241–250 of 405 posts
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I answered this in a sibling comment to yours.
I don’t think you did. You said the name makes no difference, I ask if that’s the case then why change it?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49649394
I just don’t want to copy & paste the same answer in multiple places.
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> You might make less money, but you'll almost certainly sleep easier Idk, there's something unethical in outsourcing ethical grey areas to other people while reaping the benefits of the peace (or war far from your home) it brings. Predatory monsters exist. A wealthy society that demilitarizes learns the lesson Europe is now. (If Ukraine didn't have a domestic defence industry, it wouldn't have been able to fight the…
You're not responding to their actual comment, you're arguing something else. As for "someone else will do it if i don't".... (aka your argument). That's true of a lot of things, and I sleep great at night choosing not to steal from people even though I know others will choose to steal. It turns out I don't have the ability to choose their actions for them, only my own.
That's not the argument. It's more like "if I don't do it then I better hope somebody else will, otherwise my whole country will inevitably become subservient to a despotic regime". Basically, the question is whether strict pacifism is a tenable national policy in the real world. All of modern and ancient history up to this point seems to suggest it is not.
I do think that for those of us who got into tech in the last couple of decades, the history can be rather obscured, but from the Fairchild semiconductor days, the military was a main customer, right? I think there's a real question: would the world be a better place had Fairchild and peers e.g. refused to build ICs for missile systems (including the minuteman), for example? Would the same tech have been developed wi…
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I mean non-Europeans/non-Anglosphere
So your argument is a racialist one?
If you want to get into parsing out who is “white” or not you can do that but it’s really something better done on 4chan and also not even sensible as a concept or relevant to this discussion.
Serious question: should companies not participate in contracts from their country's defense department? Or is the argument that it's only US companies which shouldn't, because the US is uniquely evil?
There is an undeniable conflict between "Don't be evil." and "Evil pays.". A lot of what militaries do can be best described as the lesser of two evils. Murdering people is bad, but sometimes a little murder can prevent a lot of murder. However ethically or unethically a state uses force, there's usually a lot of money to be had in supplying that state with the means of force. Is there room for ethics in military res…
The least ethical people I know seem to sleep the soundest. We need to study if there is a correlation there.
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I think this is secondary to a widespread loss of confidence in our nation's political and foreign policy apparatus to do what's right for the average American. "Working for the military is evil" descends from a post-Vietnam, post-Iraq, post-Snowden worldview that presupposes that the military will leverage technology it has access to in unexpected, undesirable, and broadly harmful ways.
Well that and it's indicative of the broader American social dysfunction that they are chronically incapable of holding themselves or their (still surprisingly democratic) government accountable and so everything is always about "the corporations". Every problem is meant to be solved by what corporations do or do not do.
Transforming? You guys do know where google got it's start right? SV has been DOD funded from the start.
Funding some key technologies is not the same as 'funding the valley'.
Military related funding is probably less than a few % of the financing behind startups.
There are a few strategic foundations, but it's not a defence industry.
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> Someone being invaded should lay down arms because invasion and fighting an invader are morally equal? The morality of a war is not easily encompassed in small words like “war” or “defense”. > America being America, they're mostly going to be offensive. America being America, any war fought by us not in direct defense of American people & territory is by definition an offensive war. Doesn’t stop us from calling war…
> morality of a war is not easily encompassed in small words like “war” or “defense” It's not. But you're avoiding the question. If you claim all war is morally equal, then a defender is equally at fault as an invader, and we're going to fundamentally disagree. If you don't believe that, I'm still curious about your position. > America being America, any war fought by us not in direct defense of American people & ter…
I didn’t make this claim. War is war, but the morality of our actions is found not in the act of war, but in the why & how of war.
> We still call them wars. Nobody calls what we did in Iraq or Vietnam or Korea the defense or whatever. We call them wars.
Of course we still call them wars. That was not mutually exclusive with politicians justifying it as “defense”. The mantra is defense abroad rather than defense at home, which is a fine enough mantra if you’re selling a war, but I’m not going to nod along & pretend that it’s not actually offense.
> What I'm saying is returning the DoD to the DoW absolutely presages a difference in attitude that is more dangerous and more violent.
The election of more dangerous & more violent politicians presaged that. Turns out America is more dangerous. As to whether we’re more violent? TBD. The President’s unwillingness to actually put boots on the ground abroad despite trying to talk a dangerous game makes this part less objectively clear to me.
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Why isn't it? The change was clearly made to indicate the posture of the department. Either to US citizens or to powers abroad. Even though its "just" words it indicates intent.
It was originally entitled “Department of War” and was changed after World War II for better PR. Whether it is called “Department of War” or “Department of Defense”, it’s still the same organization maintaining the same mission operating under the same budget. Personally, I view “Department of War” as more honest, because War has always been its business.
The department of defense is not equivalent to the pre-1947 War Department. The War Department was in charge of just the army. There was a separate Department of the Navy. There was no over-arching department for all of the US military.
Post WW2 the US military was restructured to organize all of the branches (including the newly-formed Department of the Air Force) under a united civilian leadership. This was done in the National Security Act of 1947. The new structure was initially called the National Military Establishment and then renamed to the Department of Defense.
So the department of war name going away wasn’t a PR thing. It was because of military parochialism. If they had called this unified structure the Department of War it would have seemed like the Army was now taking over the other branches! And I promise you today’s Admirals understand that history, even if the secretary of defense doesn’t.