Generally, for me, it means something less than entirely “good.”
The times I’m most likely to use it are when I’m finding minor fault with something - “Well… it was pretty good, but…” or when something is better than I expected, but not quite fully good - “Hey! That was actually pretty good!”
On the contrary, a volunteer army allows the ruling class to prosecute wars without risk to their own families.
As does conscription, since there are always exceptions made for that explicit purpose.
So that works out the same either way.
If a war arrives that is necessary, justified, and also has broad support among the population there will still be those who avoid fighting because they know that others will do so for them.
Yes - there will always be such people. The issue is how many of them there would be.
I would say that a nation that’s unhealthy enough to have so many such people that they would make the difference between winning and losing deserves to lose.
You can make a similar argument about taxation. By your logic payment should be optional, since a society that genuinely wants to be just and fair should also voluntarily want to give money to achieve that.
Yes, and I in fact would. And with the same proviso - any society that would fail as a result deserves to fail.
IMO, it’s always wrong.
At heart, I believe that the claimed authority by which governments draft people is illegitimate - that all nominal justifications for it are necessarily insufficient, self-contradictory or self-defeating.
But that’s a more fundamental point, and one about governance as a whole.
Even if I pretend that such authority is legitimate, I still oppose conscription.
A volunteer army serves as a check on militaristic excess. If a war is both legitimate and necessary, then people will willingly fight it. If people will not willingly fight it, then it’s almost certainly the case that it’s not necessary or justified.
And if it is indeed the case that a war is necessary and justified and there’s still insufficient support to provide for a volunteer army, then frankly, the nation is too sick to be worth saving anyway.
Well… yes. I don’t see it as much more than simple materialism simply because I don’t think that humanity in general is anything close to equipped to make much more of it.
With the internet, cheap mobile phones, and wireless tech, humanity has given itself a global consciousness
Yes, and that global consciousness has revealed itself to be to some significant degree petty, ignorant, self-absorbed and mean-spirited.
I think that at this point in time, humanity is far more in need of philosophical and sociological advancement than technological.
In your example though, I would argue that what that actually illustrates is that the establishment, maintenance and expansion of institutionalized hierarchical authority, and particularly through military means, is fundamentally evil.
It’s not that evil has an advantage broadly, but that evil essentially axiomatically has an advantage when pursuing fundamentally evil ends.
Or in simpler terms, the disadvantage good people would have in war is not an argument against good, but an argument against war.
To borrow the new age term, an old soul.
There are just people who possess a sort of cynically detached understanding of the world and people. They aren’t fired by largely pointless passion or desire, they’re intelligent and perceptive enough to generally understand things and emotionally mature enough to generally accept them and they have a way of just sort of gliding through life, maintaining a relatively even keel instead of getting distracted and disconcerted by irrelevancies.
Every single person I’ve ever known who was like that has been or is special to me.
I don’t care what other people choose to do with/to their own bodies. It’s none of my business, at all, ever.
For myself, I’m not sure. I don’t have the means, so it’s irrelevant, but if I did… I don’t know. I don’t have any issue with it really, but it doesn’t particularly appeal to me either. I can of course see advantages to overcoming the limitations of a natural body, but for whatever reason, I’ve never been much for pursuing fulfillment by acquiring things (which is pretty much what augmentation boils down to). It just seems to be too much hassle for too little gain, and particularly since the acquisition of things never leads to real fulfillment anyway - it just fuels the desire to acquire even more things.
Most likely, given the choice, I’d choose to just continue to inhabit my natural, unaugmented shell. But I really don’t know.
Yeah.
June was glorious. It was like the internet of the 1990s all over again. There wasn’t a lot of content, but what there was was posted by actual people who would actually engage in good faith. I had forgotten what that felt like.
But it’s been all downhill from there, and at this point, it’s starting to feel like Reddit, just on a smaller scale. More all the time, I’m just seeing rage bait that’s posted either by a bot or by a person who might as well be a bot, and if I bother to respond to it, it’s likely that if I get any response at all, it’s just going to be a string of shallowly emotive rhetoric and fallacies that again is either posted by a bot or by a person who might as well be a bot.
I’m cynically unsurprised but still disappointed.
I can sort of understand people who can’t bring themselves to avoid Amazon - again, for me it’s really just a gut-level aversion that happens to coincide with an ethical stance. If I didn’t have that gut-level aversion, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t be able to resist either.
But yeah - the chain restaurant/coffee shop thing just makes no sense to me at all, no matter how I look at it. There are regional and local versions of pretty much anything one might want, and they’re pretty much universally both better and cheaper.
I don’t really go out of my way. It’s more like an ingrained habit.
Most notably, I’ve never bought a single thing from Amazon. I don’t even have an account with them. That’s not an ethical decision though - it sort of works out that way, but really it’s just a gut-level reaction. The whole idea just repulses me - just looking at a page from their site is somehow gross and creepy.
By the same token, there’s a long list of businesses I’ve either never gone to or at least haven’t in the last twenty or so years - Walmart, McDonalds, Starbucks, Taco Bell, Olive Garden, Kroger, Subway, Jack in the Box, etc., etc. Basically, if they’re big enough to run national level advertising, they are eliminated from my consideration. And again, it’s not really a conscious choice - they just gross me out. It’s like the instant I set foot in a place like that, I can feel it corroding my soul.
So when I’m looking for somewhere to shop or eat or whatever, just like anyone else does, there are specific places I don’t consider at all. And all major corporations are on that list.
So what’s left over - what I choose from - is local or regional, not because I go out of my way to choose them, but just because they’re the only ones I’m willing to choose in the first place
And the sort of surprising thing, even to me sometimes, is that I’m by no means starved for choices. There’s a world of alternatives out there.
At the moment, I have… seven, I think. I mostly use two - one at kbin and one at lemmy.ninja. I have one at lemmy.world that I check in on occasionally, but there’s generally too much junk to wade through there. And I have one at lemmy.nsfw for… you know… stuff. The rest are languishing.
I just open them through my browser. I have a tentative plan to switch to an app, but I’m waiting for them to get a bit more settled first, and really the browser works fine.
I find each instance to be a different experience, so I just switch between them as I see fit. And I’m still looking for at least one more - something deliberately scholarly and sedate.
This’d likely a bit more than inconvenience, but honestly, to the degree that it would be more than that (or more accurately to the people to whom it would be more than that), I just don’t give a shit.
Make it literally impossible to knowingly lie. Full stop.