BahRamYou
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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.
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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