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Comment by Jerry2 | Hacker News Reader

My grandfather was in the US Air Force and has served as lieutenant general. He told me a story about the time he met Carl Sagan. He organized a conference on space for USAF officers and someone suggested he invite Sagan to give a keynote speech. My grandfather told me that Sagan was trouble from the start. He (or his office?) cancelled or delayed the conference multiple times and his list of demands for lodging rivaled those of a rock band. He also said he was rude and never smiled. After he gave his speech, one of the colonels asked him a question that my grandfather said was good and interesting but Sagan dismissed him in one sentence and didn't even want to engage him on it. BTW, that colonel is now a general and in charge of USSF!

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I've seen scientists reacts strangely to military people. There are all sorts of reasons, mostly based on false assumptions about the sort of people who chose a military life. But equally, lots of famous people are just jerks. Many at the top of thier fields, be them scientist or admiral, got there by walking over or past other people.

> mostly based on false assumptions about the sort of people who chose a military life.

Very good point. The prejudice against military people is very real, especially in tech. I took my military service off my resume and unless directly asked about it I try to avoid disclosing it.

Any company with a culture that causes vets to hide thier service should look long hard at their diversity program. If they cannot tolerate a former soldier they are probably pretty intolerant of all sorts of other groups too.

I was walking home one day, in uniform through a rural area, when i helped push a car out of a ditch. The lady driving seemed to recoil at me. But then her husband explained that i was not a hunter, that the camo was a uniform. She was vegan. She has seen me walking through the area in early mornings and thought i was scouting for deer.

Military service isn't a protected characteristic or something inherent in a person. It's a choice, and one people may take issue with if they're anti-imperialist.

>> Military service isn't a protected characteristic or something inherent

https://www.justia.com/employment/employment-discrimination/...

"The Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA) prohibits employment discrimination based on an employee's past, present, or future military service. This federal law applies to anyone who performs duties in the "uniformed services," whether involuntarily or voluntarily."

"Unlike many of the other anti-discrimination statutes, which apply only to employers of a certain size, USERRA covers all employers in the United States, irrespective of size. Part-time or probationary employees receive as much protection as full-time employees under USERRA."

So yes. Soldiers are a protected class for purposes of discrimination. If people in your employ feel they need to hide thier military service, that is a serious liability that needs to be addressed asap.

This lines up well with my theory that most people know so little about the military that they think what motivates a person's decision to join must be support or desire for imperialism.

I joined after 9/11 and watching live on TV while fellow humans had to choose whether they wanted to die from leaping out the window or die from fire and smoke inhalations. I wanted to help make sure that something like that never happened to my friends again. The idea of colonizing a foreign land never entered my thoughts.

Hopefully it entered your thoughts after Iraq and Afghanistan?

Did you really just call out a solider for his post-9/11 service? Wow. Good thing HN isn't twitter. A tweet like that could come back to haunt a person. Save some hate for the firefighters and kindergarten teachers.

Well, I don't know that I would agree that what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan qualifies as "imperialism." I would call that "nation building," and the motives were/are a lot different (although not entirely void of Venn diagram overlap). Most of us really thought our sacrifice was making life better for people and giving them a chance to experience freedom.

At this point I think history has shown that nation building is a bad idea and doesn't work. I think we wasted a ton of money and blood (on all sides) in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it would have been better had we never gone at all.

Now all that said, I think it's terribly fallacious and prejudiced to assume what somebody's views are because they served in the military. The military is quite diverse. You'll find people with all sorts of viewpoints and all sorts of reasons for joining.

> Well, I don't know that I would agree that what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan qualifies as "imperialism."

Afghanistan is arguably more complex, Iraq (2003) was pure imperialism.

Wikipedia says:

> Imperialism is a policy or ideology of extending rule over peoples and other countries, for extending political and economic access, power and control, often through employing hard power, especially military force, but also soft power. While related to the concepts of colonialism and empire, imperialism is a distinct concept that can apply to other forms of expansion and many forms of government [1]

The goal in Iraq was to topple the Hussein Regime (which the CIA told us had WMDs) and build up a local democratic government. The original plan was for US troops to leave after a few years.

If you want to go to "Bush lied and really just wanted cheap oil" then go for it. I have no idea what Bush's "real" motives were. I'm no fan of Bush but I don't think he was Hitler. Anyway what I've said is what I and everyone else I talked to thought about the effort.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism

> The goal in Iraq was to topple the Hussein Regime (which the CIA told us had WMDs) and build up a local democratic government

No, it wasn't; the war was conceived long before the WMD narrative (which did not come from the CIA) was concocted to justify it; both control of strategic resources and a regional powerbase as a lever to recast other regimes in the region to support the politico-economic vision of America as the metropolitan power were the motivations, as several of the architects of the war wrote openly in the years before the Bush Administration came into office. The architects of war in the administration initially sought to seize on blaming Iraq for 9/11 as the pretext for their preplanned war, raising it as early, IIRC, as while the attacks were still in progress.

That's quite a claim. You should probably include some citations to back up something like that.

But, for sake of conversation, assuming 100% accuracy on your part, it still seems really absurd to me to assume that the average military member was even aware of this conspiracy, let alone supporting it while simultaneously pretending that we thought we were building up a local democratic government.

It just occurred to me, we are probably talking about different things. My understanding of this thread was that the subject is the average military member, as those are the people who are being prejudged and stereotyped as discussed further up thread.

It seems like you are specifically talking about political leaders at the very top. If that is true, then we're probably just talking past each other, and we probably agree more than we think.

But neither concept should be laid at the feet of individual soldier. Those are the decisions of elected politicians, and the people that put them in office.

> But neither concept should be laid at the feet of individual soldier.

Well, no, individual soldiers don't, as a rule, have any more influence in the decision to go to war than the average civilian.

That being said, neither is it the case that the imperialist urge is isolated to a closed decision-making cabal; the ideological bloc advocating war for overtly imperialist reasons included people in all walks of life. Military personnel were not especially innocent, any more than they were categorically guilty.

One might get offend at your comment, but after realizing you aren't even aware that military service is a protected class, it's pretty clear it's ignorance driving your views.

Someone like Sagan who values collective human consciousness probably wouldn't meld with guys bent on militarizing space. Deep philosophical differences. Hard to judge your story without knowing what question exactly was asked.. Guess: "Is Space the ultimate high ground??"

It’s a pretty simplistic view to regard someone doing something that you don’t understand as irrational, especially when you’re not in or will ever be in their shoes.

You’d think past some age, people wise up to the nuance of the world.

Carl Sagan had different existential assumptions. He constantly writes about the need for humanity to value it's collective and fragile existence as a whole, whereas the military cares more about WHO gets to exist and which group of people dominate the other.

Excerpt: THE PALE BLUE DOT OF EARTH Image: NASA

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

-CS

That is a radically simplistic view of the military. I can say from experiance that very few in armed service think that way, certainly nobody in leadership positions. The armed services see themselves as a tool of thier government. The life-taking part of the job is only ever done when asked by that government. People on the outside would be shocked to see how much effort goes into the preservation of all lives. Google "maneuver warfare" to get a better idea of realworld military thinking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuver_warfare

It's more fundamental. First sentence in that link talks about "enemies" as a kind of axiom. In light of Sagan's quote, such concepts are absurd.

A soldier does not pick their enemy. Politicians decide if an enemy exists and then points them out to the soldier. The existential concept of enemy has nothing to do with the soldier as they cannot create nor uncreate their enemy. Only politicians, and the people who elect them, control such things.

Stalin actual toyed with the concept of a totally volunteer army, one where volunteer soldiers would elect their officers and only participate in actions with which they agreed. It didn't go well. Such an army is next to useless in the real world.

For myself, I can't imagine putting myself in a position to give politicians the power to tell me who to kill. Just... no. Are there really people who put that much faith in politicians? I don't understand that kind of thinking at all.

"just following orders" then.

I soldier could have choosen to reject the concept of „enemy“ by not being a soldier and not letting a gouvernment define distinct groups of people as „enemies“

I suspect Sagan understood the roots, purposes, and goals of the post-WW2 "war department" and US space programs at the time, far better than you do today.

Go look up the origin of the phrase "military industrial complex" and you'll see how horrified people "in the shoes" felt about the state of the military at the time.

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