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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

The basis of American freedom isn't some libertarians with rifles. Its the fact that the U.S. military consists of poorly-paid kids who care more about family and community than they do about abstract ideas. That and the fact that the military and its arsenal is physicislly distributed over numerous states. More powerful military technology makes us more free, not less. It just means it takes fewer people to break ranks from an oppressive government and effectively oppose it.

The biggest threat is well paid mercenaries. It always has been.

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Interesting thought pattern which I agree with to some extent. Have you come across any articles related to this? Would love to read.

> More powerful military technology makes us more free, not less.

Hogwash. Military technology is by definition the usurping of freedom. Always has, and always will be. You are born free - the machines are made to take it away from you.

Well, pretty soon the U.S. military will consist of even more poorly-paid drones who care less about family and community than they do about abstract bits of information coming from the command center.

Well, those are controlled by humans too. You could say the same thing about those pilots.

That also relates to the why the police is generally enforcing whatever a government wants, while the military always sides with the people when things go really wrong.

Counter examples. Civil war, Japanese internment, numerous actions against native Americans although you may not consider them protected by bill of rights.

In the context of "oppressive government" I'm thinking of the classic 1984 type situation, with a small faction suppressing the will of the majority. I.e. subversion of majoritarian will through military power.

Civil war was a civil war, with the country split into two sides. Regional bonds took precedence over national ones but the military of each faction sided with the people of their region. Japanese internment and native Americans involved minorities. The soldiers didn't come from those communities, and native americans were barely considered people much less Americans. It doesn't take much to get the majority to take action against a minority, but that's not an existential threat to democracy.

I can't even begin to express how ass-backwards this comment is. Genocide of natives and internment not only constitute existential threats to democracy; by the time either of these happens, democracy is already long dead (excluding voting and other basic human rights to only the demographics most aligned with your interests generally doesn't count as democracy. The US today would probably impose massive sanctions on the domestic US of WWII or especially the US of westward expansion).

What you're saying, albeit you managed at least a bit of tact, is that Japanese internment and the genocide of Native Americans don't count as military-assisted oppression because "it was just the minorities".

Democracy is nothing more or less than rule by the will of the majority, either directly or indirectly. If the will of "the people" is to exterminate a minority, and the military carries out that intent, that's not anti-democratic. It's lots of other things, it's definitely oppression, but it's not anti-democratic. It doesn't represent an existential threat to a political system rooted in rule by the majority.

The genocide of native Americans, slavery, segregation, and Japanese internment were all carried out consistently with the desires of the relevant polity of the time. When George Wallace stood in front of the school house and shouted "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" he didn't do it to try and impose his idiosyncratic view of the world. He did it because he knew it would endear him to "the people" of Alabama.

> If the will of "the people" is to exterminate a minority, and the military carries out that intent, that's not anti-democratic.

Well then, I don't care much for your notion of "democracy", and don't particularly understand why it would be worth defending or even necessarily better than minority rule in the first place.

Most reasonable definitions of democracy delineate between mere mob rule, and democracy as a governmental philosophy (including aspects like equality before the law).

> don't particularly understand why it would be worth defending or even necessarily better than minority rule in the first place.

The word "minority" conjures up images of the oppressed, but through most of human history, the minority have been the oppressors. The majority were, historically, ruled by the will of a minority of people that made up royal families, etc. Saudi Arabia, for example, is a society in which a minority rules the majority.

Now, of course, in a democracy the majority can use violence to suppress the minority. But that is in fact the bulwark of democracy: the majority using violence or the threat thereof to suppress royal families, warlords, etc. And while ideally the majority does not do this, oppressive rule by the majority is almost certainly preferable to any situation where the minority is in power.

Kent State

Peterloo

two examples I can pluck from memory

How about when we replace the kids with war drones and robots?

Hope you have generals that were soldiers instead of politicians or businessmen, I suppose.

Look at what the U.S. military has been doing - they're effectively well paid mercenaries. For the last 60 years, hardly anyone in the military has had a vested interest in any of the conflicts, and does it just for the money.

That describes zero of the people I've met who serve in the armed forces.

While I served > 10 years ago, you could classify everyone into a couple types: mercenaries (time servers, GI Bill folks, can't get any other job, in for the benefits, etc), and zealots (true believers in either the Red, White & Blue or in some flavor of dominionism, with plenty of overlap).

There are always articles popping up about people being so poor that the only way to escape was to join the military, or recruiters bribing people with college degrees.

But it's not true on average.

Members of the all-volunteer military are significantly more likely to come from high-income neighborhoods than from low-income neighborhoods. Only 11 percent of enlisted recruits in 2007 came from the poorest one-fifth (quintile) of neighborhoods, while 25 percent came from the wealthiest quintile. These trends are even more pronounced in the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program, in which 40 percent of enrollees come from the wealthiest neighborhoods-a number that has increased substantially over the past four years.

-- Who Serves in the U.S. Military? The Demographics of Enlisted Troops and Officers

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/08/who-serves-...

As someone who used to be a submarine officer, it describes about 80% of the people I met.

If you took away the college loan forgiveness and other benefits of the military, you'd lose quite a bit of the force.

Not for several hundred years it hasn't other wise the Swiss would still be in business as condottiere.

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