+1. We should make sure that our allies get access to our best technology and weapons platforms and obviously we can commit to defend them if they can commit to defending themselves (places like Germany need to step up to the plate) but America doesn't need to be the world's police man and can't afford to be the world's police man.
I agree that there's a cosmopolitan bias, but I'm extremely skeptical of the claim that journalists writ large are motivated by a sense of professional ethics and are exposed to people from a variety of backgrounds.
I don't think I saw a single journalist apologize for pushing the Trump/Russia misinformation, the NYT and WASHPO haven't given back their pulitzer for reporting on it, what's most telling is that after the report dropped, the journalists pivoted to impeachment - it's clear the Russia angle was more about having a stick to beat the dog than anything else.
Additionally, I think people in cosmopolitan areas are probably more ignorant about life in rural areas than vice versa. This is a pretty partisan source, but look how some journalists reacted when asked if they knew anyone who owned a pick up truck (one of the most common vehicles in America): https://www.dailywire.com/news/12138/journalists-lose-it-aft...
I'm sure journalists have 'diverse' friends/social circles, but I'd wager that they're all in agreement w.r.t culture war topics - how diverse is that really?
We would expect parcel prices to increase with upzoing - land becomes more valuable if more people are permitted to enjoy using it. That's the behavior that encourages developers to make multi-family housing.
Not everybody wants to get rich. Some people, especially the old, just want to stay in a familiar place. If you change that place, it is no longer familiar. Older people often struggle with change. People with memory problems can often get by for much longer if nothing much changes. If you make changes all around them, they might need to go into a nursing home and then struggle every day in the unfamiliar situation.
"Just following orders" has been used as recently as the Obama administration as an excuse not to prosecute CIA operatives for torture, despite American law on the books that explicitly forbids using it as an excuse for torture.
Isn't the main part that they were given legal guidance that what they were doing was not legally torture though? There's a bit in another article that got posted today [0] about that.
> Guantánamo leadership wanted to understand the legal gymnastics that would be required to implement a program of their own. “Torture has been prohibited by international law, but the language of the statutes is written vaguely,”
and
> Bush Administration lawyers had taken the position that “enemy combatants” could be held indefinitely, without trials, and that in order for something to qualify as “torture” it “must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.”
People weren't just tortured, some were tortured to death.
The United States Senate ratified, and President Reagan signed the The U.N. Convention Against Torture, which states that “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”
No amount of legal hand waving by the Bush administration can justify what was done.
Likewise, there is no excuse for the Obama administration refusing to prosecute the crimes that occurred.
Not arguing the moral point. The parent poster said the threshold of the treatment becoming torture wasn’t crossed, you are saying torture is banned by the agreement. It needs to be torture for you point to have standing
You don't think people were executed post-war for "just following orders" before the Nuremberg trials?
In other words, do you really think such people got off easy before the Nuremberg trials? If anything, much worse has happened to them throughout history, because the kings and dictators didn't have to put them through a judicial process.
This is an embarrassment of the victor and never celebrated - atrocious actors on the victorious side have been punished at times throughout history but I agree the bar is higher. It certainly isn't celebrated though - and informed societies can still be outraged (See Guantanamo, Abu Gharib, Yemenese drone strikes under Obama & Trump, the Bay of Pigs, Guatemala... the general familiarity of this list is a testament to the fact that the victor can be held accountable - even if individual actors are generally given more levity[1]...)
[1] _sigh_ Oliver North, honestly America... why did you never... eh.
Depends on the situation. Let's say you have a hostile war captive (enemy combative of a high rank) who is the ONLY one who can provide you with critical, war-winning details. You (metaphorically) would want to do whatever it took to secure those details. I've been in hairy situations before. Everything Hollywood depicts goes out the window. Embedded reporters get a newfound respect for troops once they ride out just one hot encounter. They understand the need for the military to do what they do, and are likewise frustrated when the military's hands are needlessly tied when they shouldn't be.
I agree to not engage in heinous acts for their own sake, but sometimes more vigorous actions are needed to win for the sake of innocent lives. Case in point being ISIS. They should have been afforded zero grace. In fact, my aforementioned situation has played out in the real many times over. Imagine if the man above had kidnapped a loved one. You would do and sanction anything necessary to get back your loved one. Failure to see this is a moral failure on the part of the one to make the right decisions. There are some situations where "anything goes" is the way to go. Thankfully they are few and far between.
The problem with this kind of consequentialist ethics is that thinking the end justifies the means generally makes you very vulnerable to manipulation by others who tell you what the ends will be and then ask you to do the means.
Remember, Guantanamo also had taxi drivers and aid workers in it. How many of them are you willing to torture in order to find the terrorist you've captured and maybe get some information that might help stop a future terrorist plot? The hypothetical of capturing a top general with a tight deadline provides a terrible intuition when it comes to torture.
But that is exactly the kind of intuition Rumsfeld et al wanted people to be thinking about, in order to justify torture^W enhanced interrogation techniques.
You (metaphorically) still didn't answer the underlying question, namely, wouldn't you do anything it took to save a loved one? The answer isn't grey, it's black and white. The answer is always YES to doing what it takes to save one's family. You have a moral imperative to do whatever it takes to keep your own safe, up to, and including, your own life. You fail your family morally if you fail to act when you could do so.
People like to throw in these trick questions like, "If you could save your own child, but nine others would die; or you could save the nine and your own would die. What would you choose?" Save my own child every time.
That is patently ridiculous and taken to the extreme and you know it. We are talking reasonable possible situations (not world events) that you may find yourself in. And yes, if I had a choice to save an entire building or just my kid, it's my kid every time. I fail them morally if I do not. I'm not responsible for other people's family, just my own. Now... if I could save my kid and everyone else, then yes. But my kid first.
Of course they were. The key point is the Nuremberg trials are legal trials, supposedly fair and Geneva convention friendly way to punish the loosing side one Japan escaped
Probably not at any scale beyond serial production, even then, there isn't a Russian powerplant that would offer the thrust/weight performance required for the plane to perform.
I'm sure some of the materials on the F-35 would be very difficult for other countries to make at scale, figuring out how to fabricate parts out of those unusual materials at tolerances required for low-observability would be really tricky. I'm sure there are machinists anywhere who could figure it out, but at that point we're talking about bespoke part production using 98th+ percentile operators. Although skilled labor is cheap is China and Russia, it's pretty untenable to use it to produce a knock-off that'll eventually hold an inferior Chinese/Russian engine.
While Russian doesn't have a powerful engine as the F-35, their newer planes have twin engine with a combined output larger than the single engine of the F-35.
Yeah, but thrust to weight really matters too. I'd be floored if two Russian engines had anywhere near the power to weight ratio of the F-35 engine.
But the Russian engineers are very good, they've done a great job of designing competitive planes with those constraints. I wouldn't cast stones at the prototype Sukhois or MiGs.
Agreed. What we're seeing from the thought police is a resurgence of puritanism. With various degrees of success, religions can put guard rails on puritanism with 'love the sinner hate the sin' messages, it's not apparent whether any of that exists for puritanical ideologues - the Pope washed the feet of Muslim refugees, when's the last time you saw someone woke AF go out of their way to affirm the humanity of someone who holds opposing views? Ask hollywoods liberals if they'd shake Trump's hand.
Many of us working jobs we don't really have 'passion' for are doing it to fund the things we are passionate about.
I really hate it when people talk about how they need public subsidies to follow their self-gratifying dream, like that money comes from people who aren't following their dream. I'm not going to work harder on stuff I don't like to support you having fun.
>Aside from housing, cost of living isn't that different, at least if you don't have kids. Things you buy from Amazon cost the same. Maybe it'd be a different situation if I had children.
Transportation costs are much higher in the bay area than normal parts of the country. Gas is usually $1/gallon more expensive (bay area electricity is about 2x as costly as the national average), car insurance is high, and the congestion is substantial.
It's very non-uniform though. My 10-year-old car has 30k miles on it; at 40mpg and $3.50/gal gas, that's about $260/year on gas. That's because I lived 2 miles from work and biked in during the summer while I was at Google, and I've been working from home while I'm at my startup.
A lot of FANG employees pay nothing for transportation because they take the shuttle and don't have a car.
If they live in a place with walking access to a shuttle (and enough walking distance amenities that they don't need a car), they're paying a lot in rent.
I wager you're paying more for car insurance than you spend on gas - car insurance is more expensive in the Bay Area than the rest of the country.
The price of gas certainly affects the contingent workers (guards, cooks, cleaners) whose work schedules don't line up with the shuttles.
I pay $30/month in an average month for electricity and $0/month for gasoline (TBH I don’t own a car, so a more realistic measure is I’ve probably spent about $50 this month on a Lyft ride, new brakes for my bike and a few transit rides). The point being, energy doesn’t have to be expensive if you aren’t blasting the heat, driving everywhere and doing who knows what else.
