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This thread is kind of chilling, because everyone within is treating it like it's just chat software or something. With quotes from this thread like "in the me

• flatline 7y ago
  Is all defense-related work complicit in murder? Do we not need a military? Nothing is perfect, but we are trapped on a planet with a bunch of violent, highly intelligent apes. Certainly the military does things I disagree with, and things could always be improved, but generally what is the alternative?
  • koheripbal 7y ago
    kick's comment above is absolutely delusional. It's like something a teenager would write. Im starting to wonder if hackernews is turning into Reddit.
    • Miner49er 7y ago
      From HN guidelines: > Please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills. > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. > When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      • koheripbal 7y ago
        Point taken, thank you. ...but I am concerned that HN is changing for the worse.
    • claudeganon 7y ago
      A series of ad hominem attacks that don’t address the substance of the parent are superior because...?
    • Filligree 7y ago
      Is it insufficiently cynical? It's something a teenager might write, yes, because teenagers often aren't hypocritical enough to ignore the murders just because it's a nation-state doing them. That doesn't make it wrong.
  • james-mcelwain 7y ago
    There's a huge, gigantic difference between not having a military at all and spending 1 trillion a year to be an imperialist superpower. It's almost like... there's a middle ground.
    • Hydraulix989 7y ago
      There's not, because it maintains a world order that would be happily taken up by someone else if the US didn't do it.
      • akiselev 7y ago
        There absolutely is a middle ground. It starts with actual audits of the DoD, which requires no reduction of capabilities and have never even been completed once.
    • zionic 7y ago
      The thing is, we spend that much and we're not even good imperialists. When was the last time we annexed any territory? Declared a lesser state a protectorate? Or established a new colony? We spend trillions/year to be the world police so our "allies" don't have to while they mock us on twitter.
      • kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
        We outsource the dirty stuff. The important thing is that there is a market for our bullets and bombs.
      • h0h0h0h0111 7y ago
        Annexed? In 2020, there is no need to annex a country to get everything you want from them - on the contrary, it's an administrative nightmare to annex a country when you can stick your military bases there, export your goods there, and make their economy dependent on your country's and your money without it.
        • 7y ago
  • kick 7y ago
    Answer to the first question: in the United States, yes. Whether that is a bad thing is debatable and not suited for the site we're on; try a philosophy subreddit. The United States military has lost its privilege to play any form of moralism or rational justification after their actions over the past 30-50 years. It's no longer defense in most cases, it's assault. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, the second Iraq, invading Afghanistan for funsies, there's no point to most of it. We've only had one success in decades, and it still wasn't even related to defense! There's a difference between defense and imperialistic invasions, and the United States military hasn't defended much of anything at home in quite a while.
    • knowa42 7y ago
      If you think that the only thing the U.S. military does is "assault" then you haven't really done any research at all, have you? Read up on force-projection, specifically as it relates to soft-power.
      • kick 7y ago
        Note I said most cases, which, in English, means "not all cases, but most of them." Obviously, the U.S. Military does slightly more than assault. Proportionally not much more, but a bit more. Like football. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_Black_Knights_football https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_Black_Knights_football
        • knowa42 7y ago
          Oh, okay. Unless you're relying solely on your "intuition" of what the U.S. military uses resources for, please post sources or figures for your quantification of U.S. force projection and how it's "mostly" used for assault.
      • FpUser 7y ago
        Assault - direct attack Force projection - do as we say or else.
  • Beltiras 7y ago
    Less empire, more democracy.
• djsumdog 7y ago
  Yes, there is harm that will happen, but harm will happen whether it's Microsoft or Amazon. Amazon is throwing their weight around because they didn't get the multi-billion contract. It has nothing to do with Amazon or Microsoft being better stewards of ... anything. They're both massive companies with horrid business practices, led by boards who don't give a shit about war or human suffering or the poor or anything outside growth and economic goals and shutting out their competitors.
• koheripbal 7y ago
  Is all war considered murder?
  • anthonypasq 7y ago
    No, but the majority of US foreign policy is.
    • koheripbal 7y ago
      More so, or less so, than other belligerent states it combats?
      • anthonypasq 7y ago
        most countries dont engage in foreign policy that involves invading and murdering millions of civilians.
• Angostura 7y ago
  > you'd never guess this stuff is going to be used to and to enable murder. This is only true, if you take it as axiomatic that armed forces have one job, which is killing and that all killing in armed conflict is simple murder. That's not a position I take.
• tracker1 7y ago
  So, you'd rather we keep spending too much, using too little information, and putting too many innocent people at risk? I mean, it's not like we dropped more ordinance under Obama than every president before him combined, or that the trend didn't decrease by very much after him or anything. Personally, I do think our foreign deployments and presence should absolutely be dramatically reduced. I also think most federal spending is bureaucratic fluff. That said, I have less problem when there are efforts to stabilize or reduce spending via technology. And I find that people who try to take an ethical stance over companies offering any kind of service to the government is short sighted at best, and dangerous or destructive at worst. In the end, this will happen, and I'd rather it go to a company that is focused on the problem (technical infrastructure for computing resources) over the government trying to build a bureaucratic mess that costs a significant amount more. Not that everything should be outsourced. For example, I think privatized prisons are far, far, far worse for society than providing a cloud network for the federal govt.
  • kick 7y ago
    How is Obama relevant, here? I don't believe I mentioned him. HN has always leaned libertarian, and just because Ron Paul isn't running right now doesn't mean suddenly every argument that's against authoritarianism is liberal.
    • tracker1 7y ago
      The point was that drone strikes / bombings were dramatically increased under Obama and never really stopped. I also noted that it didn't decrease with Trump. In either case, offering cloud services to the Government isn't really an authoritarian position.
  • kec 7y ago
    The end result of your stance is essentially arguing that the only problem with American intervention in the Middle East is that it isn't efficient enough.
    • tracker1 7y ago
• nova22033 7y ago
  you'd never guess this stuff is going to be used to and to enable murder. DoD uses a lot of linux and other open source software. Should we stop working on that too since, according to you, it's "enabling murder"?
  • kick 7y ago
    Last I checked, Torvalds wasn't getting billions of dollars from the DoD to install Linux on servers. That's a false comparison, and a lazy one at that.
    • jandrese 7y ago
      Almost every government lab I've seen has a rule that says you aren't allowed to use free software in the lab. Everything was supposed to have a vendor that was responsible for it that you were paying. Development labs end up using Linux and other open source software all over the place, but it gets a bit more iffy when you're going into production.
      • arwineap 7y ago
        That's interesting... We had to verify everything was approved through DADSM (potentially navy specific), but other than that as long as we had a legal license to run we were good. This is what forced me into using centos for our deployed infrastructure, and mIRC as our chat client of choice.
      • tpetry 7y ago
        And that is the reason Red Hat is making so much money: Whether it is free or not is not relevant but that you can pay a vendor who will fix your problems in production
• corporate_shi11 7y ago
  Reality is such that militaries are necessary both for self defense and defense of the weak and vulnerable. The US military has ensured peace and prosperity for billions around the world for decades given its formidable global presence. Imagine the chaos and crime that would descends on a community without police or law enforcement. The world operates the exact same way. There will always be a most powerful country enforcing stability and global compliance, and I would much rather it be the US than Russia or China.
  • FpUser 7y ago
    I prefer that to be a UN. This "ensured piece and prosperity" - you can try to explain it to a Middle East, Vietnam etc.
    • aianus 7y ago
      Vietnamese are friendly to Americans and see America as an ally in their struggle against Chinese imperialism. The hatred of China in Vietnam is near-universal and explicit. I've lived there but if you don't believe me, ask a few Vietnamese yourself, they're not shy about it.
      • FpUser 7y ago
        I actually met couple of Vietnamese (not in Vietnam though). They were not very fond of Americans to speak softly. No real hatred either (well they're very polite and I do not really now what their actual feeling were). I do believe that modern Vietmamese people are tolerant and welcomed to a tourists including the Americans. Tourists are income and people that actually did suffer war effect and immediate aftermath are mostly dead now. Also the US did not bring "the piece and prosperity" to Vietnam unless you mean withdrawing from that murderous war that they started in a first place. What brought a relative prosperity was that their communist government did soften their stance towards market based economy. And feeling some guilt US probably contributed few pesos.
• 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
  Differing views I suppose. To me I look at the new type of weaponized technologies coming out of China (that we know about) such as hypersonic missiles able to defeat most conventional mission defenses. Then I look at the salary differences between “defense” work and adtech, and I worry that our best and brightest are not working on deterrents the same way our rivals are. Combine that with a persistent stigma against working in defense and we have a recipe of losing our technology edge within the this century if not sooner. What will our rivals decide to do once that happens?
  • FpUser 7y ago
    "What will our rivals decide to do once that happened?" Nothing, you have a capacity to turn Earth into a glass fields. Also the work to improve said capacity seems to have started.
• phreack 7y ago
  Here's a talk by someone who worked on software for the military, that echoes some of your feelings from an inside perspective. https://www.calebthompson.io/talks/dont-get-distracted/ https://www.calebthompson.io/talks/dont-get-distracted/
  • wenc 7y ago
    Interesting thoughts. I wonder if anyone here has heard of the Principle of Double Effect? [1] On one hand, we need to be thoughtful and mindful of the ethical implications of all that we do. On the other hand, every action always has a context inside a larger system and has unintended consequences and being an ethical purist can sometimes be more harmful. Most people who are older fall somewhere between striving to do the right thing but also recognizing they cannot control all the consequences and even if they could, they cannot predict what greater harm or good may result. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_double_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_double_effect