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 -
I've been really thinking about this tweet.
This point is interesting, and I think rather noteworthy. There were many protests over the Vietnam conscription, Muhammad Ali's being the most famous example, so perhaps saying no backlash at all is a bit hastey. And who could forget our poor friends in Ukraine.
Still, I think she raises an interesting point. Most men still, (both legally and socially). Have to abide by the traditional man script. And this pressure is more on them then womens end of the social contract, which (from what I can see) is basically non existent.
Now the easiest explanation for this double standard is probably just gender bias: we simply have less empathy for men as a whole.
The way I see it, there are a couple of plausible solutions to make things for fair or consistent(any additional ones are welcome):
Gender "Equality". Extend "bodily autonomy" rights (for those who are actually consistent and believe in the concept, as a side note, I believe this is just a silly excuse) to men and end the draft, eliminate male disposability. Both men and women ask each other out. Stop valueing men as pure economic units. Men aren't wallets or soldiers, their people! Ect. Basically "Masculism" or some variation of MRA movement.
Extend the social contract obligations to women, and all that entails. Basically bring back some (or all) of the "patriarchy".
From what I can tell, 1 has kinda been tried, and has basically failed, probably due to the gender bias mentioned. I imagine Lauren favors the 2nd option, (& I kinda do). Implementing it may be unrealistic, however, due to various political and environmental constraints. I think realistically though, we are probably gonna have take a hard examination at the female end of the social contract at some-point, when birth rates and their implications become more severe and un-ignorable. Maybe we get lucky technology bails us out, but fundementally, I find the prospect of a society with no children, no families, etc, to be deeply dystopian.
I think one thing conscription shows (and the fact that many societies have it) is that, no society really wants to cease to exist. Nor should we. There is something valuable about societies existing, and continuing on into the future, even if we have to make some sacrifices for it. I think one can make a case (and many indeed do!) for extending some modified version of the social contract/roles to women. I've been deep thought about if societies might attempt this in the future, or what a modified variation of feminine roles/obilgations would look like. What do you think?
As to the draft specifically my preference is that we abolish it entirely or, in the alternative, draft men and women equally. The way war is fought today it seems to me women could substantially contribute in a way that was much less true before the industrialization of war. Especially in an existential context, it would seem foolish not to bend all society's available capacity towards survival. I find some amusement in the fact that, historically, this has been the more feminist/leftist position on the draft while the more conservative position has been keeping a gender-segregated draft.
What, exactly, does this entail? Are we going to restrict women's ability to work outside the home? Bring back a form of coverture? To me this reads like another of those situations where a hypothetical burden on men, regardless of its actualization, is used to justify oppressing women in a way that does not seem, to me, very justifiable.
If we abolish the draft entirely then authoritarian states with less scruples would eventually overpower and dominate all the countries that tried to do so. Then they'd do things like what Russia did with the Donbass and use their subjugated lands to go after their next round of conquests.
If we instead drafted men and women equally, this would almost certainly devolve into mere performative equality where women are mostly given noncombat roles.
If we were really committed to equality then we'd run up against the reality that women don't make great frontline soldiers, and would face even greater risk of abuse if they were ever captured.
Evolution has made men into warriors and women into childbearers. You can try to push against that but you'll always come up against biological realities.
Evolution makes everyone into a warrior. Males may be generally better, but one glance at the dangerous wild and how basically all other species operates tells us that females will fight too when needed.. The world was and is not kind enough to let anyone coast through so easily.
But even more importantly, modern warfare just doesnt really care as much about your physical capabilities as nature did, what wins war isn't manly men with thick abs swinging their muscular fists at each other anymore. Instead what truly wins modern wars (if things are even "winnable" traditionally now) is the logistics and science, even Rambo has no defense against a drone swarm.
Ukraine hasn't turned the tides on Russia because they sent ther men to the gym, but because they've engineered incredible new advancements in weapons systems and made tons of logistical optimizations. Just recently they even took over a Russian position without a single boot on the ground. And it's only going to get more and more common.
Women also get btfo'd in hand-eye coordination contests, which doesn't bode well for female drone pilots, and logistics games are probably one of the most male-skewed hobbies on the planet.
Oh don't worry about that, way things are going it seems that drone pilots won't be nearly as good as the automated AI systems in the near future either. They're already better at driving (most relevant given it's direct proof that automated systems are better at controlling machines already and they're just gonna need to figure out the proper parameters for war), at diagnosing people, and apparently even at appearing to be human. Human operated full drone warfare will be a really short part of history.
AI systems are going to make riflemen into effective anti-drone marksmen much faster than they are going to equalize the differences between men and women in combat.
And since AI systems are easily fooled by anyone who has played Metal Gear, we won't be getting rid of the infantrymen any time soon, either.
Your argument is that warfare descending into AI machines vs AI machines doesn't help to equalize biological differences?
They aren't perfect absolutely not, but these types of arguments are increasingly looking like the ones used against self driving cars where someone will say "But look, it accidently hit a cat this one time!" while ignoring the many many many other areas, and the general statistics where technology has matched or even improved over humans.
We saw this in practice already, a real life position was just taken from boots on the ground by machines. And again remember it's gonna keep getting better.
Warfare is more going to iterate to machine-assisted humans versus machine-assisted humans. On the ground, things like reaction time and muscle mass will still matter for the foreseeable future.
Self driving cars are actually a decent example of the direction warfare is headed, because they are not fully autonomous. Rather, self-driving cars are "human in the loop" technology that operate with the aid of human guidance. You should think of this less as replacing humans directly and more pushing them into a different, ideally more efficient line of work.
Arguably Waymo is behind the military; the US fielded long-range fire-and-forget computer-controlled missiles in the 1970s and the Phalanx CIWS in the 1980s, and both systems can operate fully autonomously once human guidance is released, something it seems self-driving cars still struggle with.
Ukrainian unmanned ground vehicles are similar, inasmuch as they are not supposed to replace troops wholesale, but rather allow them to operate more safely. Most UGVs in Ukraine are assigned to logistics tasks, not combat.
Firstly, Ukrainian war marketing propaganda, even if accurate, has little evidentiary value without context which even the Ukrainians likely lack - "a real life position was just taken from boots on the ground by machines" could simply be a case of "the Russians decided to abandon their position because it had become an untenable logistically" or "the Russians wanted to bait Ukraine into moving troops into it so they could plaster them with glide bombs."
Secondly, while the position might have been taken by "machines," it was not taken by "AI," it was taken by humans using remote control. This is World War Two-era technology that is probably well suited for Ukraine's needs because of the specifics of its military situation, but may be less (or differently) relevant in other, more battlespaces. Remote-controlled cars that cannot do things like "scale a fence" or "open a door" are not on the cusp of replacing grunts.
(The article you linked to references the TerMIT, Zmiy, and Protector; none of these appear to be autonomous vehicles.)
I'm not saying or suggesting that "robots won't come to the military." To an under-appreciated degree, the (US) military has had substantially autonomous systems for longer than I am alive, and we will continue to see systems with various degrees of autonomy proliferate. In the US military, likely to a degree greatly exceeding the military of Ukraine, AI already is allowed to execute on human decisions with autonomy (any self-guiding weapon) and assist human judgment (most aircraft, submarines, etc. have AI-assisted sensor filters). These technologies have not filtered down to dismounts to the degree that they have to high-end weapons systems, and that is likely to happen before infantry are replaced by machines, if only because the combination of intelligence, endurance, and mobility in a human-sized package is extremely expensive at best, even if infantry-bot does not need to carry out the many secondary peacetime operations that are required of troops.
More options
Context Copy link
As someone peripherally close to this field, I think there is a categorical distinction between a self-driving car tuned to drive against random road occurrences and an adversarial model that is actively looking for weaknesses and forcing the worst decisionmaking situations. As a concrete example, self driving cars of today probably don't worry about murals of tunnels adjacent to roadways (Roadrunner style): it's not a common occurrence. But in war you'd absolutely want your self-driving tank to not drive into such traps, and you'd expect your enemy to mass deploy paint to make it happen all at once.
A bunch of traffic cones on hoods seems able to stop Waymos, for example.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link