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crickets Nobody seems to care. I guess its because, without that spending, America would be a third-world country by now. EDIT: you can't discuss America's il
by mmjaa 8y ago
crickets
Nobody seems to care. I guess its because, without that spending, America would be a third-world country by now.
EDIT: you can't discuss America's illegal wars from the perspective of the innocent victims. This will get you downvotes - nobody likes to think of their military as anything less than 100% honourable and invulnerable to such error. Nobody wants to know about the maimed kids and utterly evil destruction of civilisation at the hands of America's Thug Warrior Class... You can't discuss America's illegal wars from the perspective of the cost to Americans - nobody likes to think what those $Trillions could have done, to improve American society - and there is much it could have done (e.g. Healthcare, Skid Row, colony on Mars, etc.). So, how can we get Americans to see the idiocy of their military-industrial-pharmaceutical-complex? What methods, perhaps extreme, might gain their decadent attention to the issue of their out of control state? One wonders ..
- prolikewh0a 8y ago>I guess its because, without that spending, America would be a third-world country by now. Care to explain how this is true?
- mmjaa 8y agoAmerican (military-industrial workers) need to eat too, yo. Its poor uneducated thug classes, currently serving in the military, need something worthwhile to justify their existence and continued participation in what can, in all fairness, be described as a Death Cult.
- sremani 8y agoThe leeches are not the poor uneducated thug classes. Its the over-educated test-taking class that has no real world skills other than paper pushing and mistaking maps for real location, while occupying positions of high authority in DC.
- qaq 8y agoWell the effects are hard to calculate but hard to argue that having worlds top military gives one a lot of negotiation leverage.
- vibrio 8y agoDoes it? Can that leverage be disentangled from being the largest economy? Economics is a much more effective tool.
- qaq 8y agoYes it can imagine there is no US mil and Saddam Hussein actually took over Quatar Kuweit and UAE and Saudi Arabia and than made a deal with Russia. Whant to calculate effects on US ecomony?
- vibrio 8y agoWe did prevent that scenario. The discussion did shift from "having the worlds top military" to "imagine there is no US military". I don't advocate US military disarmament or blind pacifism, but there is some room for enhancing efficiency and still maintaining the world's top military (and economy).
- qaq 8y agoI think I worded the example poorly but my understanding is that there is a mil. doctrine of what kind of resources US mil. needs to be able to have X silm. engagements it's hard to say how much you can scale back and keep the same capability. I would imagine that it includes handling Russia and China at the same time for example.
- bairrd 8y agoCan you explain why you think $1.5 trillion in defense spending stopped the US from being a third world country? With the state of infrastructure & healthcare in this country, and the absolute lack of over-site in military spending because of a blind 'support the troops/cops' mindset that leads to trillion dollar F-35s and small regional police departments having the capital to buy road-destroying APCs, I honestly can't fathom how spending $1.5 trillion to drop white phosphorus on random Yemenis is anything close to justifiable.
- mmjaa 8y agoIts not justifiable, thats the point. But those folks who assembled the white phosphorous bombs that were dropped on innocent people, and who live in Americas 'heartland' in safety, surety and comfort, sure did need to get paid that day. Does that help you understand the situation?
- NickM 8y agoYeah but this argument I always hear that "our economy needs the military to survive" is utterly ridiculous; if you take it down to the simplest possible alternative, we could just keep paying all the same military employees and contractors the same amounts but tell them to do nothing, and if they "sure did need to get paid that day" well then fine, at least now we've solved that problem without causing a bunch of pointless death and destruction. Now take it a step further. Imagine if instead of paying all those people to do nothing, you paid them to do useful jobs that actually help the world instead of attacking it. We could all be so much better off than we are now.
- spamizbad 8y agoAmerica by definition can not be a 3rd-world country: we were part of NATO. But less pendantically, The US would probably be stronger economically, long term, if it phased out much of its war spending and focused it instead on infrastructure, education, healthcare, and R&D. Unfortunately, in the United States, our politicians like to frame non-military spending as some sort of luxury... its all butter, bread, and circus even if its providing boring but essential services to American citizens.
- mmjaa 8y agoThe 10's of thousands of families living on skid row don't get anything from NATO membership. The millions of people with zero healthcare: same. (Unless they're in the military, which of course at least feeds them and keeps them healthy, because 'NATO'-like reasons...)
- gammatrigono 8y agoHow much money could reasonably be spent on Skid Row, and why is it in the same sentence as Mars?