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Comment by nickpinkston | Hacker News Reader

Yea, this is what people on the Left (which I am myself) turn a blind eye. Sure, the US has done plenty of awful shit with our military, but would you prefer the West to not be the dominant block in the world?

That's going to end liberalism way faster. The military / real politik foreign affairs are dirty parts of life that we'd prefer not to have, but we live in a world where we must have them.

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If liberalism surviving is defined as “western military hegemony” then I think there’s a problem with liberalism, but the military tools used to enforce it.

How should liberalism respond if 100 liberals can be silenced by 1 authoritarian with a machine gun, and the ratio of authoritarians to liberals is 1:99?

I don't think liberalism has an answer to this question. It appears to me that as liberal democracies become more democratic the likelihood that an authoritarian can take power, from the left or right, increases. So it's somewhat of a paradox.

Well said. It’s definitly a tough position but that is reality. I am an immigrant and lean more to the left of center but we got have common sense.

I would rather have America be dominant than any other nation. With all our faults, we excercise incredible restraint with our immense powers. This of course could change if we end up electing more leaders like Trump. We need to stay strong militarily but also need good and intelligent leaders which unfortunately we don’t currently have.

How many wars has Trump started? I haven't kept count.

Literally... zero?

How many has he ended?

It seems like he is trying to end at least a couple.

However, entrenched interests and Trump haters (both Dem and GOP) can't let that happen.

Fair question, it's not just about the wars he starts/ends. It's about the rhetorics and the planting of seeds of conflict and hate and what becomes of it in 4 years or 10 years or 20 years.

Simple words by a country's leader could ruin relationships between nations for decades or between different parts of society.

You don't just start hating {insert favorite target jews|blacks|muslims|christians|whites} overnight, it takes time. You plant the seeds of hate and let them flourish into ethnic cleansing|holocaust|interment camps|etc.

It's our duty to nip that shit in bud right now :). We have come so far to let that sort of shit take us back.

I apologize for taking this discussion in a political direction. In any case, I think it's important for us to have a strong military and Microsoft helping our military build better weapons/systems/tools is a good thing. A strong America is a good thing - as long as we have no Trumps :)

Fair enough. I knew pushing back here on HN with even one fact would buy me some downvotes.

One cherry-picked fact tends to earn, rightfully, downvotes.

Orange Man Bad and all that. There is plenty to jibe at Trump about, however, starting wars is not one of them. That's the exclusive realm of professional Ivy league educated politicians and diplomats AKA our betters.

Do Twitter wars count?

I'd prefer to not having a dominant block at all .

So how do you get the other actors to concede and play nice?

Remember that multi-polar worlds tend to have far more wars. Even the bi-polar Cold War was highly dangerous. Having a good single block is preferable.

Yeah, right. Almost no wars in the last 30 years.

Except for a few never-ending wars that last so long that are basically a new normal so we can count them off.

I'm not denying there aren't still huge conflicts with high loss of life, however defined, but I'm glad we don't have many true state on state open wars like the past few millennia where large percentages of the population were killed.

That's not an option that you have.

But surely, people who want to work for defence contractors can and will.

And if you were working for a company that wasn't a defence contractor, but is becoming one, you can yell and shout if you think it might deter the company and let you stay where you like staying.

"And if you were working for a company that wasn't a defence contractor...."

Do you have any idea how many decades Microsoft has been getting millions in income from the Pentagon? The whole DoD runs on Microsoft products. Windows. Office. Outlook. Sharepoint. Access. All of that stuff has expensive licenses and enterprise support contracts.

Any employee who joined Microsoft after, say, 1995 and thinks they weren't joining a "defense contractor" is just willfully ignorant.

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