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[Strife26]

Hey all, I've had far too much to drink thus far.


Do you, or does any community of people have a responsibility to look after your fellow man? Is it worth war, in the doctrinal, destuctiive, fucked up sense, to save people from the fucked up, impoverished, tyranical lives that they live?



Because, at the end of the day, damn if driving my ass over a minefield to start all that, doesn't seem like a je;;ove wau to buy the fucking farm/

[Frumple]

Hey drunk dude. Drunk posting is never the best of ideas. I've also just woke up, and posting while barely lucid is never the best of ideas either, so we can be bad idea posting together *brofist*

Anyway, yeah, we do, and it's not worth war, it's worth finding a better way than war. Violence is failure, and failure is too easy. Just as we owe it to our brothers and sisters to help them, we owe it to our kin to find the better way to do so.

[Strife26]

Fuck that. There is no appropriate answer to naked force other than that of naked force. And if that naked force ends with the body of Stife26 of Bay12 lying burning in a ditch? Well, that's the cost of doing business, and moreover a useful political tool to get the rest of the world's last superpower actually acting for a change.

[Helgoland]

There's that old saying: "A general sacrifices soldiers. A pacifist sacrifices civilians."
Strife, wherever you are, thank you for what you're doing. You are making the world a better place - or at least trying harder than most people out there. *hug*

[kaijyuu]

My modus operandi is "minimize harm." I'll call for violence if it means less violence is used overall.


Notably the big wars the US has recently (last half century or so) been involved in (iraq, vietnam, afghanistan) haven't accomplished that and have in fact done the opposite.

[Frumple]

There's that old saying: "A general sacrifices soldiers. A pacifist sacrifices civilians."

Yeah, that's a good way to try and downplay that the general sacrifices civilians just as happily as they do soldiers, and often for less reason. Don't mistake the recognition that all violence is a sign of failure as a sign of pacifism. Dealing with failure is as much a part of life as anything.

War has never brought good. At its best, it has removed a block -- the failure of some party to act as a decent human being -- to good action. All too often it doesn't manage that. It is occasionally necessary, when failure abounds on all sides of a conflict (As strife notes, there are few responses to a failure of the magnitude of naked force besides naked force in response), but it never brings benefit, only the potential for benefit, and then only at great cost. War is never "worth" it, because at its best it is a consequence of failure, not the purchase of some beneficial thing. Its cost goes toward paying a debt, not buying a good.

For all the political motivation a soldier can provide dead in a ditch, they can provide a thousand times more alive and working toward the prevention of violence through other means. That their lives are spent in such a way is no good thing. That the failure of the rest of our societies require it is a goddamn tragedy.

There's respect and condolence to those that shoulder that burden of failure, most of the time. S'just a damned shame they're out there, paying that price, being burnt up as sacrifice instead of helping to bring benefit (not to say the latter doesn't happen as well, of course, but it is rarely, if ever, to equal degrees.).

[Helgoland]

Frumple, that statement refers to the "Violence is not permissible under any circumstances" crowd. Of course a general sacrifices civilians, just as he sacrifices soldiers - it's part of the job description. But that doesn't mean that someone who opposes war is helping them more.

War has brought good - removing a block is good, even if "good" in this context means "less bad". War can be worth it. I'd argue that war itself is not a failure; allowing a situation in which war becomes necessary is. That doesn't make it any less of a tragedy, but differentiation is necessary. After all, nobody wins a war; everyone's just struggling to win the peace.

[jrrocks05]

There is another saying "war is a continuation of politics by other means" while this is true it is a politicians saying. In congress only one person has ever served in the armed forces and half are millionaires. The war on terror definitely needed to happen but once bin laden was dead we should have pulled out. The war no longer has a objective it is just fighting. I salute the men who go through war everyday. War has point but the question is do we America have to fight it?

[Sheb]

[pedant] Actually, 20% of Congress have served in the military. Since only about 10% of the US population served, this mean veterans are actually overrepresented in Congress.[/pedant]

[Chaoswizkid]

[pedant] Actually, 20% of Congress have served in the military. Since only about 10% of the US population served, this mean veterans are actually overrepresented in Congress.[/pedant]

Yes, but how many of them actually served? Were they in the military during periods of peace or of war? Were they on the political track, grabbing fast promotions to cushy desk jobs? Did they just have administration jobs to begin with?

There are a lot of different jobs within the military, and they are all very important, but I'm pretty sure most of them don't involve seeing actual combat, and when we talk about politicians being veterans, that's a very important distinction.

In fact, I'm pretty sure that people that just serve in logistics far away from the front lines don't even call themselves veterans because it'd be disrespectful to the people putting their lives on the line for real. Not certain on that, though.

[Sheb]

Well, to be fair the Vietnam War is a long time ago now, but you're starting to see Iraq/Afghanistan vets in Congress. About 16 if this is true.

So that's 3% of Congress. Since 'only' about one million Americans served in Iraq or Afghanistan out of 317 millions people in the population (~0,3%), Iraq/Afghanistan veterans are still way overrepresented.

[Korbac]

"From the dole queue to the regiment
A profession in a flash
But remember Monday signings
When from door to door you dash
On the news a nation mourns you
Another soldier counts the cost
For a second you'll be famous
But labelled posthumous."

[Culise]

There is another saying "war is a continuation of politics by other means" while this is true it is a politicians saying.

Made by a general, working for a state that was in many respects an extension of the army, and one that has been systematically and thoroughly misinterpreted over the years by many policy-makers in both the military and state.  Some of the worst people to misinterpret this were actually senior military staff operating as statesmen, not politicians.  It's critical to remember that Clausewitz argued using the dialectical model (more familiar to many from its use by Marx), which argued that from thesis and anti-thesis would come synthesis.  This statement is antithetical to the thesis that war is naught but a duel on a wider scale - that is, that military affairs should be understood solely in the realm of military conflict, but it is from the confluence from the two that a synthesis can be established. 

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Are you saying that war and diplomacy are more intertwined than a "Step 1, Step 2" process? I think the other posters might already agree on that ...

[Bauglir]

I think that the lives of soldiers given in battle are never worth it, in the sense that there's nothing they buy their country or people that was worth even a single human life. No amount of territory, wealth, power, etc. Nothing's comparable. And I agree that warfare represents a failure to resolve problems by other means, and as a failure it ought to be avoided to whatever extent is acceptable.

But that word, "acceptable" is an important one. It isn't, "possible". There are situations where war is not the greatest possible failure, and the value in a soldier's death is that they fight and die so somebody else doesn't have to. There is the cynical view that "somebody else" here means a politician or general, which is probably true to an extent, but I think that from the soldier's perspective that "somebody else" is a friend, a sibling, a spouse, a child, and that perspective is the one that gives worth to the sacrifice. I think it would be better if nobody could give the orders that make those sacrifices happen without understanding that perspective, but there's a lot of ways I think that the way our species handles violence could be better.

And then there's politics. Situations where the willingness to go to war can prevent that very war by changing another actor's course. Situations where things don't go the way they should've, where mistakes cost people lives. That sort of thing. Where lives really do get used as a cold sort of currency, and I'd like to believe (but can't) that the goal is a positive balance. There's a big gray zone of fuzziness where I have to accept that sometimes those decisions might save lives by spending them, or that maybe "lives saved" might not even be the most important metric compared to things like "quality of life", and so on. Even given that, of course, I don't think that means you can justify any decision by appealing to that - all that says is that it was acceptable to make a choice of some kind, it doesn't justify the particular choice that gets made.

I'm kind of rambling. The short version is, I think it can be worth it, but it usually isn't. Strife, I want to thank you for being able to take that risk, for being able to hope that if your life is spent in service, it will have been one of those rare deaths that occurred in the context of making the world a better place. You're a stronger person than I've ever been, for that. You're a pretty cool dude.