Why Young Men Go to War • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Young Men Go to War

#211

Post by BuckRogers » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 5:53 PM UTC

hueving wrote: post #169

BuckRogers wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to clear that up with this, "Short of having foreign troops as we have them overseas, in your hometown." I was trying to convey that there is always an alternative unless it's out of self-defense. If the Chinese were in the US today, I'm not sure we'd have much choice. I'm also not sure the people of the mideast have much choice either. Does anyone seriously expect them to embrace our "help"? It's asinine and…

>It meshes with my personal experiences quite well. Unless someone takes a swing at me, I don't fight. I get by well with this principle. Oh? And what would you do if you came across someone beating a child to death? Just watch and wait for him/her to take a swing at you before intervening?

I normally wouldn't respond to someone being downvoted, but I genuinely want to help people like yourself see this another way. The child beating scenario is a hypothetical. A 1:1 mapping with today's situation is that this child would be in Shanghai. I could fly over and try to save that child. Or, I could rely on those people that are surrounding the child already to have a more vested interest than I do as someone on the other side of the globe.

Am I to fly around the world, saving everyone? Is that even possible? What about the children not immediately near me, but closer than Shanghai? Haiti or Mexico for example. I think the people in the Shanghai region have more responsibility to save that child than me. When we did try to save that child in Iraq, we ignored the child in Haiti, Mexico and here at home too. And so many unintended consequences (like the region assuming: oh, the US is here, we'll do nothing now). People are good across the globe, it's naive to think we're the only one interested in saving children. Unfortunately it's usually a political ruse than a genuine interest to help. Instead, the children here, Haiti and Mexico either have no oil, or are already under US political control- so the industrialists in bed with the gov't don't care about children beaten there. That's the real answer.

Also, does anyone honestly believe the people of Shanghai -want- our help saving their beaten children? Just about as much as we want the Chinese coming to San Francisco to save our children in need.

Hypotheticals are good for making points easier to get across. But I wouldn't accept an overly simplified hypothetical like yours without qualifications. The way you framed yours lines up with how the war profiteers want the argument to be framed. I mean, Shanghai is a big enough city that you know for a fact that there is literally a child being beaten there, right now. There's many good reasons you're not buying a ticket personally to go find that child and save him or her.

You could say, "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." Well then, best order your ticket now. Think about those reasons why you aren't doing that. Those are the same reasons we shouldn't be sending guys with -guns- over there either to "help". If you do this exercise you'll understand how absurd the whole thing is.

Re: Why Young Men Go to War

#212

Post by orkoden » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 6:18 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #151

scrrr wrote: post #87

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.…

> If people recognise the banality of war, there will be no more wars It's not that wars are seen as heroic, or religious differences and other such BS. A lot of modern wars can be explained as the results of colonialism (either traditional or in its current covert form). Larger countries have interests in exploiting less powerful countries, to get control of trade areas, cheap oil and labor, etc. Of course they say…

Wars were fought before western colonization too. Lots of current conflicts have nothing to do with colonization.

Re: Why Young Men Go to War

#213

Post by eli_gottlieb » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 11:09 PM UTC

orbifold wrote: post #197

happyscrappy wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the US were just like Euroweenies there would be no Europe.

You have a very poor grasp of history if you mistake the lessons learned out of two brutal world wars, not to mention the senseless history of violence that preceded it, with some kind of cowardice. Your viewpoint can probably be traced back to some notion of Anglo-Saxon supremacy, that by now has lost its racial undertones and lives on as the idea of American exceptionalism: That somehow the US is a gift to the worl…

I'm as against American imperialism and militarism as anyone, but the EU simply has severe problems when taken as a self-defending military power. Namely: most EU countries are not up-to-date on their budget, equipment, and soldier contributions to the CSDP and NATO. This means that most of keeping Europe militarily stable - despite bordering Russia, the Middle East, and North Africa - falls to the American forces.

Meanwhile, Americans are kept in poverty to fund the military force that lets Europe and Japan be generous to their citizens. How just can that be?

Re: Why Young Men Go to War

#214

Post by brc » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 11:53 PM UTC

IgorPartola wrote: post #207

brc wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The truth about Vietnam is that it is an unpopular war now, and towards the end of it, but when American involvement escalated in the beginning, support was pretty widespread. 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…

Agreed with you re. Vietnam. That is a good point. Not quite agreed on WWI/II. Lots of modern military and foreign policy is based on the aftermath of WWII. After all, that was the last war that the US was involved in. All the ones after that were "operations", and the US never formally declared war on another country since. They aren't typical, yet they are always the ones other wars are compared against. So war is…

My point with ww1 and ww2 is that, if you graphed wars by people involved, destruction, whatever, they stick out of the group by a long way. I think your looking at the picture with too much of a us-centric view. The US is not involved in the majority of wars, at least not directly with men nondescript materials. You're right in that the world wars are all part of the same narrative about destabilisation that leads to other wars - arguably the majority of conflicts around today have roots in both.

But if you look at some more topical wars/conflicts - say the Arab/Israel conflict from 1948-present you see that it's not just about gaining territory but far deeper things (territory is the score, but the purpose is much deeper) plus the military conflicts during this period have been much more conventional with the majority of attacks being primarily military. Lately it has gone more asymmetrical and terrorism v conventional military but initially it was tanks on battlefields. Again other conflicts in the he second half of the twentieth century were far make typical wars in that they were relatively localised, didn't involve things like carpet bombing civilian population and didn't involve mass troop movements. Even Vietnam and Korea, wars with direct US involvement, had a fraction of the men deployed as compared with Ww2.

Also, it's a good point about making the cost of a war prohibitive - we have the means to do this now - but the costs of a war don't usually fall onto the main aggressors on all sides. Typically it falls onto the soldiers, refugees and ordinary citizens. If powerful countries were prepared to apply the costs of war to those who start them, the incidence would go down. But you spiral into an eye-for-an-eye retaliation which is a worse mess.

Re: Why Young Men Go to War

#215

Post by Crito » Sat, Apr 18, 2015, 12:15 AM UTC

pestaa wrote: post #100

wyager wrote: post #32

Well, 66% of the men in WW2 and 38% of those deployed to Vietnam went to war because the government forced them into the military under threat of imprisonment.

Well, you can't put millions behind bars.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

Re: Why Young Men Go to War

#216

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 18, 2015, 8:36 AM UTC

throwaway344 wrote: post #172

saiya-jin wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you're probably american, so you're forgiven for this ignorance, but europe consists of +-50 sovereign states. Even now with EU (that doesn't contain many states), declaring a war is always matter of a given nation. Apples to ants...

The GP said between the establishment of the papacy to Napoleon, so he's speaking about events well before there were 50 sovereign states in Europe or an EU.

[deleted]

Re: Why Young Men Go to War

#217

Post by hueving » Sat, Apr 18, 2015, 11:51 AM UTC

BuckRogers wrote: post #211

hueving wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It meshes with my personal experiences quite well. Unless someone takes a swing at me, I don't fight. I get by well with this principle. Oh? And what would you do if you came across someone beating a child to death? Just watch and wait for him/her to take a swing at you before intervening?

I normally wouldn't respond to someone being downvoted, but I genuinely want to help people like yourself see this another way. The child beating scenario is a hypothetical. A 1:1 mapping with today's situation is that this child would be in Shanghai. I could fly over and try to save that child. Or, I could rely on those people that are surrounding the child already to have a more vested interest than I do as someone…

It was not a metaphor. You said you would never fight unless someone took a swing at you. If you walked down the street and spotted a person beating another helpless person to death, would you stand by and do nothing because you had not been attacked?

Also, drop the condescending tone in your response about 'helping people see another way'. I gave you a simple hypothetical and you dumped a page of text without answering it because you didn't understand a simple question. You're not helping at all.

Re: Why Young Men Go to War

#218

Post by masswerk » Sat, Apr 18, 2015, 2:36 PM UTC

randcraw wrote: post #209

masswerk wrote: post #70

I think, going to war has much to do with the construction of the male gender. (We're talking seldom about the male side in the gender discourse, but we may be allowed to do so in this context. Please read the following cum grano salis.) In most cultures and societies males start life on the female side along their mothers. They are special, they are beloved, they are cared for – but they are also objects. When enter…

I was with you until you introduced the need for voluntary "disposability" on the part of males as a requisite to earn a place in society. I don't see self immolation in any form as being respected or admired, in the USA anyway. I think all adult males don't inherit a natural place in society simply because they are males, the way that females do as mothers. Fatherhood just doesn't fill the bill comparably, perhaps b…

There have been attempts to rewrite world history based on statistics of how many young man to "burn" there were in a society at a given time – and it works out greatly. While I do admit that this isn't of that importance in modern societies, I would still maintain that the patterns are still to be observed. Also, war has been one of the first means of making a fortune, with trade becoming another one only in the 18th century or so. Still, we may observe some inheritance here, by the emphasis on the risks involved to justify the wins. (Read Jane Austen's "Persuasion" as a sociological study on the matter and you'll see how the British upper- and middle classes would have imploded under the pressure of second sons around 1800, if there hadn't been the Navy and the Army as means of making a fortune and becoming eligible for marriage. Even more true for the lower classes, but there's no much writing on this.)

As a sidenote, we may observe that the US has undergone some efforts and investments in the past decades to decouple its war force from this logic by the means of technology.

Re: Why Young Men Go to War

#219

Post by Houshalter » Sat, Apr 18, 2015, 4:15 PM UTC

john_b wrote: post #204

Houshalter wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like watching disaster movies, yet do not support actual disasters.

Yet presumably you recognize them for the natural, if tragic, events that they are? One's support for or opposition to a force of nature is rather irrelevant.

I'm saying that noting that people enjoy war movies and kids play games about war, doesn't mean they support war at all. Disaster movies are liked for the same reason as war movies. There is adrenaline and excitement and suspense. Thinking about how you would react in those situations and discussion with friends afterwards. No one wants to watch movies about boring everyday life.

Re: Why Young Men Go to War

#220

Post by mercer » Sat, Apr 18, 2015, 5:37 PM UTC

AYBABTME wrote: post #49

yequalsx wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your second paragraph seems callous to me. Going to war for the sake of not wasting one's hard training, so to speak, is not moral. At least as I look at it. War is horrible and should be avoided at all costs. Sometimes it is justifiable and necessary. War should be a last resort. I wish society had alternate means of accomplishing your first paragraph without resort to the second.

Why is it callous? Why get in the army in the first place, if not to do the work of the army? I'd be hypocritical to join the army with the desire to then avoid operations. I can understand that people be against war. I don't like violence. I don't encourage violence and certainly do not enjoy wars. But wars exist and as a citizen, you can decide to wish that war magically weren't a thing, or do something about their…

Interesting, in 'Army of Altruists' David Graeber argues the same thing: many young man enter the army because they want to do good, or for other reasons that are not 'killing'. It's not the core of the article, but it's a very interesting article nonetheless:

http://blogs.uoregon.edu/philanthropy/files/2014/08/army-of-...