Comment by yakshaving_jgt
7 hours ago
Military technology is a public good. The only way to stop a russian soldier from launching yet another missile at my house is to kill him.
7 hours ago
Military technology is a public good. The only way to stop a russian soldier from launching yet another missile at my house is to kill him.
I'd agree, although only in those rare cases where the Russian soldier, his missile, and his motivation to chuck it at you manifested out of entirely nowhere a minute ago.
Otherwise there's an entire chain of causality that ends with this scenario, and the key idea here, you see, is to favor such courses of action as will prevent the formation of the chain rather than support it.
Else you quickly discover that missiles are not instant and killing your Russian does you little good if he kills you right back, although with any chance you'll have a few minutes to meditate on the words "failure mode".
I'm… not really sure what point you're trying to make.
The russian soldier's motivation is manufactured by the putin regime and its incredibly effective multi-generational propaganda machine.
The same propagandists who openly call for the rape, torture, and death of Ukrainian civilians today were not so long ago saying that invading Ukraine would be an insane idea.
You know russian propagandists used to love Zelensky, right?
If there was less military technology, the Russian soldier wouldn't have yet another missile to launch at your house in the first place
Are you going to ask the russians to demilitarise?
As an aside, do you understand how offensive it is to sit and pontificate about ideals such as this while hundreds of thousands of people are dead, and millions are sitting in -15ºC cold without electricity, heating, or running water?
No, I'm simply disagreeing that military technology is a public good. Hundreds of thousands of people wouldn't be dead if Russia had no military technology. If the only reason something exists is to kill people, is it really a public good?
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I don't think U.S.-Americans would be quite so fond of this mindset if every nation and people their government needlessly destroyed thought this way.
Doesn't matter if it happened through collusion with foreign threats such as Israel or direct military engagements.
Somehow I don’t get the impression that US soldiers killed in the Middle East are stoking American bloodlust.
Conversely, russian soldiers are here in Ukraine today, murdering Ukrainians every day. And then when I visit, for example, a tech conference in Berlin, there are somehow always several high-powered nerds with equal enthusiasm for both Rust and the hammer and sickle, who believe all defence tech is immoral, and that forcing Ukrainian men, women, and children to roll over and die is a relatively more moral path to peace.
It's an easy and convenient position. War is bad, maybe my government is bad, ergo they shouldn't have anything to do with it.
Too much of the western world has lived through a period of peace that goes back generations, so probably think things/human nature has changed. The only thing that's really changed is Nuclear weapons/MAD - and I'm sorry Ukraine was made to give them up without the protection it deserved.
It's not the only way.
An alternative is to organize the world in a way that makes it not just unnecessary but even more so detrimental to said soldier's interests to launch a missle towards your house in the first place.
The sentence you wrote wouldn't be something you write about (present day) German or French soldiers. Why? Because there are cultural and economic ties to those countries, their people. Shared values. Mutual understanding. You wouldn't claim that the only way to prevent a Frenchmen to kill you is to kill them first.
It's hard to achieve. It's much easier to just mark the strong man, fantasize about a strong military with killing machines that defend the good against the evil. And those Hollywood-esque views are pushed by populists and military industries alike. But they ultimately make all our societies poorer, less safe and arguably less moral.
I'm in Ukraine now.
Tell me how your ideals apply to russia, today.
In the short run, today, you of course have to shoot back. What else can you do..
In the long run, just piling up more military is not the solution.
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