I think you should be more thankful of and respectful towards the people "in the trenches," and also the technologists, who make it possible for you to live in a safe place and spend your time according to your desires.

Why didn't it?

There are no Mongol hoards waiting to invade, suggestions to the contrary come from those who profit from the fiction and those who buy into it.

No, politicians decided that. That's an important distinction. If we don't like what the military is doing, we need to place blame where it belongs: on the politicians.

There are no Mongol hoards waiting to invade

The military is still highly important. Think about the role it played in the Revolutionary War, Civil War, and WWII, to name a few wars that most consider to have been justified for the US to enter. More recently, the Gulf War where Hussein invaded Kuwait. I personally believe that in the future, Iran and/or North Korea will acquire a nuclear weapon that threatens US citizens. Somali pirates. Who knows what else will come up. We still need a military.

Do you recognize the problem here?

Regardless, this whole thought that we should be "thankful" to the American military is absurd. They have billions of dollars to spend every year, why do they also require thanks? Do tanks run on thanks?

No. Thanks is needed because without the blinding effect of popular societal support, their actions do not stand for themselves. The military requires praise to be shovelled onto it like coal into a furnace 24/7 so that its hired guns can continue to lie to themselves and sleep at night. Listen, if you think they should have thanks, then do it yourself; however it is not your place to scold others who want nothing to do with it.

(2) And, yes, you should be thankful that someone is willing to defend your freedoms.

(3) I don't scold people who don't thank the military; I scold people who denigrate the military. Actually, it's not scolding, it's showing a more rational way to think about it.

(4) I've enjoyed this, but I'm done here.

[2] I assert they do nothing of the sort.

[3] Call it what you like, telling people that they should be more respectful of the military when they express concern about being, by proxy, responsible for a loss of life, is... I don't even know how to describe it. Lets say "insensitive of the humanity of others".

[4] Cheerio

If you cannot separate political policies from military ones, you cannot pretend to argue usefully about this.

"I only recognize that a distinction could exist when we restrict the discussion to conscripted armies."

You need to further elaborate on this, because one easy interpretation is that you have no idea how to reason about volunteer armies. I'm not going to even go into more esoteric arguments about how "volunteer" anything actually is--just consider that the military does not (except in some bizzaro world some people seem to want to live in) spontaneously go to war. The politicians guide policies, the politicians set agendas, and declare wars and deploy troops (for our sake here, I consider the President in the politician camp).

(I'll also argue that things like what the CIA/Homeland Sec. do that require drones and such are wrong, so save it.)

It is wrong to inflict injury on another human being (we could argue this, but let's not). That said, surgeons cut to good effect, police detain suicide attempts, and bouncers eject unruly patrons. We can argue that harm is being done in all those cases, but to good effect.

More to the point, though, javert is saying that the military deserves praise in terms of how effective/professional they are, and you did not disagree beyond saying that the divide between politics and force was beyond you.

You cannot with a straight face tell me that you refuse to agree that the (American) military is due praise for their ability due to their given directions--while at the same time participating in this community here on HN.

Tell me, what is the cost of pushing consumerism and advertising on people? What is the cost of buying the latest and greatest smartphone? What is the cost of the shinier, faster computer? What is the cost of developing games and amusements to distract and destroy manhours of productivity?

What is the cost of datamining to circumvent privacy and better target ads? Of streamlining sharing of information about friends who wouldn't do so themselves?

So, please, by all means, criticize those dumb sociopaths in the military--but hold yourself to the same goddamn standard when talking about the majority of your fellow hackers!

You are seriously undereducated on this. Were you born this stupid, or did you put effort into it?

At the very least, go read about how the war was actually executed, and to what degree politicians influenced military decisions (where to bomb, etc.). Read about the push to let natives do more of the fighting, and read about how shitty the South Vietnamese government was. There were a lot of factors involved, and few of them were failures of the military.

militaristic view of the world

That I think the military is a tool we need, does not make my worldview "militaristic." (Truly, I think the military is needed to ensure peace, but that's beside the point.)

should impose our views

I'm not imposing my views, I'm sharing my views. It's rational discussion. If you act as if sharing views equals imposing them, than you're giving a free bone to the dogs that want to destroy free speech (and believe me, they're more common than people think).

Not all tools are neutral. Tools also have intended uses and inherent affordances towards certain uses.

Yes, you can use a knife to kill and also to cut a piece of a cake. An RPG? Much less neutral.

>Without having a military, we would be up shit's creek.

Yes, but if you did not have a military, lots of countries around the world would also be better off. You know, from certain imperialist, self-serving, resource grubbing, our-idea-of-society-spreading kind of actions...

Looks more like something that was assigned to the Air Force mostly for public relations ("look, we also save lives").

No, it's not warm and fuzzy to think about things in this way, but we're not children and we don't have the luxury of idealistic naivety.

Those were not halcyon days for mathematicians, physicists and engineers. I'll take the juvenilization of the profession instead.

I appreciate that scientists don't always have freedom of choice under a brutal regime.

Stalin was a western ally. Stalin was, without doubt, evil.

German scientists worked for the US; they were recruited through Operation Paperclip.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip)

There's interesting stuff about President Truman's anti-Nazi directive (tl;dr: Don't use scientists who were (or were supportive of) Nazis) and the way that was ignored.

No he wasn't; he was just an ally. The term "western allies" excludes the Soviet Union, that's why I intentionally chose it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Allies

German scientists that helped the US, to whatever extent they helped the US, did help to preserve our civilization, even if they tried to destroy it during the war. But let's ignore them; I'm talking about the thousands of American scientists and engineers worked on defense applications in the 20th century, and to some extent about those of Britain, Canada, France, and so forth.

When a man with his finger on the button of half the world's nukes says things like that, you damn well better put your best minds to work figuring out how not to let it happen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomber_gap

The Soviets were, with some justification, terrified of a US first strike at the time.

What if there's a peaceful answer which sacrifices way of life instead of human life? Would supporting it be "luxury"?

People's cat pictures were a vanishingly small portion of the landscape.

As an example, cheap computing power is one of the reasons that while at the beginning of the 90's, nuclear power was considered a money losing proposition by electric utilities and everyone was trying to get out from under them but by the end of the decade, all the utilities were hanging on to their nukes for dear life and trying to figure out how to extend their licenses/service life.

Now, a much bigger percentage of the focus is simply getting information out of one spot, tranporting it to another, dolling it up w/some marketing glitz.

That's not to say that the cool stuff isn't still going on, but that it is a smaller percentage and the profession has been dumbed down significantly (hence brogrammers and all).

No I don't want to go back.

At my first job we did some work in expert systems and Ai(applying it to engineering problems) and one guy moved from those projects because of his concerns sbout the source of the funding.

I think computers should be employed to do useful things like 1. help us colonize space, 2. stop world hunger, 3. stop poverty, 4. stop war, 5. help people to love each other, 6. help us understand and love God/a higher being (assuming you believe in God/a higher being).

If your work is for some SAAS app that doesn't work toward those things- it is contributing to the death of humans just like a military application- only in a different way.