If they were, they would be marketroids, not scientists.
Being able to explain scientific concepts to non-scientists is not "lying" or "marketing", it's fucking called "teaching".
How would slashdotters feel if *real* lawyers came here and started laying the smack down on some of the "IANAL, but I play one on Slashdot!" types here? Lots of smart people with degrees in computer science, physics, math, and a million other technical fields, and they don't grasp the first thing about how the law actually works. Does that make them stupid? or just - not expert in the field of law?
Too often scientists and engineers make the mistake of assuming that "because you don't understand my field of expertise, you must be an idiot." There are plenty of very smart people who simply aren't expert at physics, or computer science, or chemistry, or biology. Talking to them with the presumption that they are intelligent and capable of understanding does not mean you have to lie, or be inaccurate in your statements.
We don't make hard-but-necessary choices, we pander and pretend everybody can have whatever they want for the price of a wish, and tell them that those horrible "rich people" will pay the price.
I was always curious about how the claim that "we're going to reduce the cost of healthcare" squares with "nothing about your coverage today will change."
How do you extend coverage to 30 million extra people, not change any existing plans, and end up with the aggregate costing less than it used to?
Cost (N + 30,000,000) < Cost (N) seems like the old "sell it at a loss but make it up in volume!" strategy.
Yep, it's a press release, and we have to wait until we see some hard numbers to see whether or not this single development would make it "commercially viable".
But you can't disregard the fact that - if the claim is true - doubling the output of the fermentation process makes it one step closer to "commercially viable" than it was before.
They're not claiming that "fermentation & enzymatic hydrolysis are the breakthrough," what they're claiming is that a new combination of enzymes and refinement of the process have increased the yield significantly.
I wonder how someone who can read and write and is not a millionaire can be a Republican.
The big problem is that Republicans used to be conservative, but these days they're virtually indistinguishable from the democrats when it comes to spending, and even more hypocritical in claiming that they can cut taxes while raising expenditures, and it'll all magically even out somehow.
But they have that reputation still that they're the "conservative" party, and so people who don't look at their current behavior and policies are fooled into thinking they actually are conservative still.
The most fervent right-wingers I know are from the working class. They can go through unbelievable mental contortions to rationalise being against themselves.
I think you can be a fiscal conservative and a member of the working class - all it takes is an understanding that spending beyond your means is usually a road to bankruptcy and other disasters.
I'd lay pretty good money on a vast majority of both those groups being unable to explain what a Gaussian is, honestly.
But don't let the fact that a Gaussian is a fairly involved piece of mathetmatics get in the way of your conservative-bashing - of course D.KOS is full of incredibly bright technocrats who all aced their university level mathematics classes, while no conservative who watches Fox could have more than a 6th grade education.
So a veiled reference to "how badly Bush bungled" -- the Mission Accomplished fiasco was his, not Obama's -- has been replaced by a "Big nasty oil company probably one of Bush's friends!" counter?
Or is Olbermann being clear and referring to it as a counter of "how many days Pres. Obama has shown almost no leadership or sense of urgency about an issue that could fuck over the economy (and people) of an entire region of America for several generations"?
Would McCain be any better? Likely not. Does that mean Obama is doing a "good job" of handling it? Not in the least. It's possible to be disappointed & upset with the behavior of your leaders in circumstances like this. Obama rightly deserves criticism for some of what he's done, regardless of whether you believe McCain would have been worse.
For the FY2009, the federal budget was approximately 3.1 trillion dollars. Of that, 1.89 (~61%) trillion was mandatory (entitlement) spending - Social Security, Medicare, National Debt service, Unemployment, welfare, and the like. The remaining 1.21 trillion (~39%) was discretionary spending.
Of that 1.21 trillion, about 515 billion (~42%) was spent on the Department of Defense.
For FY2010, the planned budget is ~3.55 trillion dollars. Of that, 2.184 trillion (~61%) is mandatory spending. The remaining 1.368 trillion (~39%) is discretionary spending.
Of that 1.368 trillion, 663.7 billion (~49%) is slated for the DoD.
While these numbers are big, they are nowhere near the 66% of discretionary spending you're asserting is being spent on the military.
And frankly, we should be scared shitless about the way "mandatory" spending is ballooning, and expected to balloon, over the coming years - that's stuff we "don't have a choice" about because NO politician is going to get elected on a promise of "Vote for me and I'll slash your Social Security payouts." These entitlement programs have serious funding problems, and no politician is seriously (credibly) attempting to address them, we're simply kicking the can down the road for our kids to pay the bill later.
By who? This thing looks like shit, will probably sell 500 units to the people who buy every new computer gadget that's produced, and will die a silent death in the dark, rightfully so.
I have a computer input device with a lot of keys on it already - it's called a keyboard, and it works a lot better when I'm not sliding the keyboard around on the desktop while trying to type.
This is a solution in search of a problem to solve.
You're the one who claimed that the iOS 4 update "broke" something because it was running slow.
I'm simply pointing out that it's not broken, the hardware simply can't keep up with the computing requirements of the new version of the OS.
And no, Windows 7 will not run the same on a 2-year old laptop as it would on a brand new laptop. You'll see that the older laptop has much more trouble keeping up than the new one does, and that's the point.
Wouldn't need to repeat myself if you weren't so insistent on being wrong.
Yeah, I never knew that so many people were wondering what my thoughts were on cosmetic surgery in porn - that's the only reason I can figure it's considered "Informative".:)
I don't mean to say that there's no place for "professionally" done porn, as some of the amateur stuff is frightening, too. I just think "CG" porn would end up with exaggerated "sexiness" to the point of freakishness, and the idea of some computer-generated girl just sort of defeats the purpose.
I don't mind non-amateur, I just don't want to watch girls stuffed full of silicone and collagen.
Okay, compare the performance of Windows 7 on a brand new laptop, versus its performance on a 2-year -old laptop.
iOS 4 didn't "break" anything on your iPhone 3G. Your 2 year old, underclocked, limited-RAM iPhone 3G simply doesn't have the power to provide you with the responsiveness you desire when running the brand-new iOS 4. Welcome to the inexorable march of progress.
Hopefully never, at least fully. I'd much prefer real, natural-looking girls to the cosmetic surgery-enhanced freaks that some of the porn stars have turned into today, and would be very disappointed to see it turn into a bunch of Sims-style "animated" bullshit.
And you got all of the updated system applications, frameworks, and other code which powers all of the iOS 4 stuff, even if your hardware doesn't take advantage of all of them.
It's a performance hit, and downgrading would certainly help, but consider that the targeted hardware is ~2.5x faster than your underclocked iPhone 3G which runs at 412Mhz, vs. the iPhone 4's 1Ghz.
Like I said, what you're complaining about is like saying that you're outraged that Windows XP doesn't run as fast on hardware that originally shipped with Win98 as it does on "the latest" stuff. The iOS 4 release changes a lot of system code, and is targeted for a much faster hardware platform.
Have you ever done any form of end-user technical support?
If you're talking to a user about their network problem, are you going to tell them, "Open your iOS 'Settings' application on the iOS iPad, and click the iOS Settings 'Network' button to bring up the information on your iOS Networking." Why would your end user need to know a single thing about the "Cisco iOS Networking settings," or hear about them from you? And more to the point, why would you constantly refer to "iOS" to your users? To them it's an ipad, not an "iOS device".
The number of times you would need to make this distinction you're worried about are ridiculously rare - perhaps in a memo to your boss, explaining the root cause of an issue where the Apple device's settings and the Cisco device's settings both had to be adjusted - but even then, why would you specify the OS name? Do you refer to laptops as "laptops" or "windows xp laptops"?
I look forward to reading about your concerns regarding bears live-bearing baby bears in a biology textbook, or polished Polish soldiers polishing boots in a history textbook.
I see the same behavior on my 3G, recently upgraded to iOS 4.
Left hand, signal plummets. Right hand, signal drops a hair slower. Before iOS 4, I'd see some attenuation in areas with limited reception, but not to this extent.
Number of dropped calls I've had over ~2 years of using the 3G? 10-20. Inconvenient, but I really don't think it's that different than my experience with other carriers (Sprint) previous to my swap to AT&T. Maybe I'm just lucky to live and work near strong signals.
Yeah, I wish Microsoft would do the same thing and let me run Windows XP at modern speeds on a system that originally shipped with Windows 98 or 2000!
It's not "broken" in iOS 4, it's the fact that it's a significant update with a lot of new features, running on an older piece of hardware... what exactly did you expect?
Or as an alternative, you could use the power of "context" to figure out what is intended, as we do every day with the numerous homographs already in use in the english language, such as polish, bear, wind, close, lead, and dozens of others.
Stop freaking out about name collisions, you handle dozens of them every day without batting an eyelash, why is this any different?
Offtopic, and purely speculation, but it's not uncommon for classical guitar players to grow their fingernails out longer to use when plucking guitar strings. It's typically seen on the right hand, as that's the more common dominant hand, but if he's left-handed, it could explain the length of his fingernails.
The cultural, political and religious similarities between Sunni and Shia Arabs in the Middle East are rather clearer than between either and Brits/Americans.
Certainly, but the original question under consideration was Kuwait, and the implication that since it was historically governed from Basra, it's questionable whether or not we had a moral justification to push Iraq back out. The area of Kuwait was historically governed from Basra, which is, currently a part of the country known as Iraq, which was a western construct that was created at the same time as, and by the same process as, Kuwait. If we had allowed the various middle eastern mandates to devolve back along existing cultural lines after world war 1, the modern middle east would no doubt look very different. Look at the issues the US has had in Iraq, with the Kurds, Sunnis, and Shia all at each other's throats, and all very clearly unwilling to share power comfortably in a national unity government.
I would argue that the bottleneck is tactical and strategic, and technology should be applied toward intelligence-gathering.
And you do realize that the overwhelming push in the DoD is towards UAVs and other "drones" - most of which are unmanned & unarmed, right? The Predators and their close relatives get the splashy newspaper headlines ("Drone Strike kills 13 suspected militants!"), but there are far more unmanned reconnaissance drones than there are drones flying around armed with missiles and bombs looking for something to kill. I think you can make a pretty strong argument that much of the current focus of defense spending on R&D is focused on systems that will provide us with better reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering capabilities... so perhaps there's a step in the "moral" direction here after all?
I'm not sure if I'm about to engage in a semantic game, but let us say that they should be being used on your behalf, but aren't.
I would agree with the first part - they should be being used on my behalf; and I would partially agree with the second half - sometimes they are not. Your assessment seems to be that every conflict in the past 30 years has been a gross abuse of military power aimed at protecting the interests of a secret cabal; I'd disagree with that assessment, and the two conflicts I named earlier are, in my estimation, legitimate uses of the military on my behalf for humanitarian purposes and protection of American interests abroad. And to the extent that the politicians, in whom we've entrusted the ability to use the military, are misusing it, that is a moral failing of the politicians, and by extension, of the people who gave that sober trust to people who would misuse it.
But with some underlying principles to limit where war may even be considered, no? Without restraint, eventually war will be abused for any possible interest, declared in terms of an unwinnable war on an undefinable enemy. Which may be what's happening.
Yes, with some underlying principles about where war is immoral and can't be justified - e.g., "We like your women, and will take them from you." That would be a (exaggerated, but you get the point) example of an immoral reason to even consider war.
As far as the abuse of justification for war, as you said: May be happening. I think the general urge with this is to paint every conflict of the past 30-50 years in terms of our current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it's important to understand the context of the older conflicts, and not just say "Well, the government fed us a line of bullshit about Iraq, so they probably were doing that every time." And I have heard this statement, largely word-for-word, from self-styled pacifists I've discussed this topic with. I don't want to try and put words in your mouth, and I think you've demonstrated a refreshing amount of thought & knowledge on
In what sense? Culturally? Politically? Religiously? Geographically? In terms of the mutual trading, navigation and security opportunities their cooperation provided? Kuwait can be identified as British-American in the same way South Africa identified itself as white, and Iraqi (or, indeed, simply Arabic) in the same way South Africa was black.
Modern day Iraq (prior to Saddam's ouster) is primarily dominated by Sunnis. The southern portion of Iraq, which includes Basra, is historically a predominantly Shiite area - So yes, culturally, politically, religiously - the "Basra" that governed Kuwait is quite different from the "Iraq" that tried to take over Kuwait in the 90's. Point is, if you're going to say that Kuwait is a western construct, you can't then claim that Iraq - which is also, primarily, a western construct - had any more right to "own" Kuwait than Kuwait itself did. Going back through history, that area has been claimed and subsequently subdivided by numerous empires. So where does it end? Do we attribute Kuwait and Iraq back to some "Mesopotamian" government which no longer exists?
The moral basis for British/American fighting in Kuwait the '90s was it's valuable from a strategic and resource PoV that we keep control of a territory we occupied and have effectively never departed from.
Our national interests certainly played a part, nobody can deny that they did. Humanitarian reasons and legal reasons also played a role, and I would suggest that both of those also offer compelling moral weight to the justification for our involvement there.
And given the current level of debt, is it moral to pay Raytheon for random crap?
Depends on what we're assigning the term "random crap" - I won't agree to a blanket "yes, it's all crap," but I would certainly believe that a good portion of our spending to Raytheon (and other contractors) is wasteful or unnecessary "make-work." Sec. Gates has been pushing for a lot of program cuts since he took office, and I think it's good that he's undertaking that review. But like I said - just as I can't say "all programs" are moral, neither can I say that "all cuts" are moral, either.
But civilians in enemy territory haven't volunteered to serve for or against you. Why is defence of your interests worth their peaceful citizens' lives but not your criminals' lives?
Again we come to a broader-stroke issue where it takes two parties to tango. They have not volunteered to serve for or against you; It is not *immoral* for them to be killed as collateral damage, provided that: 1) Attempts at dispute resolution involving heavy use of diplomacy and trade incentives have been exhausted; 2) the military makes serious reasonable efforts to prevent killing innocent non-combatants; 3) the war is a just, morally defensible war;
I would offer the same justification if for some reason, say Canada decided to invade New England, where I live. As outraged as I would be by someone invading my homeland, and as sad as I would be to see civilians killed, I would not call it "immoral" for a Canadian unit to accidentally kill American non-combatants, as much as I would mourn the loss of those civilians. War isn't pretty, and it's not perfect - accidents do happen, and as long as reasonable care is taken to avoid that, I think that's about as much as you can expect of people in a warzone. It may be sad, it may be unfortunate, but it is not "immoral", and those people are citizens of the country you are at war with, so by extension, the government is conducting a war on their behalf.
Why so possessive? It's a representative democratic republic.
Because as I said, they government is acting on my behalf, and I do not like my agents working on my behalf in an immoral manner, and find that to be a fireable offense.
Slashdot Mirror
Being able to explain scientific concepts to non-scientists is not "lying" or "marketing", it's fucking called "teaching".
How would slashdotters feel if *real* lawyers came here and started laying the smack down on some of the "IANAL, but I play one on Slashdot!" types here? Lots of smart people with degrees in computer science, physics, math, and a million other technical fields, and they don't grasp the first thing about how the law actually works. Does that make them stupid? or just - not expert in the field of law?
Too often scientists and engineers make the mistake of assuming that "because you don't understand my field of expertise, you must be an idiot." There are plenty of very smart people who simply aren't expert at physics, or computer science, or chemistry, or biology. Talking to them with the presumption that they are intelligent and capable of understanding does not mean you have to lie, or be inaccurate in your statements.
Cue the standard slashdot response of, "If they're too fucking stupid to understand it, that's not my problem," in 3... 2... 1...
So distilled water has no isotopes of Hydrogen and Oxygen in it at all? Man, you must get thirsty drinking that.
But, but... this is politics!
We don't make hard-but-necessary choices, we pander and pretend everybody can have whatever they want for the price of a wish, and tell them that those horrible "rich people" will pay the price.
I was always curious about how the claim that "we're going to reduce the cost of healthcare" squares with "nothing about your coverage today will change."
How do you extend coverage to 30 million extra people, not change any existing plans, and end up with the aggregate costing less than it used to?
Cost (N + 30,000,000) < Cost (N) seems like the old "sell it at a loss but make it up in volume!" strategy.
Man I wish I could have figured out that this is just another clever lie from the cellulosic ethanol cabal.
How do you do it? It's like you're privy to data that's not available to normal people!
Skepticism is perfectly healthy. Refusing to consider anything because "it's never worked before" just makes you look sort of dumb.
Yep, it's a press release, and we have to wait until we see some hard numbers to see whether or not this single development would make it "commercially viable".
But you can't disregard the fact that - if the claim is true - doubling the output of the fermentation process makes it one step closer to "commercially viable" than it was before.
They're not claiming that "fermentation & enzymatic hydrolysis are the breakthrough," what they're claiming is that a new combination of enzymes and refinement of the process have increased the yield significantly.
The big problem is that Republicans used to be conservative, but these days they're virtually indistinguishable from the democrats when it comes to spending, and even more hypocritical in claiming that they can cut taxes while raising expenditures, and it'll all magically even out somehow.
But they have that reputation still that they're the "conservative" party, and so people who don't look at their current behavior and policies are fooled into thinking they actually are conservative still.
I think you can be a fiscal conservative and a member of the working class - all it takes is an understanding that spending beyond your means is usually a road to bankruptcy and other disasters.
I'd lay pretty good money on a vast majority of both those groups being unable to explain what a Gaussian is, honestly.
But don't let the fact that a Gaussian is a fairly involved piece of mathetmatics get in the way of your conservative-bashing - of course D.KOS is full of incredibly bright technocrats who all aced their university level mathematics classes, while no conservative who watches Fox could have more than a 6th grade education.
So a veiled reference to "how badly Bush bungled" -- the Mission Accomplished fiasco was his, not Obama's -- has been replaced by a "Big nasty oil company probably one of Bush's friends!" counter?
Or is Olbermann being clear and referring to it as a counter of "how many days Pres. Obama has shown almost no leadership or sense of urgency about an issue that could fuck over the economy (and people) of an entire region of America for several generations"?
Would McCain be any better? Likely not. Does that mean Obama is doing a "good job" of handling it? Not in the least. It's possible to be disappointed & upset with the behavior of your leaders in circumstances like this. Obama rightly deserves criticism for some of what he's done, regardless of whether you believe McCain would have been worse.
For the FY2009, the federal budget was approximately 3.1 trillion dollars. Of that, 1.89 (~61%) trillion was mandatory (entitlement) spending - Social Security, Medicare, National Debt service, Unemployment, welfare, and the like. The remaining 1.21 trillion (~39%) was discretionary spending.
Of that 1.21 trillion, about 515 billion (~42%) was spent on the Department of Defense.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_United_States_federal_budget
For FY2010, the planned budget is ~3.55 trillion dollars. Of that, 2.184 trillion (~61%) is mandatory spending. The remaining 1.368 trillion (~39%) is discretionary spending.
Of that 1.368 trillion, 663.7 billion (~49%) is slated for the DoD.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_federal_budget
While these numbers are big, they are nowhere near the 66% of discretionary spending you're asserting is being spent on the military.
And frankly, we should be scared shitless about the way "mandatory" spending is ballooning, and expected to balloon, over the coming years - that's stuff we "don't have a choice" about because NO politician is going to get elected on a promise of "Vote for me and I'll slash your Social Security payouts." These entitlement programs have serious funding problems, and no politician is seriously (credibly) attempting to address them, we're simply kicking the can down the road for our kids to pay the bill later.
By who? This thing looks like shit, will probably sell 500 units to the people who buy every new computer gadget that's produced, and will die a silent death in the dark, rightfully so.
I have a computer input device with a lot of keys on it already - it's called a keyboard, and it works a lot better when I'm not sliding the keyboard around on the desktop while trying to type.
This is a solution in search of a problem to solve.
You're the one who claimed that the iOS 4 update "broke" something because it was running slow.
I'm simply pointing out that it's not broken, the hardware simply can't keep up with the computing requirements of the new version of the OS.
And no, Windows 7 will not run the same on a 2-year old laptop as it would on a brand new laptop. You'll see that the older laptop has much more trouble keeping up than the new one does, and that's the point.
Wouldn't need to repeat myself if you weren't so insistent on being wrong.
Yeah, I never knew that so many people were wondering what my thoughts were on cosmetic surgery in porn - that's the only reason I can figure it's considered "Informative". :)
I don't mean to say that there's no place for "professionally" done porn, as some of the amateur stuff is frightening, too. I just think "CG" porn would end up with exaggerated "sexiness" to the point of freakishness, and the idea of some computer-generated girl just sort of defeats the purpose.
I don't mind non-amateur, I just don't want to watch girls stuffed full of silicone and collagen.
Okay, compare the performance of Windows 7 on a brand new laptop, versus its performance on a 2-year -old laptop.
iOS 4 didn't "break" anything on your iPhone 3G. Your 2 year old, underclocked, limited-RAM iPhone 3G simply doesn't have the power to provide you with the responsiveness you desire when running the brand-new iOS 4. Welcome to the inexorable march of progress.
Hopefully never, at least fully. I'd much prefer real, natural-looking girls to the cosmetic surgery-enhanced freaks that some of the porn stars have turned into today, and would be very disappointed to see it turn into a bunch of Sims-style "animated" bullshit.
And you got all of the updated system applications, frameworks, and other code which powers all of the iOS 4 stuff, even if your hardware doesn't take advantage of all of them.
It's a performance hit, and downgrading would certainly help, but consider that the targeted hardware is ~2.5x faster than your underclocked iPhone 3G which runs at 412Mhz, vs. the iPhone 4's 1Ghz.
Like I said, what you're complaining about is like saying that you're outraged that Windows XP doesn't run as fast on hardware that originally shipped with Win98 as it does on "the latest" stuff. The iOS 4 release changes a lot of system code, and is targeted for a much faster hardware platform.
Have you ever done any form of end-user technical support?
If you're talking to a user about their network problem, are you going to tell them, "Open your iOS 'Settings' application on the iOS iPad, and click the iOS Settings 'Network' button to bring up the information on your iOS Networking." Why would your end user need to know a single thing about the "Cisco iOS Networking settings," or hear about them from you? And more to the point, why would you constantly refer to "iOS" to your users? To them it's an ipad, not an "iOS device".
The number of times you would need to make this distinction you're worried about are ridiculously rare - perhaps in a memo to your boss, explaining the root cause of an issue where the Apple device's settings and the Cisco device's settings both had to be adjusted - but even then, why would you specify the OS name? Do you refer to laptops as "laptops" or "windows xp laptops"?
I look forward to reading about your concerns regarding bears live-bearing baby bears in a biology textbook, or polished Polish soldiers polishing boots in a history textbook.
I see the same behavior on my 3G, recently upgraded to iOS 4.
Left hand, signal plummets.
Right hand, signal drops a hair slower.
Before iOS 4, I'd see some attenuation in areas with limited reception, but not to this extent.
Number of dropped calls I've had over ~2 years of using the 3G? 10-20. Inconvenient, but I really don't think it's that different than my experience with other carriers (Sprint) previous to my swap to AT&T. Maybe I'm just lucky to live and work near strong signals.
Yeah, I wish Microsoft would do the same thing and let me run Windows XP at modern speeds on a system that originally shipped with Windows 98 or 2000!
It's not "broken" in iOS 4, it's the fact that it's a significant update with a lot of new features, running on an older piece of hardware... what exactly did you expect?
Nope, but it's a bitch when I pee.
Or as an alternative, you could use the power of "context" to figure out what is intended, as we do every day with the numerous homographs already in use in the english language, such as polish, bear, wind, close, lead, and dozens of others.
Stop freaking out about name collisions, you handle dozens of them every day without batting an eyelash, why is this any different?
Offtopic, and purely speculation, but it's not uncommon for classical guitar players to grow their fingernails out longer to use when plucking guitar strings. It's typically seen on the right hand, as that's the more common dominant hand, but if he's left-handed, it could explain the length of his fingernails.
Certainly, but the original question under consideration was Kuwait, and the implication that since it was historically governed from Basra, it's questionable whether or not we had a moral justification to push Iraq back out. The area of Kuwait was historically governed from Basra, which is, currently a part of the country known as Iraq, which was a western construct that was created at the same time as, and by the same process as, Kuwait. If we had allowed the various middle eastern mandates to devolve back along existing cultural lines after world war 1, the modern middle east would no doubt look very different. Look at the issues the US has had in Iraq, with the Kurds, Sunnis, and Shia all at each other's throats, and all very clearly unwilling to share power comfortably in a national unity government.
And you do realize that the overwhelming push in the DoD is towards UAVs and other "drones" - most of which are unmanned & unarmed, right? The Predators and their close relatives get the splashy newspaper headlines ("Drone Strike kills 13 suspected militants!"), but there are far more unmanned reconnaissance drones than there are drones flying around armed with missiles and bombs looking for something to kill. I think you can make a pretty strong argument that much of the current focus of defense spending on R&D is focused on systems that will provide us with better reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering capabilities... so perhaps there's a step in the "moral" direction here after all?
I would agree with the first part - they should be being used on my behalf; and I would partially agree with the second half - sometimes they are not. Your assessment seems to be that every conflict in the past 30 years has been a gross abuse of military power aimed at protecting the interests of a secret cabal; I'd disagree with that assessment, and the two conflicts I named earlier are, in my estimation, legitimate uses of the military on my behalf for humanitarian purposes and protection of American interests abroad. And to the extent that the politicians, in whom we've entrusted the ability to use the military, are misusing it, that is a moral failing of the politicians, and by extension, of the people who gave that sober trust to people who would misuse it.
Yes, with some underlying principles about where war is immoral and can't be justified - e.g., "We like your women, and will take them from you." That would be a (exaggerated, but you get the point) example of an immoral reason to even consider war.
As far as the abuse of justification for war, as you said: May be happening. I think the general urge with this is to paint every conflict of the past 30-50 years in terms of our current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it's important to understand the context of the older conflicts, and not just say "Well, the government fed us a line of bullshit about Iraq, so they probably were doing that every time." And I have heard this statement, largely word-for-word, from self-styled pacifists I've discussed this topic with. I don't want to try and put words in your mouth, and I think you've demonstrated a refreshing amount of thought & knowledge on
Modern day Iraq (prior to Saddam's ouster) is primarily dominated by Sunnis. The southern portion of Iraq, which includes Basra, is historically a predominantly Shiite area - So yes, culturally, politically, religiously - the "Basra" that governed Kuwait is quite different from the "Iraq" that tried to take over Kuwait in the 90's. Point is, if you're going to say that Kuwait is a western construct, you can't then claim that Iraq - which is also, primarily, a western construct - had any more right to "own" Kuwait than Kuwait itself did. Going back through history, that area has been claimed and subsequently subdivided by numerous empires. So where does it end? Do we attribute Kuwait and Iraq back to some "Mesopotamian" government which no longer exists?
Our national interests certainly played a part, nobody can deny that they did. Humanitarian reasons and legal reasons also played a role, and I would suggest that both of those also offer compelling moral weight to the justification for our involvement there.
Depends on what we're assigning the term "random crap" - I won't agree to a blanket "yes, it's all crap," but I would certainly believe that a good portion of our spending to Raytheon (and other contractors) is wasteful or unnecessary "make-work." Sec. Gates has been pushing for a lot of program cuts since he took office, and I think it's good that he's undertaking that review. But like I said - just as I can't say "all programs" are moral, neither can I say that "all cuts" are moral, either.
Again we come to a broader-stroke issue where it takes two parties to tango. They have not volunteered to serve for or against you; It is not *immoral* for them to be killed as collateral damage, provided that:
1) Attempts at dispute resolution involving heavy use of diplomacy and trade incentives have been exhausted;
2) the military makes serious reasonable efforts to prevent killing innocent non-combatants;
3) the war is a just, morally defensible war;
I would offer the same justification if for some reason, say Canada decided to invade New England, where I live. As outraged as I would be by someone invading my homeland, and as sad as I would be to see civilians killed, I would not call it "immoral" for a Canadian unit to accidentally kill American non-combatants, as much as I would mourn the loss of those civilians. War isn't pretty, and it's not perfect - accidents do happen, and as long as reasonable care is taken to avoid that, I think that's about as much as you can expect of people in a warzone. It may be sad, it may be unfortunate, but it is not "immoral", and those people are citizens of the country you are at war with, so by extension, the government is conducting a war on their behalf.
Because as I said, they government is acting on my behalf, and I do not like my agents working on my behalf in an immoral manner, and find that to be a fireable offense.