From the beginning there was slavery, and stealing land from native peoples. Most people agree now that these things were not good, but I don't think we have faced just how bad they were and made adjustments to how we think about other people. What people have cared about is advantage for themselves, not for other people who they regard as inferior. They reject tyranny only when they are on the receiving end of it. Now its coming back on us. I don't think the problem has really been getting worse, its just been changing form.
People who have children often think of their children first, because its their responsibility as parents. The fact that many people often make "protect the children" arguments over-zealously or dishonestly does not mean that the rest of us have no legitimate desire to protect children. But I do think you make a good point, that a lot of the things people do to adults, or to themselves as adults, don't start being a good idea just because we're past a certain age.
You know, it's the rich and corporate elite who hate our freedoms.
In my experience the government "hates our freedom" also, its not just the rich and corporate elite. Everybody is trying to control stuff, because if you control stuff that other people need, you can make other people to pay you to manage it. Low level bureaucrats make rules about things like where you can and can't walk outdoors, not because it necessarily protects the environment (sometimes it does), but because making and enforcing rules gives them something to be paid for. It works that way all the way to the top. Even if the rich weren't buying influence, government would still be expanding and restricting our freedom. I'm not saying "government is bad" - private corporations work that way also. Its just in the nature of greed and power. So to whatever extent we really do love freedom, and not just our own advantage at other people's expense, its on us to restrain it.
I just would not expect them to be the guardians of the Constitution, since it is clearly not their job.
All US congressmen and senators take an oath of office, which begins "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States..."
It is definitely their job. Same for the president.
Atheism is not a religion. And not all atheists have a theist-like penchant for making stuff up and declaring it the truth. But some do. I was commenting on one particular class of atheists, not on atheists in general.
But please don't argue that disbelieving in something because there is no evidence of its existence is an unreasonable position.
Atheism is not an unreasonable position. I made it clear in my post that I consider it to be a reasonable position. The kind of arrogant intolerance implied by the poster I was responding to is unreasonable however.
If you have no evidence of God, then it would be unreasonable for you to believe in God. (Some people argue you should believe to cover your ass just in case, but I consider that cowardice.) Moreover its reasonable to assume that the people who claim to have externally unverifiable evidence of God are deluded or lying, since they're clearly deluded or lying about all kinds of other verifiable things. But many thoughtful people's ideas about God are much more nuanced and consistent with objective reality than any flying spaghetti monster or other such straw men. So it is unreasonable to subject their gods to the same degree of ridicule. Ostensibly the straw men are equivalent to other gods, because all are equal in lacking evidence for their existence. But there is the simple, easily controllable and repeatable kind of evidence that scientists deal so effectively with, and there is subtler, more difficult to pin down evidence at the margins, where certainty starts to break down. For a person who has actually made a serious consideration of the issue, and isn't just getting off on glibly dismissing theists as morons, it is unreasonable to consider all of the gods as equally unlikely or equally unreal. Certainly all theists are at least somewhat mistaken about their gods, but that doesn't necessarily make them completely mistaken. By all means disbelieve in their gods: that is reasonable. But it is unreasonable not to leave the door open a little bit to discovering something new. Its that kind of closed-mindedness, combined with an implied authoritarianism, that I was commenting on. I have no beef with sincere atheists.
In regards to dark energy....According to a physicist who posted on here a couple of years ago (I'm too lazy to find it and link to it), the expected expansion rate of the universe is based on a solution to Einstein's equations that makes a homogeneity assumption that is now known to be false. Nobody has redone the solution using what is now known to be a more realistic matter distribution, because its hard, and because there's a disconnect between the theoretical and observational physics disciplines. And of course there's always a disconnect between what subject matter experts understand and the more simplified, sensationalist versions that the rest of us read about. So if what this man says is true, it seems the whole 'dark energy' thing is largely BS. I see no reason to posit a mysterious energy to account for a discrepancy between observation and a model, if the model is already known to be incorrect.
Of course dark matter is a different subject.
In my opinion its reasonable to assume that our theory of gravity is limited in certain regards, and those limitations might have some unknown implications in regards to dark matter. But there's a lot of evidence for dark matter, and one would expect that there is a lot of matter out there that's not easy for us to see, for various reasons.
Actually you suggested not letting religious leaders steal their money. The stealing that they're doing is pretty much just a matter of asking for offerings based on false doctrines. Stopping that implies a level of coercive control quite a bit beyond "shunning".
Also, it may be reasonable for you to conjecture that other people's gods are unreal. However, since the idea of 'God' is largely an interpretation of internal experiences, and you don't have access to anyone's internal experience except your own, you're only guessing that other people's interpretations are delusional. That may be a reasonable guess, given the evidence you have. But its a guess, and there is a huge variety to human experience. Yours is actually a religious attitude, just an atheistic one, which is why ex-atheists like C. S. Lewis often make such marvelous religious crusaders.
I've oftened wondered about this. Is there such a thing as having a principle of expedience? In a utility sense.
It seems to me that expedience is a principle, but you'll screw yourself eventually if its the only one you've got. What works well in the short term often fails in the long term. Seeing this, you start trying to take the longer term into account also. But because the long term is too far away to predict in a purely mechanistic sense, that forces you to observe and make use of the other natural 'rules' we normally call principles.
Chinese is boring. They may have thousands of characters, but each one has a single unique reading.
The pronunciation may be unique for the character, but each character typically has many possible meanings depending on what its paired with, and many, many characters have the same pronunciation.
That's because our tech economy is being swallowed up by a military-industrial behemoth. Try getting a job east of the Mississippi creating something that someone would actually willingly buy with their own money, and you'll see what I mean. (Obviously I'm generalizing here.) Ada isn't even in favor in the government any more, and has been replaced by C++ in a lot of areas, but the government contracting sector is growing so fast that the Ada stats go up anyway.
Maybe industry is trying to drive wages down. C/C++ is my core skill, aside from algorithm R&D, and I've had a pretty hard time finding jobs with it. Of course a lot of that is me, but I hadn't noticed vary favorable supply/demand conditions for engineers in that area.
I can respect someone who stands on principle, but principle doesn't pay the mortgage.
You're not "standing on principle" unless you're willing to risk important things, such as the mortgage, to do that. Otherwise you're choosing expedience over principle, and any stated regard for principle is mostly posturing.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. And of course even a principled person has to make choices between important things, and may reasonably choose the mortgage, particularly if they have children.
But sometimes its better for kids to grow up in an apartment with honest parents than in a house with people who will trade their society's future economic health for temporary comfort.
the humans running companies, however, can experience real fear.
I think this approach would make things much worse instead of better. In the risk/reward analysis, the lavish lifestyle that the executive gets for his behavior already rivals the value of his own life. Coercion works better against poor people, who might not risk their own lives for $200. But for $200,000,000, the rich person will just use some of that money to add walls, security cameras, and hire body guards. And this reaction is damaging, because the poorer people then have to live in a more security paranoid society, as well as pay for it ultimately. We already see a lot of this. And it makes appealing to the rich person's sense of civic responsibility, already weak, even less effective, because they see all the little people as dangerous enemies.
As ineffective as the ballot box approach is, for various reasons, I still think its far better than the violent approach. If people were less selfish, and voted more consistently for lawmakers that make fair laws, then the law would make abuse a lot harder for the wealthy.
They'll often blow off violent crimes also, if the victim isn't pressing charges because they're dead. They may rule it an accident or suicide without doing even a superficially adequate investigation, and even if there are known pieces that don't fit. It's less trouble that way.
Yes, I am ignoring the standard definition, or generalizing it somewhat. For someone like an undergraduate engineering student, a force is a godlike cause of motion which doesn't seem to have an understandable rationale within the system being analyzed. Gravity is just an inverse-square attraction with a particular constant: who knows why. But with a deeper understanding, often the 'force' disappears as a special mover in nature. Maybe I should prefer the term 'effect' as in 'Casimir effect' vs 'Casimir force', rather than using the word 'pseudo'. My point was that lots of forces look like effects when you understand them, whether that's by changing the reference frame or through some other transformations.
Somewhat similarly, we learn of other things, such as different 'phases' of an element, solid, liquid, gas, or whatever, and to a young person these seem like real changes. And of course a thousand years ago they were thought of as separate 'elements'. I suppose that heat doesn't seem at all like motion to most people. But when you understand better what's going on, its all just energy and statistics.
Electrostatic attraction (or repulsion) follows from energy considerations involving light. From that standpoint it doesn't look to me like a 'force'. I know very little about the strong and weak forces. No doubt some of this hinges on subtleties in what a person means by 'force'.
I almost added a few sentences on the sex angle, and how that does and doesn't relate to what I'm talking about, but decided it wasn't worth the effort.
Thanks for the rocking chair meaning of the word 'rock' though, I wasn't aware of that one.
Other words are also used for their positive or negative connotation, stripped of other meaning. An example that comes to mind is when people say that something rocks. A song, a radio station, a musician, or a band can rock. Nothing else can rock, sorry.
I've noticed that many people with "good" language skills wield words easily because that's how they think. When they hear a new phrase they get some sense of its meaning, and subsequently use it where it seems to be appropriate. But it seems they don't actually have thoughts aside from their collection of phrases. If an idea doesn't map neatly to the syntax of whatever their primary language is, its not even real to them. On the other hand, some people who are slower with words struggle with language because they're not thinking in cliches, and have the challenge of figuring out how to contort their thoughts into words. These people appear stupid to those in the glib class, but in a substantial way they're actually smarter. (Of course, lots of really smart people are good with words, and lots of people who have trouble with words are stupid in other regards also.)
Electrochemists everywhere have known why the 'damn chemical reaction' gets going for many decades, and equipment that allows study at 'nano' scales has been around for quite a while now also, even though it continues to get better. I see no basis to criticize these researchers, since there was almost no information of substance in the article. But I have to agree with the grandparent: if you want to get your research funded, or want people to read your article, be sure to scatter the word nano around. Some people will react to the word as if its a sure indicator of cutting edge work.
Should you become interested in further discussion, feel free to e-mail me at m j backues at yahoo, without spaces. I have a moderate amount of spare time coming up, and wouldn't mind collaborating on a book or article. I really don't know a lot besides what can be extrapolated from anecdote though.
It disturbs me that political discussion in this country has become so divorced from reality. I've been on the political right, and am naturally inclined to that kind of perspective. But when the last few years' events exposed some limitations in right-wing thinking, rather than appraising and evolving, so that they could bounce back with a superior political product, all of the right-wing leaders and talking heads just doubled down on the same bullshit.
I'd be interested in hearing your opinion about the direction the US is going with armed drones.
It seems to me like a bad idea, because it makes it easier to use lethal force without caring about the consequences. In the long run, does an extensive use of unmanned airstrikes do more good or harm? From the outside its hard to tell, and I don't trust those who make the decisions to ask the right kinds of questions. Given a choice between agonizing over morally difficult situations, or sleeping easy by assuming that what we're doing is "good" and never checking too closely, most people will do the latter.
There's a lot of money being made in weapons development, in parts of the country where its hard to make anything approaching that kind of money in other ways. On the development end, people pretend that its about love of country, but actual decisions about what to develop mostly come down to money. In theory, the people controlling the purse strings are the ones responsible for deciding what gets done. But their information comes to them through lobbyists and other self-interested parties. A majority of people in the process think they believe that morality is important, but moral decision making is always someone else's responsibility.
Our Islamicist enemies are bad because they murdered innocent people at the WTC. Yet it seems that relatively few people care about whether people that the US kills overseas are innocent. We believe they are guilty by association with our enemies, for failing to prevent our enemies from striking at us from their region of the world. Yet why does this argument not apply to the innocent people in the WTC, who failed to prevent US agents and US supported governments from murdering overseas? Its true that America's enemies understand force, and violent force often needs to be met with violent force. But if that force is not applied with sufficient restraint and intelligence, in the long run it makes things worse rather than better. The fact that most other nations, if they had our power, would do worse than we do is irrelevant. They don't have our power, and most of them are too corrupt to attain anything like it. We have our power, and we are responsible for ourselves. Are we acting wisely? To decide that we would have to start by gaining a realistic view what we're doing.
The US is at least an order of magnitude stronger than any of its enemies, but our economy and in some ways our national morality has been rotting for a while now. We our by far the greatest threat to ourselves. Southern Ohio, for example, was a technological power-house a hundred years ago, but now its a technological shithole. Everyone knows this is because the labor unions fucked it up. But the labor unions didn't force us to become stock market obsessed and largely abandon R&D except for weapons systems. A lot of modern industry is not labor intensive, and its not labor costs that are preventing us from competing. For example we could have a much larger IC industry if we invested a fraction of our defense budget in building new fabs. If that's not the government's legitimate business then fine: give the money back to private industry and change the tax and legal structure so that it stops favoring wall-street gambling over industry building.
The WTC attacks hurt. But its been ten years now. Maybe its time to move on. There will be more terrorist acts in the future. But its no reason to let ourselves degenerate towards being a second world police state.
My specific question was whether developing a large unmanned mechanized military is a good thing. From where I stand its not, there are other more productive directions to turn that technological talent. But I don't have first person experience where that technology is being used.
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From the beginning there was slavery, and stealing land from native peoples. Most people agree now that these things were not good, but I don't think we have faced just how bad they were and made adjustments to how we think about other people. What people have cared about is advantage for themselves, not for other people who they regard as inferior. They reject tyranny only when they are on the receiving end of it. Now its coming back on us. I don't think the problem has really been getting worse, its just been changing form.
People who have children often think of their children first, because its their responsibility as parents. The fact that many people often make "protect the children" arguments over-zealously or dishonestly does not mean that the rest of us have no legitimate desire to protect children. But I do think you make a good point, that a lot of the things people do to adults, or to themselves as adults, don't start being a good idea just because we're past a certain age.
Why do they hate our Freedom?
Oh yeah -they're the government
You know, it's the rich and corporate elite who hate our freedoms.
In my experience the government "hates our freedom" also, its not just the rich and corporate elite. Everybody is trying to control stuff, because if you control stuff that other people need, you can make other people to pay you to manage it. Low level bureaucrats make rules about things like where you can and can't walk outdoors, not because it necessarily protects the environment (sometimes it does), but because making and enforcing rules gives them something to be paid for. It works that way all the way to the top. Even if the rich weren't buying influence, government would still be expanding and restricting our freedom. I'm not saying "government is bad" - private corporations work that way also. Its just in the nature of greed and power. So to whatever extent we really do love freedom, and not just our own advantage at other people's expense, its on us to restrain it.
Which is also why dreams of colonizing mars make no sense.
I just would not expect them to be the guardians of the Constitution, since it is clearly not their job.
All US congressmen and senators take an oath of office, which begins "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States..."
It is definitely their job. Same for the president.
Atheism is not a religion. And not all atheists have a theist-like penchant for making stuff up and declaring it the truth. But some do. I was commenting on one particular class of atheists, not on atheists in general.
But please don't argue that disbelieving in something because there is no evidence of its existence is an unreasonable position.
Atheism is not an unreasonable position. I made it clear in my post that I consider it to be a reasonable position. The kind of arrogant intolerance implied by the poster I was responding to is unreasonable however.
If you have no evidence of God, then it would be unreasonable for you to believe in God. (Some people argue you should believe to cover your ass just in case, but I consider that cowardice.) Moreover its reasonable to assume that the people who claim to have externally unverifiable evidence of God are deluded or lying, since they're clearly deluded or lying about all kinds of other verifiable things. But many thoughtful people's ideas about God are much more nuanced and consistent with objective reality than any flying spaghetti monster or other such straw men. So it is unreasonable to subject their gods to the same degree of ridicule. Ostensibly the straw men are equivalent to other gods, because all are equal in lacking evidence for their existence. But there is the simple, easily controllable and repeatable kind of evidence that scientists deal so effectively with, and there is subtler, more difficult to pin down evidence at the margins, where certainty starts to break down. For a person who has actually made a serious consideration of the issue, and isn't just getting off on glibly dismissing theists as morons, it is unreasonable to consider all of the gods as equally unlikely or equally unreal. Certainly all theists are at least somewhat mistaken about their gods, but that doesn't necessarily make them completely mistaken. By all means disbelieve in their gods: that is reasonable. But it is unreasonable not to leave the door open a little bit to discovering something new. Its that kind of closed-mindedness, combined with an implied authoritarianism, that I was commenting on. I have no beef with sincere atheists.
In regards to dark energy....According to a physicist who posted on here a couple of years ago (I'm too lazy to find it and link to it), the expected expansion rate of the universe is based on a solution to Einstein's equations that makes a homogeneity assumption that is now known to be false. Nobody has redone the solution using what is now known to be a more realistic matter distribution, because its hard, and because there's a disconnect between the theoretical and observational physics disciplines. And of course there's always a disconnect between what subject matter experts understand and the more simplified, sensationalist versions that the rest of us read about. So if what this man says is true, it seems the whole 'dark energy' thing is largely BS. I see no reason to posit a mysterious energy to account for a discrepancy between observation and a model, if the model is already known to be incorrect.
Of course dark matter is a different subject.
In my opinion its reasonable to assume that our theory of gravity is limited in certain regards, and those limitations might have some unknown implications in regards to dark matter. But there's a lot of evidence for dark matter, and one would expect that there is a lot of matter out there that's not easy for us to see, for various reasons.
Where did I suggest we shun anyone?
Actually you suggested not letting religious leaders steal their money. The stealing that they're doing is pretty much just a matter of asking for offerings based on false doctrines. Stopping that implies a level of coercive control quite a bit beyond "shunning".
Also, it may be reasonable for you to conjecture that other people's gods are unreal. However, since the idea of 'God' is largely an interpretation of internal experiences, and you don't have access to anyone's internal experience except your own, you're only guessing that other people's interpretations are delusional. That may be a reasonable guess, given the evidence you have. But its a guess, and there is a huge variety to human experience. Yours is actually a religious attitude, just an atheistic one, which is why ex-atheists like C. S. Lewis often make such marvelous religious crusaders.
It's a time honoured tradition, often rightly or wrongly compared to a drug dealer's "the first hit is free, kid".
The president of one of my previous companies fondly compared it to an alien that attaches to your face and you can't get it off.
I've oftened wondered about this. Is there such a thing as having a principle of expedience? In a utility sense.
It seems to me that expedience is a principle, but you'll screw yourself eventually if its the only one you've got. What works well in the short term often fails in the long term. Seeing this, you start trying to take the longer term into account also. But because the long term is too far away to predict in a purely mechanistic sense, that forces you to observe and make use of the other natural 'rules' we normally call principles.
Chinese is boring. They may have thousands of characters, but each one has a single unique reading.
The pronunciation may be unique for the character, but each character typically has many possible meanings depending on what its paired with, and many, many characters have the same pronunciation.
But I agree Japanese is screwier.
You can see the "fast risers" like Ada (WTF?)
That's because our tech economy is being swallowed up by a military-industrial behemoth. Try getting a job east of the Mississippi creating something that someone would actually willingly buy with their own money, and you'll see what I mean. (Obviously I'm generalizing here.) Ada isn't even in favor in the government any more, and has been replaced by C++ in a lot of areas, but the government contracting sector is growing so fast that the Ada stats go up anyway.
Maybe industry is trying to drive wages down. C/C++ is my core skill, aside from algorithm R&D, and I've had a pretty hard time finding jobs with it. Of course a lot of that is me, but I hadn't noticed vary favorable supply/demand conditions for engineers in that area.
I can respect someone who stands on principle, but principle doesn't pay the mortgage.
You're not "standing on principle" unless you're willing to risk important things, such as the mortgage, to do that. Otherwise you're choosing expedience over principle, and any stated regard for principle is mostly posturing.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. And of course even a principled person has to make choices between important things, and may reasonably choose the mortgage, particularly if they have children.
But sometimes its better for kids to grow up in an apartment with honest parents than in a house with people who will trade their society's future economic health for temporary comfort.
the humans running companies, however, can experience real fear.
I think this approach would make things much worse instead of better. In the risk/reward analysis, the lavish lifestyle that the executive gets for his behavior already rivals the value of his own life. Coercion works better against poor people, who might not risk their own lives for $200. But for $200,000,000, the rich person will just use some of that money to add walls, security cameras, and hire body guards. And this reaction is damaging, because the poorer people then have to live in a more security paranoid society, as well as pay for it ultimately. We already see a lot of this. And it makes appealing to the rich person's sense of civic responsibility, already weak, even less effective, because they see all the little people as dangerous enemies.
As ineffective as the ballot box approach is, for various reasons, I still think its far better than the violent approach. If people were less selfish, and voted more consistently for lawmakers that make fair laws, then the law would make abuse a lot harder for the wealthy.
They'll often blow off violent crimes also, if the victim isn't pressing charges because they're dead. They may rule it an accident or suicide without doing even a superficially adequate investigation, and even if there are known pieces that don't fit. It's less trouble that way.
Yes, I am ignoring the standard definition, or generalizing it somewhat. For someone like an undergraduate engineering student, a force is a godlike cause of motion which doesn't seem to have an understandable rationale within the system being analyzed. Gravity is just an inverse-square attraction with a particular constant: who knows why. But with a deeper understanding, often the 'force' disappears as a special mover in nature. Maybe I should prefer the term 'effect' as in 'Casimir effect' vs 'Casimir force', rather than using the word 'pseudo'. My point was that lots of forces look like effects when you understand them, whether that's by changing the reference frame or through some other transformations.
Somewhat similarly, we learn of other things, such as different 'phases' of an element, solid, liquid, gas, or whatever, and to a young person these seem like real changes. And of course a thousand years ago they were thought of as separate 'elements'. I suppose that heat doesn't seem at all like motion to most people. But when you understand better what's going on, its all just energy and statistics.
Electrostatic attraction (or repulsion) follows from energy considerations involving light. From that standpoint it doesn't look to me like a 'force'. I know very little about the strong and weak forces. No doubt some of this hinges on subtleties in what a person means by 'force'.
It seems to me that all forces, if properly understood, are in some sense pseudo forces.
I almost added a few sentences on the sex angle, and how that does and doesn't relate to what I'm talking about, but decided it wasn't worth the effort.
Thanks for the rocking chair meaning of the word 'rock' though, I wasn't aware of that one.
Some others...hi-fi, cyber, eco....
Other words are also used for their positive or negative connotation, stripped of other meaning. An example that comes to mind is when people say that something rocks. A song, a radio station, a musician, or a band can rock. Nothing else can rock, sorry.
I've noticed that many people with "good" language skills wield words easily because that's how they think. When they hear a new phrase they get some sense of its meaning, and subsequently use it where it seems to be appropriate. But it seems they don't actually have thoughts aside from their collection of phrases. If an idea doesn't map neatly to the syntax of whatever their primary language is, its not even real to them. On the other hand, some people who are slower with words struggle with language because they're not thinking in cliches, and have the challenge of figuring out how to contort their thoughts into words. These people appear stupid to those in the glib class, but in a substantial way they're actually smarter. (Of course, lots of really smart people are good with words, and lots of people who have trouble with words are stupid in other regards also.)
Electrochemists everywhere have known why the 'damn chemical reaction' gets going for many decades, and equipment that allows study at 'nano' scales has been around for quite a while now also, even though it continues to get better. I see no basis to criticize these researchers, since there was almost no information of substance in the article. But I have to agree with the grandparent: if you want to get your research funded, or want people to read your article, be sure to scatter the word nano around. Some people will react to the word as if its a sure indicator of cutting edge work.
Should you become interested in further discussion, feel free to e-mail me at m j backues at yahoo, without spaces. I have a moderate amount of spare time coming up, and wouldn't mind collaborating on a book or article. I really don't know a lot besides what can be extrapolated from anecdote though.
It disturbs me that political discussion in this country has become so divorced from reality. I've been on the political right, and am naturally inclined to that kind of perspective. But when the last few years' events exposed some limitations in right-wing thinking, rather than appraising and evolving, so that they could bounce back with a superior political product, all of the right-wing leaders and talking heads just doubled down on the same bullshit.
I'd be interested in hearing your opinion about the direction the US is going with armed drones.
It seems to me like a bad idea, because it makes it easier to use lethal force without caring about the consequences. In the long run, does an extensive use of unmanned airstrikes do more good or harm? From the outside its hard to tell, and I don't trust those who make the decisions to ask the right kinds of questions. Given a choice between agonizing over morally difficult situations, or sleeping easy by assuming that what we're doing is "good" and never checking too closely, most people will do the latter.
There's a lot of money being made in weapons development, in parts of the country where its hard to make anything approaching that kind of money in other ways. On the development end, people pretend that its about love of country, but actual decisions about what to develop mostly come down to money. In theory, the people controlling the purse strings are the ones responsible for deciding what gets done. But their information comes to them through lobbyists and other self-interested parties. A majority of people in the process think they believe that morality is important, but moral decision making is always someone else's responsibility.
Our Islamicist enemies are bad because they murdered innocent people at the WTC. Yet it seems that relatively few people care about whether people that the US kills overseas are innocent. We believe they are guilty by association with our enemies, for failing to prevent our enemies from striking at us from their region of the world. Yet why does this argument not apply to the innocent people in the WTC, who failed to prevent US agents and US supported governments from murdering overseas? Its true that America's enemies understand force, and violent force often needs to be met with violent force. But if that force is not applied with sufficient restraint and intelligence, in the long run it makes things worse rather than better. The fact that most other nations, if they had our power, would do worse than we do is irrelevant. They don't have our power, and most of them are too corrupt to attain anything like it. We have our power, and we are responsible for ourselves. Are we acting wisely? To decide that we would have to start by gaining a realistic view what we're doing.
The US is at least an order of magnitude stronger than any of its enemies, but our economy and in some ways our national morality has been rotting for a while now. We our by far the greatest threat to ourselves. Southern Ohio, for example, was a technological power-house a hundred years ago, but now its a technological shithole. Everyone knows this is because the labor unions fucked it up. But the labor unions didn't force us to become stock market obsessed and largely abandon R&D except for weapons systems. A lot of modern industry is not labor intensive, and its not labor costs that are preventing us from competing. For example we could have a much larger IC industry if we invested a fraction of our defense budget in building new fabs. If that's not the government's legitimate business then fine: give the money back to private industry and change the tax and legal structure so that it stops favoring wall-street gambling over industry building.
The WTC attacks hurt. But its been ten years now. Maybe its time to move on. There will be more terrorist acts in the future. But its no reason to let ourselves degenerate towards being a second world police state.
My specific question was whether developing a large unmanned mechanized military is a good thing. From where I stand its not, there are other more productive directions to turn that technological talent. But I don't have first person experience where that technology is being used.