As an engineer I have serious moral qualms about furthering the goals of any military. Contributing means being complicit.
The fact that the military funds research doesn't change that.
The fact that the military funds research doesn't change that.
After all, I would not be here, and my job would not exist, and the freedom I have to do this work would not exist, if soldiers like my grandfather hadn't stepped up to Hitler and Stalin and Mao and say "No, you're wrong, and we're willing to use violence to protect our way of life". Just my 2c but I definitely respect the ultimate sacrifice that my grandparents generation gave to create this quite nifty Liberty bubble that these few generations get to play in.
Put another way: who benefits from $Giant_New_Military_Platform like new fighter planes? They don't really keep me safe as a citizen of the US: they don't prevent terrorists and they don't threaten other thermonuclear states. Yet we spend trillions on stuff like this any justify it with bellicose rhetoric and it seems like the only people benefiting from it are people selling it.
Military Industrial Complex
Yet most act like that "friendly reminder" never happened. The collective memory is in fact short.
And the people who work at those military/government contractors. In some sense, military spending is a job-work program that transfers funds from the public coffers to citizens. That it's for useless tech means it has attributes of an entitlement. That it's called military spending and has bellicose rhetoric is part of making that entitlement palpable to citizens it wouldn't be otherwise.
There are indeed warlords just over the hill, and they have names like Entropy and Resource Availability.
Yes, fear is a large part of it. But it takes courage to fight against that fear and be responsible for the future of your people (whomever they are). Pretending that there is no evil in the world is cowardice.
You call me blind to the future by looking at the past, but quite frankly, you appear to be repeating the mistakes of the past by not learning from them.
Democracy was not "won". Liberty for all does not exist.
These are fights that every generation must wage.
Or we will (and are currently) losing.
Over what time-frame? Do you have supporting data you can point me to ("In the past 10 years, more countries have switched from democratic to non-democratic government than vice versa")?
Thanks!
Some of the evidence they walk through: the collapse of political norms, political restraint and the rise of win at all costs brinksmanship, the delegitimization and dehumanization of political rivals, attacks against independent institutions and neutral arbiters, and much more.
Is a great place to start.
That standing up to Hitler also involved a peer partnership with the USSR's military.
Also, as part of war reparations, millions of Germans were placed in forced labor by agreement of Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labor_of_Germans_after_...
The comment's grandparent could have just as well been defending Western Europe from Stalin's USSR territorial lust. They didn't stop moving west just to be polite.
That vast military stand-off, which became the cold war, was a military conflict. The US deployed over three million soldiers to Europe in the 1950s almost entirely to stop the USSR from advancing any further.
I'm by no means equating the three, but it's ahistorical to present the American military as an idealistic organization that exists to battle evil. Hell, Mao killed more Soviet soldiers than the USA ever did.
In the 20th century we had already gone through a war so terrible it was called the war to end all wars, until 20 years later when we made it look small by comparison. The deaths in WW2 accounted for 3% of the entire population of the world. And we hadn't even invented the atomic bomb until the very end.
After WW2 we were on the precipice of the next war potentially eliminating the human race. I can see why we were reluctant to jump into it all over again by "battling evil" and forcing Russia to give back the territory they took from Germany.
It's just kind of silly to portray the American military as "standing up to Stalin" because Americans are taught Stalin equals evil and America equals good and ipso facto America must have stood up to Stalin.
That is, if you take as a constraint that you don't actually want to start an all-out war, the post-WW2 west stood up to Stalin in probably the best way it possibly could have.
It's extremely glib to point out that the Nazi's lost to the Russian winter (let's be frank, Russian weather did more to the Nazi's than Russian soldiers ever could...) without recognizing that:
- Hitler's strategy that lost in Russia was completely predicated on the knowledge of the Western Front. No UK/USA, we may not have had Hitler losing in Russia.
- The USSR would have taken all of Europe had it not been for the USA liberating France and meeting the USSR in Berlin.
Easy to say Russians did the heavy lifting when the truth is that Hitler fucked it all up.
Easy to say that Russians did the work, when the truth is that the reason why France and UK aren't post-communist bloc countries is because of what Americans did.
Also, I recall hearing a talk about how one of the effects of post-WW2 soviet communism on western/northern europe was the creation of lots of social welfare programs. (Sadly I'm not in a place where I can source this but I could have sworn it was a talk by Michael Parenti.) The reason I bring this up is because I think it's disingenuous to claim that if it hadn't been for Britain and the US that France would today resemble the Balkans or Ukraine. What we typically associate with "post-communist bloc" countries happened far later when the USSR fell apart. It's a big jump to say that places like Britain would have become part of then suffered under Soviet Communism.
Even if you are one of the ~1% of APAM students it's spoken about in broad terms and hazy generalities after Teapot Dome (unless you count history of Baseball, which somehow is somewhat inexplicably regarded as a critical component of America history).
I find this interesting because many Americans broadly understand the succession of events leading up to and constituting WWII. On the other hand, the topics that are covered to death are barely recalled: The Revolutionary War? Washington fought that one. Civil War? Harper's Ferry & Manassas? 1812? "The time we fought the Canadians".
you already lost this game when you had to go back to ww2 for a just war.
So if your goal is "I should further the goals of a military because it provides room for the sort of work I enjoy" and not "I should further the goals of a military because the military does good things," it is not at all clear that backing the US military over those of the USSR and China is the right option.
It is also worth remembering that plenty of people the US killed could have had grandchildren who wanted to work in these same fields.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_in_the_...
> worth noting that scientific researched flourished in the USSR
You seem to be talking about two totally different things. The grandparent did not talk about scientific advancement. He also wasn't talking about the USSR's military, he was specifically talking about the US's. The US, you may be surprised to discover, pursued, and continues to pursue, a political agenda quite different than that of the USSR.
> "I should further the goals of a military because it provides room for the sort of work I enjoy"
He didn't say that at all. He said specifically 'create this quite nifty Liberty bubble', which is not the same thing.
That is why I interpreted the "quite nifty Liberty bubble" as referring to the ability to participate in technical / scientific endeavors - the "freedom I have to do this work" - not about liberty in the abstract.
('criley2, if I'm misreading you, please let me know.)
There's a reason to be proud of Western enlightenment values, which are closely connected to Western liberal democracy.
But the reason the US was able to do so much fundamental research in the 20th century is not (just) because the US culturally valued fundamental research - it's because the US was able to get popular support for taxing people and spending it on the war effort (both the World Wars and the Cold War) and decided that fundamental research was necessary for the war effort.
The politicians today who are cutting NASA's budget, talking about shutting down DoE, etc. aren't simply victims of Koch propaganda or disbelievers in the enlightenment - they just no longer have political cover for publicly funding research to the same extent that it was funded previously. Nobody believes that the US is at a technical disadvantage against the people we're currently at war against. They still have the political cover to fund the military itself, which continues to get large amounts of funding from political parties that generally want to lower taxes, but that base won't let them fund basic research as much as it did in the past.
Are you implying that the USSR spent a smaller percentage of tax revenue on the war effort?
--- Edit: also, the movement to close down DoE and cut NASAs budget certainly WAS created by American oligarchs like the Koches. They have created a propaganda machine to push for tax cuts for the rich. And part of the propaganda, pushed by outlets funded or controlled by GOP billionaires, like Fox, Limbaugh, Cato(founded as Koch), Sinclair, Heritage, SPN, Cit U, Jud Watch, Bradley, Searle, etc etc. is that we need to shrink government (so we can cut taxes on the rich.)
One description of that strategy is here [1] Today’s Republican Party is the party that those activists made. Congressional Republicans who came up in the populist tax revolts of the 1970s abandoned the old party orthodoxy of balanced budgets and rebranded themselves as the tax-cutting party. They embraced the idea that deficits don’t matter as long as those deficits result from Republican tax cuts.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/18/opinion/republicans-tax-c...
The vast majority of chips produced in Asia come from Taiwan, not the RoC. That’s a big difference, given that this discussion is about the innovation of democratic vs. autocratic governments, and the Taiwanese and Chinese governments are on completely opposite sides of that spectrum.
I’m not saying that Taiwan innovates more than a China because it has a democratic government, but it’s at least worth distinguishing between the two countries.
But history paints a different picture, with events like Iraq, the Kontras, NSA Dragnetting just to name a very select few.
Governments are willfully violent towards its own citizens and others for what is often not much of a reason at all.
Hitler’s plan really was world domination. He had plans for a rocket-powered trans-Atlantic plane to bomb New York. Not to mention that the Nazis had the V2 and even a jet fighter by the end of the war (but too few resources to build/deploy them). With more resources the Nazis may well have developed their nuclear bomb.
As far as I know, most historians agree that the US hastened the Allies victory over Germany but the Allies would have (eventually, probably) won anyways.
What our grandfathers did was noble. What we do now is the business of war. I find it diminishing to compare what they did to what Google does now.
How can you possibly compare it with overthrowing governments in South America and the Middle East, Vietnam, Guantanamo, Abu Gharib, drone strikes on hospitals, up to 200k civilians dead in Iraq, and much more - and of coursr the deeply, deeply questionable motives of all of these.
The actions of our ancestors in WWII were borne out of necessity - those of the modern military are driven by money, greed, propaganda and political point-scoring.
You are looking at allied actions in WWII through rose colored glasses if you think that's worse.
Dresden, Tokyo, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Berlin, Saint-Nazair... the allies engaged in total war.
Civillians are part of the war making capability of a nation, and in WWII all sides considered them to be valid targets.
In Saint-Nazair's case it wasn't even enemy civillians. The German U-boat port was too heavily fortified, so the British wiped out the occupied French town that fed it.
The British, U.S., USSR, Germans, Japanese, and Italians all practiced atrocities and mass warfare and/or genocide against civilian populations. I'm not challenging the credibility of your list, only the one-sidedness.
If we want to defend the necessity and impact of those weapons, they should be taken in the context of modern american and NATO warfare, not in the context of WW2. Normandy 1944 was a very different conflict than Libya 2011 for instance.
The business of war most of the time makes us the aggressors.
A pacifist might say Hitler, Stalin and Mao are just symptoms of the deeper problem, which is the willingness of human beings to engage in violent conflicts just because somebody tells them to.
Why was the US an ally of GB/France/etc and not Germany/Italy? Contrary to your belief, greed can be ideological -- striving for global free trade is an example of this.
Also, the US formally joined the war in 1941, but were providing material support to the Allies and otherwise prepping before then.
Businesses in the US were serving both sides of the conflict.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust#cite_ref...
However, by 1940, it was very clear that the US was going to get dragged in anyways, and it would serve the US interests first to start preparing for war before it starts (note that the draft was instituted over a year before Pearl Harbor). Moreover, the US was neutral only in name: various acts passed more or less saying that the US would give aid to anybody so long as they were British or French. (Originally, it was cash-and-carry, but when Britain exhausted its cash reserves, it became Lend-Lease instead).
The intelligence services knew. The general public didn't.
The US provided support to the side they ideologically agreed with -- it wasn't just a case of "Germany randomly declares war on the US".
Well, certainly, the Roosevelt Administration was, but they were (prior to Pearl Harbor) also forced to maintain an outward pretense of neutrality while backing the Allies, because a large part of the rest of the US was also motivated by ideology...to either be sympathetic to the Axis Powers (one large, well-bankrolled faction) or to be opposed to intervention (another large, well-bankrolled faction, that often worked together with the preceding one against any interventionist policy.)
That's a big difference, and one you chose not to respect.
His CiC may not have agreed, but my grandfather told me, to my face, that he fought fascism and was proud to do so.
EDIT: To make clear what I meant, re: your comment: the state-building narrative the US has adopted substitutes the righteous struggle of people like your grandfather in order to avoid acknowledging, among many things, the reluctance to participate in world affairs and the frankly brazen pro-Nazi stances of many in the american public and the government at the time.
It's not correct to say that we have to attack a country/dictator in order to stand up to them.
My bad, I totally forgot that the Cold War never happened and that the soldiers of WW2 didn't form a hard border in Berlin that they were not friendly over.
As far as I know, no? The US was quite far from Berlin by the end of the war, and did not engage the USSR in battle for territorial control of Germany.
> saving dozens of countries from communism?
Surely not "dozens", but was there even one? The other Allies essentially handed Poland over to Stalin.
I believe GP was referring to a few years later, when the Berlin airlift broke the Soviet blockade of West Berlin - a clear attempt by the Soviet Union to expand their spehere of control to West Berlin and eventually West Germany as a whole.
The whole reason Japan started their program of military expansion in the first place was to guarantee access to natural resource, e.g., petroleum, needed by their industry.
By 1943 Japan was facing chronic shortages of petroleum products, rubber and other essential supplies because of interdiction by the US Navy's "Silent Service" (submarine force). And that was before Japan lost most of her navy, most of her large transport ships (by 1945 Japan was reduced to using mostly small wooden transport ships) the Phillipines, Iwo Jima and Okinawa (which while in Japanese hands could be used to operate aircraft to give Japanese shipping some protection from the US Navy).
It is unlikely that Japan could have done much more than feed itself after 1945.
The takeaway from WWII is not that the military is a wonderful thing but that the UN is a wonderful thing.
Btw I am lucky as my fathers house was bombed (when he wasn't in it) oh but he did live near the larges spitfire plant - which was a military target.
The same UN that causes Cholera outbreaks, protects rapists (as long as they wear blue helmets), and steps aside to allow massive genocides to occur on a not-irregular basis ( Rwanda, Bosnia, Sri Lanka, South Sudan for starters).
Or are you talking about the UN that funded the Oil for Food program so a bunch of super-elite rich people could get kickbacks from an evil dicatator?
Maybe it's the UN that has stood by for decades while more and more dictators and legitimately horrible people acquire and use WMDs (Libya, Syria, North Korea, and on and on)...
Seriously, how much good has the UN actually done that wasn't backedstopped by a US Super Carrier or two?
glowing historical illusions of "responsibility" and "valor" don't protect us from nuclear holocaust.
Keeping "free" nations safe and prosperous is as fine a goal as any.
Boy they pay great though...
Doesn't really explain why google pays less in London UK for that google does in low col states in the states.
And I don't think Lockheed and BAE pay their engineers as much as FANG companies do and they certainly don't out compete on benefits.
IBM, Cisco or any other typical IT company pays 120-150K salaries in bay area and not much of profit sharing/ equity.
These smug generalizations, if you did not vote for X, you are racist! If you are not for A, you are for Genocide! are not going to win you over people that are not already in your camp.
You come across as wanting that sweet sv $ and benefits without having to make any moral choices - if you got to work for CNI company's you know what the deal is.
And before you ask yes I did face that at my first job when I analysed some high speed film from one experiment and though oh I know what that "objct" is and my office mates said yes that's probably REDACTED.
If their efforts fails, they can choose to resign, or take other actions as employees in history have. It's not the only option, it may be the only option ultimately that succeeds in removing yourself from complicity.
You will find that in general that a lot more googlers probably wouldn't take that view.
I don't agree with this. Many open source projects have been used for sinister means (not just by governments). But does that make those contributors complicit? Should those contributors be safe-guarding against all possible unintended use cases?
It seems like you're painting all military efforts and funding in evil terms. But these efforts are directed by many different people, each with their own goals and agendas. Some of those efforts are intended for the betterment of humanity, while other efforts are at the detriment of humanity (at least in my opinion).
I worked for several years at a large defense contractor. The majority of our funding came from military contracts. I worked on a project intended to help detect and disarm explosive devices. And I worked next to a team that was trying to rapidly detect infectious diseases. We all thought we were doing work that would benefit society. But virtually any technology can be used for malicious purposes. Does that make us complicit if those technologies are ever used in malicious ways? Do the evil actions of some people in an organization make the entire organization evil? Does that mean that all military efforts are unjust?
Yes. If you choose to work for an entity you help further their work. Militaries are made for war and by contributing to a military, you directly help them commit atrocities. Working for a military is simply war profiteering [1].
> Do the evil actions of some people in an organization make the entire organization evil?
Yes, if you voluntarily join an organization knowing they have evil people doing evil things.
> Does that mean that all military efforts are unjust?
Yes, with probably the only exception being a defensive war.
I can now assume that miners and forgery workers are complicit in murder because they harvest and refine the metals that build weapons. And that farmers are complicit because they produce the food that is used in military rations, the wool or cotton that is used to make their uniforms.
Technology is neutral - who it's used by and how is not.
I don't care what you build, if it has the goal of improving a workflow or automating a process then it will de-facto support one organization over another.