The banality of killing

The higher up the chain of command you are, the easier it is:

I spent every day of my seven-month deployment in Afghanistan trying to figure out how to kill the Taliban commander in my area. He lived and operated to our north and every day would send his soldiers down to plant bombs, terrorize the villages and wrestle with us for control of the area. Our mission was to secure the villages and provide economic and political development, but that was slow work with intangible results. Killing the Taliban commander would be an objective measure of success.

I never killed him. Instead, each day we would kill his soldiers or his soldiers would kill our Marines. The longer I lived among the Afghans, the more I realized that neither the Taliban nor we were fighting for the reasons I expected. Despite the rhetoric I internalized from the newspapers back home about why we were in Afghanistan, I ended up fighting for different reasons once I got on the ground — a mix of loyalty to my Marines, habit and the urge to survive.

The enemy fighters were often young men raised alongside poppy fields in small farms set up like latticework along the river. They must have been too young and too isolated to understand anything outside of their section of the valley, never mind something global like the 9/11 attacks. These villagers fought us because that’s what they always did when foreigners came to their village. Perhaps they just wanted to be left alone.

The more I thought about the enemy, the harder it was to view them as evil or subhuman. But killing requires a motivation, so the concept of self-defense becomes the defining principle of target attractiveness. If someone is shooting at me, I have a right to fire back. But this is a legal justification, not a moral one. The comic Louis C.K. brilliantly pointed out this absurdity: “Maybe if you pick up a gun and go to another country and you get shot, it’s not that weird. Maybe if you get shot by the dude you were just shooting at, it’s a tiny bit your fault.”

My worst fear before deploying was what, in training, we called “good shoot, bad result.” But there is no way in the chaos and uncertainty of war to make the right decision all the time. On one occasion, the Taliban had been shooting at us and we thought two men approaching in the distance were armed and intended to kill us. We warned them off, but it did no good. They continued to approach, and so my Marines fired. What possible reason could two men have to approach a squad of armed Marines in a firefight? When it was over and the two men lay dead we saw that they were unarmed, just two men trying to go home, who never made it.

On most occasions, when ordnance would destroy the enemy or a sniper would kill a Taliban fighter, we would engage in the professional congratulations of a job well done like businessmen after a successful client meeting. Nothing of the sort happened after killing a civilian. And in this absence of group absolution, I saw for the first time how critical it actually was for my soul and my sanity.

Nobody ever talked about the accidental killing. There was paperwork, a brief investigation and silence. You can’t tell someone who has killed an innocent person that he did the right thing even if he followed all the proper procedures before shooting.

It is somewhat amusing that Americans are still insisting that the United States are “the good guys” in all of this long and sordid history of invading and occupying other countries. How many more countries do they have to occupy, how many more innocent civilians have to be killed by American soldiers, before Americans wake up to the fact that, just maybe, the country which has invaded and is currently occupying literally dozens of sovereign countries is not, in fact, “the good guys”.

The fact that there are bad guys out there does not automatically make those who oppose them good. When Hitler and Stalin went to war, who was the good guy?

Donald Rumsfeld once said that the USA could only win if it killed terrorists faster than it created new ones. Considering that we’re now 14 years into “the war on terror”, I think it should be obvious that the USA did not win on the basis of his metric. Forget peace, give isolation a chance.

I’m not a big fan of Louis CK, but in this case, he has a point. “Maybe if you pick up a gun and go to another country and you get shot,
it’s not that weird. Maybe if you get shot by the dude you were just
shooting at, it’s a tiny bit your fault.”

Afghanistan is not our business. Ukraine is not our business. Iraq is not our business. Syria is not our business. Iran is not our business. And while the neocons are off playing Risk in foreign lands, the homeland has been invaded by 50 million invaders. The only war genuinely worth fighting is the one being completely overlooked and ignored.

The author concludes:

Ensuring our own safety and the defense of a peaceful world may require
training boys and girls to kill, creating technology that allows us to
destroy anyone on the planet instantly, dehumanizing large segments of
the global population and then claiming there is a moral sanctity in
killing. To fathom this system and accept its use for the greater good
is to understand that we still live in a state of nature.

Monsters so often tell themselves they are heroes.

The danger of fantasy

I’ve long wondered why the science fiction ranks were so littered with gamma males, both on the supply and the demand sides. I’d theorized it was because it was an escape for unathletic people; at my first group book-signing, about every third person commented how little like a “science fiction author” I looked. I didn’t understand what they meant until I looked at my fellow authors, most of whom were at least 100 pounds overweight and looked as if the only adventure upon which they’d ever embarked was Cheetoh Quest.

However, the recent discussion at Alpha Game concerning Graduating Gamma and Diagnosis: Gamma has opened my eyes to the real connection between the Gamma male and fantasy fiction. And, in answer to a question that someone asked earlier, I do think science fiction and fantasy, particularly modern Pink SF, is psychosocially dangerous for young men of the Gamma persuasion.

Consider this comment from JW, whose situation we’ve been analyzing at his request.

I’ve got this over-inflated sense of self, and that external things haven’t burst that. A combination of parents being too soft and a relatively forgiving and facilitating world/state/government/society/community/family has allowed this ego in me to survive. In a more challenging environment it would be broken down.

I’ve maintained this self from adolescence, and whereas for many people their parents “knock” that out of them Ive got this “tantrum-like child” in my head. Whats happening is I’m protecting this child in my head (which is objectively me, not an external body) and running away or avoiding anything that challenges the beliefs or ideas of this child-like persona. One of which would be “I’m special”….

Seeing myself within an objective social hierarchy using the conceptual
framework you have makes it much clearer. I’m wannabee alpha, in my head
I’m special and therefore deserving of alphaness, I’ll lead, I’ll get
the girl, I’ll be the hero, but the reality of what I am bursts that
bubble every time. Once I’m challenged by objectively superior men I
crumble and/or avoid run away. And yet I yearn for that while doing
nothing to either deserve it or try to get it.

This is the danger posed by the Pugs, the Rand al’Thors, the Harry Potters and so forth. In many ways, they are the precise opposites of the Frodos, the Conans, and the Marcus Valeriuses. (In the middle would be the Aragorns, the Tarans, and the Luke Skywalkers.) They are Special, with a capital S, but not due to anything they have ever done. They have Special powers and are innately recognized as superior beings with a right to lead, initially by the astute, but eventually by everyone.

Most importantly, they don’t have to do much more than show up in order to have leadership handed to them on a silver platter, nor do they have to do much beyond be a figurehead and occasionally make Difficult Decisions. If you think about it, they are essentially what the average millennial thinks a CEO is, and they are handed that quasi-CEO status for nothing more than being Special.

This is pure poison for the Gamma soul. It not only justifies his failure to act or to self-improve, but flatters his delusions about himself. Those who fail to recognize his Special status, those men who fail to fall in line to follow him and those women who fail to offer their hearts to him, are either evil or foolish and blind, just like the antagonists in the book. And one day, just like those antagonists, they will get their comeuppance! It is inevitable, it is fated.

No wonder the Farmboy’s Journey is so popular. It’s basically psychological reinforcement for the Gamma mind. And, writers take note, the less the protagonist has to actually do, the more that his accomplishments revolve around his being rather than his deeds, the more popular it is likely to be with the Gamma crowd because it flatters their desire to lead, get the girl, and be the hero.

Contrast this with Frodo. He is the hero, but he leads nothing and he gets no girl. All he does is shatter the power of Mordor and save the People of the West. Conan is the hero, wins a crown, and gets numerous girls, but he does it all through his deeds; he is the opposite of Special, being frequently dismissed as a mere barbarian. Marcus Valerius is an aristocrat, but for him it is as much burden as benefit, and while his Valerian blood provides him with leadership of the House legion, it doesn’t offer him anything more than the opportunity to fail.

I think one can tell a lot about a boy by learning who his favorite characters from various books are. For example, my favorites from The Lord of the Rings were always Eomer and Faramir, which in itself is telling in retrospect. Both were men who were content to be overshadowed, but proved to be competent leaders when the burden was thrust upon them, and both were stubbornly loyal to the point of endangering themselves. My guess is that neither of them likely held much appeal to the Gamma crowd, who would be more drawn to the hidden Specialness of Aragorn, and even more drawn to the likes of the infuriating Rand al’Thor and the insipid Harry Potter.

It’s an interesting field that remains largely unfurrowed, the psychosociality of literature. But one thing that is already clear is that if you’ve got a young Gamma on your hands, you might want to consider pushing more Louis L’amour, Robert E. Howard, and Jack London on him than permit him to indulge himself in repeated reinforcements of his delusional Specialness.

The future looks less than bright

 So much for the self-esteem theory of education:

There was this test. And it was daunting. It was like the SAT or ACT
— which many American millennials are no doubt familiar with, as they
are on track to be the best educated generation in history — except
this test was not about getting into college. This exam, given in 23
countries, assessed the thinking abilities and workplace skills of
adults. It focused on literacy, math and technological problem-solving.
The goal was to figure out how prepared people are to work in a complex,
modern society.

And U.S. millennials performed horribly.

That
might even be an understatement, given the extent of the American
shortcomings. No matter how you sliced the data – by class, by race, by
education – young Americans were laggards compared to their
international peers. In every subject, U.S. millennials ranked at the
bottom or very close to it, according to a new study by testing company
ETS.

“We were taken aback,” said ETS researcher Anita Sands. “We
tend to think millennials are really savvy in this area. But that’s not
what we are seeing.”

The test is called the PIAAC test.
It was developed by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development, better known as the OECD. The test was meant to assess
adult skill levels. It was administered worldwide to people ages 16 to
65. The results came out two years ago and barely caused a ripple. But
recently ETS went back and delved into the data to look at how 
millennials did as a group. After all, they’re the future – and, in
America, they’re poised to claim the title of largest generation from
the baby boomers.

U.S. millennials, defined as people 16 to 34
years old, were supposed to be different. They’re digital natives. They
get it. High achievement is part of their makeup. But the ETS study
found signs of trouble, with its authors warning that the nation was at
a crossroads: “We can decide to accept the current levels of mediocrity
and inequality or we can decide to address the skills challenge head
on.”

The challenge is that, in literacy, U.S. millennials scored higher than only three countries. In math, Americans ranked last. In technical problem-saving, they were second from the bottom.

This isn’t surprising to me. Generation X had to understand its toys in order to play with them. There is nothing creative about a tablet or a smartphone. You can’t do anything on it. It’s basically a dumb terminal on the mainframe of the Internet. These digital natives are actually digital cargo cultists, comfortably familiar using things they don’t actually know the first thing about.  As far as they’re concerned, it might as well be magic.

Related Works Book Bomb

Larry Correia has posted the third and last of the 2015 Sad Puppies Book Bombs, this one for Related Works and the Campbell nominees:

BOOK BOMB!

This is our last Sad Puppies 3 Book Bomb. Remember, you’ve only got a few more days to get your nominations in for the Hugo awards. The Sad Puppies bombs are special because these are the works in the different categories that the Evil Legion of Evil has put forth as suggestions for our Hugo nomination slate. The last two we did went amazing.

RELATED WORKS:

CAMPBELL AWARD:

Nominations close on March 10, so if you’re registered to vote on the Hugo Awards, don’t forget to review the Rabid Puppies recommendations as they’ve been updated several times to reflect various eligibility issues, gun-shy authors, and other changes. Don’t leave it to the last minute!

In addition to the three Sad Puppies recommendations for the Campbell Award, please note that Rabid Puppies is also supporting Rolf Nelson for his debut novel, The Stars Came Back. Castalia House will be publishing the sequel to it later this year. As before, if you’ve already bought these works, please consider supporting the Bomb by posting a review of them.

Smells like disruption

Google appears interested in presenting an opportunity to competitors:

The trustworthiness of a web page might help it rise up Google’s rankings if the search giant starts to measure quality by facts, not just links. THE internet is stuffed with garbage. Anti-vaccination websites make the front page of Google, and fact-free “news” stories spread like wildfire. Google has devised a fix – rank websites according to their truthfulness.

Google’s search engine currently uses the number of incoming links to a web page as a proxy for quality, determining where it appears in search results. So pages that many other sites link to are ranked higher. This system has brought us the search engine as we know it today, but the downside is that websites full of misinformation can rise up the rankings, if enough people link to them.

A Google research team is adapting that model to measure the trustworthiness of a page, rather than its reputation across the web. Instead of counting incoming links, the system – which is not yet live – counts the number of incorrect facts within a page. “A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy,” says the team (arxiv.org/abs/1502.03519v1). The score they compute for each page is its Knowledge-Based Trust score.

The software works by tapping into the Knowledge Vault, the vast store of facts that Google has pulled off the internet. Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings.

Considering what we’ve learned about a) the lies committed by corrupt scientific researchers, b) the inferiority and corruption of the U.S. educational system, and c) the proclivity for complete fiction on the part of the U.S. news media, it’s not difficult to predict that this will be a complete debacle if Google is foolish enough to implement it. If I were a competitor to Google search, I would be on my knees praying that they would follow through on this concept in the most extreme manner possible.

You know this is most likely an SJW-driven affair, because only SJWs would be dumb enough to risk a corporation’s entire business model in the interests of their ideology. If this is simply a genuine attempt to improve their offerings, Google will introduce it as an option for those interested in it and it will either succeed or fail on the merits of the implementation. If it is an SJW attempt to drive the narrative, it will be imposed as a replacement for the link-based system and people will rapidly turn to competitors who don’t seek to impose their reality on the masses.

I tend to doubt that the ABCNNBCBS cabal will be buried deep within the “truth-based” links due to their near-complete disassociation with observable reality. But you never know. Perhaps this is Google’s stealth means of taking on the mainstream media indirectly.

Back on the field

Soccer has started up again at the higher levels. Last night Ender’s team scrimmaged the first team on the main field while we veterans held a normal practice on the practice field. We ended early enough for me to catch the last quarter of the game; Ender played the second half and did pretty well. He only let in two goals, one of which should have been called for offsides, and while he was a bit shaky with the offseason rust, he did better than the starting goalie, who let in three, one of which was a disaster. Needs some work on his goal kicks and distributions, but the punting was good.

I’m rusty myself. Six shots, and all but one wide by inches. Everything is going a little to the right, so I need to adjust for that. The ball control is better than I’d expected, and while all my offseason running and stretching has helped – I can actually walk today, contra SB’s expectations – there is no substitute for the actual sprint-and-stop of gameplay.

It’s clear that Ender isn’t going to take over for the starter this season, he’s a good guy who is three years older and has earned his place. At this point, Ender is better off playing spot duty and second halves when the game is under control than dealing with all the pressure from still-immature players who blame the goalie for permitting scores after complete defensive breakdowns.

The first team won 5-1, and they did so without breaking a sweat. It was clearly humiliating to the cocky younger guys, who are of American high school varsity age and all seemed to be three inches taller than they were when the fall season started. Ender did not take it at all well when I mildly observed that when we veterans played the first team last fall, we beat them by three goals.

It’s rather amusing. The juniors tend to instinctively treat the veterans as if we’re old and past it until they notice that the first team players, who are all in their 20s, tend to regard us as older comrades. The kids don’t know that most of of the first-teamers have played with us from time to time because when we’re short; we’re allowed to field up to two younger players when we have less than 14 men.

The one thing the young guys never seem to figure out is that if you’re still playing soccer 25 years after you started playing at the first team level, you were probably pretty damn good at it back in the day. Our entire team is probably as talented as the average of the best four junior players, we’re just older, fatter, balder, and slower than they are. Technically, I’m one of the worst players on my team and there isn’t a defender on the juniors team that could shut me down. Combine that with the fact that we’re more experienced, more muscular, and some of our players have been playing together for 30 years, and they don’t have a chance. But they never put two and two together until they go up against the old men on the field.

It was the same at my old club, which competed at a higher level. When the club held a tournament of champions for its 75th Anniversary, and invited back all the teams that had ever won promotion for a 7-on-7 tournament, the team that won was not either of the two most recently promoted first teams, but my veteran’s team that had won two successive promotions the previous two years. For me, though, the most memorable thing was seeing a first team from 40 years before, and the frail, white-haired, white-bearded goalie who at 65 was still better than Ender or the starting junior’s goalie. I wasn’t surprised to hear that after playing for our first team, he’d gone on to play a few years for a championship team at the professional level.

It’s all part of the process, the circle of soccer. The juniors are growing up, some of them at different rates than others. The exposure to the first team at the end of last year was important, because it made it clear to them that all their idiotic pecking order games are over. At the first team level, nobody gives a damn about much except how well you play and what you have to contribute to the team. The kid who attacked and exchanged bloody noses with Ender in the first practice last fall is now polite and respectful, and as Ender noted, almost salutes when I address him. He and Ender aren’t friends, but they play well together, the kid is a solid defender who takes his job of protecting his goalie seriously. Conflict isn’t always a bad thing.

There are still some problem children. The tall and arrogant sweeper took the ball last night despite Ender calling for it as he came out, then told Ender that he didn’t give a fuck when Ender chewed him out for it. Their coach, who is a first team player and the first good coach most of these kids have had in their entire careers, shrugged and told Ender to simply go for the ball and take the sweeper out the next time he doesn’t listen. He’s one of those big, athletic kids who needs to be taken down a few times before he’s able to pay attention; I’m going to suggest to our captain that we scrimmage the juniors for just that purpose. The kid has three inches on me, but I’ve got 30 pounds of muscle on him; I figure that after I blow by him a few times, score a couple of goals, and put him down on the ground once or twice, he’ll be in more of a mood to listen.

How to reduce crime

Norway cuts crime by 30 percent:

Norway recently made the controversial decision to deport a large amount of Muslims with ties to radical groups. Despite all the liberals in Norway deeming this “racist”, the logical party went ahead with it and the result almost shut down every opposing voice in the government instantly. This is one of the best stories we have eve seen come from such a liberal area of the world.

Violent Crime Dropped By 30%! That’s right, whopping 30%, and it’s all because a couple of
politicians decided to enforce the laws that they already had. What a
world we live in where that is a shocking thing to do in a government.

Imagine how much crime in Norway will be reduced when the Europe Belongs To Us generation takes over. Sure, the Baby Boomers won’t approve, but by then, they’ll all be dead.

The best of all possible worlds

I stand corrected. Dr. Pangloss was right. Because we live in a world where THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED! We live in a world where A WEASEL TOOK A RIDE ON A FLYING WOODPECKER’S BACK. I don’t even want to know the real story. I’m just happy to know that it happened on my planet.

A lesson in Gamma

This revelatory explanation by a Gamma male was so unexpected, and yet so illuminating, that I felt it worth bringing to the attention of the VP readership as well:

Gammas think they are Alphas.

It sounds insane, but it’s true. A man who knows his place and sticks to that place is usually left to his own devices. Pay tribute to those above, demand tribute from those below, and if a man should disagree with either his own or your relative position in the hierarchy, then conflict will ensue to determine who is correct. It’s a simple enough formula and it occurs frequently, if not daily, during the course of a man’s life. Men tend to be very diligent about ensuring the proper order of things, but once that order is established, there is an element of stability. The victor may be magnanimous to the defeated. In turn, the loser is expected to acclimate himself to his new position.

Gammas introduce instability to this hierarchy. They refuse to accept their station, nor do they propose to increase it through deeds and experience. Like women, they come to expect a certain station in life and feel wronged when it is not provided for them. A common Gamma thought would be “why should he be the leader and get all the glory for himself?”

The part that I thought was particularly insightful was this statement: “Doubtless, thinks the Gamma, the leadership position was earned through
subterfuge and oppression since that is how he would obtain it.”

A leadership position earned through subterfuge and oppression? Strange, for some reason that sounds strangely… familiar?

Asking for trouble

This epically lunatic deployment looks likely to put more than a few American soldiers in danger this summer:

US 173rd Airborne Brigade Commander Michael Foster said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC said the US would deploy personnel by the end of this week to train the Ukrainian national guard.

“Before this week is up, we’ll be deploying a battalion minus… to the Ukraine to train Ukrainian forces for the fight that’s taking place,” Foster stated. “What we’ve got laid out is six United States companies that will be training six Ukrainian companies throughout the summer.”

The training will take place at the level of US and Ukrainian national guard companies, Foster explained, adding that “we have nothing above battalion staff level” engaged in the military training. The current plan is for US forces to stay six months, he said, and noted there have been discussions about how to increase the duration and the scope of the training mission.

The current channels for military training set up between Ukraine and the United States would not be used for transferring defensive lethal aid if the United States decided to provide arms to Ukraine, Foster told Sputnik on Monday.

I imagine Putin is already conferring with his generals about the best way to encircle and capture this battalion, which would be a bigger military humiliation for the United States than the Vietnam War combined with the failure of Operation Eagle Claw.