6 ms·
It wasn’t literally the point of the plane when it was being designed. It’s the fourth or fifth public justification. It’s actual literal point is to make a lot
by bradleyjg 5y ago
It wasn’t literally the point of the plane when it was being designed. It’s the fourth or fifth public justification. It’s actual literal point is to make a lot of people a lot of money. It does that very well.
- djrobstep 5y ago> It’s actual literal point is to make a lot of people a lot of money. Indeed. "The purpose of a system is what it does"
- perl4ever 5y agoThat's not a useful definition. It makes me think of when people say that there's no sense in debating if a supreme court decision was correct, because the supreme court is the highest legal authority. If they are correct by definition, then what are they doing to decide cases?
- xref 5y agoAlso the SC regularly overturns its own precedents. Similar concept to Papal Infallibility https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papal_infallibility https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papal_infallibility
- djrobstep 5y agoI'm not sure how that connects at all - "the purpose of a system is what it does" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...) isn't making any claims about correctness.
- perl4ever 5y agoI would say that the purpose of something is what is proper or correct for it to do. I think the slogan should not be taken literally and means more like "don't let the (possibly many-faceted and disputed) purpose of a system blind you to what it does".
- fmakunbound 5y agoI've come to think of it as a public works project. Employs a huge number of people, provides corporate welfare for Lockheed and their suppliers, but no one is going to fight a world war with it. It's already close to obsolete to way cheaper, recent radar systems and non-meatspace crafts.
- dylan604 5y agoAlso known as the military industrial complex. I seemed to remember a prominent person speaking/warning quite decisively about that.
- gremlinsinc 5y agoI can think of a few ...most recently probably Sanders, but I'm pretty sure Dwight Eisenhower warned about the MI Complex in speeches, and probably Kennedy too.
- owenmarshall 5y agoRead “War is a Racket”, written in 1935 by retired USMC Major General and two-time Medal of Honor recipient Smedley Butler for an excellent historical perspective.
- bradleyjg 5y agoIn total taxes paid per capita the US isn’t far off from the countries of Western Europe. But they get universal health care and mass transit that’s actually good, we get F35s, surgeons that drive Ferraris, and tens of thousands of college administrators.
- lumost 5y agoIn fairness, the basic premise of NATO was that the US would handle military protection of Western Europe in exchange for solidarity on foreign policy, trade, and economic development. If Nato didn't exist its debatable whether western Europe could maintain their existing level of defense expenditure. The EU would also need to manage increased defense expenditure amongst member nations to avoid an arms race.
- brippalcharrid 5y agoI don't doubt that what happened here was primarily the result of constellations of self-interest and incompetence, but do governments ever tend to change their public justifications for programs to be more accurate once the potential advantage to competing nations of having known about them ten or twenty years ago has faded away?