141–150 of 223 posts
Not politically correct, but essentially the truth about human nature. These two statements: 1. “War is so compelling that you can even get a room full of pacifists to pay money to be entertained by it.”" 2. "“My sister is a complete and utter feminist and pacifist,” he explains. “She doesn’t see the irony. She’s participating in this wonderful festival … that’s reenacting a battle. Nobody reenacts the Treaty of Ghen…
Junger is saying that war is really emergent behavior: young men are violent, so they are not just willing to go to war, but want to. It's certainly a new perspective to me. I suppose it makes some sense, though it feels to me that wars today are "not what they used to be". Take WWI and WWII. There was mass draft and the country was generally behind these. I am sure there was a great number of people who were unhappy to be drafted, but it seems that here people actually believed in the existential threat to the US.
Then take the Vietnam war. Hugely unpopular. Look at this widely circulated picture of a lighter supposedly carried by a US soldier in Vietnam: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/07/10/article-2171404-14....
Now, today our military is volunteer-based and tiny compared to, say, what it was during WWII. Only a small percentage of the population serves, and are pre-selected. Is it then fair to say that all or even most young men want to go to war? It seems to me the answer is no.
So the remaining question is whether war happens because of this emergent behavior or for other reasons. Basically, if we gave that small percentage of young men something better than war, would war stop? Or would we continue to wage war anyways?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are actually interesting parallels to Silicon Valley and startups for techies. It is "the place to be", "the place to prove yourself". The cosy safety net of corporate life leaves you with the naggging feeling that you're not quite as good as someone "hacking" at the startup. The notion isn't new, Shakespeare as usual sums it up: And gentlemen in England now-a-bed Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not h…
Not being a native speaker, I can't find a handle on this quote. Can anyone please explain in simpler words what Shakespeare meant?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> “I have friends who are anthropologists and primatologists and evolutionary psychologists … [who are under] an enormous amount of pressure to generate data that shows that all gender differences are cultural.” You would think that, no matter what your goals for the roles of gender (or sex) in society are, you would achieve these goals best by deliberately seeking out and investigating the properties of the underlyi…
Are blacks less intelligent than whites? How many jews were really killed in the holocaust? These are absolutely not settled questions but what university will allow that kind of research? Who will publish it if the results support something that's illegal to publicly state? Even academics put their careers ahead of integrity when it would result in losing their career as well as being widely condemned.
The more important thing is that it was about humans. Humans did these things to other humans. You should not feel any better about what happened if you're not personally related to any of those who caused the suffering than you should feel any less offended if you're not personally related to those who suffered.
The Holocaust was a failure of humanity. As was every single genocide before and after that particular one. Turning it into a "Nazis killing Jews" story allows us to artificially distance ourselves from what happened: "I'm not a Nazi, so why should I care?" or "I have nothing against Jews, so what does it have to do with me?" ("I only hate gay people").
In Germany we have a huge problem with this. We pretend to have dealt with our history, but we vehemently oppose the idea that the "monsters" who committed that "great evil" were normal human beings. As if that would somehow make them innocent. It does quite the opposite, actually: acknowledging that it was "just" humans doing those things to humans can help us understand what made ordinary humans "like us" end up doing something that horrible to other ordinary humans.
We're actually seeing something similar with East Germany: because everybody knows East Germany was an "Unrechtsstaat" (literally the opposite of a "Rechtsstaat", or "state of law", but also implying "organized injustice") their mass surveillance and censorship was fundamentally different from our mass surveillance and censorship. There's absolutely nothing we could learn from them because by definition we're nothing like them and any attempt to portray East German life as anything other than constant suffering and oppression "trivializes" the injustice of its government.
Creating taboos around these problems doesn't solve them, it just hides them. The US hasn't solved its racism just because the current president has darker skin. Acknowledging physiological differences between sexes or even ethnic groups isn't sexist or racist. Treating people unfairly because of these differences (or assumptions about the extent of those differences via stereotype pigeonholing) is.
Not politically correct, but essentially the truth about human nature. These two statements: 1. “War is so compelling that you can even get a room full of pacifists to pay money to be entertained by it.”" 2. "“My sister is a complete and utter feminist and pacifist,” he explains. “She doesn’t see the irony. She’s participating in this wonderful festival … that’s reenacting a battle. Nobody reenacts the Treaty of Ghen…
I abhor war, but I'm not stupid enough to pretend it can be stopped with an army of unicorns farting rainbows. There are evil, greedy, nasty people out there who love to collect power just for the sake of collecting power.
As colonel Jessop says:
"Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lieutenant Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know, that Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives! You don't want the truth, because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall"
Reading history makes one acutely aware of the fact that orderly and humane societies need walls with men on them, to keep out those who don't wish it so. It's an unpalatable fact sometimes but that doesn't make it less true.
So I respect the role that armed forces plays in my peaceful life, and while I will never support an unjustified invasion of a peaceful country, and I will always dislike war, I understand it's just part of who humans are.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The army is the reason young men go to war. That's what I infer from your comment at least. What other institution is so organized, so marketed, so respected, as the army? What other institution will take you in and dedicate the same level of attention and money in guiding you? What other institution does all the above with as low of a barrier to entry? To some extent, the army provides the same benefit as a cult. Th…
Luckily in most other developed western countries it carries no prestige to be part of the army outside of certain low income / right wing / uneducated circles. To the point where the majority of university students would never consider dating someone who went to the army. While there was still conscription, if you didn't chose to do alternative civil service, you were in the minority and considered suspect.
But they would never consider dating street sweepers or shop workers or manual labourers either, or anyone else they see as beneath their social status as "university students", despite relying on those people every single day of their lives. It's pure class snobbery, and this is why many people hold "students" in contempt.
Fortunately most grow out of it when they graduate.
This is pretty interesting. I have always thought of war as a political and economic phenomenon. Why try to get by with what you currently have when you can just take what your neighbor has? In some cases it's just cheaper to go beat someone up and get their lunch money than to earn your own. Junger is saying that war is really emergent behavior: young men are violent, so they are not just willing to go to war, but w…
When thinking about war, it's better to exclude ww1 and ww2 from the sample as outliers. Of course they are the default war experience and the worst wars around, but they aren't typical.
It's emergent behaviour - it has to be, as it is endemic with human history - I think you're no more likely to stop wars than you are to stop men looking at women's breasts. You can temper the behaviour with morals and ethics but it's ready to surface at the slightest slip of those things.
It's not that young men want to go and start a war, but that some men crave power for powers sake, and it's easy to talk young men into getting involved once a war is in the offing.
Ironically the best thing you can do to temper the behaviour is to let men gather wealth and power via peaceful means, such as commerce and trade. Where this happens they usually don't go into war with their neighbours. Having the majority of the worlds people not under the sway of religion would be a good start as well, but I'm of the belief that religion is hard wired in as well - remove an ancient text and god and people usually start tot replace it with some other belief system anyway. And it would be those belief systems clashes that would probably be the 'cause' of wars down the track.
Related question: is there an elite conspiracy to keep the USA at war? "There has been no decade in which the USA has not been at war." http://www.loonwatch.com/2011/12/we-re-at-war-and-we-have-be...
I forgot who said it, but it went like this: "If people recognise the banality of war, there will be no more wars." Of course its not that simple, but we, I suppose especially us techie boys (us because I am one), think that an M1 Abrams tank, a F-15 airplane or a Sig Sauer rifle are, well, cool. We also think uniforms look good. And we dream of being heroes, especially when we are young. It is, of course, nonsense.…
This reminded me of the article "The Jihad Cult: Why Young Germans Are Answering Call to Holy War" [1] - after reading it, I got the impression that at least some young men became jihadists because they are basically narcissistic losers whose attempts to be cool via normal and non-destructive means (like becaming famous rapper or kickboxer) failed so they convinced themselves that joining ISIS is the cool thing - the…
They wanted war, let them have it all the way to the bottom with all the (percieved) glory of death. They had chance offered to become members of society they were living in, and they refused. Okay, we should respect that choice, but with all consequences. Younger age is no excuse for such mistakes.
