281–290 of 405 posts
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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> "someone else will do it if i don't".... (aka your argument) 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 no…
Would you define Russia not nuking Ukraine as "strict pacifism"? Because every modern country and army seems to have some basic standard of ethics and morals that restrict them from waging total war even if you want to argue that's purely for diplomatic or PR reasons. There are a whole lot of decisions that need to be made to get from "strict pacifism" to total war, so I don't know why we need to flatten this into a…
Nobody reasonable would. Russia started a war of choice. That's the opposite of pacifism.
Strict pacifism would be Ukraine refusing to fight after being invaded. Someone saying all war in all circumtances is evil and should not be contributed to, directly or indirectly, is sort of endorsing that view. The folks calling for nuclear disarmament, or no first use policy, are pretty far away from that.
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Heavy use of cluster munitions (and land mines) was critical in allowing Ukraine to stop the second Russian invasion in 2022-2023 and stabilize the front lines. The notion that they kill civilians indiscriminately, or that it's unethical for defense contractors to build them for the US and allied militaries, is ludicrous and disconnected from objective reality.
> cluster munitions was critical in allowing Ukraine to stop the second Russian invasion in 2022 Genuinely want to read more about this. Do you have a good source? I'd always assumed cluster munitions had no legitimate use.
https://static.rusi.org/lessons-learned-ukraine-offensive-20...
https://www.csis.org/analysis/seizing-initiative-ukraine-wag...
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it probably has something to do with the fact that a full 2% of their GDP comes from US military aid alone: https://www.cfr.org/articles/us-aid-israel-four-charts
And they can redirect resources to the war if we removed it. If anything, removal of our support probably leads to the use of dumber less targeted weapons like carpet bombing or good ole white phosphorus that they’ve already demonstrated use of in past conflicts. If we were giving them 30+% of their gdp then yea, dropping that probably stops the conflict. 2% is just a budget reshuffle.
Are you saying 10's of thousands of bombs US supplied to level the entire cities and countryside to the ground is preferable to IL having to get this elsewhere, because why exactly? What does precision have to do with it?
You can scroll around here to see what US did by providing all those mostly free bombs:
https://earth.google.com/web/@31.31022959,34.24130746,30.076...
(south is the only thing google is not misrepresenting on the aerial imagery)
This is preferable to carpet bombing, yeah? How?
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you might wonder, reading this, how a person could say "I honestly haven't heard this before" about such a widely-discussed topic, in a thread about that topic, when the OP is a paper about a very closely related topic. it is, under the circumstances, a surprising assertion. the purpose of propaganda is not to convince the ignorant or skeptical, but to exhaust and/or discredit opponents.
What political objectives? The only objective I see with those two companies is making money.
they literally published a manifesto. did you not know about that?
I guess google them, dude. read the paper you're posting on a thread about. good luck
edit: on reflection, I still think he's BSing
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> it’s still the same organization maintaining the same mission operating under the same budget WWII demonstrated wars of conquest don't work in the industrial age. When America and its Department of War and Navy were founded, invasion and conquest could still be done profitably. WWII showed that was no longer true–industrial machinery and skilled workers are destroyed by invasion and even base resources quickly beco…
Whether a war is fought defensively or offensively, war is still war. I don’t have a lot of patience for the romantic notions of men, that changing one word in a bureaucratic ensemble of Departments is going to change meaning of what it means to go to war or the reality of war itself. Only how we actually prosecute our wars & handle the subsequent consequences of war will give them any meaning.
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I don't think that quote helps your case or detracts from the parent. Tangentially—and perhaps counterintuitively—it can be taken as an argument in favor of the name change. The statement also does little to address the ethical concerns at the root of the relationship between industries and the military.
They noted it but I think the important part was before then the Department of War only really existed when congress declared war. Once the war was over 95% of those people went home and back into civilian life. So even if a President wanted to start a war they had limited resources to do so unless Congress declared war and re-expanded or formed a Department of War.
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Oh, do they have some mechanism by which they just took people's votes away entirely?
Pretty much, corporate lobbying, corporate donations, superpacs, the list is pretty much endless. Little timmy's vote in rural nebraska isn't moving the needle. Maybe he can complain at his local town meeting about the datacenter they're building in his back yard. Or put a sign in his yard to show he's on the blue team or the red team but practically it doesn't matter. As an aside, I emailed my congressman (blue) abo…
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> "someone else will do it if i don't".... (aka your argument) 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 no…
Would you define Russia not nuking Ukraine as "strict pacifism"? Because every modern country and army seems to have some basic standard of ethics and morals that restrict them from waging total war even if you want to argue that's purely for diplomatic or PR reasons. There are a whole lot of decisions that need to be made to get from "strict pacifism" to total war, so I don't know why we need to flatten this into a…
Also, it's questionable whether Russia's nuclear arsenal would even work reliably. The USA and other nuclear powers spend enormous amounts every year just on nuclear weapons maintenance and testing. Those munitions can't just be stored in a warehouse indefinitely like rifle cartridges and pulled out when needed; they require periodic remanufacturing in order to remain operational at all. Russia is a relatively poor and highly corrupt country so I suspect many of their nukes wouldn't deliver the rated yield if used today. From their perspective an attempted strike resulting in a fizzle would be even worse: all of the diplomatic disadvantages for no military gain.
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Oh, do they have some mechanism by which they just took people's votes away entirely?
Pretty much, corporate lobbying, corporate donations, superpacs, the list is pretty much endless. Little timmy's vote in rural nebraska isn't moving the needle. Maybe he can complain at his local town meeting about the datacenter they're building in his back yard. Or put a sign in his yard to show he's on the blue team or the red team but practically it doesn't matter. As an aside, I emailed my congressman (blue) abo…