> Are you, in the same post, arguing that "the citizens have not signed off on it", that "they seem to consider the work being done a very good thing", and that "things aren't Democratic"?

Yes.

Human beings are extremely illogical, prone to bias, etc - if the topic of this thread was directly about that abstract(!) idea (like in a thread about human psychology) this would not be controversial or difficult to realize/perceive, but since the topic of discussion is a specific object level matter, minds tend to not have access to that knowledge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-dependent_memory

https://www.victoriaadvocate.com/blogs/reader/politics_plus/...

> Lol.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_realism_(psychology...

https://ehyde.wordpress.com/2013/12/14/freud-on-humor-and-so...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness

> Talk about cognitive dissonance.

In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is the perception of contradictory information, and the mental toll of it. Relevant items of information include a person's actions, feelings, ideas, beliefs, values, and things in the environment. Cognitive dissonance is typically experienced as psychological stress when persons participate in an action that goes against one or more of those things. According to this theory, when two actions or ideas are not psychologically consistent with each other, people do all in their power to change them until they become consistent. The discomfort is triggered by the person's belief clashing with new information perceived, wherein the individual tries to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort.

I would enjoy to actually talk about cognitive dissonance, if you are willing, and able (and the conversation is not censored for being inconsistent with site guidelines, both explicitly stated and non-explicit/de facto enforced caps like: be curious, but not too curious).

Do you perceive yourself to be both willing, and able? I guess, there may be only one way to find out, considering cultural norms.

> Count me in as someone who approves of military research. Seems like an incredible amount of humanities achievements come through military research and I quite like some of them. So, keep doing it please.

During your contemplation of the matter, did you consider this (as well as the links above):

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-counterfactual/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_thinking

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

If not: why not? (I ask this question both rhetorically, and literally.)

Might it be possible that you lack substantial desire to hold beliefs that are necessarily true (or in other words: to have a default (or even occasional) cognitive state other than that which is outlined in my "naive realism" link above)?

> On a more realistic note, I'd much prefer democracies have the most advanced weapons in the world . And I think that the USAF protects most democracies in the world. So I'm pro a strong USAF.

"Each to his own" as the saying goes. Personally, I would much rather people have goals that are more balanced between the dominance of the country they live in with the well-being of all of humanity, regardless of one's culture or geographical location. Do you think that would be a bad idea, or that it is unrealistic, or that such thinking is (in fact*) an example of "cognitive dissonance"?

Note: this comment contains many juicy "baits" that might attract the mind's attention and invoke pre-conditioned behavior (rhetoric, ad hominem, etc)....it will be interesting to see if that is how you will respond, especially now that I have explicitly made reference to that common human cognitive behavior. Sometimes I will "inb4" specific common sub-perceptual intuitive behaviors (leveraging the phenomenon whereby humans tend to have an aversion to behaving in a way that was explicitly predicted before they do it), but in this case I think I will leave those not mentioned.