Player, for me to answer that question, please define what you would accept as “defense:”
Defense against actual attack against US territory by conventional, unconventional, nuclear, radiological, chemical, biological, and/or cyber forces?
Defense against actual attack against US allies and/or interests by same?
Defense against actual attack against friendly or neutral peoples or nations that request US assistance?
Defense against the imminent threat of attack by same (of course, this assumes you've sufficient intel assets in place to detect this)?
Defense against actual or imminent proxy attack - do you consider the defense to be against the proxy or the sponsoring power, or both?
Also, please define the damage level the threat or attack could cause that you would consider justifying going to war over? To keep it simple, let's just consider lives lost for now. Would you believe war justified if an actual attack took 1 US life? 100? 10,000? 1,000,000? What about the threat of attack - if the threat, if carried out, would likely take . . . how many lives before a war to remove or mitigate that threat would be justified? What is your value for "likely?" 10%? 50%? 80%?
Now, if we also consider non-direct population damage - economic, infrastucture, resources, food/water supply, etc., what level of damage justifies a war of defense? Now consider the consequential indirect loss of life. How many lives lost indirectly (through, for example, patients dying because hospitals were disabled) would justify a war of defense?
And, while we’re at it, should we feel justified going to war, what should our goal be? To remove the ability to attack the US, or, if something less, what would that be?
Answer these questions, and I’ll be able to give you an example, if it exists.
Any of your dot points. Which war fits any of these?
As for AGW , the science os settled, economics is clear in terms of cost of BAU, socially progressive on terms of empowering the masses and politcally international
Player, just answer the questions. No squirming. How do YOU define defensive war?
As regards global warming, nope, your’s is not an answer. As I said before, to be valid, your plan must be solidly based on scientific, economic, social, historical, and political data clearly demonstrating, in detail, the development and critical analysis of alternatives, the climatic, economic, social, and political effects the selected alternative, and, in detail, how, in practice, it would be internationally and implemented and enforced.
Even economically, the answer is far from settled, given that the other aspects of the answer haven’t been - each can’t be taken in isolation and “answered” based on a host of assumptions - probably the worst of which is that part about “. . . reduce our global emmisions fairly and equitably across the world . . .” That’s like that part in a development flow chart where it says “a miracle happens here.”
you made the claim so its on your head explain what you mean. An example would help. As for "that’s like that part in a development flow chart where it says “a miracle happens here.”
you better do your homework and read the paper. Oh and the science is crystal clear on what needs to be done.
Nope. Your claim. I’m unaware of ANY feasible plan to reverse or turn around global warming, so I’ve nothing to prove. My position is to prepare for it, while doing anything reasonable to reduce our global warming impact, that doesn’t impact our preparations. YOU are the one who said that was unsatisfactory, that we needed to fix it, so I’m just asking you to tell me how, and not in grand concepts, but an executable plan. Otherwise, preparing for it is what we must do.
I don’t know where you were 30 years ago Gene, but this is where we are now. We could have changed our infrastructure using basically the economic systems we had at the time. We could have invested in solar and shifted subsidies away from coal and oil. Feasible plans were being proposed. But we (the US) were the worst players in the world and less powerful players didn’t have much choice. So now, people like you are saying nothing can be done. That was the actual plan all along, do nothing, then nothing could be done, profit from the chaos.
Lausten, now you’re sounding like a conspiracy theorist. I could say the same things about many of the threats we face - if we’d have only done something then . . .
The reality is that most humans have a hard time with long range planning, and politicians, only worried about the next election, are the worst.
Regardless of how we got here, however, we are where we are, and have to deal with things as they are, not as we would wish them to be.
As for what I was doing 30 years ago, I’d just returned from a year long unaccompanied deployment to the middle and far east, and was getting reacquainted with my wife and daughter.
The biggest conspiracy going on now is people coming up with conspiracies and making memes and artificial clicks to promote them and keeping people from trusting real news and science. Epstein just got arrested and if having a high ranking judge let you off easy is not a conspiracy, I don’t know what is. Anti-global warming is not so much conspiracy as pseudo science used by powerful people so they can keep their planet killing businesses going. They are very aware of people’s short attention spans and inability to think ahead a few decades. They don’t need a conspiracy, they were born into an economy based on carbon and greed and they just found a place in it.
You saying “regardless” is a symptom of that. The whole point is how we got here. It’s that whole “doomed to repeat it” thing, except this time, we aren’t just destroying an empire in the corner of a continent, we have a global empire, and it’s not sustainable.
