Mikina comments on "Money for salaries, not weapons." National strike in Italy against rightwing budget. "People can't make it to the end of the month. This budget doesn't raise wages or allow people to retire."

[–] Mikina@programming.dev -5 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Well, then you better hope that your country does invest in defense and force projection, so other countries don't think it will be easy to attack it.

No defense budget -> higher chance of being attacked -> you will get drafted and probably have to fight with pitchforks, because no army.

Defense budget -> Force projection -> attacking your country is a higher risk -> you have an army that has the resources to defend the country, so no need to draft civilians if it happens (at least from the start, but the chance is drastically lower).

It's not that difficult to understand, unless you're deep into Putin's ass spreading his bullshit propaganda about "defense bad".

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[–] Ookami38@sh.itjust.works 4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Countries don't exist in vacuums. A big part of geopolitics is figuring out how to manage not getting attacked while being able to build up things other than war machines. For instance, if you have allies you trust, your COMBINED force projection would need to be enough to prevent attacks, leaving each with more room to focus on their economies. If you want to be completely isolated, sure, you have to be able to individually defend yourself, but we live in a world where we really CAN'T be completely isolated, so it only makes sense to try to work together.

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[–] Mikina@programming.dev -2 points 10 months ago (1 child)

This is true and I agree, however the issue is that it's currently starting to be really difficult to rely on allies, given what's happening with US and some other NATO countries. Honestly, and of course this is just a personal preference, I'd rather we currently spend more on defense because of that. Of course, if the situation was different (i.e like two years ago), I'd probably not be that much OK with it.

I'm also not saying that we shouldn't spend money on anything else, but budget creation is extremely difficult topic, and my main point is that I really don't like how "spending on weapons" is used as a scrapegoat from lack of proper social budget, because it is clickbaity. There's a lot of other, more serious, budget issues that could be focused on. This kind of "anti-war" rethoric plays right into the hands of Russian hybrid war, which is (unfortunately pretty succesfully, which is why I'm speaking against it so vehemently) framing any kind of increased budged spending as warmongering, and that is something that is more likely to get people like me into trenches.

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[–] verdi@feddit.org 1 point 10 months ago

It's US' hybrid war. The Russians have been trying to destabilise the EU for 2 decades with no success. Banon makes a trip through Europe after establishing Cambridge analytica with success in the UK and all of a sudden, the far right polls at 30%. Putin is an idiot who can't even defeat a demilitarised UA. The real enemy comes from the west and has already infiltrated every facet of our daily lives through MS, Alphabet, Meta et all. That enemy can't be beat with bigger defense budget at the expense of the people, in fact it's the exact opposite, they hate us because we are the living proof they are nothing but a bastardised version of European primitive civilisations.

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