this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2024
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It's not like China is going to stop making weapons if I refuse to make weapons.
"It's not like drug addictd will stop taking drugs if I quit heroin."
"I can't force the world to behave as I would like it, so I may as well not have morals"
You know, every country has an army. Either their own, or another country's...
Ask the dead about honour
My parents said the same thing about air pollution and carbon emissions
I suppose the difference is that a country doesn't just get conquered by force if it stops polluting.
Even if the US suddenly lost all its fighter jets, naval force, missiles and bombs. How likely would an invasion be in the next 10 to 50 years?
It is quite a big country with a big population, with a practically uninhabited and difficult to cross country in the north, and a poor drug war ridden country with significant amount of jungle in the south. To the west and east are oceans with some thousands of kilometres until the next sizable and properly inhabitated landmass.
So purely in geographics terms, invading and conquering the US is a huge pain.
Now add to it all the issues of the US dominance in global trade and the ramifications such an invasion would have.
The US doesnt need that army or MIC for defense. It is offense focused and it needs to keep murdering people all over the world to keep its wheels turning.
I don't disagree with you, especially in the short term, but Noah Smith (economist at https://www.noahpinion.blog/) does have some eye-opening opinions on the industrial might of China, and what that could mean for USA influence if China wanted to push things. (All this assumes no one uses nukes, of course.)
I'm going from memory, so errors are probably mine, not Mr. Smith's. But, basically, wrt manufacturing, China is already where the USA was during / near the end of WWII. Even if we had the tech and raw materials, the USA would not be able to up with China's factories if it came to war. They could basically just keep throwing drones and bombs at the USA until we literally ran out of anything to defend ourselves with, much less fight back with. Even if much of the rest of the world's factories were on our side.
CHIPS act is one way the Biden admin was trying to restart strategic manufacturing in the USA. We'll see how that goes.
Almost all pollution is by industries and not your parents, so...
If anything you could criticize them if they voted to keep the pollution going.
Buying a big SUV, shopping at h&m, eating red meat multiple times a week, and flying to the other side of the world during summer, are all worse than voting for climate change. Companies don't pollute for the sake of it.
Check out the EPA's stats on ghg emissions at this LINK. 28% of emissions total are from non-agriculture/shipping transportation, and if you break that down then 57% of the 28% are light duty vehicles, all larger road vehicles are 23%, and aircraft are 9%.
Since 2005 emissions carbon-equivalent total of the USA has fallen about a billion metric tons thanks to awareness and federal programs to reduce and eliminate emissions, almost exclusively in the Electrical Power sector.
So even if you cut out all consumer non-business transport you're left with 72% of emissions. A person who votes to curttail polution does more good than a person who drives a hybrid.
Hybrids don't reduce CO2 emissions that much anyway. Better to go all electric and vote for climate protection.
yeah this is a really stupid argument
"It's not like Israël is gonna stop killing Palestinians if I refuse to kill Palestinians"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility
I mean
That's true tho, pretty much nobody else murders Palestiniains but Israel still does.
Change on all of these scales has to come from societies around the world, not from individuals.
https://afsc.org/gaza-genocide-companies
...
I'm not saying the US government and US citizens aren't contributing, but almost nobody, and I did specify that earlier, is going to get out of their chair, fly to Israel, and pull the trigger. At the end of the day, Israelis are the ones killing people no matter where the weapons come from. Whether or not each individual american decides to fly to palestine to commit a war crime doesn't have any impact on the war crimes being committed: votes do.
Why would you need to fly to Israel when you can pilot a drone bomber from Langley?
The USA has admitted to using their own surveillance drones over Gaza, do you have a source on the USA troops or remotely operated equipment firing into Gaza?
Not without a security clearance.
yes but I'm saying that doesn't mean you should just start killing Palestinians as well
Doesn’t make you any less responsible when the fruits of your labor are used to murder civilians.
What if I have only ever worked constructively on anti-missile defense systems?
A THAAD still could potentially be used for offense even though they don't use any warheads.
A better argument could be early warning systems, or even their space division where they may have NASA or ESA contracts. Products closer to scientific research, like the Osiris, crew capsules, or the lunar rover they are supposedly teamed up with GM to design.
That’s a harder question to answer and depends more on your own moral compass. Do you believe that having better defensive capabilities empowers the users of your creation to feel safe enough to do evil things? I certainly don’t think you could absolve the makers of anti-missile systems who supply militaries that are committing genocide.
Such as if Trump would start to send anti-missile systems to Russia.
I wonder how many arms companies aren't involved with Israel.
Potentially the prosthetic arm companies
When you realize they actually have an adverse incentive to support indiscriminate bombardment...
If we don't build the bombs dropped on Gaza, China will.
Israel builds weapons so they could do it themselves
https://afsc.org/gaza-genocide-companies
...