This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Because that's not how it works in reality.
In 1947, Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall published Men Against FIre: The Problem of Battle Command, arguably one of the most influential publications in military psychology. In it, he makes the now infamous "ratio of fire" claim that fewer than 25% of men in combat actually fired their weapons at the enemy. His figures are contested, but the finding itself has been independently reproduced by multiple studies performed by other armies over multiple centuries. And remember we are talking about men that were drilled into operating their weapons and are in mortal danger.
The reason for this remains the object of intense debate, but Marshall most definitely succeeded in convincing people to look into methods of increasing this ratio.
By 1950 and Korea the US Army had started efforts to use B. F. Skinner's newly discovered conditioning techniques to do so.
One of the most famous changes wrought by these programs was the use of human silhouette instead of bullseye targets during basic training as one such conditioning tweak. But it is also one of the least successful.
The increase in the availability of crew served weapons, which provide a sociological pressure to the individual soldier, and the widespread use of artillery which allows for the reduction of the enemy to an item on a map did a lot more to increase the ratio. All these factors and more made Korea an important learning experience for this venture and all the lessons learned would be applied to the extreme in the next war.
VIetnam would see these techniques perfected, and used with great effect.
Desensitization is of course the name of the game here, the level of bloodthirsty rhetoric and celebration of killing in a recruits training was significantly increased compared to Korea and even more significantly so compared to the world wars. Training videos and lectures full of gory details and celebration of the mutilation of the enemy were commonplace.
Conditioning was also greatly employed, to produce reaction without thought. While previously a marksmanship course would have you take a prescribed position while calmly shooting at stationary targets, a similar course for Vietnam would have you standing in a foxhole, wearing full gear, waiting anxiously for a moving target to pop up at random and only allow you a few moments to shoot. That same target producing a satisfying sound when dispatched correctly.
A great emphasis was placed on realism, they went as far as making mock Vietnamese villages complete with livestock and villagers to have the recruits patrol and do mock missions within. All to turn the destruction of the enemy into a reflex.
Of course all this conditioning comes at a cost. The mental restraints we have against killing are there for a reason, and many argue that the atrocities committed against Vietnamese civilians as well as the widespread psychatric issues associated with Vietnam vets are consequences of such conditioning.
This is all to say that the idea that destroying your fellow man as something that can be simply be turned on and off and controlled with individual reason is far from an accurate picture.
The distance between an effective soldier and what you term psychopathy is much smaller than I think you realize.
This is most probably what the law cares about. But you're not hearing me if you think that is what matters. Whether it is true or not.
This is a nice theory, but I can't forget living in a country where significant part of the population were in the army - and not in a parade peacetime army, but the army actively engaged in fighting, and still somehow they do not look or act like a bunch of psychos. In fact, the only event that I could describe as "psycho-driven mass shooting" (as opposed to terrorism or combat engagement) that I could remember happened in 1994. Compare to how often these happen in the US, where the proportion of people who seen combat training, let alone real combat, is much lower. According to your theory, mass shootings or murders by veterans should happen very often, and the more people pass combat training, the more they should be perpetrating such events. But this is not what is happening, by which I can conclude your theory is flawed.
It should matter.
I don't see why. Rather the theory would predict that all else being equal vets are more violent and more deadly in their violent encounters than the average. Terrorism being well within consideration here.
Frankly I have no idea of the numbers on that so that's a falsifiable claim right there.
Again you seem to have this weird idea of the only alternative to rational consideration being some fictitious conception of psychopathy. It's just not that simple.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If this description is accurate, than this would imply that Marines are a much greater threat to their own society than subway hobos, at least per capita. Being gratified by killing and mutilation, and being likely to uncontrolledly resort to it upon provocation, sounds far, far worse than being unable to hold a job and a home or being numbed by drugs.
This goes without saying. Most of what I talk about isn't even required for this to be true.
Fortunately, Marshall seems to have fabricated most of his evidence and that which follows from it thus does not.
I don't follow?
None of this line of argument relies on SLAM's numbers being rigorously obtained. I recall for instance independent British and Soviet reports that came to similar conclusions.
Your recollection doesn't actually count as evidence.
It was in Antony Beevor's book on D-Day, which I don't see very many reasons to consider fabricated. Don't have my copy at hand to give you a page though.
But like I said it's been reproduced independently many times. du Picq's Études sur le Combat had similar numbers for instance.
There's something about it that doesn't pass the smell test. Were pre-firearm armies gently poking each other with spears to make sure no one gets hurt? Combat was way more visceral in those times, so I'd imagine people would be even more inclined to avoid harm. Taking it further, when these armies were pillaging conquered cities, were they forced to do it, or were they having the time of their life?
Not pre-firearm, and I'll try to dig up a primary source later, but I've read in several books and heard from numerous Civil War Reenactor lectures when I was a kid, that American Civil war soldiers often refused to use Bayonets, preferring to club each other with the butt ends of their rifles, so as to avoid conscious guilt for having killed another human. A reenactor would frequently quote a letter to us that went something like "I hit them with the butt of the gun, so if I have to answer to the Lord I can say I just knocked him out."
We do have evidence of Pre-Modern armies engaging in warfare that relied on non-violent shows of skill and ability. And one must keep in mind that before the gunpowder era armies were rarely, if ever, made up of peasantry. They were typically an upper or upper-middle class endeavor. Even Rome and Sparta, famed for their citizen armies, were societies in which citizens were nearer the top of the pyramid than they were to the slaves at the bottom.
More options
Context Copy link
I've seen many ways people try to reconciliate this with the brutality of antic and medieval combat. Some claim it wasn't actually that brutal and war was mostly about boasting harder than the enemy before industry.
I don't buy it. I think it's better explained by the sociological element, much like the increased ratio for crew served weapons. It's much harder to not participate in melee or the sort of unit tactics of that time than it is not firing at the enemy in modern times.
Of course it's hard to compare when we only have hard numbers from after records were properly introduced. But for all of the controversy surrounding SLAM's particular ratio of fire claim it's hard to argue there is nothing to the idea when so many independent sources replicate it.
Falsifying it would required some cross-cultural methodological error that I just don't see how to introduce.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link