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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

We often let the ideals of perfection get in the way of progress. Wouldn't it be great if we could live in a world free of nukes, free of war, free of the massive amount we spend on these sort of things?

Unfortunately, we're not there, and it's probably not a stable equilibrium. Instead, history has shown that complacency does not lead to peace.

So what to do? I think the correct answer is to match other countries capabilities, but always always always take a "peace first" approach to everything. It's far from perfect, but it does lead to progress. As such, such things as analyzing drone footage with AI, datacenter contracts, satellite bandwidth contracts, etc, are a necessary part of the peace process.

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This comment doesn’t fit with the pacifism at all costs mentality of many, however, it’s by far the most erudite point I’ve read in these parts in a long time. Peace is achieved only through strength. ISIS for example doesn’t care about our lofty ideals of peace. This is/was a group that burned prisoners alive and gang raped kidnapped women. They don’t respect treaties or pontification on civility. If we as a free society are to have peace, we must be prepared for war.

Exporting democracy with bombs has not worked well so far, I guess (or hope) governments learnt that. Terrible mistakes has been made, justifying war at all cost to satisfy people for election, or other wrong motivations.

You can't just destroy a regime, replace that with another democratic one and expect that a State of peace will grow. This just doesn't work. People from different areas of the world are used to different way of dealing with power, for cultural and religion issues. This is especially true with stabilizing an extremist Muslim regime. You need to cut their extreme belief, destroy their motivation, give them other chances. Examples: Gaza, Paris and its suburbs, etc.

Most of the time, in those contexts, war doesn't resolve anything.

They never planned to export democracy after all.

This logic could work for Switzerland. What if your country started numerous wars in the past?

The United States is by far the greatest promoter of war on the planet. There is absolutely no goal of peace within the US Military Industrial Complex.

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