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?
>nor been at risk of being drafted to fight overseas?
I doubt there will ever be another draft in the US. As technology becomes more important the priority will be keeping the industrial base running for military R&D and weapon manufacturing, not on having millions of barely trained kids most of which you can't properly equip.
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."
Well, there is the thing where the US has a massive army even without a draft. They’d need to fight some near equal opponent to ever get to the point where their professional army needs to be supplemented.
Though I don’t disagree with the premise that we’re still far away from purely AI warfare.
I'm going to ignore your attempt at ad-hominem because you're far off mark. Anyways: (1) there will be violence and people will suffer from someone else's power (2) you're better off wishing for that power to be as nice as it can be (3) the US has been about as nice as one could wish for, based on historical precedent and what contenders are demonstrating they would do.
Of course the US has done plenty of bad stuff to plenty of people. But you're delusional if you think some alternative power would have been gentler.
I too wish for a world power that never resolves to violence and never does any mistake. I too think that life is valuable everywhere, and that none should be sacrificed. But the real world doesn't yet offer us these circumstances.
>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.
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.
I think being alive is awesome in aggregate even though there are people whose existence is miserable and for whom it's absurd to suggest that life might be awesome.
You might think Descartes was an awesome human, but what about the broken hearts he left behind? His past lovers might think your aggregate perspective is absurd.
Your focus on picking particular contradictory perspectives doesn't seem relevant to me. I don't think it's particularly sophisticated. It comes to me as being more interested in cynicism than pragmatism for aesthetic reasons.
> 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.
Obviously. But would they have been happier if it was a different country doing it?
I can think of a few countries that would probably have been better, but none of them are in a position to actually do so. I can think of many countries that would have been worse, some of which could have, but didn’t do so.
> 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.
While it would be a boneheaded thing to do if you had any social grace, would it make it any less true (assuming it were true)?
On the whole I’m just less likely to trust the good intentions of a (near) dictatorship than that of a democracy.
That may be because I grew up in one, but I can’t exactly change that.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
Easy - I don't think that, so it's not justified. The opinions of "the vast majority of humanity" are not part of the decision making process that has resulted in this situation.
> I wonder if it's possible to describe this as a series of logical axioms
I don't wonder, I believe it is! These are the (simplified) axioms along which I form my opinions about not only this, but all geopolitics in general:
- Actions that cause human suffering are bad.
- Actions that reduce human suffering are good.
- Innocent suffering in a conflict is inevitable.
- Force will be required; conflict is inevitable; the world is imperfect.
- The use of force is righteous or not depending on how the resultant innocent suffering is accounted for before, during, and after.
I believe that my opinion is completely consistent with these statements. You asked if using violence to stop other violence is wrong, and my answer is "it depends". If the Houthis were taking action against the those actually committing the atrocities, we'd probably not be having this conversation. Deliberately causing harm to innocents is never acceptable, never right. This is terrorism as a tactic.
If you think that second order violence IS an acceptable course of action, where do you draw the line? How much societal disruption in countries with less food security are we willing to induce?
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.
> 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 is an absurdly bad faith interpretation of what I've said. You and I agree on the conflict in Gaza. The only opinion that I've offered is that terrorism isn't an acceptable response from a third party.
If you agree that there is too much collateral suffering in Gaza, but you're happy with a course of action that is deliberately inflicting more collateral suffering, then you're a moral hypocrite.
"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.
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?