Reminds me of my father (who was in the Airborne) looking over my shoulder playing the training in America's Army.
"That's pretty realistic. Do they have a level where you have to go knock on somebody's door and tell them their son was killed in a training exercise?"
That said, I feel like this article, like the censors, gives video games much too much credit. Glorification of violence is everywhere in our culture and fiction; I'd imagine at least 95% of gamers understand intuitively that the games they play bear very slight likeness at best to the reality of war (although probably more in the sense that they might be killed themselves rather than that they might kill others.)
After all, one of the things (multiplayer) video games do teach you is that combat is seriously dangerous. Pop out of cover for one second and you can get shot in the head, bam, you're dead. In a game, that means respawning; nobody seriously believes that's how it works in real life. In that sense, I have to think that these games, as unrealistic as they are, are still the most realistic fictional depiction of war you can experience-- and the lessons you learn are much more valuable than those of, say, comic books.
Which is not to say that we don't have a bit of a violence problem in our culture (though I'm on the side of Steven Pinker in thinking that our violence problem is probably better than it ever has been). But the problem is not the kids running around playing cops and robbers. The problem is the kids who never properly learn the distinction between playing and hitting-- and worst of all, those who learn it by the maxim that "If you hit your brother, I'll hit you even harder."
I actually think a bigger problem is not the fear of violence leaving the screen and coming into daily life, but that we increasingly see violence as 'that things that happens behind a screen, its pretty entertaining'. I have no data to back this up, but the general population certainly seems to be more 'meh' about US military actions abroad. I think your father's reaction was responding to the issue that you've trivialized and turned into a game something that should be horrific, or at least unpleasant.
It reminds me of a piece on NPR about family members of the victims of homicide. One person pointed out that it's common fun to host "murder mystery parties" but nobody would ever think of hosting a "rape mystery party". Similarly Grand Theft Auto is fine, but Rapelay is highly controversial. Obviously part of the reason we're less sensitive to some types of violence is because we have less violence (I think many people have a friend that was raped, but very few have a friend who was murdered). However, even if this detachment comes from an increase in non-violence there are still effects of increasingly conflating violence with entertainment.
I really don't see how it could be true that US citizens are "meh" about military action. We treat military casualties in the single digits as tragedies. We're somewhat less adverse to collateral damage, but compared to Vietnam, let alone the wholesale firebombings of WWII, even that is (and I hope everyone will pardon me for saying it) pretty minimal.
That's the essence of Pinker's point-- the more aware we become of each individual death, the less violent we become, but the more violent we feel. Violent video games are probably the pinnacle of expression of that: our culture is so safe and so risk averse that we become upset by 100% fictional violence which hurts literally no one.
And I feel the comparison between murder and rape is pretty much invalid, for the reason you state. We do have a very serious rape problem, and again, it is obviously not because of all the rape video games out there, or glorification of rape in our culture. It's because real men do not learn to respect real women in the real world.
So now we make machines to kill for us. Pretty soon they will be nearly autonomous. All to remove our guilt.
My ex-boss, was a sniper in Vietnam. One phrase he hated over all others was "kill them all and let God sort them out". He always labeled those who used that as pussies. He had no respect for them.
We got all sorts of good stories out of him about his time over there, but never anything involving killing other people. That was discussed only with people who were there and even then rarely. He could tell us how he could take parts off a moving car from a long distance but never would mention the obvious connection.
I am quite sure a lot of them are sociopaths or just bastards. But did we give them any other choice, the nice guys don't even finish last, they just die first.
I bought and read SEAL Team Six: Memoirs of an Elite Navy SEAL Sniper. In it, the author says that all snipers need to have a really strong faith, philosophy, or something like that to guide them so that they don't lose control of themselves and get intoxicated by the power. When you have someone in your scope, you really can feel like God, the decision to kill or let live is yours. He says that's why it was so easy for someone like the Washington sniper to get carried away and go on a killing spree. If you don't have something strong in you to guide you and keep you under control, you'll go wild, in his opinion.
"We treat military casualties in the single digits as tragedies."
There's obviously a huge difference between television "mourning" for a stranger, and knowing the pain of losing someone you care about, or experiencing violence first-hand. And frankly, most of the statements you hear in response to military casualties are, at some level, driven by politics.
I don't believe that becoming aware of death makes us less violent, and I don't believe it makes us more violent. I think the general effect is to intellectually separate us from the horror of real violence.
When I was younger, I remember playing a game called Aces Over Europe. I took a pilot character through to 1943 or so. Then he got shot down, and he was dead. Weeks of playing. No respawning. I spent about thirty seconds wanting to cry about him being dead, and then remember my grandfather surviving world war II, just, and spending the rest of his night waking up screaming from the memories, and didn't play war games after that.
Maybe things have changed, game wise. I can't say whether that means anything though.
Maybe the "closest" we can make CoD and other FPS to REAL war is ... make the first person die permanently and render the software useless after a fatal hit. Once & only once.
The loss of $39 for the video game should teach em fine.
Fighting games are incredibly realistic and advanced.
Games like Battlefield, with the right mix of realism and "fun", are the greatest possible war propaganda instruments ever created.
The "Department of Defense" and other agencies have too many smart people working in them and too much recruiting pressure not to be funneling money into these "video game" projects.
Iran is specifically depicted in Battlefield 3. This isn't an accident, whether it was simply the fact that video game designers knew that Iran has been a coming target for years or they were given instructions.
War propaganda is a real part of contemporary American media and video games. Its not something that happened in the 1940s and 1950s and then stopped as soon as color television arrived.
We are at war right now. There is a large multi-decade (multi-century depending on how you look at it) military campaign going on in the middle east and its surrounds that most people are completely unaware of because of how powerful the grip of the propagandists is on American media.
Take a look at this map, and think back to all of the lies we have been told about the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and everywhere else.
http://www.zeemaps.com/326199 Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Syria. All of these countries just happen to be adjacent to eachother.
We are told that these are all noble missions, vital emergencies involving "weapons of mass destruction", or glorious democratic revolutions, and led to believe that each is basically a separate case.
The order of the invasions and other deployments across these countries and regions continues to be tactical. The motivations are many -- territory, resource control, money control. The lies told to justify the next step, in each case, are not very material to the actual overall mission objectives.
Afghanistan -- a foothold, limited resistance, and it was key to restore the heroin funds used to back intelligence/covert operations and establishment bank accounts.
Iraq -- A key battle, money control, resource control. Made an Iran sandwich.
Eqypt / Libya
February 21, 1987
Early last year, President Reagan approved a secret directive under which United States military forces would support Egypt in the event of a ''pre-emptive'' attack on Libya...
...In March 1986, the semiofficial Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram said Cairo had rejected three requests from American delegations for joint military action against Libya...
...But several Administration officials who support President Reagan's policy on Libya insisted today that the meeting with President Mubarak and the subsequent planning were not an attempt to press Cairo to invade.
In April 2011, Mubarak was removed from power by a "democratic uprising" and by July rumors circulated that he was "in a coma".
Also in July 2011, "Libya Rebels" get formal backing by the United States and $30 billion. Within a relatively short period of time Qaddafi was killed.
Syria -- A key strategic ally of Iran, tactical position.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7GVSx7yMaA Battlefield 3 Launch Trailer illustrating storyline in which noble American fighters rescue one of their own from "Iranian terrorists" while searching for "the nuke". Players are to act out exactly the myth presented by the propaganda on other popular media.
There is certainly a propaganda campaign being run to encourage Americans to support war. It is being run by powerful people with vested political and financial interests who spend millions of dollars to project their message across all forms of news media.
If you think video games are anything more than a sideshow to this, you're delusional.
I don't think it's delusional at all. It is long known that if you can indoctrinate children at an early age (bonus points if you make it fun) that their beliefs will often have been shaped without them knowing it.
For instance, framing Iran as bad guys without giving it much thought--it just seems "self-evident" somehow...
The use of Iran as the enemy in a video game is not due to the fact that Dice is being manipulated behind the scenes by the government in an effort to breed a legion of living robots. This idea is in fact delusional.
When you look at the history of entertainment, from novels to video games, the most memorable content gives us something that is plausible and realistic, allowing us to relate better to the experience. This is why the political enemies of the United States are often featured in games, movies, novels, etc... Because they are currently extremely unfriendly to our country, it seems far more realistic that we may end up in a conflict with them in the future.
The most successful shooters are often the ones that follow this principle. The people who play them aren't a bunch of xenophobic, extremist, right-wing fascists, they are ordinary people who like the games for their realistic graphics and engaging stories.
I happened to be watching RT while at a hotel on business. I thought the obviously Kremlin slanted take on Syria was a bit amusing, that Syria was fighting an armed insurgency. You'd read the New York Times and think they were just mowing down civilian protestors. Sure enough, a few weeks later the cover of the Economist has Syrian "protestors" wielding machine guns.
Whats impressive is that both the "right" and "left" media in the United States pretty much run the same story, leaving some minor disagreements on detail making each seem to be at opposite extremes of each other. That's important when you have to you propaganda or marketing to get your message out.
Here is the latest AAA release by the studios on this theme, and I for one am impressed by it's authenticity. It is only available in certain territories at the moment, but will soon go global;
As a former Marine infantryman, and a former Marine PR idiot, I think his numbers are off but a lot of the concepts are right, with a caveat. It's not sociopathy of the organic sort. It's the kind of detachment from prolonged exposure to extreme, unmitigated stress. So don't take this article as justification to feel like there's something mentally wrong with people who join a combat arms unit.
After I EASd I realized that a _lot_ of perfectly normal behavior in the service is downright _weird_ in the civilian world.
It was perfectly normal to make my rack (bed), tuck those hospital corners in, get the folds just so ... then sleep on top of the made bed, wrapped in a poncho liner or a comforter from the PX.
Because you save time and hassle in the morning. Toss the blanket in the wall-locker, tighten up the green wool blanket and you're good to go.
A perfectly normal adaptation to circumstances.
As with sleeping on top of the covers, so goes a lot of behavior that civilians would (do) label sociopathic: laughing at grisly crap. Gallows humor. A cynical narrow view of the world. And so on.
You'd be mentally defective to NOT adapt to those circumstances.
Me .. I think about some of the stuff I thought was funny, some of the things I did when I was 20, and I'm appalled. I've got my funny sea stories - other things I don't talk about. Or think about, much.
"After I EASd I realized that a _lot_ of perfectly normal behavior in the service is downright _weird_ in the civilian world. ... I think about some of the stuff I thought was funny, some of the things I did when I was 20, and I'm appalled."
This is part of the brilliance of the military: they mostly use young people who are still maturing and often don't know any better and brainwash them in to doing their bidding. Older, more experienced people are not so easily used.
I have a feeling if humans were physically feeble and infirm for their first 25 or 30 years and became fit and healthy afterwards, we'd have a lot less war.
I understand very well that you yourself don't think that one has to be a sociopath to become an infantryman, but that is exactly what the author is claiming in this article. That's why so many former military guys (such as myself) think that this article is idiotic.
There are definitely a disproportionate amount of people who return from war with psychological issues, but sociopaths are pretty rare. Many people who have been in combat have a difficult time relating to the rest of the world, but it doesn't make them psychopaths.
There are probably a few people who choose to become military contractors because they are sick individuals that enjoy killing their fellow man, but I suspect that the majority of the people who go that route do so because they leave the military without any marketable skills and find it hard to pass up the six-figure incomes that are offered to military contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Just to clarify a bit, I don't disagree with his assessment of the video game / movie industry, just his statements about soldiers being sadistic killing machines without a sense of morality.
There are probably a few people who choose to become military contractors because they are sick individuals that enjoy killing their fellow man
'Sociopath' has become unfortunately loaded word. I certainly don't think of a serial killer or sadist when I see that term, but rather someone who is emotionally and socially detached from their surroundings, out of ongoing necessity as much as anything else. It's callous indifference as opposed to cruelty, just as people who work on industrial farms and in slaughterhouses are acclimatized to their rather unpleasant jobs, as opposed to hating animals or glorifying in their suffering. The sociopathy described here is the mindset of 'nothing personal/just business' taken to its logical conclusion: one might say that the US has a comparative economic advantage in the projection of military power, this military contractor is essentially one of many service workers to whom we (as society) have outsourced some of our morally unpleasant tasks.
I agree. Most sociopaths will never commit a violent act and often lead somewhat normal lives. I was just trying to use the term in the same context the author did. There are some sociopaths that are serial killers and sadists, but most sociopaths are not.
There have been rare cases where complete lunatics have joined the military during a time of war for the sole purpose of killing people. I can't remember the name but I think there was at least one soldier from Vietnam who returned to the United States and became a serial killer.
I have heard (BBC documentary, a couple of years ago) that about 10% of soldiers are evil/psych/sociopaths and become heroes because of it (or die trying) and about 10% behave similarly because they are so unselfish that they are willing to sacrifice their lives.
That documentary also stated that modern military training tries to get rid of the former, and to shape more people to behave similar to the latter 10%, and is fairly successful at it (as measured by the fraction of soldiers willing to actually aim at the enemy)
So yes, there probably is something different about you. Whether to call that wrong, I don't know.
His numbers are off because his "80%" of sociopaths are more like 2% according to real studies. The rest more than likely are dealing with managing their own PTSD symptoms.
The numbers aren't necessarily off - he does couch the numbers to begin with, but he also takes pains to specify he's talking about frontline combat units, not the service in general. I don't have the numbers to hand, but the US military has a ton of support staff (ie non-frontline) - it's possible that these numbers are more similar than they appear.
Grossman's book is at least 10 years old. Selection processes may have been optimised over the intervening time to increase the 2-5%. After all, sociopaths can stay in combat zones much longer and will not suffer PTSD.
Being ex-military and not a sociopath -- he lost me when he said that the "vast majority of us are straight up sociopaths"
We constantly made decisions that increased the risk to ourselves while trying to minimize the risk to civilians. That is not a mindset of a sociopath.
From what I could tell from my time in the service, your view of your situation is highly dependent upon who you are serving with. I'm willing to bet it is highly likely that the group this supposed sociopath served with had no such compulsions. Without proper oversight, I could easily see a group mindset of this kind developing. As such, I'm willing to bet he thinks all soldiers are like him, when the reality is that he is likely the outlier.
There's data about a lot of gang members entering the service these days and receiving a lot of military training, but then taking that training back to the gang (as well as smuggling some weapons). If it's reliable data, I wonder if the number of sociopaths in the military could be growing, if it's also possible that gang members have a higher probability of being sociopaths. A lot of conditionals there, I know.
Sorry, what data are you talking about? I haven't seen it. I'm sure there's a journalist who wrote something like a) a the number of gang members who wouldn't normally join the military are b) allowed into the military because of the dire need for same and then c) all kinds of hijinks ensue. But I don't think it happens very often, and I really doubt the transfer of mad military skilz is going back into the gangs.
Having run several arms rooms in my day I find it hard to believe that weapons are being smuggled out. The accountability (down to the individual bullets) and multiple layers of oversight at all units are probably the only time I have seen government control done right.
This is also a guy who left the gov't military to become a "private military contractor". He's a lifer and sometimes you have to try to bring everyone to your level by casting them as "sociopaths" in order to sleep at night.
We do it for real, time and time again, with no other motivation but pay, leave, and the chance to brutalise whomever we deem the “enemy”.
Yeah, the guys who aren't PMCs are doing the same thing except for the "dulce et decorum est" reasons instead of the cash.
People don't sign up for the military because they really think it's sweet and fitting to die for one's country, they sign up for the military because it's how they get into college or out of their shitty 2000 person town.
I dated a girl who served, one day when I was ranting about recruiters working high schools and the unfairness of being recruited after exposure to 12 years government hype, and she said to me "You know, the army is what got me out of <podunk town>"
There is another option: the public university system. In most states, it's very cheap (re: you can work to pay for it), especially given financial aid.
Now, many high schoolers do not consider this to be an option for them (i.e., not the "learning" type). Figuring out why that happens to so many people is a harder question.
In your experience, what determines the degree to which a unit will uphold such standards vs. degenerating into what the OP calls "sociopaths"? Is it a matter of training? leadership? character?
Hmm. As I read the article, it seemed like the author was alternating between suggesting that experience was what turned people that way ("he was the FNG [ed: fucking new guy] that got blown up because he was incompetent, who left the fight before it turned him into one of us."), and suggesting that there is something else at play ("only roughly 20% of combat troops ever get PTSD – when if you think about it, it should affect everyone that ever sees combat."). I read it as him carefully suggesting that the career self-selects for sociopathic tendencies.
Well, the author says he is not an academic so I think we can freely assume he may not necessarily mean sociopath as how it may or may not be understood by psychologists or the DSM-IV. I think he refers more to apathy.
Leadership. (That's my experience, which isn't the op's)
The problem is that leadership isn't a consistent action. Very capable and honest leaders can be sullied by PTSD (one symptom of which is lack of empathy) given enough combat experience.
However the degree this affects a unit, and the starting point, is primarily due to the leader. Especially in combat units.
It's also possible that his experiences jaded him as well as what another commenter said about group dynamics. Having that sort of attitude may just be how he copes with it. There are all kinds of people in the military, many like you and many that are not.
Street fights and other violent encounters are the same.
There is no honor, no right way to fight and nothing good comes out of it except you surviving.
It's nothing like video games - martial arts won't help (well, beyond helping keep you in shape), a bullet will kill you in a horrible, slow way (dying instantly means you're lucky) or leave you with a disability for life, a simple knife slash will leave you in a hospital for a long time and a simple hit with fist can dislocate your jaw, which is really terrible (you can't eat, can't speak, your face is swollen, you drool all the time).
Sadly, kids don't seem to understand, and most people laugh when I tell them the best strategy is RRF - Reason (give them the wallet, try to solve it with words), Run (as fast as you can and don't look back), Fight (only if all else fails, and fight as if your life depends on it)...
This is patently false and completely ridiculous. Someone who is trained to take and give a hit will always have a significantly better chance in a fight.
Actually I don't think so, and I'm also a veteran.
The winner is most often the person more inclined to inflict damage on the other combatant. The idea that you are worried about hitting and being hit means you are still operating in some sort of a rules-based sphere. This is why martial-arts isn't really taught to soldiers beyond a few "look how you can do this" training sessions.
The ultimate combatant is the person that sees the weapon within arms reach that will end the fight - permanently. Most people never achieve this level of death dealing, because it's a really, really abnormal way to operate.
One of my teachers was in the French Foreign Legion and he told me that in a fight one should aim to inflict maximum pain and damage as fast as possible.
Needless to say, my classwork improved after that conversation. I jest, but he was quite intense.
> The winner is most often the person more inclined to inflict damage on the other combatant.
I cannot stress enough how true this is. The person willing to take it the farthest, up to and including killing you, is the person that will win that fight.
You are assuming an awful lot about me based on a few words and also have a very limited view of the martial arts. Some martial arts are for show, some are for fitness, some are for sport, and some are for inflicting the most damage in as little time as possible. What you end up learning has more to do with the philosophy of the instructor and studio than the style you chose to study. My instructor is also a combat veteran. I study american kenpo under him. The system is one of the more violent martial arts. TDK has the reputation of being the McDonalds of the martial arts, belt factories where you just show up once a week, pay your dues, and walk out with a black belt after a year and a half. Even still, I am sure there the some hardcore TDK studios out there.
As for martial arts not being taught to soldiers, what do you call Krav?
The thing with 99,999% of martial arts is that they're practicing the wrong thing. At best they're practicing for competitions and some are even trying to pose as street-cred martial artists but yet that's a whole another universe away from survival. And survival isn't about fighting—at all. The thing is, it wouldn't be legal to teach survival in a dojo.
Fighting is about winning but survival is about... surviving, and anything goes. Survival is dirty, in the sense that if you think it's going to be a fight you will only realize he had a knife when the damn thing is already between your ribs or whichever side you momentarily forgot to leave less protected. Survival is something where you will get injured, bleeding and body parts disjoint very quickly; most often both of you do, and running like hell is often the best way to survive: in a war that might not always be an option, though.
Of course, that is, assuming it started as a one-on-one situation and ended as one, too.
This sounds a lot like what Krav Maga claims about its teachings. They certainly have a point when they say that fighting in the ring and fighting against gangs with guns and knives on the street is a very different situation that traditional martial arts do not do much about.
Unfortunately, from what I understand, Krav Maga students don't practice against resisting opponents. Because of this, it has been criticized as more of a "dance" art, where the student and the opponent are just going through a "kata" or predefined motions without meeting real resistance.
Of course, it is rare to come across a situation in any martial art where your training opponent will be resisting 100%, the way a real opponent would on the street.
However, there are some martial arts where opponents do give a significant amount of resistance both during training and in competition. I have heard the claim made that this factor makes the students of these other arts more ready for real survival situations than something like Krav Maga.
Krav Maga - Is not a 'dance' martial art. You will learn the quickest way to ensure your opponent is on the floor and will not be able to getting up again easily.
You will train against resisting opponents. You will train against multiple resisting opponents simultaneously. Then you will train against opponents with plastic knives and guns.
You are taught things like 'If your opponent is on the floor - keep kicking him - because then you look like a psycho and nobody wants to fight a psycho'.
Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Judo, Muay Thai, boxing, various types of wrestling, and many other arts train and compete against resisting, sometimes strongly resisting, opponents.
It's interesting, Krav Maga makes similar accusations about "regulated" sports like the ones you mentioned. Its argument is that on the streets you're not both following the same rules on the fighting ring, you're using guns, knives, pencils, baseball bats and kicks to the groin, almost always facing multiple opponents at the same time. There's nothing in the sports you listed that prepares you against that.
That said, I agree that simulating twisting the weapon out of someone with a gun pointed at your forehead with a fully extended arm might lead to a boost in confidence, but not so much of a boost in survival rates. I'd still argue that your chances are better with techniques fine-tuned for the streets, rather than the ring.
I meant situations where you're at a disadvantage - as I said, doing any kind of martial arts will keep you in shape and will decrease your reaction time (unless you "freeze" in a real situation), but when you don't know how your attacker will move or he's got a weapon in their hands, it's not of much help (not as much as most instructors make it out to be, anyway).
And you'd be surprised at how many hits a fat, untrained drunk man can take and dish out, especially once adrenaline kicks in...
How so? All I ever heard from people who did serious martial arts is that an attacker with a weapon will always be in advantage, and an attacker with no moral qualms even more so. Your karate won't help you much if someone attacks you with a knife, or a shattered bottle.
Low-level, trained MMA fighters would wreck a street brawling toughman 10/10 times. If they rush the MMA fighter with a broken bottle, they'd get slammed to the floor on their own velocity and the MMA fighter would twist around, take their back, grab and arm, get their legs around it pull. Good luck fighting with a broken arm.
We saw it play out recently. Remember Kimbo Slice? If you don't, he used to post videos of him beating the crap out of regular dudes in street fights for money. He became a legend. People were saying he was unstoppable. He went to the UFC based on that and lost just about every major match he was in. Why? Because he doesn't train for the various martial arts the way even the lowliest fighter does there. He's currently in boxing, now, and likely will be back fighting normal people in the street for 500 bucks again.
Seriously, you think guys who train 8 hours a day in Muay Thai and Jiu Jitsu aren't going to be good at beating you up? You think some street thug would rough up Junior Dos Santos or Anderson Silva? They would KILL the common man, likely in short order. A broken glass would just make them more careful about it (and piss them off even more).
This isn't even to say if Silva grabbed a glass, too. Then what?
While the MMA fighter is going for side control, what's he planning to do about his attacker's 5 mates?
This is how a pub fight does down: you go to the gents, and a bunch of guys pile in after you. None of them can fight on a martial arts sense but it doesn't matter, there's no room anyway for fancy high kicks. They drag you to the floor and stomp on you 'til you stop moving. Then they go back into the bar, calmly finish their drinks, and quietly leave.
The true martial artist sense trouble brewing, phones a taxi to come right to the front door of the pub, and gets straight into it.
I have never seen gang street bar fights in my life. I've seen guys jump another to rob/intimidate one person, but they'd do that to anyone just randomly walking through their hood. That's not a street fight, that's criminal scum. Where are you that dudes are ganging up on one guy?
And, why is it always in hypotheticals that the trained guy is going to sit there doing katas and flowery BS belt presentation moves? I can't think of a martial art that doesn't practice (at one level or another) dirty, close-quarters, and stick-n-move fighting. You can always tell a skilled fighter vs drunken haymakers, which looks alot like this:
I don't understand this comment. The parent was saying that he was a street brawler who went MMA; why are you repeating it? And he by no means "did so well". He did not do well at all.
That is the problem with painting the martial arts with such a broad brush. Many styles have techniques specifically designed to deal with knife/gun/weapon attacks, and some styles are designed mostly around dealing with such things.
A broken bottle is probably not as dangerous as you may think. A knife, you are probably going to get cut but your attacker will fair far worse. A gun becomes less useful the closer an attacker is, during something like a mugging, they are typically very close.
But, even when learning how to deal with an attacker with a knife or gun, any decent instructor will tell you the best response is just to give them what they want and get out of there. It is the same as when engaging in just a fist fight, it is more a matter of 'is this worth it' or 'do I have a choice here' rather than 'can I take this guy'.
I did a martial art for a while where we trained against bottle/knife attacks etc.
I think that training was mostly useless, some nerd in a dojo attacking you in a predetermined way with a plastic bottle while you do "hip throw #3" is going to be very different to a real fight.
The idea is to build up reflexes. When someone comes at you with a beer bottle, you're not thinking "Ok, this is Attack Pattern Delta, therefore I execute Hip Throw #3." You simply react.
I guess I understand what you are trying to say, but you can't seriously think you, with a knife in hand, are going to kick an unarmed Bruce Lee's ass?
(using Bruce Lee because he is internationally famous, but assume I mean any world-renowned, elite trained multi-dimensional fighter)
The person still needs to be trained how to use a knife in combat. Have you ever stabbed anybody? (I haven't) but it seems obvious that it would be a lot harder than you'd think. (what is the proper grip? how do you thrust, how not to break your wrist, obviously can't go lunging blindly because if you miss your momentum carries you to a defenseless position... lot's of things going on here)
If your self-defense strategy entails being Bruce Lee (by which I also mean any world-renowned, elite trained multi-dimensional fighter), it's safe to say you're overpreparing. Trying to become Bruce Lee "just in case" you get mugged is like trying to become Michael Jordan to win pickup basketball games.
I know a bunch of amateur basketball players who try to do precisely this. They know they'll never be Jordan, but they do practice pretty hard, much harder than I'd ever expect.
I guess it depends on what form of martial arts you are talking about. Some only focus on "dirty fighting". The whole purpose is to maim the other person so that they have no choice but to quit fighting.
And 5.56 won't help you if an enemy has a tank. What's your point? The argument was that as someone trained in martial has significantly better chance than someone that isn't. For instance, here where I live, the probability of enemy having a gun is infinitesimal.
I think some people here underestimate what kind of preparation regular, twice a week, hour and a half long training for a year or two can provide. Many brawlers train martial arts as well, but if your enemy is not one of them, he will not have spent anything near that amount of time on deliberate practice.
On the other hand, martial arts are not much of an use if there's more than one enemy. Sure, you may be able to take out one of them, but the second one will not wait gladly for his turn.
And 5.56 won't help you if an enemy has a tank. What's your point?
My point? To paraphrase Han Solo: "Hokey religions and hand-to-hand are no match for a good blaster at your side ..."
Well, not quite. But that was too fun not to use.
The argument was that as someone trained in martial has significantly better chance than someone that isn't.
Depends on your definition of 'trained': attitude is everything.
A guy can be a trained martial artist, kick-ass in tournaments and still loose big in a fight because - away from the mat - he utterly lacks the will to fight.
My point - I guess this goes back to Mr. Solo - is that martial arts are great and all but it's way to easy to fool yourself that you're capable of kicking ass, but you're not.
Especially if you're facing off against a guy with a gun.
Which are pretty much available to anyone in the US, where I live.
A guy can be a trained martial artist, kick-ass in tournaments and still loose big in a fight because - away from the mat - he utterly lacks the will to fight.
Well of course, and a guy with a gun may still lose to a kid if he tries to operate it with his feet. In other words -- I don't accept your premise. If he has no will to fight, he will not fight. If he is forced to fight, he's at least no worse than someone who's not trained.
People trained in martial arts are more than capable of kicking ass, because, well, that's the whole point of martial arts. I suggest you to go to the martial arts training and see for yourself what kind of fight can trained people give.
And the whole gun talk only proves the fact that if you live in US, you're fucked and nothing can help you.
The Onion has its own take on the difference between real war and video game war: an "ultra-realistic" war game featuring endless paperwork, awaiting orders, and repairing trucks: http://www.theonion.com/video/ultrarealistic-modern-warfare-... (I don't mean to trivialize war by this, and I should point out that The Onion is satirical.)
I read a post by a Marine once that said that a realistic war game would simulate guard duty by staring at a black screen for hours, and then send a minute flash of light several hours into the game when you're numb and tired.
Reminds me of the description of the game Desert Bus...
Ahh, good times... not. I clocked over 6000 hours guard duty during my military time; a game based on my experience would be a few minutes of action and hours of boredom.
On a similar note: I recently watched the movie "Act of Valor". I had no idea it was one big propaganda piece before I got in. As soon as the movie started I thought "Yep, here we go. 110 minutes of pure army PR".
What I thought was more interesting were the comments on the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. You can check them out for yourself here: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/act_of_valor/
It is a shit movie; no doubt about it. What I find interesting are the comments on the reviews that the critics gave.
Critics of course correctly pointed out how this movie is basically an advertisement paid for by the Navy. However, any critic that dared to give a bad review or even mention the word "propaganda" was attacked by countless posters that were shouting how he is a "damned liberal" and how the soldiers "die for [him] everyday to protect [his] freedom".
I do not understand the glorification of soldiers and I probably never will. War is a horrible, horrible thing. Soldiers are professional killers. As Voltaire said: "All murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets"
There is no glory or honor in war (more specifically the current situation in Afghanistan/Iraq). The soldier sure as hell did not die for you. He most likely died protecting his comrades that he has been living with for the last 4 years. The soldier probably doesn't even give a shit about you. The Army is not defending America's "way of life". Terrorists do not hate you because of your "freedoms".
As a Canadian, I really don't understand why my opinion is so frowned upon in the US.
This is a sentiment I also have had a hard time sharing and even understanding. The adulation and worship of the military that has risen in recent years is a strange bird indeed.
It's essentially unpatriotic to not consider every single service member a "hero", or fail to thank them for their service. It doesn't make sense to put the military on an unrealistic and imaginary pedestal.
I like one point in particular that he touched on. That is, the military's careful manipulation of the media and public perception and the lens through which we view military personnel.
I know I'm supposed to laud infantrymen as brave and patriotic (which is why I'd never voice this in public), but frankly..nearly every frontline veteran I've ever met seems like an uneducated, violent and scary thug. I know that's basically what you have to be to fight on the frontlines, but the disparity between public opinion and reality is shocking.
but frankly..nearly every frontline veteran I've ever met seems like an uneducated, violent and scary thug.
I never went to war, but I was a rifleman in the Marines, spent eight years there.
One thing I've noticed about me, and other guys like me, is that you'd never know on first acquaintance that I was a Marine. Commonly heard: But you don't look/act like a Marine!
I suspect you've met more so-called 'frontline veterans' than you think.
I spent a lot of time near Beaufort, SC on a nearby island after college. All the marines from Parris Island would go to downtown Beaufort on the weekends. Most of the marines were dicks looking for a fight. Some were cool but I remember thinking they were the exception not the rule.
I am very tempted to flag this. the sociopath thing really rubs me the wrong way -- there are logical flaws with using that label. War is a part of society. If society tells you to go kill somebody and you do, you can't be a sociopath.
Having said that, it's a great first-person account of what real combat is like, at least for this one guy. I am concerned the effect on HN discussion will be negative. Hopefully I'm wrong.
The United States made a huge mistake in moving to an all-volunteer army in the 1970s. With a draft and mandatory conscription, everybody had the common experience of serving and perhaps doing really bad things in the line of duty. As it is now, the vast majority of civilians have absolutely no idea what military service is like, as the author points out.
In this lack of context everybody becomes really impressionable. Not only can the military manipulate public opinion through selective release of information, other soldiers like this one can also. When the majority of people don't have context, they'll believe anything.
This is why you couldn't get away with writing a really negative article about WWII right after the war. It wasn't that somehow the war wasn't terribly horrible, it was that the average Joe reading it would immediately say something like "yeah, but that's not the way it was for most people" or "you think that's bad? I remember when..."
We don't have that kind of audience now. Once again, as the author points out, most of the readers only know cartoon violence and have never even hunted an animal. So people are left substituting other experiences and trying to draw rough analogies. The one thing I know for sure is that different people in different units can have vastly different impressions of a conflict. In my mind, this article would have been better with less "I'm the sane one and the other soldiers are crazy" and more "Here's another view"
I would also note that it has become fashionable for authors to say they have all sorts of combat experience when they don't. I'm sure this author isn't one of those people, but I've learned over time to be suspicious of people who wear the grisly warrior mantle as a way to get around my critical thinking skills. This area is just really difficult to discuss, especially when it's about an ongoing operation.
War is part of society? To barbaric ones maybe. Civilized societies don't settle disputes by mass murder.
> If society tells you to go kill somebody and you do, you can't be a sociopath.
Are you kidding me? Society can't tell a person to go kill somebody. A person tells another person to kill somebody. It is this absurd respect for authority that makes these wars possible, combined with a lack of personal accountability. Didn't we learn the lesson of the second World War?
> The United States made a huge mistake in moving to an all-volunteer army in the 1970s [...] As it is now, the vast majority of civilians have absolutely no idea what military service is like, as the author points out.
That was the entire point of ending conscription! Vietnam became a huge PR nightmare because average kids from middle class families had to fight in it. That's why it got constant media attention. That's why people protested in the streets. The people don't mind war as long as it doesn't affect them personally, and poor people have no say anyway. So now poor kids with few options are recruited into the military. Problem solved.
> War is part of society? To barbaric ones maybe. Civilized societies don't settle disputes by mass murder.
It's quite the opposite -- only civilized societies can have the kind of logistics, range, military culture, ability to support the warrior class (or standing armies), and numbers to engage in organized warfare. Conflicts between small bands of foragers can hardly be even called war.
Not to mention mass murder which absolutely requires the kind of discipline, organization and leadership only a very cohesive and civilized society can provide. It just doesn't happen outside of civilization, no one has the means, or could benefit from it. Anything of the scale of holocaust is only possible in a highly industrialized country.
> So now poor kids with few options are recruited into the military. Problem solved.
Actually, poor kids seem to be enlisting at lower rates (relatively) to richer kids:
> Enlisted recruits in 2006 and 2007 came primarily from middle-class and upper-middle-class backgrounds. Low-income neighborhoods were underrepresented among enlisted troops, while middle-class and high-income neighborhoods were overrepresented.
"Arguably, however, Genghis Khan and the Mongols were the dominant force that shaped Eurasia and consequently the modern world. Not for what they destroyed – though they wrought much destruction all over the continent – but for what they built. They came close to uniting Eurasia into a world empire, and in so doing they spread throughout it technologies like paper, gunpowder, paper money, or the compass – and trousers. They revolutionised warfare. More lastingly, in the word's of the author: ' ...they also created the nucleus of a universal culture and world system. (...) With the emphasis on free commerce, open communication, shared knowledge, secular politics, religious coexistence, international law, and diplomatic immunity.' ".
>> Civilized society? Not at all. Just organized tribal warfare.
> The story may be a bit more nuanced that that:
Make that a lot more nuanced:
(From the same review cited above):
"The Mongols' was the first modern army. It was built on a rational structure (based, like the Roman legion, on units in the multiple of tens) and promotion was strictly on merit. Thoroughly disciplined and highly mobile – infantry was unknown – it could execute complex tactical manoeuvres in silence upon orders from centralised command. Speed and efficiency in conquest were their trademark, and the source of the fear they struck in the enemy. Horse and bow where the Mongol warriors' strength – and it the end their weakness. Forests hindered the deployment of mounted armies, in the humid heat of India the bows failed, and the horses' strength faded when they could not find pastures in the Syrian desert.
Warfare technology and logistics were other factors in the Mongols' superiority. The gunpowder formula was changed to yield explosive force, rather than slow burn as in fire-lances and rockets. Guns and cannon were developed. Specialised troops of craftsmen were skilled in building complex siege machines from local materials – obviating the need to move them over long distances. They perfected sapping of walls, thus making static defence impossible. A dedicated medical corps looked after the wounded. The army and its horses spread across the plains for forage and sustenance, thus obviating for the need for supply lines – yet a sophisticated communication system based on melodies to ensure accurate memorisation allowed the scattered troops to regroup at short notice and to remain in touch with the distant leadership.
The intelligence system was second to none, and the Mongols knew much more about the lands they were about to invade than the defenders knew about the Mongols – if nothing else because the latter lived off the land and needed to know where water and pastures were to be found. In addition, the Mongols developed highly sophisticated methods of psychological warfare, spreading rumours about their cruelty and destruction. This unsettled the rural populations that then fled before the advancing army, hamstringing the defence efforts."
Yes, of course. It came to existence when Ghengis Khan united nomadic tribes but so did the countries in Europe -- Franks were a confederation of tribes, Poland was founded by a tribe subduing its neighbours, etc, etc. That is how civilization is born.
If it wasn't for that they wouldn't be able to reach Europe. That is why we call them the Mongol Empire.
Oh c'mon. If you define civilized society that broadly than anything capable of organized warfare is by definition a civilized society. It would be a pointless tautology. In that context my response that systematic murder is uncivilized (and that therefore a society that engages in systematic murder is an uncivilized society) becomes a direct contradiction in terms. So that's obviously not what I meant.
When I speak of a civilized society it is in comparison to other societies. Not all countries violate human rights on the same scale, and therefore, not all countries are equally civilized.
The Mongols may not have had cities (besides Karakorum, the capital). However, by the time Genghis Khan's conquests were under way they had a written alphabet, a very highly organized military structure, a complex legal code, freedom of religion, and a postal system that was unrivaled until the Pony Express was established in the US. They were generally far more sophisticated than you give them credit for and their system of warfare was more than just 'tribal'. Sure, they used hit and run tactics, but a great deal of logistics and organization is required to besiege cities.
Sacking cities and killing the inhabitants was nothing new. The Crusaders did it at the end of the siege of Acre during the 3rd crusade. Khan actually gave the cities he attacked a chance to surrender and be spared.
Also, the term "barbarian" is loose, vague, and sometimes downright irresponsible when talking about history. Different cultures have viewed others as barbarians throughout history. Unless we're talking about one of these specific cases (such as the Greeks calling those north of them barbarians, or the ancient Chinese calling everyone around them that) it's a meaningless term. Would you call tying peasants to the land and severely limiting their rights and freedom to even move around a barbaric practice? Or is it just cruel or unfair?
I truly believe that a civilised society does not fall apart after the death of one man.
The Mongolian Empire was an incredible military achievement, but it was only an Empire in terms of conquest - it wasn't an Empire in terms of sustained society (like the Roman, Byzantine, or British Empires). The guy at the top dies, and the whole thing falls apart? That's not really a 'civilised society'.
Ancient Greece was a collection of societies that shared Greek culture. "Alexander's Greece" lasted only a few years and was hardly a society unto itself - it was another example of an empire-by-conquest. The guy at the top dies, and it all falls apart again.
Unless you're trying to tell me that Alexander turned the people all the way to the Indus into greek culture adherents, no, Alexander's empire wasn't a society.
It's important to note here that Alexander created a short-lived empire - he did not create the society we think of as 'ancient greek'. That pre-existed him quite considerably in greece. And just because he gathered Perseopolis into his fold doesn't make the society there 'greek'.
But there was still a civilized Greek culture that formed the backbone of Alexander's organization and army, even if all the conquests weren't assimilated into the same civilization.
"Yes, of course. It came to existence when Ghengis Khan united nomadic tribes"
The original poster posited that Ghengis Khan's activities birthed the society. Alexander's activities did nothing like this - the society was already there, and greek culture was fairly widespread to begin with, though perhaps not in the direction of the Indus. When Alexander died, the Greeks didn't fade away to become background players again - they were a powerful political and especially social force for centuries to come... largely in the opposite direction to Alexander's conquests.
Alexander was an incredible conquerer, but he did not make nor break Greek civilised society.
I'm going back farther than that--to gizmo's contention that civilized societies don't engage in warfare. spindrift made the counterpoint that "only civilized societies can...engage in organized warfare", to which Genghis Khan may or may not be a counterexample, but Alexander's Greece is every bit as much of a counterexample to gizmo's argument.
> When I speak of a civilized society it is in comparison to other societies.
That's exactly what I did, I compared the Mongol empire to early medieval countries in Europe (Franks and Poland) which I definitely consider civilized, though as you mention not all are equally civilized. There is no tautology here.
You should pay attention to the website he gave as his source - a website run by the Heritage Foundation known for having a strong conservative bias. I found some criticisms to the study in the comments of a blog:
1. Authors show a graph showing the median income of the family of recruits is $48,616 then proceed to define any family making more than that as "affluent".
2. Authors didn't have income data of the recruits and their families so they based their study on what neighbourhoods the recruits came from using zip codes (!) and whether the neighbourhoods were considered low-income, high-income, etc.
Politicians are the body and voice of society. I hate to expose an ugly truth to you, but it is not a single person deciding to go to war. It takes many people to nod in agreement before bombs start being dropped and troops start marching.
War is the norm throughout history. Peace is really just an interval between the normal behavior of countries.
And conflating war with mass murder is a tenuous argument. Was it mass murder when HMS Conqueror torpedoed the Belgrano in the Falklands killing 323?
How about all the deaths resulting from NATO interceding in the Libyan civil war? Or during the Kosovo/Serbian confict?
And that's just recent history. In Vietnam, you had Australia, France, and the US fighting a ruthless war. Are they all uncivilized?
Careful when you sling epithets at countries; most have a history of engaging in this barbarism you deplore.
And if you think that "we're all past that now," you need to do some reading of pre-WW1 literature and news. The idea tha t the Continent would engage in some of the most ruthless fighting was inconceivable. After all, it was a "civilized" time.
There are some logical flaws with the sociopath label, but there is certainly some truth to it, at least from my own experience. I'll provide a single example.
One of my childhood bullies - let's call him Tom - is most definitely a sociopath, and he joined the marines, along with his two brothers who are not unlike him. All three of these guys have been violent for as long as I've known them. During middle school and high school (and the couple years after where he happened to live in the same city as my university), he would pick fights with anyone and everyone for the dumbest reasons. I think he did it just to do it. Oddly enough, despite all the bullying and "shittalk" towards me over the years, he never fought me - although we did come close a couple of times but I just laughed at his stupidity and that was that. One of the last "conversations" I had with Tom was shortly before he went off to boot camp (or whatever you want to call it) and I asked him why he was going; he explained that he had nothing else better to do so he might as well go kill some people. He said those exact words, and he was dead serious.
If you're wondering why I didn't avoid the guy like the plague, it's because he and I had a lot of the same friends and he would always throw parties as his house to which my friends would invite me. Despite Tom's overly violent behavior, he was always very popular with the ladies, and most people really liked him. This is the same guy who posts pictures of himself on facebook cutting off the heads of goats in his marine gear. My theory is that because of his aggressive behavior (and using it to "dominate" others), people perceived him as an alpha male. Can I get a second opinion on this? Because so many people liking such a violent sociopath has always bothered and confused me.
Back on topic though... while Tom and his brothers are an example of some confirmation of the article's statements, as far as marines (or army, navy, etc.) go, for every Tom I've known, I've also known at least a few very easy-going men. So the author is partially right but his argument is flawed. Violent sociopaths without education probably do gravitate towards the military and war, but the statistics have got to be way off - not nearly 80% - but that's just from the small sample set of my experiences.
"Because so many people liking such a violent sociopath has always bothered and confused me."
I think it's pretty much what you state, but less evo-psych than being an alpha male. Someone who is a sociopath doesn't really care too much about others most of the time, hence they can be extremely confident individuals in certain circumstances. Confidence is a major factor in social success.
I remember reading an interview of a guy who enlisted to see what it feels like to get the 'rush' of killing another human. Disturbing comment on motivation to begin with, but he also reported his disappointment on killing his first person. Nothing happened. He pulled the trigger over here, a man over there fell down, dead. No rush, no spiritual oomph.
The United States made a huge mistake in moving to an all-volunteer army in the 1970s.
My life is my own to live. It's not your right to dispose of it. The draft is a massive violation of individual rights.
If a nation cannot get enough paid volunteers to fight a war, that war is simply not worth fighting.
In my view, mandatory conscription is one of those first-class evils that we need to dismiss as a society---like genocide, slavery, and denying women the right to vote.
My father was drafted to Vietnam, and although he survived the war, I think it damaged him badly and in turn damaged me.
So please consider whether you really want to advocate the draft.
While I do agree with you in some regards, there is a very real policy impact involved in having a professional all-volunteer army.
When you have to draft chunks of your population in order to conduct warfare, public opinion is very much against you if your cause is not 'just'.
"If a nation cannot get enough paid volunteers to fight a war, that war is simply not worth fighting."
The flaw here is that there are always going to be people available to fight for a chance at gold. Additionally, and even more troubling for the United States, we are increasingly reliant on machines to do this work for us--there is increasingly no meaningful connection between the citizenry and the hawkish body politic.
If we do not have drafts, nor the possibility of drafts, then we find ourselves in a position where either:
1. We do not fight, for war is not worth fighting.
2. We continue to fight, and find ways of reducing the human requirement even further than it is already.
(2) is much more likely, given the history of man and the way our tech is evolving.
At best, this implies that one day we'll have robots blowing up other robots, all made by autonomous factories--this is merely a farcical misallocation of resources.
At anything less than best, this implies that we'll have robots blowing up lots of civilians or other troops. It doesn't matter whether the lives lost are ours or not, it matters only that things are worse off.
I'd suggest that the United States solely use draftees, and that we pursue national policies that don't require us to deploy widely to hostile areas.
It is good design to solve problems directly, rather than to solve them indirectly by introducting a different problem.
So let's solve the problem of the US entering unjust wars directly, rather than by introducing a new problem (the draft).
How to solve it directly?
The recent unjust US wars do reflect cultural problems: a belief among politicians and the populace that it is worthwile to sacrifice thousands of American lives and trillions of American dollars to occupy and rebuild other countries.
The way to solve the problem is to combat that notion on an intellectual level. To speak out about it. Some other solution (like requiring a draft) is just duct tape.
The ideas of society at large can improve over time. Just look at the history of women and minorities to see that. This is one of those areas where cultural activisim can lead to an improvement.
I am very optimistic that my generation (I'm in my 20s) will not engage in wars like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam once we become the generation that directly makes those kinds of decisions.
In fact, my fear is that my generation will be unwilling to take preemptive offensive action when it is necessary (e.g. to prevent untrusted parties from acquiring nuclear or biological weapons).
As an outsider, in the last decade it's been really weird to watch the US public demand war while at the same time demanding that soldiers don't die. It just reinforces how distant people are from the idea of war.
Hell, the entire Vietnam War had less US dead than there were Allied dead in one day of the bloodiest battle in WWI. And after a decade of fighting, the US efforts in Iraq have less than 10% of the US deaths in Vietnam. Afghanistan less than 4%. And still the rhetoric is one of siege and difficult fighting. How soft and spoiled are the commentators who think war should involve no sacrifice at all; that effectively it should be like a video game?
How soft and spoiled are the commentators who think war should involve no sacrifice
It's horrible to waste soldiers for nothing, which is what's been going on over there for quite some time. The problem is, it is a total sacrifice - people losing their lives for nothing.
Sad that so many people get so worked up over the loss of 5k soldiers, and not the unnecessary destruction of a state, involving hundreds of thousands of deaths of foreigners.
If it really is 'waste' that people are worried about, why not that?
You mean Saddam Hussein (Iraq) and the Taliban (Afghanistan)?
But yeah, I definitely think we should have acted much more forcefully to end the wars much more quickly and with far fewer casualties on both sides.
I think we probably could do this without resorting to nukes, but applying the same "kind" of intense pressure. Hiroshima/Nagasaki were huge successes compared to a minimum decade-long ground invasion and occupation of Japan resulting in possibly millions of deaths.
I don't think that there is anything terribly indirect about linking (explicitly) the blood of common Americans with hawkish politicians.
An intellectual argument is irrelevant in the face of the masses--by definition, half of them are of below-average intelligence, yeah? So, we should pursue policies that make it concrete--even to the slowest citizen or smartest zealot--that there will be immediate, personal sacrifice for any military action they support.
I would also question the analogy to women and minority rights--neither has particular import here, and only muddy the waters. War is an issue that has faced all states, regardless of race and gender; it is somewhat misleading to treat it as something that may be "overcome" like a silly cultural preference of the West.
"In fact, my fear is that my generation will be unwilling to take preemptive offensive action when it is necessary (e.g. to prevent untrusted parties from acquiring nuclear or biological weapons)."
This is also a place where I think we differ in viewpoint.
Why is it so that Pakistan can have the atomic bomb, but not Iran? Why Israel and not Iraq?
I do not live in fear of my fellow man because he is armed--I only am worried if he is actively hostile. If your state does not pursue hostilities, what does it matter what they have in their stockpiles?
I believe that the bigger threat to my (apparently, our) generation is to continue to live in fear of terrorism, war, weapons, and each other--so many problems would go away if people would just accept that some day their ticket comes up, and do the best that they can in the meantime.
An intellectual argument is irrelevant in the face of the masses
No. If you look at history, from the middle ages until now, you see a continual improvement. Moreover, the idea that people are brutes is disturbing. We have to see people as reasoning individuals; otherwise, we decay into fascism, religious extremism, etc.
Why is it so that Pakistan can have the atomic bomb, but not Iran? Why Israel and not Iraq?
It's fine for nations to have it where it represents absolutely zero threat, from the perspective of the agent (in this case, the US). Pakistan should not have it. (Remember, Pakistani leaders knowing sheltered Bin Laden.)
I only am worried if he is actively hostile.
There are many groups that are actively hostile that are not identical to a national government. There are many national governments that are largely sympathetic to these groups.
so many problems would go away if people would just accept that some day their ticket comes up, and do the best that they can in the meantime.
Dude, you're asking me to just lay down and let the terrorists kill people. No way. We should just stop the bullies. There should be no tolerance for that kind of shit.
I'm more in agreement with angersock on the topic of the draft.
I would love to live in an enlightened world where we can all talk out our issues, without ever resorting to violence. I do believe that people, on an individual level, can be reasonable.
The problem <i>is</i> the masses. If a leader comes out with a compelling argument casting group X (country, terrorist cell, religious belief, etc) as a direct threat to the social group YOU belong to, you probably won't want to be the one who stands up and says "maybe that guys full of it?". You look weak and you look like you don't want to be part of the group. And the leader will tell you as much and try to push you out of the group.
Now, spin that story where there's a universal draft. All of a sudden, you and everyone else in the social group have to weigh the consequences of you or someone you love dying somewhere far away. When someone pipes up and tells the leader he/she's full of it, they don't sound like such a nay sayer.
In regards to just 'laying down and letting the terrorists kill you', I don't believe angersock meant that at all (correct me if I'm wrong) - we should avoid all this security theater BS. Do you really think that body scanners at airports are stopping terrorists? Any time I've flown into the states it seems like there's as many TSA agents as there are passengers.
(you can surround statements with asterisks like so to get italics :) )
You're basically correct in your interpretation of my views on the security theater and the like. The sad, sorry state of the matter is that when your country is as wealthy as ours, and--more importantly--as large as ours, you kind of have to stop thinking about things any other way than statistically.
It's a hell of a thing to say, but honestly, what's a few thousand deaths in a fluke attack? What's a few hundred million dollars worth of property damage?
The likelihood of that happening to any one of us is so small as to be absurd--even less if everyone is armed, but that is a brand of crazy I don't expect to sell to everyone.
The damage these attacks has actually done to us has been to invoke this media meme of the evil terrorists coming to kill us in our moment of distraction.
The initial loss my country suffered has been compounded beyond all reason by the fear-mongering and reactionary policy-making. Worse still, while we fret about a loss of men and material over a decade ago, our government (with, apparently, our own consent and approval!) has gone on to attack our fundamental liberties and notions of decency so systematically that many still refuse to believe they're up to anything.
All because people are dumb, and get afraid, and are susceptible to the same emotional pandering as they've always been. Oddly enough, I'm actually in agreement with javert about the fact that people should reason more--I just know that you can't write policy that depends on it.
You look weak and you look like you don't want to be part of the group. And the leader will tell you as much and try to push you out of the group.
That's why we have the Bill of Rights in the US. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and so on. Our society is (currently) civilized enough that people can speak up without problems.
All of a sudden, you and everyone else in the social group have to weigh the consequences of you or someone you love dying somewhere far away.
That just tips the balance differently. Now, if you're a big war hawk, people can say, "Well, you don't have to go fight or have family that fight." If everyone has to go fight, and you're a dove, people will say, "Well, you're just a coward who isn't willing to give your fair share."
we should avoid all this security theater BS
I totally agree with you. TSA is a massive violation of rights and is ridiculous. The solution is to end states that give terrorists leeway in their borders or directly support them. And I don't mean a 10 year ground occupation. I mean forcing their leaders to abide by certain written rules, or they get booted.
"Dude, you're asking me to just lay down and let the terrorists kill people. No way. We should just stop the bullies. There should be no tolerance for that kind of shit."
You have a somewhat inflated sense of agency here, I believe. Additionally, these "terrorists" and "rogue states" are hardly "bullies"--and your claim of "no tolerance for that kind of shit" is exceptionally incongruous with past and present US foreign policy.
It's not like the terrorists decide that their favorite golf course is closed for the weekend, so instead they blow up some innocent civilians. In the absence of motivating forces, such as economic depression, sanctions, or political meddling, they are likely to not be terrorists--or even more likely, to be somebody else's problem!
As for the intent of my comment: do a calculation with me.
Run it through (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28600+million+times+20...) and we see that something like 345 human-life-equivalents are wasted every year waiting in line to pull off shoes and get groped or irradiated. All so that people can feel more safe? From an effective non-threat?
In ten years we've wasted more human-live-equivalents than the WTC attacks. From fear and bureaucracy alone.
"Pakistan should not have it. (Remember, Pakistani leaders knowing sheltered Bin Laden.)"
So, the proper argument here is that Pakistan's security is questionable, but that's beside the point.
What does it matter that the Pakistanis knowingly sheltered Osama? Good God, if we were to hold nations accountable for the company they keep America (not to mention all of Europe and the rest of the world) would have a great lot of explaining to do!
"There are many groups that are actively hostile that are not identical to a national government. There are many national governments that are largely sympathetic to these groups."
There may be a reason for this, yes? If you knew of a world government with an exceedingly strong economy and a disposition for meddling extensively in the sovereign affairs of other states, wouldn't you be a wee bit wary? The reason that we face so much hostility is due to our failings in foreign policy, least of which being our military adventurism.
"If you look at history, from the middle ages until now, you see a continual improvement."
Improvement in what, technology? Amusement? Wealth?
Kill ratios?
This is a lot to unpack, but I think that one could make an argument that things are different--not necessarily better--and that happiness of a serf, a slave, or a modern person is open to debate. I'd enjoy debating this point further, but not immediately.
"Moreover, the idea that people are brutes is disturbing. We have to see people as reasoning individuals; otherwise, we decay into fascism, religious extremism, etc."
You've never seen a reasoning brute? You've never seen a fascist attempting to do what they believe is best for their nation? You've never seen a reasoning zealot do what they think is best for their faith?
"Reason" is not some panacea that magically turns the barbarians into white-collar workers and lays the lion down with the lamb.
At any rate, I intended to suggest not that the great unwashed slavering masses will throw us repeatedly into war: I meant to suggest that any more abstract reasoning, any more intellectual appeal, is too open to debate, argument, and misinterpretation. A draft is quite clear.
When you have to draft chunks of your population in order to conduct warfare, public opinion is very much against you if your cause is not 'just'.
When you have to draft chunks of your population in order to conduct education, public opinion is very much against you if your cause is not 'just'. There will always be people willing to teach for a chance at gold.
People will oppose most policies if you tie the policy to forced labor, and rightly so. Forced labor is really bad.
That's not an argument for forced labor, that's just a ruthless political maneuver you want to apply to get the policies you desire. Similarly, politicians often attach poison pills to bills they want to kill (e.g., attach tax cuts for coal power to an environmental bill).
In my opinion, it's unlikely that a war is just if the citizenry is unwilling to submit to a draft.
In the same way, if an administration can't convince everyone in the population to pay for a war with tax increases, then the war either isn't defensible or the administration is too stupid to wage it effectively.
The worst possible situation is when you get a war that is fought by volunteers being paid with borrowed money.
Are you willing to apply this logic to policies you support?
Is public education unjust if the citizenry is unwilling to submit to forced labor in public schools? Is care for old people unjust if the citizenry is unwilling to submit to forced labor cleaning old people's bedpans?
(I'm assuming you support these two policies, based purely on the observation that most people do.)
First off, I'm going to call "straw man". No one is forced to clean old people's bedpans. They all do it for money, or because of a sense of obligation/love.
But, there are a few other big differences between waging war and providing social services.
Perhaps the biggest is that a particular war is a one-time, no-easy-turning-back event, that generally provides little direct benefit to the population funding it. By way of contrast, I'm not saying that civil defense should in general go unfunded.
I'm saying that a single massive expenditure of blood and treasure, which will almost certainly result in the violent deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children, should probably need to meet a somewhat higher bar than the requirement and funding of compulsory high school. Whenever many extra innocent people are likely to die prematurely, extra scrutiny of the decision-making process is required.
Because it is precisely when people are asked to pay for something that they seriously evaluate whether it is worth the expense -- and this is a calculation that needs to be made for war more so than for anything else. In general, I think most populations are more than willing to spend what's necessary to defend themselves from a large, immediate threat -- there was little trouble in getting people to pay extra taxes for WWII.
Also, because of its one-time nature, the cost of the war could easily come at the expense of other services. In general, people have consented to paying for social services (yes, in the long run they'll cause America to run a deficit if nothing changes, but for now it's being paid for with tax dollars).
They all do it for money, or because of a sense of obligation/love.
Soldiers also do it for money. You are advocating that we change this in order to make a policy you oppose less politically popular.
I'm just trying to determine whether you are willing to apply this logic in an intellectually consistent manner, or if it's just a political maneuver unrelated to your real motivation [1].
If the possibility of deaths is the justification for tying forced labor to another policy, then there are many government programs we should tie forced labor to - construction, policing and firefighting are all obvious examples.
Are you really attempting to say that going to war is just as serious as public education or elderly care-giving?
The gist (which seems to be going over your head), is that the decision to go to war is not one that should be made lightly. If you don't have any 'skin in the game,' then you're more apt to make the decision lightly (or just be apathetic, letting others make the decision).
Instituting a draft increases the chances that someone you know may die as a result of the decision to go to war. It's easy to make the decision to go to war if someone else's friends/family are the ones making the actual sacrifice. For example, how many politicians are willing to put their kids on the front-lines?
Are you really attempting to say that going to war is just as serious as public education or elderly care-giving?
I'm addressing this reasoning: "In my opinion, it's unlikely that $POLICY is just if the citizenry is unwilling to submit to a draft [to provide necessary labor for $POLICY]."
Nothing leot said is specific to war, so I don't see why you are attempting to contrast war to other policies.
Also, regarding the chances someone may die, forced labor on construction projects increases the chance that someone you know may die as a result of the decision to engage in construction (to select one particular non-war policy with real physical risks). It's easy to make the decision to build roads if someone else's friends/family are the ones making the actual sacrifice. So should roads be built with forced labor?
For example, how many politicians are willing to put their kids on the front-lines?
This is unknowable, since we (thankfully) don't allow parents to enslave their children.
>> For example, how many politicians are willing to put their kids
>> on the front-lines?
>
> This is unknowable, since we (thankfully) don't allow parents to
> enslave their children.
I'm sorry if this comes across as harsh, but this really seems like
you're trying to troll me here. "How many [GROUP OF PEOPLE] are
willing to put their children in [DANGEROUS SITUATION]" is a common
idiom that has nothing to do with slavery.
In this specific case, it means things like:
1) How many policitions would be happy to see their children on the
frontline?
2) How many policitions would support [WAR AGAINST X] if they knew
that their child would be on the frontlines (or killed in action)?
3) How many policitions would implement a draft, and then pull strings
to make sure their children exempt?
It's a matter of the people making decisions only reaping the
benefits, but being divorced from the costs.
Generally how this works is you draft people (or let them volunteer), but then people can volunteer to remain in longer.
Sometimes, after being drafted, one can (based on performance or aptitude) elect to go career early on -- staying longer, but going for more serious training.
US drafts work from the bottom up. Because as you go higher up (e.g. people in college, then blue collars, then white collars, then leadership...) those people are increasingly indispensable to the war effort. In Vietnam, they made universities give them lists of the students that were doing badly to draft first, once they ran out of people not going to college.
And if I had children, I would definitely consider relocating them abroad as an option, depending on whether they personally agreed with the war and other factors.
In short, as you go up that hierarchy, people are increasingly politically active, yet are increasingly isolated from the draft.
So, if you wanted this solution to work (and I contend it's a very poor solution to the problem anyway), there are some serious obstacles.
Back in the day there used to be serious social stigma to colored people using the same drinking fountains as white people.
Nationalism is just as bad as racism. People are people. Black and white are just the same as people from Country A and Country B. I dont want to go fight people whos only problem is me trying to kill them.
> If society tells you to go kill somebody and you do, you can't be a sociopath.
I think there is social value to having some well-behaved sociopaths on your team (ie, the Jayne Cobb archetype).
But certain jobs/roles will absolutely self-select in favor of violent individuals with little empathy (and if you're not one already, the military, and to a lesser extent the police, are happy to turn you into one). This obviously isn't true of most military personnel, but there is a tendency, and the outliers on that bell curve will be ugly indeed.
I'm realistic enough to know that war isn't going to just go away, and in some situations is a necessary evil. But I would happy enough if we could just stop exalting war as inherently glorious, and instead viewed it as the utter horror that it is, only to be employed at the utmost necessity.
> The United States made a huge mistake in moving to an all-volunteer army in the 1970s.
I actually think I agree with the logic here. Forced conscription was part of the reason for public opposition to Vietnam; the opposition to Iraq would have come quicker and stronger if the costs and realities were more uniformly distributed.
>I am very tempted to flag this. the sociopath thing really rubs me the wrong way
Geeze Louise. I don't think flagging, on this site, is meant as a downvote for articles where you disagree with some terms' definitions.
>The United States made a huge mistake in moving to an all-volunteer army in the 1970s. With a draft and mandatory conscription, everybody had the common experience of serving and perhaps doing really bad things in the line of duty.
Are you seriously proposing that, instead of sending in a few thousand well trained guys who can do the job, it's preferable to send a few million who can barely fire a rifle - just because it may make for effective anti-war propaganda? If you are truly serious, you should at least know that it doesn't work. Only Vietnam turned a significant proportion of its veterans into anti-war activists. Korea, the World Wars and the Civil War had no such effect.
The World Wars were justified in the eyes of the population, Korea didn't last long enough to get worked up about, and there were draft riots during the Civil War as well as federal repression of the anti-war movement.
"Not only can the military manipulate public opinion through selective release of information, other soldiers like this one can also."
It's illegal for a soldier to even tell a reporter how they feel about the war, whereas the military has a propaganda budget of several tens of billions of dollars per year to control what gets shown on TV, in movies, in newspapers, etc. Yes, a retired soldier could theoretically spin something, but in reality they have basically 0 percent control over the way that war is portrayed and sold to society.
It seems as if he was trying to define sociopathy as purely the act of doing what's socially unacceptable, and that if society condones it then it's by definition not sociopathic. However I don't believe that's true since gov != society and even society can be conditioned into sociopaths.
I'd say I consider sociopathic as anything that's harmful to society, regardless of how society perceives it.
War is a part of society. If society tells you to go kill somebody and you do, you can't be a sociopath.
I usually like most of your contributions, but reasoning like this bugs me. "Society" in your reasoning is being treated something like a mathematical set. Society isn't so cleanly defined. Even for that, one could still have psychopathic tendencies, be told to by society to go and kill, but go and kill for completely disparate, possibly psychopathic reasons.
We set up a system where society approves of the use of lethal force. (In fact, many believe the true defining characteristic of a government is the monopoly in the use of force) People are instructed by this system to go kill people.
As long as that's all the information we have, there's nothing to indicate that these people care nothing about societal norms. In fact, they might actually be less sociopathic than those who do not serve. The only thing we'rd offered is descriptions of the cavalier attitude they have towards death, but, yet again, this is not an indicator of being a sociopath. Perhaps a callous and heartless person. Perhaps a crazy person. Perhaps as you point out they may actually be sociopaths. But nothing in this article tells us one way or another. Instead we're presented with these experiences as being the "true" nature of the entire conflict, and then the brutal and crass attitudes observed as being indicative of some sort of psychiatric disorder. That's just a little too much wringing of the hands and over-reaching for my comfort.
There is a premise here: going off and sneaking through the high grass to kill somebody in a brutal and bloody fashion without remorse is indicative of a psychiatric disorder. I'd like to explore that idea. But this article doesn't go there. Instead it's trying to be a "yeah, well this is how it really is, kid." and all I'm saying is to take such stories -- no matter what their slant -- with a gain of salt.
If it makes you feel any better, if the author had written the same tough-guy-been-there story with the soldiers all acting like boy scouts I would feel the same way. The only difference is that there would be plenty of folks willing to take that apart for me, so no comment would be needed.
Grossman is a Psychology professor at West Point (or was when he wrote this), and a former Army Ranger, although he never saw combat. His conclusion is actually similar to the author of this piece. First, he argues, with evidence, that humans have a pretty high disposition to not kill each other unless there is an immediate threat to themselves or loved ones. The evidence he uses to support that claim are the no-fire rates among front line soldiers in World War I and II. I think the stat he found was only about 20% of infantry in trenches shot their weapons. The fire rate among infantry by the Vietnam era was about 95%, and it had steadily increased up to that point. He claims that modern infantry training are responsible for this firing rate, that one of main points of modern infantry training is to get a solider to fire their weapon when instructed.
He also talks about PTSD, and that the amount of people who do not get some form of PTSD from front-line combat is about the same amount of people who have sociopathic tendencies. He then posits that these are the same people who tend to seek out special forces. And the author of the linked piece was, I think, talking mostly about special forces.
In the end, Grossman makes some extrapolations to media, and causation between violent media and actual violence. I don't think he supports that claim well. But if you've ever heard his name before, it was because of those claims. He was a whipping boy in the videogame press because of it, but I think his other work is interesting.
On Killing DOES NOT agree with the premise that soldiers are sociopaths. It makes the exact opposite claim. He says that tools that have been employed to increase firing rates have themselves increased the PTSD rate to astronomical levels.
PTSD's existence itself (at levels since Vietnam) proves that W's thesis is incorrect. Grossman's allowance for sociopathic behaviour is a demonstrated, consistent 2%.
Yes, I agree with what you said. However, Grossman also talks about the soldiers who do not experience PTSD. And he posits that those soldiers have sociopathic tendencies. And he further posits that those soldiers tend to self-select into the special forces.
W says up front that he is talking about infantry and special forces: When I say soldier, let me be clear that I am talking about the Infantryman and the Special Forces operator, as I have next to no knowledge about anything outside of this relatively small percentile of service personnel. I suspect that he is special forces, and is reporting mostly on his experiences with other special forces soldiers.
Like I said, 2%. This is the allowance that Grossman and his research support as being "sociopathic/psychopathic". Infantry units on average would make up close to 10-30% of an Army, depending on the force. The whole book is about the factors that can increase/decrease PTSD occurrences, but his basic point is that killing is so unnatural that PTSD is the normal part of the human reaction to killing. (IOW, everyone gets it to a degree).
He also does not say this 2% is pre-disposed to joining SF units. He does, interestingly enough, suggest that the data does point to this 2% being pre-disposed to mercenary work.
The evidence he uses to support that claim are the no-fire rates among front line soldiers in World War I and II. I think the stat he found was only about 20% of infantry in trenches shot their weapons.
I got to speak at length to some Vietnam veterans while I was in high school. One of them, who was in Army logistics in Vietnam told me that the people in the unit often laid down cover fire, but they were doing their best to scare the heck out of the Viet Cong but not kill any of them. Why? They just wanted to get out of the situation to safety, and the last thing they wanted was to kill someone's best buddy and have someone go all avenging hero on them.
I told this bit to another acquaintance who was a marine, whose entire family had a history of joining the marines, and he said, "That's army for you. My family, when we join the Marines, we sign up to Kill!"
You're assuming obedience to lawfully delegated authority (ie a chain of command) as the high water mark of societal norms, and reasoning from the perspective that sociopath should be pathologically opposed to anything societal, sort of like the unabomber. But one could be alienated from society in general - in the sense of peaceful civilian life - without totally rejecting all social institutions. In that case, you might be content to work in a war zone and maintain only the most basic connections with family, colleagues and so forth.
You're being too literal about the word psychopath. The original article claims, in essence, that war creates an environment where ordinary people can kill without it affecting them much personally. That is, from a behavioral point of view, what psychopaths do in regular society.
The article definitely isn't claiming that the 5% of so of humanity that is genetically incapable of feeling (much) empathy (i.e. sociopaths) make up 80% of the military corpus. The math obviously doesn't work out.
The article claims that war changes people. Some end up with PTSD, other people cope in another other way that makes them look like psychopaths.
I'm not sure that the math doesn't work out. I'd think that 80% of the part of the military that actively engages in combat is well below 5% of the population. I'd consider it obvious that psychopaths would be much more likely to join a group of people where they would be tolerated, perhaps even glorified while also giving them an outlet for their tendencies.
"If society tells you to go kill somebody and you do, you can't be a sociopath."
...what? I'm at a loss for words on this one. Just because society - a large, faceless group prone to rallying around propaganda and emotional bandwagons - embraces a cause, doesn't mean it's acceptable by default to kill in the name of that cause.
And it certainly doesn't mean you're not a sociopath.
>The United States made a huge mistake in moving to an all-volunteer army in the 1970s. With a draft and mandatory conscription, everybody had the common experience of serving and perhaps doing really bad things in the line of duty. As it is now, the vast majority of civilians have absolutely no idea what military service is like, as the author points out.
The last time there was coerced/forced military service in the US, many people here were not alive. Imagine how the disproportionately-libertarian leaning crowd in places like HN would react to being compelled to serve in the military.
War is a part of society that the vast majority of that society likes to keep romanticized and far away from home. The idea that the "society tells you to go kill somebody" is a gross oversimplification.
And claiming that a society made you do something and therefore you can't be called sociopath for doing it is not exactly the soundest excuse, because you can ultimately blame everything on the society.
Great post. I too noticed that the author's "combat experiences" seemed to be more about relating the experiences of his friends than his own personal thoughts and feelings.
The best analysis I've seen about the combatant are the works of LCol. Grossman. On Combat and On Killing are outstanding pieces of work that say pretty much the exact opposite of W here.
The best example of this is his story about his buddy never seeing the dead bodies of a family, and trying to hold this up as some moral issue. It was really more an issue of his brain simply filtering out everything that wasn't a direct threat to his immediate existence.
Adrenaline may make you super strong, but it also makes you blind, deaf, and destroys fine motor skills like marksmanship and bladder control.
I think you might be one of the only people in this thread who knows what he's talking about. Certainly your comment squares well with everything I heard growing up from my dad, who fought in three wars and was never shy about telling me stories, ranging from funny to grisly, about what he did.
If he came out and made a bunch of ridiculous claims about actual events, I would find it appropriate to assume that he was a liar.
In this article, his ridiculous claim was simply his personal opinion about the psychological state of the average soldier, so I find it pretty likely that he was actually a soldier, even though his opinion is clearly wrong.
"As it is now, the vast majority of civilians have absolutely no idea what military service is like. In this lack of context everybody becomes really impressionable."
When you vote, you are exercising political authority. You are using force. And force, my friends, is violence, the supreme authority from which all other authority derives. Whether it is exerted by ten or ten billion, political authority is violence by degree. The people we call "citizens" have earned the right to wield it. Naked force has settled more issues in history than any other factor. The contrary opinion "violence never solves anything" is wishful thinking at its worst. People who forget that always pay. They pay with their lives and their freedom.
I have a cousin coming of age who's downright excited to join the military and become a sniper. I have little doubt that war video games are partly responsible for that.
Now, I don't think violent games are inherently bad, and relatively few people playing them will actually sign up to go blow up insurgents in the desert.
But there is a significant difference between Modern Warfare and Hitman, Doom, GTA, etc.: most other violent games are either clearly fictionalized, or you knowingly play a villain. While a few nutcases might emulate the game, no reasonable person, not even most children, will draw the conclusion that the game activity is normal, real or justified.
But wars really happen, and they are seldom sexy or heroic. Even if you accomplish the most kick-ass mission ever, you probably lost friends in the process. Any soldier anywhere would happily give up their medals and glory if it meant the fallen got to go home to their families.
War is hell. While I would never advocate any form of censorship, selling video games that hides this reality is socially irresponsible.
Many violent video games are, in effect, murder simulators.
I wonder how much more realistic they'd have to get before most people who gladly play them now would object to them.
In many games you can already hear the screams of the victims and even the victims pleading for their lives, and see quite a bit of gore as the murder is carried out.
However, you can't yet feel your hands around someone's throat, feel the blood pumping in their veins as you slowly squeeze their throat until they die. You can't feel their warm blood spurt out of their bodies or feel the knife plunge in.
It's probably just a matter of time until improvements in virtual reality do let you experience just that. You will be able to more effectively feel just what it's like to kill somebody.
Would you object to those sorts of games? Would they even still be games at that point? What effect do you think such realistic experiences of simulated murder have on the players?
Wow, awesome read. If this guy consulted on a video game I would never play it. Mowing down Russian civilians in the game MW2 was more than F'd up enough for me.
Have a bad guy escape through some civilians, you shoot after him. Then after coming closer find a parent/child dead with another child screaming over his/her family's body.
That would be a scene that makes people remember what war really is. But war games are not about war. They are about shooting things and feeling justified about it.
I'd be very interested to know if it's even possible to create a game where you genuinly feel remorse for killing an innocent person while chasing "the bad guy".
Many games have innocent bystanders, and there is a spectrum of consequence, from none (GTA), to inconvenience (Oblivion), to an instant game-over (Ghost Recon). In any case, I've never felt bad, since it's just a game.
Can a game elevate the characters to a point where you feel, even for a moment, real loss? I don't think it's very easy, if even possible.
Even just a small reminder that "you might want to consider the moral consequences of what you've been doing" is beyond what most games do. It doesn't necessarily require branching consequence paths and other silly mechanics, it doesn't require building up an attachment to the fictional character, just a small reminder that makes the player think about something in a broader context instead of focusing on the action. Of course game content around these things is fine, it's just not usually done that well.
One thing that stood out for me while I was playing Lord of the Rings Online (noting that the LotR universe is a very black-and-white-morals one) was a bounty hunter quest line where I made money killing some wanted thugs. This led to a bounty poster on me:
"For the death of Jachad, Hunter of no account, Cuthbert Sprunt offers two gold pieces.
This Elf has come to Evendim and caused nothing but trouble. Just ask Mrs. Idden where her boy Andy is, or the widow Tripper why her son Will is missing a brother!
If you think you've been wronged in this, Jachad, "bounty-hunter," then you come talk to Mr. Sprunt at the Sparring Circle. We'll sort it out, fair-like."
Of course the game quickly reminds you that Sprunt is a low-life villain, and I subsequently defeated him (though he lived since he gave up in the fight). But it was one of the few times the game ever questions the morality of player's actions, and even though it was incredibly brief it stood out for that reason.
"Can a game elevate the characters to a point where you feel, even for a moment, real loss? I don't think it's very easy, if even possible."
I've read reports of gamers crying when they had to kill the companion cube in Portal.
Gamers can and do form quite intense attachments to game characters, and I think they can and do feel genuine loss upon some of these characters' deaths.
However, the problem with many video games (and movies, and much other media) is that "the enemy" is usually just a faceless, almost less than human cardboard cutout that you're often either manipulated to feel glad to get rid of or indifferent over having killed.
It need not be that way, but it often if not almost always is.
I am an experienced soldier with combat experience in several corners of the world. I have a distinguished service record. The only units I've ever known are Special Forces units. I've operated in several tiers of the community. I was medically discharged following injuries sustained in combat operations. You deserve a better account than M provides. Please understand some detail must be left out.
I am not an academic any more than M or his psychologist. It's important to include the psychologist that asserts violent personality disorder outside of the DSM.
There are a lot of guys like M floating around special operations (the community) but perhaps many of you do not understand the community. The special operations umbrella is pretty large depending on how you classify. To simplify, there are several degrees (tiers) divided by purpose and specialization. The degrees might look like a pyramid if you represented them by the number of soldiers in each. M would be near the bottom of a special operations pyramid, meaning he's a highly proficient infantryman, probably supporting a higher unit. A good guess for M would be Ranger Battalion. He mentions Special Forces (Green Beret), which is at least branch consistent.
M wouldn't make it at a higher level of the community. The community would correct the matter if he did. In special operations, psych evaluations are routine. There are evaluations for aptitude and there are evaluations for disposition. If you are a sociopath by clinical standards, you will not climb the pyramid. You will be told that this is why you were denied ascension. At lower levels of the pyramid, a clever man can influence the evaluation but not considerably so. At higher levels, the evaluations are much harder to 'game' because they are conducted over time in a range of dynamic scenarios. The higher tiers need a pool of exceptional candidates to use as a baseline. In a class of elite SOF operators, the higher tiers are looking for standouts. Those standouts are further evaluated. M never made it that far, which is why he thinks there are no heroes. I'll only discuss the lower tier to address M's depiction. It differs considerably at higher tiers.
One of the many problems with M's depiction is the misrepresentation of the community. An FNG is much more common in a line unit than in a proper special operations element (furthering my suspicion that M came from a support element). There are no FNGs in the community. Each SOF operator, regardless the branch, spent 18-24 months in a pipeline training specifically for special operations costing the government more than $1 million per candidate. If they complete the training, they go to a team a 'cherry'. They need real world experience as an operator and they need advanced training beyond their generalized training. This does not mean walking point in a mine field. This means developing the training plans for the rest of the team, coordinating cross training with the senior members, and accounting for equipment. The entire experience prepares the cherry for the demands of sustained operations far from the flag pole (built up bases) during a deployment. The cherry is one of maybe 15 men who are going to be fending for themselves throughout the deployment.
The sensation is nothing like sex but your first fire fight is a lot like losing your virginity. You'll always remember. The adrenaline dumps. Your senses heighten and you become acutely aware of your 'anchors'. Cheek, pad of your trigger finger, your shoulder pocket (where your long gun is firmly tucked) or maybe your elbows. Whatever your problem points were during exercises. Between engagements are lulls, mag changes. You move. You communicate. You decisively engage yet you hardly think. Hours go by before the engagement is over. You feel exhilaration. Consider the state you are in emotionally, chemically. And at this moment you have your first coherent thought in hours. What do you think about? Does it suggest anything about you?
I wish I felt something for the people we expired in my first fire fight. I didn't. This isn't sociopathy. This is pragmatism. We are all going to die. In that moment, the person most likely to die is my adversary. My training is superior. My firepower is superior. I have the strategic advantage. In order to achieve success in the objective that brought me to the patch of earth I meet my adversary, I must first know that one of use will expire- the one that is least present. You accept mortality so that you can control your emotions during the engagement. Why fear death when you can elude it? At the conclusion of the fire fight, you don't have time to think. The end of the fire fight is not the end of the day. Are there any casualties? Do you have all of your equipment? You have to establish communications with command. They may have guidance for follow on actions. They may have intel of a quick reactionary force descending upon your location. The avenues of approach and egress from your location may have been rigged to blow while you were engaged. Command mind know a better route for exfil. There remains a tremendous amount of work before you'll be in a position to reflect. It could be hours. You'll probably sleep first. When you wake up, the feeling is gone. You remember the exhilaration. You remember the triumph. In my first deployment, this was the routine every other day for three weeks before we were pulled from the area to decompress. My thoughts were, "keep calm" My emotions would only ever cloud my judgment and performance. It was crystal clear to me that they were useless in a war zone, including malice.
The situations that I have encountered have been horrific. I would not propose that we expose the youth to these horrors. Help us all if we ever go down such a road. We should focus on effective management of a crisis. For me it is perspective. For others it might be something else. Nothing could have prepared me for my first fire fight. That, like losing your virginity, is something you must experience to ever really understand. The rest of the horrors of war are handled through live tissue training. If you understand basic medicine and tissue trauma, you'll be able to stomach what you'll see along the way. To suggest that video games should more realistically depict war is to suggest that we should practice applying a condom to a dildo rather than a cucumber. It doesn't prepare anyone to lose their virginity but it does increase the comfort with going down that road. Teach children stronger critical thinking skills and you'll prepare them to avert more conflict in the first place. Failing that, you'll prepare them to handle the horrors of the conflict.
This is in line with my experience (I spent a bunch of time with tier 2 SOF (Army SF) and other parts of the military) -- the people who seemed like the mentally unhinged were either in line combat or combat support units which experienced a lot of combat, not the SOF crowd.
The Army SF guys (and the higher level people, who I didn't spend as much time with, and who you can't really talk about; the tier 2 missions were largely public like training, medical outreach, etc. and sometimes had reporters when they could get them...) were among the most mentally balanced, generally respectable, and moral people I met in the military. They were also a lot older than the majority of line infantry -- 28+. (Generally, Army SF, medical, and aviation were the people I found most intelligent, sane, and worth being around, but the medical people were in a lot of cases barely thinking of themselves as military, just as doctors who happened to be deployed.)
Some of the biggest dirtbags were the support troops assigned to SF (I think for JSOC/tier-1, you get tier-2 and some specialist JSOC parts for support, or Rangers when they need a large blocking force, but for tier-2, you would get a wide variety of detached troops as cooks, mechanics, etc.); and these guys acted like they were operators, and were a lot more likely to get in trouble. It was pretty hilarious.
The weirdest thing is that Army SF doctrinally has the Foreign Internal Defense mission (training local troops), which requires a high level of cultural sensitivity, etc. Yet, in a lot of Iraq/Afghanistan, they picked rank-compatible line units for that mission (i.e. an O-6 from an infantry unit advising an ANA general running an infantry unit), and often from the National Guard (where they were more "local" in their NG recruiting area, and thus even less culturally aware than regular army), and used even Army SF for direct action type missions. Then brought in contractors to do the direct mentoring mission, wtf.
"I wish I felt something for the people we expired in my first fire fight. I didn't."
I have a hard time believing you didn't feel something for the people you _killed_ in your first fire fight. Word selection can expose more than a writer's vocabulary range.
That sentence stood out for me for some reason, but overall, it was a great insight that's given me a lot to think about.
Far be it from to tell anyone what they should do but I must say this comment was very well written, engaging, and informative. You might want to consider writing about this more; I think the best way for the civilians to understand what war and military life is like is for those at the tip of the spear is to communicate.
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." --Wittgenstein
That's my reaction to most of these 182 comments. I grew up with a combat veteran, and between listening to his stories and reading those of many other vets, including the OP, the only thing that's clear to me is that there are as many ways of coping with combat as there are combat veterans. Instead of arguing about whether or not people are sociopaths, go listen to few veterans sometime.
I have a friend in the special forces who has changed as a person completely since his first deployment.
The last time we hung out, we went to a casual bar for a drink. He brought his pistol everywhere he went now out of paranoia. He spoke in jealousy of the British mercenaries who were allowed to kill anyone without permission. "I wish we could do that," he said. I was honestly baffled.
It truly is amazing how much war can change someone. He lives and loves to kill now. He says there is no better rush in the world.
"the vast majority of us are straight up sociopaths"
Society can't function without socially acceptable outlets for this and other anti-social behaviors. That is the best justification I have found for a long list of things that don't seem to make sense in an enlightened society.
What would the world be like if we didn't have the Army and NFL? A lot of people would find new, more chaotic outlets for their aggression.
One thing I vividly remember from the Iraq war was how much everyone seemed to care about a couple thousand US casualties, and how little everyone seemed to care about a hundred thousand Iraqi casualties.
One thing I remember is how accurate the US casualty number was -- we had names and hometowns for every US casualty, and usually a cause of death. In some sense, this is to be expected, as we have records of everyone who gets shipped out, and most have at least some family or friends who awaited their return.
We weren't even sure how many Iraqis had died, nor how they died. Some of the more common estimates of Iraqi deaths vary by a factor of ten or more. Records in Iraq are spotty, at best. Most Iraqis don't have a great deal of family and friends in the US, so we don't feel their loss in quite the same way.
There are much cheaper, better ways to let out anti-social behavior and violent action between consenting fucked-up people. 4chan, fight clubs, boxing, BDSM, etc.
Shit, we could fund the entire country going crazy on $3,000,000,000,000 or so.
I don't have first-hand, or even second-hand experience of war. I can only go by what I read in articles like this.
But logically, the author is making a lot of sense. Any apathy or desensitization to killing is either a result of social conditioning (sociopathy) or a psychological predisposition (psychopathy). There are of course other ways this could come about, and the author's 80% figure is probably an over-estimation, but I think the proliferation of military contractors really increases the chances that what the author says is true.
I wonder if there has ever been a study that tries to figure out how prevalent these kind of issues are.
Kids are going to have a hard time unlearning the fake reality presented to them by video games.
As a personal development junkie, I find war to be very problematic (well duh). Killing people is just so... unenlightened.
Then again, I find the warrior ethos or what you might call the male Warrior archetype to be of great interest. It's pretty obvious that this is something that the modern world very much lacks, at least we don't have any formal initiation rites for it (going to Marine boot camp might qualify though).
Whoa, I know the guy who runs this website, along with several of the authors. He actually just launched it a few days ago, primarily for the Penny Arcade forum readers. Small internet.
I'm doing what I can, but given my limited means cloud storage, better hosting, and the like are unavailable to me. The site is cached & is still up - CloudFront is just throttling bandwidth, as far as I can tell. Recommendations would be appreciated.
He hasn't really convinced me he's a sociopath. More like he's suffering from PTSD and coping with it by acting out sociopathic tendencies. I mean obviously I don't have the first clue, but I ask myself would a real sociopath write something like this?
Off topic, but it's really annoying when the actual content of a page represents 1/5 of its length and the rest are comments. The scrollbar is made to give you a hint of how much of the article is left. This completely defeats this purpose.
From what little I know about the UK school system, there's actually a natural stopping point at 16 after the GCSE. Between 16 and 18 one would study for "A-levels", or not as the case may be.
Violent video games & media must be banned. It should be treated like child pornography.
A federal law prohibiting the dissemination of such material and people who develop or make such games and movies should be given the same punishment those filming child pornography receive. I personally recommend a minimum of 10 years.
The social and psychological corruption of society must come to an end.
I know many of you will not agree with my opinion, but I think you don't understand how bad an impact blatant violence in games and media has on people.
Where does the violence start? Modern warfare? AA? CS? What about fantasy like World of Warcraft? If hitting someone with a giant hammer ok, if you don't see the blood? Then what about car racing? If you can crash the car, do you assume people will think about the guy inside who has shards of glass inside his skull now? Is that violent? What if you don't see it? And animal cruelty? Is the frogger with cars running over the main character violent, or not? What about the games which depict whole wars but need only your imagination to add 2 and 2 together and realise that in chess you aim to kill as many soldiers of the opponent as possible (some skilled and specialised, half of them just cannon fodder - it's ok to sacrifice those), until the king is left alone and captured by the enemy...
Actually it's hard to find games which do not imply violence in one way or another. Even cards symbolise opposing kingdoms on them. Even Go happens around life, death and taking liberties...
This is one of countless ways the military carefully shapes the public opinion of the troops. It’s a shameless PR exercise. One of our guys got a Military Cross (a medal for bravery) awarded after he got shot in the bum and continued to fight. His platoon was isolated on a rooftop with no escape for hours, and there was literally nothing else he could do but fight. This does not make him a hero. It makes him a soldier with a sore bum.
"... your lead guy gets blown up and you spend the next hour or so casevac’ing [ed note: casualty evacuating] him ..."
that's CASVAC. Correct pronunciation. A portmanteau or joining of "CASualty" and "EVACuation". The difference b/w MEDIVAC and CASEVAC? The former is by medical vehicle, the later ad-hoc.
I can't imagine how anyone enjoys games like these unless they really are sociopaths. War is when young men go die for the old men's mistakes and kill a lot of women in children in the process.
That's all these games are. If you seriously can't understand how normal, empathic people could enjoy playing pretend, then you, not they, are the one who has difficulty distinguishing reality from fiction.
Have you ever watched an action movie and enjoyed it? If so, you should be aware that it is essentially the same thing as playing a violent video game.
Have you ever read a fantasy/sci-fi/historical novel where a conflict took place and people died? It's still the same thing.
Did you ever read comic books or watch loony tunes? Both are full of violence.
Aggressive behavior is sadly just a consequence of being a member of the animal kingdom. However, we are gifted with an intelligence that allows us to understand that violence is not a favorable attribute in any society, so we developed artificial outlets for our aggressive tendencies in the form of video games, movies, music, comic books, sports, and even literature. There isn't anything unhealthy about playing a violent video game. I suspect if someone did create the game that was described in the article, that most people who currently enjoy violent games wouldn't enjoy playing it, which incidentally happens to be the author's point.
It's because, ultimately, games of all sorts (not just video) are in this funny realm where we don't think too much about what we're doing beyond the mechanics of the game. The story wrapped around the mechanics becomes the chrome added to the machine that generates the fun; required for the total experience, but maybe not the essence of the game.
After the housing crisis in the US, do you still play Monopoly? How can you without sympathizing with all those people who got foreclosed on while the banking fatcats got rich?
The tight feedback loops of videogames make us examine them more closely, but, truly, games have always done this.
All that said, I don't enjoy CoD and the like because I'm not a FPS kind of guy, and I don't like the glamorization of war. But I had a lot of fun playing Warhammer 40k for a short time after college, so... does that make me a sociopath?
I find the source of most of the fun is the initial hit of adrenaline that lasts for about 10 minutes when playing multiplayer. It gets pretty old after that so I rarely play them. I have a large stack of shrinkwrapped freebies including war fps that I haven't yet touched dating back to 2009. Usually I just give them away.
I prefer the fps games where complete suspension of disbelief is required like the Dooms/Quakes. First time I played that and I raised the flashlight to see that I was about to get mauled I almost wet myself. No empathy required as it is so clearly not real. I however start to feel guilty about leading units in Civ to die. I empathize with you. :P
Edit: Since this is getting downvoted I'll add another bit to clarify. Games that simulate anything are still pretty simple and if you don't bring your imagination to supplement the experience, it gets pretty boring pretty quickly. I find it more fun to play who I am than to go with the assumed pigeonhole for success.
Because most, if not all, societies have tended to view women as helpless physically and therefore unable to adequately defend themselves. There are broadly three categories people take particular exception to with regards to violence - women, children and the elderly.
Any type of game where you shoot another human being is F*d up. The hypothetical scenario where you can accidentally kill innocents does not justify the game.
The game does not have to 'justify' itself to you, or anyone. It is what it is - a virtual world where human conflict drives the story and the mechanics, and the goal is entertainment. And if people like playing games where other humans are enemy, what does that tell you about people?
Maybe you have not noticed, but violence is part of human nature, and our creative works (of all kinds) have used this because, for better or for worse, it mirrors us. If you don't like the reflection, don't look.
I don't suppose you think any book where humans kill humans is also 'F*d up'? What about movies? Or is it only acceptable when they provide moral overtones you agree with?
>And if people like playing games where other humans are enemy, what does that tell you about people? //
I've played such games a little but never thought of the people I was playing with as the enemy. The people you play with are your friends normally aren't they?
I think parent means what the characters in the games are supposed to be. I don't think the vast majority of players see others as "enemies", they're simply adversaries, much like in a sports game.
There's the random oddball (usually an immature kid) that gets too worked up when he loses and starts insulting people, but then again, that's common in sports too.
So, paintball? Because I don't know of any video game where you shoot another human being.
I do know of plenty of games where you "shoot" blocks of pixels. And I assure that I'm perfectly capable of distinguish them, both at a rational and emotional level.
"I don't know of any video game where you shoot another human being. ... I do know of plenty of games where you "shoot" blocks of pixels."
This reminds me of a story in Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad (which is a fantastic book -- highly recommended).
From this[1] description of the story:
In the story "How Trurl's Own Perfection Led to No Good," Lem describes
how Trurl consoles a deposed dictator named Excelsius by building him a
simulated kingdom -- a small-scale mechanical model controlled by
computer programs -- so that his client can play at being a tyrant
without actually harming anyone. But Klapaucius objects that, because
Trurl's model is so perfect, Trurl has actually created a host of
conscious beings who are suffering under Excelsius' misrule...
"If an imperfect imitator, wishing to inflict pain, were to build
himself a crude idol of wood or wax, and further give it some
makeshift semblance of a sentient being, his torture of the thing
would be a paltry mockery indeed! But consider a succession of
improvements on this practice! Consider the next sculptor, who builds
a doll with a recording in its belly, that it may groan beneath his
blows; consider a doll which, when beaten, begs for mercy, no longer a
crude idol, but a homeostat; consider a doll that sheds tears, a doll
that bleeds, a doll that fears death, though it also longs for the
peace that only death can bring!
. . .
You say there's no way of knowing whether Excelsius' subjects groan,
when beaten, purely because of the electrons hopping about inside --
like wheels grinding out the mimicry of a voice -- or whether they
really groan, that is, because they honestly experience pain? A pretty
distinction, this! No, Trurl, a sufferer is not one who hands you his
suffering, that you may touch it, weigh it, bite it like a coin; a
sufferer is one who behaves like a sufferer!"
"That's pretty realistic. Do they have a level where you have to go knock on somebody's door and tell them their son was killed in a training exercise?"
That said, I feel like this article, like the censors, gives video games much too much credit. Glorification of violence is everywhere in our culture and fiction; I'd imagine at least 95% of gamers understand intuitively that the games they play bear very slight likeness at best to the reality of war (although probably more in the sense that they might be killed themselves rather than that they might kill others.)
After all, one of the things (multiplayer) video games do teach you is that combat is seriously dangerous. Pop out of cover for one second and you can get shot in the head, bam, you're dead. In a game, that means respawning; nobody seriously believes that's how it works in real life. In that sense, I have to think that these games, as unrealistic as they are, are still the most realistic fictional depiction of war you can experience-- and the lessons you learn are much more valuable than those of, say, comic books.
Which is not to say that we don't have a bit of a violence problem in our culture (though I'm on the side of Steven Pinker in thinking that our violence problem is probably better than it ever has been). But the problem is not the kids running around playing cops and robbers. The problem is the kids who never properly learn the distinction between playing and hitting-- and worst of all, those who learn it by the maxim that "If you hit your brother, I'll hit you even harder."
That's what we should be talking about.