The Big Picture: A Guy Named Joe

GrizzlerBorno

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rokkolpo said:
What the hell, I just saw rise of cobra 5 minutes ago.
How....peculiar.
What are you doing pointing out the elephant in the room for? I was expecting him to bring that up but I'm glad that he did not.

OT: I agree with a few people on here in saying that CoD and Halo and BC2 ARE our generations G.I. Joe. NOT because they specifically inspire kids to join the army. but because... well, think about what Yahtzee said in his Black Ops Review.

85% of modern first person shooters are about what? Invading the US (earth, if you're Sci-fi). I'll probably incur flame for this but: our generation of "GI Joe" is just the US sitting on it's high horse making itself out to be the innocent nice guy that all the heartless villains love to hate/invade. THAT is what young americans are being taught now. before it was "unconditionally hate Nazis/Communists/(okay i'll admit i don't know what mine and Bob's GI Joe taught)"
Now it's: "We're the good guys, and the world HATES us for it. So prepare yourself"

If I'm way out of line..... I don't care. This NEEDS to be said.
 
Dec 14, 2008
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Therumancer said:
This kind of mentality has given birth to a situation today where we can't clearly identify a culture like that of The Middle East as an enemy, rather we need to take a reactive perspective and only target very specific individuals like those ACTIVELY engaged in terrorism rather than the core issues. The same could be said about China, or anyone else. Unlike previous generations where the media was making no bones about treating our enemies as enemies, and suggestiong violence and military action as a method of dealing with them, today the message is a naive one where violence is always wrong, there are always magical solutions that will arrive to avoid large scale violence, and worst of all is identifying an entire broad group of people as the enemy.

Today's mentality is one where we would not go to war against "Nazism" if it was to rise the same way. Rather we'd make a big deal about only opposing those guys at the top of the food chain, and misunderstanding the huge, international culture, with the fanatical millions behind it, we would of course wind up getting our tails kicked. It says a lot when you consider that people have made arguements that Patton was unworthy to wear a US uniform by modern standards because you know... he made no bones about wanting to destroy the enemy.

The point is a society that won't let you identify the bad guys as bad guys, and does everything in it's power to avoid confrontation, or at least confrontation on the level of a "total war", "us or them" level which would actually see a resolution.

Such are my thoughts.
So, you're suggesting we commit cultural genocide just because a few random extremists are being assholes? That's like wiping out christianity because of the Phelps family!

Being the enemy, as you say, all the works that were produced from the Middle Eastern culture, all the art and cities you'd need to burn down, not to mention the Millions slaughtered. We also might as well fore go all the inventions from the Middle East and deem them evil. To top it all off we should see if the pope is willing to back our conquest, just to prove how much we didn't fucking learn from history!

Therumancer, I see you as a natural born cynic that can only trust people as far as you can spit, but you're to smug about your self to ever excrite any bodily fluid. You need to learn that people are all rather fine, but they can occasionally be assholes. The only reason that Nazism and the Taliban ever came to power was because people were fucking afraid of those insane assholes, all we need to do is give people the power to stop extremism and they will.
 

Nikolaz72

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Apr 23, 2009
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Armored Prayer said:
LadyRhian said:
Armored Prayer said:
This was great episode, in fact some points felt inspiring.

I just thought of something interesting though. You mention each generation's version of G.I. Joe and I though "whats this generation's version?" The first thing that came to mind was military FPS like CoD, and how popular it was for both men and boys. Its like the old G.I. Joe what with being about real life soldiers and special forces except its an interactive game. Maybe thats one of the reasons its so popular.(besides being a great game)

Try not to take most of this seriously. Like I said its just an interesting thought I had.
But do the kids who play the game aspire to be those soldiers? Does playing the game make them want to be one when they grow up? That is why I don't think it holds the same kind of place as the other G.I. Joes. It's easier to pwn n00bs in COD than it is to become a real, honest to God soldier or member of the special forces. And that's why most people would rather just play the game.
Well for the question I don't see why not. I've come across a few people who after playing the games were interested in joining the military. Of course you have a good point about the games being easier than actually becoming one, and I bet many players would rather play a game about the military than become part of it.
A lot of people who played with Action figures didnt join the military. I bet ya as many folks playing Computergames (Since its mainstream now) joined the Military as those who played with Action Figures.
 

Lukyo

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Hmmmmm . . . interesting take of how we must choose our own place in life. Of course one could paradoxically argue that since we must choose our place in life we really don't have a place in life.

As A man of the generation after yours the only thing I had to aspire to, other than fictional characters on tv, was my father, a man of the generation before yours.

There is a standard of manliness that all men are expected to aspire to, regardless of station or status, of course if I start explaining what it is I'll be dismissed as a out-dated Christian fool.
 

Keesor

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Thank you Movie Bob.

That was an insightful look at what it means to be a man in this day and age. though a bit depressing that our lives will never inspire myth or legend it is comforting to know it okay to live a life of meh. This will not do for a 30 something year old male who's been spoon fed testosterone driven male role models on a rampage of righteousness against the force of evil or otherwise.
 

Therumancer

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Nov 28, 2007
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philosophicalbastard said:
So, you're suggesting we commit cultural genocide just because a few random extremists are being assholes? That's like wiping out christianity because of the Phelps family!

Being the enemy, as you say, all the works that were produced from the Middle Eastern culture, all the art and cities you'd need to burn down, not to mention the Millions slaughtered. We also might as well fore go all the inventions from the Middle East and deem them evil. To top it all off we should see if the pope is willing to back our conquest, just to prove how much we didn't fucking learn from history!

Therumancer, I see you as a natural born cynic that can only trust people as far as you can spit, but you're to smug about your self to ever excrite any bodily fluid. You need to learn that people are all rather fine, but they can occasionally be assholes. The only reason that Nazism and the Taliban ever came to power was because people were fucking afraid of those insane assholes, all we need to do is give people the power to stop extremism and they will.
What I am saying is that there is no point to preserving a culture that wants us dead simply for the sake of preserving it. It's not like anyone is saying "we should wipe out any group of people we find mildly inconveinent" this has been going on for decades, and has gotten well beyond that.

Let me put things into context for you. You know the "Aliens" franchise? The basic premise of this series is that you have a race of beings that is pretty much bent on the destruction of humanity in order to propagate itself. According to some of the novels, the central intelligence (Queens) are sentinent and even aware of what they are doing. The Aliens becoming smarter and more adaptive being a theme in the extended canon. The big theme to this books is how inevitably some moron insists on keeping some of these things alive, so they break free and start killing again. The reasons for this vary with the storyline, varying from the moronic/profit-minded/evil like distilling a drug called "fire" from their glands, to the benevolent, with people wanting to harness their restorative properties to cure illness. The bottom line is that since these things want to kill everyone, there is no reason to keep them alive at all, and the people who keep saving some are a bunch of mouth breathers who simply do not learn.

The big differance between "Aliens" and a human culture, is of course the fact that it's palatable when your dealing with an alien life form, but not so palatable when your dealing with our own species. That's a reflex we need to overcome if the world is ever going to progress. Why preserve a group of xenocidal theocrats so they can continue to try and kill us and take over the world? No, they aren't evil from their own perspective, and I can't claim we're exactly paragons of virtue, so the situation is a basic reality based "us or them" equasion. Diplomacy has been being attempted for decades and has consistantly failed.

To put things into another perspective, I again point to World War II. The Nazis were defeated by demonizing them beyond all reality, and then relentlessly exterminating them, including women and children. It went from a huge, international movement, to a tiny underground fringe after the war. We spent decades hunting down survivors even after the war ended.

You have to understand, Hollywood would have you believe that there was a tiny group of Nazis who somehow managed to hold Germany in a grip of terror, with a majority of people fearing a tiny minority of secret police. Somehow this group of people managed to take control of other nations and do the same thing. In reality the majority of Germany supported the Nazis, as did substantial numbers of people in the various countries they conquered, many of these countries providing manpower to the Nazi invasions of other areas. You never see movies where you have say Nazis with French or Romanian accents for example.

The threat posed is by a culture, as long as the ideaology survives so does the threat. You can kill the military and leaders indefinatly, but as long as the ideas remain in force more soldiers and more leaders will eventually rise. In finishing Germany the US and the forces allied with us at the time literally bombed the country into rubble, that included the civilian infrastructure to break the will/culture of the people, cause problems like food and material shortages, and of course reduce the overall population and send the survivors into hiding. Advancing through the cities was building to building fighting, where civilians, many of them defending their homes, were butchered, even those not directly involved in fighting with the Volkssturm. The Hitler Youth engaged in harrying tactics and itself was wiped out (ie children). Even after the end, as I pointed out above, the US and it's allies continued after the war to hunt down people that still held onto the ideas.

Japan is perhaps a slightly better example, as it was an even more closed country than Germany, and had theocratic elements where the surrender of the Emperor was a big deal because at the time he was still viewed as a god I believe. Japan was occupied (and still is to this day), had it's domestic military forces greatly limited, and has been undergoing massive cultural reforms in the intervening decades. A lot of work remains to be done, but the Japan of today is a lot more civilized and progressive than the one that was defeated during World War II.

The enemies we've defeated are those we've destroyed culturally, half-measures do not work. It's when we stopped doing this kind of fighting (with the advent of the Baby Boomers) that we ceased to actually win wars. The Middle East is only the example I use because it's who we're fighting right now. Should it come to a war, I'd advocate the same exact tactics if we got to this point with the same failure of diplomacy and more measured responses that we've seen.

See, the problem isn't just the terrorist, the Taliban fighter, Al Queda member, or any of those groups and their leaders. The problem is the guy who doesn't fight, but believes in the primacy of Islam and the inherant destiny to rule the world. It's about his hatred of infidels, and the fact that seperating the church and state is an anathema to them. Even if that guy doesn't actually DO anything besides mind his own business, he and the other guys like him are eventually going to see people who embrace those same ideas and seek to put them into practice. The people who think like that and will look up to those fighters as heroes is why the people keep coming into existance.

One thing to understand is that unlike movies, the enemy is not stupid. When we have a huge military force in the region nobody is running around screaming "kill Americans" publically. They keep that to themselves when we're not around, and tell us what we want to hear. They also understand propaganda and realize that talking about peace will hamper American war efforts because of our lack of propaganda and information control, and a desire to end the war especially with how long it has gone on. Once we're out of their back yard they can rebuild and come after us for revenge with even more terrorism.

To put things into perspective, like most people on these forums, I'm not a Commando. On the other hand I believe in my country, respect my special forces, and think it's awesome when our guys go into other countries to get things done on our behalf. Heck, I read books, and comics about it, watch TV shows about it, and play video games about it (occasionally, not a big FPS fan). Even if someone wiped out all of our special operatives, as long as the US and people like me were still here, we'd find more people to go into the special ops community and it would continue on. To stop us from doing that, you'd have to level the US as a whole.

Heck, simply leveling the US wouldn't do it. You'd probably have to kill nearly every American. See, the tactics I espouse in warfare are there because I know what it would take to really beat/destroy the US, and extend the same level of respect to my fellow humans. If someone came into the US and managed to level a good portion of the military, while landing troops, that wouldn't be the end of it. Just like the guys in The Middle East we'd be fighting them as insurgents. The whole "Fortress America" thing would go into effect and you'd have Americans fighting in the mountain ranges (some of which are quite strategic), swamps, and forests. It wouldn't be over until the invading forces pretty much killed off the whole idea of America on any sizable level, by not only beating the insurgents, but exterminating those with America in their heart whose existance would create more insurgents. It's foolish to assume that just because we're dealing with a foreign culture, it's easier to defeat than we would be.

All this rambling pretty much gets down to the simple fact that war blows chips, nobody wants to go to war and risk getting shot, nobody wants to go kill some poor schmuck in his back yard, nobody wants to see their friends or family do either of those things, and no leader wants the blood on their hands of having ordered the elimination of an entire way of life, for good or ill. All of these things are reasons why wars are to be avoided, and why you try diplomacy and middle ground responses first. However, once you actually go to war, it's simply "us or them" there are no rules, and no morality, it's all about who is going
to be standing at the end. If I was who I am now, and it was 30 years ago, I wouldn't be advocating the same things (and calling what I am saying insane) because we wouldn't have tried to resolve the situation enough in other ways. At this point however I think anything short of what I suggest is just repeting failed strategies, it's time to "Git er Done" as "Larry The Cable guy" would put it. There is no longer any doubt about what needs to be done when you view things reasonably, it's become an exercise in procrastination... and honestly I blame the mentality of the Baby Boomers for that. If this happened the same way with the World War II generation in power, it might not be pretty, but this whole conflict would be history by now.
 

Simonism451

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Therumancer said:
They *DID* shirk their responsibilities, even if they understandably don't want to view it that way. "Sorry dood, I'd rather sit here and get stoned than go fight in a jungle"... well duh, who wouldn't.
"Sorry dude I don't want to fight in an army that has done things like this"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre

Yeah, fucking communist pansys
 

Simonism451

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Therumancer said:
The Baby Boomers, already leaning towards the far left really saw little wrong with communism (or at least as they understood it, I'm not going to rant about the systems since this is long enough), and also didn't want to give up their decadence to go get shot at in a jungle. The biggest issue of course being that nobody wants to fight, and the boomers used every trick they could muster and any half arsed justification they could form to try and derail the war effort and avoid having to go. They *DID* shirk their responsibilities, even if they understandably don't want to view it that way. "Sorry dood, I'd rather sit here and get stoned than go fight in a jungle"... well duh, who wouldn't.
"Sorry dude, I don't want to fight with the same people that did MyLai."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre
Yeah communist pansy for sure!
 

Smokescreen

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Therumancer said:
Why preserve a group of xenocidal theocrats so they can continue to try and kill us and take over the world?
So my first problem with this statement is; who decides who the xenocidal theocrats are?

My second problem with it is that it seems to blithely ignore how those xenocidal theocrats found power.

All this rambling pretty much gets down to the simple fact that war blows chips, nobody wants to go to war and risk getting shot, nobody wants to go kill some poor schmuck in his back yard, nobody wants to see their friends or family do either of those things, and no leader wants the blood on their hands of having ordered the elimination of an entire way of life, for good or ill. All of these things are reasons why wars are to be avoided, and why you try diplomacy and middle ground responses first. However, once you actually go to war, it's simply "us or them" there are no rules, and no morality, it's all about who is going
to be standing at the end. If I was who I am now, and it was 30 years ago, I wouldn't be advocating the same things (and calling what I am saying insane) because we wouldn't have tried to resolve the situation enough in other ways. At this point however I think anything short of what I suggest is just repeting failed strategies, it's time to "Git er Done" as "Larry The Cable guy" would put it. There is no longer any doubt about what needs to be done when you view things reasonably, it's become an exercise in procrastination... and honestly I blame the mentality of the Baby Boomers for that. If this happened the same way with the World War II generation in power, it might not be pretty, but this whole conflict would be history by now.
And my final problem with it is that it really, really wants to break the world or history down into discrete, understandable chunks and human beings have refused that since forever.

I'm sorry man; I find your thoughts to be presented in a muddled fashion and one that doesn't really take enough information about the past into account. I'm not even sure I can agree or disagree so much as say that I feel your point of view needs a great deal of enhancement from a book learning perspective, or significant rewrites so it takes into account the fact that human beings are very, very rarely fissionable into black and white hats.

I'd be the first person to agree that there is evil in the world that needs to be stood against, that the role of men in the modern era has become foggy and very challenging to find in an acceptable manner but with the obliteration of the older roles the hope is that we find new ones that make our own lives worthwhile, because we demand it of ourselves.

But that shit is hard, yo. And while violence against others is an option for reasonable people, let us hope that we would need to be pushed into unreasonable circumstances to use it, and then take responsibility for the path leading us both to violence and, once violence is over, away from it.
 

skibadaa

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I think escapist should scrub Lisa Foyles and give her budget allotment to Bob, so then maybe we could have 10-15 minute big picture episodes. As ever, fantastic stuff this week, loving it :D
 

Swaki

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i grew up in 90s Denmark so i wasn't exposed to a whole lot of G.I. Joe, i spend most my days as a child reading Donald Duck comic books (you have no idea how huge old Donald is in Scandinavia, its like all dc and marvel cartoons combined, selling about one million copies each week, or 20% of Denmark's residents buying one copy) but from the few episodes i have seen of the show, its pretty heavy on fatherhood, super strong and all knowing males protecting children from danger and teaching them life lessons, if they really influenced you that heavy you should have about 12 kids of different ethnicity that you devoted your entire life to protect and educate (I'm just assuming you don't have kids, my apologies if I'm wrong).

It was good episode, even if you still use those rather unsettling faces, though i wish you would touch upon subjects that are more universal, this one really only applied to men in their mid 30s who grew up on cartoons, and speaking as a person living in a socialistic country, i always get nervous when an American mentions communism, cause the things that qualifies you as a communist in the US would be considered extremely right winged over here, im just hoping we are to small for you guys to invade us ^^.
 

Therumancer

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Nov 28, 2007
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Simonism451 said:
Therumancer said:
The Baby Boomers, already leaning towards the far left really saw little wrong with communism (or at least as they understood it, I'm not going to rant about the systems since this is long enough), and also didn't want to give up their decadence to go get shot at in a jungle. The biggest issue of course being that nobody wants to fight, and the boomers used every trick they could muster and any half arsed justification they could form to try and derail the war effort and avoid having to go. They *DID* shirk their responsibilities, even if they understandably don't want to view it that way. "Sorry dood, I'd rather sit here and get stoned than go fight in a jungle"... well duh, who wouldn't.
"Sorry dude, I don't want to fight with the same people that did MyLai."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre
Yeah communist pansy for sure!
Oh, we've done worse than that.

Let me be blunt, war sucks, that's pretty much an example of why. As I explained in my rants, we did stuff like that to the Nazis too, where do you think The Hitler Youth went?

See, in a war there is only winning and losing. The purpose of defeating the military is to get to the civilians and infrastructure in order to kill them and break their stuff. This "massacre" is only noteworthy because of both left wing outrage born of detachment from the realities of warfare, and because we took what was pretty much a defensive posture during the battle.

Part of the principle of warfare is to break the enemy's will to fight. You can't engage to protect your home and family if they are already dead. What's more people are unlikely to head to the hills to become insurgents if everyone they even remotely know is likely to be wiped out merely from association. Hard held beliefs are also going to be challenged by relentless slaughter.

There are examples of such engagement strategies failing, but just as many of them working.

To put things into perspective, let's say I'm leading an army and I have to take a specific objective in another country. Between me and that objective are a lot of towns and villages of the culture I'm opposing. If I proceed through the region nicely, I'm going to be harried and have my forces ripped to shreds. What's more I'm leaving the infrastructure and idealogy intact, so if I have to come back this way I could run into problems, especially if these towns and villages provide supplies for my enemy.

I send my troops into a couple of villages and horribly murder to inhabitants, and then display the bodies all over the place. People from the area are going to go "holy Sh@t that could be me" contrary to what many think, people, especially civilians and insurgents are not going to rally especially in the face of that kind of threat to their families. They are going to flee the atrocities. Those villages and towns are going to clear out and refugees are going to start heading towards my objective, putting a ton of pressure on the enemy who either have to engage their own people, or stretch their own supplies to care for them (or break ranks to let them through). "Driving the enemy before you" is an old warfare tactic as old as time, and you see it used throughout the world even today (this is one of the big reasons why you see so many huge herds of refugees being forced into wierd places in Africa and so on).

Does this make me a nice guy? Hell no. It works however, and in a real war there is no morality, only winning and losing. Something we've forgotten since World War II.

In the case of 'Nam however the various "Vanishing Villages" were done more for morale purposes. As I said, people are less likely to decide becoming a Gueriella is a good idea if it means their entire town is going to be wiped out just because of them.

You might not LIKE what I'm saying, but that's the sad realities of war. The very fact that you oppose such tactics are why we haven't been winning wars (and trust me, making incidents like this one into a circus has not helped the case, as well as gimping our military). It's also one of the reasons why I am so critical of the baby boomers, who still simply do not get it. Morality has no place in war. The only reason why anyone has claimed to have been part of a GOOD war is because they wrote it that way in the history books later.

I'll be blunt, if I was in command of a military operation (which I never will be) I might order something like that done under the right circumstances. The reason being simply that I am going to try and complete my objectives for my side, and minimize the risk to my own people. If it means slaughtering hundreds of enemy civilians, so be it. They should have thought about that before they decided to push things to the point a war started and I got sent there to begin with. Want me to stop killing people? Surrender, and comply with whatever societal changes we demand. If I'm there at war, then it's my job to be their own personal devil.
 

Squarez

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Therumancer said:
Skips around the actual issue.

The problem is the rise of liberalism from the 1960s. A lot of the guys calling the shots nowadays are the same guys who were doing the anti-war crusades for Veitnam and Korea and have gotten to define morality and history according to what they wanted.

The thing is that when the boomers were rising into power in the 1980s, it was the birth of Political Correctness. The idea that we could have no bad guys, no matter what they said or did. The USSR was to be presented as a potential group of friends and allies, as opposed to a giant enemy, and you saw this in children's media with a "get them young" attitude. Understand that while the primary enemy was fictional, groups like the Russians WERE present in the form of a USSR version of GI Joe, who despite tensions GI Joe ultimatly wound up teaming up with in most cases to fight a common enemy.

This kind of mentality has given birth to a situation today where we can't clearly identify a culture like that of The Middle East as an enemy, rather we need to take a reactive perspective and only target very specific individuals like those ACTIVELY engaged in terrorism rather than the core issues. The same could be said about China, or anyone else. Unlike previous generations where the media was making no bones about treating our enemies as enemies, and suggestiong violence and military action as a method of dealing with them, today the message is a naive one where violence is always wrong, there are always magical solutions that will arrive to avoid large scale violence, and worst of all is identifying an entire broad group of people as the enemy.

Today's mentality is one where we would not go to war against "Nazism" if it was to rise the same way. Rather we'd make a big deal about only opposing those guys at the top of the food chain, and misunderstanding the huge, international culture, with the fanatical millions behind it, we would of course wind up getting our tails kicked. It says a lot when you consider that people have made arguements that Patton was unworthy to wear a US uniform by modern standards because you know... he made no bones about wanting to destroy the enemy.

The point is a society that won't let you identify the bad guys as bad guys, and does everything in it's power to avoid confrontation, or at least confrontation on the level of a "total war", "us or them" level which would actually see a resolution.

On a lot of levels the problem is your dad's day (so to speak) rather than your grandfather's day. His toys were pretty much made by his grand-dad's generation. Consider that "Dad's" generation were the "make love, not war" generation, who had no sense of national duty, dodged the draft (as opposed to seeing it as a responsibility), and even if the wars at the time were a mess took things to an absolutly ridiculous level in opposition because none of them wanted to get shot at. "Dad's Generation" pretty much defined itself by tearing down society in favor of what it wanted at the moment, and while some good did come of it, a lot more problems occured. There are a lot of sociologists who believe we pretty much face the task of needing to rebuild our society after the US Baby Boomers, and it remains to be seen if the current, indoctrinated generations (given how long they lived, there is more than one, Gen X and Gen Y) can throw off a lot of the propaganda and get things back on track.

Such are my thoughts.
TL;DR. We should basically be demonising the entire country of Afghanistan instead of trying to understand it's culture and who figuring out who the "bad guys" are and who is an innocent party.

And of course, it's all the LIBERALS' fault; as if promoting freedom, liberty and acceptance to all people in a country with it's entire constitution based on friggin' freedom, liberty and acceptance is a bad thing.

P.S. Having the country's official position towards the Middle East (and by implication, Islam) being "fuck them all, they're all the enemy" will totally reduce terrorist attacks. Sounds like a good plan to me.
 

xdom125x

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this episode was pretty interesting and thought provoking.
p.s. Bob said ex-boyfriends when I think he meant exes.(sorry couldn't resist)
 

Simonism451

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Therumancer said:
Simonism451 said:
Therumancer said:
The Baby Boomers, already leaning towards the far left really saw little wrong with communism (or at least as they understood it, I'm not going to rant about the systems since this is long enough), and also didn't want to give up their decadence to go get shot at in a jungle. The biggest issue of course being that nobody wants to fight, and the boomers used every trick they could muster and any half arsed justification they could form to try and derail the war effort and avoid having to go. They *DID* shirk their responsibilities, even if they understandably don't want to view it that way. "Sorry dood, I'd rather sit here and get stoned than go fight in a jungle"... well duh, who wouldn't.
"Sorry dude, I don't want to fight with the same people that did MyLai."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre
Yeah communist pansy for sure!
Oh, we've done worse than that.

Let me be blunt, war sucks, that's pretty much an example of why. As I explained in my rants, we did stuff like that to the Nazis too, where do you think The Hitler Youth went?

See, in a war there is only winning and losing. The purpose of defeating the military is to get to the civilians and infrastructure in order to kill them and break their stuff. This "massacre" is only noteworthy because of both left wing outrage born of detachment from the realities of warfare, and because we took what was pretty much a defensive posture during the battle.

Part of the principle of warfare is to break the enemy's will to fight. You can't engage to protect your home and family if they are already dead. What's more people are unlikely to head to the hills to become insurgents if everyone they even remotely know is likely to be wiped out merely from association. Hard held beliefs are also going to be challenged by relentless slaughter.

There are examples of such engagement strategies failing, but just as many of them working.

To put things into perspective, let's say I'm leading an army and I have to take a specific objective in another country. Between me and that objective are a lot of towns and villages of the culture I'm opposing. If I proceed through the region nicely, I'm going to be harried and have my forces ripped to shreds. What's more I'm leaving the infrastructure and idealogy intact, so if I have to come back this way I could run into problems, especially if these towns and villages provide supplies for my enemy.

I send my troops into a couple of villages and horribly murder to inhabitants, and then display the bodies all over the place. People from the area are going to go "holy Sh@t that could be me" contrary to what many think, people, especially civilians and insurgents are not going to rally especially in the face of that kind of threat to their families. They are going to flee the atrocities. Those villages and towns are going to clear out and refugees are going to start heading towards my objective, putting a ton of pressure on the enemy who either have to engage their own people, or stretch their own supplies to care for them (or break ranks to let them through). "Driving the enemy before you" is an old warfare tactic as old as time, and you see it used throughout the world even today (this is one of the big reasons why you see so many huge herds of refugees being forced into wierd places in Africa and so on).

Does this make me a nice guy? Hell no. It works however, and in a real war there is no morality, only winning and losing. Something we've forgotten since World War II.

In the case of 'Nam however the various "Vanishing Villages" were done more for morale purposes. As I said, people are less likely to decide becoming a Gueriella is a good idea if it means their entire town is going to be wiped out just because of them.

You might not LIKE what I'm saying, but that's the sad realities of war. The very fact that you oppose such tactics are why we haven't been winning wars (and trust me, making incidents like this one into a circus has not helped the case, as well as gimping our military). It's also one of the reasons why I am so critical of the baby boomers, who still simply do not get it. Morality has no place in war. The only reason why anyone has claimed to have been part of a GOOD war is because they wrote it that way in the history books later.

I'll be blunt, if I was in command of a military operation (which I never will be) I might order something like that done under the right circumstances. The reason being simply that I am going to try and complete my objectives for my side, and minimize the risk to my own people. If it means slaughtering hundreds of enemy civilians, so be it. They should have thought about that before they decided to push things to the point a war started and I got sent there to begin with. Want me to stop killing people? Surrender, and comply with whatever societal changes we demand. If I'm there at war, then it's my job to be their own personal devil.
Well if that's how war is (you've got a point, no doubt) why do you think of people opposing war as hippocritic cowards?