Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A violently true depiction of what war really is

mediumdifficulty.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 264 posts

Re: A violently true depiction of what war really is

#51

Post by angersock »

itmag wrote: post #41

As a personal development junkie, I find war to be very problematic (well duh). Killing people is just so... unenlightened. Then again, I find the warrior ethos or what you might call the male Warrior archetype to be of great interest. It's pretty obvious that this is something that the modern world very much lacks, at least we don't have any formal initiation rites for it (going to Marine boot camp might qualify tho…

"Killing people is just so... unenlightened."

Care to elaborate? As far as I know, war practiced at the societal level is usually not for personal development.

Re: A violently true depiction of what war really is

#52

Post by angrycoder »

Nitramp wrote: post #28
angrycoder wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>martial arts won't help This is patently false and completely ridiculous. Someone who is trained to take and give a hit will always have a significantly better chance in a fight.

How so? All I ever heard from people who did serious martial arts is that an attacker with a weapon will always be in advantage, and an attacker with no moral qualms even more so. Your karate won't help you much if someone attacks you with a knife, or a shattered bottle.

That is the problem with painting the martial arts with such a broad brush. Many styles have techniques specifically designed to deal with knife/gun/weapon attacks, and some styles are designed mostly around dealing with such things.

A broken bottle is probably not as dangerous as you may think. A knife, you are probably going to get cut but your attacker will fair far worse. A gun becomes less useful the closer an attacker is, during something like a mugging, they are typically very close.

But, even when learning how to deal with an attacker with a knife or gun, any decent instructor will tell you the best response is just to give them what they want and get out of there. It is the same as when engaging in just a fist fight, it is more a matter of 'is this worth it' or 'do I have a choice here' rather than 'can I take this guy'.

Re: A violently true depiction of what war really is

#53

Post by spindritf »

gizmo wrote: post #34
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #21

I am very tempted to flag this. the sociopath thing really rubs me the wrong way -- there are logical flaws with using that label. War is a part of society. If society tells you to go kill somebody and you do, you can't be a sociopath. Having said that, it's a great first-person account of what real combat is like, at least for this one guy. I am concerned the effect on HN discussion will be negative. Hopefully I'm w…

> War is part of society War is part of society? To barbaric ones maybe. Civilized societies don't settle disputes by mass murder. > If society tells you to go kill somebody and you do, you can't be a sociopath. Are you kidding me? Society can't tell a person to go kill somebody. A person tells another person to kill somebody. It is this absurd respect for authority that makes these wars possible, combined with a lac…

> War is part of society? To barbaric ones maybe. Civilized societies don't settle disputes by mass murder.

It's quite the opposite -- only civilized societies can have the kind of logistics, range, military culture, ability to support the warrior class (or standing armies), and numbers to engage in organized warfare. Conflicts between small bands of foragers can hardly be even called war.

Not to mention mass murder which absolutely requires the kind of discipline, organization and leadership only a very cohesive and civilized society can provide. It just doesn't happen outside of civilization, no one has the means, or could benefit from it. Anything of the scale of holocaust is only possible in a highly industrialized country.

> So now poor kids with few options are recruited into the military. Problem solved.

Actually, poor kids seem to be enlisting at lower rates (relatively) to richer kids:

> Enlisted recruits in 2006 and 2007 came primarily from middle-class and upper-middle-class backgrounds. Low-income neighborhoods were underrepresented among enlisted troops, while middle-class and high-income neighborhoods were overrepresented.

This and much more on the topic: http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/08/who-serves-...

Re: A violently true depiction of what war really is

#54

Post by mikeryan »

roboneal wrote: post #7

Being ex-military and not a sociopath -- he lost me when he said that the "vast majority of us are straight up sociopaths" We constantly made decisions that increased the risk to ourselves while trying to minimize the risk to civilians. That is not a mindset of a sociopath.

This is also a guy who left the gov't military to become a "private military contractor". He's a lifer and sometimes you have to try to bring everyone to your level by casting them as "sociopaths" in order to sleep at night.

We do it for real, time and time again, with no other motivation but pay, leave, and the chance to brutalise whomever we deem the “enemy”.

scary.

Re: A violently true depiction of what war really is

#55

Post by skeltoac »

munin wrote: post #36
skeltoac wrote: post #12

"the vast majority of us are straight up sociopaths" Society can't function without socially acceptable outlets for this and other anti-social behaviors. That is the best justification I have found for a long list of things that don't seem to make sense in an enlightened society. What would the world be like if we didn't have the Army and NFL? A lot of people would find new, more chaotic outlets for their aggression.

I think fewer people would have a problem with this if the outlet for sociopathic aggression didn't involve detonating women and children

Few people will like this, too, including myself, but the truth is that as long as they aren't "our" women and children...

I'm kissing my hard-earned 198 away here by speaking truth. Hate the truth, not the speaker.

Re: A violently true depiction of what war really is

#56

Post by gizmo »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #40
stcredzero wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

War is a part of society. If society tells you to go kill somebody and you do, you can't be a sociopath. I usually like most of your contributions, but reasoning like this bugs me. "Society" in your reasoning is being treated something like a mathematical set. Society isn't so cleanly defined. Even for that, one could still have psychopathic tendencies, be told to by society to go and kill, but go and kill for comple…

I must be missing what ticked you off here. We set up a system where society approves of the use of lethal force. (In fact, many believe the true defining characteristic of a government is the monopoly in the use of force) People are instructed by this system to go kill people. As long as that's all the information we have, there's nothing to indicate that these people care nothing about societal norms. In fact, they…

You're being too literal about the word psychopath. The original article claims, in essence, that war creates an environment where ordinary people can kill without it affecting them much personally. That is, from a behavioral point of view, what psychopaths do in regular society.

The article definitely isn't claiming that the 5% of so of humanity that is genetically incapable of feeling (much) empathy (i.e. sociopaths) make up 80% of the military corpus. The math obviously doesn't work out.

The article claims that war changes people. Some end up with PTSD, other people cope in another other way that makes them look like psychopaths.

Re: A violently true depiction of what war really is

#57

Post by mattquinn »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #21

I am very tempted to flag this. the sociopath thing really rubs me the wrong way -- there are logical flaws with using that label. War is a part of society. If society tells you to go kill somebody and you do, you can't be a sociopath. Having said that, it's a great first-person account of what real combat is like, at least for this one guy. I am concerned the effect on HN discussion will be negative. Hopefully I'm w…

"If society tells you to go kill somebody and you do, you can't be a sociopath."

...what? I'm at a loss for words on this one. Just because society - a large, faceless group prone to rallying around propaganda and emotional bandwagons - embraces a cause, doesn't mean it's acceptable by default to kill in the name of that cause.

And it certainly doesn't mean you're not a sociopath.

Re: A violently true depiction of what war really is

#58

Post by majelix »

mattdeboard wrote: post #6

As a former Marine infantryman, and a former Marine PR idiot, I think his numbers are off but a lot of the concepts are right, with a caveat. It's not sociopathy of the organic sort. It's the kind of detachment from prolonged exposure to extreme, unmitigated stress. So don't take this article as justification to feel like there's something mentally wrong with people who join a combat arms unit.

W saddens me; he's clearly dealing with guilt by just labeling himself and his buddies as sociopaths.

Re: A violently true depiction of what war really is

#59

Post by gizmo »

spindritf wrote: post #53
gizmo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> War is part of society War is part of society? To barbaric ones maybe. Civilized societies don't settle disputes by mass murder. > If society tells you to go kill somebody and you do, you can't be a sociopath. Are you kidding me? Society can't tell a person to go kill somebody. A person tells another person to kill somebody. It is this absurd respect for authority that makes these wars possible, combined with a lac…

> War is part of society? To barbaric ones maybe. Civilized societies don't settle disputes by mass murder. It's quite the opposite -- only civilized societies can have the kind of logistics, range, military culture, ability to support the warrior class (or standing armies), and numbers to engage in organized warfare. Conflicts between small bands of foragers can hardly be even called war. Not to mention mass murder…

I present to you: Ghengis Kahn. 40 million people died as a result of his campaigns. Civilized society? Not at all. Just organized tribal warfare.

> Actually, poor kids seem to be enlisting at lower rates (relatively) to richer kids

Huh. I stand corrected.

Re: A violently true depiction of what war really is

#60

Post by [deleted] »

orbitingpluto wrote: post #24
cpursley wrote: post #10

I can't imagine how anyone enjoys games like these unless they really are sociopaths. War is when young men go die for the old men's mistakes and kill a lot of women in children in the process.

You have empathy issues. Plain and simple. :P I find the source of most of the fun is the initial hit of adrenaline that lasts for about 10 minutes when playing multiplayer. It gets pretty old after that so I rarely play them. I have a large stack of shrinkwrapped freebies including war fps that I haven't yet touched dating back to 2009. Usually I just give them away. I prefer the fps games where complete suspension…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN