Cops are targets, but it seems that in the less safe places of the world they certainly need more than a side arm. That or they could simply wear ski masks to work, but that brings up other issues… Most cops in the US have ARs only they can’t carry them off duty and are limited to pistols.

@SDS
Don’t worry no offense taken.

@Keith
War can get messy. I think that in principle if a slave found that his/her master were losing in a war I can see them rising up and would not rule out retribution being meted out. Not everyone stands to lose when the existing social order is broken down.

“It’s not that I advocate the wholesale slaughter of them, rather I find the label of innocent to be misleading and to be honest an outright lie. The term is thrown around so often that we all too often forget that these victims were just as fallible as anyone, The horror of war is not that is merely death on industrial scale but also the fact that under duress civilians will tear each other to pieces and sell each other out to survive. That I think is a better argument against war than merely a body count.”

Ah, thanks for the clarification. I agree with your general sentiment that civilians are not just helpless bystanders who want to be left alone, at least not all the time. I would argue, though, that there are many cases where some of the people caught up in a war had minimal if any control over starting or prolonging it; the obvious examples would be children (and I would include at least some examples of child conscripts in that, though I certainly wouldn’t fault soldiers on the other side who shot child soldiers in combat), social groups who have no power in their society (like slaves, or women in some cultures/places/times), and third parties unaffected by the war (such as civilians in Country A killed when terrorists from Country B launch an attack on soldiers from Country C who happen to be in Country A).

I think I forgot to mention that some courses in Equity (law school) will help too with this discussion

Well at least you picked out one of my points. It wasn’t an ‘argument’ as such because it was not directed to ‘convince’ but to enlighten. It can’t ‘convince’ because it is written so sporadically. There is a difference. But I do confess it may have been more charged in certain points.

@ Crusader

I can understand your opinion. I don’t think anybody wants to deal with irrational civilians. By the way I just want say again that I do respect your opinion because I understand everyone shares different experiences etc. and I did not mean to antagonize if I did in any way.

Firstly giving an opinion and arguing in its strict sense is quite different, there’s issues of intent, sentence structure and interpretation. Expressing an opinion but not directing it as an attack to another persons opinion is a discussion of ideas. But yes you can interpret it as an argument.

Secondly I don’t know what you are ‘agreeing’ to in the first sentence of the second paragraph. To be a soldier does not mean to juggle morality and duty.

Thirdly I’m not a sociologist or biologist but I’m aware the pre-frontal cortex has a lot to do with controlling aggression, planning and assorted judgment tasks and morality is in essence about ‘controlling’ action. Having studied developmental psychology I am aware also that moral judgment may not develop at all for some people! I also never said a soldier or anyone must juggle with morality. The point/opinion I tried to make is this: humans have acquired ‘morality’ and however they did it a world with it is better than one without.

Fourthly, I don’t see a ‘question’ in your 7th paragraph. I never said people must be saints either. Also, however hard you try, you cannot build a tower devoid of gravity. But you can act courageously, fairly, cooperatively, honestly, and/or altruistically. Its about transcending your mere birth nature, the instinctively causal impulse that distinguishes us from mere animals. The point is no you can’t sit around and ‘wish’ “if we weren’t” – you shut up and just try to get there as best as you can. So you fall along the way, so what? You don’t just give up.

Lastly, you disagree with my take on war as a social force or just the tone? You know by social force I do mean: society as a whole including the humans in it, its institutions run by humans with human traits + instincts + urges, the global economy, religion etc. As in I am looking AT, not down on it, as a feature of HUMAN society. You call it SOCIAL because society has embody forces humans have created but fail to properly control, e.g. economy.

Well in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I’m not exactly surprised. The Israeli army bottled the place up and rolled, the hell did they expect to see? Let’s not forget the now-generations of ill-will the civilian populace, what, two infitadas? You’re right, of course. We still do kill civilians because sometimes they don’t run from infantry and armor, but that doesn’t change the fact that airstrikes and indirect fire are probably the largest factor in Western civilian kills. You’re never going to be as precise as a trained infantryman, that’s just the fact of the matter. You can fin-stabilize your artillery, or laser sight your bombs and just because you’re not actually there, inevitably you’ll kill more people you didn’t want to.

Now I wasn’t claiming that ROE is always followed. I WAS claiming that ROE exists for a good reason. It’s breaking news, but maybe you’ve heard that there’s a gun battle a police academy in Pakistan right now? In Mexico, policemen get hunted and killed all the time. In Iraq, people sneak in as recruits and blow themselves up. Really, only in the Western world do we think it could possibly be sensible to arm our police with Glocks and not ARs, because cops are targets.

@Anon
They did cheer, I wish it were otherwise, but what I heard made me sick.

@Eej
Like Haesslich I don’t think VOTOMS is anti-war, it takes excellent advantage of the setting, and the Scopedog is simply a tool. It is the pilot that makes it deadly. For VOTOMS war is hell, but no one seems to actively try to put an end to it, merely survival is the greatest victory they can hope for.

@cspdelta
My degree ain’t official until June, meaning I can’t claim it on a job application, yet. Then there is the issue of not having planned for an early completion of college…I am trying to get orders for whatever is available, suffice to say unemployment grants plenty of free time.

In between rates right now hoping to make HS but we shall see.

@Keith
It’s not that I advocate the wholesale slaughter of them, rather I find the label of innocent to be misleading and to be honest an outright lie. The term is thrown around so often that we all too often forget that these victims were just as fallible as anyone, The horror of war is not that is merely death on industrial scale but also the fact that under duress civilians will tear each other to pieces and sell each other out to survive. That I think is a better argument against war than merely a body count.

@mareo
I think that it is a grand illusion that people can remain aloof from national issues, but ultimately one may have no interest in the War on Terror (or whatever term is fashionable these days) the War on Terror is interested in you. It’s easy to forget that we all contribute to policy even if all we do is pay our taxes, I know that the people who died that day from the Towers were not innocent, they were civilians but they did contribute to the circumstances that led to the planes hitting, every American shares that responsibility. Even if I thought that the 2003 was unnecessary the consequences of defeat for me are too disgusting to allowed to be realized IMO, it’s not right but I don’t think that here is much right in the world to begin with.

@Versus
IF given the choice between me or the other guy I am fairly certain I would pick me, but in your scenario I have never been, I hope to never have to face it, though my most common foe is usually no draftee or conscript.

A newborn is by and large innocent, if the mother is smart she will do all she can to keep her child alive, that’s where things get real iffy and the mother might well screw someone over to feed her kid, as to the kid’s guilt in regards to the people who got screwed to ensure he/she came of age I think will vary from person to person. Still if the mother left jilted people alive I cannot say the kid can expect all that much mercy if discovered. For the landmine kid I feel sorry, but what business does the kid have poking around a minefield? If it was long term certainly the locals would have known about it, and the UN does raise a hubbub about clearing ordinance. Certainly the parents would have to bear some of the blame for allowing their kid to run free. Even so if your old enough to walk around your old enough to be mean to other kids, so it would have to be on a case to case basis. Honestly if it was the local bully who got his leg blown off I probably wouldn’t care.

@Dorian Cornelius Jasper
Thanks for reading.

@skoll
I agree that the front line is disappearing though judging by recent events in Georgia I would not rule out conventional war anytime soon. Even when you have infantry and tanks rolling around in come cases like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict not all civilians run at the first sign of trouble even after a rocket launch some people just didn’t know that a retaliatory shell was inbound. Even with heavy armor rolling around it seems not everyone wanted to run assuming they were able to run. I agree that most nowadays are from the flyboys, but the image of smart bombs gives the false illusion that they don’t kill unintended targets. Even during the 1991 Gulf War you still had blue on blue because instruments were off and the featureless desert resulted in people getting lost. At the height the USAF A-10 operates on it’s hard to get a good ID night time just makes things worse.

Even with ROE the illusion is that soldiers are behaving like policemen when it is not the case, not in terms or armament and generally crooks don’t actively go looking for cops. ROE doesn’t solve everything you still have to factor in human judgment which I think we can all agree can be fallible to a startling degree.

Gents, giving me brains a work out. Yes, ethics and morality are inevitably roped into a discussion of war. I will stir the nest further, though, in suggesting that war may serve a need (Skoll), it can be strongly argued it does so pathologically. And it terms of benefits, I suggest it does not do always do so across a broad spectrum of society. It may serve to drive innovation, but I’m not sure war is a necessity per se. Other “problems” such as the financial meltdown and environmental degradation can do the same. Humans are indeed animals, but they have demonstrated an ability to organize societies that behave in specific ways to regulate conflict. The Dobe Ju tribesman in South Africa created and continue to live in an egalitarian society: although they were aware of the outside, they made conscious decisions to live a certain way to avoid large scale organized violence (i.e. war). Granted there are difficulties in extrapolating this to other contexts, but I think it illustrates the degree of choice in human behaviour. While humans have some ballistic, stereotyped behaviours, the ones involved in modern armed conflict (I think) the social science literature has amply shown, is far more influenced by learned behaviours. Indvidual human aggression, while subject to many biological influences is still mediated by experience.

As an aside, if war is an evolutionary misstep, it’s been a protracted, painful one.

War is a social phenomenon (see above, you guys and gals =) ). I think SDS was getting at the point that morality OUGHT not be abandoned even in the extremis of war, as you yourself agree. Whether this is sustained is a different story.

@SDS
Yeah, ethics/morality/epistemology wasn’t really my cup of tea (did peace and conflict studies/psychology/anthropology in undergrad). As a fellow social scientist you have to know taking a position = argue, placing facts together to express an opinion =). Or are you one of those hardcore empiricists =)

@THAT readers
Back to our beloved animu: in a sense it may be a comment on Japan’s good fortune that the current generation does not know war (or a whitewashing/willful ignorance job for those so inclined). Having renounced war in its Constitution, I guess one could say making anime with lasers and cool robots as entertainment isn’t seen as hypocritical, as they all understand, it’s make-believe. It’s one thing to make art about something you know nothing about, and another to do so as if you do. Perhaps Crusader-kun was concerned that either act would contribute to a distorted view of warfare, or that it reflects the (possibly poor) understanding of war in Japan. Remember folks, it’s cartoons. You’d need a lot more research to ascertain the public’s view on warfare.

TL;dr war is complicated, Japan may or may not know war, it could be reflected in anime. As you can see, responding to comments are a welcome distraction from school work

No,you’re here to argue. You just said you wrote your posts to stimulate discussion, and by the fact that you have an opinion and are willing to defend it– you are intending to argue.

First off, let me say that I agree. You may be a sociologist, but I’m a biologist, and even through my point of view, the idea that morality is so inherent to our species so as to not be abandoned in war under any circumstances I think is incorrect. From a purely material and evolutionary point of view, the animal brain developed first, the part of the brain that tells us to beat other member of our own species to death in competition for food, mates, whatever. The frontal cortex, in which conceptual thinking like modern social interactions and ‘morality’ developed relatively late.

What does this mean? To be blunt, human morality, ethics, the whole shebang are the most superficial part of our composition. Go lower than that, as is required by a human living on the edge of society, and you have the human as a social animal. Go lower than that and you have the human as an absolutely selfish animal. Morality is defined by a doctrine determining what is ‘right and wrong’. In a broad sense that pedantic and semantic, you are right, ‘everyone follows a moral code’, because right decisions lead to survival and wrong decisions lead to death for some. But in any sense that is worth talking about, and you yourself pointed out that war temporarily relieves moral concerns, you’re not there.

To be a soldier does not mean to juggle morality and duty. I’ll disagree there. The very existence of military and paramilitary personnel is itself a compromise in traditional ‘morality’, as they are in the very business of death and obedience. It is widely accept that what motivates a soldier is not overarching ideal, goodwill or ill-will, or even military chain of command but the man next to him and his own life. In effect, a soldier is lowered to a social animal in the context of war.

Does this mean that morality should be absent from the practice of war? In my opinion, no, because for however many encounters a soldier might survive on the battlefield, it is for the civilian, who has the luxury of ‘morality’ on a daily basis, that they fight, and without a connection to the civilian base, war becomes counterintuitive, as I have already stated.

What I mean to prove, however, is that morality as a human concept is not so pervasive. It has, and it will continue to be, shed when unnecessary because at our bones we are animals, and what we do not need we discard. Christopher McCandless went into the Alaskan wilderness to ponder the meaning of life and to find himself, and by the end, his diaries indicate he was much more interested in what he ate every day than the meaning of life.

Now here’s where I’ll question you a little. Your posts imply that you look down upon war as a social force, as well as the ’social machine’ that generates it. I question this particular point of view, again, as a biologist. We still war because it still benefits us. Because in some way, it is required for our overarching drives of success. Whether or not these drives are in tune with one another from the government to the soldier to the civilian is irrelevant; as a society, we still require war to relieve the pressures caused by our ‘religion, misunderstanding, egoism, and obstinancy’. You said it yourself, war is a social force.

We ARE religious (some of us, anyway), egotistical, obstinate and prone to misunderstanding, and these flaws are inherent in our design. Any attempt at snobbery with lines such as ‘If only we weren’t so callous!’ or ‘If only we weren’t so selfish!’ or ‘If only we could work together!’ are hilariously misguided, unrealistic, and as dangerous as raw aggression. It’d be the equivalent of trying to build a tower and saying to yourself, ‘I’m just going to ignore /gravity/’.

Sure, there have been ‘wrong’ wars, wars where the benefit was negative, but in evolution there are missteps too, there are dodos, and trilobites, and dinosaurs.

So to wrap this all up, morality is not inherent to humanity, and war serves a purpose more basic than morality (which is why we still have it). I disagree with your tone (yeah, I know, a little stupid) in your overall take on war as a social force, and I believe that in its necessity, humanity should not blanch from the duty of war.

Haha, a crash course on ethics in law school isn’t going to cut it! You’ll need to take 2-3 more courses dealing with knowledge and reality, then some sociology stuff and a few miscellaneous Wikipedia searches.

Ethics is a beautiful thing, if not because its every warmongers political propaganda. Whilst I saw the particular issues Crusader raised, I preferred to comment on them in a more general respect. I personally don’t see the value in picking up the moral and social shambles during or after war. You can discuss all you want about the practical realities and difficulties of soldiers at war, it gets us nowhere. Why? Because the soldier is every bit as vulnerable as the civilian who both are enveloped in this gigantic social machine and lose sight of it all. You need to know its causes. And sadly, history tells us most wars are fought due to: resource/power/religion throw in some misunderstanding, sprinkle some egoism and obstinacy, mix well, and serve hot.

The point is: war is a social and human force. I did not intend to ‘argue’ but just generate discussion.