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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.
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 British successfully invaded Afghanistan multiple times, but never held it for prolonged periods. Which is probably what the US should have done.
There's this book, No Good Men Among the Living, which argues that the US successfully destroyed the Taliban in the invasion, but then stupid governance and our taking sides in the vast web of tribal politics brought it back.
And then the Americans, acting on bad information, stormed both 'government' offices in a nighttime raid, killing Abdul Qudus and his fellow officials (Yunis managed to escape and was never seen again). The three former Taliban guys decided that surrendering didn't seem like such a good idea and went back to Pakistan where they helped lead the new Taliban insurgency.
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I don't really know anything about the history of Britain in Afghanistan, but it's worth noting that the Empire tended to operate on the Roman model - the incoming Brits put and keep an appropriate member of the local royal caste on the throne, we help keep things orderly, we invest to some extent and we make various rather one-sided trade deals.
The Americans (and probably the USSR) were hamstrung by being explicit regime-changers rather than 'you can keep things basically the same as they were, with us technically on top but generally hands-off'.
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That's not a good comparison though. USSR also invaded it, and they lost. And then USA lost too. Like sure they could have won if they went full scorched earth, and decimated any civilian areas. But at that point it's a slaughter, it's not a war. There wouldn't be anything left to conquer.
And I think that if they were more ruthless, there would be far more attacks on the West too.
I'm think USA could've actually won if they were far more aggressive and stern handed, and focused into making it into a new state of USA, and not the half-assed version they did. But ultraviolence wouldn't be the answer.
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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.
The US probably could have destroyed the Taliban, but it would have involved getting into a war with a (supposedly friendly, though that comes with more caveats than Trump's Mar-a-Lago files) nuclear power. Still, suppose the US actually wins. Fighters killed, all remaining people too cowed to put up armed resistance. What does the US get out of it? Some land halfway across the world. Sure, it's not worth NOTHING; it would certainly make Russia and Iran nervous. But it wouldn't be worth the squeeze.
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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.
Uh, Hadrian wants a word.
Somehow I doubt the "understanding of insurgency" that you imagine exists actually works in any real sense. More violence or no violence are the only two answers.
How much of modern "theory of war" (for want of a better term) ever gets empirically confirmed or rejected by military practice? I used to assume the sort of people who wrote for Foreign Policy/Foreign Affairs knew what they were talking about, but after browsing /r/geopolitics over the past two years and constantly seeing similar headlines from those sorts of sources that always end up proving laughably wrong I'm beginning to wonder how much insight these people really have.
It's all officers, who by definition are not soldiers and know fuck and shit about fighting all making up theories about how soldiers fight. They quite literally know nothing. They're vaguely aware that they're in charge of fighting, and a good officer might even know which sergeant he needs to tell to go fight, but they know as much about the process as a big city mayor knows about trash collection.
Very nearly 100% of all military analysis, history and theory has been catalogued and written by people who have never even seen a gunfight firsthand, much less kicked a door. Interesting so far as it goes, but to use any of it as a practical manual is ridiculous.
Do you have any idea why we still have this system where our officers (mostly, with commissioning-program exceptions) don't start as soldiers? It feels like an outdated relic of "aristocrats get to be officers, commoners just get to be enlisted" days that are now centuries past. I could imagine a system of "try to pick out your smartest recruits, and put them in charge of the others when they've had enough study and experience", but the attitude "put them in charge when they've had enough study; what good is experience?" is baffling to me. It seems like the system depends in part on at least some of the smartest recruits getting missed by or rejecting it. That happens (one of the smartest kids I knew went enlisted Air Force, and I had a friend decide "Chemical engineering has been so stultifying, I'd rather be marching on Baghdad"), but it seems dangerous to rely on.
It's not like the system has just been unaware of the importance of its NCOs, either. Supposedly one of the Army OCS test questions from ~1950 was "You are in charge of a detail of 11 men and a sergeant. There is a 25-foot flagpole lying on the sandy, brush-covered ground. You are to erect the pole. What is your first order?", to which the answer was of course "Sergeant, erect that flagpole."
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I know embarrassingly little about the military, but don't officers typically start out as soldiers? Or are full-on wars these days so rare that by the time they're promoted to officers, most of them haven't actually done much fighting?
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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.
While I agree we weren’t ‘nice’ in Afghanistan, uh, worse than WWII is quite a take.
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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.
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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.
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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
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.
From acoup:
The difference between dragging a civilian out of their house and shooting them in the head and dropping a bomb on the from the air is that for the former, there is no ambiguity of intent. Luckily for us, Sir Harris has left no doubt about his intent. WP estimates peak around 350k dead Germans from the air raids, while the total number of civilian deaths in GWBs Afghan adventure is given as 46k.
Both of these numbers include casualties which were genuinely unintended. Some civilians will always die in war. But in my world model, the median Afghan civilian death was unintended while the median German air raid death was intended.
(Lest there be any confusion about me whining about dead Germans, let me also state that the conduct of the Western Allies in WW2 was the least war-criminal of all the parties involved.)
That being said, I agree that any intentional killing of civilians is terrible. Ideally, it should happen very rarely and the perpetrators should be punished similarly to civilian murderers. For the US troops in Afghanistan, I do not think that there existed a directive to kill as many civilians as possible, but GWB was obviously not very concerned with human rights. So I think that there was a widespread culture of commanders turning a blind eye to any human rights violations their unit might commit.
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"War crimes"
Jesus. Son, you need an education.
Read up on the US civil war, especially the "irregular" areas. Go look up Canadian war trophies, WW1. Go read the history of the Red Army's advance to Berlin in WW2. Go read absolutely any actual memoir from any actual soldier in any actual war, and see how much of it you've been taught to think is "war crimes". Then go read the actual history and definition of war crimes and the incidence of prosecution (or not).
And when you're done, come back and tell the class what you learned. Right now, you simply don't know enough about the subject to even ask the right questions.
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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I think you might be doing a little WWII-washing of what wars are like. Everything you described seeing in A Grunt’s Life is stuff that occurred in WWII, and received much more of a wink and a nod or a slap on the wrist at the time. On the topic of body part collections, in 1944 a sitting U.S. Representative (D - Penn) presented President Roosevelt with a letter opener made from a Japanese soldier’s arm. That’s way higher level than an Lt hiding his tooth collection or whatever.
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.
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100% agreed. Obligatory acoup on strategic airpower, aka morale bombings.
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