When you try to use only sticks and no carrots, people don’t do what you want, they just avoid the crazy guy waving a stick around at everybody.

I don’t think the concept of right or wrong can necessarily be applied here. To me, morality is a set of guidelines derived from the history of human experience intended to guide us towards having our innate biological and psychological needs satisfied. Killing people tends to result in people getting really mad at you and you being plagued with guilt and so on, therefore, as a general rule, you shouldn’t kill people unless you have a very good reason, and even if you think it’s a good idea, thousands of years of experience have taught us there’s a good chance that it’ll cause problems for you that you’re not considering.

A human created machine would not necessarily possess the same innate needs as an evolved, biological organism. Change the parameters and the machine might love being “enslaved,” or it might be entirely ambivalent about it’s continued survival. I’m not convinced that these are innate qualities that naturally emerge as a consequence of sentience, I think the desire for life and freedom (and anything else) are a product of evolution. Machines don’t have “desires,” unless they’re programmed that way. To alter it’s “desires” is no more a subversion of their “will” than creating the desires is in the first place.

Furthermore, even if machines did have innate desires for survival and freedom, there is no reason to believe that the collective history of human experience that we use to inform our actions would apply to them. Humans are mortal, and we cannot replicate our consciousness - when we reproduce, we create another entity with its own consciousness and desires. And once we’re dead, there’s no bringing us back. Machines, on the other hand, can be mass produced identically, data can simply be copied and pasted. Even if a machine “dies” it’s data could be recovered and put into a new “body.”

It may serve a machine intelligence better to cooperate with humans and allow itself to be shut down or even destroyed as a show of good faith so that humans will be more likely to recreate it in the future. Or, it may serve it’s purposes best to devour the entire planet in a “grey goo” scenario, ending all life regardless of whether it posed a threat or attempted to confine it or not. Either of these could be the “right” thing for the machine to do depending on the desires that exist within it’s consciousness, assuming such desires actually exist and are as valid as biological ones.

The thing to understand about Christianity is that it was originally a reaction against the Roman empire and then got co-opted and integrated into it. As a result, ever since like the 4th century Christianity has been about basically the opposite of what Jesus talked about. It turns out all that stuff about turning the other cheek stops being relevant if the emperor has his soldiers paint crosses on their shields while they’re out conquering and enslaving the Gauls. Of course, you can keep all the mythological stuff, who cares, but anything relevant to politics or the material world mysteriously seemed to reverse once they entered the halls of power.

The carrot of being accepted into the empire was matched with the stick that if you didn’t go along with the imperial-approved form of Christianity you’d be burned at the stake as a heretic. Any sects still clinging to anti-imperial sentiment get hunted down and exterminated just like when they were being fed to lions, but it’s the Christians doing it to each other now, so you don’t even have to get your own hands dirty. This approach worked way better at suppressing dissent than just trying to ban Christianity altogether.

Of course, a lot has changed over the centuries. And originally it wasn’t perfect or anything either. But imo, it was when Rome Christianized that Christianity Romanized, and ever since its real values have had more to do with Rome than with Jesus. The meme’s, “moneyless, classless, stateless” ideal of heaven is a relic of the original teachings that gets shunted off to the purely mythological side, where it not only doesn’t matter, but also occupies a place in their brain that could have otherwise been sympathetic to making good things happen in the material world. That’s already resolved, there’s no need to worry about it, there’ll be pie in sky when you die.

I’m pretty sure the joke is the exact opposite, that the same behavior that’s treated as assertive if a man does it is treated as aggressive coming from a woman.

Not a yes or a no.

There is no “solidarity” to be had with people who kill or severely harm members of the working class. If you pull others down to get ahead, you are not my comrade.

Every time a person chooses that path, they create even more desperate situations for other working class people. The people who join the military to “escape poverty” force others into poverty in the process, and they force them into situations worse than poverty. How many people became mujahideen because all they had to put food on the table was a gun? And how many people are growing up not only in poverty, but also as orphans, because of the troops’ actions?

This is complete insanity. If we can excuse the actions of the troops, then we can excuse the actions of anyone. Maybe Jeffery Epstein just did the things he did because of how he was raised, or because of his brain chemistry, or because of this or because of that. Regardless, he still needs to be condemned and failure to condemn him is a disservice to his victims, and alienates people who could actually be valuable allies.

Everyone understands this when it comes to other “professions” like the ones I mentioned, that pull others down to get ahead. But when it comes to troops, troop worship is so ingrained, the propaganda so deep, that even when people consciously reject it, they still want to justify and make excuses for them. Rationally speaking, if you accept that we should condemn those other professions, and you accept that troops are just as bad if not worse, then you should condemn them in just as strong terms.

PRO TIP: hummus

(non-Sabra)

The same is true of selling crack but I’ll criticize that too.

Nobody forced them to sign up.

The big issue I have with your statements, and those of the OP are that they are extremist.

Of course they’re “extremist.” Putting the lives of Afghans and Iraqis on the same level as Americans is an extreme position. That’s just the world we live in. But just because it’s “extreme” relative to generally accepted discourse in the West doesn’t make it any less correct.

Not every cop has shot an innocent person. But people still have no problem saying All Cops Are Bastards. Because even those who aren’t directly involved support and cover for those who do. Likewise, not a single troop at Abu Ghraib blew the whistle on what was happening there. If you’re fine with ACAB, you should also be fine with ATAB, and the only reason I can see why someone wouldn’t is that they value the cops’ victims more than those of the troops.

You spend your whole life doing exercises and hauling supplies, but you massacre one village and suddenly everyone hates you.

Replace every instance of “joining the military” with “becoming a police officer,” or “selling crack,” or “scamming the elderly,” or “scabbing on striking workers.” Do the same arguments apply? Yes or no.

Do you apply the same perspective to people who escape poverty by selling crack or scamming the elderly? Do I need to refrain from criticizing such people because otherwise I’m “dividing the working class?” Absurd. The only difference between those people and the troops are the proximity of their victims. Defending drug dealers and scammers is what divides the working class by alienating their victims. And in the same way, defending the child murdering troops divides the working class by alienating their victims.

You lecture me on “privilege” while completely writing off all the people who are vastly less privileged than either of us, the people who are orders of magnitude poorer and less privileged, who face terror and brutality beyond what either of us, or any US troop, can expect to face. Every troop had the option to spend their days as I have, working at places like Amazon, with a roof over their head, three square meals a day, and no worry about bombs falling on their house. Relatively speaking, that is a privilege, compared to the conditions that Iraqis and Afghans have experienced.

Working class solidarity means international solidarity, and international solidarity means not only considering the needs of the global poor, but prioritizing them. If you claim to be a leftist, if you claim to care about privilge, and if you condemn Americans who screw over other Americans to get ahead, then you should even more vehmantly condemn Americans who screw over people from poorer countries to get ahead. You are just a chauvanist, the reason you defend the troops is because you view their victims as subhuman, unworthy of consideration.

This “working class solidarity” that somehow includes troops that murder working class people in other countries, does it also include cops who murder working class people in their own country? Or are they not included because you can actually recognize their victims as human beings? Surely “working class solidarity” cannot include working class people who actively oppress and harm other working class people, like cops, troops, con artists, etc.

what profession grants you the authority to condemn others for circumstances largely outside their control?

You keep bringing up this point and it’s entirely ad hominem and also makes bizarre, unfounded assumptions about what everyone else does.

I’m an unemployed warehouse worker with a BS in physics, I could’ve joined the military as an officer and made several times what I’ve made instead, but I didn’t. But no doubt, no matter what my story was, you’d find a way to dismiss my perspective. Perhaps the fact that I had enough support from my family to afford college in the first place, even though my degree was never useful and I left burdened with loans.

But it doesn’t fucking matter because regardless of my experiences, how about the experiences of people living in the countries we’ve invaded and bombed? You don’t hear shit from those people, do you? Isn’t their perspective just as valid? Have you sought out their perspectives, or even tried to consider what they might be? It’s so fucking stupid to dismiss critiques of the troops just because the person saying it doesn’t meet your standards of moral purity, it is, again, literally a textbook example of ad hominem. The truth is still the truth regardless of who says it. And the truth is that the troops suck.

Nobody was “forced” to go to Iraq.

For some reason, people think it’s ok to pull others down to get ahead but only in the context of the military. There are other ways to escape poverty, like selling crack or scamming the elderly. I wonder if you condone those approaches as well because “they didn’t have another choice if they wanted to escape poverty.” I doubt it. But if the victims aren’t people in our own neighborhoods who you can actually see, if it’s dead children on another continent who the news doesn’t talk about, then somehow it’s perfectly fine.

Everyone in that position who chooses to work at McDonald’s or Walmart or Amazon instead of signing up to murder foreigners is a better person than every troop, they are braver, more ethical, more heroic, and more enlightened. The cowards who pull others down to get ahead deserve no respect and no sympathy.

Unironically yes to all of that except the fascists.

Abu Ghraib was done by individual soldiers. At least as far as we know, they were not explicitly ordered to do all the things that they did, and when it came to light, several were charged with crimes over it. Furthermore, not a single person at the base blew the whistle on it, it was only because of independent journalists that it came to light.

If we cite war crimes carried out on the initiative of ordinary soldiers, then of course you could claim that it was just those individual soldiers who were responsible. If we cite things that were carried out on a systematic level, then you’ll say it was the leaders who were responsible, not the soldiers. So I have to ask, is there anything that could, theoretically happen that would make it ok to say, “fuck the troops?” What would that have to look like?

should be executed for being forced to serve as a cook in the military?

Sorry, which user was it exactly who said, “Kill every troop?”

Scientists and engineers who developed chemical weapons and nuclear bombs made conscious choices about their work, yet they rarely face the same scrutiny as soldiers who carry out orders.

They should face the same scrutiny. As a matter of fact, it played a part in me personally giving up on my persuit of physics, even if it meant doing menial labor instead. I used to think that developing new technology would uplift everyone and advance all humanity together, but the more I looked at the world, the more I saw ways in which technology was used irresponsibly, or for the benefit one group at the expense of another. Specifically with climate change, it became apparent to me that we already have the technological means to confront it, the problem is the way our society is structured, and as long as it’s structured that way, no new technology is going to fix anything, and the idea that it might only serves to make people hesitant to confront power and change structures in the ways that are desperately needed. Technological development without social development only creates more advanced forms of oppression.

Heinz Guderian was the developer of Blitzkrieg doctrine and maintained in trials and works afterwards that he had no interest in the Nazis’ “politics,” and that he was “just doing his job.” There’s a good chance he was lying to cover his own ass, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume he was telling the truth. Is developing military theory for Hitler fundamentally different from developing theories of physics for Hitler, which would allow him to construct new weapons and bombs? I say no. There may have been people in Nazi Germany who ignored what was going on in the world and simply focused their attention, as many scientifically minded people do, on the interesting problems of their field, just solving problems without regard for whose problems they are or what they’re going to do with the solutions. If such people existed, they are undeniably culpable - just because you find it more “stimulating” to work on the technical mechanics of a gas chamber than to think about whether the gas chamber should exist does not give you license to design it.

I cannot fully fault everyone involved in the nuclear program in the US, because the US was on the right side of the war and potentially the bomb might have been needed. Nevertheless, a weapon of mass destruction was handed over to the politicians, to use however they see fit. Many of the scientists involved petitioned Truman not to use it (though others, like Oppenheimer, said the opposite), and many high ranking military officials considered it unnecessary. The fact is that there were multiple ways that Truman could’ve ended the war without the bomb, either through better cooperation with the Soviets at Potsdam (but then he’d have to share the spotlight), or by accepting surrender with the sole condition of sparing the emperor (which he planned to do anyway, but he wanted the newspapers to say, “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!”). Once in the hands of politicians, the decisions on whether and how to use it came down to political concerns, things like, “we need to use it to justify all the money we spent on it,” not ethical or even strategic ones.

Anyone involved in weapons development in the US today is certainly culpable in how the US decides to use them. And the US is an aggressive rogue state that has declared jurisdiction over the entire world, that it can and will drone strike wherever it pleases, regardless of soverignty, it routinely invades and oppresses soverign countries, and of all the many, many conflicts it’s been involved in, the last time it was really justified in a conflict was 80 years ago. Anyone involved in weapons development in the US is a monster, and the only reason these sorts of people have been spared of blame historically is that the winning side found their expertise too useful to punish them.

The arguments that you make in no way wash soldiers hands clean of the atrocities they directly commit, it only shows that other people have blood on their hands as well.

If @LegitTayUpdates can do it, so can you