Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[WealthyRadish]

Those are only military assistance figures, not including economic assistance. Why would you compare it to population, as though the governments used it for public programs or something? It's typically training and weapons. I included Israel and Iraq/Afghanistan for comparison, since they're ones everyone knows we've paid billions to anyway.

The point of showing the USAID data isn't necessarily to show the sums involved, it's to show that these are governments that we have been supporting from the beginning. Even at the height of Nasser's conflict with Britain over the canal, when he was flirting with the USSR, or Mosaddegh's nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the region's stayed in the economic sphere of the west, with trade agreements, defense agreements, and the aid listed here. Is this really just an argument about how much propping up is "propping up"?

Jordan is the winner here, as you said. Considering that they've started with essentially nothing, and have been able to milk both sides of conflict after conflict for as long as they have without drawing ire, it's impressive really.

[Helgoland]

Can we at least agree that spending even 1/10 of the money on helping people that we currently do on hurting people would be an incredibly massive improvement, and probably do a fuck of a lot more to address terrorism and instability than what we're currently doing?

Hurting people and helping people are often consequences of the same act - you've got a false dichotomy there. Not that I'm arguing that everything's fine as-is, but what you say seems overly simplistic.

Also I'd like to remark that I too

<3 mainiac

I should probably go mention Greece in the Europol thread, that ought to fix it

[mainiac]

Why would you compare it to population, as though the governments used it for public programs or something?

Because you said it was propping up the government?  A government isn't going to be propped up by amounts of cash that are tiny.

it's to show that these are governments that we have been supporting from the beginning.

Supporting is a vastly different statement from propping up.

I should probably go mention Greece in the Europol thread, that ought to fix it

[Frumple]

... m... mainiac. What's up with that picture's name?

[Flying Dice]

You have one less response than mainiac had countries, so I'm not sure exactly how those are supposed to line up.

Yeah, I forgot to include Japan. Which is pretty much the same case as the others, they were nominally democratic as early as the 1910s. The main change under U.S. occupation was the 1947 constitution, and the primary political democratizing element of that was women's suffrage. They'd had universal male suffrage since the 1920s. Somewhat amusingly, two of the major goals of the occupation were land redistribution and increased unionization of workers, not exactly what I'd call anti-communist measures.

Basically everything he listed except Greece was related to the aftermath of WWII and (with these two exceptions) not particularly associated with U.S. interventionism. One other that he didn't name was Italy, we spent a lot of the late '40s interfering with their elections to keep the Communist party out of office. That, South Korea, and perhaps Greece are about the only ones I'd deem "successful"; we mucked up in the Philippines, failed in China and Albania, and pretty much everything after that is firmly in the early '50s under the aegis of the Cold War (also failures in terms of creating successful democratic industrialized states by backing authoritarian regimes and rebels).

[penguinofhonor]

He did mention Italy, and you initially put it in the same category as the rest of the non-Greece examples.

[SalmonGod]

Can we at least agree that spending even 1/10 of the money on helping people that we currently do on hurting people would be an incredibly massive improvement, and probably do a fuck of a lot more to address terrorism and instability than what we're currently doing?

Hurting people and helping people are often consequences of the same act - you've got a false dichotomy there. Not that I'm arguing that everything's fine as-is, but what you say seems overly simplistic.

Just because harming one person can incidentally benefit another does not mean that deliberately focusing efforts on more effectively harming people instead of focusing efforts on more effectively helping people is false dichotomy.  Crunchy variation and grey area in the results from current modes of action doesn't make a false dichotomy out of pointing out how the principles underlying that mode of action could be vastly different.  It's not overly simplistic to note that there is a very, very, very clear and strong bias in priorities when half of U.S. military R&D spending over 10 years could virtually end world hunger, according to U.N. estimates.

[mainiac]

... m... mainiac. What's up with that picture's name?

I didn't even look at the name until you pointed that out.  I dont know man.  I dont know.

[Egan_BW]

Jeez, this is heavy. Can we talk about Trump again? he's funny.

[SalmonGod]

Jeez, this is heavy. Can we talk about Trump again? he's funny.

How about a bad lip reading of the republican debate?

[Helgoland]

Just because harming one person can incidentally benefit another does not mean that deliberately focusing efforts on more effectively harming people instead of focusing efforts on more effectively helping people is false dichotomy.  Crunchy variation and grey area in the results from current modes of action doesn't make a false dichotomy out of pointing out how the principles underlying that mode of action could be vastly different.  It's not overly simplistic to note that there is a very, very, very clear and strong bias in priorities when half of U.S. military R&D spending over 10 years could virtually end world hunger, according to U.N. estimates.

Military spending is not "deliberately focusing efforts on more effectively harming people". Do you know that old aphorism 'The best weapon is that which need not be used'? Plus you're moving the goalposts: The original quote was about 'spending even 1/10 of the money on helping people that we currently do on hurting people'. There's no-one, or at least close to no-one, who regards hurting people as an end in itself. The money spend on 'hurting people' is intended to help others. If it's intended to help the right people - who knows. That's different from case to case. But the ol' pacifist bit you're doing here - or at least the pacifist bit I'm seeing in what you wrote - is not a valid criticism of what's going on, simply because it misrepresents the underlying forces and mechanisms at play. So yeah, it is overly simplistic to note that the US is spending a lot of money on its military and that similar amounts of money would be good to have elsewhere, because it's both impossible - in a very literal sense - and undesirable to slash the former to help in the latter in the manner you appear to be advocating.


Is the US spending too much on its military? Hell yeah - though a big part of that is the European nations spending too little. Would it be good to redirect funds currently earmarked for the military to other fields? Hell yeah - just look at the current state of the world! Prevention is better than reactive treatment, both in medicine and in politics. Is looking at aggregated numbers and loudly decrying apparent injustices a good way to discuss the implementation of such policies? Hell no - even disregarding the dangers of falling from such an awfully tall horse, it's simply not a good way of getting the right people to talk about the right issues. If you want change, you have to appeal to the middle of society, and that means building bridges, finding allies - and therefore taking a much less confrontational stance, and acknowledging that there's a legitimate case to be made by the other side as well.

(I know you're a radical, and you probably know by now that I'm very much a reformist, so we probably won't change each other's minds. I probably should've just kept my mouth shut... But that sort of pacifist thinking rubs me all the wrong ways.)

[Frumple]

Military spending is not "deliberately focusing efforts on more effectively harming people". Do you know that old aphorism 'The best weapon is that which need not be used'?

Think most people that thinks on this stuff does. It's also a pretty terrible one, because the weapon which is unused is pretty inevitably found use for, as we've seen time and time and time again. You're welcome to try to find a nation that committed to military buildup that didn't end up using it aggressively at some point, often fairly quickly. Preeeetty sure you'll not find a particularly high number there. States have certainly failed the everloving hell out of that metric, heh.

Tempted to get into the pacifism thing, but nah. Not actually a pacifist myself, odd as that may seem considering some of my statements. Just think we do a hell of a lot beyond necessity, sanity, and the most vague pretenses of reason, much of that enabled by just how much goddamn resources we sink into our military and how much a lot of people seem to think that means we get to turn off our brains when we use it.

[Bauglir]

To dramatically oversimplify, the local, popular political will for American military intervention anywhere else is based on one of three things. Bravado - America is the best, and it's up to us to make the world a safer place. Justice - Those sons of bitches need to be struck down for the good of everyone else. Greed - We need this stuff, so it's an act of necessity, not violence. At the policy level, a lot of the people with authority have a dangerous love of making "the hard choices"; there's a certain tough guy-ism that a lot of advisors and politicians aspire to, in which they work very hard to justify monstrous human costs by finding a metric that makes it look rational. There's a certain kind of mind that decides propping up a dictator is the morally correct thing to do, and calls it "realism"; they're a lot less vocal and a lot less obnoxious than they were during, say, the Cold War, but the same sort of thinking applies.

I'm a pragmatist at heart, so I agree that on this scale the ends often justify the means, but there's a fair bit of willful ignorance about what the ends actually are; instead what apparently matters is justifying the means already decided on.

But that is just my tangent about one of the things that is Wrong With America, and shouldn't be taken too seriously. It's never really that simple. The point is, there's no actual political impetus to solve problems in the region - the political will is there for a dramatic overthrow of a villainous tyrant, but most of the voting population isn't motivated by problem-solving. They're motivated by things that make them feel the world is Right. So if we wanted to, I don't know, install a puppet dictator we actually controlled and forced to implement gradual democratic reforms that transition a given nation, it isn't going to happen. It's expensive, it's boring, it's slow, it requires constant attention, and most importantly it feels Wrong - and quite frankly it probably is wrong from a pragmatic point of view, but I do not have the time, energy, or resources to design a workable Middle East policy from the ground up in my spare time for the purpose of making a forum post. So consider it an arbitrary example.

But there is no solution that satisfies the constraints of the real political arrangements we have to deal with, and so sadly we're waffling along with what is the best we can do. And that's probably the most depressing part of it - our fuckups have caused so many problems, but if we ever stopped fucking up it would get so much worse, because it's already too fucked up to let go. We gotta keep sinking these costs, because the alternative is a cost in human lives and rights that we aren't willing to pay.

[SalmonGod]

I think that aphorism, like just about any anti-pacifist rhetoric, only works on small scale - small groups and individuals.  If one individual person can clearly tell that they are completely incapable of violently challenging another individual person, then sure, the best weapon will likely not need to be used (often).  On an international scale involving the interactions of billions of people, it doesn't make any sense at all, and can't be backed up by any case in reality.  On this scale, I would argue that yours is the simplification.

Sure, the State's military dominance means no one is directly challenging their military might.  But there's no fucking way that military might isn't going to be used anyway, as Frumple said.  Unless the U.S. became so isolationist that it had zero interests outside its own borders, that military might is going to see application.  And I'm not necessarily going to argue that this is wrong (without getting into truly radical anarchist talk about doing away with nation-states).

The question is just how much is actually needed, and how much of what is being addressed by military means could be addressed in other ways.  It's not that military might isn't 100% undesirable or unnecessary.  It's that a socio-structural apparatus so large that is irrefutably purposed towards destructive capability is not going to be able to maintain on such a scale the nuanced focus necessary to subvert excess destructive capability into ends that aren't purely destructive, regardless of whatever intentions the architects of that structure had.

You accused me of moving the goal posts, but if anything I was moving them backwards.  R&D at a glance looks like about 1/10 of military spending.  Our military is already so overwhelmingly, obnoxiously beyond that of any other nation on the planet that it can already be considered in great excess.  R&D, by definition, is investment in further expanding that excess.  And I was talking about sacrificing half of that investment into solving one of the world's most horrendous and widespread problems - one that afflicts far more people (nearly 800 million) far more consistently than any combination of violent conflicts that our military exists to address has ever come remotely near affecting.  I sincerely doubt this would result in us falling off our tall horse, and would likely go a long way towards addressing why our horse must be so tall in the first place.

This may not be a good way to discuss implementation of policies, but that discussion will never even begin until we accept that the primary issue here is one of priorities.  I'm very used to getting the whole 'reality is more complicated than you're making it out to be' bit, but no discussion can ever constructively dig into the crunch of details until there is agreement on the premises and guiding principles that discussion will operate on.  Our policy-makers very clearly choose to address certain problems over others, and overwhelmingly favor addressing them in a certain fashion.  I'm sure this is what makes me a radical, but I cannot see how that is a false dichotomy or oversimplification.  I'd love to build bridges, but I find I have to build 90% of the bridge between "let's actually build bridges" and "let's build up our capability to blow up bridges".

[scriver]

The discussion has mostly gone by it, but as I europeen I feel I have to say that I do think a lot of the success of western Europe is owed to American foreign policy post WWII (the threat of the Cold War , not just it's own inertia. Because in the 20's and 30's, a lot of that inertia was heading in the opposite direction from freedom (AMRRIKUH) or democracy (culminating in the fascist regimes of Germany, Italy and Spain). I believe the point of the reconstruction investment in Europe was partly to avoid repeating what had happened in Germany after the first world war, right? Anyway, it helped stabilizing west Europe a lot.