• Hubi@feddit.org
      0·
      11 days ago

      The commercialization is what took out all the fun. You used to go to war over physical things like land or treasure, then it was ideology and now it’s just so the green line goes up. Lame af.

        • Programmer Belch@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          0·
          11 days ago

          Yes! It was very surprising that it was so spot on. I guess there were people there knowing that the future of war was remote. The radar wasn’t even invented by that date!

          • DagwoodIII@piefed.socialEnglish
            0·
            11 days ago

            I just rewatched the pilot episode of Babylon 5. The space station has a daily newspaper.

            It’s always fun to read old SF and see what they got right and what they missed.

            Probably the king of misinformation is ‘The Man Who Sold The Moon.’ Gets every detail wrong, but it’s still a fun read. One of the businessman/hero’s greatest inventions is an automatic light switch you don’t have to touch to turn on lights when you enter a room. Best invention of 1954!

  • terranoid@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    0·
    11 days ago

    lol holy fuck I hope no one takes this seriously, because Vietnam was fucking hell for the soldiers. No one thought it was awesome except some conservative Nixon supporting fucks who didn’t care because they didn’t have their 16 year old get drafted.

    • hyphen0175@lemmy.zip
      0·
      11 days ago

      There’s a lot of interesting idea in this paper, presented in a very strange way. The main idea is that drone warfare takes a lot of the masculinity (for example, courage in the face of death) out of warfare, and masculinity can be seen as one of the main concepts that drive war. The act of killing is no longer masculine in this context (like the meme shows) and this poses a big problem for the military. The paper takes a strange direction and implies that because it can’t be masculine, it might be queer (gay), and further that this queerness could be a positive opportunity for changing the discourse about war. It’s a cool idea that talking about drone warfare’s emasculation could change people’s minds about war, but the way that they used queerness as a concept to get there reads so bizarrely.

      • gandalf_der_13te@feddit.org
        0·
        11 days ago

        i’ve actually been thinking whether there could maybe be some kind of machine-wrestling. i.e. fights for show or competition or sth, similar to the olympic games, but purely involving machines. drones and such

        i guess maybe nobody wants to participate there to not leak their secret military technology?

      • Flatfire@lemmy.ca
        0·
        11 days ago

        I was so taken out of it, I thought they may have just been using queer in the context of irregularity but then they hit me with “drones could give people gender anxiety” and I didn’t know where I was anymore lol

        It’s almost an interesting train of thought, but war isn’t inherently masculine, and I think it’s a pretty undeserving concept once you consider external factors that drive people to conflict. This feels like it views masculinity solely through the lens of what is more accurately described as toxic masculinity, where the image of maleness is based in some combatitive quantity.

      • Fuckfuckmyfuckingass@lemmy.world
        0·
        11 days ago

        I’ve had conversations with people who think that Medieval warfare was more honorable and better because of the hand to hand nature of it, and that guns ruined how badass it was.

        It also draws to mind the inventor of the machine gun Hiram Maxim’s idea that the machine gun would be so terrible that people would stop having wars.

        The reality is that war has always been the worst thing that can happen, and most people die of disease and indiscriminate weapons like artillery.

        It seems the strategy of making hell more hellish to stop the hell is a poor one.

        • AFallingAnvil@lemmy.ca
          0·
          11 days ago

          In fairness, nukes kinda are the ultimate making hell more hell and so Maxim’s idea worked to a degree.

          • Fuckfuckmyfuckingass@lemmy.world
            0·
            10 days ago

            Nukes are the ultimate Chekov’s Gun. It’s only a matter of time before one gets touched off somewhere for some reason. Especially as society continues to crumble from underlying ecological collapse.

        • idiomaddict@lemmy.world
          0·
          11 days ago

          I do think warfare is more honorable and better the less technology you use, but that’s just because technology lets you increase the distance of warfare and the distance is what actually makes wars worse or less honorable.

          I would not have said better without the prompt of your comment, but I value the deadliness of war negatively, so something like a club can kill fewer people than a gun, which can kill fewer people than a neutron bomb.

          I think it’s more honorable to give all parties involved an honest chance in winning a fight and in harming the other side. Drone operators are functionally immune to harm, and their side only risks the value of a drone, whereas the other side is often unarmed and fully vulnerable to drone attacks, just by sleeping near a window or being outside [or going to a wedding, but that’s not my point]. It’s a lot harder to hit someone with a club without being vulnerable to their attacks yourself, and you cast an even wider net of damage with similarly low risk of the people actually impacted by your neutron bomb being able to attack you back.

          A good historical example for how this is not dependent just on technology and for why medieval warfare was NOT more honorable is the Siege of Caffa. The Golden Horde flung plague-ridden corpses over the city walls, infecting the residents, causing them to flee, and likely causing the Black Death. That again, involves an increased distance of warfare. Any time you fight in a way that can’t be reversed, it’s less honorable and deadlier, thereby making it worse from my perspective.

        • dalekcaan@feddit.nl
          0·
          10 days ago

          On its face, making war more hellish to dissuade people from waging war sounds like a good idea. Where it falls apart is that the ones waging war typically aren’t the ones going through hell.

    • gandalf_der_13te@feddit.org
      0·
      11 days ago

      wtf did i just read. lmao. this gotta be some ragebait paper.

      I show how descriptions of drone warfare are rife with symptoms of an unresolved disorientation, often expressed as gender anxiety over the failure of the distance–intimacy and home–combat axes to orient killing with drones.

    • FinjaminPoach@lemmy.world
      0·
      11 days ago

      Lemmy has got to be the only place where people use reaction academic papers rather than reaction gifs. But i love that. Thanks for sharing

  • UnspecificGravity@piefed.socialEnglish
    0·
    11 days ago

    I do think its funny that people think the drone war future is one in which humans aren’t getting killed instead of where where humans can’t even fight back.

    Go watch ANY footage of the war in Ukraine and think about swarms of those drones working their way down your street, because that is what it looks like.

      • QuinnyCoded@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        11 days ago

        who? everyone that joins Russias army to be cannon fodder does it willingly, there isn’t a draft (as of yet anyways)

        there’s ~30,000 Russian losses per month

          • Mirshe@lemmy.world
            0·
            11 days ago

            Drones cannot occupy a city. Drones cannot hold land. Even in the grim darkness of the 21st century, a drone is far more susceptible to outside factors eliminating its fighting capability than a human soldier standing in the same spot. At the end of the day, yes, a bulk of the fighting will be done by remote, but you’ll still need meatbags with guns to actually advance and take areas. There’s really no way to get around that unless we somehow develop autonomous robots that are able to make smart choices and strategize on the ground without human oversight, and I simply don’t see us managing any serious level of “AGI” from the current idea of machine learning, at all.

          • QuinnyCoded@sh.itjust.works
            0·
            11 days ago

            war fucking sucks man. They’re still an enemy soldier who’s invading a nation trying to defend itself, I wouldn’t consider that an “innocent person”.

  • acargitz@lemmy.ca
    0·
    10 days ago

    The war version of Zizek’s “my chatbot fucks your chatbot, we get sex out of the way and we can discuss philosophy”.

  • DarkCloud@lemmy.world
    0·
    11 days ago

    Anyone who thinks America were the good guys in Vietnam is full on fucking stupid.

    America who faked an attack on themselves (Gulf of Tonkin incident) to get into a war, start loosing and so used chemical weapons and random attacks on women and children. Then continuing to lose Richard Nixon decided to extend the war crimes and deaths several years in order to run an illegal and undeclared war against Laos and Cambodia - allowing Pol Pot and the Kymer Rouge to get into power off the millitarism and anti-American sentiment the wars created.

    Eventually when the American media and students got angry enough and the war dead and massive extent of war crimes, and illegal actions of Nixon got too much, America finally decided to accept their losses and just leave. Leaving Pol Pot to commit his own extremist crimes against humanity.

    Ultimately Vietnam had to then go to war with their neighbors in order to stop Pol Pot’s war cimes and genocides.

    All because America was afraid of Socialism.

    The fucking “good guys”, spraying agent orange and napalm on children.

  • BigDiction@lemmy.world
    0·
    10 days ago

    Nothing gets the murder juices flowing like being forced into a hot, humid environment you never thought about until getting drafted.

  • wdx@feddit.org
    0·
    10 days ago

    I get the feeling someone had a frustrating day at work due to Kubernetes

  • wieson@feddit.org
    0·
    10 days ago

    Nah, cosacks riding in with their war falcons, raining down birds of fire onto a nuclear power is way cooler than lukewarm and wet amithumbs getting stuck in the jungle.