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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   24859 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

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Apparently zoink does.

As I indicated in my response to him, it's to illustrate a point in principle. Sure, the US military has often been used badly. The US military's record over the last thirty years is pretty darn embarrassing. The point I am making, citing Heinlein, is that past incompetence notwithstanding, it is both necessary and good for the US military to be able to deploy a wide range of levels of force, as appropriate for many different mission profiles.

I read @zoink's comment as calling for decisive action and full commitment. That does not require using maximum violence in all cases.

Well, he said, "The United States should stop with this half ass shit... If the US decides that you are deserving of its wrath there is no resistance, there is capitulation or everyone dies."

I asked a clarificatory question: "Er, are you advocating that the US should only do nothing or destroy its enemies utterly? And if the standard for utter destruction is astronomically high, doesn't that imply that most of the time the US should do nothing?"

His response to this question was: "Errr... um...errr.... ummm....uuuuur... Correct."

I took that to mean that, yes, his position is as I described it - that the US should either do nothing, or completely annihilate its enemies with nothing in between.

I believe that the point in the Starship Troopers passage, and the metaphor of punishing a baby by cutting its head off, is an effective argument against that position. Sometimes a military should enact a level of destruction that stops somewhere short of "everyone dies" (zoink's words) or "utter destruction" (mine), because the policy goals that a nation might wish to achieve with military action might be, well, something other than complete annihilation of its foes.

Now to his credit zoink seems to back off from his statement and say that he was using bombastic rhetoric. I'm not entirely sure what his actual position is - he rejects the child comparison but concedes he was using extreme rhetoric, but does he concede the actual point of controversy, that is, that some mission profiles call for less than maximum force, and that is desirable for the US military (or any military) to be able to exert controlled force for limited effect? But I stand by what I said as being a reasonable interpretation of what he had said at the time.

This is a more correct reading, but I was being bombastic and did reference nukes and killing "everyone". I completely deny the comparisons to disciplining children. The military breaks things until whatever the state wants to happen happens. Deploying the military should involve wailing and gnashing of teeth as we beg God for forgiveness for what we may do.

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