Neither Ukraine nor Israel have reached this hypothetical technological era in which a draft is not required, and those facts are inescapable to any American in those countries observing it.
One reason the US military doesn't need a draft is because its proxy forces which are supplied by US equipment do have a military draft.
This is not a complex argument nor are there any facts which are not mutually agreed upon by all parties here.
I'm not able to follow the ideological contortions that would be required to not understand something as simple as:
"The US supplies the equipment, and the local US-backed government uses a draft to supply its army with the number of soldiers it needs to use the equipment."
A more sophisticated thinker would ask questions like "from which people's perspective?" and "at what point in time?"
These questions would give you access to critical insights, one of them is that it's never persuasive to take a rough estimate of hypothetical aggregate good and bad and then attempt to weigh it using one's personal intuitions at present to derive a universal claim.
Peoples who were ethnically cleansed at scale to facilitate settler or US commercial expansion or currently suffer under US-backed dictatorships will tend to have a negative view of the US as an empire.
People whose countries need the US as an ally to protect them from an aggressive regional power and/or currently experience economic prosperity and political stability within a democratic government because of the US will tend to have a positive view of the US as an empire.
Telling a Guatemalan whose entire family was massacred by US-trained death squads in the Guatemalan civil war that you've done the math from a god's eye view and the US is the best possible hegemon in aggregate is unpersuasive, bordering on absurd.
It would be like arguing to a Polish person whose entire family was executed in stalinist trials of the 1940s that the Soviet Union was in aggregate benign because of all the aid they gave out to peoples fighting wars of liberation from european colonial dictatorships, which in aggregate killed far more people than Stalin did.
If you can't understand that the second example and the first are equally absurd, you are wearing ideological blinkers that make it hard for people outside the US to take you seriously.
Attributing malice to other empires but "good intentions gone awry" to your own is a fundamental attribution error, and one you should be wary of to avoid unpleasant surprises in foreign policy outcomes.
>But you're delusional if you think some alternative power would have been gentler.
You're saying that people who don't agree with a non-falsifiable claim about hypothetical alternatives are delusional. That suggests a closed system of thought which has left behind empiricism and must now be considered metaphysical. I'm a plain materialist so I can't go any further with any statements that assert definite knowledge of things outside of material reality.
>I too wish for a world power that never resolves to violence and never does any mistake
This has nothing to do with what I said and is not an opinion I hold so you must've meant to respond to someone else, I definitely wouldn't want to say that you're irrational, overly emotional, and have become accustomed to arguing by intentionally mischaracterizing what other people say to preserve your existing psychological commitments in a fundamentally juvenile and dishonest way.
Would the abstract "one" you're thinking of happen to be a middle class college educated American who has never been on the receiving end of American benevolence in the form of saturated bombing of civilian areas, nor been at risk of being drafted to fight overseas?
Is your point that those people's lives are somehow inherently less valuable or is your point that you're willing to sacrifice as many of them as it takes to get a good outcome for you?
> overall the world is a better place with American hegemony expressed through her military superiority.
This seems like a non-falsifiable claim about the future, even if it can be argued for rationally with regard to the past.
Have you ever been somewhere that you needed to defend this belief rationally, or does it appear to you as self-evident?
I think we can evaluate how far the discourse is fallen by the reflex to attempt to hide questions that the hegemon's apologists don't like instead of answering them.
Perhaps this bullying attitude is one of the many reasons that most of the world does not feel that it's better off today with American hegemony.
Nothing says "we're concerned about AI risk and harm to human life" quite like partnering with the military-industrial complex.
It's even better timing to do this while the Pentagon is providing material and intelligence support to a government whose decisonmakers' public statements are explicit admissions of intent to commit war crimes and also convey genocidal intent.
Glad we spent all that time talking about AGI and Roko's Basilisk, those should be top of mind always, never the current actions of the humans in charge at both OpenAI and the US government.
As you said, innocent suffering in a conflict is inevitable. Is the logical axiom that international shipping which is connected to the US and Israeli economies is more innocent than Palestinian children? Is any cargo ship crew more innocent and less culpable than say, an infant?
If you want to make an argument that some groups of people are inherently evil and subhuman and must be destroyed, just go ahead and make it.
This makes perfect sense when you consider that all of the people who will benefit from this will be dead or far away in very large estates by the time the negative externalities become undeniable from a liability perspective.
Are you saying that Israel has received less military and economic aid since? Are you saying that President of the United States is unavailable for some reason? Or are you saying that the newspaper article from 42 years ago is false or misleading?
Saying that supporting a government which has made dozens of public statements that convey unambigious genocidal intent with the actions that seem in line with this intent is one wrong.
Taking military action to apply pressure the first group to stop is not considered an equal wrong by governments which represent approximately 96% of people on earth.
If you think the vast majority of humanity is engaged in passively or actively allowing a second wrong, is the 4% justified in using violence to stop the second wrong while providing critical military, economic, and political assistance for the first one?
I wonder if it's possible to describe this as a series of logical axioms or if there's some kind of special pleading going on here. It doesn't seem to be a logically consistent position to me, and since that's also the position of an overwhelming supermajority of people who have reviewed public statements made by Israeli decsionmakers, I'd say the burden of proof is on you.
"It's not a placed to dump inconvenient bodies, it's just a place where at least some of the bodies are people of known identity who were killed by police or corrections officers that cleared themselves of wrongdoing and somehow forgot to tell anyone."
Very reassuring. I think we can all agree that this isn't worth investigating because Mississippi has always been a place bereft of racial bias and government corruption.
We all only have a coinflip chance of inferring tone online so I wouldn't feel bad. It's also possible I misinterpreted both your comment and the OP to a degree.
There's a lot of politically driven economic boosterism in the air right now (more than usual even) and I may have lazily assigned you to that camp with scant basis.
It's natural for politicians and their adherents to cherry-pick the data and intentionally withhold context on it to make themselves look as good as possible, while their opponents do the reverse. Then everyone accuses the other side of ignoring their numbers which they say are the true reflection of "reality."
Ever was it thus, but it's more exaggerated in these conditions where both the "good numbers" and the "bad numbers" break records and can zig-zag suddenly.
Luxembourg has a 6% unemployment rate, the US has a 3.7% unemployment rate, and
North Korea has a 0% unemployment rate.
Those unemployment numbers are objective realities in terms of being a reflection of a set of collection methods and definitions. But those are not merely a poor proxy for the population's overall wellbeing, they are actively _misleading_.
Prices for food, housing, medical care, education, and used cars going up in the US by 20-50% in a 3 year period while corporate profit margin percentages are at historical highs does not inspire confidence in the future.
Throw in an ongoing decline in life expectancy that puts the US firmly in the category of developing countries while paying 250-400% more GDP for medical care than other industrialized countries, two costly proxy wars which threaten to continue growing in scope, outright state and regulatory capture...
...and worst of all, a political, economic, judicial, and cultural elite with a fairly bipartisan mainstream consensus which doesn't appear to be willing or able to seriously address these issues with policy favored by suparmajorities of the voting public but not by the largest donors.
When the people in charge have been pissing on your leg for decades and tell you that it's just raining when you never see them get wet, you can't expect the abuse to stop in the future, not even if you elect the alternative from one of the two oligarch-backed choices.
One reason the US military doesn't need a draft is because its proxy forces which are supplied by US equipment do have a military draft.
This is not a complex argument nor are there any facts which are not mutually agreed upon by all parties here.
I'm not able to follow the ideological contortions that would be required to not understand something as simple as:
"The US supplies the equipment, and the local US-backed government uses a draft to supply its army with the number of soldiers it needs to use the equipment."