[racketcon2089]

Would the abstract "one" you're thinking of happen to be a middle class college educated American who has never been on the receiving end of American benevolence in the form of saturated bombing of civilian areas, nor been at risk of being drafted to fight overseas?

Is your point that those people's lives are somehow inherently less valuable or is your point that you're willing to sacrifice as many of them as it takes to get a good outcome for you?

[sebzim4500]

>nor been at risk of being drafted to fight overseas?

I doubt there will ever be another draft in the US. As technology becomes more important the priority will be keeping the industrial base running for military R&D and weapon manufacturing, not on having millions of barely trained kids most of which you can't properly equip.

[racketcon2089]

I can tell you're not in Ukraine or Israel right now. Would you like to know how?

[Aeolun]

He’s talking about the US military. Why would they be in Ukraine or Israel?

[racketcon2089]

Neither Ukraine nor Israel have reached this hypothetical technological era in which a draft is not required, and those facts are inescapable to any American in those countries observing it.

One reason the US military doesn't need a draft is because its proxy forces which are supplied by US equipment do have a military draft.

This is not a complex argument nor are there any facts which are not mutually agreed upon by all parties here.

I'm not able to follow the ideological contortions that would be required to not understand something as simple as:

"The US supplies the equipment, and the local US-backed government uses a draft to supply its army with the number of soldiers it needs to use the equipment."

[Aeolun]

Well, there is the thing where the US has a massive army even without a draft. They’d need to fight some near equal opponent to ever get to the point where their professional army needs to be supplemented.

Though I don’t disagree with the premise that we’re still far away from purely AI warfare.

[sebzim4500]

>Neither Ukraine nor Israel have reached this hypothetical technological era in which a draft is not required,

They have worse equipment and a much smaller professional army.

[AYBABTME]

I'm going to ignore your attempt at ad-hominem because you're far off mark. Anyways: (1) there will be violence and people will suffer from someone else's power (2) you're better off wishing for that power to be as nice as it can be (3) the US has been about as nice as one could wish for, based on historical precedent and what contenders are demonstrating they would do.

Of course the US has done plenty of bad stuff to plenty of people. But you're delusional if you think some alternative power would have been gentler.

I too wish for a world power that never resolves to violence and never does any mistake. I too think that life is valuable everywhere, and that none should be sacrificed. But the real world doesn't yet offer us these circumstances.

[racketcon2089]

>But you're delusional if you think some alternative power would have been gentler.

You're saying that people who don't agree with a non-falsifiable claim about hypothetical alternatives are delusional. That suggests a closed system of thought which has left behind empiricism and must now be considered metaphysical. I'm a plain materialist so I can't go any further with any statements that assert definite knowledge of things outside of material reality.

>I too wish for a world power that never resolves to violence and never does any mistake

This has nothing to do with what I said and is not an opinion I hold so you must've meant to respond to someone else, I definitely wouldn't want to say that you're irrational, overly emotional, and have become accustomed to arguing by intentionally mischaracterizing what other people say to preserve your existing psychological commitments in a fundamentally juvenile and dishonest way.

[Aeolun]

It feels like you understand where he was going with his comment and are deliberately misconstruing it to have something to reply to?

As much as I do not enjoy the US doing all these things, I think it’s fair to say that they’re maybe the most benevolent?

I don’t think China historically has a great track record when it comes to military intervention, but they also mostly leave people alone.

The US seems to always go in with the best of intentions only to royally fuck it up.

[racketcon2089]

A more sophisticated thinker would ask questions like "from which people's perspective?" and "at what point in time?"

These questions would give you access to critical insights, one of them is that it's never persuasive to take a rough estimate of hypothetical aggregate good and bad and then attempt to weigh it using one's personal intuitions at present to derive a universal claim.

Peoples who were ethnically cleansed at scale to facilitate settler or US commercial expansion or currently suffer under US-backed dictatorships will tend to have a negative view of the US as an empire.

People whose countries need the US as an ally to protect them from an aggressive regional power and/or currently experience economic prosperity and political stability within a democratic government because of the US will tend to have a positive view of the US as an empire.

Telling a Guatemalan whose entire family was massacred by US-trained death squads in the Guatemalan civil war that you've done the math from a god's eye view and the US is the best possible hegemon in aggregate is unpersuasive, bordering on absurd.

It would be like arguing to a Polish person whose entire family was executed in stalinist trials of the 1940s that the Soviet Union was in aggregate benign because of all the aid they gave out to peoples fighting wars of liberation from european colonial dictatorships, which in aggregate killed far more people than Stalin did.

If you can't understand that the second example and the first are equally absurd, you are wearing ideological blinkers that make it hard for people outside the US to take you seriously.

Attributing malice to other empires but "good intentions gone awry" to your own is a fundamental attribution error, and one you should be wary of to avoid unpleasant surprises in foreign policy outcomes.

[AYBABTME]

I think being alive is awesome in aggregate even though there are people whose existence is miserable and for whom it's absurd to suggest that life might be awesome.

You might think Descartes was an awesome human, but what about the broken hearts he left behind? His past lovers might think your aggregate perspective is absurd.

Your focus on picking particular contradictory perspectives doesn't seem relevant to me. I don't think it's particularly sophisticated. It comes to me as being more interested in cynicism than pragmatism for aesthetic reasons.

[Aeolun]

> Peoples who were ethnically cleansed at scale to facilitate settler or US commercial expansion or currently suffer under US-backed dictatorships will tend to have a negative view of the US as an empire.

Obviously. But would they have been happier if it was a different country doing it?

I can think of a few countries that would probably have been better, but none of them are in a position to actually do so. I can think of many countries that would have been worse, some of which could have, but didn’t do so.

> It would be like arguing to a Polish person whose entire family was executed in stalinist trials of the 1940s that the Soviet Union was in aggregate benign because of all the aid they gave out to peoples fighting wars of liberation from european colonial dictatorships, which in aggregate killed far more people than Stalin did.

While it would be a boneheaded thing to do if you had any social grace, would it make it any less true (assuming it were true)?

On the whole I’m just less likely to trust the good intentions of a (near) dictatorship than that of a democracy.

That may be because I grew up in one, but I can’t exactly change that.