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An ostentatious proposal

Barber Shop said:
I see that Travis has been reading those Ron Paul brochures I mailed him...
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"Shoot the wounded" has been proposed as a military strategy before. It has never been implemented in the USA military for "morale" reasons.

So don't you find it odd that that when it comes to the civilian population so many just don't care that millions are dying from treatable diseases and conditions?
 
Travis said:
"Shoot the wounded" has been proposed as a military strategy before. It has never been implemented in the USA military for "morale" reasons.
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Why is "morale" in scare quotes? Do you not believe morale is a real thing? Do you believe the policy was rejected for reason other than morale?

So don't you find it odd that that when it comes to the civilian population so many just don't care that millions are dying from treatable diseases and conditions?
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Not really, no. Even assuming there's actually support for the questions your begging ("millions", "dying", and "treatable"; see Zig's request for evidence, above), I'd figure morale is still the driving fator. That is, the morale drain in the civilian context is not perceived as great enough to outweigh the resource drain. There are probably many reasons for this, as well as other influencing factors. But no, it doesn't surprise me at all that military priorities and attitudes differ markedly from civilian priorities and attitudes.

Actually, I think your comparison to the military is kind of interesting. The military context is a context of extremes. The military is driven by one single, brutal idea: kill people until you get what you want. Anything that serves that idea is considered. It's no accident that the military, more so than any other organization in our society, embraces policies that necessarily maim and kill civilians. It's extreme, but it's what the military does. It's no accident that military vehicles are orders of magnitude less efficient than their civilian counterparts. It's no accident that the military is so often criticized for lack of restraint: the military's purpose is best served by unrestrained violence.

So when you say the military aids their wounded, rather than leave them be, this suggest to me that this is the more extreme, more "costly" solution. That the military, in its pursuit of that one overarching goal, finds low morale to be more burdensome than additional medical support. When you say the military aids their wounded, my first thought is, "of course they do, because the military always does whatever it takes to get what they want, even if it means mass slaughter. Where a sane civilian population would exercise restraint and seek out cost-effective trade-offs, the military will pay whatever price necessary to win battles and win wars."

Of course wars justify all kinds of things. That's why it's tempting to portray things other than war as being equivalent to war, so you can justify the excesses of military strategy in civilian life. Fascism tries to do this, to cast the entire national experience as an existential struggle, a war without end, that touches all lives, in which no-one is a civilian, and for which everyone will be expected to make supreme sacrifices.

So when you say the military does something, I say, the military does it for a reason, and do you really want to expand the military reasons to aspects of civilian life outside of the military?

tl;dr -- why is "morale" in scare quotes, in your post?
 
Travis said:
"Shoot the wounded" has been proposed as a military strategy before. It has never been implemented in the USA military for "morale" reasons.
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Travis, would you care to back that statement up with anything substantial?

By the way, what you suggest happened (when??) would be a matter of "personnel policy" rather than "strategy."

I think you are speaking about an area where you know less than nothing, sort of like me going on and on about brain surgery. Ya see, I am clever enough to know not to do that, about brain surgery.

Suggest you take that pro tip and run with it, amigo.
 
theprestige said:
The military context is a context of extremes. The military is driven by one single, brutal idea: kill people until you get what you want.
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Actually, I'd revise that. The real point of a military is to convince everyone else that you are willing and capable of killing people until you get what you want. You don't have to do a thing until someone calls your bluff.
 
TragicMonkey said:
I think the solution is to get rid of money. After all, nobody really needs money. We need goods and services. If we simply provide everybody with the goods and services they need, and they provide us with the goods and services we need, we'll have no use for bits of paper or numbers in a bank account. Then instead of wasting our lives trying to collect more numbers in a bank account, we can actually accomplish something as a species, like building a sex temple on the moon. Doesn't that sound worthwhile? Low-gravity sex in worship of sex demons, on the moon! It's economically titillating.
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Where do I sign?
 
TragicMonkey said:
Actually, I'd revise that. The real point of a military is to convince everyone else that you are willing and capable of killing people until you get what you want. You don't have to do a thing until someone calls your bluff.
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Fair enough. Actually, I kinda rambled on a bit there. I guess all I was really trying to say was, the military's business is war, and war calls for extreme measures. Therefore, unless you want to cast your whole society as being in a state of perpetual war, it's probably better not to use the military as a template for society as a whole.

Also, I really wanted to know why Travis put "morale" in scare quotes up there. I guess he must have me on ignore.
 
theprestige said:
Fair enough. Actually, I kinda rambled on a bit there. I guess all I was really trying to say was, the military's business is war, and war calls for extreme measures. Therefore, unless you want to cast your whole society as being in a state of perpetual war, it's probably better not to use the military as a template for society as a whole.

Also, I really wanted to know why Travis put "morale" in scare quotes up there. I guess he must have me on ignore.
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Don't flatter yourself. It's well known he doesn't put people on ignore, no matter how dumb they are - he does run the Studies after all.

He may choose not to respond to that particular question, though, as it isn't really important. That's up to him.

You say there's a difference between military and civilian lives. You seem to be saying that the difference is that military lives are prized higher. Is that really what you mean?

Because you seem to be saying that you can't compare letting civilians die to letting military personnel die. So presumably, there's a reason why military life is worth more?
 
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whatthebutlersaw said:
Don't flatter yourself. It's well known he doesn't put people on ignore, no matter how dumb they are - he does run the Studies after all.
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He may choose not to respond to that particular question, though, as it isn't really important. That's up to him.
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The military comparison is one he introduced to support his argument. I assume it's important. I'd like to better understand what he thinks the military's motivation is.

You say there's a difference between military and civilian lives. You seem to be saying that the difference is that military lives are prized higher. Is that really what you mean?
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Not at all. I'm not sure why it seems that way to you. What I'm trying to say is that the military goes to great expense to preserve military lives because it prizes victory at (almost) any cost, and therefore it prizes the morale bonus to victory that it achieves by preserving military lives.

Because you seem to be saying that you can't compare letting civilians die to letting military personnel die. So presumably, there's a reason why military life is worth more?
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No, I think you can compare the two. I also think it's important to understand the differences between military and civilian values, so that you can make sensible comparisons and useful conclusions.

I don't actually think that military life is worth more per se, except possibly in the sense that the military is in the business of trading lives (and other things) for victory. I think if the military determined that they got more victory out of not preserving soldier's lives, and instead spending those resources on other, more victory-enabling things, they would probably do so. As it is, the military seems to think the morale bonus is worth the cost of the medical resources.

That's what the comparison shows us. It shows us that the military values human lives because it can trade them for victory, and because it is willing to pay high costs to do so. High costs in health care, high costs in fuel consumption, high costs in terms of quality of life and personal freedoms, etc.

So when Travis says, "the military does such-and-such, why can't civilians do the same," I'm curious to know the motivations behind why the military does it, and what the implications are. Should civilian society share those motivations? Can civilian society achieve the same outcomes with different motivations? Is the military's desired outcome really what Travis thinks it is? Is that really the outcome we should desire for civilian society?
 
Yeah how terrible for me to shine a bright light on a huge piece of hypocrisy.

AMERICA! The land where the military gets health care and a huge portion of the civilians do not.
 
TragicMonkey said:
I think the solution is to get rid of money. After all, nobody really needs money. We need goods and services. If we simply provide everybody with the goods and services they need, and they provide us with the goods and services we need, we'll have no use for bits of paper or numbers in a bank account. Then instead of wasting our lives trying to collect more numbers in a bank account, we can actually accomplish something as a species, like building a sex temple on the moon. Doesn't that sound worthwhile? Low-gravity sex in worship of sex demons, on the moon! It's economically titillating.
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Please add me to your list of supporters and feel free to include me in any call for donations to your campaign.
 
Travis said:
Yeah how terrible for me to shine a bright light on a huge piece of hypocrisy.

AMERICA! The land where the military gets health care and a huge portion of the civilians do not.
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AMERICA! The land where the military can be ordered to risk their lives and a huge portion of the civilians cannot.

AMERICA! The land where adults can vote and children cannot!

AMERICA! The land where government employees get a paycheck from the government and a huge portion of nongovernment employees do not.

Oh, the hypocrisy of it all!

You've jumped the shark, Travis.
 
Ziggurat said:
So don't you find it odd that that when it comes to the civilian population so many just don't care that millions are dying from treatable diseases and conditions?
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Evidence?
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The Tea Party opposition to the proposed health care reforms of Obama.

Darth Rotor said:
Travis, would you care to back that statement up with anything substantial?

By the way, what you suggest happened (when??) would be a matter of "personnel policy" rather than "strategy."
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In the book Armageddon in Stalingrad a shoot the wounded policy came into effect for infantry units right before the Soviet toehold on the west river back held.

"Shoot the wounded" as a strategy is also talked about in the book How to Make War.
 
Ziggurat said:
AMERICA! The land where the military can be ordered to risk their lives and a huge portion of the civilians cannot.

AMERICA! The land where adults can vote and children cannot!

AMERICA! The land where government employees get a paycheck from the government and a huge portion of nongovernment employees do not.

Oh, the hypocrisy of it all!

You've jumped the shark, Travis.
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You still haven't accepted that access to health care should be a right haven't you? You still think that health care should be reserved for the privileged few don't you?
 
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