What’bout nuhkla warheads and north korea taking charge of the middle east? and you do realize that people have been fighting there for thousands of years, why stop the tradition?
Sorry, I mean a world with no country, no goverment, only a few public services remain.
What public services? This is america.
GSG: YOU’RE in America. THIS is the internet.
Sun: That’s a nice thought, but I certainly doubt it. Most likely there would be a lot of "police actions"and civil wars.
Hades: You’re being completely impractical and you know it. I do not love war by any means, but would you rather the US and Canada had just stood still during WWII and not do a damned thing while Europe and Asia went to Hell? Are you seriously calling for a dismantling of the military, or are you trolling? Here’s a few reasons why that would be a horrible idea:
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Loss of jobs. I’m not just talking about jobs directly in the military. To use the US as an example, there are countless CIVILIANS employed under the Department of Defense and its branches. If you completely dismantled the military, you’d put millions of people out of a job, no exaggeration. And most of these people aren’t, as you so eloquently put, “murderers.”
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Here’s a no brainer: no defense. The only countries that have NO military currently are very small (Liechtenstein, Costa Rica, et cetera). Countries like Canada, the US, China, et cetera cannot do this because I’m pretty damned certain that the other countries of the world aren’t going to follow suit. And I don’t know if you read the news, but just about any country that HAS a big military (America, Russia, China) has a lot of enemies. They’d all be fucked.
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Also for countries with big militaries: we have our fingers in way too many pies. While it would be nice to assume that pulling out of foreign countries would make everything nice and happy and shiny again, the most likely scenario is that we’d create more hostilities than we left behind. In some of these countries, if not most, it probably would have been better that people didn’t interfere at all. But now that people HAVE interfered, it’s only going to get worse if we pull out completely.
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This is the least likely scenario in any country except (maybe) the US. Armed revolt. If we have no military, then who is going to take over? That’s right. The people with the guns. Psycho gun hoarding fucknuts. Do you really want your neighbor to the south to be MORE conservative than it is now? I doubt it.
If what you’re saying is “wouldn’t it be nice if there was no war and everybody lived happily and peacefully and picked flowers and held hands and sang songs la la la,” then yeah, that’d be nice. But it’s never happening. Stop confusing the ideal with reality. People are sadistic bastards with or without a military, and you know it.
Zhare: My grandfather was in WWII, and that didn’t fuck up my dad. My dad was in the Navy, and my uncles in the Air Force, and none of us were HORRIBLY SCREWED UP because we didn’t have a father figure. Furthermore, for practical reasons, you can’t really control whether or not your employees MARRY or have kids FFS. That’s the most insane idea put forward in this thread. Congrats.
I would stop confusing the ideal with reality… except in order to stop, I’d have to start first, and that would be retarded.
Here’s a better idea: Stop conjuring arguments that don’t exist for yourself to try to refute. I said “in an ideal world” pretty explicitly dude 
It sounds like you’re the one baiting me.
But yes, I was trolling. Just not you. I wanted Info to shit a brick at my “murderers” comment, but apparently he knows better now. I miss the old days.
Oh yeah and:
If you completely dismantled the military, you’d put millions of people out of a job, no exaggeration. And most of these people aren’t, as you so eloquently put, “murderers.”
The creation/loss of jobs should never be a reason for doing anything. Jobs are a biproduct of work needing to be done, not the other way around. Giving people pointless work just for an excuse to pay them isn’t how healthy economies function. If the American Military ever stopped being useful, you can bet your ass it’d be gone in a hurry, no matter how many jobs are lost. So yeah, I found this point kind of misguided. As a general rule, I don’t WANT to see people thrown into unemployment, but come on… I’d rather see people unemployed because they can’t find a job in the professional deathbringer industry than live in a world where they’re required for my safety. It’s not even close to debatable.
I don’t consider preserving jobs to be a good argument for or against anything else. Jobs create themselves where work is needed. You can’t create unneeded work to generate jobs and expect to get a return on it. It’s just… the complete opposite of effective. I’m saying this because you seem to be under the impression that jobs are inherently good no matter where they come from and what they produce, like they’re something you can artificially create more of and give to whoever you want and they’ll always be useful. That’s not how things work. No one arguing against the existence of a monstrous military force is going to give a shit that people will no longer be getting paid to maintain that force. No one’s going to say “Hey, let’s keep this massive army around, just so we’ll have to keep pouring money into it!” It’s absolutely insane that you’d think they would.
That used to be my view. The government gives out busywork as an excuse to redistribute money from taxpayers who do real work to government employees – soldiers, tree planters, street cleaners, etc.
One problem with this view is that our society has long had an excess of everything it really needs. There is plenty of food and shelter to go around. Basic human needs are no longer the issue. Now, the majority of jobs are aimed at improving our quality of life. The market economy is justified because it drives people to produce highly refined goods that improve our quality of life.
When a huge proportion of society is unemployed, however, the quality-of-life justification fails. How can we say that the market economy works for our benefit, when around 10% of the U.S. population is unemployed and seeking employment? When another 7% have given up on seeking employment? If we want to maximize the national quality of life, everyone needs a little money. The poorest will benefit more from having a little money than the richest will from having a little more. Money has diminishing returns.
We could just hand it out, but that creates an incentive not to work. Instead, the government creates jobs – jobs that do at least a little good and require some hard work. These jobs pay at least enough to live on. They also teach skills to people who often lack skills. They force people to use their minds and willpower from day to day, ensuring that the unemployed do not atrophy into truly unemployable creatures. When the economy picks up, these people will be prepared to take on more lucrative private sector jobs. The work ethic instilled by years of government employment will translate to an entrepreneurial spirit in better times.
This is not to say I endorse starting wars to save economies. On the other hand, I think World War 2 revitalized the American economy in just this way. There are legitimate reasons to employ lots of soldiers. To tie this back to the thread, I think it would be economically and socially unwise to start rejecting would-be soldiers, with families or without. In my personal experience, many military recruits had no real prospects when they joined. Many had minor criminal records from their youth. They tend to emerge from the military with dignity and a work ethic, and a spirit of obedience and loyalty. Better they should spend their young adulthood in the military, than unemployed and perhaps criminal. Depending on your views, you may even think the military is doing some good. Most will agree that its existence deters aggression by other nations.
So if Obama wants to create jobs that would not “naturally” exist, as F.D.R. did during the Great Depression and World War 2, there is merit in the idea. If that means employing more soldiers with families, so be it. And if the government can employ more people in preserving the environment and fostering innovation, as Obama suggests, all the better.
Instead, the government creates jobs – jobs that do at least a little good and require some hard work.
This isn’t what I’m talking about though. I mean a world where militaries aren’t at all necessary for any reason. Millions of unemployed people wouldn’t stop me from choosing that world over this.
In general, I’m talking about jobs there is no demand for in any way. In order to do a small amount of good, there has to be at least SOME demand by some group of people for the product or the service being created, even if the jobs aren’t natural, by which I’m assuming you mean extremely urgent. Every job that exists, even government created jobs, serves some purpose beyond employment. Keeping a large military force around just to have an excuse to throw money at employees doesn’t fit this mould.
I agree with everything you said though.
The trouble with this solution is that it relies upon an inherently just and benevolent state; to be obedient and loyal to simply any authority isn’t a virtue. Similarly, breaking the law is not inherently immoral, while legal lines of employment are not necessarily moral. In example, I believe it’s more moral to sell marijuana than cigarettes or alcohol, despite its illegality and their legality. The former is less addictive and less dangerous in both the long and short terms, at least according to the available data.
This isn’t to say that joining the military is inherently immoral, or that the point that it helps create jobs is invalid. I’m only arguing that, from a purely philosophical angle, none of these points without further back-up qualify the military as a morally superior option, only a more legal option.
As for creating jobs, truly meaningless busywork is a waste and nothing more, but this is quite rare. As X-wing points out, most of the jobs offered do some sort of good, even if it’s rather small. Even if a street-cleaner isn’t the keystone of a society, but it’s nice not to have litter all over the streets. That said, I don’t think our military needs to be, or should be, as large as it is.
I like Arac’s last paragraph. Exactly what I wanted to get at. I’m not talking about the government creating jobs where there are demand gaps that could potentially be filled, even though they don’t technically HAVE to be. I’m talking about truly meaningless busywork here. I don’t support using it just to create “jobs.”
It was a piggy-back on “ENGLISH MOTHER FLIPPER DO YOU SPEAK IT?!”, but this is an English speaking board so I see why it was inappropriate.
Should people with children and spouses not be allowed to join the military?
This way fathers(or is some cases mothers) wouldn’t be separated from their children for months on end and having a good chance of dying in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A lot of people who are kids of people in the military are really screwed up and detached because of these things.
To further expand on this proposal, should people with children and spouses not be allowed to join the police or fire squads? While these two services do not have the same deployment issue as the military, they do have the risk of death in doing their jobs. Firemen, also, have stings where they must sleep in the fire house away from the home. If the risk of death on the job is a reason for not allowing family people from joining the military ranks, that risk should also cover any job which has a higher than normal risk of death.
You also talk about separation from the family. What then of doctors, lawyers, and other jobs which require long hours away from the family? Many lawyers work fucking absurd hours. Pretty much all hospital staff do too. I would posit that there is a greater chance of growing up screwed up and detached if one’s parent lives at home but is never there because of some such profession. However, with the military, the military man is not at home; it gives no illusion of the parent being able to give attention the child but choosing not to because of his job.
Ah, okay Hades. I missed the word “ideal.” As they say in France: my bad.
But if one is free to fire employees without justification… *wink
I’m not sure, witnessing a long street-cleaners’ strike kinda refutes this argument. Men revert to a savage condition and next thing you know you’re hammering radscorpions just to get to work.
That’s a thought.