works. Even today we’re watching Chinese movies on Netflix. That is the use and export of soft power. And unlike America, that has only 250 years of history to draw upon its soft power, China has almost 4000 years of history to draw upon. The efficacy of Chinese soft power is not to be underestimated. It is indeed seductive.

Now the question moves to goals and intentions. And here an understanding of Chinese history can aid us in a better understanding of the present Chinese leader, Xi Jing Ping.

What are Xi Jing Ping’s true goals? Simple, he seeks membership among the greatest of Chinese emperors. The greatest of Chinese emperors are judged by a single metric: did they unify all of China? As the opening sentence of the great Chinese novel, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, I quoted at the beginning of this essay, unification is the way the Chinese see themselves when in a golden age.

This compulsion to unify all of China is the defining source of Xi’s ambitions. And that means Taiwan. Taiwan is the last remaining province of a fully unified China. China equal to that ruled by the Qin Shih Huang Di, the very first emperor to unify all of China, or the great conqueror Han Wu Di, or Li Shimin of the mighty T’ang or Zhu Yuanzhang of the wall building Ming. It is to this rank of Chinese men that Xi aspires.

What should America do? I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to avoid a war with China that most people are certain is inevitable. They call it the “Thucydides Trap.” But, if the study of history has taught me anything it is that nothing is inevitable, contingencies matter, and human agency means the most. We may live in a complex adaptive system, but nothing, nothing is inevitable. Therefore, America must find a way tone down its arrogance and find a way to peacefully unite Taiwan with China.

Here is how I would do it if I were president.

First, I would engage in a series of CBM’s (Confidence Building Measures in diplospeak) with Xi Jing Ping regarding our naval stance in the Straits of Taiwan. I would make it policy that no American naval ships traverse the Straits of Taiwan any longer. Then I would halt the sale of advanced weapons to Taiwan.

Second, I would begin preparing the Taiwanese to consider peaceful unification with the mainland along the lines of the British handover of Hong Kong to China in the 90s. I would make it clear that we would not consider unification unless Taiwan was allowed to keep its democracy, and democratic traditions for a minimum of 80 years. I would do this to assuage the Taiwanese about a possible authoritarian takeover of the island in the case of unification. China did one nation, two systems successfully once before. They can do it again.

Third, I would secretly engage Xi Jing Ping with the following proposal: the United States of America would fully encourage and accept the unification of Taiwan with the mainland under the following conditions. Number one, Taiwan would have three representatives on the politburo, one of which would be a power ministry, either interior, defense, or foreign affairs. My fallback position, which is my true goal of course, would be the acceptance of two politburo members from Taiwan, but I would not relent on one serving as a power minister in one of the three ministries aforementioned.

I am relatively certain that Xi and the current politburo would agree to this proposal. It would serve to put Xi in the exhalted ranks of Chinese leaders in which he craves to be included. Mos timportantly, it would not harm a single vital national interest of the United States. The Chinese might have a salient in the first island chain, that being the island of Taiwan, but the United States would still have Korea, Japan, Okinawa, and the Philippines. Not to mention the defenses in depth that the second island chain provides us in the Pacific ocean. Much less the great fortress of the third island chain of Midway, Wake and Hawaii. Defenses in depth matter much more than a salient in the first island chain.

Now, I recognize this goes against every national security intellectuals thinking. It is completely contrarian. But the more I’ve thought about it over the last few years the more I believe that is the best way to avoid general warfare between two nuclear great powers from the Straits of Malacca to the South China Sea and into the deep blue waters of the Pacific.

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