u/CreatureXXII

So, I was curious and looked up how many commercial planes there are in the world, and as of June 2025, IATA reported that there are around 35,550 commercial planes in the world, 30,300 in active service, and 5,250 in storage. With that in mind, that's honestly a lot less than I initially thought, because when you look up flights on Flightrader24, airplane icons are everywhere.

Now, the IATA data only covers large commercial planes, not small, private planes. If you were to include private planes, that number jumps up to approximately 400,000, but keep in mind, most private planes are small propeller planes like the Cessna 150.

Now, does anyone want to take a guess at how many cars there are in the world? From what I was able to gather, there are over 1.6 billion cars in the world!

35,000 commercial planes is nothing compared to cars, even including private planes, 400,000 is barely a drop in the bucket compared to 1.6 billion cars.

Now, I know this is an apples and oranges comparison, and that individually speaking, planes burn more fuel and produce more emissions than cars, but just like with buses, planes carry more people and are more likely to be full, so they balance out with most modern commercial planes having a fuel efficiency of about 2-3 L/100 km per passenger.

Of course, electric trains don't use fossil fuels and can carry more passengers than planes while using less space as they don't need massive runways, making trains one of the most efficient modes of transport. And I firmly support replacing short, regional flights with high-speed rail.

Now, I don't know how many trains there are in the world, but I'm going to take an educated guess and say that it's a lot less than cars. Not sure about ships and such, but 1.6 billion cars is wayyyy too many cars, considering that cars are everywhere and infest every spot, whilst planes remain in the sky, and trains on dedicated tracks.

While I was initially planning to create a somewhat long post, I'll make this quick and to the point. This question mostly applies to those voluntarily signed up to be a part of an imperialist military. Draftees and conscripts are a different scenario.

To put it simply, what should a socialist's position be regarding imperialist soldiers? Should we view them as "Workers in uniforms," as some suggest, or should we view them as imperialist goons?

Now, as a non-American, one thing that always dumbfounds me about Americans more broadly is how they basically worship US service members like they're saints and how criticizing US soldiers in any way is basically blasphemy. When, if anything, US soldiers should be relentlessly criticized, for they are directly complicit in imperialism.

But let me know what our position should be. But what I will say is that my sympathies lie with the victims of imperialism, not the perpetrators.