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As someone who also is a military researcher, I may be able to help. I have worked on things that if the USA went to war, I know that I have directly contribute

As someone who also is a military researcher, I may be able to help. I have worked on things that if the USA went to war, I know that I have directly contributed to that war. I truly hate that my research will contribute to killing. I wish that it wasn't necessary. But as events like Crimea annexation and the South China Sea shows, if the USA is not there, then other nations are very happy to use their might to boss others around. I truly do think the USA is a force for good, and I want that to be there for my following generations.

wallace_f 8y ago
I agree with you, but it's not so black and white. The atomic bomb is a notable example, and consider Eisenhower and many other military leaders said "there was no reason to use that awful thing." I realize my high school education, and most othet's, led me to believe this wasn't the case. I'm not trying to say it's wrong, but it deserves a lot of skepticism.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- colechristensen 8y ago
  Reading a biography of Oppenheimer explores much of this. One thing is clear, the bomb was used on an essentially defeated enemy. From another angle though, it was necessary to push back Stalin and could be considered not as the last blow of WWII but the first blow in the cold war. It is difficult to question the possible outcomes if different choices were made but you can be sure that the last 80 years could have been much different and much worse. The bomb did make certain kinds of war impossible, and it is not clear if that would be true if they had not been used when they were.
  - ethelward 8y ago
    > One thing is clear, the bomb was used on an essentially defeated enemy. The bomb were used on an enemy that was sooo defeated that there was a coup attempt by the military between the two bombs to prevent the emperor from capitulating.
wereanempirenow 8y ago
ahh yes, the illegal annexation of Crimea, where horrific war crimes were committed and countless innocent civllian lives were lost in wanton slaughter. oh, wait, nm, jk, exactly zero people died in the Crimean referendum, and it was the textbook example of a "bloodless coup" expressing the will of the people. also, just ignore that wizard behind the curtain who keeps mentioning that Crimea became part of Russia in 1784, when Catherine the Great took it from the defeated Ottoman empire, and that Crimea remained part of Russia up until the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. and whatever you do, don't fall into the logical trap of Whataboutism, where you point out the war crimes and illegal wars and slaughter of civillians by the US in order to make it look like the US is actually guilty of far worse Imperialism than Russia. such as the US directly assisting with killing over 58,000 civillians in Yemen between 2016 - 2018. https://www.apnews.com/24ee4b33373a41d389e2599c5aa7bbfa https://www.apnews.com/24ee4b33373a41d389e2599c5aa7bbfa and whatever you do, don't connect the dots and interpolate every US war going back to WW2 and draw factual, evidence based conclusions from the Pentagon's own Top Secret stats on civillian casualties, which condemn the Pentagon as being the biggest group of mass murdering thugs in the history of warfare. don't even think about pulling that citations please crap, and repeating obscure inconvenient truths, such as the CIA's own reports that 66% of the tens of thousands of Vietnemese killed by the Rolling Thunder mass bombing campaign were totally innocent civillians: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP78T02095R000600020001-0.pdf https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP78T02095... "hold on there", i can here you say, "Vietnam is ancient history, we here at the Pentagon have learned very hard lessons--we don't do that anymore" record scratch freeze frame the USAF killed tens of thousands of civillians in Raqqa and Mosul. (depending on your views of the seriousness of the ISIS problem, you may not have a problem with that.) https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/07/amnesty-led-coalition-denial-civilian-deaths-raqqa-180716195240680.html https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/07/amnesty-led-coalition... the Pentagon killed so many civillians in Raqqa and Mosul that even they admit "nobody will ever know how many died." https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/pentagonno-one-will-ever-know-how-many-civilians-us-has-killed-in-fight-against-isis/2018/06/05/4b3fec30-6900-11e8-bbc5-dc9f3634fa0a_story.html?utm_term=.2d0774ce1369 https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/penta... https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1002567 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo... and while the Neoliberal world virtue signals to itself about its own hollow anti-Islamophobia self-righteous indignity outrage about the NZ mosque mass shooting by Brenton Tarrant four days ago, yesterday and today the US military is bombing the 10,000 civillians and women and children huddled in a literal tent city in a muddy field in Baghuz, Deir Ezzor, Syria--the pocket holdout where "Last Stand of ISIS" is being fought. here is a pro-ISIS tweeter calling out all of you Kufar for your War Machine's hypocrasy towards Muslim lives: https://twitter.com/inasiciid_/status/1108383064793575424 https://twitter.com/inasiciid_/status/1108383064793575424 https://twitter.com/thepathofhaqq/status/1108858206825205760 https://twitter.com/thepathofhaqq/status/1108858206825205760 https://twitter.com/rogue_corq/status/1108842942771404801 https://twitter.com/rogue_corq/status/1108842942771404801 i'm sorry, i cannot have respect for anyone working in the Scienes on behalf of the Pentagon. i don't care if you are only doing pure research far removed from directly assembling the Phosorus cluster bomb shells. you are still helping the worst military in history which has and is slaughtering hundreds of thousands of human beings. you don't deserve to sleep peacefully at night for your being a "lil' Eichmann" and helping to commit genocide and war crimes. it doesn't matter how valuable your work might be someday, it doesn't matter if your work will hypothetically save more lives someday in the future, because right now, today, you are helping to kill human beings. you are helping the most unjust military War Machine to stomp over country after country and perpetuate the most exploitive global EMPIRE in the history of civillization.
Razengan 8y ago
> if the USA is not there, then other nations are very happy to use their might to boss others around. This is kind of the same logic that often makes me wish for an extraterrestrial invasion. An alien species has a much higher chance of treating us all equally, than we do ourselves.
- sidcool 8y ago
  Funny. I wrote a blog post sometime back claiming that an external real or perceived threat is a unifying factor for societies and nations. So if we want to unite the earth, we need an extra terrestrial threat. It could be asteroid or alien invasion. Now these are less probable, hence we should set up Martian colonies and then just allow the earthlings to do their thing. They will eventually treat Mars humans as a threat. This is our only option to unify the earth.
  - TuringNYC 8y ago
    Sounds eerily similar to concepts in the Sci Fi novel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(novel)
  - Razengan 8y ago
    Simply having an "exit" from the complications on Earth, the possibility of relocating to Mars and starting from scratch, would give a lot of people hope, something to look forward to. It could also end up being an exclusive resort for the elite of our society to escape to, so they may no longer have to pretend to care about Earth at all.
  - CarlSchmitt 8y ago
    > This is our only option to unify the earth Why do we think that a unified earth will be a good thing? It seems too utopian to me...
    - Razengan 8y ago
      Unified as in: Nobody trying to harm each other, or other species, or prevent them from doing their thing. Why would anybody think that's not a good thing?

wallace_f 8y ago

I agree with you, but it's not so black and white. The atomic bomb is a notable example, and consider Eisenhower and many other military leaders said "there was no reason to use that awful thing." I realize my high school education, and most othet's, led me to believe this wasn't the case. I'm not trying to say it's wrong, but it deserves a lot of skepticism.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
colechristensen 8y ago
Reading a biography of Oppenheimer explores much of this. One thing is clear, the bomb was used on an essentially defeated enemy. From another angle though, it was necessary to push back Stalin and could be considered not as the last blow of WWII but the first blow in the cold war. It is difficult to question the possible outcomes if different choices were made but you can be sure that the last 80 years could have been much different and much worse. The bomb did make certain kinds of war impossible, and it is not clear if that would be true if they had not been used when they were.
- ethelward 8y ago
  > One thing is clear, the bomb was used on an essentially defeated enemy. The bomb were used on an enemy that was sooo defeated that there was a coup attempt by the military between the two bombs to prevent the emperor from capitulating.

wereanempirenow 8y ago

ahh yes, the illegal annexation of Crimea, where horrific war crimes were committed and countless innocent civllian lives were lost in wanton slaughter. oh, wait, nm, jk, exactly zero people died in the Crimean referendum, and it was the textbook example of a "bloodless coup" expressing the will of the people. also, just ignore that wizard behind the curtain who keeps mentioning that Crimea became part of Russia in 1784, when Catherine the Great took it from the defeated Ottoman empire, and that Crimea remained part of Russia up until the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. and whatever you do, don't fall into the logical trap of Whataboutism, where you point out the war crimes and illegal wars and slaughter of civillians by the US in order to make it look like the US is actually guilty of far worse Imperialism than Russia. such as the US directly assisting with killing over 58,000 civillians in Yemen between 2016 - 2018. https://www.apnews.com/24ee4b33373a41d389e2599c5aa7bbfa https://www.apnews.com/24ee4b33373a41d389e2599c5aa7bbfa and whatever you do, don't connect the dots and interpolate every US war going back to WW2 and draw factual, evidence based conclusions from the Pentagon's own Top Secret stats on civillian casualties, which condemn the Pentagon as being the biggest group of mass murdering thugs in the history of warfare. don't even think about pulling that citations please crap, and repeating obscure inconvenient truths, such as the CIA's own reports that 66% of the tens of thousands of Vietnemese killed by the Rolling Thunder mass bombing campaign were totally innocent civillians: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP78T02095R000600020001-0.pdf https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP78T02095... "hold on there", i can here you say, "Vietnam is ancient history, we here at the Pentagon have learned very hard lessons--we don't do that anymore" record scratch freeze frame the USAF killed tens of thousands of civillians in Raqqa and Mosul. (depending on your views of the seriousness of the ISIS problem, you may not have a problem with that.) https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/07/amnesty-led-coalition-denial-civilian-deaths-raqqa-180716195240680.html https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/07/amnesty-led-coalition... the Pentagon killed so many civillians in Raqqa and Mosul that even they admit "nobody will ever know how many died." https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/pentagonno-one-will-ever-know-how-many-civilians-us-has-killed-in-fight-against-isis/2018/06/05/4b3fec30-6900-11e8-bbc5-dc9f3634fa0a_story.html?utm_term=.2d0774ce1369 https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/penta... https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1002567 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo... and while the Neoliberal world virtue signals to itself about its own hollow anti-Islamophobia self-righteous indignity outrage about the NZ mosque mass shooting by Brenton Tarrant four days ago, yesterday and today the US military is bombing the 10,000 civillians and women and children huddled in a literal tent city in a muddy field in Baghuz, Deir Ezzor, Syria--the pocket holdout where "Last Stand of ISIS" is being fought. here is a pro-ISIS tweeter calling out all of you Kufar for your War Machine's hypocrasy towards Muslim lives: https://twitter.com/inasiciid_/status/1108383064793575424 https://twitter.com/inasiciid_/status/1108383064793575424 https://twitter.com/thepathofhaqq/status/1108858206825205760 https://twitter.com/thepathofhaqq/status/1108858206825205760 https://twitter.com/rogue_corq/status/1108842942771404801 https://twitter.com/rogue_corq/status/1108842942771404801 i'm sorry, i cannot have respect for anyone working in the Scienes on behalf of the Pentagon. i don't care if you are only doing pure research far removed from directly assembling the Phosorus cluster bomb shells. you are still helping the worst military in history which has and is slaughtering hundreds of thousands of human beings. you don't deserve to sleep peacefully at night for your being a "lil' Eichmann" and helping to commit genocide and war crimes. it doesn't matter how valuable your work might be someday, it doesn't matter if your work will hypothetically save more lives someday in the future, because right now, today, you are helping to kill human beings. you are helping the most unjust military War Machine to stomp over country after country and perpetuate the most exploitive global EMPIRE in the history of civillization.

Razengan 8y ago

> if the USA is not there, then other nations are very happy to use their might to boss others around. This is kind of the same logic that often makes me wish for an extraterrestrial invasion. An alien species has a much higher chance of treating us all equally, than we do ourselves.

sidcool 8y ago
Funny. I wrote a blog post sometime back claiming that an external real or perceived threat is a unifying factor for societies and nations. So if we want to unite the earth, we need an extra terrestrial threat. It could be asteroid or alien invasion. Now these are less probable, hence we should set up Martian colonies and then just allow the earthlings to do their thing. They will eventually treat Mars humans as a threat. This is our only option to unify the earth.
- TuringNYC 8y ago
  Sounds eerily similar to concepts in the Sci Fi novel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(novel)
- Razengan 8y ago
  Simply having an "exit" from the complications on Earth, the possibility of relocating to Mars and starting from scratch, would give a lot of people hope, something to look forward to. It could also end up being an exclusive resort for the elite of our society to escape to, so they may no longer have to pretend to care about Earth at all.
- CarlSchmitt 8y ago
  > This is our only option to unify the earth Why do we think that a unified earth will be a good thing? It seems too utopian to me...
  - Razengan 8y ago
    Unified as in: Nobody trying to harm each other, or other species, or prevent them from doing their thing. Why would anybody think that's not a good thing?