BahRamYou
5d ago
To be honest, I had actually never heard of either of those cases. Maybe I heard about them in passing but I don't remember. So I assume the general public was the same. They're both bad, but not enough to be an extended major news story in the US.
Reading up on it now... they seem pretty similar? In both cases you've got enlisted men going way over the line, committing multiple war crimes. Murdering civilians and prisoners. They're caught red-handed, and either let off with a warning or given only a minor punishment. I... don't see how that's supposed to make me feel good? It seems like the military has learned nothing from its 20 years in the war on terror and is still playing coverup to people who would have been hung in the Nuremburg trials.
BahRamYou
5d ago
Yeah, rural Nevada might as well be on the moon from the point of view of an average American. I'm not going to drive thousands of miles for that.
BahRamYou
5d ago
Wait, wtf? Their names were Lola and Ruby? Is this a simulation? Why not just go all out and name her Lolita, geez... (sorry if this is an inappropriate joke. I just feel like it adds to the strangeness of the situation)
BahRamYou
5d ago
A lot of OF is basically geo-arbitrage. The US has more money but no legal prostitution. 3rd worlders who can speak English step in to fill the void.
Fair enough! But those acts were also condemned at the time by most people. And it's not like they helped the war, they actually made things much worse by making the Japanese public more angry. Even the Greeks in the Iliad understood that desecrating dead bodies was not justified.
Let me rephrase that for you, @Skibboleth, @quiet_NaN and @JTarrou. (Yeah I should have written that differently. I was wrong.)
Since this post was inspired by a TV show, I was mostly thinking of the stuff that happened in the show. Which yeah, I know, isn't real, but it seems to portray itself as "based on true events" or something. All the episodes have comments saying things like "Scary how accurate this is" or "It's like I'm home again". The audience seems to really love it. If the events didn't happen, they wish it did.
Obviously nothing can compare to the sheer overall size of WW2. 50million+ dead is just mind boggling. But the US at least didn't have to do much counter-insurgency there. The places we occupied were pretty friendly to us. The strategic bombing, while it kill a lot of civilians, was at least nominally aimed at military targets and done in an impersonal way.
The stuff they show in "A Grunt's Life" is just straight-up war crimes. Any court would agree. Bombing Nagasaki certainly wasn't nice, but it was legal. This stuff would just get you sent to prison. That's the sense in which I think it's worse.
edit: here's another interesting comment i just saw on an episode from a paid subscriber: "Gotta love War Crimes 2/7. Some of the guys who were around for the 08 deployment told us how fucked up it was. Guys from 3/7 and 3/4 called us War Crimes when I was in the unit from 2012-2015." Granted just some anonymous internet comment, but... it raises my suspicions.
BahRamYou
5d ago
the leadership and administration had no idea how to actually win the war or what that would even look like
Presumably it would mean something like "set up a new government in Afghanistan that has some sort of stability, and doesn't hate the US, or at least doesn't hate us enough to sponsor terrorists."
Which, sure, is a challenging goal! Especially after we invaded their country and toppled their government. And like you said, the Taliban was (and is now) doing some good things... but then there's that whole "harboring Al-Qaida" thing. In hindsight we probably should just destroyed Al-Qaida but left the Taliban in charge and left. But with them gone we were kinda commited to putting up a new government so it wouldn't just turn into an even worse breeding ground for terrorists.
I can see how the low-level soldiers didn't want to do dangerous things when it would have been much safer and easier to just "shoot first, ask questions later." But the basic logic is sound... if you do that, you're just creating more and more enemies in a never-ending cycle. If you kill 9 insurgents but also accidentally kill 1 civilian, and that 1 civilian has 10 friends... congrats, you've just created 10 more insurgents and made the problem worse.
In the show, the grunts aren't even trying to be careful. They seem quite happy to kill anyone they can, including women, children, and injured prisoners. They have a running competition to see who can kill the most. When their Afghan allies get killed, they just laugh. The main character keeps a collection of body parts as war trophies. At one point he and another character take turns raping the corpse. I realize this is just fiction, but it seems to show what a lot of vets wish they could have done in the war. They really hated the Afghanis... not just the enemies but all of them, in a very racist way, and wish they could have committed genocide. That's pretty disturbing to me.
BahRamYou
6d ago
"this is what war is like"
It's the opposite for me. I feel like there's a ton of content about war. This was more interesting to me to show the non-war fighting parts of the military, which is most of it in these peaceful times.
BahRamYou
6d ago
They mostly just reflect back whatever the customer says. So they can be dirty, flirty, romantic, or casual, whatever you want. In that sense its nicer than a real girlfriend who's often in a very different mood than what you want. Plus, they're chatting this stuff all day, so like any job they eventually get much better as a pro than a regular person would be. And it's much more "real" than AI, which tends to show its cracks when you make it write too much.
BahRamYou
6d ago
That makes sense to me. As someone with, uh, some experience in both, the experience really is quite different. With real life prostitution, you have to first find them (not always easy when they're trying to stay discrete), find a place/girl you like, book an appointment if its a nicer place, wait a bit if its a busy time, negotiate on services and maybe haggle a bit, check to make sure you're not getting scammed, then pay all in cash. It can really be a pain. But on the plus side, once it's over I really feel satisfied and go on with my life. OF and any kind of online porn is really easy to get started, but it feels like a treadmill that never ends.
Well, i'm not a "hardcore fan" but I somehow found the change to pay $6 for access to non-censored, full episodes. other comments say the same thing.
I think you're just too young and underenformed about the war in Afghantistan. We weren't "nice". We stayed there 20 years killing a ton of civilians. It makes WW2 look nice by comparison.
edit: sorry that came across too harsh. I didn't mean to insult you. I just disagree with your opinion about the war in Afghanistan.
BahRamYou
6d ago
From what I've seen, the episodes on their platform are way darker and more serious. Also the people that leave comments there tend to seem very serious like "yell yeah! Truth! That's how it was!" So I'm a little concerned that maybe most of our military vets wish the war in Afghanistan was much more violent...
Yeah, for sure it's intended for an audience of ex-enlisted. And yet it's still weirdly captivating to me as someone who was never in the military at all. It seems like Generation Kill is from 2008, so that's still... not so modern, compared to this. A big theme in this is the role smart phones and social media have had on the modern military experience. Not to mention women and gays.
edit: one thing that jumps out at me from watching this is how young most of the characters are. Typically they enlist at age 18, and then get out as soon as possible. So a typical marine now would have barely even been born when that movie came out.
Lately I've stumbled on a new (to me) dark corner of the internet: VetTV.
At first I thought it was just a youtube channel, since it was showing up in my shorts feed. And I assume that's what it started as. But eventually it became a full-fledged subscripion service with its own website, which you can subscribe to for just $6 a month (not an ad, I just thought it's interesting that it's a paid service but the cost is so low).
Anyway, they do have some very funny shorts and short videos. Mostly screwball, low-brow comedy, like you'd expect from young people who just got out of the military, especially the marines. Some of my favorites were: innappropriate gunny vs young marines, high school recruiting and holy waterboarding.
Bear in mind, those are just the clips they could get on youtube, the full episodes on their site are much more raunchy. It's obviously not a big budget production, but it is a little more polished than typical youtube channels. It's a low-budget yet professional studio where absolutely anything goes. So, well... they have some promotional clips where they compare themselves to a porn sites, and that's not wrong. It's interesting to see what ordinary people can come up with on a camera when there are absolutely no restrictions.
They have a few full-length (lightly censored) episodes on youtube for free. In particular I really recommend Recruiters. I liked it because... well, many reasons.
- I've never been in the military myself, but I used to get those sales pitches from recruiters as a teenager. So it's relatable to me in a way most war movies aren't.
- Most war movies are about soldiers in the field fighting big heroic battles. This (and a lot of their content) are about normal, boring office jobs. In this case they're working a call center in a strip mall. This seems more like the actual reality for most modern military people. And it's just a new angle that doesn't usually get explored in war movies.
- There's a real moral dilemna here. How are they supposed to convince young people to join when they're going through their own mid-life crisis and feel depressed about their service? What can you actually offer a kid in peacetime to convince him? What are they supposed to do when caught between the realities of modern life and impossible demands from higher-ups? At times, they almost seem like drug dealers or con-artists, willing to lie cheat and steal to con kids into signing a contract. EG, the female recruiter is not shy about promising boys that they'll "totally get so much pussy..." right before shipping them off to all-male military bases in the middle of nowhere. Her tactics only get more extreme and unethical from there.
- Even though they're just working an office/sales job, you still get the sense that it's a real military job too. They have to wear uniforms, follow uniforms, and exercise relentlessly. They're under immense pressure to meet quota every month or... well, I'm not sure what happens if they don't, but it seems very bad. That would "fail the mission." It's just interesting to see that clash of cultures.
Their more serious series is A Grunt's Life. This one... is interesting, but it's a very tough watch.
- For one thing, they're mostly all in uniforms all the time, and often wearing helmets, so it's just hard to tell the characters apart. I guess that's part of why militaries wear uniforms. Not as good for Hollywood though.
- It's set in a remote base in Afghanistan, in Helmand province, in one of the most intense periods of counter-insurgency. The troops their seem jaded beyond belief, convinced that this mission will never work because Afghanistan is such a hellhole. Their leader, Lt Murphy, (the main character of the series) is an older enlisted man turned Lieutenant. He's an antihero who's very good at his job but very dark and twisted. His main goal it seems is killing as many Afghanis as possible and collecting body parts for his personal collection, and he doesn't much care whether they come from insurgents or civilians.
- The higher-ranking officers are always portrayed as hopelessly naive and out of touch. They have to radio in from far away, and keep telling the base to "win hearts and minds" when it's an obvious trap.
- The Afghanis are portrayed as either complete idiots who shoot their own heads off, or utter villains who push their wives to tank bullets. Admittedly the low budget plays a factor here, some stuff got obviously cut. Every so often it makes me think it's setting one of them up as sympathetic, but then he takes a heel turn. And they couldn't find anyone who actually speaks Pashtun so they just used a mix of Turkish and Hindustani for their language. Some of this is admittedly pretty funny, but cmon... it's a racist caricature.
- The marines have a weird sort of sexuality. Sometimes its just being horny young guys with nothing much to do. But it goes way past that. They seem to enjoy really public displays of sexuality that most straight guys would never do. "Marine gay" is how they sometimes describe it. The show has some really graphic, depraved scenes that honestly seem worse than anything I've seen in porn. But there's still a sense of comedy to it. I really don't know how to describe it. "Insanity" is probably the easiest word to use.
As a work of art, it's certainly powerful. It made me feel things. It sucks me in to the whole "whoo rah, kill 'em all" feeling of comeradie and bravery, and makes me curse those stupid officers who won't let the grunts just "do what needs to be done."
But then I step back a minute. Granted, I was never there, I'm just a sissy civilian who only read the news. But from my perspective... the higher up officers were correct. The grunts in the show are basically just murdering civilians, or at least going way, way past any sort of justified warfare. The Afghanis are, quite reasonably, furious that these foreign invaders keep killing them, and they have no idea why because of the huge language and culture barrier. The officers are trying to bring peace, while people like Lt. Murphy just keep fanning the flames by killing people.
It reminds me a lot of two other famous war movies, which I'm sure it was inspired by. Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse now. In both cases, there's a bad guy (the drill sergeant and Colonel Kilgore) who looks super cool and badass in the movie. People love those characters. But I think it's important to keep our perspective and remember that they're villains who caused immense harm and suffering. I wish people were more film-savvy and could see that, because I don't think those movies are at all ambiguous.
Also, after writing out all of this, I realize that almost all of their characters are marines. So in some sense, it's not really about military life in general, but just the marines. It's almost like, how civilians see the general military, is how other military branches see the marines. Or maybe it's just that people in the marines have a hard time transitioning back to civilian life after leaving the military, and need something like this to cope.
...Thoughts on any of this? Sorry I don't have an exact thesis statement here. Maybe it's a sign of how corrupt and out-of-touch Hollywood is that we need something like this to bring us "real" cinema. Maybe it's a sign of how we're all so brainwashed by porn that porn starts to influence everything else. Maybe it's a sign of how horrific military life is that it just can't be expressed in any mainstream media. Maybe now, with cellphones and social media, we can finally see "the truth" of what war and military life is really like. Maybe it's just funny to see women trying to act like men, when mainstream TV usually shows the opposite. Or maybe I'm just bored and looking for something new I can't find on Youtube.
BahRamYou
7d ago
Is it possible this is just a weird case where four weird people met by chance? That make the result extra weird and newsworthy, but not really representative of anything.
Like you said, it's pretty weird for a guy to be filming an unrelated 12-year-old girl. And apparently his wife was there with him.
It's also very weird for a 12-yr-old to be carrying weapons, especially a freaking axe. And then her 14-yr-old sister didn't seem to think that was odd.
It seems to me like two chuunibyou middle school kids trying to act tough. Maybe hoping to join a gang later, maybe they read some news stories about migrant gangs and got scared, or maybe they just thought it would be fun to go around wacking things with an axe. Then a weird creepy guy started filming them, but he probably wasn't intending to do anything else. And then the whole thing blew up.
I'm not like, defending this or anything. But there's plenty of much worse evidence out there of actual crimes.
BahRamYou
9d ago
One way I could see it being transformative is if it puts more pressure on cities to finally improve their airport infrastructure.
Right now, it usually takes at least an hour to check in, clear security, and get to your gate. But it's highly random, so most people try to get there at least 2 hours before the flight. Even more if you're at a busy airport and trying to do something complicated.
Then on top of that, most airports are far from the city and most cities don't have very fast transit options to get there. Typically an hour to get to the airport, could be more if you're coming from far away.
Repeat again on the other side, especially for an international flight... 1 hour to get out of the airport, 1 hour to get back into the city. Minimum.
Flying from NYC to London takes about 7 hours. That's annoying, but becomes much worse then you add in around 5 hours of extra time to get from your home to the plane, and then the plane to your real destination. 12 hours, plus the jet lag and stress of travel basically kills an entire day.
Right now, we put up with all the extra waiting because there's just not enough pressure to make it better. 5 hours of waiting seems reasonable compared to 7 hours on the plane. And rich people can avoid some of that anyway by using private planes. But if Boom can get that down to 3.5 hours on a plane, I think there'd be a lot more pressure on cities to improve the overall airport experience. It's not impossible, it wasn't all that long ago that people could just drive right up to the gate and step on the plane with minimal security. We still need security of course, but we could automate a lot of it, and add valet parking and better public transit.
Combine all of that? Let's say the current model is 12 hours total from NYC to London. Boom + Better Infrastructure could get it down to 6 hours total. That really is a pretty change. It would make it a lot more practical to go to a meeting in both cities on the same day. Or work in one for the week and commute home for the weekend. Still a long trip, but only half of what it is now.
OK yeah. Looking into it more, it sounds the makings for a hilariously old school imperialist land squabble. Going by this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Antarctic_Territory: "Only four other countries accept Australia's claim to sovereignty, being New Zealand, the United Kingdom, France, and Norway, all of which have territorial claims in Antarctica and mutually accept each other’s claims"
So it's the British Commonwealth, France, and Norway vs the entire rest of the world!
BahRamYou
9d ago
hmm, are you suggesting that Britain could ship away all of its undesirable white males to Antarctica...? (just a joke)
BahRamYou
10d ago
"At 660,000 square miles, the territory is about eight times the size of Great Britain"
Huh! That's interesting. I had no idea the UK had that much territory in Antarctica.
Still, I can't imagine them actually going through with such an ambitious plan, or that all the other countries would stand by and allow them to do it.
For your original question, it seems like Saudi Arabia is still working on the line. I'm not sure it will actually get finished, or whether it'll be any good... but there's a decent chance it will amount to something big.
BahRamYou
10d ago
it's an interesting question that's surprisingly hard to answer.
At first glance, you're right. Those majority-minority districts produce huge majorities for democrats that waste a lot of their votes. For example, look at Georgia's 4th district: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia%27s_4th_congressional_district#Election_results where the Democrats have been winning by 50+ points in almost every election.
On the other hand, those districts are very effective. It leads to way more black congressmen than they would probably have without them. For example the Congressional Black Caucus has 55 members while the Hispanic Caucus only has 37, despite the US having a larger overall Hispanic population. And since many of those are very safe seats, it leads to those congressmen sticking around a long time, giving them much greater influence in congress than the ones from swing districts who haveo spent all their time campaigning and usually don't last more than a few cycles.
That in turn leads to black voters being very loyal to the Democrats. Democrats typically get something like 90% of the black vote, compared to 40% of whites and 50-60% of other racial groups. It's actually really hard to find any other demographic that's nearly so loyal to one party. Black voters also have higher voter turnout than most other non-white racial groups. Going from this: https://edition.cnn.com/election/2020/exit-polls/president/national-results the only similar effect is if you group people by "do you self-identify as a liberal/conservative." Most demographic effects are waaaay smaller. And the Democrats really need that voting block. Playing with https://www.cookpolitical.com/swingometer/2024 shows how ugly the electoral map gets for them without it... changing their share of black voters down from 90% to just around 75% means they suddenly lose all the swing states they won in 2020, without changing anything else.
Or to put it another way: bringing in 10 extra black voters with one voting Republican gives the Democrats around +9 votes overall. Bringing in 10 extra Asian or Hispanic voters with 4 of them voting Republican gives the Democrats just +2 votes. So they'd need 5 times as many Asian or Hispanic voters to get the same effect they get from Black voters.
So, maybe it costs the Democrats a few congressional districts, but pays off for them overall in statewide elections. But then you also have to ask... why are Democrats doing so (relatively) badly among every other demographic? Probably a lot of reasons, but some of it might be that they're giving black voters too much control of the party. They take on positions like Reparations and Defund the Police which are popular with black voters, but unpopular with moderate voters. They choose Kamala Harris in large part just because they needed someone who was black enough to appease their base, not because she was a good candidate.
Overall it's hard to say. In a different world where they weren't required to have those majority-minority districts (mostly meaning black districts because of how the population maps play out), all of politics would be so different that we really can't say with any certainty. It's amazing how redrawing a few lines on the map, which aren't even state boundaries, can have such a drastic effect on everything.
BahRamYou
10d ago
But we've been here before. Around the late '00s, Disney felt that it was shackled by its perception as a girl brand,
This is weird. To me they are a girl brand, and they've been that way a very long time. I vaguely recall liking Disney when I was a very young child, but it seems like me and every other boy I knew stopped liking them when we were around 10 years old. Not even into puberty yet, but old enough to be interested in more violent, action-heavy stuff. Disney was about pretty Princesses singing songs and wearing fancy clothes. And that was fine, we didn't make fun of girls for liking it, we just weren't interested, for the same reason we weren't interested in any of the other pink brands.
I can see why their corporate executives might want to change that and become some universal brand that appeals to everyone. But institutions have cultural inertia and sometimes they just can't be changed. It's like how almost every country tries hard to get into the World Cup but there's only a few that are regularly good at it. And it's not always about money or resources because tiny countries like Uruguay can be weirdly good at it while the US struggles. Sometimes we just have to accept that things are as they are.
When I went to Disneyland for the first time a few years ago, everything had this feeling of "cute, safe, friendly." Perfect for a stereotypical 1950s family on vacation for 2 young children, and I guess also fun for Disney adult women who want to cosplay as princesses. But the whole Star Wars area felt weirdly out of place, like trying to cram an actually scary haunted house into a McDonalds.
BahRamYou
14d ago
That's my suspicion. Its like people have taken the prestige from the entire field of mathematics and awarded it all to this one guy, because they need a single person to be the face. No one cares about the number 2, even if he's also super smart and successful.
BahRamYou
14d ago
There's also the Mathew Effect, where people give credit to the most famous scientist just because it adds prestige. But can sometimes lead to people like Einstein getting solo credit for things he just briefly mentioned.
BahRamYou
14d ago
See i see anecdotes like that, and I think "cool, what did he say that's so smart it made a highly respected professor feel awe? Can i see it too? Maybe I can't understand it but Id like to try. "
With Einstein, there's tons of famous quotes from him, and a ton of pop science designed to help regular people understand his work. Because he did interesting work that we want to understand. Scott Aaronson has a nifty blog helping regular people understand his own work in quantum computing. Ive never seen anyone try to do that for Terence Tao. It just seems like hyper abstract academic stuff that only mathematicians would care about.
Why do you put war crimes in scare quotes like it's some kind of joke? Your argument is "it's OK for US soldiers to commit murder and rape because other armies in other wars did even worse shit." Think for a second about how stupid and fucked up that is.
This is the 3rd time now that you've just straight insulted me. We're just two nerds on the internet typing words, so there's not much point to that. But if we were two grunts this is the point where I'm supposed to punch you in the face, right? Establish dominance by physical violence and all that shit. What a great system.
So imagine we've done that. I've punched you, you've punched me, we've both got some brain damage but we're best buds now. I'll also buy you a shitload of booze if that helps.
Are you willing to admit that maybe... just maybe... the rank-and-file of the US military did some bad stuff in Afghanistan? Or are you still going to be like "no we were perfect angels! We did nothing wrong! It was those evil officers and stupid civilians who caused all the problems!"
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