This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
Their more serious series is A Grunt's Life. This one... is interesting, but it's a very tough watch.
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.
Civilian discovers war involves killing and vets have dark senses of humor. And marines are gay.
News at 11.
Wait until he finds out what they do with crayons.
You know I think you see war less in media these days and OIF/OEF were "small" in many ways. The military is pushed out of our culture in a way that's kinda new given the World Wars and Vietnam have defined American identity for a long time.
I'm wondering if you see vets in political office less now?
The vets we see in politics today are coming commonly from middle-ranking specops officers (there's apparently a direct pipeline from Navy officers to congress). Previously it tended to be high-ranking commanding officers (Eisenhower) or low-ranking ones from aristocratic families (Kennedy, Bush). I'm not sure what the actual numbers are, or the trends over time, but the type of vets who are becoming politicians are changing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If you enjoy getting a dark, "this is what war is like" perspective from a veteran, Phil Klay's "Missionaries" is educational.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not a vet, but I made some effort to follow the war in Afghanistan as closely as possible for much of its duration. My understanding is that the Afghan war was quite bad.
The "winning hearts and minds" aspect appears to have been aimed primarily at American hearts and minds, not Afghani ones. That is, the goal was to persuade Americans that they were winning Afghani hearts and minds so the mission could be sustained, as opposed to actually winning Afghani hearts and minds. When the Afganistan papers leaked following the pullout, my understanding is that this was more or less confirmed by internal documentation; the leadership and administration had no idea how to actually win the war or what that would even look like, and so they defaulted to "what can we do that will look good back home?"
The Taliban appears to have had what amounts to a durable public mandate throughout the war, and there is at least some argument that they were in fact the good guys, to the extent that the term applies to a place as alien as Afganistan. They'd ruthlessly suppressed opium cultivation and the practice of Bacha Bazi, ie organized rape of young boys, to give two examples of concrete moral issues; the factions we sided with were, from the accounts I've heard, enthusiastic proponents of both. I've heard numerous accounts from vets about how they were ordered to not interfere with drug cultivation, and how they were told to ignore what their Afghan "allies" were doing in their barracks on the weekends.
I would argue that the higher-up officers were in no sense "correct". They were essentially running a scam, whereby they ordered the low-level soldiers to do highly dangerous, exceptionally pointless and often quite evil things in pursuit of meaningless bureaucratic objectives, shoulder to shoulder with "allies" who were frequently moral monsters, and not-uncommonly on the enemy's payroll. On top of that, they're soldiers, not policemen, and their entire training and corporate ethos is based around breaking things and killing people. They're a hammer, and most of the things around them are nails, and some of the things that aren't nails probably ought to be... This was not an environment that encourages deep ethical analysis and carefully regulated restraint.
I was prepping for deployment when they rolled that "hearts and minds" shit out. We started referring to the Mozambique drill as the "Hearts and Minds" drill. Two in the heart, one in the mind.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Oh, I was a fan of the series, at least back when they were putting full episodes on YT. I'm not enough of a fan to pay for their bespoke platform. I know quite a few vets, and they heartily endorse the show, most of the jokes have a generalized kernel of truth to them.
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...
There's definitely strong selection bias in effect. The people who aren't hardcore fans are almost certainly not paying money for access.
Funnily enough, I personally think that the war in Afghanistan wasn't violent enough. If you can't solve your problems through violence, you're not applying enough violence. The American brass thought you could win against an insurgency by being nice, and that never gets you anywhere I'm afraid.
From my understanding, the US was willing to use drones to attack weddings to kill a few Taliban along with dozens of civilians. Are you arguing that they should have done more of that?
A classical counter-insurgency strategy is to figure out (or guess) where an insurgent was coming from, and then simply kill all of the people in their home village. Roughly since WW2, strategies of this kind are universally recognized as war crimes, however.
Besides, while this might deter secular insurgents, religious insurgents are often indifferent towards the life of their countrymen. See Hamas. So the way this strategy would have made peace in Afghanistan would have been through genocide.
The US had the technical capabilities to turn Afghanistan into a desert and call it "peace", but they thankfully did not have the political capabilities to do that.
Yes. I do think the US military should have been more ruthless. The British conquered Afghanistan and held it for a long time, at a time of far less technological disparity. A lump sum of competent ultraviolence often adds up to less net violence than a prolonged quagmire where you're desperately trying to use the bare minimum, below which you would straight up lose. And in the end, the US did lose.
The US didn't lose for lack of violence. If they'd chimp out, the Taliban could just hide, wait until it blows over, at atart taking shots once the guard is lowered again. The technological disparity is an American diaadvatage there, because the costs of mobilizing a modern army are higher than leaving some IEDs on the road.
The reason why they lost is that they got high on their own supply about muh freedom, democracy, and whatnot. In some inverse of "magical dirt theory" they thought that if you give Afghans and Iraqis a few western institutions, they will become westerners, and neglected basics like teaching them that they should fight for their own country.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Our understanding of insurgency is pretty developed at this point, and applying more violence is not the answer.
The problem in Afghanistan was lack of clarity from the very top about America's goals, which is why the military couldn't build a coherent insurgency or counter-insurgency plan. Instead they just applied violence to whoever happened to be looking funny at the US at any given moment. More of that would have been disastrous.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
Lol, WW2 was nicer than afghanistan?
See, this is the sort of thing civilians believe that makes it necessary for vets to have their own entertainment. Bonkers.
More options
Context Copy link
WW2 involved deliberately flattening German and Japanese cities. Allied strategic bombing alone is estimated to have killed over a million civilians in the space of about four years. And that's before we talk about the Soviets or the Axis.
More options
Context Copy link
This is a bit extreme, even if you were going for hyperbole. I mean, WW2 ended with the US dropping two nukes on Japan lol
100% agreed. Obligatory acoup on strategic airpower, aka morale bombings.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think the target audience is very important here, these shows strike me like exactly the kinds of stories fellow enlisted dream up and tell each other based on a mix of harsh reality, dark fantasy, but mostly just blowing off steam that you can only fully understand if you were there. By far the most accurate portrayal of modern military life in a warzone I've seen is Generation Kill, highly recommend it if you're interested in this kind of thing.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link