While I admire pacifists, the sad reality of the world is sometimes you have to stand and fight. Is making tech for war in the interest of ending the conflict, and dying, as quickly as possible "for the greater good"?
Yes sometimes. However in the present day it's usually the agressors that play the peace makers and cause much of the conflict around the world. They have whole P/R departments to spin their war mongering into spreading democracy and rights while at the same time destroying the livelihoods of millions. They have their citizens brain washed to think that there is some unquestionable evil out there which must constantly be combated to divert their attention from local issues to an always elusive foreign enemy.
> However in the present day it's usually the agressors that play the peace makers and cause much of the conflict around the world.
History is written by the victors, and always has been. You're only likely to approach the truth (or at least, approach making it generally accepted) when it can't threaten the powerful enough to matter. There's a reason why it usually takes 50-100 years for a country to admit major wrongdoing (i.e. the U.S. apologizing for Japanese internment, or Britain apologizing for forcefully exporting children to Australia).
Sure, but the US hasn't had to stand and fight since WWII. That's a lot of unnecessary wars. An unbelievable amount of wasted resources and wasted lives. Chances are any war this technology will be used in is going to be an unnecessary war and therefore an immoral war, simply based on our history. If that wasn't the case, we wouldn't even debate whether Microsoft should be giving this to the government. In a WWII situation we'd want any advantage. In today's world, moral people do and should indeed try to limit the damage of the immoral wars the US fights.
Stand up and fight for what? Most people are completely blind to the realities and driving forces behind various conflicts. The Wall Street Journal and New York Times et al are usually not telling an accurate or comprehensive story.
There are a few difficult aspects to the reality of war. One is that wars are fought for strategic reasons, such as continuing campaigns against enemies, controlling resources, or maintaining the "petrodollar" status, etc. The other is that since war involves risking one's life or killing other people, only moral justifications are adequate.
This is problematic because the real motivations for war are practical and strategic and not actually moral. But since military personnel require moral justifications, there is no choice but to fabricate them. For this reason, information control is a key aspect of warfare.
The reason people are blind is because they have been inundated with propaganda. US intelligence must require large outlets like NBC, NY Times and Wall Street Journal, etc. to toe the line when it comes to certain key war propaganda. If they do not do this, then soldiers will not fight. Soldiers are not going to go to battle if the president gives a speech saying "well, the oil executives say that if we can't maintain the status quo for pipeline protection then we can expect 8% higher oil prices next year". They are not going to risk their lives for something like that. They _will_ happily go kill an "evil dictator" and his "evil minions".
But the bottom line for control in our world is deadly force. If we want to get away from that then we need everyone to start following an entirely new paradigm.
If I try to snatch your phone out of your hand, are you "just trying to control more resources" by preventing me from doing this? Are you saying there is no such thing as theft?
Nation states currently operate like violent criminal gangs. In the same way that street gangs indoctrinate their members into loyalty, nation states indoctrinate their populations.
And in the same way that most of the benefits of gang crime go to the leaders, most of the benefits of war go to a country's upper class, while everyone else bears the risks.
The difficulty is in finding out which side is moral, not in determining if one is. Also it's non-binary. Each side can have moral and immoral reasons to varying degrees. This is the common phrase "lesser of two evils" at work.
And yet, we have fairly good evidence from the relatively recent past that sometimes you do need to stand up and fight, and it may be for the safety of yourself, your faimily or even for the safety of people across the world.
WWII was a thing, the Nazi party came to power and started pushing their agenda, and the holocaust actually happened. And the farther back in history you go, the more it becomes apparent that it's not really all that much of a statistical outlier except in scale.
That we don't need to continuously make sure we're strong enough to defend ourselves is a fiction that people in countries with strong governments that enforce the rule of law like to tell themselves. That's only possible because the government is there to be the ultimate arbiter, and as libertarians will quickly point out, that's only possible because they have, and ruthlessly enforce, their monopoly on violence (to our collective benefit, IMO).
No such thing exists for nations between themselves, except for pacts like the U.N. or NATO, and that's not a solution, it's just kicking the problem up the chain so we can act like it's not our problem.
Economic and military strength are related, and one can lead to the other, but it generally seems to be delayed when going from economic strength to military strength (because it's a matter of actually investing in developing new technology or buying it).
Do you think not helping China as much economically (read as: hurt us both economically to suppress them somewhat) would prevent their research of military technology, including both hardware and software/network capabilities?
I disagree with how the current administration is dealing with Russia and China, as I disagree with a great many (most!) the things they do, but I don't think that really affects the calculus of the equation on whether we should continue to invest in our own military technology.
I do not want it to be this way, it's just how I perceive it to be, and as much as people have taken exception with my statements, I'm not seeing a lot of arguments that explain how it's wrong or can be escaped.
> Military hardware is useless if the politicians continue to make strategic blunders.
It's also useless if it doesn't exist. Available but unused when needed is a step up from not available when needed. The ultimate outcome might be the same, but one is a precursor to "available and used when needed" and the other isn't.
> Do you think not helping China as much economically (read as: hurt os both economically to suppress them somewhat) would prevent their research of military technology, including both hardware and software/network capabilities?
Obviously yes. It's absolutely evident that the large majority of the economy of China is based on export towards rich countries. Without US investments China would be extremely poor.
Yet, the US decided to embargo communist Cuba (and Vietnam) and invest heavily in "communist" China. The latter being very capitalistic.
> Obviously yes. It's absolutely evident that the large majority of the economy of China is based on export towards rich countries. Without US investments China would be extremely poor.
You say obviously, yet fail to link why making China poorer would significantly affect military investment and which type. How much money does it take to throw people at software? And people are something China has a LOT of.
Depending on how you measure it, China's economy is between the 1st and 3rd largest in the world (I think first largest is a stretch, but there's apparently some metrics which rank it that way based on purchasing power).
The United states is not the only country that China exports to. It's a large chunk, and it would hurt, but as we're seeing, China is not willing to let the United States dictate everything in the relationship. Why would they let the United States use economics to tell them they can't research what they would describe as technologies used to protect themselves when they aren't willing to do so for lesser reasons, as evidenced by the current tariffs?
At most, we'll cause them to hide their activity. Why would they stop in light of the aggressive stance by other countries to dictate their future? North Korea certainly doesn't seem to like it, and China is in a position of much more power.
> Yet, the US decided to embargo communist Cuba (and Vietnam) and invest heavily in "communist" China. The latter being very capitalistic.
Well, yeah. Because doing otherwise hurts us economically, and economics drives a huge amount of decision making. And barring a concerted world effort to to China to stop investing in any military tech, while the rest of the world would undoubtedly continue, I doubt China would be willing to stop. It's not all that different than if some nations came to the United States and told us to stop researching and building up our military. We'd tell them it's none of their business and they have no say in what we do. Why would we expect China to act any differently?
>> WWII was a thing, the Nazi party came to power and started pushing their agenda, and the holocaust actually happened
Indeed it was, but many people act like the whole thing just sprung up from a vacuum. There was an entire history which went before, and at least libertarians seem to attempt to dig a little deeper. If you don't want to hear out the prologue to these kinds of dastardly events, there isn't much difference between your acceptance of propaganda and your supposed adversary's.
"Because the politics of Europe so clearly had nothing to do with America, it took a massive propaganda campaign to solidify American involvement. This allowed an overwhelming victory for the allies and the disastrous peace agreement that followed. So much of the ensuing horror of the 20th century, Scott and Woods contend, resulted directly from Wilson’s foreign policy."
Yes, I am sure someone will come and point out some nutty thing some or the other libertarian said. You don't have to be in complete agreement with someone's viewpoint just to hear out their views.
> the sad reality of the world is sometimes you have to stand and fight.
For "democratically elected institutions" (as Nadella put it) and by tacit approval the wars of aggression and internal repression they perpetrating -- or against the corruption and profiteering in them, that helps create a lot of these sad realities and never seems to make them any better?
> It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear. While such an economy may produce a sense of seeming prosperity for the moment, it rests on an illusionary foundation of complete unreliability and renders among our political leaders almost a greater fear of peace than is their fear of war.
-- Douglas MacArthur
It's like when you ask someone who is running around with a knife to drop the knife, and they scream "What? Should I just let anyone do anything to me? Why don't I just stop breathing right now?"
Pacifism is a straw man. The issue isn't that the US should unilaterally disarm; but as the world leader in arms racing, and also kinda not slowing even when major opponents topple (also see the cold war), and also a rather sad reality of a track record of murdering hundreds of thousands of civilians, directly or by direct support, it would be nice for the US to have the moral integrity and backbone matching its military capability and economic power rather than inversely proportional to it.
> No admiral wants to be without a ship. No general wants to be without a command. Both mean men without jobs. They are not for disarmament. They cannot be for limitations of arms. And at all these conferences, lurking in the background but all-powerful, just the same, are the sinister agents of those who profit by war. They see to it that these conferences do not disarm or seriously limit armaments.
-- Smedley Butler
> The business of buying weapons that takes place in the Pentagon is a corrupt business - ethically and morally corrupt from top to bottom. The process is dominated by advocacy, with few, if any, checks and balances. Most people in power like this system of doing business and do not want it changed.
-- Colonel James G. Burton
That's the sad reality of not just the US, but also the US.
I don’t perceive anyone here to be claiming that war is good.
Rather, we simply don’t know of any viable alternate to the existence of defensive militaries, right now: So long as human aggression exists, those unable or unwilling to defend themselves against forceful attacks will inevitably be stomped out of existence.
This is why to sustain a peace-loving society, that society need to be capable of exerting physical force defensively if need be, even if that capability is never actually used (in fact, to have the capability but never use it is the ideal goal).
Pure pacifism only exists in a bubble of ignorance to the existence of the military and police that are already there defending it, or by pure chance that no aggressor has yet stomped over it. As such, it’s certainly not real pacifism, unless you also make sure to move to a part of the world where there’s no police or military defense forces. These are hard to find, because where and when they exist, they do not exist for very long except for extreme good luck (like geographic isolation).
Maybe some day, humanity’s groups will figure out a better solution to aggressive behavior than everyone holding metaphorical guns to each other’s heads, but it doesn’t look like we’re anywhere near there yet. Remember — all it takes is one aggressor to stomp all over a world of pacifists, so local solutions here do not work, or if they appear to work, it will only be momentary.
Are you claiming all wars are unjust? I want my country to have the ability to defend itself. Hell not a single country on this planet would exist without war! No not even Lichtenstein.
Two facts (or conjectures maybe) lead to a third: [1] Civilian technology is increasingly critical militarily, sucking tech companies into this market^ [2] The military industrial complex(es) are a global force unto themselves, with a potentially frightening influence on war and peacetime policies... possibly more influence than the banking sector.
So... are we going to see SV pivot into a major military income stream? You are what you eat and the military industry is a large plate.
There's a lot of daylight between pacifism and an objection to MSFT entering the wider arms producing market.
In any case, it's Satya that opens the door to this discussion by calling it a principled decision and stating the principle. Is democracy the only standard? An absolute standard? Do US interests play? Many of the US' allies are not democracies and some of its rivals are not.
^The advertising-espionage dovetail is especially weird and worrying.
Democracy certainly is not free as in gratis, but the MIC isn't aligned with the 'democracy' part. Most importantly we need reliable information in order to vote intelligently, and the MIC and its owners do not provide this.
"Peace is a condition that exists only when those who hate to fight are better prepared to do so than those who love to"
As someone belonging to a nation, whose history is littered with repeated invasions accompanied with atrocities and mass genocide, I fully support Microsoft's decision.
A Pacifist is someone who demands that others die for his freedom.
If I recall correctly there was no actual war in the universe of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Oceania just pretented wars were going on to keep citizens in a constant state of fear.
"It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist."
There was the implication that the wars are not truly being fought, such as in the quote above.
That was my interpretation anyway. War is never actually witnessed by the protagonist, it's just used as a rationalisation of various actions by the state.
