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Comment by gabipurcaru | Hacker News Reader

the red and blue colors suggest that less is worse. Why would that be the case? It seems like it should ideally be the opposite, if anything

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> Why would that be the case?

If free societies don't want to defend - they are conquered by the oppressed societies, and cease to be free.

And it's not like in modern Europe there are no wars (Russia-Ukraine for one example), or aggressive dictatorships (Russia, Turkey, less agressive but 100% dictatorship Belarus, and a few more dictatorships in making, all of them using nationalism as the building block).

Belarus is indeed very agressive, only New Zealand Empire can stop it from its attempts to conquer the world...

https://www.article19.org/resources.php/resource/38692/en/be...

I wrote it's "less agressive", but it's still a dictatorship.

It is also an Eastern europeam country with a population of 10m people (link to wikipedia to be added). Does this fact make it more or less agressive?

It's aggressive towards its own people, not towards neighbors. And it's a dictatorship, so it can change in a moment. These facts make it a possible threat.

The value proposition depends on the country. For instance, Finland absolutely needs high level of support for it's concript army to stop Russia even of thinking of an attack (it's not about would it succeed but at what cost). Better to offer worse odds to the generals throwing dice in Kremlin or what ever other apparatus was responsible for Ukraine.

Australia's defence is the same. Our only real threat is Indonesia, and if they decided to invade, we can't stop them by ourselves. So it's the defence plan to do more damage than would be gained.

Of course, Indonesia isn't likely to invade - it has enough trouble keeping itself together; all the decent economic bits of Australia are on the far fringes of the continent; and the US Navy would finally get the chance to engage in a maritime war, so they'd be in like Flynn to help out.

To put it bluntly: Because they stand at risk from invasion by Russia. The notion is that they're too complacent in spite of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and its current propaganda campaign of Novorossia around Lithuania.

Do you think defending your country from invasion is worse than letting some assholes conquer your home?

Historically the large powers have instigated conflicts as much as defended against incursion. So, I think it's highly context sensitive what sort of war people are thinking about depending on the country.

If the question was "would you fight a war to stop some assholes conquer your home?" then I would answer "yes". However, given that there has to be two side to any conflict somebody presumably has to be the "assholes" and that's not something I'd be too happy doing.

A completely agree. I was just pointing out that going to war doesn't automatically = bad.

The "assholes" may not have come from elsewhere.

If the question is 'Are you willing to fight for your country' then a 'Sure, count me in. Huzzah!' seems to be a bit more than the commitment to defend your home.

Defending your country is - as far as I'm concerned - a very specific case of fighting for your country.

Also - defending a country (a more or less random historical entity with potentially largely different political and ethical views even among residents) shouldn't be conflated with defending your home.

For me the former is abstract and quite artificial. The latter is literally the place where I live.

Note that "defending your country from invasion" isn't the survey question, its "fight a war for". For the UK, our next war is much more likely to be a war of aggression or an intervention in someone else's conflict hence rather low desire to get involved. If there were a credible threat, I'm pretty sure the figure would be much higher.

I expect the answers is highly correlated with "is the next war your country involved defending from an aggressor or being the aggressor?".

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