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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   2275 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 1, 2025

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Why do Redditors compulsively refer to weapons of war designed to maim and kill people as “toys”?

How much of playing with toys is some kind of evolved behavior for practicing the use of a weapon designed to maim and kill animals and people? Humans spent an awful lot of time as hunter-gatherers who have a long learning period and are expected to be very handy with some sort of primitive weapon as adults. Maybe weapons are toys because toys are weapons.

Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to this moment which will tell if he is to die at that man’s hand or that man at his. What more certain validation of a man’s worth could there be? This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance either one. In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. This man holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby removed from existence. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.

Clark, who led last year’s expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a re-examination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skill found in the same region earlier shows evidence of having been scalped.

–The Yuma Daily Sun

I gotta say, knowing the context doesn't make this look much less like 3am drunk philosophy.

Fair. I know there are plenty of angles from which Blood Meridian is just edgy cringe.

Has no one here been in the military?!

Weapons of war are very commonly referred to as toys in the military. And there is a simple reason: They are fun. There really is nothing more fun than wielding the power to end life. 4 star Marine Corps General James Mattis famously said:

It’s quite fun to shoot them, you know. It’s a hell of a hoot. It’s fun to shoot some people.

And basically everyone in the military agrees. Some non-military folk use the word "toys" to mock the military's enjoyment of violence, but for the most part people use the word positively.

(I say all this as a former Naval officer who was become a committed pacifist. One reason among many for the transformation is just how fun it is to kill.)

(I say all this as a former Naval officer who was become a committed pacifist. One reason among many for the transformation is just how fun it is to kill.)

I can fully see how this would be true of mowing down dim figures with ranged weapons at a distance, videogame-style. Can I ask, from curiosity, if in your experience it's also true of killing in hand-to-hand combat, where you can see/ hear/ smell the physical damage being done and watch the life leaving people's bodies?

I don't have firsthand experience. But I've been around lots of marines who have. And I'd say infantry type jobs very strongly select for people who find the infantry "fun".

Notably General Mattis (quoted above) was an enlisted infantryman before becoming an officer and served as an infantry rifle platoon commander in his first leadership roles.

Also don't forget that gladiator fights in the Roman Colosseum were widely considered entertainment. There is a famous account from Augustine's confessions where he related an account of a friend Alypius. Alypius was outraged about the morality of gladiator fights and refused to participate. But some friends dragged him to the show anyways. Here is Augustine's account of how Alypius learned to enjoy the violence:

Alypius kept his eyes closed and forbade his mind to roam abroad after such wickedness. Would that he had shut his ears also! For when one of the combatants fell in the fight, a mighty cry from the whole audience stirred him so strongly that, overcome by curiosity and still prepared (as he thought) to despise and rise superior to it no matter what it was, he opened his eyes and was struck with a deeper wound in his soul than the victim whom he desired to see had been in his body. Thus he fell more miserably than the one whose fall had raised that mighty clamor which had entered through his ears and unlocked his eyes to make way for the wounding and beating down of his soul, which was more audacious than truly valiant--also it was weaker because it presumed on its own strength when it ought to have depended on Thee. For, as soon as he saw the blood, he drank in with it a savage temper, and he did not turn away, but fixed his eyes on the bloody pastime, unwittingly drinking in the madness--delighted with the wicked contest and drunk with blood lust. He was now no longer the same man who came in, but was one of the mob he came into, a true companion of those who had brought him thither. Why need I say more? He looked, he shouted, he was excited, and he took away with him the madness that would stimulate him to come again: not only with those who first enticed him, but even without them; indeed, dragging in others besides. And yet from all this, with a most powerful and most merciful hand, thou didst pluck him and taught him not to rest his confidence in himself but in thee--but not till long after.

That's such a vivid account of the overall thought process; thanks for posting! If St. Augustine's depiction is accurate, it sounds as though there's a strong element of visceral carnivore/ hunting drive in there, which I guess checks out. It certainly makes sense for a partly meat-eating species to have a mode where it enjoys the sensory experience of catching and ripping apart a living animal while it screams. "Eew fresh meat, its pain gives me the squick" isn't exactly a survival-friendly instinct.

Has no one here been in the military?!

I haven't, so that's at least one. I did join the Peace Corps right after Gulf 1, which was my halfass way of serving without having the prospect of killing anyone. I think a few members have definitely served and have posted about it, but possibly didn't see this thread or assumed anything to do with reddit wasn't worth replying to.

It's a way to trivialise a serious matter and avoid an expectation of treating it seriously. Much of the time it's probably a habit they do subconsciously without considering how it affects the framing.

It's also an implied admission of distance (physical/social/psychological); those weapons are far away and pointed at someone else. Nobody describes a weapon as a toy when it's present and pointed at themself.

Probably because it is a game.

It's just part of a broader trend of infantilized language that reached its zenith with the millennials who shaped the culture and vocabulary of reddit, cf. "adulting", "girlboss", referring to people in their 20's as "kids" at risk of being "groomed" by anyone even a few years older than them, etc.

It's also a way to denigrate what a portion of the population think is a constitutional right. No one would think a toy deserves special protection so that's why they push that phrasing.

I think it's a more general pattern of referring to (some) adult male-coded things that way. "Toy" wouldn't be out of place referring to motorcycles, power tools, or construction equipment either. Loosely, I think it implies "nice to have" in a way that maybe isn't really necessary.

I'm not sure I'd use it for weapons in a hot war, though. Maybe for (morally-justified?) exercises of technical superiority: the F-22 is a very shiny toy that has but one (unmanned) aerial combat victory to its credit, right up until it isn't. Quasi-disposable drones operated from safe and secure Nevada are maybe toys. A battle rifle handed to a grunt in a trench with live fire overhead is not a thing to joke about.

That’s the thing if they were talking about their Gucci AR that they only ever took to the range I could see it, but when you’re talking about an artillery system in a currently ongoing war that is definitely going to kill people, it feels so ghoulish.

War is ghoulish endeavor. There was a saying that only losing generals have glorious victories, because they are the ones that haven't seen what battlefield aftermath is after winning.

Could you provide additional context? Is this about drones?

Literally any kind of weapon. Small arms, artillery systems, cruise missiles, ships, heavy bombers. Every time there’s a new weapons system delivered to Ukraine it’s “Ukraine has some fun new toys to play with” or “Operation Spiderweb destroyed a lot of Russia’s toys”. Once you notice it, you notice that they do it constantly and it’s really started grinding my gears.

Reddit is to my gears as a big bag of unshelled peanuts and gravel would be if thrown, bag and all, into a fine clockwork. There is only grinding. Short extremely niche subs, I can't stand visiting the site.

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