1044: “Romney Quiz”

[scharb]

Mind = Blown

How have I never made this connection before?

[Eternal Density]

b) Please let me know when abortion is safe for both patients.

Not that I care too much about the topic, but this argument... [deleted]

a) Please let me know when capital punishment is safe for both the executioner and the executed.
b) Please let me know when eating animal corpses that have been set on fire is safe for both parties.
c) Please let me know when having sex is safe for both participants.
d) Please let me know when fighting terrorists is safe for both sides.
e) Please let me know when __________________________________ ...

Of course, I'm not saying a fetus is the same thing as a convinced criminal, a terrorist, or whatever you imagine. I'm just saying that if you get appendicitis, no-one guarantees that you won't have complications. However, appendix will most probably not make it.

a) Never, it's not meant to be.
b) 'animal corpses that have been set on fire' LULZ! I'm pretty sure the chicken in my sandwich hasn't been set on fire, but either way the chicken is already dead so the question of whether eating it is safe for the chicken is kinda moot.
c) I've heard exclusive monogamy is pretty safe but I wouldn't know anything about that.
d) I'm pretty sure that'll never be safe from anyone, and I'm also pretty sure it's not relevant.
e) _.__ _.__ __..

The parallel to appendicitis is also irrelevant, as appendicitis is an ailment: a malfunction of human biology. An appendix is an organ, not offspring. The womb is meant to be a safe place.

It's messed up that we have suicide prevention hotlines to stop people who feel unwanted from offing themselves, yet it's okay to get rid of the unwanted if you do it soon enough... without giving them a choice in the matter.

[unus vox]

I love Randall.

Step 1: Create an absurdist comic that, while topical, does not inherently carry a concrete statement.
Step 2: Post it for your left-brained fanbase, most of whom literally make a living off of problem solving.
Step 3: Make some popcorn and read your forums.

[whateveries]

I really think we ought to back off from those commitments ahead of time. Find out how the world behaves when the US Navy doesn't interfere, while we still have a navy that we can restore order with if we need to. As it is, we spend more than 1% of GDP for our navy when nobody in the world knows what it does for us. Nobody knows what the alternatives are.

Sorry to wade in, but , let's just leave your navy where it is, As an Australian I very much appreciate knowing your boys and girls are out there on those big boats. See, we have, at best a 'difficult' relationship with one or two of our close neighbours (not you NZ we love you guys) and I have the fullest faith in the fact the relationship would be very much more difficult without them.

And don't worry I am sure you extract more than enough cash out of our economy via your cultural exports and economic agreements weighted in your favour to offset the cost of looking after us, and well, if you were not to be looking after us, I doubt whoever ran the country once we were wiped out would probably not be so favourable to your products/culture/agreements. *i am pleasently suprised by how difficult i made that concept t to read*

*edit*

Oh Oh and, seeing as how the democrats get upset by the republicans dropping of the 'ic', why not fire back and drop the 'Re' in Republicans. Although, where i come from, being called a Publican party would only net you more votes.

also medicare works very well here, as does our social security system, and our gun control laws, the only thing we don't do right is protect domestic industries from parasitic foreign countries/coorporations, but I wouldn't suggest adopting the US model on that, perhaps the chinese model would be appropriate, where it is considered treason not to use an australian product. unless it's beer, we love imported beer so much, we even started to make it here.

[J Thomas]

Sorry to wade in, but , let's just leave your navy where it is,

I want to welcome your participation.

As an Australian I very much appreciate knowing your boys and girls are out there on those big boats. See, we have, at best a 'difficult' relationship with one or two of our close neighbours (not you NZ we love you guys) and I have the fullest faith in the fact the relationship would be very much more difficult without them.

I didn't know anything about that. When I remember the map, it seems like the only close neighbors are new guinea and indonesia. New Guinea does not seem in position to make much difficulty. I thought you guys were getting along real well with the indonesians. All patched up after the East Timor thing. Lots of government cooperation. A few terrorist attacks, nothing significant. They don't have a significant navy, but neither do you. I guess if you didn't get along they could raid your trade routes, and you couldn't do much about it?

China now, they could be a threat in the long run, if they felt like becoming a military threat. If they wanted to nuke your cities the USA couldn't do much about it except nuke them back. If they wanted to stage an invasion it seems like they'd invade closer places first -- at least new guinea or indonesia, so they could concentrate supplies and staging areas etc. I doubt they'll have the kind of navy which could do that for 20 or 30 years, but I guess maybe they could cut that to 15 years if they tried hard.

And don't worry I am sure you extract more than enough cash out of our economy via your cultural exports and economic agreements weighted in your favour to offset the cost of looking after us, and well, if you were not to be looking after us, I doubt whoever ran the country once we were wiped out would probably not be so favourable to your products/culture/agreements. *i am pleasently suprised by how difficult i made that concept t to read*

I guess I'm naive. I don't begin to see who'd wipe you out with conventional weapons, unless it was China. They aren't known for doing much along those lines. Sure, they killed a lot of Tibetans in 1959, but china was having a famine, so part of the chinese army went to tibet and kind of lived off the land. Also the CIA was trying to get Tibetans to revolt. But apart from Tibet, who have they come close to genociding in the last 70 years?

Anyway, you should think about what to do when the US Navy stops coming to visit. I see this happening in one of two ways. First, our aircraft carriers could become too vulnerable. The USA won't admit that until we lose one, and then we'll have a chinese fire drill. We have no backup naval strategy, or if we do it's so secret that nobody can find out it exists without a need-to-know. We will panic, and that will probably include trying to keep our remaining carriers safe, probably at home. I'd estimate a 50% chance of that happening within the next 30 years, but it could be sooner.

The second way is if the US economy collapses. The USSR had a working navy to the end, but they reached the point they couldn't afford to pay to take the ships out of dock. If the time comes that the USA is exporting oil for hard currency, we aren't going to be flying a whole lot of 6000 gallons/hour warplanes or sending out the carrier groups their carriers depend on. I can't guess how likely that sort of breakdown is or when, but I imagine it might be possible within 2 years.

If you're depending on the USA to keep somebody from killing 23 million Australians, I think you'd do well to have a backup plan. Just in case the USA is freaking out when you need us.

Oh and, seeing as how the democrats get upset by the republicans dropping of the 'ic', why not fire back and drop the 'Re' in Republicans. Although, where i come from, being called a Publican party would only net you more votes.

That's a bit subtle for us. Democrats who want to upset Republicans sometimes call them "Rethugs". It's all very silly.

[Pfhorrest]

I must ask, though: Exactly how long have you spent in uniform ready to defend your country's interests domestically or abroad? 21 years like me? 21 months? 21 weeks? 21 days?

I personally have helped to fend off every single foreign invasion of the United States which has occurred in my lifetime.

I have never been a part of any military or paramilitary organization and may not have ever fired an actual firearm.

Maybe ask again when there are actual armies actually attacking us to defend ourselves from.

Please read it again focusing on the underlined portion.

I read it the first time and that was my point.

The only legitimate interest that justifies military action to defend is our freedom from military invasion.

Antiterrorism is police work, not military; it's practically the whole reason we have a federal police force (the FBI) in the first place.

Everything else -- what, "securing" foreign resources? Enacting "regime change" that we think will maybe prevent possible future military invasion? You're asking how much of that kind of work we've done, before we can criticise that people do it? A gang-banger thug may as well say "How much time have you spent out on the street robbing people at gun point? How many drive-bys have you done? Get some experience defending your interests before you criticise."

No. If you're a fucking thug robbing people and shooting up the houses of others you think might shoot you some day, you're a fucking thug and I can tell you so without having to have been a thug to level that criticism. You don't have to have been a criminal to denounce the crime, and you don't have to have worked in the military to denounce much of its activities. Did you ever consider that maybe people don't join the military because they denounce its activities, and aren't giant hypocrites who engage in activities they denounce?

But just as denouncing the thug mugging people and shooting up houses isn't the same as denouncing all violence -- you've still got legitimate self-defense -- denouncing the military today is not the same as denouncing people who have actually defended us from actual invasions.

Too many people doing the former in the military today try to suck up the glory of the many true heroes who have actually died for a just cause doing the latter, and it dishonors those heroes for wannabes with some expensive technology blowing up backwater primitives half a world away to act like they deserve the same glory as men who died defending their homes.

Until you've fought a just war like them, and not just served as a cog in some gigantic sabre-rattling machine vaguely "protecting our interests", maybe you're not one to talk either.

[whateveries]

Sorry to wade in, but , let's just leave your navy where it is,

I want to welcome your participation.

We all make mistakes.

As an Australian I very much appreciate knowing your boys and girls are out there on those big boats. See, we have, at best a 'difficult' relationship with one or two of our close neighbours (not you NZ we love you guys) and I have the fullest faith in the fact the relationship would be very much more difficult without them.

I didn't know anything about that. When I remember the map, it seems like the only close neighbors are new guinea and indonesia. New Guinea does not seem in position to make much difficulty. I thought you guys were getting along real well with the indonesians. All patched up after the East Timor thing. Lots of government cooperation. A few terrorist attacks, nothing significant. They don't have a significant navy, but neither do you. I guess if you didn't get along they could raid your trade routes, and you couldn't do much about it?

oh, look, it may be some deep seated xenophobic jerkiness I have lurking deep down inside, or it might jus be a suspicion that the indonesian military has a portion that just cannot betrusted with things that go bang, or it might be, no, wait. it probably is xenophobia. Hopefully. (but their leader is called Bam Bam. (then again ours is a ranga known for weilding knives at midnight, so...)

China now, they could be a threat in the long run...

China seems to have it worked out that the best form of colonisation is the one done in the economic arena, you have to hand it to those guys, they took a while to get on board the capitalism train, but they nailed it. Hard. (mousy tongue would be so cranky)

India is another one to watch, But seriously, those guys play cricket, so in my terms of political understanding they are one of the good guys. what pakistan? yes, they play cricket too, so, well, they have to be the good guys too don't they, what? (Now that I think about it I notice a disturbingly low cricket attendence in the Northern Americas, suspiciously low)

And don't worry I am sure you extract more than enough cash out of our economy via your cultural exports and economic agreements weighted in your favour to offset the cost of looking after us, and well, if you were not to be looking after us, I doubt whoever ran the country once we were wiped out would probably not be so favourable to your products/culture/agreements. *i am pleasently suprised by how difficult i made that concept t to read*

I guess I'm naive. I don't begin to see who'd wipe you out with conventional weapons,...

my hyperbole I am afraid...

Anyway, you should think about what to do when the US Navy stops coming to visit. .

You just sent tremors through the slattern community.

If you're depending on the USA to keep somebody from killing 23 million Australians, I think you'd do well to have a backup plan. Just in case the USA is freaking out when you need us.

wait, as long as you get here beofore the million me and mine are counted in are slaughtered, I can work with that. As long as Kyle Sandilands is in the first million.

Oh and, seeing as how the democrats get upset by the republicans dropping of the 'ic', why not fire back and drop the 'Re' in Republicans. Although, where i come from, being called a Publican party would only net you more votes.

That's a bit subtle for us. Democrats who want to upset Republicans sometimes call them "Rethugs". It's all very silly.

Silly I can handle, your politics makes more sense now.

[ijuin]

Furthermore, any tax that increases the cost of an employee is viewed, in total, as the cost of an employee to a business. Businesses will only pay so much for an employee (MC=MB, of course), so a tax which increases the cost of an employee will necessarily decrease the wage of said employee.

The tricky thing is that since employers are always looking to pay the absolute minimum necessary to get the desired quantity and quality of labor, if you reduce the non-compensation cost of the employee (i.e. all of the money spent on the employee that does not personally benefit the employee--e.g. fees paid to government, or paid for the tools that the employee uses to do the work), there is nothing that will inherently convert any of that savings into increased employee compensation. In non-technical terms, if your boss saves a dollar on employing you, there is nothing to make him pass even one penny of that dollar onto you--he will pocket as much of it as he can get away with.

This issue--the fact that employers will prefer to pocket savings rather than passing them on to employees or customers--is why simply cutting employer costs has a reduced effect on employment itself. Why should the boss pass any of his savings onto you unless doing so raises his own bottom line? After all, offering you more money will only make you work harder if you are already working below your maximum.

[Klear]

Now excuse me while I join Ms. Johannson atop Shadowfax as we ride out to crush the Zerg.

Somebody needs to draw that. Preferably as a rule 34.

[PhingerSpex]

Has it really reached the point where people unthinkingly buy into the stereotype without even seriously considering alternative reasons why someone would actually dare to be Republican?

Or Democratic. And yes, it really has reached the point where American politics is all about the stereotype.

No chance that someone might be a conscientious "ordinary Christian"

There is no such thing as an "ordinary Christian".
Do you believe in the Bible? If not, you're not an "ordinary Christian".
Do you believe the Bible is true, or an allegorical tale? Do you believe the world was created 6000 years ago, and that two people called Adam and Eve were the first humans ever? Do you believe in evolution? Do you believe in the four different stories of Jesus' life, as told in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? Do you believe that when you drink Communion wine, it really is blood? Do you believe you should kill people who commit adultery? Do you think you should whip people who make money from charging interest on loans?

There is no such thing as an "ordinary Christian".

[Klear]

There is no such thing as an "ordinary Christian".
Do you believe in the Bible? If not, you're not an "ordinary Christian".
Do you believe the Bible is true, or an allegorical tale? Do you believe the world was created 6000 years ago, and that two people called Adam and Eve were the first humans ever? Do you believe in evolution? Do you believe in the four different stories of Jesus' life, as told in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? Do you believe that when you drink Communion wine, it really is blood? Do you believe you should kill people who commit adultery? Do you think you should whip people who make money from charging interest on loans?

There is no such thing as an "ordinary Christian".

Wait, what are you saing? That you cannot be ordinary christian unless you're dogmatic? Or that you can't be ordinary christian if you are?

I'm a little confused by your post, but there's plenty of people who don't submit to catholic teachings but I'd still describe them as "ordinary christians". Maybe it's just different in the USA?

Edit: IMO this is the same kind of thinking which leads a lot of people to thinking that all followers of Islam are terrorists and such. Maybe I'm jsut misinterpreting you though.

[J Thomas]

There is no such thing as an "ordinary Christian".
Do you believe in the Bible? If not, you're not an "ordinary Christian".
Do you believe the Bible is true, or an allegorical tale? Do you believe the world was created 6000 years ago, and that two people called Adam and Eve were the first humans ever? Do you believe in evolution? Do you believe in the four different stories of Jesus' life, as told in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? Do you believe that when you drink Communion wine, it really is blood? Do you believe you should kill people who commit adultery? Do you think you should whip people who make money from charging interest on loans?

There is no such thing as an "ordinary Christian".

Wait, what are you saing? That you cannot be ordinary christian unless you're dogmatic? Or that you can't be ordinary christian if you are?

I'm a little confused by your post, but there's plenty of people who don't submit to catholic teachings but I'd still describe them as "ordinary christians". Maybe it's just different in the USA?

Edit: IMO this is the same kind of thinking which leads a lot of people to thinking that all followers of Islam are terrorists and such. Maybe I'm jsut misinterpreting you though.

I'm not completely certain, but I think he's saying that there's no such thing as an "ordinary Christian".

Not that all christians are the same, but that they're too diverse to set a norm to.

But politicians can't treat us as unique snowflakes, they have to figure out ways to appeal to maximum numbers of voters. So when Democrats look at which shoppers are particularly attracted to the GOP brand, they think about types of people because that's the best our limited brains can do. Of course it's mostly Democrats who analyze the Republican brand, since Republicans have little to gain by doing that in public, and if an analyst isn't partisan for one side or the other, who will listen to him?

Democrats see the GOP as a fragile coalition among a few large groups. Each of the individual groups looks reasonably homogeneous, at least enough to think of them as separate groups, and somehow the GOP has to balance them enough to keep them together.

First there are traditional Republicans. They want government to favor businesses over unions. After all, a union is basicly a monopoly, right? They restrain trade and make things more expensive. So in general if a union is in favor of something they're against it. They want the government to stamp out recreational drugs which are bad for business productivity. They want a strong military, and they want favorable foreign trade agreements. They want businesses to get easy low-interest loans, and they want low inflation.

Then there are southerners. They used to be Democrats but the Democratic Party decided it didn't like them and threw them away, and they've been Republicans ever since. Democrats think it's because they're racists, but that's a small part of being southern. More than other americans, southerners believe in traditional families and traditional morals. They tend to be christian. They want a strong military, particularly since military pay is a better deal for them than it is for richer places. Lots of military retirees live in the south because it's a cheaper place to live. Southerners tend to believe in free enterprise the way they believe in christianity. They want to stamp out recreational drugs because those are bad for families and bad for addicts etc. They want low inflation and they don't understand banks.

Then there are libertarians. Libertarians want minimal government. They want freedom. They want freedom to have recreational drugs whether they would actually use them or not. They want businesses to be free to make money. They do not want christians deciding how they should live. They tend to want a weak military, or no military at all. They tend to want to eliminate government influence over inflation by disbanding the Fed and switching to the gold standard. They do understand banking, and many of them want to make fractional-reserve banking illegal. Or at least teach everybody enough about how banks work that the banks would all fail for lack of suckers.

There was a time when the southerners and the libertarians were great for traditional Republicans. They could talk like they were christians with traditional family values, and talk about minimal government, and they got votes. But increasingly the other groups want more than friendly talk. Southerners field their own candidates like Santorum. Libertarians field their own candidates like Ron Paul. They expect to actually get political results. And Democrats dream of the GOP splitting. That's probably less likely than it would appear. All three groups hate liberals. Liberals tried to use the government to change society. They trampled on southern values. They trampled on libertarian freedom. They trampled on business. Republicans remember. If the Democratic Party ever takes over again, maybe the hidden liberals will come creeping out of the woodwork again to crawl over everybody. So there's a pretty good chance the GOP will hold together at least until the last voter who actually experienced liberals has been buried.

Of course it doesn't have to be split among traditionals, southerners, and libertarians. There are christian voters outside the south who get attracted to southern candidates. There are militarists who care mostly about keeping the military strong and keeping those military contracts pouring into the trough. You can split things up whichever way is most useful to you. But of course your abstractions are creations, tools to aid your thinking and not real things in themselves.

Conceptualization is art, and you are the artist.

[Klear]

@J Thomas

Wow... that's actually a pretty nice breakdown for us non-americans. We not only tend to view the republicans as a homogenous group, but often all americans as a single homogenous group, so thanks for that.

[VioletSkies]

Step 1: Create an absurdist comic that, while topical, does not inherently carry a concrete statement.
Step 2: Post it for your left-brained fanbase, most of whom literally make a living off of problem solving.
Step 3: Make some popcorn and read your forums.

I was thinking exactly this. This comic could not be more innocuous (evidenced by different people saying it seems both "pro Romney" and "anti Romney" at the same time), and yet it has exploded into left versus right.

For our non-American readers, just so you know, only the polar ends of the spectrum are so loud and vociferous. There ARE moderates in the country who don't fly off the handle at the slightest provocation.

And to our American readers, shame on you. No wonder we appear to the rest of the world to be completely polarized and to not accomplish anything.

[Klear]

Step 1: Create an absurdist comic that, while topical, does not inherently carry a concrete statement.
Step 2: Post it for your left-brained fanbase, most of whom literally make a living off of problem solving.
Step 3: Make some popcorn and read your forums.

I was thinking exactly this. This comic could not be more innocuous (evidenced by different people saying it seems both "pro Romney" and "anti Romney" at the same time), and yet it has exploded into left versus right.

For our non-American readers, just so you know, only the polar ends of the spectrum are so loud and vociferous. There ARE moderates in the country who don't fly off the handle at the slightest provocation.

And to our American readers, shame on you. No wonder we appear to the rest of the world to be completely polarized and to not accomplish anything.

So the comic is basically trolling? I hope not.

BTW, politics are polarized the same way in Czech republic (even though we have more than two parties) so I believe this is pretty much universal. Here whoever is leftist is automatically a communist in the eyes of the right wing people and those in turn are often, oddly, also communits in the eyes of the leftist. And don't get me started on the ones who are actually voting for the communist party. Yeah, I think politics are a filthy matter no matter where you are from.

[Rotherian]

I must ask, though: Exactly how long have you spent in uniform ready to defend your country's interests domestically or abroad? 21 years like me? 21 months? 21 weeks? 21 days?

I personally have helped to fend off every single foreign invasion of the United States which has occurred in my lifetime.

I have never been a part of any military or paramilitary organization and may not have ever fired an actual firearm.

Maybe ask again when there are actual armies actually attacking us to defend ourselves from.

Please read it again focusing on the underlined portion.

I read it the first time and that was my point.

The only legitimate interest that justifies military action to defend is our freedom from military invasion.

That is your opinion. (Which, of course, you are entitled to, but those that create national policy, the Legislative branch of the federal government - which includes members from more than one political party - have a different opinion.)

Antiterrorism is police work, not military; it's practically the whole reason we have a federal police force (the FBI) in the first place.

The FBI has no jurisdiction to pursue someone suspected of any felony offense (including terrorism) past national borders, without obtaining permission from the country on the other side of the border in question. Are you suggesting that they should just chase the suspect to the border, then say, "Oh well. We tried."?

Everything else -- what, "securing" foreign resources? Enacting "regime change" that we think will maybe prevent possible future military invasion? You're asking how much of that kind of work we've done, before we can criticise that people do it? A gang-banger thug may as well say "How much time have you spent out on the street robbing people at gun point? How many drive-bys have you done? Get some experience defending your interests before you criticise."

No. If you're a fucking thug robbing people and shooting up the houses of others you think might shoot you some day, you're a fucking thug and I can tell you so without having to have been a thug to level that criticism.

I welcome you to provide undeniable evidence that any projectile from any weapon that I personally fired while deployed to Iraq even touched the exterior walls of a building, much less actually penetrated a building. Of course, said evidence does not exist because very few members of the military engaged in the action that you specified. I didn't, nor did any member of my unit.

You don't have to have been a criminal to denounce the crime, and you don't have to have worked in the military to denounce much of its activities. Did you ever consider that maybe people don't join the military because they denounce its activities, and aren't giant hypocrites who engage in activities they denounce?

Since you are trying to draw comparisons between two things which, in actually, are - at their core - completely different, allow me to connect two things with a much greater degree of similarity. An orange and a small grapefruit may appear, to one that has no experience with either, to be very simiilar. They are both citrus fruits, and externally there is a great deal of similarity. (There are still visible differences, even from the outside, but if one had experience with neither, they might be convinced that the two fruits are the same.) If you peel back the exteriors of each, you will start noticing more marked differences between the two fruits. If you actually take the time to bite into each one, you will know that they are definitely not the same fruit.

Being a thug and being a soldier have a lot fewer external similarities than an orange and a grapefruit. Internally, there are even fewer similarities.

Also, note that I have not starting using profanity against you, but that you appear to have felt that profanity was necessary to add some weight to your argument.

I'm not saying that the military doesn't have some problems, it does. One would be hard pressed to find any organization, military or otherwise, which doesn't have an issue or two (or several, in some cases).

Additionally, standing outside looking in rarely yields a comprehensive viewpoint. Try this experiment:

You and a friend each grab a notebook and a writing utensil. If there is one available, find a room with an exterior facing window. One of you stand inside the room and list everything visible within the room. The other should stand outside the window and list everything visible within the room. Neither should communicate information during the course of the experiment. Once each of you has completed a list, compare them. Unless a) the room is completely encased in glass, or b) information is passed prior to the list comparison, the lists will be somewhat different.

But just as denouncing the thug mugging people and shooting up houses isn't the same as denouncing all violence -- you've still got legitimate self-defense -- denouncing the military today is not the same as denouncing people who have actually defended us from actual invasions.

Too many people doing the former in the military today try to suck up the glory of the many true heroes who have actually died for a just cause doing the latter, and it dishonors those heroes for wannabes with some expensive technology blowing up backwater primitives half a world away to act like they deserve the same glory as men who died defending their homes.

I've killed (and believe me, I still have nightmares about that), but I've never fired a shot at someone that did not shoot at me, or the soldiers I was sworn to protect, first. I didn't use expensive technology, I used a rifle that cost less than $1000 to purchase whole (and quite a bit less if you do your own assembly). I didn't blow anybody up. I returned fire when somebody shot at me.

Also, please discontinue with the polite fiction that there is somehow glory in either defense or offense. There is none. There is merely acting in what you believe to be a necessary manner at a given point in time.

Until you've fought a just war like them, and not just served as a cog in some gigantic sabre-rattling machine vaguely "protecting our interests", maybe you're not one to talk either.

You've probably heard the phrase, "[You] can't see the forest for the trees." This can be true in some respects in that within a forest, it is hard to tell where it ends until you reach a clearing. So, in essence, from within an organization one might not know how it looks to an external observer.

However, the reverse is just as true. You can't see the trees for the forest. That is, as an external observer, you might be able to get an idea of the general shape of the forest, and may even be able to see that the ones nearest you are deciduous. However, assuming that the entire forest contains only the types of trees that you can see from your viewpoint, although it might be close enough in your opinion, would most likely not reflect reality. Likewise, from outside an organization, what you observe may not reflect the reality of the situation.

I don't expect you to change your views. All I really expect is that you devote rational thought to examining your views. If you choose not to do so, I can't really do anything about it. And since this will likely come up in discussion, I examine my views on a daily basis to see if my preconceived notions reflect the evidence that I have available.

[Pfhorrest]

Antiterrorism is police work, not military; it's practically the whole reason we have a federal police force (the FBI) in the first place.

The FBI has no jurisdiction to pursue someone suspected of any felony offense (including terrorism) past national borders, without obtaining permission from the country on the other side of the border in question. Are you suggesting that they should just chase the suspect to the border, then say, "Oh well. We tried."?

Maybe work with those other countries' own police forces on apprehending and prosecuting the criminal?

If they just say "no" and actually condone undeniable acts of terrorism against us, that's tantamount to an undeclared war and is deserving of military response.

Everything else -- what, "securing" foreign resources? Enacting "regime change" that we think will maybe prevent possible future military invasion? You're asking how much of that kind of work we've done, before we can criticise that people do it? A gang-banger thug may as well say "How much time have you spent out on the street robbing people at gun point? How many drive-bys have you done? Get some experience defending your interests before you criticise."

No. If you're a fucking thug robbing people and shooting up the houses of others you think might shoot you some day, you're a fucking thug and I can tell you so without having to have been a thug to level that criticism.

I welcome you to provide undeniable evidence that any projectile from any weapon that I personally fired while deployed to Iraq even touched the exterior walls of a building, much less actually penetrated a building. Of course, said evidence does not exist because very few members of the military engaged in the action that you specified. I didn't, nor did any member of my unit.

I wasn't calling you (or anybody else in the military) a gang thug doing the things that gang thugs do. I was making an analogy between judging thugs for the things they do without doing them oneself, and judging the military without having been in it. In said analogy, "shooting up the houses of others you think might shoot you some day" is analogous to preemptive wars (and muggings are analogous to military action to "secure foreign resources").

You don't have to have been a criminal to denounce the crime, and you don't have to have worked in the military to denounce much of its activities. Did you ever consider that maybe people don't join the military because they denounce its activities, and aren't giant hypocrites who engage in activities they denounce?

Since you are trying to draw comparisons between two things which, in actually, are - at their core - completely different [...]

Being a thug and being a soldier have a lot fewer external similarities than an orange and a grapefruit. Internally, there are even fewer similarities.

The point of the analogy is that one does not have to participate in an action one condemns in order to condemn it. With obvious uncontroversial crimes, that much is obvious; we condemn criminals without being criminals all the time. So why must one have been in the military to condemn some of the things it does? The point is not to call military action obvious crime, but to establish a principle with a clear, exaggerated case of obvious crime, and then apply it back to the subtler case of controversial military actions.

Also, note that I have not starting using profanity against you, but that you appear to have felt that profanity was necessary to add some weight to your argument.

Sorry, I've had a stressful few days and it's bleeding through in my language. It wasn't directed at you (note again above that I was not calling you a thug), but for emphasis of the obviousness of condemning (actual, uncontroversial) thugs committing (actual, uncontroversial) crimes.

I've killed (and believe me, I still have nightmares about that), but I've never fired a shot at someone that did not shoot at me, or the soldiers I was sworn to protect, first. I didn't use expensive technology, I used a rifle that cost less than $1000 to purchase whole (and quite a bit less if you do your own assembly). I didn't blow anybody up. I returned fire when somebody shot at me.

I don't condemn every individual soldier in the field. I've no doubt that most are in a similar situation to yourself. What I condemn is the overall organization. My condemnation of the individuals in it extends only to their support of it. You're backing a condemnable organization, even if your actions themselves are not condemnable.

[unus vox]

Step 1: Create an absurdist comic that, while topical, does not inherently carry a concrete statement.
Step 2: Post it for your left-brained fanbase, most of whom literally make a living off of problem solving.
Step 3: Make some popcorn and read your forums.

I was thinking exactly this. This comic could not be more innocuous (evidenced by different people saying it seems both "pro Romney" and "anti Romney" at the same time), and yet it has exploded into left versus right.

For our non-American readers, just so you know, only the polar ends of the spectrum are so loud and vociferous. There ARE moderates in the country who don't fly off the handle at the slightest provocation.

And to our American readers, shame on you. No wonder we appear to the rest of the world to be completely polarized and to not accomplish anything.

So the comic is basically trolling? I hope not.

Or maybe Randall felt like being silly, and doesn't feel the need to warn his readers that some comics are not meant to be critically dissected in order to achieve some groundbreaking statement.

Some people troll themselves.

[J Thomas]

I must ask, though: Exactly how long have you spent in uniform ready to defend your country's interests domestically or abroad? 21 years like me? 21 months? 21 weeks? 21 days?

....
Maybe ask again when there are actual armies actually attacking us to defend ourselves from.

Please read it again focusing on the underlined portion.

I read it the first time and that was my point.

The only legitimate interest that justifies military action to defend is our freedom from military invasion.

That is your opinion. (Which, of course, you are entitled to, but those that create national policy, the Legislative branch of the federal government - which includes members from more than one political party - have a different opinion.)

When they agreed to join the UN, they signed an international treaty that spelled out the circumstances that the USA is justified in attacking other nations. If they disagree with that treaty they should withdraw from the UN rather than just break the treaty whenever they feel like it.

Antiterrorism is police work, not military; it's practically the whole reason we have a federal police force (the FBI) in the first place.

The FBI has no jurisdiction to pursue someone suspected of any felony offense (including terrorism) past national borders, without obtaining permission from the country on the other side of the border in question. Are you suggesting that they should just chase the suspect to the border, then say, "Oh well. We tried."?

It depends. Usually, international police cooperation is the best approach. That has worked so well that there have been no significant terrorist attacks in the USA in the last 10 years, despite our state-terrorist attacks on multiple foreign nations. When foreign nations drag their feet a bit about cooperating, a degree of patience is likely to pay off handsomely. So for example Bush demanded that the Afghan government deliver Bin Ladin, and they quite reasonably asked for proof of his crimes. Bush said we had proof but we wouldn't show it to them. They didn't agree about what to do and they argued with each other some, and Bush started a war real quick. Who knows what would have happened if we had given them the evidence, or given them time to decide? No way to tell now, but it's real clear that what we did got a bad result. Did Bush actually have evidence? It was only a couple of years later he claimed he had proof that Saddam was building nukes, and later we found out that was only lies.

It's a lot easier for us to get into wars than out of them, so we need to be careful and deliberate before we punch those tarbabies.

Everything else -- what, "securing" foreign resources? Enacting "regime change" that we think will maybe prevent possible future military invasion? You're asking how much of that kind of work we've done, before we can criticise that people do it? A gang-banger thug may as well say "How much time have you spent out on the street robbing people at gun point? How many drive-bys have you done? Get some experience defending your interests before you criticise."

No. If you're a fucking thug robbing people and shooting up the houses of others you think might shoot you some day, you're a fucking thug and I can tell you so without having to have been a thug to level that criticism.

I welcome you to provide undeniable evidence that any projectile from any weapon that I personally fired while deployed to Iraq even touched the exterior walls of a building, much less actually penetrated a building.

He isn't saying that you personally robbed anybody. He's objecting to your bad reasoning. If it was true that US voters couldn't reject military adventures until after they personally participated in those military adventures, we'd have a pretty sorry excuse for a democracy. And if it was true for soldiers, it would also be true for thieves. If you can't say that fighting some particular war is a bad idea until you have personally fought that war, then you can't say that robbing particular people is a bad idea until you have robbed those people. It's the exact same reasoning, about obviously different things.

I'm not saying that the military doesn't have some problems, it does. One would be hard pressed to find any organization, military or otherwise, which doesn't have an issue or two (or several, in some cases).

Speaking for myself, I think the US military does a lot of things very well. Putting aside the problems which are pretty much inevitable with large organizations, I think none of the serious problems are the fault of the military. They were given far too grandiose goals, and far too much money. Also they grew too fast.

About specifics, in 2001-2003 the US military was organized to destroy other militaries. They did that exceptionally well. The Iraqi army folded without much of a fight; the minor unexpected problems came mostly from civilian irregulars. We were not ready to run an occupation on a hostile civilian population. Perhaps they should have declined the mission, but the politicians told them there would be no civilian resistance and they did not disagree.... One giant problem that built on this one was that the Israelis gave us training in their methods of urban warfare and civilian control. The methods were very efficient, but unfortunately they were based on the assumption that the civilian population would be implacably hostile no matter what you did, and that tended to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Local civilians who got treated that way did tend to become implacably hostile. It didn't work very well, and by the time we had better training a lot of damage had been done. Poor planning, about something our military had been forbidden to plan for until after the war began.

I'm not sure it's a good thing for our military focus to switch to civilian control. It's expensive, and a long grinding effort, and the long-term rewards look minimal. But it might turn out that US society collapses and we will need the military to occupy the USA, and if so then it will be a good thing that they now have a lot of training and first-hand experience at it.

But just as denouncing the thug mugging people and shooting up houses isn't the same as denouncing all violence -- you've still got legitimate self-defense -- denouncing the military today is not the same as denouncing people who have actually defended us from actual invasions.

Too many people doing the former in the military today try to suck up the glory of the many true heroes who have actually died for a just cause doing the latter, and it dishonors those heroes for wannabes with some expensive technology blowing up backwater primitives half a world away to act like they deserve the same glory as men who died defending their homes.

When was the last time the USA actually got invaded? The last time I can think of was Pancho Villa in 1916. He made a raid across the US border that lasted less than a day, and in response about 5000 US soldiers raided northern Mexico for 6 months in a "punitive expedition". I guess there were several more incursions on US soil while we were doing that.

Until you've fought a just war like them, and not just served as a cog in some gigantic sabre-rattling machine vaguely "protecting our interests", maybe you're not one to talk either.

You've probably heard the phrase, "[You] can't see the forest for the trees." This can be true in some respects in that within a forest, it is hard to tell where it ends until you reach a clearing. So, in essence, from within an organization one might not know how it looks to an external observer.

However, the reverse is just as true. You can't see the trees for the forest. That is, as an external observer, you might be able to get an idea of the general shape of the forest, and may even be able to see that the ones nearest you are deciduous. However, assuming that the entire forest contains only the types of trees that you can see from your viewpoint, although it might be close enough in your opinion, would most likely not reflect reality.

When you decide whether your own actions were justified, you particularly need to look at the trees. The "forest" provides the bigger context, that might result in people shooting at you because of your uniform etc, maybe independent of anything you personally did. But your personal actions came from the specific things close to you.

When voters decide how long they want to keep spending massive sums to continue the war, they have to look at the forest. It's only natural after so much has been sacrificed already, to hope that if we keep sacrificing more then someday something might happen which can somehow justify it. We have to look carefully at that possibility, and choose whether that chance is worth more lives and money. If you've spent time in the trees that might not give you any better perspective about the future of the forest.

[Rotherian]

When you decide whether your own actions were justified, you particularly need to look at the trees. The "forest" provides the bigger context, that might result in people shooting at you because of your uniform etc, maybe independent of anything you personally did. But your personal actions came from the specific things close to you.

When voters decide how long they want to keep spending massive sums to continue the war, they have to look at the forest. It's only natural after so much has been sacrificed already, to hope that if we keep sacrificing more then someday something might happen which can somehow justify it. We have to look carefully at that possibility, and choose whether that chance is worth more lives and money. If you've spent time in the trees that might not give you any better perspective about the future of the forest.

I'm sure you and Pfhorrest both understand what I am trying to say. Based upon some of the posts made in other threads, both of you strike me as intelligent people. Assumptions based upon limited information, while not morally better or worse than those based upon less limited (but still not perfect) information, can still be incorrect.

I was going to make a long-winded analogy about icebergs and the visible portions thereof. I decided against it.

Therefore, in the interest of civility, I am willing to concede that, as a former member of the US military, I have a positive bias toward them (and thus my viewpoint may not accurately reflect the entirety of the military), if you (that is, J Thomas and Pfhorrest) concede that your viewpoint of the military does not necessarily accurately reflect the entirety of the military.

If we can start from that common ground, I believe that we can actually have a rational debate about the military. Because this back and forth is getting us nowhere.

[Pfhorrest]

Therefore, in the interest of civility, I am willing to concede that, as a former member of the US military, I have a positive bias toward them (and thus my viewpoint may not accurately reflect the entirety of the military), if you (that is, J Thomas and Pfhorrest) concede that your viewpoint of the military does not necessarily accurately reflect the entirety of the military.

If we can start from that common ground, I believe that we can actually have a rational debate about the military. Because this back and forth is getting us nowhere.

I'm not actually too interested in discussing the merits of the military and its specific actions, although I supposed I could be down for that; but I consider that a tangent from the reason I was originally posting, which was to call out the fallacy in your "don't knock it until you've tried it" type of argument.

If there are good reasons to knock something, those are likely also good reasons not to try it, and if people can learn those lessons without trying it, more power to them.

I suppose I was a bit too subtle in my way of saying that. The intention was "I've participated in every military action during my lifetime that I think should have happened in the first place"*, with the consequent implication that "I don't need to participate in actions I think shouldn't happen in order to think that they shouldn't happen." Getting into what actions really should or shouldn't happen is strictly beside that point.

*(This might be a bit of hyperbole, because I can't say with certainty that I condemn everything the US military has done in my lifetime, and I probably don't. But you don't get the choice of what wars to fight when you sign up to fight, and nothing has been so obviously worth fighting as to counterbalance the obviously wrong ones which I'd end up required to fight if I signed up at all).

[Rotherian]

Therefore, in the interest of civility, I am willing to concede that, as a former member of the US military, I have a positive bias toward them (and thus my viewpoint may not accurately reflect the entirety of the military), if you (that is, J Thomas and Pfhorrest) concede that your viewpoint of the military does not necessarily accurately reflect the entirety of the military.

If we can start from that common ground, I believe that we can actually have a rational debate about the military. Because this back and forth is getting us nowhere.

I'm not actually too interested in discussing the merits of the military and its specific actions, although I supposed I could be down for that; but I consider that a tangent from the reason I was originally posting, which was to call out the fallacy in your "don't knock it until you've tried it" type of argument.

I wasn't inviting you to discuss the merits, per se. A debate doesn't occur when both sides of the discussion are only talking about the positive points.

Most of your apparent problems with the military seem to stem from the non-domestic usage of them. One thing you need to realize - and maybe you already do - is that although commanders are allowed to make decisions about the specific tactics and strategies used, they are not allowed to decide strategic goals (they might, in some cases, be consulted about certain ones, but the politicians are the ones that decide whether to act upon that advice), and they aren't allowed to decide not to deploy. The Executive and Legislative branches of the federal government are the ones that make those decisions.

The military is a tool for enforcing political decisions, albeit a tool comprised of human beings (and associated equipment). If you really want to point the finger of blame at someone, point it at the politicians. Better yet, try to garner support for the political candidate that you believe will avoid using that tool the most.

Finally, if you interpreted my comment(s) as "don't knock it until you've tried it", then maybe I used the wrong words to try to get my point across. What I was merely trying to get across is that being outside and looking in, (under most circumstances) doesn't give one a full picture of what is there. If I am not mistaken, I have brought this point up several times in follow-on posts, but that point has yet to be discussed otherwise.

[J Thomas]

.... Assumptions based upon limited information, while not morally better or worse than those based upon less limited (but still not perfect) information, can still be incorrect.

....

Therefore, in the interest of civility, I am willing to concede that, as a former member of the US military, I have a positive bias toward them (and thus my viewpoint may not accurately reflect the entirety of the military), if you (that is, J Thomas and Pfhorrest) concede that your viewpoint of the military does not necessarily accurately reflect the entirety of the military.

If we can start from that common ground, I believe that we can actually have a rational debate about the military. Because this back and forth is getting us nowhere.

Certainly none of us understand the entirety of the military. And yet, as citizens and voters we have a responsibility to make choices even while we know that our information is limited and imperfect.

.... Most of your apparent problems with the military seem to stem from the non-domestic usage of them. One thing you need to realize .... is that although commanders are allowed to make decisions about the specific tactics and strategies used, they are not allowed to decide strategic goals (they might, in some cases, be consulted about certain ones, but the politicians are the ones that decide whether to act upon that advice), and they aren't allowed to decide not to deploy. The Executive and Legislative branches of the federal government are the ones that make those decisions.

A commander is not protected by an order from a minister or prince who is absent from the theater of operations and has little or no knowledge of the most recent turn of events. Every commander responsible for executing a plan that he considers bad or disastrous is criminal. He must point out the flaws, insist that it be changed and at last resort resign rather than be the instrument of the destruction of his own men. Every commander in chief who—as a result of superior orders—delivers a battle convinced that he will lose it, is likewise a criminal. Napoleon

In retrospect, Shinseki was right to object to the Iraq invasion, and right to maintain his objections to the point that he was replaced. Even though the result was that a lesser man did his job badly. There was the chance that the politicians would listen to him and revise their plans accordingly, and that chance was worth the cost.

The military is a tool for enforcing political decisions, albeit a tool comprised of human beings (and associated equipment). If you really want to point the finger of blame at someone, point it at the politicians. Better yet, try to garner support for the political candidate that you believe will avoid using that tool the most.

Yes. Beyond the responsibility of a senior officer to share his expertise with the politicians and object to plans he believes are seriously flawed, the military must obey the politicians.

What should happen when a war goes sour? When our existence is at stake we can't quit, unless we can work out some sort of truce. But what if it's just some war we got into because it seemed like a good idea at the time, and it turned out bad?

Vietnam turned out bad. Officially our military guys said it was going well, but the Pentagon Papers showed they were pretty gloomy on it among themselves. They thought it was their patriotic duty to lie about it to US citizens. Afterward, they thought out what went wrong and decided the problem was that we had lots of draftees serving in the regular army and we didn't call up the Reserves. Regular army officers who say things aren't working look like they are personally incompetent. It looks like they can't make things work, and it looks like the liars can. Reserve officers can tell the truth because they're just doing their duty and not bucking for promotions. So they redesigned the system so any big long war would require us to bring in the Reserves.

To some extent that's worked. Many Reserve officers are pretty scathing in private about what they've seen. But it didn't come close to solving the problem.

So here we are. Voters don't understand the war so they don't know how long we should continue. Soldiers are told they are obliged to tell voters the war is going well. If it reaches the point that the best way to support the troops is to get them out of there, how are we supposed to find out?

[Pfhorrest]

I wasn't inviting you to discuss the merits, per se. A debate doesn't occur when both sides of the discussion are only talking about the positive points.

I was using "merits" in the sense of "value" in general, not in a specifically positive sense. To discuss the merits of something, as in to discuss not only how good it is, but whether it is any good at all, and if so, why, and if not, why not.

Most of your apparent problems with the military seem to stem from the non-domestic usage of them. One thing you need to realize - and maybe you already do - is that although commanders are allowed to make decisions about the specific tactics and strategies used, they are not allowed to decide strategic goals (they might, in some cases, be consulted about certain ones, but the politicians are the ones that decide whether to act upon that advice), and they aren't allowed to decide not to deploy. The Executive and Legislative branches of the federal government are the ones that make those decisions.

The military is a tool for enforcing political decisions, albeit a tool comprised of human beings (and associated equipment). If you really want to point the finger of blame at someone, point it at the politicians. Better yet, try to garner support for the political candidate that you believe will avoid using that tool the most.

I do blame the politicians. But it's like... let us grant for the sake of argument that Monsanto is a horrible company that does bad things. (Pick your own least favorite company if you like, but they seem to be the bane of everybody everywhere, be it for health, environment, or intellectual property issues, and probably others). That doesn't mean that everybody who works for them is a bad person. The janitors certainly aren't suing people for patent infringement for having their heirloom organic seed infected by genetically modified corn genes. They're just cleaning the floors. Likewise the guys who drive their trucks. The people who input data in accounts receivable. The secretaries who make phone calls and schedule appointments. The guys who keep the servers running, the artists who design their ads... Not even the biochemists figuring out how to engineer plants resistant to certain pesticides. Maybe not even the lawyers doing the actual suing (maybe). But somewhere up at the top of the company are some executives planning and directing all the bad things the company does, and even if none of them are mustachio-twirling cackling evil villains, the company as a whole is still condemnable.

So then you meet Bob the janitor, who decided to go work for Monsanto. And you, knowing the evil monstrosity they are, ask him "Why!? Why would you work for them? How can you support such a horrible company?" Any failure to do something right can be boiled down to either "didn't know", "didn't care", or "couldn't help it"; so if we grant that supporting Monsanto is the wrong thing to do, and that nobody is strictly forced to work for them, Bob's answer must be one of two things: he didn't know, in which case, if he regrets it now that he does, he's innocent and the point's been made; or he didn't care, in which case he's tacitly approving of all their wrongdoing and deserves condemnation alongside the rest of the company.

There was a time when "couldn't help it" was an answer for "why did you join the military", and those people are even more innocent than the "didn't know" camp. But nowadays, from the perspective of someone who finds the actions of the modern military (as a whole, from the politicians down) condemnable, "why would you willingly sign up for that?" has only two possible answers -- "I didn't know, I didn't realize the bad things they do", or "I don't care, I don't find the things that they do bad".

Any discussion about why to find the organization as a whole condemnable will clear up whether the individual lacked either proper knowledge or proper concern (from the perspective of the person finding it condemnable, of course; and likewise, further discussion on what knowledge and concerns are proper may vindicate the organization of those charges).

Finally, if you interpreted my comment(s) as "don't knock it until you've tried it", then maybe I used the wrong words to try to get my point across. What I was merely trying to get across is that being outside and looking in, (under most circumstances) doesn't give one a full picture of what is there. If I am not mistaken, I have brought this point up several times in follow-on posts, but that point has yet to be discussed otherwise.

Which is it that you think we could gain insight into looking at it "from the inside": your reasons for joining the military, or the reasons for the military doing what it does? Because nobody that I've seen is condemning you personally, except to the extent that you adopt as part of your identity an organization that they are condemning. Your reasons for joining it may distance you from the condemnation of the organization, but the condemnation of the organization itself will not be affected by your reasons for joining it.

So if you have some special insight into why politicians command the military to do as they do, which will vindicate those actions, then lets hear it; but if not, the only question for you is why would you willingly put yourself under their command? That you were just following orders and making the best of a dangerous situation isn't much of a defense when you had to first choose to be subject to those orders and be put in (or help create) that situation.

[J Thomas]

Most of your apparent problems with the military seem to stem from the non-domestic usage of them. ....

The military is a tool for enforcing political decisions, albeit a tool comprised of human beings (and associated equipment). If you really want to point the finger of blame at someone, point it at the politicians. Better yet, try to garner support for the political candidate that you believe will avoid using that tool the most.

I do blame the politicians. But it's like... let us grant for the sake of argument that Monsanto is a horrible company that does bad things. (Pick your own least favorite company if you like, but they seem to be the bane of everybody everywhere, be it for health, environment, or intellectual property issues, and probably others). That doesn't mean that everybody who works for them is a bad person. The janitors .... They're just cleaning the floors. .... But somewhere up at the top of the company are some executives planning and directing all the bad things the company does, and even if none of them are mustachio-twirling cackling evil villains, the company as a whole is still condemnable.

So then you meet Bob the janitor, who decided to go work for Monsanto. And you, knowing the evil monstrosity they are, ask him "Why!? Why would you work for them? How can you support such a horrible company?" Any failure to do something right can be boiled down to either "didn't know", "didn't care", or "couldn't help it"; so if we grant that supporting Monsanto is the wrong thing to do, and that nobody is strictly forced to work for them, Bob's answer must be one of two things: he didn't know, in which case, if he regrets it now that he does, he's innocent and the point's been made; or he didn't care, in which case he's tacitly approving of all their wrongdoing and deserves condemnation alongside the rest of the company.

There was a time when "couldn't help it" was an answer for "why did you join the military", and those people are even more innocent than the "didn't know" camp. But nowadays, from the perspective of someone who finds the actions of the modern military (as a whole, from the politicians down) condemnable, "why would you willingly sign up for that?" has only two possible answers -- "I didn't know, I didn't realize the bad things they do", or "I don't care, I don't find the things that they do bad".

You are implying that you think the US military as a whole is bad. That puts you outside the US dialogue. When you say that, it translates in the American language to "I'm a commy/anarchist/liberal/foreign bastard who hates democracy and the USA and I want you to ignore everything I say except to revile me and tell me I'm stupid and evil". You can't be part of the discussion in the USA unless you support the troops. In discussion, you can support the troops by saying you support the troops, or you can support the troops by saying we need to get them out of an unwinnable mistake of a war. In practice you can support the troops by paying your taxes, and if you see somebody in uniform you can buy him a cup of coffee or something. You can send a box of chocolate chip cookies to some soldiers in Afghanistan.

....

Finally, if you interpreted my comment(s) as "don't knock it until you've tried it", then maybe I used the wrong words to try to get my point across. What I was merely trying to get across is that being outside and looking in, (under most circumstances) doesn't give one a full picture of what is there. If I am not mistaken, I have brought this point up several times in follow-on posts, but that point has yet to be discussed otherwise.

Which is it that you think we could gain insight into looking at it "from the inside": your reasons for joining the military, or the reasons for the military doing what it does? Because nobody that I've seen is condemning you personally, except to the extent that you adopt as part of your identity an organization that they are condemning. Your reasons for joining it may distance you from the condemnation of the organization, but the condemnation of the organization itself will not be affected by your reasons for joining it.

So if you have some special insight into why politicians command the military to do as they do, which will vindicate those actions, then lets hear it; but if not, the only question for you is why would you willingly put yourself under their command? That you were just following orders and making the best of a dangerous situation isn't much of a defense when you had to first choose to be subject to those orders and be put in (or help create) that situation.

You are implying that "I'm just following orders" is not a valid excuse. But mostly Americans believe it is a valid excuse for US soldiers obeying US orders, though it is not a valid excuse for foreign soldiers following foreign orders.

The bottom line here is that in both our current wars, we went in thinking it would be like the liberation of France. The people were being oppressed by corrupt brutal governments, and once we freed them they would be grateful and they would organize themselves into a peaceful grateful democracy like France, and we could happily put military bases there to help us organize the rest of the region.

And in both cases, we had a lot of trouble setting up local governments, and those local governments did not get much support from their patriotic citizens, and we had to use our army for long years to suppress strong determined revolts. In both cases we wound up interpreting the result as ethnic clashes, where our responsibility was to keep the ethnic groups from killing each other and meld them into a single political unit. This goal has, of course, failed.

In the process, of course, various horrible things happened. We don't have a good way to suppress a hostile population without doing anything bad. It's been the same for everybody else -- france in algeria, china in tibet, germany and japan wherever they occupied, russia in chechnya, you name it. England did superbly well in northern ireland, partly because the ethnic violence was almost entirely symbolic with hardly any real terrorism or ethnic cleaning going on. We don't know how to do it.

I say it's better not to try. But consider -- at the time, we had people arguing with a completely straight face that the West was at war with Islam, and that a billion muslims were all about to try to destroy us all, and we would inevitably be forced to nuke them. The argument was that the most merciful thing we could do was to try our very best to convert them into secular democratic consumers of western culture. Because the only alternative was a nuclear conflagration that would kill up to a billion people. No matter how idiotic that sounds today, it was a serious policy stand back then.

Also, you talk like it's wrong to join the military. But consider -- 20 years ago the military represented personal security. You had to give up certain privileges, but if you could keep your nose clean for 20 years you'd get a very good pension with great perqs. Money for college even while you served. You'd be first in line to get a job as a bureaucrat for the Federal government, and in another 20 years you could retire with a double pension. If you didn't come from an affluent background, and if you could get in, it was the best way to reach a comfortable living. And then around 10 years ago we went to war. Not like the Gulf War, where we spent a year building up supplies and then six weeks bombing the iraqis, and then we went home. This was an occupation intended to last indefinitely. Say that after 12 years you thought it was real bad. Your choice was to give up everything -- pension, second pension, all the perqs -- and try to get a job in a depressed economy. And if you were regular military you couldn't quit in wartime. They'd say you were just trying to get out of the hardships, that you were violating your oath because you were too much of a wimp to take it. There are severe penalties for that kind of thing.

That path takes a different kind of courage than fighting in battle. You have to take your own individual initiative, against all your buddies and against your nation, and you can expect to lose pretty much everything. For a principle. Far easier to decide that everybody's doing the best they can in a hard situation, and if we all keep slogging maybe things will work out.

[Rotherian]

Pfhorrest, we could continue like this for a long time, but I find that I do not wish to do so. You seem to want to blame the military for politician's decisions. I want the military to only be blamed for things which were completely within their sphere of control.

As I've said before, I'm willing to concede that my positive bias keeps me from having an all-encompassing viewpoint, as long as you also concede that your negative bias keeps you from having an all-encompassing viewpoint.

The way I see it is that we have one of two rational options: a) You can list every point about the military which you condemn, and then we can discuss those; or b) we can agree that both of our positions are valid for a given value of "valid", and that neither fully represents reality.

Of course, there are also plenty of irrational options, and you are more than welcome to choose those, if you so desire.

[J Thomas]

Pfhorrest, we could continue like this for a long time, but I find that I do not wish to do so. You seem to want to blame the military for politician's decisions. I want the military to only be blamed for things which were completely within their sphere of control.

When there are failures then people try to figure out who to blame them on. The current wars are a great big failure, mitigated somewhat by spending vast amounts of money. But I'm not interested in arguing whose fault it was. I want to figure out what to do.

As I've said before, I'm willing to concede that my positive bias keeps me from having an all-encompassing viewpoint, as long as you also concede that your negative bias keeps you from having an all-encompassing viewpoint.

I approve of your attempt at moral relativism. I would like for you to expand this. Consider the various crimes people get convicted of. Will you agree that people have an undeserved bias against criminals, despite not knowing the individual circumstances of each event the criminals are accused of? And that we lack the all-encompassing viewpoint that would tell us whether the laws are right laws versus wrong laws....

The way I see it is that we have one of two rational options: a) You can list every point about the military which you condemn, and then we can discuss those; or b) we can agree that both of our positions are valid for a given value of "valid", and that neither fully represents reality.

I don't think anything useful will come from arguing whether the army is good versus the army is bad. I'm more interested in what policies are good for us.

How big a military do we need? When we were the richest in the world and the USSR threatened to conquer everybody, we wanted a very big military. We could afford it. We could spend endless years preparing to fight the USSR without ever actually doing so. Since we believed a war would end in nukes killing everybody, we didn't have to be good at military defense and there was no way to tell how good we actually were. Those days are gone. We have to change with the times.

What kind of war should we prepare to fight? There's every reason to think we won't have a land war in asia against China for 20 years. Should we be ready for that now? The Russians are careful to keep their treaties etc, they don't want a big war either. They never did. In the next 20 years all our wars will be with third-world nations who are no real threat to us. What kind of military should we have, to do that?

Our last invasion of Panama shows that we are competent to do that. We can invade small latin american nations that know they can't possibly win, get things sorted out fast, install a government that will do what we want, and get out. Entirely apart from the question whether we should do that, we know it's an available option. We should stay strong enough to keep that option open. But what about larger nations like Venezuela? When they have a government that is widely unpopular, they don't need us to overthrow it. They can do that themselves if we merely stop giving that government weapons and riot-control training etc. When they have a government that is popular, invading it is likely to get a result worse than iraq.

Should we try to encourage coups or revolutions in nations whose governments we don't like? I think in general that has had bad results too. Chile, greece, indonesia, nicaragua, philippines, el salvador -- are there any examples where that came out better than awful in the long run? South korea, maybe, the dictator we installed there did OK and then got replaced by a vibrant democracy, right? Anybody else?

But what can we do to get rid of governments we don't like? Wait for them to do something so bad it calls for war, and then destroy the country? There has to be some way. We're the USA! We have the right and the duty to get rid of evil governments. But I don't know how.

We could have done a lot better in Iraq. We could have given Saddam an offer he could not refuse. Give him a few billion dollars and asylum if he sold Iraq to us. We get the place unbombed, for a lot less than we spent bombing it. We have time for an orderly transition, gradually dismantling the secret police etc. In retrospect it appears he did have considerable support in Iraq, but he wouldn't after he sold them to us. I suggested that to Bush, but he wouldn't listen.

I think we need to redesign our military. We need to fundamentally change our procurement system. We don't need to buy 500,000 drones. We need to buy automated factories that can quickly turn out 500,000 drones when we need them to. We don't need to buy many millions of PGMs, we need to be able to make them as quick as we need them. We don't need small numbers of advanced warships, we need lots of commercial ships -- container ships maybe -- that can quickly convert into warships.

We need a small, strong core of fighting men -- not just Marines. And we need to be able to recruit large numbers of trainees quickly. Set up computer games and paintball games and whatever we can so that enthusiastic civilians can cheaply learn how to do it, and then call them up at need. In a real emergency they'd suffer a lot of casualties while they learn for real. But we can't afford the training we do now, on the scale we do it.

We need an advanced logistics system, more automated than our current one, so that in an emergency we can get supplies to the troops. It has to work well when the time comes, on short notice, and not cost too much until then.

tl;dr: I don't care about who to blame. What we have does not work very well. And we can't afford it. Some of us think we need our current military so we can achieve our current objectives. We can't afford our current objectives. We need something cheaper, quick. We need to make more realistic objectives, and we need to achieve them cheaper.

[Rotherian]

Pfhorrest, we could continue like this for a long time, but I find that I do not wish to do so. You seem to want to blame the military for politician's decisions. I want the military to only be blamed for things which were completely within their sphere of control.

When there are failures then people try to figure out who to blame them on. The current wars are a great big failure, mitigated somewhat by spending vast amounts of money. But I'm not interested in arguing whose fault it was. I want to figure out what to do.

As I've said before, I'm willing to concede that my positive bias keeps me from having an all-encompassing viewpoint, as long as you also concede that your negative bias keeps you from having an all-encompassing viewpoint.

I approve of your attempt at moral relativism. I would like for you to expand this. Consider the various crimes people get convicted of. Will you agree that people have an undeserved bias against criminals, despite not knowing the individual circumstances of each event the criminals are accused of? And that we lack the all-encompassing viewpoint that would tell us whether the laws are right laws versus wrong laws....

The way I see it is that we have one of two rational options: a) You can list every point about the military which you condemn, and then we can discuss those; or b) we can agree that both of our positions are valid for a given value of "valid", and that neither fully represents reality.

I don't think anything useful will come from arguing whether the army is good versus the army is bad. I'm more interested in what policies are good for us.

How big a military do we need? When we were the richest in the world and the USSR threatened to conquer everybody, we wanted a very big military. We could afford it. We could spend endless years preparing to fight the USSR without ever actually doing so. Since we believed a war would end in nukes killing everybody, we didn't have to be good at military defense and there was no way to tell how good we actually were. Those days are gone. We have to change with the times.

What kind of war should we prepare to fight? There's every reason to think we won't have a land war in asia against China for 20 years. Should we be ready for that now? The Russians are careful to keep their treaties etc, they don't want a big war either. They never did. In the next 20 years all our wars will be with third-world nations who are no real threat to us. What kind of military should we have, to do that?

Our last invasion of Panama shows that we are competent to do that. We can invade small latin american nations that know they can't possibly win, get things sorted out fast, install a government that will do what we want, and get out. Entirely apart from the question whether we should do that, we know it's an available option. We should stay strong enough to keep that option open. But what about larger nations like Venezuela? When they have a government that is widely unpopular, they don't need us to overthrow it. They can do that themselves if we merely stop giving that government weapons and riot-control training etc. When they have a government that is popular, invading it is likely to get a result worse than iraq.

Should we try to encourage coups or revolutions in nations whose governments we don't like? I think in general that has had bad results too. Chile, greece, indonesia, nicaragua, philippines, el salvador -- are there any examples where that came out better than awful in the long run? South korea, maybe, the dictator we installed there did OK and then got replaced by a vibrant democracy, right? Anybody else?

But what can we do to get rid of governments we don't like? Wait for them to do something so bad it calls for war, and then destroy the country? There has to be some way. We're the USA! We have the right and the duty to get rid of evil governments. But I don't know how.

We could have done a lot better in Iraq. We could have given Saddam an offer he could not refuse. Give him a few billion dollars and asylum if he sold Iraq to us. We get the place unbombed, for a lot less than we spent bombing it. We have time for an orderly transition, gradually dismantling the secret police etc. In retrospect it appears he did have considerable support in Iraq, but he wouldn't after he sold them to us. I suggested that to Bush, but he wouldn't listen.

I think we need to redesign our military. We need to fundamentally change our procurement system. We don't need to buy 500,000 drones. We need to buy automated factories that can quickly turn out 500,000 drones when we need them to. We don't need to buy many millions of PGMs, we need to be able to make them as quick as we need them. We don't need small numbers of advanced warships, we need lots of commercial ships -- container ships maybe -- that can quickly convert into warships.

We need a small, strong core of fighting men -- not just Marines. And we need to be able to recruit large numbers of trainees quickly. Set up computer games and paintball games and whatever we can so that enthusiastic civilians can cheaply learn how to do it, and then call them up at need. In a real emergency they'd suffer a lot of casualties while they learn for real. But we can't afford the training we do now, on the scale we do it.

We need an advanced logistics system, more automated than our current one, so that in an emergency we can get supplies to the troops. It has to work well when the time comes, on short notice, and not cost too much until then.

tl;dr: I don't care about who to blame. What we have does not work very well. And we can't afford it. Some of us think we need our current military so we can achieve our current objectives. We can't afford our current objectives. We need something cheaper, quick. We need to make more realistic objectives, and we need to achieve them cheaper.

J Thomas, although we didn't initially agree, thank you for that reasoned response. Those are actually good ideas. I'm not sure if it would be possible for either the Democratic party or the Republican party - or both, which is even more unlikely - to support them. Despite that, they are still very good ideas. There currently exists a comprehensive simulation that could be used, but it would need to be expanded from its current format, and they would have to make basic changes to it, as well (e.g. make the enemies aliens that are somehow still restricted to small arms weapons, or something similar).

[J Thomas]

Spoiler:

Pfhorrest, we could continue like this for a long time, but I find that I do not wish to do so. You seem to want to blame the military for politician's decisions. I want the military to only be blamed for things which were completely within their sphere of control.

When there are failures then people try to figure out who to blame them on. The current wars are a great big failure, mitigated somewhat by spending vast amounts of money. But I'm not interested in arguing whose fault it was. I want to figure out what to do.

As I've said before, I'm willing to concede that my positive bias keeps me from having an all-encompassing viewpoint, as long as you also concede that your negative bias keeps you from having an all-encompassing viewpoint.

I approve of your attempt at moral relativism. I would like for you to expand this. Consider the various crimes people get convicted of. Will you agree that people have an undeserved bias against criminals, despite not knowing the individual circumstances of each event the criminals are accused of? And that we lack the all-encompassing viewpoint that would tell us whether the laws are right laws versus wrong laws....

The way I see it is that we have one of two rational options: a) You can list every point about the military which you condemn, and then we can discuss those; or b) we can agree that both of our positions are valid for a given value of "valid", and that neither fully represents reality.

I don't think anything useful will come from arguing whether the army is good versus the army is bad. I'm more interested in what policies are good for us.

How big a military do we need? When we were the richest in the world and the USSR threatened to conquer everybody, we wanted a very big military. We could afford it. We could spend endless years preparing to fight the USSR without ever actually doing so. Since we believed a war would end in nukes killing everybody, we didn't have to be good at military defense and there was no way to tell how good we actually were. Those days are gone. We have to change with the times.

What kind of war should we prepare to fight? There's every reason to think we won't have a land war in asia against China for 20 years. Should we be ready for that now? The Russians are careful to keep their treaties etc, they don't want a big war either. They never did. In the next 20 years all our wars will be with third-world nations who are no real threat to us. What kind of military should we have, to do that?

Our last invasion of Panama shows that we are competent to do that. We can invade small latin american nations that know they can't possibly win, get things sorted out fast, install a government that will do what we want, and get out. Entirely apart from the question whether we should do that, we know it's an available option. We should stay strong enough to keep that option open. But what about larger nations like Venezuela? When they have a government that is widely unpopular, they don't need us to overthrow it. They can do that themselves if we merely stop giving that government weapons and riot-control training etc. When they have a government that is popular, invading it is likely to get a result worse than iraq.

Should we try to encourage coups or revolutions in nations whose governments we don't like? I think in general that has had bad results too. Chile, greece, indonesia, nicaragua, philippines, el salvador -- are there any examples where that came out better than awful in the long run? South korea, maybe, the dictator we installed there did OK and then got replaced by a vibrant democracy, right? Anybody else?

But what can we do to get rid of governments we don't like? Wait for them to do something so bad it calls for war, and then destroy the country? There has to be some way. We're the USA! We have the right and the duty to get rid of evil governments. But I don't know how.

We could have done a lot better in Iraq. We could have given Saddam an offer he could not refuse. Give him a few billion dollars and asylum if he sold Iraq to us. We get the place unbombed, for a lot less than we spent bombing it. We have time for an orderly transition, gradually dismantling the secret police etc. In retrospect it appears he did have considerable support in Iraq, but he wouldn't after he sold them to us. I suggested that to Bush, but he wouldn't listen.

I think we need to redesign our military. We need to fundamentally change our procurement system. We don't need to buy 500,000 drones. We need to buy automated factories that can quickly turn out 500,000 drones when we need them to. We don't need to buy many millions of PGMs, we need to be able to make them as quick as we need them. We don't need small numbers of advanced warships, we need lots of commercial ships -- container ships maybe -- that can quickly convert into warships.

We need a small, strong core of fighting men -- not just Marines. And we need to be able to recruit large numbers of trainees quickly. Set up computer games and paintball games and whatever we can so that enthusiastic civilians can cheaply learn how to do it, and then call them up at need. In a real emergency they'd suffer a lot of casualties while they learn for real. But we can't afford the training we do now, on the scale we do it.

We need an advanced logistics system, more automated than our current one, so that in an emergency we can get supplies to the troops. It has to work well when the time comes, on short notice, and not cost too much until then.

tl;dr: I don't care about who to blame. What we have does not work very well. And we can't afford it. Some of us think we need our current military so we can achieve our current objectives. We can't afford our current objectives. We need something cheaper, quick. We need to make more realistic objectives, and we need to achieve them cheaper.

J Thomas, although we didn't initially agree, thank you for that reasoned response. Those are actually good ideas. I'm not sure if it would be possible for either the Democratic party or the Republican party - or both, which is even more unlikely - to support them. Despite that, they are still very good ideas.

It's something that has to start partly with the military. The politicians cannot possibly tell the military in technical detail how to do its job. They decide the goals, the military estimates how much it costs to achieve those goals. We cannot afford what we have now, so we must scale down our goals.

I say we need to be able to field a large army quickly, if it turns out suddenly we need it, but we can't afford to keep a large standing army all the time. So we need ways to get people partly pre-trained, and we need ways to train them quickly. We need to build weapons quickly partly because we don't know ahead of time how much we'll need and partly because it's suicide to pay for weapons instead of weapon factories. If we want 500 warplanes and the contractor builds a factory to produce 500 planes, and then the costs mushroom and we decide we can only afford 200 planes and then 150 -- what the hell! Get a real emergency and we'll run out. Keep the factory on standby and produce as many planes as we need.

As much as practical we must learn to get by with commercial products. Military electronics is perennially obsolete and therefore super-expensive, because the updating process is so slow. I've read about our military doing great things along those lines. Infantry with little tiny radio controlled toy planes that have basicly webcams on them, for the sort of reconnaissance they shouldn't depend on multiple levels of bureaucracy to provide. All the technical stuff has to come from the military, probably after the funding is cut and while the goals are under discussion.

We have to stop getting into long-term hostile occupations. We aren't good at it. Nobody's good at it. It isn't worth doing. This is something the politicians have to decide. It would help if we had some sort of clear alternative available.

There currently exists a comprehensive simulation that could be used, but it would need to be expanded from its current format, and they would have to make basic changes to it, as well (e.g. make the enemies aliens that are somehow still restricted to small arms weapons, or something similar).

The cost of making software is very small compared to the cost of testing how well it teaches skills, or the cost of hands-on training. For the long run it would be good to include scenarios where you're facing things our current enemies don't have. Like, at any time a drone you can't see might fire a hellfire missile at you. Or some sort of friendly vehicle might come close to you and attract PGM fire. Random-seeming artillery. If we have the sort of emergency that requires us to call up green Reserves, very likely they'll face more than small arms.

[BytEfLUSh]

b) Please let me know when abortion is safe for both patients.

Not that I care too much about the topic, but this argument... [deleted]

a) Please let me know when capital punishment is safe for both the executioner and the executed.

a) Never, it's not meant to be.

This is all I needed.

Abortion was never meant to be safe for both patients.


EDIT: OK, I think I have some explaining to do... I currently don't have a clear stance on abortion. I just didn't like the argument about "safety for both patients". If the goal of the operation is to remove a fetus, then I don't think his/her (or its) safety is relevant. Anyway - what about the "morning after" pills? Do they also count as murder?

[J Thomas]

b) Please let me know when abortion is safe for both patients.

Not that I care too much about the topic, but this argument... [deleted]

a) Please let me know when capital punishment is safe for both the executioner and the executed.

a) Never, it's not meant to be.

This is all I needed.

Abortion was never meant to be safe for both patients.


EDIT: OK, I think I have some explaining to do... I currently don't have a clear stance on abortion. I just didn't like the argument about "safety for both patients". If the goal of the operation is to remove a fetus, then I don't think his/her (or its) safety is relevant. Anyway - what about the "morning after" pills? Do they also count as murder?

What about when a woman is raped? She never agreed to get pregnant, but is that a excuse for murder? If it is murder....

Seriously, if an unborn baby is an innocent life and its mother doesn't have the right to kill it, why should she get that right just from being raped? I can maybe see giving her the right to kill her rapist, but why should she have the right to kill an innocent baby?

[Pfhorrest]

Pfhorrest, we could continue like this for a long time, but I find that I do not wish to do so. You seem to want to blame the military for politician's decisions. I want the military to only be blamed for things which were completely within their sphere of control.

I blame whoever is at the top of the chain of command, and by proxy whoever decided that working for them would be a good idea, after decades of evidence about what kinds of commands those people at the top tend to give. Since politicians are in the military chain of command, at the top of it no less, "the military" as a whole includes them and deserves blame (or, if applicable, praise) for their decisions.

As I've said before, I'm willing to concede that my positive bias keeps me from having an all-encompassing viewpoint, as long as you also concede that your negative bias keeps you from having an all-encompassing viewpoint.

I approve of your attempt at moral relativism. I would like for you to expand this. Consider the various crimes people get convicted of. Will you agree that people have an undeserved bias against criminals, despite not knowing the individual circumstances of each event the criminals are accused of? And that we lack the all-encompassing viewpoint that would tell us whether the laws are right laws versus wrong laws....

Neither what Rotherian or you are saying are relativism. That's just fallibilism. There's a big difference. Relativism says that no answers are any more correct than any others. Fallibilism just admits that what any of us thinks are the correct answers might not be completely correct, but doesn't deny that some answers can be more correct than others.

The way I see it is that we have one of two rational options: a) You can list every point about the military which you condemn, and then we can discuss those; or b) we can agree that both of our positions are valid for a given value of "valid", and that neither fully represents reality.

I don't think anything useful will come from arguing whether the army is good versus the army is bad. I'm more interested in what policies are good for us.

To me those are the same thing (so long as "us" is all-inclusive and not limited to just the US or something). And as I said earlier, I'm not really interested in getting into that subject. This is neither Rotherian's (a) or (b); I'm not interested in arguing about who is right about this matter, and I'm not going to settle for some "we're both kind of right, from a certain point of view" either. I'm happy just to agree to disagree on that matter, because that's not the matter that interests me.

What interests me is the second-order issue: if any organization has a track record of behaving in some way, and if that behavior is blameworthy, who in the organization deserves that blame, and who is warranted to place it?

I joined this conversation because Rotherian implied people who hadn't been a part of the organization weren't warranted to blame it for its actions, and the topic has since shifted to include how much the little people in the organization share in its overall blame. Discussing whether this particular organization deserves blame for what particular things is beside that point.

In general I assert that whatever blame there is to be placed, anyone with the relevant information is warranted to place it, whether they are part of the organization or not; and whatever blame there is to be placed, it is to be placed to some degree upon anyone who knowingly supported the behavior.

In specific terms of the military, that means that whatever military actions are blameworthy can be rightly criticised just the same by anyone in the military or not; and anyone who joined the military knowing it engages in those kinds of actions shares to some extent in their blame.

Which if any military actions are blameworthy is irrelevant to those points of principle.

[J Thomas]

Pfhorrest, we could continue like this for a long time, but I find that I do not wish to do so. You seem to want to blame the military for politician's decisions. I want the military to only be blamed for things which were completely within their sphere of control.

I blame whoever is at the top of the chain of command, and by proxy whoever decided that working for them would be a good idea, after decades of evidence about what kinds of commands those people at the top tend to give. Since politicians are in the military chain of command, at the top of it no less, "the military" as a whole includes them and deserves blame (or, if applicable, praise) for their decisions.

As I've said before, I'm willing to concede that my positive bias keeps me from having an all-encompassing viewpoint, as long as you also concede that your negative bias keeps you from having an all-encompassing viewpoint.

I approve of your attempt at moral relativism. I would like for you to expand this. Consider the various crimes people get convicted of. Will you agree that people have an undeserved bias against criminals, despite not knowing the individual circumstances of each event the criminals are accused of? And that we lack the all-encompassing viewpoint that would tell us whether the laws are right laws versus wrong laws....

Neither what Rotherian or you are saying are relativism. That's just fallibilism. There's a big difference. Relativism says that no answers are any more correct than any others. Fallibilism just admits that what any of us thinks are the correct answers might not be completely correct, but doesn't deny that some answers can be more correct than others.

I disagree that your definition of relativism is the only good meaning for the word, and that isn't what I want to discuss right now.

The way I see it is that we have one of two rational options: a) You can list every point about the military which you condemn, and then we can discuss those; or b) we can agree that both of our positions are valid for a given value of "valid", and that neither fully represents reality.

I don't think anything useful will come from arguing whether the army is good versus the army is bad. I'm more interested in what policies are good for us.

To me those are the same thing (so long as "us" is all-inclusive and not limited to just the US or something). And as I said earlier, I'm not really interested in getting into that subject. This is neither Rotherian's (a) or (b); I'm not interested in arguing about who is right about this matter, and I'm not going to settle for some "we're both kind of right, from a certain point of view" either. I'm happy just to agree to disagree on that matter, because that's not the matter that interests me.

What interests me is the second-order issue: if any organization has a track record of behaving in some way, and if that behavior is blameworthy, who in the organization deserves that blame, and who is warranted to place it?

I joined this conversation because Rotherian implied people who hadn't been a part of the organization weren't warranted to blame it for its actions, and the topic has since shifted to include how much the little people in the organization share in its overall blame. Discussing whether this particular organization deserves blame for what particular things is beside that point.

In general I assert that whatever blame there is to be placed, anyone with the relevant information is warranted to place it, whether they are part of the organization or not; and whatever blame there is to be placed, it is to be placed to some degree upon anyone who knowingly supported the behavior.

OK. You are interested in the general case and so am I. I agree with you that anybody who thinks they know something is entitled to blame whoever they want. I go farther -- anybody can blame anybody else based on whatever criteria they choose. But then I wonder, where do we go from there? It seems to me that if your blame has no follow up with punishment, why would people care whether you blame them? If you won't do anything about it then you're all talk and most people will ignore you. So let's say that you blame Bush and Congress and the US army. How are you going to punish them? You and what army?

[Pfhorrest]

OK. You are interested in the general case and so am I. I agree with you that anybody who thinks they know something is entitled to blame whoever they want. I go farther -- anybody can blame anybody else based on whatever criteria they choose. But then I wonder, where do we go from there? It seems to me that if your blame has no follow up with punishment, why would people care whether you blame them? If you won't do anything about it then you're all talk and most people will ignore you. So let's say that you blame Bush and Congress and the US army. How are you going to punish them? You and what army?

It's a question of right, not of might. Rotherian suggested that anyone criticising the military without having served in it was less likely to have a valid, i.e. right, criticism. No grunt in the military or citizen outside it has much might to act on their criticism, certainly not much more than each other, so the only question in play here is the question of who's right.

But you think that fallibilism entails relativism and so uncertainty about who's right means nobody's right, so you wouldn't care about that anyway.

[Rotherian]

Which[,] if any[,] military actions are blameworthy is irrelevant to those points of principle.

Let me see if I am interpreting this correctly. Are you stating that the military is condemnable, even if none of their actions is condemnable?

If so, the only response I have to that is -> (O.o)

[Rotherian]

It's a question of right, not of might. Rotherian suggested that anyone criticising the military without having served in it was less likely to have a valid, i.e. right, criticism. No grunt in the military or citizen outside it has much might to act on their criticism, certainly not much more than each other, so the only question in play here is the question of who's right.

As I said before, I may have used the wrong phrase to try to get my point across. As I've already explained, external views are not all-encompassing. As I've already admitted, neither are internal views.

I've tried numerous times to engage you in rational discussion, but the replies I have received distill to something to the effect of, "I have my views, and although there might be facets that I am not considering, I refuse to admit that they may not fully represent reality."

In short, you have a viewpoint and you aren't going to allow silly little things like facts get in the way of maintaining that viewpoint.

In a way, you are correct, though. You don't need to know anything about a subject to form an opinion. Knowledge is only necessary for informed opinions. For example, I initially thought that you were an intelligent and rational person. That, however, was just an opinion. Thanks to this excercise in abject futility that was an attempt at a reasoned conversation with you, I now realize that my initial opinion of you may have been in error. Thank you for helping me gain a more informed opinion about you.

[J Thomas]

OK. You are interested in the general case and so am I. I agree with you that anybody who thinks they know something is entitled to blame whoever they want. I go farther -- anybody can blame anybody else based on whatever criteria they choose. But then I wonder, where do we go from there? It seems to me that if your blame has no follow up with punishment, why would people care whether you blame them? If you won't do anything about it then you're all talk and most people will ignore you. So let's say that you blame Bush and Congress and the US army. How are you going to punish them? You and what army?

It's a question of right, not of might. Rotherian suggested that anyone criticising the military without having served in it was less likely to have a valid, i.e. right, criticism. No grunt in the military or citizen outside it has much might to act on their criticism, certainly not much more than each other, so the only question in play here is the question of who's right.

To the extent that the USA has a representative government, it does matter what citizens want. Politicians can't cut funding for a war while the mass of citizens want us to "support the troops", Those citizens think the troops want to win the war and not to come home, so they think we need to spend as much money as the troops need to win without taking casualties, and keep spending that money until the war is won. That has a lot to do with why we are still fighting the same war after 10 years, with no prospect of ever winning it, spending well over $2 trillion in real money. Politicians are afraid to let the soldiers stop fighting, because they think the voters will punish them for it.

To the extent that people might change their minds about how to support the troops, arguments about what to do can actually matter. Even when there's no objective way to decide which argument is more wrong, still what people believe can make a difference.

But you think that fallibilism entails relativism and so uncertainty about who's right means nobody's right, so you wouldn't care about that anyway.

I really don't want to get into that argument here. By Bayesian analysis I think probably nobody is right, because almost always when we look at the past we find out that from our perspective -- superior to theirs, based on more information and more precise information -- nobody was right then. It's possible that somebody has gotten it right this time around, but that isn't the way to bet.

Also, moral choices are, well, choices. You can blame somebody for making a different choice from you, since from your point of view they are wrong. I don't say that everybody is just as right as everybody else -- that would be silly. I say that I'm right and you are wrong when you disagree with me. I believe I'm right because that's my choice. At the same time, I observe that nobody agrees with me and I want to peacefully coexist with all these fools who are wrong, as best I can.... And even though they're wrong, a lot of them have a lot of good will in them.

I think you might have a fruitful discussion with Rotherian, because I expect he differs from you in some fundamental ways. I will put words in his mouth, as if I understand. If I get it wrong Rotherian can disagree. I think this might speed up the discussion because I think he doesn't understand some of your ideas and maybe vice versa.

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You think that it's fundamental to morality that the same rules should apply to everybody. If something is wrong when I do it, then it's wrong when you do it. I think Rotherian disagrees with that. You shouldn't treat good people the same way you treat bad people. So for example, the USA is good and enemies of the USA are bad. It would make no sense for the US Army to treat US enemies the same way it treats US friends.

Say you find an example where the US military did something bad. But we know the US military is good, how can they do bad things? There are three possible explanations.

1. It could be one of the rare bad apples who didn't get weeded out. We do our very best to keep all bad people out of the military, but a few slip by. We do the best we can, and we are the best in the world. You can't blame the US military for a very few bad apples.

2. It could be a rare mistake. Our highly professional soldiers are very good at avoiding mistakes, but every now and then mistakes happen. You can't blame the US military for a few mistakes when most of what they do is precisely the right thing.

3. It could be that some tactics which look bad are absolutely necessary to win the war. It's sad when that happens. But we must do whatever it takes to win, because we are good and the enemy is evil. It's unfortunate when the enemy forces us into a dirty war where we must do some bad things. But letting the enemy win would be worse. Our soldiers hate it and they keep having nightmares after they come home about the bad things they had to do. War is hell. Support the troops. Don't let the evil enemy win.

On the other hand, when the enemy does the same bad things or other bad things, it's because they are evil. The only way to stop them from doing horrible war crimes is to defeat them. If they weren't evil people doing evil things, we wouldn't have gone to war with them in the first place.

When you talk like the good guys are no better than the bad guys, you are being profoundly insulting.
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I don't think Rotherian understood that you think you are being fair when you talk as if the US military is not qualitatively different from the Russian army, or Saddam's army, or the old german SS. He thought you just hate the US military, and by extension you probably want the enemy to win.

When we said that saying that you can't judge the military until you've served in it is the same as saying you can't judge thieves until you've been a thief, he didn't understand the argument at all. It probably sounded to him like we were saying soldiers are as bad as thieves. Because he doesn't agree that you should use the same rules to judge good people that you use to judge bad people. You can't judge the military unless you've served in it, but you can judge criminals without becoming a criminal. The claim that the two arguments are just alike makes no sense to him; he disagrees. The two arguments are very different because the military is good and you can't judge it until you experience it directly, while criminals are bad so you can judge them just fine.

[Rotherian]

There currently exists a comprehensive simulation that could be used, but it would need to be expanded from its current format, and they would have to make basic changes to it, as well (e.g. make the enemies aliens that are somehow still restricted to small arms weapons, or something similar).

The cost of making software is very small compared to the cost of testing how well it teaches skills, or the cost of hands-on training. For the long run it would be good to include scenarios where you're facing things our current enemies don't have. Like, at any time a drone you can't see might fire a hellfire missile at you. Or some sort of friendly vehicle might come close to you and attract PGM fire. Random-seeming artillery. If we have the sort of emergency that requires us to call up green Reserves, very likely they'll face more than small arms.

The great thing about using simulations is that they can be altered to fit whatever scenario is needed. The reason I suggested aliens (of the BEM variety, not the "green card or lack thereof" variety), was that it would allow the civilian public to practice using analog versions of real weapons, but since it would be a digital simulation, there would be no actual expediture of ammunition. This video game training could then be followed up with a couple of weeks of actual training in the event of an emergency.

However, I'm not really sure how effective it would be in the long term. Perhaps instead, they could reverse the relative sizes of the Active and Reserve components. Ensure that all, Active or Reserve, undergo basic training, then have the Reserve undergo their one weekend a month drill, and their two weeks in the summer drill. During those drills, ensure that they, by means of simulation, hone the skills that they learned in basic training.

This would allow for a trained Reserve that could be called when necessary, but at a fraction of the cost of maintaining the current military.

I'm sure that there are flaws in that scenario, and I'm equally sure that someone here will point them out, but it is a start.

[J Thomas]

....

The great thing about using simulations is that they can be altered to fit whatever scenario is needed. The reason I suggested aliens (of the BEM variety, not the "green card or lack thereof" variety), was that it would allow the civilian public to practice using analog versions of real weapons, but since it would be a digital simulation, there would be no actual expediture of ammunition. This video game training could then be followed up with a couple of weeks of actual training in the event of an emergency.

I think I see. If civilians publicly practiced against simulated enemies with towels on their heads, or chinese opponents, etc then it might be offensive to somebody. If the opponents have green blood and pointed ears then it's less insulting.

However, I'm not really sure how effective it would be in the long term. Perhaps instead, they could reverse the relative sizes of the Active and Reserve components. Ensure that all, Active or Reserve, undergo basic training, then have the Reserve undergo their one weekend a month drill, and their two weeks in the summer drill. During those drills, ensure that they, by means of simulation, hone the skills that they learned in basic training.

This would allow for a trained Reserve that could be called when necessary, but at a fraction of the cost of maintaining the current military.

That sounds like potentially a big savings. We would have to expect the Reserves to be less effective than the same number of full-time soldiers, and if we get into a big war we'll make more mistakes and take more casualties. But it would be cheaper, which is something we desperately need. And we could still field a very large army if we had to.

I want to work toward other goals too, so I propose a more radical solution. Our military is increasingly isolated from the rest of society. Increasingly they have their own separate culture, and vote as a block. This separation is potentially a dangerous thing for the nation. To the extent that we have to depend on a large highly-professional military there's no help for it. But if we can partly switch back to a citizen army then those problems dissipate.

If we could somehow improve the training to the point that the bulk of the military is part-time people who think of themselves as civilians, then we would not have so many people worried about what the military does. The military would not be a special group of mostly men with special privileges that does a lot of secret stuff. It would be pretty much everybody.

The risk of a coup would be different too. There would then be little chance that a professional army that was more loyal to itself than to the nation might take over, even when Congress was clearly unable to govern. But given an issue that deeply divided the public, a citizen army might split more than one way and fight itself, as to some extent happened in the Civil War.

[Rotherian]

I think you might have a fruitful discussion with Rotherian, because I expect he differs from you in some fundamental ways. I will put words in his mouth, as if I understand. If I get it wrong Rotherian can disagree. I think this might speed up the discussion because I think he doesn't understand some of your ideas and maybe vice versa.

It isn't that I don't understand his ideas, it is just that I don't agree with his stance that, regardless of the actual actions of the military, they are condemnable. I think, through reasoned discourse - through discussions of the military's specific actions - we can come to a common understanding. Maybe I just expect too much.

You think that it's fundamental to morality that the same rules should apply to everybody. If something is wrong when I do it, then it's wrong when you do it. I think Rotherian disagrees with that. You shouldn't treat good people the same way you treat bad people. So for example, the USA is good and enemies of the USA are bad. It would make no sense for the US Army to treat US enemies the same way it treats US friends.

I don't, generally, condem the actions of the military organizations of other nations, even if they were enemies at a given time. I do condemn specific acts by members of those military organizations, but I realize that a large majority of those military organizations weren't responsible for the acts of a comparative few. I don't blame the entire German military during World War II for the atrocities that occurred at Auschwitz, I blame those that were physically present at Auschwitz and took part in those atrocities. I don't blame the entire Japanese military for the attack on Pearl Harbor. I blame those that actually participated in the attack.

If someone shoots at me, or anyone else I have sworn to protect, I don't return fire because I condemn the person for firing a weapon, or for being an enemy. That would be silly and a bit hypocritical. I return fire to reduce or eliminate the other person's ability to continue to fire at me and/or those that I am protecting.

In short, I don't think that any argument that assumes blame by association is valid. You don't blame a passenger in a car when the driver is the one doing the speeding (or you shouldn't - for all you know the passenger could have been telling the driver to slow down for the last ten miles). You don't blame somebody just because they happen to be friends with someone you don't like (well, you might, but I think we can all agree that doing so is a bit petty). You don't blame the military just because you don't like war (because they aren't the one's declaring war, and a majority of soldiers would be happy if they spent 20 years or more in the military and never went to war).

Title 10 of US Code, Section 3062 establishes the following:

(a) It is the intent of Congress to provide an Army that is
capable, in conjunction with the other armed forces, of -
(1) preserving the peace and security, and providing for the
defense, of the United States, the Commonwealths and possessions,
and any areas occupied by the United States;
(2) supporting the national policies;
(3) implementing the national objectives; and
(4) overcoming any nations responsible for aggressive acts that
imperil the peace and security of the United States.

Notice that declaring war isn't one of those capabilities listed.

Say you find an example where the US military did something bad. But we know the US military is good, how can they do bad things? There are three possible explanations.

1. It could be one of the rare bad apples who didn't get weeded out. We do our very best to keep all bad people out of the military, but a few slip by. We do the best we can, and we are the best in the world. You can't blame the US military for a very few bad apples.

2. It could be a rare mistake. Our highly professional soldiers are very good at avoiding mistakes, but every now and then mistakes happen. You can't blame the US military for a few mistakes when most of what they do is precisely the right thing.

3. It could be that some tactics which look bad are absolutely necessary to win the war. It's sad when that happens. But we must do whatever it takes to win, because we are good and the enemy is evil. It's unfortunate when the enemy forces us into a dirty war where we must do some bad things. But letting the enemy win would be worse. Our soldiers hate it and they keep having nightmares after they come home about the bad things they had to do. War is hell. Support the troops. Don't let the evil enemy win.

On the other hand, when the enemy does the same bad things or other bad things, it's because they are evil. The only way to stop them from doing horrible war crimes is to defeat them. If they weren't evil people doing evil things, we wouldn't have gone to war with them in the first place.

When you talk like the good guys are no better than the bad guys, you are being profoundly insulting.

As I stated earlier, with a lot more verbiage, I believe that specific actions can be condemnable. I don't believe that organizations are, themselves, condemnable.

I don't think Rotherian understood that you think you are being fair when you talk as if the US military is not qualitatively different from the Russian army, or Saddam's army, or the old german SS. He thought you just hate the US military, and by extension you probably want the enemy to win.

When we said that saying that you can't judge the military until you've served in it is the same as saying you can't judge thieves until you've been a thief, he didn't understand the argument at all. It probably sounded to him like we were saying soldiers are as bad as thieves. Because he doesn't agree that you should use the same rules to judge good people that you use to judge bad people. You can't judge the military unless you've served in it, but you can judge criminals without becoming a criminal. The claim that the two arguments are just alike makes no sense to him; he disagrees. The two arguments are very different because the military is good and you can't judge it until you experience it directly, while criminals are bad so you can judge them just fine.

I, personally, believe that theft, in general, is bad. Do I believe that all thieves are condemnable? Not necessarily. What was it that the thief stole? Jewelry? Condemnable. Large amounts of money? Condemnable. Food? Maybe not. Why did the thief steal? For the thrill? Condemnable. To see if he/she could get away with it? Condemnable. For revenge? Understandable, but still condemnable. To feed his or her family? Heck no, unless violence was used.

As for the comment about saying that one couldn't judge without participation, I've already admitted, at least twice, that the manner in which I worded that was incorrect. In fact, I'll even admit that the premise was incorrect. One can form a judgement about something without really knowing anything about it. We generally call these opinions (as opposed to informed opinions, which can be gained by either experience or comprehensive study).

However, I still don't believe it is right to condemn an organization on the basis of a concept that one finds distasteful. That is my opinion. I would venture so far as to say that it is my informed opinion. If I find evidence - not rhetoric, but actual evidence - to suggest otherwise, I may amend that informed opinion on the basis of that new evidence.