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Comment by vikramkr | Hacker News Reader

Over the past few years a series of American agencies have lost their reputation and world standing. The FAA with the 737 max, the CDC with the test, the FDA with testing regulation and hydroxychloroquine. Its important to have institutions that work, but we've spent years deliberately gutting them and undervaluing them. All that money spent on the military and homeland security, and in the end we were caught utterly unprepared for the greatest national security threat of the past few decades. Even though we have more aircraft carriers than makes sense to have, we'd rather build another one than invest in crucial infrastructure such as strong regulatory agencies and science infrastructure. And we get to pay the price of those misplaced priorities as we barrel towards 200,000 dead. Hopefully this serves as a sort of wakeup call.

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I think you'd make a stronger argument by instead of making a military or other things argument, and just make a 'fund other things more' argument.

The reason I think you should stay away from pointing fingers, especially at a relatively divisive issue like military or especially aircraft carrier funding is because then you shift a question of "should American be world leading in commercial air travel regulation, pandemic prevention and control, and medical development" to a far more complex one of what America's role in the world should be.

The combined CDC, FDA and FAA budget is something like 35 billion dollars a year. Overall DOD budget is is nearly 700 billion, making up nearly half of annual discretionary spending (roughly 1.5 trillion). You could literally double the funding of those three agencies and barely budge the overall calculus of the budget.

Edit/Add-on: I think the whole sub-thread under my comment (my bad =/ - I get the irony...) is an example of the types of distractions that might be avoidable if you don't scope military spending into discussions.

There is a huge disparity here that needs to be addressed.

The Pentagon can’t pass an audit for decades, $7 Trillion just in the last 10 years unaccounted for. Yet we increased the annual military budget by $100B a year in 2018 alone.

Meanwhile we say we can’t afford these other programs.

If national security is a priority then why this mentality? Given such a mentality, the military should probably just subsume the CDC or something, just so the politicians can fund CDC as part of “the military”.

The root cause though is this obsession with growing the largest fighting force and largest employer on the planet. We have 30x more bases than the rest of the world combined! The same people who say they want to see smaller government and hate central planning tell us to open our pocketbooks to keep giving more, more, more to continuously operate in 80 other countries.

Then when we ask why can’t we have money for better education and healthcare to cover all our own citizens like European countries, they turn around and tell us the reason those countries can afford it is that we protect them. Well if that’s true, how is that America first, I wonder?

Nothing makes sense.

The fact that "military" is a "divisive" issue proves the point of how we got to this point in the first place.

People are divided on what the US military‘s role in the world should be and how much money it should take to uphold that role.

Sitting atop the longest stretch of global stability (largely enforced/maintained by the US military), it’s very hard to think clearly about what variables we can or should fiddle with.

The globe might feel stable while sitting inside the US and reading domestic media sources, but it sure hasn’t been easy for the dozens of countries we’ve been invading/occupying for the past decades.

I think the reverse. The globe is relatively stable, and there are pockets of instability, some of which are the fault of the US.

Of course this is all a challenging exercise (which is my only real point) since we don’t have counterfactuals for any of these scenarios.

If we're making sweeping generalizations, then countries with stable benevolent governments who don't threaten their neighbors / the US and fund terrorism don't get invaded or occupied either. To be clear, I'm not saying every foreign policy action the US has undertaken in the last few decades has been superb.

If we're making sweeping generalizations, then countries that don't project military power to prop up dodgy regimes and enforce their currency on major commodities don't get targetted by terrorist action. To be clear, I'm not saying every action that resistance organisations and foreign governments have taken in the last few decades has been superb.

:) :)

> Sitting atop the longest stretch of global stability (largely enforced/maintained by the US military), it’s very hard to think clearly about what variables we can or should fiddle with.

Yes, if you only count the 20th century. Apparently the human race is only 100 years old. It’s time you read some history.

I mean... here’s Europe alone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_Europe?wp...

I’d be very keen to learn about a particular period, or multiple, of an earth without large scale armed conflict (obviously controlling for difference in scale over time).

Could you point me to a few?

That's a though one to argue. 90% of people in a peaceful country take peace for granted, so their opinion on what should the military do is honestly nonsense.

Anticipating the downvotes: if you think peace is "easy" and are no aware of how much a strong military power is required to hold it you are delusional.

Where did you get that the military is divisive?

People are divided on the amount of funding the military should receive and whether or not it needs to continue growing.

I love this "half of annual discretionary spending". It is designed to confuse the fact that military spending is only %15. [1]

https://www.kff.org/medicare/issue-brief/the-facts-on-medica...

I don't think spending more on military than the next 10 countries combined can be described as "only" in any way.

The highest spender are the US, with $732.0 billion, followed by China with $261.0 billion, then India and Russia with $71.1 and $65.1 billion respectively.

Militaries are reliant on domestic production and labor. (Paying Chinese solider costs the government a fraction as much as an American soldier.) So instead of an exchange rate conversion, you should be doing a purchasing-power conversion. For these three countries, that means multiplying by 2x to 4x.

Also, the US is particularly inefficient at capital spending. It costs us a billion dollars to build a mile of subway, and costs countries like France a fraction of that. So that weighs further in favor of discounting our spending in that comparison.

The majority of DoD's budget is not salaries. Only the salaries should be scaled in this way.

E.g. many other countries are buying our F-35s at the same price we are. Other countries simply can't get equally effective jet fighters, aircraft carriers, etc., at a third to a quarter of the price.

You're correct, personnel costs is not the majority of DoD costs. However, their "pay and benefits" take up 40% of it's budget (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...)

Procurement (the most visible part of the budget we hear about) is 20% of the DoD budget.

Also, one needs to take into account Black Budgets - as they are totally opaque and we have no idea what amount of the budget they consume, assuming they are even accounted for in the 700 billion dollar number the budget claims to be.

The same is true for China and Russia.

Ooohhh hey again, we havent comment threaded in like five years... how are you doing.

Hanging in thank you for asking.

Why would only salaries be scaled that way? It costs China a fraction as much as the U.S. to build a train line. Do you think it costs them the same amount in nominal dollars to build a landmine?

>So instead of an exchange rate conversion, you should be doing a purchasing-power conversion. For these three countries, that means multiplying by 3x or 4x.

Where did you get those numbers from? According to the OECD the renminbi PPP rate is 4.198 whereas the the current exchange rate is 7. That's 1.67x not 3x.

https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-parities-p...

Now equalize labor cost... tada!

PPP does include labour. Whether or not it adequately reflects the share of labour costs for the Chinese military I don't know.

No matter which way you slice it, America has a very capable blue water navy while China's barely qualifies. They're on tier with India, Italy, and Russia; only capable of force-projection in their neighborhood. Besides the US, France and the UK are capable of global power projection; that's it. And both of those are in NATO too.

France isn't in NATO.

Edit: ok they are. But they did attempt to withdraw and were only stopped by the 20 year rule. And they still don't have unified nuclear command.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal_from_NATO

France was a member of NATO from the very beginning. In the 60s France had some manner of dispute with the rest of NATO and disassociated themselves in some capacity, but technically remained a member. Since 2009, French/NATO relations have been largely normalized, I think with the exception of how the French government chooses to control France's nukes.

> Edit: ok they are. But they did attempt to withdraw and were only stopped by the 20 year rule. And they still don't have unified nuclear command.

Be that as it may, I don't think Americans need an expensive navy to protect themselves from the French.

That would be news to NATO. https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/nato_countries.htm

France is a founding member of NATO.

> So instead of an exchange rate conversion, you should be doing a purchasing-power conversion.

Are soldiers with greater purchasing power more effective on the battlefield?

They're not, and that's the point. If a software company in the U.S. was spending 5x as much as one in India (where are experienced developer might make 1/5 as much or less), would you say the U.S. company was spending to much?

All the battlefields created in the last 20 years have been more like walking into quicksand

Thats a really interesting question.

My brother was a Colonel in the airforce, Commander of the 10th Medical Wing. He is a really successful doctor who then led the VA for the state of alaska...

He is now CEO for a hospital in Idaho.

The point is that his life path was truly successful for him through the military and he has added great value to the nation through that experience.

Had he been a minion in a more oppressive style regime, such as China - or North Korea, or even Russia, then I would expect he would have been less effective at being such a positive value to those nations as he is to the US.

And this is due only in a small part as to his ability to have a happy, successful material life here in the US and also raise an amazing family.

I can only applaud your brother's accomplishments!

That said, why do you believe that he succeeded because of the military and not in spite of it? Is his story in any way typical for veterans? From my understanding, not at all.

Also, why do you assume that Russian or Chinese military service is less valued or constructive for their service members than US service? Are you basing this on something, or just the general image created by US media about the Chinese and Russian armed forces?

Thanks for your reply -- Ill be honest - I evaluated my statement based on your response, and the only thing I can come up with WRT what I am basing it on is actually a bias to my understanding of how corrupt those regimes are.... now, thats not to say that the US doesnt have a problem with corruption (its getting worse, here in the US, whereby politicians are enriching themselves at the expense of others -- see "politicians made millions from stock trade before the pandemic information was released" type stories)

The US is filling the role of the Roman Empire, securing trade routes to allow efficient scales of tech expertise and production. If that military is scaled back or shown to be obsolete/ineffectual, then globalism itself will come into question.

The dark ages were caused by the localizing of production, with local feifdoms losing access to specialized technical expertise. To some extent, this is what we see now with companies moving produuction back to North America.

> The US is filling the role of the Roman Empire

Yeah, and look how that ended.

In fact, its entirely apt cautionary tale because due to taxes and an ever increasing cost of living in Rome proper citizen-soldiers (during the Republic) often went bankrupt and fell into destitute while fighting campaigns from Rome's conquest and returned to see the oligarchy take their fields/land and displaced them further and further out of Rome.

This is the story of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, direct descendants of Scipio Africanus (the illustrious Soldier and Savior of the Roman Republic) and the Land/Ag Plebeian reforms they achieved that cost them both their lives after several stints in Politics.

It got to a point that due to land consolidation that it was less expensive to buy the wheat from Egypt, have it transported by boat, and used (often slave labour) to bake the bread then it was to buy a loaf locally. My old History professor went on an amazing rant about this for an hour in one of my Roman History courses when we were discussing the true costs of Imperial Expansion and what is often swept under the rug as a footnote in History, she was old but still pissed because they didn't let her include it in her book.

The World now is ever more interconnected than ever, and one could argue why that is a horrible trade-off both for national security purposes but also for self-reliance reasons as we saw with the PPE shortage and the faulty equipment that came from China. But I fail to see how the West at least would abandon the critical supply chains they have developed in order for Society to function unless we have something like an asteroid collision. Even now the EU as well as Australia, and New Zealand are siding with the US' stance on punishing the CCP's Security Law in Hong Kong that is going to undo the relationship that served as an access point into China via a neutral party.

Are you seriously suggesting that if the US empire scaled back its efforts in those regions then we'd return to the dark ages? Because when I was in Europe Somali pirates were hi-jacking oil tankers and the US didn't intervene, it took the European companies and military to put an end to that entirely by themselves without the need of US involvement.

I think the US is headed for the same fate as Rome as it refuses to learn the same lessons, but if given the choice between China or the US as the Global Superpower I think its the latter that must retain its position as the former is hellbent on a suicidal mission that destroys everything in its path and will commit horrible acts of barbarism and won't hesitate to take the whole World down with it in its folly (see recent cases: Xianjing, Wuhan, Hong Kong and Beijing).

I just hope we can attain a position where the World doesn't need superpowers and can return to at least a mutually beneficial city-state model as COVID has proven we cannot really overcome such huge issues like pandemics (or likely wide scale famines or global catastrophes) at such a scale. I mean governing 300+ million People is hard to conceptualize, but with Nation-States like China and India where it goes into the billions is just unfathomable and failure is the only real outcome in that.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODI1VOOoey0

> Are you seriously suggesting that if the US empire scaled back its efforts in those regions then we'd return to the dark ages?

No, we’d probably return to the era of world wars.

> Because when I was in Europe Somali pirates were hi-jacking oil tankers and the US didn't intervene, it took the European companies and military to put an end to that entirely by themselves without the need of US involvement.

What?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy_off_the_coast_of_Soma... :

> In the late 2000s, anti-piracy coalition known as Combined Task Force 150, including 33 different nations, established a Maritime Security Patrol Area in the Gulf of Aden. By 2010, these patrols were paying off, with a steady drop in the number of incidents.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_Task_Force_150 :

> Countries presently contributing to CTF-150 include Australia, Canada, Denmark,[1] France, Pakistan, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. Other nations who have participated include Italy, India, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Thailand and Turkey. The command of the task force rotates among the different participating navies, with commands usually lasting between four and six months. The task force usually comprises 14 or 15 ships.[2] CTF-150 is coordinated by the Combined Maritime Forces (CMF), a 33-nation coalition operating from the US Navy base in Manama, Bahrain.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_Task_Force_151 :

> On 8 January 2009, at the United States Fifth Fleet headquarters in Manama, Bahrain, Vice Admiral William E. Gortney, USN, announced the formation of CTF-151 to combat the piracy threat off Somalia, with Rear Admiral Terence E. McKnight in command.

> I just hope we can attain a position where the World doesn't need superpowers and can return to at least a mutually beneficial city-state model

That will mean war.

Within a single country, government serves the purpose of providing a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. This monopoly is an impediment for the otherwise random violence people would live under. Internationally, the same is true for superpowers.

> No, we’d probably return to the era of world wars.

As opposed to the constant and just as deadly porxy wars fought in placed like Georgia, India, Hong Kong, Syria, Yemen, Somlaia, Tunsia, Libya, Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan... That seems like a World War situation to me in that it spans 2 or more continents and some conflicts/occupations have lasted longer than the World wars combined.

> > In the late 2000s, anti-piracy coalition known as Combined Task Force 150, including 33 different nations, established a Maritime Security Patrol Area in the Gulf of Aden. By 2010, these patrols were paying off, with a steady drop in the number of incidents.

The existence of a collation and the presence of the US doesn't invalidate my statement, seeing as how most of these hijacking were happening in the Mediterranean Sea the EU Naval Force had a vested interest in protecting its shores and the influx of refugees coming in from Northern Africa was also happening simultaneously so a joint effort only make sense. But here are a list of hijackings and see how many of them bein released were a result of US involvement, its not as many you are making out to be [1].

> That will mean war.

Why, because you say it does? We are seeing the massive revamping of Civil Rights and the systemic Police Brutality in the US without a Civil war after the protests, why can't that amount of civility exist in this process? Riots did occur, but as the blueleaks is revealing a lot of it was external criminal enterprises taking advantage of the situation to foment unrest for its own ends.

As did looting from opportunistic people, but I heard it best when someone said 'Those were the people who otherwise cannot participate in Consumerist Society, that is afforded to everyone else.'

Jura, a canton with strong Anarchist Intellectual History on top of its reputation for perfecting the art of superior Rolex watch making while the rest of the World was in the midst of World War, separated from Bern/Switzerland for a period of time with nothing more than a simple vote.

Jura was technically its own Nation for a while and no blood was shed. California gained Independence and declared itself a Republic (hence the flag) in the Bear Flag Revolution of 1846 without bloodshed. Many former Soviet Satellites nations gained independence after the USSR dissolved without having to take up arms, as did Slovenia after the collapse of Yugoslavia--by contrast Croatia and Serbia went to war and ruined their economies and have created deep wounds in their society as a result that and are still felt to this day, where as Slovenia is a member of the core EU member nations, which has many negative implications but the point stands.

> Within a single country, government serves the purpose of providing a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.

Agreed, which is why the State is inherently an evil institution, one we've been warned by the creators of the US who detested War and Empire and put in certain vanguards to ensure it didn't occur. And exercising these in the modern World will now make you an extremist, terrorist and Enemy of the State.

> This monopoly is an impediment for the otherwise random violence people would live under. Internationally, the same is true for superpowers.

You base your (flawed) argument on the basis that Humanity cannot conduct itself without abject violence and wanton barbarism, when in reality those predictable outcomes are a direct byproduct of Imperial decree: importing slaves from Africa and generational disfranchisement, isolating conquered aboriginal People into small, remotely located and undeserved areas of the US (reservations) and expecting them to have any opportunities all while promoting things that lead to vice and violence (gambling and alcohol are huge problems in Native People) as their only way to succeed.

I will go on record so say that I'm not an apologist for these things, its sad, but I didn't do it and to be fair my startup's parent company had Native American outreach programs to help them grow hemp on reservation land for subsidized costs in seed, so I don't have what is often regarded as 'white guilt' as my family was also exploited when they came to the US as did just about every race/creed that came in search of a better Life in the New World. Its just what happened.

I argue that because of the abundance afforded to us by automation and technology we can already start from a much better position and can make this a more inclusive system, that does not limit based on fictional borders or race and instead can see and find value that is inherit in all of Human Capital. Its an incentive and distribution issue, not one of scarcity. We can already feed the entire World many times over with the food produced now. That was thought to be unfathomable when the Nation-State model was created, so why are we still using this archaic framework to model our Society?

Taiwan and the UK just opened up its borders to Hong Kong refugees, and Taiwan has made a form of UBI available to those that decide to come as they value the highly skilled labour that comes from HK, whereas the UK is limiting it to BN passport holders born before the handover in 97. And still, Ivan Ko a property tycoon, is thinking about settling a new Hong Kong in Ireland [2]. The World is shifting and I'm super excited to see it happening as it seems they will have to compete for its citizens.

The Nation-State model is being challenged before your very eyes if you want to pay attention to it, I'm saying its best to embrace it and benefit from the disruption rather than go to war to try and needlessly try to keep pretend it can remain intact in the 21st Century.

Its not like this notion is anything new, it was just limited to the rich and powerful: Venice, London, Vatican, Monaco, Gibraltar, Macau etc...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ships_attacked_by_Soma...

2: https://www.independent.ie/business/irish/property-tycoon-ey...

> As opposed to the constant and just as deadly porxy wars fought in placed like Georgia, India, Hong Kong, Syria, Yemen, Somlaia, Tunsia, Libya, Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan... That seems like a World War situation to me in that it spans 2 or more continents and some conflicts/occupations have lasted longer than the World wars combined.

England and France famously fought a "Hundred Years' War" in the 14th and 15th centuries over the claim of the English king to the French throne. From that time onwards, neither country ever experienced a Hundred Years' Peace even on their own soil. The longest stretch of peace for either country started in 1945 and extends to the present day.

If the world today seems like a World War situation, you are severely underestimating just how deadly the World Wars were: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-conflict-deaths-var... and see also https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/conflict-deaths-per-10000...

> The existence of a collation and the presence of the US doesn't invalidate my statement

Your statement was:

"Somali pirates were hi-jacking oil tankers and the US didn't intervene, it took the European companies and military to put an end to that entirely by themselves without the need of US involvement"

In other words, you made the very strong statement that European powers addressed the issue of Somali piracy "entirely by themselves" and that "the US didn't intervene". In reality, the US did intervene and the European intervention was not entirely by themselves--countries including Pakistan and Japan even helped!

> But here are a list of hijackings and see how many of them bein released were a result of US involvement, its not as many you are making out to be

It's more than zero, which is what you made it out to be.

> You base your (flawed) argument on the basis that Humanity cannot conduct itself without abject violence and wanton barbarism

Yes, and I think it takes a completely willful or perhaps tendentious ignorance of history to claim otherwise.

> when in reality those predictable outcomes are a direct byproduct of Imperial decree: importing slaves from Africa and generational disfranchisement, isolating conquered aboriginal People into small, remotely located and undeserved areas of the US (reservations)...

That's beside the point. Every part of the world had centuries of war before Americans ever did these things. Those slaves were exported by West African slavers. Indians also practiced slavery and warfare.

It also applies across cultures. If you look at the history of China, there are periods where China is a unified empire and then there are periods where China is divided into multiple warring states (one of which is literally called the "Warring States Period"). European history between the fall of the Roman Empire and the end of WWII can be seen as a single long Western warring states period.

> Its not like this notion is anything new, it was just limited to the rich and powerful: Venice, London, Vatican, Monaco, Gibraltar, Macau etc...

The Venetians sacked Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade. London was the seat of a global empire won through centuries of warfare and more of an example of my model than of yours. The Vatican's relative inability to maintain the loyalty of continental Europe was a direct contributing factor to the Thirty Years' War, which is one of the most brutal and bloody conflicts in history.

> England and France famously fought a "Hundred Years' War" in the 14th and 15th centuries over the claim of the English king to the French throne. From that time onwards, neither country ever experienced a Hundred Years' Peace even on their own soil. The longest stretch of peace for either country started in 1945 and extends to the present day.

And Spain fought for independence/Reconquista for 780 years against Moorish occupation of Iberia, the Sengoku Jidai lasted 148 years of internal civil war. I'm really not sure what else you're trying to achieve other than deflecting from the point that we don't have to abide by this mode of operation moving forward and trying to one-up your understanding of Imperial conflicts form the past isn't proving as effective as you think it is.

That fact that it occurred is not being denied, no one is disputing this took place. It just isn't in the US' People's interest to do this given the alternative that exist today. I'm come for a military family, I lived near the biggest Marine Base camp in the US: I've seen first hand the consequences of these campaigns, there is no glory in it just a long list of sad casualties and injured people on the US side.

> It's more than zero, which is what you made it out to be.

Only because your initial argument was based on the notion that the dark ages awaited us if the US pulled out of trade route protection in its attempts to fill the vacumm left behind Rome, when in reality that it's clearly not true... But if you wish me to clarify: yes, US joint coalitions helped, in conjunction with other Global partners participation, re-commandeer sea vessels lost to pirates.

> Yes, and I think it takes a completely willful or perhaps tendentious ignorance of history to claim otherwise.

You seem entirely fixed on the idea that it must continue this way so much you refuse for it to be any other way. Do you really think having this mindset is correct during a pandemic, mass economic crisis and global civil unrest while China is trying to expand its territory and illegally annex Hong Kong and eying up Taiwan, while playing bully in the South China Sea? This doesn't end well for Humanity if it does and could ensure we really do go extinct, Nuclear leaks have been detected in N. Europe from possible failures in Russia this week, do you really think Warfare is in any way a viable choice given all the problems we have going on? We still have Fukushima pouring nuclear contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean for what will soon be a decade in 9 months from now.

I'm afraid there really is no getting to people this belligerent and jingoistic about the matter, I just wonder how long you'd hold that point of view if it was you and those you care about on the front lines fighting these needless banker wars.

1: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/radiation-sc...

I think that if you would describe the other party here as jingoistic, you're not understanding what they mean.

Their argument is essentially that war is inevitable, and US imperialism is a good way to prevent it. This is a consequentialist anti-war position. Consequentialists often believe that a bad thing is okay if it decreases the net number of bad things. This does not mean they are in favor of bad things happening.

Short of reaching post-scarcity, I don't see a path forward that ends violence without inflicting more. The conservative in me wants to carry on as is, because it's working better than anything else ever has. The liberal in me wants to push for economic measures to take the place of as much of the military as possible, and introduce transparency and oversight to prevent things like the war in Iraq.

You're saying a path exists that would awaken the radical in me. But you haven't explained how it works. You've just suggested that Europe can do what the US is doing instead, which seems net zero. And you've suggested that perhaps we can all just agree to stop, which seems impossible. I genuinely would love to hear more options, it is hard to escape a false dichotomy.

Essentially what I was going for, except I would use the term “hegemony” rather than “imperialism” since, at its best, the US does not seek to actually control the rest of the world so much as establish conditions for peace and constrain aggression in the international sphere. Some examples of this include American diplomatic intervention in the Suez Crisis, the Marshall Plan, the rebuilding of Japan, the Korean War, the Persian Gulf War, intervention in the 1990’s Yugoslav wars, and suppression of ISIS over the past decade.

I don’t think everything the US has done served this purpose or even had this motive, and I think it’s counterproductive at the very least for the US to abuse its hegemonic power. But it’s also essential, and basically good, for the US to exercise that power responsibly when it’s beneficial to do so.

> I think that if you would describe the other party here as jingoistic, you're not understanding what they mean.

> Their argument is essentially that war is inevitable, and US imperialism is a good way to prevent it.

How is that not jingoistic? State worship is bad, dare I say 'Anti-American' in the Founder's understanding of the term but going so far as to suggest that US imperialism is a net 'good' in the World?! The US being the biggest most expansive empire the World has ever seen, is the very definition of jingoism as the US can't seem to think in terms outside of war tactics to solve issues; I still remember talking to my physics professor in a somewhat somber yet joking manner about how that spy satellite that was falling back into Earth was blown up using a missile was using also using the same military tactic they used on the moon to see if it had water.

> Consequentialists often believe that a bad thing is okay if it decreases the net number of bad things. This does not mean they are in favor of bad things happening.

That seem more like a rationalization than it does a valid argument, as its premise is not in seeking the most good but in accepting that evil is a constant occurrence and detracting its source is not an option.

Suffice it to say: as a Hedonist at my core I don't accept this argument nor it's flawed premise. Moreover, I come from a lineage of people who are often used as the cannon fodder to achieve that end, and its a cycle I intend to break, if only with my own Life.

> Short of reaching post-scarcity, I don't see a path forward that ends violence without inflicting more.

That is exactly the aim I pursued and abandoned my career for and focused instead on food and agriculture, something I have now in my mid 30s have dedicated the largest part of my Life toward, and we've already achieved post-scarcity not just caloric terms but also in real abundance terms due to technology, mechanization, and automation. Much is left to be done, but that requires more engineering than it does Life Scientists like myself. I just hope we have the right incentives to direct them towards that instead of a Lockheed Martin or Dow Chemicals.

I've since left my work as farmer and chef after achieving all of my goals because I think the next target is to focus on the broken Supply Chains to ensure this occurs in masse in order for it to be replicated elsewhere, as I honestly think that is the only thing left to achieve other than the adoption of more sustainable practices and models. Which COVID is already doing that more effectively than anything I've seen to date as the factory farm model and its immensely complicated supply chains have faltered and failed to deliver on their promises under scrutiny leaving small, local (often organic) farms with more customers and demand then they can meet and their CSA programs are selling out seasons in advance! Community gardens plots were sold out well in advance of planting season where I live, and are getting people to take an active role in community based solutions towards food security.

> I genuinely would love to hear more options, it is hard to escape a false dichotomy.

Honestly, I'd enjoy exploring that too, but this conversation is beyond the scope of this format and requires more in depth discussion and further reading than I think this medium allows.

I'd start with the works of Murray Bookchin, and the ecological centered efforts and works of Alexander Grothendieck and take it from there once you understand the ecological damage and unnecessary destruction we see in a World to maintain the State model that serves the few and the expense of the many in a system that ultimately puts us all at greater risk despite having the means to works toward a more desirable society in our Lifetime.

Consider that we are seriously going to be colonizing Mars in our Lifetime, mainly through the efforts of a Private company not a Nation-State, and the amount of potential economic growth that entails to achieve that could literately usher in a period of Global prosperity unlike anything else we've ever seen as it won't stop with just a colony but also asteroid mining and resource gathering.

We live in the best time in Human History, and yet we walk around as though we're resolved to endless perpetual warfare and reckless ecological death as an absolute. I refuse to accept that and would rather die trying to break that cycle than live comfortably waiting for this perilous and harrowing inevitability.

> I'm really not sure what else you're trying to achieve other than deflecting from the point that we don't have to abide by this mode of operation moving forward and trying to one-up your understanding of Imperial conflicts form the past isn't proving as effective as you think it is.

I'm pointing out that perpetual warfare is the human condition and that the world we're living in today is the most peaceful we've known in all of human history. That provides very strong and direct evidence that whatever we've been doing between 1945 and 2020 is helping.

> I'm afraid there really is no getting to people this belligerent and jingoistic about the matter, I just wonder how long you'd hold that point of view if it was you and those you care about on the front lines fighting these needless banker wars.

Don't presume to know anything about me. Leave the personal bullshit out of it. We both want the same thing. It's just that the historical record provides very direct evidence that hegemons--be they Roman, Chinese, Mongol, British, or American--can sustain longer periods of peace than any balance of power ever can.

Also:

> Only because your initial argument was based on the notion that the dark ages awaited us if the US pulled out of trade route protection in its attempts to fill the vacumm left behind Rome, when in reality that it's clearly not true

I entered this thread after your false claim that “the US didn't intervene” in Somali piracy. It’s not my fault you got that point of fact wrong. It’s also not my fault that you refuse to concede that point of fact and make inappropriate assumptions about my personal motivations. The only thing you are proving is your own inability or refusal to disagree in good faith.

If the above, abridged history of Rome interests you, check out the podcast The History of Rome by Mike Duncan.

> If the above, abridged history of Rome interests you, check out the podcast The History of Rome by Mike Duncan.

Thanks, I'll check it out. I don't have any apple products, so don't have an account on the Apple Store but I saw he has a youtube channel.

So only the US by virtue of "something" has a vested interest in globalism?

> only the US by virtue of "something" has a vested interest in globalism?

It’s a tragedy of the commons.

That said, I believe we could protect this common with 2/3 the current military budget, maybe half.

If you're going to have a discussion about federal spending, it's important that you understand the difference between discretionary and non-discretionary spending and why both are relevant. As well as understand what spending expenses have revenue (ie taxes) tied to them and which ones don't.

I'm not going to be proscriptive here and argue for either. But simply leave it at make sure you understand the key factors / attributes of income and spending beyond just a pie chart.

At nearly three-quarters of a trillion, the DoD budget is difficult to ignore. It had bipartisan support. It has not made us any safer.

It's not fingerpointing. It's simply a perfect example of a system and priorities gone sideways. It's a 700 billion gorilla that continues to bloat because saying otherwise is considered to be unAmerican, etc.

The narrative of not talking openly about the DOD budget needs to change.

Chalmers Johnson and Robert Higgs were making the case as long ago as 2006 that the actual US defence budget was obfuscated and was over a trillion dollars.

They argue that if you add the budgets of the Department of Energy (nuclear research), the Department of Homeland Security, the defence-related programs of the the Department of State and international assistance programs (e.g. Israel, Egypt?), the Department of Veterans Affairs, NASA, the Department of the Treasury's military retirement costs (Military Retirement Fund) you can add 50% to the nominal defence budget.

[1] https://mondediplo.com/2008/02/05military

[2] https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=1941

It seems very relevant because the military was apparently completely unprepared for biological warfare. Like in all their talk of terrorism they hadn't even considered the possibility. Sure, this virus wasn't an intentional attack, but it easily could have been. How much good do all those weapons do when a virus can bring the country to a halt?

$35 billion is an EXTRAORDINARY amount of money. It's the economic output of Vermont, a state with 630,000 people.

the US is an EXTRAORDINARY large country. It has a population >500x greater than the state of Vermont, a state with 630,000 people.

I wouldn't call it EXTRAORDINARY (especially not all-caps) when you know there are countries like Russia, Canada and China.

The only extraordinary thing would be the wealth distribution vs market value of the USA.

In context it should be very easy to see why I phrased things the way I did. I do not personally think there's anything EXTRAORDINARY about US population size OR the budget amounts in question.

And the US as a whole is 500x the population of Vermont.

The data we have on hydroxychloroquine is now convincingly negative-there's just a ton of misinformation and it's become a political issue. But when some institutions fail you get widespread mistrust of both institutions and experts, which maybe is part of the compounding problem.

The hydroxychloroquine study I'm referring to has less to do with the data and more to do with how the FDA behaves regarding the drug, where they gave the drug an emergency use authorization based off of what seemed like pretty blatant interference from the executive branch. If the drug had ended up working, maybe their reputation would have taken less of a hit, but that wouldn't have changed how inappropriate that authorization was, and how it demonstrated that you could get a drug approved if you had enough political power from the president behind you. That's not a message that's making me optimistic when we look at vaccine development right now - that core trust that the agency operates on science/public health instead of politics has been shaken.

There was some early evidence it could be effective. I’m actually supportive of the FDA’s move to do both the emergency approval and the retraction. Without the ability to take calculated risks in a situation where either approving or unapproving can cause harm, the agency could be a hindrance more than a help. And that means some emergency measures will prove wrong. If none prove wrong, the agency is being too cautious and allowing people to die because of it.

EDIT: I hate the politicization of HCQ by Trump, of course.

HCQ was authorized to be used as a treatment, not merely authorized to be used in trials or for compassionate use (as remdesivir was). That’s the scandal in the face of lack of evidence at that time.

It’s another in a very long line of mistakes over the past three years pointing towards one thing: process matters. It’s boring, it’s not dynamic, but it’s also the thing that prevents organizations from making some extremely bone headed mistakes.

Agree with the point, but the disregard for process has been going on for longer than 3 years. If we want our principles to be taken seriously we can't just call out the other side. Remember "I have a pen and a phone"? How well did that work out?

...and it wasn't our side that called in a drone strike on American citizens overseas, without even a nod to due process.

And who pushed for this drug? I don’t believe the CDC even cared to consider it that much. But the current administration and Trump were pushing way too hard on this. So they felt compelled to investigate. Look at all the damage Trump has corn to all of the organizations in the USA. He’s trying to take away any independent power and concentrate it into his office.

It seems that successive administrations have lost sight of the benefits of soft power and only go for the hard version instead. Having world-leading institutions with the ability to advise other goes a lot further, for a fraction of the cost.

Courtesy of Hollywood (more soft power, but with a more dubious pedigree) there is no situation where the CDC does not, absolutely, have it's shit together. For the price of a single aircraft carrier you could probably make that a reality.

It baffles me that you can complain about executive departments without mentioning the elephant in the room.

When the executive is a psychotic fascist who actively sought to be actively ignorant and contemptuous of the government he runs, why would you expect the civil servants to be able to effectively perform their duties?

It is a conscious effort. Any sort of independence has to be rooted out.CFPB is a good recent example. It was pretty independent from vagaries of poltics until Mnuchin got in. In fact, yesterday he was bemoaning the fact that those agencies staff career beaurocrats ( as opposed career politicians). It is sad to watch.

Or maybe instead of throwing more money at the problem we can face up to the fact that our democratic system is broken. That these institutions have been politicized over the years and are being run by people who are good at playing the game versus being good at their jobs.

Right. It's not a question of money, it's a question of competence and corruption. When you point out that government agencies are a revolving door of industry executives people think you're insane.

Just look at the FAA and letting Boeing 'self-certify.' That seems to be how the FDA does business as well.

Completely abolishing the FDA would have been an improvement in this case since the FDA became an impediment to testing, and would have saved money to boot. I’m not saying to abolish the FDA; I’m just saying that underfunding it wasn’t the problem.

Many would argue that these agencies, vested with limited lawmaking ability by congress yet under the control of the executive, were always doomed to failure and it was just a question of time. I think it's a little more nuanced than that but those people kind of have a point. These agencies are subject to doing stupid things at the whim of the executive and having effective lawmaking authority behind them makes the damage worse when they do.

It's pretty simple, politicians are paid by large corporations to gut, capture and deregulate these agencies to be able to increase profits and decrease costs.

Where's the gutting? The budgets of the FAA, the FDA and the CDC are all at or near all time highs.

Don't forget that cretin, Ajit Pai, with the FCC and the net neutrality disaster.

Without distracting from you central point (which I very much agree with), please read the science around hydroxychloroquine, not the news. It works best taken with Zinc, and early when symptoms first present.

No. This has been disproven by the only good studies we have. Even with zinc and early, it has not been shown to have any effect.

There are zero studies that disprove zinc + early has a strong effect. You are wrong. Also, the lancet study was retracted for flawed methodology, other studies show slight benefit of hydroxychloroquine. There are zero studies that show it has no effect.

You can’t show that it has zero effect without indefinite numbers of patients enrolled in the study. It hasn’t shown any dramatic improvements in the studies that are there. The rest is a tradeoff between enrolling even more patients into studies to prove small improvements (or not) or to move on and spend resources on finding things that do have a major impact.

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/06/05/th...

There's no studies yet. But there aren't any preliminary results that look promising, and the only people who think it is promising also thought hydroxychloroquine was.

So it's pretty unlikely it's going to do anything.

Provide links to that 'science' if you're going to claim it exists, including any corroborating studies.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.02.20080036v...

> In univariate analyses, zinc sulfate increased the frequency of patients being discharged home, and decreased the need for ventilation, admission to the ICU, and mortality or transfer to hospice for patients who were never admitted to the ICU. After adjusting for the time at which zinc sulfate was added to our protocol, an increased frequency of being discharged home (OR 1.53, 95% CI 1.12-2.09) reduction in mortality or transfer to hospice remained significant (OR 0.449, 95% CI 0.271-0.744). Conclusion: This study provides the first in vivo evidence that zinc sulfate in combination with hydroxychloroquine may play a role in therapeutic management for COVID-19.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.02.20080036v...

"This study provides the first in vivo evidence that zinc sulfate in combination with hydroxychloroquine may play a role in therapeutic management for COVID-19."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030698772...

"we hypothesize that CQ/HCQ plus zinc supplementation may be more effective in reducing COVID-19 morbidity and mortality than CQ or HCQ in monotherapy."

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mujeeb_Shittu4/publicat... roquine-against-SARS-CoV-2-may-require-Zinc-additives-A-better-synergy-for-future-COVID-19-clinical-trials.pdf

"We seek to draw the attention of the scientific community to the possibility of drastically reducing the effects of the vi-rus on the affected patients and improving clinical tri-als outcome through the synergistic action of zinc and chloroquine"

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rishad_Ahmed2/publicati...

"Thirdly, hydroxychloroquine acts as an ionophoric agent for Zinc ions and thus increases the influx of Zinc ions into the cytoplasm of host target cells regardless whether the host target cells are infected or not [10]. Zinc ions adhere to the RNA dependent RNA polymerase enzyme of the virus and stops COVID-19 polymerization intracellularly."

We do need follow up and repeated clinical trials.

There are already good retrospective observational studies out, like [0]

[0] Outcomes of 3,737 COVID-19 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine/azithromycin and other regimens in Marseille, France: A retrospective analysis https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S147789392...

And another recent study https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-020-05983-z

> hydroxychloroquine use was associated with decreased in-hospital mortality.

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