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Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

Behind any philosophical notions of statehood, a country is still just whatever territory your army can protect from other armies.

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Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. They just lead to more predictable, and therefore boring and nastier, discussion.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

And this is exactly why we must all remember to pledge 2% of our Gross Domestic Product to Lockheed Martin.

Europe thanks you, so it can only pledge 1.5 %

How much do we give to Apple?

More like few trillion to Afganistan and Iraq with no real threat but idk, you can say whatever % too.

I wonder if the parent comment was referring to NATO’s 2% Defense Investment Guideline [0], where NATO countries agreed in 2006 to spend 2% of their respective GDPs on defense. The Americans periodically get grumpy that the European countries tend to come in short of that target.

[0] https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_67655.htm#indirect

Non sequitur aside, given the outcome of this very situation, is it not true that power dictates (whether we like it or not)?

It's a little under 0.2%, using the revenue and GDP numbers from last year. (You might have misplaced the decimal point?)

Without your countries army, another army will come in. Kill or resettle your family to some shitty outback place and settle their own people on your property. Your property is acquired under your current government and your property rights is only valid under said government, another government can just rewrite the rules as they please. There is no such thing as "natural property rights".

Other countries "armies" are still walking right across the border and into the US.

Will it?

Lots of countries have tiny armies, and those that have large ones aren’t habitually invading their neighbours. There are a couple of potential exceptions to this, but it’s been holding up pretty well.

History's proven that completely false. A well armed militia of volunteers can defeat a much larger, professional, funded military, as the Taliban defeated the US. Similarly no country existing has any hope of successfully occupying the continental United States given how high the rate of weapon ownership there is

Guess what the Taliban became (and already were)? Just another government with their own set rules and regulations. This is what every "independent militia" or warlord aspires to become.

At this moment, several countries in the world can completely annihilate and depopulate the US. One of the things that are stopping them is... Lockheed Martin.

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