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."

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.

>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.

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

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?

"All we did was fulfill a contract for a government agency" is the enterprise tech Nuremberg defense.

> overall the world is a better place with American hegemony expressed through her military superiority.

This seems like a non-falsifiable claim about the future, even if it can be argued for rationally with regard to the past.

Have you ever been somewhere that you needed to defend this belief rationally, or does it appear to you as self-evident?

I think we can evaluate how far the discourse is fallen by the reflex to attempt to hide questions that the hegemon's apologists don't like instead of answering them.

Perhaps this bullying attitude is one of the many reasons that most of the world does not feel that it's better off today with American hegemony.

For whom?

Nothing says "we're concerned about AI risk and harm to human life" quite like partnering with the military-industrial complex.

It's even better timing to do this while the Pentagon is providing material and intelligence support to a government whose decisonmakers' public statements are explicit admissions of intent to commit war crimes and also convey genocidal intent.

Glad we spent all that time talking about AGI and Roko's Basilisk, those should be top of mind always, never the current actions of the humans in charge at both OpenAI and the US government.

As you said, innocent suffering in a conflict is inevitable. Is the logical axiom that international shipping which is connected to the US and Israeli economies is more innocent than Palestinian children? Is any cargo ship crew more innocent and less culpable than say, an infant?

If you want to make an argument that some groups of people are inherently evil and subhuman and must be destroyed, just go ahead and make it.

What does the word honest mean, I have no choice but to post here instead of using a search engine

This makes perfect sense when you consider that all of the people who will benefit from this will be dead or far away in very large estates by the time the negative externalities become undeniable from a liability perspective.

We're talking about Israel intentionally killing their own hostages, right?