[lnsru]

It sounds silly, but the cold war was a nice period of peace. Both sides were prepared and knew what’s coming. So peace was inevitable. When opponent gets weak war happens. Sounds even sillier, but strong and ready armies are warrant of peace.

[maeln]

> but the cold war was a nice period of peace

Tell that to the Vietnamese, the Afghan, the Cuban, the korean, ... And arguably you might include a lot of eastern european country. Just because the confrontation didn't happen in the country that were "enemy" didn't mean they didn't cause wars.

[jack_riminton]

But you're not arguing against the implied alternative, ww3

[maeln]

There is another alternative : two country not being powerful enough that they can wage a proxy war by using less powerful country. The issue is not the military power, it is the imbalance.

[jack_riminton]

Do you think nuclear weapons avoided ww3?

[jack_riminton]

Exactly, people have a "non-event bias" they can't fathom thing that didn't happen because of the preceeding things that had to happen to prevent it!

[aspenmayer]

> Exactly, people have a "non-event bias" they can't fathom thing that didn't happen because of the preceeding things that had to happen to prevent it!

No news is good news, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_a_disjunct

> The formal fallacy of affirming a disjunct also known as the fallacy of the alternative disjunct or a false exclusionary disjunct occurs when a deductive argument takes the following logical form:

   A or B
   A
   Therefore, not B

If the news is good, then there's no other newsworthy events to cover, so the good news must rule the day.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/slow_news_day

> 1. (journalism) A time when media organizations publish trivial stories due to the lack of more substantial topics.

> 2016, W. Lance Bennett, chapter 5, in News: The Politics of Illusion, 10th edition, University of Chicago Press, →ISBN, page 136:

> > Perhaps you have seen a television news program on a slow news day. In place of international crises, press conferences, congressional hearings, and proclamations by the mayor, the news may consist of a trip to the zoo to visit a new “baby,” a canned report on acupuncture in China, a follow-up story on the survivor of an air crash, or a visit to the opening of baseball spring training in Florida.

If the news is bad, coverage of it will be minimal to nonexistent. Why? No news is good news, after all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent

> In propositional logic, affirming the consequent (also known as converse error, fallacy of the converse, or confusion of necessity and sufficiency) is a formal fallacy (or an invalid form of argument) that is committed when, in the context of an indicative conditional statement, it is stated that because the consequent is true, therefore the antecedent is true. It takes on the following form:

   If P, then Q.
   Q.
   Therefore, P.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subversive_affirmation

> Subversive affirmation is an artistic performance that overemphasizes prevailing ideologies and thereby calls them into question. Simultaneously with affirmation, the affirmed concepts are revealed, and artists distance themselves from those concepts. Strategies of subversive affirmation include "over-identification", "over-affirmation" and "yes revolution".