Vilageidiotx

Control VS Freedom

Economic globalism is doing a better job at stopping Russia than the US military is. Did anybody ever think we were going to put boots in Crimea? Whatever game Putin is playing at, it was never the risk of conventional warfare that scared him, and he can't play too long at this game if he wants to keep the goodwill of his people. If he went too far, it would be an embargo of Russian oil, universal across the west, that would bring him down. War would just muddle things up and damage everybody involved. I'm sure the Ukraine has no interest in being completely burned away by such a conflict.

Likewise, we wouldn't want to go to war with China. The economic repercussions would be severe in both countries. Severe enough, it is true, to most likely bring down the Chinese government. But it would also be severe enough that even the United States, if we are perfectly honest, would risk revolution. You triple the price of living and tell Americans that the Senkakus, or even Taiwan, is worth the bloodbath that would be a war against China. It isn't the cost of the military that would bring either of us to the brink - it is the cost of cutting off trade.

That is the reality of the modern world. Militaries have some uses when dealing with entities that aren't part of the economic system, AKA rebels and terrorists (though this is debatable, since we have failed the largest of these operations time and time again), but in the post-cold war economy, where there is no alternative to the west's trade network, those countries with economies large enough to project power entirely owe their economic capacity to international trade, and their ability to function at an internal level can be completely destroyed.

Control VS Freedom

Economic globalism prevents actual conventional wars (with a little help from nuclear weapons). Clinton could have sent one ship to the Taiwan strait and everything would have been cherry. A guaranteed war with the west would have been economic suicide. The Gulf of Aden, similarly, does not require the amount of military spending we currently engage in. Not even close to that. Now, I am not saying we need to obliterate the entire military. That is unrealistic - at this point in our civilization, we still need it. What I am saying is that, in the United States, we waste too much money on defense, and that it would be much more practical to spend that money domestically. I would rather see that money used to put people through school.

And scales can be deceptive - it doesn't seem to describe the percentage scale, but I assume that means percentage of unemployed? If we pulled that scale up to complete 100% rather than the 14% that allows the graph to skew, what you would see is a small bump of people managing to get a job while the grand majority of unemployed people enter poverty. That really creates a moral puzzle: What is worse? Fourteen people abusing the system, or eighty six people living on the streets?

Control VS Freedom

So Boerd said
The military is just a better version of welfare. You both pay poor people, but with welfare you pay them to sit on their butts where the military gives them great job skills. Don't tell me the military wastes money if you love a Eurowelfare state.

People sitting on their butts would be a neutral position, economically. The Military is a negative one. Welfare would be somebody being payed to be a purchaser who doesn't produce. The Military is somebody payed to do damage, and then not produce. And that is just talking about the mythological creature that is the welfare queen. For the most part, welfare is just used to hold up people who are productive in low pay jobs.

And no, the military doesn't only gives job skills to people in support roles, and even that is kind of iffy. Our current job market likes people who follow traditional paths, so ex-military often ends up struggling. Somebody who sees combat gets it even worse, because people assume combat experience means baggage. For years, I assumed that the military was a good jumping point too, until I worked in a place meant for finding people jobs. The biggest complications were prison time, military service, and having a disability.

Descended From

mdk said
Well they were definitely slaves -- if anything should be in quotation marks it's "HIS." Dude owned slaves, there's not really a moral upside to that, so let's not step around the issue at all. Lots of people in history owned slaves. Once upon a time, Hammurabi was literally *THE* paragon of morality. We've changed. If we're gonna be objective about historical figures then we need to get past the part where we try to make them 'okay' by modern standards. Lee was kind of a bastard, who did lots of other cool stuff and was otherwise a pretty remarkably awesome dude.

Yeh, but we don't really spend a lot of time praising the Babylonians. Quite the opposite, really.

The biggest difference between Hammurabi and Lee would be where they stand on the chain of human progress. Hammurabi codified law, presumably making punishment a less arbitrary experience. He owned slaves because the moral philosophy of the time hadn't developed to the point where there was opposition to it. The worth of human life is much less in an environment as harsh as the bronze age. I hate to use this phrase, but you can argue that he didn't really know any better.

In Lee's day, abolitionism was already a popular belief. People knew slavery was evil. The English speaking world had already accepted that life has a certain worth, and that freedom was a natural human right. Jefferson had flip-flopped on the same issue - recognizing, occasionally, that there was something wrong with Slavery but never going so far as to be an abolitionist. By the 19th century, slavery was being upheld through mental gymnastics, and Lee was one of those who followed this line of thought. You can't really escape the fact that, despite society moving against the concept of slavery, Lee and others remained slave owners for no other reason but for the easy lives that slavery afforded him, and his wife, and his children.

I'm not saying that he is evil, or that the Civil War was a conflict of good vs evil. Personally, I would call it a war between two different types of exploitative economics - feudal chatel slavery vs industrial wage slavery. In the north, children were forced into industrial contracts by their starving parents, where they did dangerous jobs like work on operating machines or mine coal in tiny, dust filled shafts. There were people unable to escape work in company towns because they worked twelve hours a day and were only payed in script that only bought things in company stores, so they could never save money. Chinese workers on the west coast where also forced into slave-like conditions, where escape often lead to them being beaten or killed. When slavery did finally end, the relationship didn't always change, and many former-slaves ended up share-croppers because they had no way to leave that relationship.

But it is important, despite how muddy these things are, to not go and white wash history so it feels more comfortable to us. Lee owned slaves - he was not blind to the idea that maybe slavery was evil, he just didn't agree that it was. This doesn't make him a monster we have to vilify, but we shouldn't try to exonerate him either, or work to create excuses for his behavior.

So call me crazy

HeySeuss said
*Amateur Psychology* That black goo is religious guilt.I still have nightmares that I have to go back to high school for some reason......even though I have a Bachelor's from the University of Maryland.

Oooh! Doublepost.

So call me crazy

HeySeuss said
*Amateur Psychology* That black goo is religious guilt.I still have nightmares that I have to go back to high school for some reason......even though I have a Bachelor's from the University of Maryland.

Oooh! Or that dream where you forgot about a class until it is time for the final, then you suddenly remember? I know i've ran across several other people who have had that exact same dream.

Control VS Freedom

TheEvanCat said
Militaries are good things for a lot of reasons. Like A-A-Ron said, they're humanitarian tools.In addition, they're good places for people to end up in. Where else in America can you start again, get out of the ghetto, and be treated the same if you're white, black, gay, straight, male, female, rich, or poor? The military is, in the long run, focused on the precision application of violence. But there's so much more to that that nobody ever thinks of: you need so much to run a military. You need clerks, acquisition guys, finance guys, doctors, police, fire departments. And militaries generally teach you these things for free, and give you an opportunity to get those job skills.At least the US Military will pay for your education, healthcare, dentistry, housing, and utilities. Then they'll give you the steadiest paycheck you'll ever have, since you generally aren't worrying about downsizing. You leave when your contract is up or decide to reenlist and give four more years of your life.They're not evil constructs of war crimes, they're probably the best thing to happen to someone in this economy. It's more than fighting, it's a good shaping force on people. They need to be kept.

I disagree. Sorta. You need a standing army just in case some shit goes down, and you need the infrastructure that allows you to mobilize, but the rest of the military is an economic liability.

Whereas it is true that the military employs people, it employs people to be a drain on the economy. The military doesn't actually produce anything - quite the opposite, actually. It tends to just destroy. So with the military, we have jobs, but no tangible end product. The only product is economic waste - maimed people, potential markets that are burned, foreigners actively interested in working against the west after have their lives destroyed, soldiers for who have their educations payed for by taxes only to have them killed, or at least rendered helpless, thus representing another form of financial loss.

The same sort of energy would be better used domestically. If the government took the people who would be come soldiers and instead payed for their education in technical fields, with guaranteed employment in those fields once they graduated, our money would be better spent. We need engineers, and architects, and doctors. People who's work actually produces something tangible, that could be used to better life for all of us. Let them rebuild the ghettos instead of making new ones across the sea.

The American military, as it stands, seems to exist for two reasons: for the continued health of a defense industry who pays politicians to keep it in business, and for the masturbatory quality it gives to patriotism.

Death Threats

Once they've threatened your life, all the niceties are out the window (heh). Shut the window. Call your manager. If she keeps causing shit, threaten to call the police

If you happen to land the sub-human garbage who thinks it is appropriate to get angry in public over nothing, and they get to the point where you can at least say you were afraid for your life, then you don't have to play ball with them anymore. Most people are going to side with you anyway (though I suppose that would be the shitty thing about a drive through. At least in the places where I have worked, I could play my cards right and turn everybody against the person who was angry. Maybe they will start honking if she gets loud enough.)

Precipice of War - We Write Under The Sign Of The Goat

Nice. Marc and Yared met Sahle at the same time tho.

Precipice of War - We Write Under The Sign Of The Goat

Wilted Rose said
Well, despite it being fuck all early in the morning. I woke up and got onto my computer. Of course, this means I remember things I usually don't and boop, I remember I had a post written just waiting to be posted. So I did, a week late but...Yeah.

Better late than Prospo