☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆Imperial soldiers be like
glorkon
AzraelI wonder what would happen if we didn’t have a military at all
What do you think the drones are for?
gandalf_der_12tebecause we wouldn’t have the internet. the US military contributed significantly to the development of today’s internet.
probably with some time delay, the germans love a good race (/s)
apart from that, the military did some significant research into a lot of technology, including airplanes (and rockets), internet, nuclear energy.
You failed to get the point I was making. Just because the military is a driving factor to technological progress, doesn’t mean it’s a good thing all of a sudden. And all that progress could also have been made by science. Wernher von Braun didn’t care who funded his research into rockets.
Good point. But let me ask you this:
Without a military or nuclear weapons, what is preventing other countries from taking advantage at the first chance they get?
Criticize the U.S. all you want. But the country is full of valuable resources that other countries want. Take away the U.S.'s ability to defend themselves and the risk of foreign nations taking advantage will spike dramatically. Nukes are basically the ultimate “don’t even think about it” sign.
w-what if those foreigners do to us what we do to them
Your conscience is projecting
sorry full of valuable resources? what, corn? dataservers? pedophiles?
the U.S. is not some piggy bank waiting to be cracked. Realistically, the current US military exists to defend America from all the nations it’s pissed off by invading them in the past. It’s a self-fullfilling system.
I’m talking about big oil and gas production, food and farmland, massive agricultural output and the ability to export it at scale, freshwater and arable land (underappreciated, but increasingly strategic as climate stress rises elsewhere), minerals (some, not all).
And don’t forget non natural resources the U.S. has like:
Capital markets: Deep, liquid markets that can fund governments and companies. Money is a resource; the U.S. is one of the main wells.
technology and IP: Advanced R&D, software, aerospace, biotech, semiconductors design, and the companies that sit on them.
Security alliances and military reach: Not a resource in nature, but it functions like one. i It shapes trade routes, deters threats, and sets terms.
The world’s reserve currency system: Being able to transact, borrow, and settle trade in USD is a kind of meta-resource. Others want access to it more than they want a mine.
That bundle is why the U.S. stays permanently relevant, for better and worse.
the U.S.'s ability to defend themselves
If you have nukes and are the only sick fucks ever top use it why do you need to ‘defend’ yourself everywhere in the world unprovoked.
get fucked with your BS. You’re parroting regime propaganda.
Even they at least became less hypocritical in naming it the Dep of War, not defense.
Maybe follow that lead if you want to be a little warcriminal imperialist bootlicker.
Every fucking day there’s some fucker online that makes me despise that cancer country even more.
Absolute scum of the earth
I never specifically said “joining US military is bad”, I said joining the military in general is a bad thing. And neither did I talk about nukes, which are the ultimate evil.
I also never demanded to remove the military capabilities of one country, leaving it open for other countries to attack. I never talked about these things, about balance of power, about mutually assured destruction and all these geostrategic aspects of military logic.
All I said was - if you are a person who joins your country’s military, I despise you. Period. This is a statement I made completely disregarding all these other aspects you mention, and it is completely logically valid on its own.
Correct. You never demanded to remove the military capabilities of one country.
I said “I wonder what would happen if we didn’t have a military”, and you made a comment about the little girl’s backpack. I followed up with a counter argument.
This is how conversations work.
Thats the trick. If a country doesn’t have a military and they have something like resources other countries want. The become puppets of the countries that have militaries. The exceptions are small countries that don’t have enough of anything anyone wants for others to bother taking it. They don’t tend to do so well usually.
It’s a race to the bottom.
lumettariaSo what you’re saying is… superpower nations shouldn’t exist
but they do. And now it is just a game of brinksmanshit
Correct. If there is one, then others have to exist to balance them out. Only with none can we all exist without militaries. And that really should be a goal.
ironically the countries with more natural resources typically have lower quality of life. this is known as the resource curse phenomenon.
Very much so. So ewhere there is a balance of having enough to be a stable country, but not so much to draw attention. But it’s a very small point to balance on.
OBJECTION!The “resource curse” is just people trying to pretend imperialism isn’t responsible. Norway has plenty of oil and they have a high quality of life, because nobody invaded them.
Plenty of these countries had leaders who wanted to use their resources to help the people, but the powers that be, most often the US, didn’t want that. And so for example Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran, a peaceful, democratically elected progressive, was overthrown by the CIA, and he was replaced by a monarch who could be easily bribed and would use the oil to enrich himself. And when that monarch caved to domestic pressure and participated in an oil embargo, US support was withdrawn and he was overthrown and the current government came to power.
There’s no “mystery” or “curse.” It’s just imperialism. The story generally goes that these resources were stolen by force during colonialism and remained in foreign hands after independence and the country still functions as a neocolony, leading to poverty and exploitation, or war and instability if they challenge it.
PolandIsAStateOfMindYeah i’m sure it’s a curse, and not centuries of colonialism, imperialism, uneven trade etc etc.
The Third World is not poor. You don’t go to poor countries to make money. There are very few poor countries in this world. Most countries are rich! The Philippines are rich! Brazil is rich! Mexico is rich! Chile is rich—only the people are poor. But there’s billions to be made there, to be carved out, and to be taken—there’s been billions for 400 years! The Capitalist European and North American powers have carved out and taken the timber, the flax, the hemp, the cocoa, the rum, the tin, the copper, the iron, the rubber, the bauxite, the slaves, and the cheap labour. They have taken out of these countries—these countries are not underdeveloped—they’re overexploited!
-Michael Parenti
but think of the stock market!
Ah, I see. So when the U.S. bombs another country, it’s genocide. But if someone does it to the U.S. it’s a good thing? Got it.
Wont someone please consider the genociders??
Yeah it’s a good thing when fascist states get bombed. You’d be the kind to both sides WW2 if it was socially acceptable to go to bat for the nazis
And what about the innocent people who voted against the fascist government? They deserve to die too?
Are westerners only able to conceptualise the killing of civilians? Are they so far removed from having normal countries that they forget that wars are fought between armies?
Talk about cultural chauvinism.
The implication here is: “You people are detached, soft, and incapable of understanding real war.” That’s not an argument. That’s a moral superiority pose. It frames one group as hardened realists and the other as naïve spectators. Historically, that kind of framing is how conflicts get emotionally escalated. Dehumanization rarely begins with slurs. It begins with sweeping generalizations.
And the irony is thick. You’re accusing me of only conceptualizing civilian deaths, while simultaneously minimizing the reality that modern warfare absolutely does kill civilians. The idea that wars are cleanly fought “between armies” belongs in the 19th century, not the 21st. Civilian harm is a central moral and legal issue in contemporary conflict. That’s not Western fragility. That’s international humanitarian law.
The implication here is: “You people are detached, soft, and incapable of understanding real war.”
No the implication is that westerners love killing civilians so much that they forget that wars are fought between militaries. I’ll be more clear about this next time.
That’s not an argument. That’s a moral superiority pose.
You want an argument? It’s trivial to give one. All western countries have been involved in warmongering in west asia since before I was born. There is full justification for any group in west asia to launch attacks on western military assets.
Even under international law (which western militaries refuse to follow), retaliating against military attacks is fully allowed. America and its zionist occupation of Palestine attacked Iran (military targets and civilians), and even inside its borders and capital city*. The Iranian state has every right to bomb any American military target, even if it were inside US border.
*this isn’t the first time either. The Americans did this last year, and even in trump’s 1rst term
minimizing the reality that modern warfare absolutely does kill civilians
Sure, there are civilians casualties from war. So should America be allowed to bomb and genocide whoever they want with no one fighting back?
Civilian harm is a central moral and legal issue in contemporary conflict. That’s not Western fragility. That’s international humanitarian law.
Lmao western militaries do not give a single fuck about civilians or collateral damage or international law. You really want to present the butchers of gaza as some sort of hippies in 2026?
So just to be clear, are civilians legitimate targets as long as they live in the “wrong” country?
Reading comprehension curse strikes again
I have never once advocated for the deliberate targeting of civilians and have specified again and again that warfighting should be between militaries.
I didn’t say you supported deliberately targeting civilians.
My point was that attacking military targets inside heavily populated areas will inevitably kill civilians. That’s why civilian protection is a central principle in international humanitarian law. The rule has to apply universally.
“I genocided your brothers and bombed your schools and seiged you but please don’t hit my military targets cause I put them in densely populated areas”
Your humanitarian principle requires everyone in the world to basically allow themselves to be attacked by America, it’s European lapdogs and the zionist occupation.
From a legal and military standpoint your logic is simply absurd.
Self-defense and protecting civilians are not mutually exclusive. That’s literally why the laws of war exist.
I don’t even know what point you’re trying to make anymore. Let’s cut this thread honestly it’s long enough.
Cowbee [he/they]The US Empire is an empire, countries opposing the US Empire are presently not imperialist. You’re comparing them by abstracting the concept of bombing outside of the necessary context it exists in, ie you’re using metaphysics to analyze reality.
Depends on your definition. The U.S. fits the definition of “Informal Empire” pretty well, but it’s definitely not an old school empire like Rome or Britain
Imperialism isn’t something that exists as a static concept, but functions differently depending on the dominant mode of production. The US Empire absolutely fits the Marxist understanding of imperialism as a specific stage of late-monopoly capitalism.
Imperialism as a concept predates Marxism and isn’t reducible to Lenin’s model. We can debate which framework is more useful, but pretending there’s only one definition isn’t serious.
The processes of earlier forms of imperialism predate Marxism, such as Roman imperialism. The analysis of capitalist imperialism, on the other hand, is most well-understood by how Lenin analyzed it with Marxism. Lenin wasn’t invalidating earlier forms of imperialism, but analyzing the specific character of capitalist imperialism, the form that by far matters the most today.
Lenin’s framework is one influential analysis of capitalist imperialism. That doesn’t make it exhaustive. Modern geopolitics also includes state security competition, regional spheres of influence, and non-capitalist power projection.
Marxists have also continued to expand analysis of imperialism beyond Lenin. One such example is Cheng Enfu’s analysis of neoimperialism, where imperialist countries have ralied behind a single dominant Empire, the US, rather than compete with each other (though this is falling apart now). Geopolitics isn’t limited to imperialism, but imperialism is the principle contradiction driving development in the world today, that being the socialization of global labor struggling against the privatization of the profits made by global labor in the hands of the few in imperialist countries.
Five Characteristics of Neoimperialism: Building on Lenin's Theory of Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century - Monthly Review
Cheng Enfu is a principal professor at the University of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, director of the Research Center for Economic and Social Development at the Chinese Academy... READ MORE
Calling imperialism the principal contradiction is a theoretical commitment, not an empirical conclusion. Other schools like realism or institutionalism would identify state security competition or balance-of-power dynamics as primary.
And what are the opposing tendencies in these contradictions?
In realism, the opposing tendencies are expansion of one state’s power and balancing by others to preserve sovereignty. In institutionalism, it’s integration versus fragmentation. Neither requires framing global politics as capital versus labor.
And yet both of these are largely driven by imperialism, as secondary contradictions of the single most important factor in the global economy.
We’re working from fundamentally different priors. I don’t think global politics reduces to a single economic contradiction. I’ll leave it there.
I don’t believe it does either, though, just that one issue is primary.