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> Is it really so terrible to research arms for the people who risk their lives keep us safe? If this was the only thing the weapons were used for, then maybe

> Is it really so terrible to research arms for the people who risk their lives keep us safe? If this was the only thing the weapons were used for, then maybe people wouldn't be upset about this kind of stuff. The same arms will however also be used to extrajudicially assassinate people based on nothing else than their phone signal, in countries we are not at war with; they might be sold to regimes like Saudi Arabia that kills countless civilians in places like Yemen; they might be used to fight wars based on reasons the administration knows to be false; they might be used to gun down civilians by private contractors; the list goes on. I'd not be opposed to participating in military research if the weapons were actually used "responsibly" (I know that's a somewhat subjective terms, but most of my examples are quite clearly considered immoral by most people).

v_lisivka 8y ago
Are you sure you want to be unarmed in front of enemy just because someone else may use your weapons unresponsively? Look at Ukraine then. Ukraine exchanged their nuclear arsenal for promises of safety by Russia, Britain, and USA. Is Ukraine safe place now?
- Eupolemos 8y ago
  I think all he's saying is, that until he feels his own country resolves to use its arsenal in a somewhat responsible manner (he gave some pretty good examples to the contrary), he doesn't think you can make weapons for them in good conscience.
  - v_lisivka 8y ago
    Yep. But I'm asking about consequences. Ukraine was very poor after collapse of socialism, so USA had worries that Ukraine may sold or lost some of their nuclear bombs, ballistic missiles, or supersonic bomber to an enemy of USA, so USA (with Russia and Britain) promised security to Ukraine in exchange of promise to demolish all that, and to stop development of any new weapons which can harm USA. So we dropped our weapons and stayed unarmed in front of Russia. I personally, counter-attacked Russians with pneumatic pistole, which I then exchanged on field to hand-made grenade, so other few, with real hunter riffles, had chance against AK's and BTR. Is my example bad for you?
    - honestoHeminway 8y ago
      These are people who travel from gated communitys to gated work places, where there work might end some family life half a world away. Reality does no longer factor into those lifes.
- sandworm101 8y ago
  Speaking as someone in the military: yes. There are a great many weapons i dont want. Because by me (and everyone else in uniform) not wanting them they dont exist. Top of that list: plastic schrapnel. I dont want. It isnt manufactured. Therefore even ISIS cannot use it. Also on the list: direct-energy blinding weapons design to destroy the retina. Easily biult, but happily not a thing.
  - v_lisivka 8y ago
    > Also on the list: direct-energy blinding weapons design to destroy the retina. Easily biult, but happily not a thing. They are used by Russians against Ukrainian snipers. Few snipers are already blind at working eye.
    - sandworm101 8y ago
      Ive seen public reports about this sort of thing. It is hard to verify exactly what is being employed. Sounds like consumer-type lasers, not purpose-biult stuff.
- grumdan 8y ago
  Helping a military that is behaving immorally and being unarmed are also not the only options. If more and more people refuse to work for the military on these grounds, this may in the long run put some pressure on them to change their behavior. I do admit that this is hopelessly idealistic though and I don't expect this to happen anytime soon.
  - v_lisivka 8y ago
    Can I ask question first about "immorally" to be sure I understand you correctly? There are few different kind of morality in circulation, so I need to know about what morality we are talking. Liberal morale is used at the West: every person life costs infinity, so we cannot exchange life of a person to save another person or even infinity of persons. However, at war or in military, Liberal morale can't be used, because Liberal morale forbids to send soldiers to protect civilians: life of a soldier has same cost as lives of all civilians in the country. So every military in the world uses Utilitarian morale, where each life has a cost. In most countries, order of life cost is: our politics > our commandment > our civilians > other civilians > our soldiers > enemies, and goal is to minimize loses. In some countries order can be different, e.g. religious leaders can send civilians to kill other civilians or civilians can be used to protect soldiers (e.g. famous speech of V.V. Putin: «We will put our soldier behind their (Ukrainian) mothers and children. Not in front but behind. Will they shoot at them? At their own mothers and children?» https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoQXvPsBBn8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoQXvPsBBn8 ), and so on. So my question is: to which kind of morality you are referring when you are talking about "immorality"?
    - grumdan 8y ago
      I didn't have a concrete moral framework in mind, but I was thinking of a few baseline rules that should hold in most sensible systems, such as not bombing hospitals (like what happened with that hospital in Syria a while ago), not killing civilians without due process in countries where there is formally no state of war (drone strikes in Pakistan and other countries), not starting wars of aggression based on falsified intelligence (Iraq, Vietnam), investing reasonable amounts effort to avoid harm to non-combatants (that "Collateral Murder" video, US support for the Saudis' actions in Yemen, drone strikes based on just cellphone signals); all of these points are arguably features of many different moral systems and should be much less controversial than the dilemmas you bring up. I'm not a lawyer, but as far as I know to they are all standard components of rules of engagement (like the Geneva Convention). Also, all of these have been repeatedly violated by the US military or its contractors, making me more hesitant to want to help them, even under the assumption that they are necessary to protect our liberal societies from other regimes.
volgo 8y ago
Twitter and Facebook are used frequently to track down foreign combatants to be killed. Should people who work there be shamed as well? In fact, those social media sites have been used to manipulate foreign militant uprisings and sway political discourses (whether in the U.S. or in other countries). Also, people who worked on GPS technology are directly responsible for the GPS-guided missiles that have been fired into Syria and other parts of Middle East. Should those people be ashamed as well?
- zajd 8y ago
  > Twitter and Facebook are used frequently to track down foreign combatants to be killed. Should people who work there be shamed as well? yes, and not only for the reason you listed (although that certainly is one)
  - awat 8y ago
    I would also say it’s one of the reasons they are getting so much flack at the moment. If the extent of data brokering was crappy mailers I would be far less passionate about the topic.
- csydas 8y ago
  I think this is purposefully muddying the issue - there's a reason that mens rea* is part of law; the state of mind a person has in an action weighs heavily on our judgement of the outcome. Facebook, Twitter, et. al. are first and foremost data-mining ad agencies that also provide social networking services. The fact that you can also use them to target terrorist is not really a by design item, much like even though you can beat someone to death with a wrench, it's primary function and the design goal behind it is to secure nuts to bolts and screws. So yes, there is a bit of a difference when Google's tech happens to also be used by the military for image analysis from drones and when Google willingly assists and participates in such projects. The major concern a lot of people have is that it's a very big switch in market from what they were doing to Project Maven. People who otherwise were maybe concerned, or heck, even satisfied with Google's influence on their lives and happy to participate in reCAPTCHA and pay for Google services now find their work and money being used to pay for something they disagree with. I do not appreciate the simplification of the outcomes, as no civilized society judges in that way - we consider the motive as well as the outcome, as well as the state of mind of the person who committed the act. Likewise, there's quite a bit of a difference in US Army RnD grabbing an open source project and embedding it into drone guidance systems and Google taking a Government Contract; aside from the willingness of Google in this state, they demonstrate their complicit nature as a company via the contract and the payments; the open source project likely wasn't even aware of it until they read about it in some news article or saw snippets of their code in a Press Release/Demo. * I realize that this is meant as a method of judging guilt (hence Guilty Mind), but the concept is the same here. The state of one's mind in making an action should be relevant.
whattheasdf 8y ago
This kind of detached and effete attitude is putrid and a clear sign of such impudence that it is a definitive sign of one's sanity if it makes one ill. Nothing screams detached entitlement than arm chair criticism in the absence of rational thought and intellect. At no time in all of humanity has ever a power existed that has shown as much restraint as the people of the USA. Call it a sign of overabundant achievement and plenty that we can afford such pathological altruism if you like, but it is nothing but astonishing that the USA and the people that created it have not used that power to any degree that is even worth noting, regardless of the effete impudent spoiled rotten, entitled snob class wants to nit pick in the absence of legitimate fault. I do agree with you though in one regard, we should not be engaged with the world the way the USA is right now. We should be spending basically all research resources on discovering viable alternatives to oil for both energy and, more importantly, materials, so that we can pull back into the USA and slam the doors shut on the petulant savages that keep trying to tear the USA down all the while as they benefit from and take advantage of and have zero respect for us for everything that we do ... all the while demanding that the corrosive savages be allowed to storm our gates and freeload off us. Take the EU, the most vile and sick petulant spoiled rotten snobs the world has ever seen, as they insult and try to damage us after having saved them from authoritarianism (which we apparently shouldn't have), rebuilt the European economy, have been protecting them with our military paid for by our citizens being robbed of both money and opportunity, and subsidizing their industry through imbalanced tolls and tariffs, all so they could offer "free" healthcare and "free" education, paid for by American tax payers that have been robbed and stolen from for decades now to support spoiled rotten brats not just in self-important Europe, but all around the world. Guess why you are able to dialogue on this site, and why Silicon Valley even exists when nothing even remotely like it exists anywhere else, and why does the USA exist that everyone wants to parasitize and freeload off, and why you have democracy and freedom ... yes, because of that evil evil military that has been doing nothing but keeping the deepest most heinous impulses of all the alternatives to the USA from expressing themselves, is why you are free and why your life has been improving and why it is better than that of your parents. The disrespect stops here and you will start having to face the reality of what it means not to be able to take advantage of the American people and are in for a rude awakening when you realize that you were spitting in our face and ridiculing us and making fun of this, that, and the other thing while not having the most basic sense to not bite the hand that fed you for so long and you took for granted like the spoiled rotten brants you are. How about addressing why we are having to conduct extrajudicial assassinations of people in order to keep not just the USA safe, but YOU safe and YOUR economies from failing when, e.g., muslims overthrow the vile yet necessary Saudi authoritarian regime. You want to be so stupidly high and mighty and self-righteous from your little armchair? ... How about you go do that in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and Somalia or China? Leave the evil evil west and USA, go flee to the far more morally superior noble savage society you put on a delusional pedestal. And sure as hell stop using anything America and the American people in the American military have produced; no more computers, no internet, definitely cannot be on site site or any social media, you can't use GPS or mobile phones, and you can't use planes. The list goes no and on. So stop using all the things you spoiled rotten brats take for granted.
torstenvl 8y ago
fight wars based on reasons the administration knows to be false Go ahead and give an example, if you wouldn't mind?
- __m 8y ago
  Iraq
  - DonHopkins 8y ago
    Also Trump's Wars of the FBI, the Justice Department, the Deep State, Robert Mueller, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama.
  - torstenvl 8y ago
    And what exactly was the lie?
- Semirhage 8y ago
  Vietnam.
colechristensen 8y ago
None of that happening has anything to do with technology. The only reason we know about it is improvements in communications. Nations having people killed across borders outside of the judicial system isn't a new thing, and it isn't going away. The technology to do it is incidental, and a very minor part of defense R&D output. Functioning communications enables war crimes just as much as or more than weapons, so why not refuse to work on computer networking research too? (one could make a million such arguments about essentially everything)
lend000 8y ago
Yeah, but you're barking up the wrong tree. The military will get the weaponry it wants regardless, likely at a higher cost to the taxpayer and/or more side effects (pollution, for example) if they're forced to do it in-house because all powerful private sector companies somehow agree to 'boycott' and leave the money on the table. It is in everyone's best interest for their military to be the most superior -- the real issue is in military leadership and civilian policy-makers causing the problems. It dilutes the message when you spend energy on issues that should be primarily reserved for commander-in-chief discussions.
torstenvl 8y ago
I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a single example of any military Google might help that has gone to war based on reasons the appropriate authorities knew to be false. I anticipate that your response would be to cite the first second Bush Administration's claim of Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction. Before making that response, I encourage you to familiarize what that term means under federal law (and has meant since 1994). 18 U.S.C. §§ 2332a(c)(2) and 921(a)(4). In order for someone to believe that the claim of WMDs was a lie, they would have to believe that the Hussein regime did not possess grenades, and that the President knew it.

v_lisivka 8y ago

Are you sure you want to be unarmed in front of enemy just because someone else may use your weapons unresponsively? Look at Ukraine then. Ukraine exchanged their nuclear arsenal for promises of safety by Russia, Britain, and USA. Is Ukraine safe place now?

Eupolemos 8y ago
I think all he's saying is, that until he feels his own country resolves to use its arsenal in a somewhat responsible manner (he gave some pretty good examples to the contrary), he doesn't think you can make weapons for them in good conscience.
- v_lisivka 8y ago
  Yep. But I'm asking about consequences. Ukraine was very poor after collapse of socialism, so USA had worries that Ukraine may sold or lost some of their nuclear bombs, ballistic missiles, or supersonic bomber to an enemy of USA, so USA (with Russia and Britain) promised security to Ukraine in exchange of promise to demolish all that, and to stop development of any new weapons which can harm USA. So we dropped our weapons and stayed unarmed in front of Russia. I personally, counter-attacked Russians with pneumatic pistole, which I then exchanged on field to hand-made grenade, so other few, with real hunter riffles, had chance against AK's and BTR. Is my example bad for you?
  - honestoHeminway 8y ago
    These are people who travel from gated communitys to gated work places, where there work might end some family life half a world away. Reality does no longer factor into those lifes.
sandworm101 8y ago
Speaking as someone in the military: yes. There are a great many weapons i dont want. Because by me (and everyone else in uniform) not wanting them they dont exist. Top of that list: plastic schrapnel. I dont want. It isnt manufactured. Therefore even ISIS cannot use it. Also on the list: direct-energy blinding weapons design to destroy the retina. Easily biult, but happily not a thing.
- v_lisivka 8y ago
  > Also on the list: direct-energy blinding weapons design to destroy the retina. Easily biult, but happily not a thing. They are used by Russians against Ukrainian snipers. Few snipers are already blind at working eye.
  - sandworm101 8y ago
    Ive seen public reports about this sort of thing. It is hard to verify exactly what is being employed. Sounds like consumer-type lasers, not purpose-biult stuff.
grumdan 8y ago
Helping a military that is behaving immorally and being unarmed are also not the only options. If more and more people refuse to work for the military on these grounds, this may in the long run put some pressure on them to change their behavior. I do admit that this is hopelessly idealistic though and I don't expect this to happen anytime soon.
- v_lisivka 8y ago
  Can I ask question first about "immorally" to be sure I understand you correctly? There are few different kind of morality in circulation, so I need to know about what morality we are talking. Liberal morale is used at the West: every person life costs infinity, so we cannot exchange life of a person to save another person or even infinity of persons. However, at war or in military, Liberal morale can't be used, because Liberal morale forbids to send soldiers to protect civilians: life of a soldier has same cost as lives of all civilians in the country. So every military in the world uses Utilitarian morale, where each life has a cost. In most countries, order of life cost is: our politics > our commandment > our civilians > other civilians > our soldiers > enemies, and goal is to minimize loses. In some countries order can be different, e.g. religious leaders can send civilians to kill other civilians or civilians can be used to protect soldiers (e.g. famous speech of V.V. Putin: «We will put our soldier behind their (Ukrainian) mothers and children. Not in front but behind. Will they shoot at them? At their own mothers and children?» https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoQXvPsBBn8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoQXvPsBBn8 ), and so on. So my question is: to which kind of morality you are referring when you are talking about "immorality"?
  - grumdan 8y ago
    I didn't have a concrete moral framework in mind, but I was thinking of a few baseline rules that should hold in most sensible systems, such as not bombing hospitals (like what happened with that hospital in Syria a while ago), not killing civilians without due process in countries where there is formally no state of war (drone strikes in Pakistan and other countries), not starting wars of aggression based on falsified intelligence (Iraq, Vietnam), investing reasonable amounts effort to avoid harm to non-combatants (that "Collateral Murder" video, US support for the Saudis' actions in Yemen, drone strikes based on just cellphone signals); all of these points are arguably features of many different moral systems and should be much less controversial than the dilemmas you bring up. I'm not a lawyer, but as far as I know to they are all standard components of rules of engagement (like the Geneva Convention). Also, all of these have been repeatedly violated by the US military or its contractors, making me more hesitant to want to help them, even under the assumption that they are necessary to protect our liberal societies from other regimes.

volgo 8y ago

Twitter and Facebook are used frequently to track down foreign combatants to be killed. Should people who work there be shamed as well? In fact, those social media sites have been used to manipulate foreign militant uprisings and sway political discourses (whether in the U.S. or in other countries). Also, people who worked on GPS technology are directly responsible for the GPS-guided missiles that have been fired into Syria and other parts of Middle East. Should those people be ashamed as well?

zajd 8y ago
> Twitter and Facebook are used frequently to track down foreign combatants to be killed. Should people who work there be shamed as well? yes, and not only for the reason you listed (although that certainly is one)
- awat 8y ago
  I would also say it’s one of the reasons they are getting so much flack at the moment. If the extent of data brokering was crappy mailers I would be far less passionate about the topic.
csydas 8y ago
I think this is purposefully muddying the issue - there's a reason that mens rea* is part of law; the state of mind a person has in an action weighs heavily on our judgement of the outcome. Facebook, Twitter, et. al. are first and foremost data-mining ad agencies that also provide social networking services. The fact that you can also use them to target terrorist is not really a by design item, much like even though you can beat someone to death with a wrench, it's primary function and the design goal behind it is to secure nuts to bolts and screws. So yes, there is a bit of a difference when Google's tech happens to also be used by the military for image analysis from drones and when Google willingly assists and participates in such projects. The major concern a lot of people have is that it's a very big switch in market from what they were doing to Project Maven. People who otherwise were maybe concerned, or heck, even satisfied with Google's influence on their lives and happy to participate in reCAPTCHA and pay for Google services now find their work and money being used to pay for something they disagree with. I do not appreciate the simplification of the outcomes, as no civilized society judges in that way - we consider the motive as well as the outcome, as well as the state of mind of the person who committed the act. Likewise, there's quite a bit of a difference in US Army RnD grabbing an open source project and embedding it into drone guidance systems and Google taking a Government Contract; aside from the willingness of Google in this state, they demonstrate their complicit nature as a company via the contract and the payments; the open source project likely wasn't even aware of it until they read about it in some news article or saw snippets of their code in a Press Release/Demo. * I realize that this is meant as a method of judging guilt (hence Guilty Mind), but the concept is the same here. The state of one's mind in making an action should be relevant.

whattheasdf 8y ago

This kind of detached and effete attitude is putrid and a clear sign of such impudence that it is a definitive sign of one's sanity if it makes one ill. Nothing screams detached entitlement than arm chair criticism in the absence of rational thought and intellect. At no time in all of humanity has ever a power existed that has shown as much restraint as the people of the USA. Call it a sign of overabundant achievement and plenty that we can afford such pathological altruism if you like, but it is nothing but astonishing that the USA and the people that created it have not used that power to any degree that is even worth noting, regardless of the effete impudent spoiled rotten, entitled snob class wants to nit pick in the absence of legitimate fault. I do agree with you though in one regard, we should not be engaged with the world the way the USA is right now. We should be spending basically all research resources on discovering viable alternatives to oil for both energy and, more importantly, materials, so that we can pull back into the USA and slam the doors shut on the petulant savages that keep trying to tear the USA down all the while as they benefit from and take advantage of and have zero respect for us for everything that we do ... all the while demanding that the corrosive savages be allowed to storm our gates and freeload off us. Take the EU, the most vile and sick petulant spoiled rotten snobs the world has ever seen, as they insult and try to damage us after having saved them from authoritarianism (which we apparently shouldn't have), rebuilt the European economy, have been protecting them with our military paid for by our citizens being robbed of both money and opportunity, and subsidizing their industry through imbalanced tolls and tariffs, all so they could offer "free" healthcare and "free" education, paid for by American tax payers that have been robbed and stolen from for decades now to support spoiled rotten brats not just in self-important Europe, but all around the world. Guess why you are able to dialogue on this site, and why Silicon Valley even exists when nothing even remotely like it exists anywhere else, and why does the USA exist that everyone wants to parasitize and freeload off, and why you have democracy and freedom ... yes, because of that evil evil military that has been doing nothing but keeping the deepest most heinous impulses of all the alternatives to the USA from expressing themselves, is why you are free and why your life has been improving and why it is better than that of your parents. The disrespect stops here and you will start having to face the reality of what it means not to be able to take advantage of the American people and are in for a rude awakening when you realize that you were spitting in our face and ridiculing us and making fun of this, that, and the other thing while not having the most basic sense to not bite the hand that fed you for so long and you took for granted like the spoiled rotten brants you are. How about addressing why we are having to conduct extrajudicial assassinations of people in order to keep not just the USA safe, but YOU safe and YOUR economies from failing when, e.g., muslims overthrow the vile yet necessary Saudi authoritarian regime. You want to be so stupidly high and mighty and self-righteous from your little armchair? ... How about you go do that in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and Somalia or China? Leave the evil evil west and USA, go flee to the far more morally superior noble savage society you put on a delusional pedestal. And sure as hell stop using anything America and the American people in the American military have produced; no more computers, no internet, definitely cannot be on site site or any social media, you can't use GPS or mobile phones, and you can't use planes. The list goes no and on. So stop using all the things you spoiled rotten brats take for granted.

torstenvl 8y ago

fight wars based on reasons the administration knows to be false Go ahead and give an example, if you wouldn't mind?

__m 8y ago
Iraq
- DonHopkins 8y ago
  Also Trump's Wars of the FBI, the Justice Department, the Deep State, Robert Mueller, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama.
- torstenvl 8y ago
  And what exactly was the lie?
Semirhage 8y ago
Vietnam.

colechristensen 8y ago

None of that happening has anything to do with technology. The only reason we know about it is improvements in communications. Nations having people killed across borders outside of the judicial system isn't a new thing, and it isn't going away. The technology to do it is incidental, and a very minor part of defense R&D output. Functioning communications enables war crimes just as much as or more than weapons, so why not refuse to work on computer networking research too? (one could make a million such arguments about essentially everything)

lend000 8y ago

Yeah, but you're barking up the wrong tree. The military will get the weaponry it wants regardless, likely at a higher cost to the taxpayer and/or more side effects (pollution, for example) if they're forced to do it in-house because all powerful private sector companies somehow agree to 'boycott' and leave the money on the table. It is in everyone's best interest for their military to be the most superior -- the real issue is in military leadership and civilian policy-makers causing the problems. It dilutes the message when you spend energy on issues that should be primarily reserved for commander-in-chief discussions.

torstenvl 8y ago

I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a single example of any military Google might help that has gone to war based on reasons the appropriate authorities knew to be false. I anticipate that your response would be to cite the first second Bush Administration's claim of Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction. Before making that response, I encourage you to familiarize what that term means under federal law (and has meant since 1994). 18 U.S.C. §§ 2332a(c)(2) and 921(a)(4). In order for someone to believe that the claim of WMDs was a lie, they would have to believe that the Hussein regime did not possess grenades, and that the President knew it.