Virginia Gun Massacre
- Thread starter IdleRich
- Start date
Guybrush
Dittohead
Ahaha...those results are hardly surprising. Have you ever played Myst? It's the computer game equivalent of thorazine
Yeah, I know. And Wolfenstein 3-D hardly is realistic by today’s standards:
This is more like it:
hundredmillionlifetimes
Banned
Yes. And the US military spends vast sums on battle simulations, models and games for daily use across all of its operations, from training to actual conflict, as well as on the related research [just examine this ("Introducing Emotion into Military Simulation and Videogame Design") for an example of the kind of research being undertaken in countless university, corporate, and military "research labs"], not to mention its collaborations with both Hollywood and games manufacturers.
Is it doing all of this just for "harmless" fun? To make users become less prone, less susceptible, and more averse to violence? [as opposed to - more clinically, more ruthlessly -preparing them for it?]
That would be analogous to claiming that advertising has no relationship, no connection, no impact on consumerism [which would certainly be news to all the companies that spend countless billions on advertising every year].
Guybrush
Dittohead
I don’t remember where I read it, but apparently the U.S. military was displeased with a large percentage of the U.S. soldiers in WW2 not ever using their weapons. This led to their introducing some kind of a desensitisation program—a de-humanisation program, if you will—which evidently worked wonders with the soldiers operating in Vietnam, nearly all of whom readily fired their weapons. If anyone has a link I would be glad to see it.
hundredmillionlifetimes
Banned
Two researchers, Peter Watson [whose War on the mind: The military uses and abuses of psychology was also made into a play at the Crucible Theatre] and Dave Grossman [ On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society], deal directly with this topic.
The state has harnessed not only technology to make more powerful weapons but also the science of psychology to make more soldiers more effective killers. Most men will avoid killing if at all possible. After World War II, S. L. A. Marshall and his team interviewed hundreds of American soldiers. They found, unexpectedly, that only one in five in frontline combat actually fired their rifles. The analysis of what it takes to kill in war has been pursued further by Dave Grossman in his book On Killing. There is quite a bit of evidence from various wars that most soldiers avoid killing at all costs, even at the risk of being killed themselves. By reconstructing old battles in which soldiers with muskets fired at each other for hours standing in lines only a few dozen meters apart, analysts have determined that most of them who fired intended to miss (by shooting over the heads of the enemy), leading to very low hit rates. The closer one is to another person, physically and emotionally, the harder it is to kill them, and the greater the psychological trauma from doing so. Most of the killing in infantry battles is caused by artillery and machine guns, not direct engagement by infantry with rifles.
Western militaries took notice of Marshall's findings and used insights from psychology to improve killing rates, as described in Peter Watson's book War on the Mind. They found that the greatest incentive to kill came not from ideology, hatred of the enemy or fear of being killed, but from loyalty to the immediate fighting group. Relevant factors in military training are recruitment at an impressionable age, training to hate and dehumanise the enemy, training to obey authority, and peer pressure. However, this is still not enough to make most men fire in battle. The extra factor needed is conditioning, against based on insights from psychology. As Grossman puts it, the "procedure of precisely rehearsing and mimicking a killing action is an excellent way of ensuring that the individual is capable of performing the act in combat."
For example, the easiest way to damage someone with one's hand involves sticking one's thumb through the person's eye into the brain and moving the thumb around. This is abhorrent to most people, even to think about. To train soldiers in this killing technique, one karate instructor has students practise using oranges taped over the opponent's eye. Similarly, rather than shooting at traditional targets, soldiers are trained to shoot at pictures of enemy troops that pop up unexpectedly and destruct realistically when hit. After conditioning of this sort, the soldier performs on "automatic pilot" in the actual combat situation. Use of these techniques raised the firing rate of US soldiers from 20% in World War II to over 90% in the Vietnam war.
And Zizek's take: "I believe that the really ultimate fantasy is we will have war which is somehow virtual and takes place nowhere. In the last bombardments of Iraq a few months ago, in daily reports Baghdad was depicted as just a normal city, as if the bombing is just a nightmare which happens during the night and somehow life goes on. It’s as if war becomes simply virtualized. What’s my point here? I will try to answer the question of why we fantasize about violence. This tendency to erase death itself from war should not seduce us into endorsing the standard notion that war is made less traumatic when no longer experienced by soldiers as an actual encounter with another human being to be killed but as an abstract activity in front of a screen. That’s the idea, that today war is virtualized, nobody even sees the bodies, it’s a kind of videogame. What I learned from talking with war psychologists in the States is that the result is not less guilt but more anxiety. Even in the Gulf War of 1991, I read that in a report, that of American soldiers who had psychological traumas after the war, the majority of them were not as you would expect the ones who actually killed the Iraqi soldiers. It’s even the obverse correlation, those who experienced the war as strictly virtual, they didn’t feel guilt but an unbearable anxiety. This can retroactively explain another paradox. Already in World War I a mysterious phenomenon occurred which is I think a kind of military counterpoint to false memory syndrome. Sixty to seventy percent of soldiers remember this mythical, "authentic" experience of warfare such as that hailed by Ernst Junger. I see you, my enemy and briefly our gazes meet, there’s an authentic real encounter with another flesh and blood being, then it’s always the same, I stick you with a bayonet and throw you over my shoulder. However, according to all data it’s maximum one half percent that actually had this experience of killing in face–to–face combat. Far from being the ultimate traumatic point that you try to erase, the need to have this face–to–face encounter rather has a pacifying aspect of getting rid of anxiety for us. What really causes anxiety is virtualized warfare. My point I hope is now clear. This opposition between modern, virtualized warfare and the need to have the brutal encounter with another soldier this opposition is ultimately the same as the opposition of Benigni’s father [Zizek is referring to Benigni's character in the film Life Is Beautiful] and Vinterberg’s father [from the film Celebration/Festen]. In the same way that it’s not that unfortunately we have to kill real persons and then we imagine how nice it would be to play just keyboard wars, but that it’s the soldier playing war behind the screen who is full of anxiety and fantasizes about a face–to–face real encounter, which although it would make him guilty would give him a real guilt ..." [From The Superego And The Act]
Guybrush
Dittohead
Maybe with the help of elder hunters’ psychological conditioning techniques?
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Not to mention those all-night Quake -4,564,307 sessions...
Guybrush
Dittohead
crackerjack
Well-known member
When I saw that title i thought he was on that 'Slave Rebellion' tip.
Guybrush
Dittohead
Ah, yes, I didn’t think of that. That would have made my day.
This is a bit crap, though.
vimothy
yurp
Just as I thought, Glenn Harlan Reynolds in TCS Daily, porn and violent video games are good for children:
- http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=072804C
- http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=072804C
Guybrush
Dittohead
I pretty much agree with Reynolds. I haven’t made my mind up about violent video games yet. I think it’s beyond dispute that you get numbed by participating in virtual violence, but Reynolds’ has a point in that you can view video games as an innocuous outlet for violent behaviour, making you less tempered, testy, or whatever, in real life.
Porn, on the other hand, I think is almost exclusively good. Most importantly, it seems that a general increase in porn consumption leads to rape instances decreasing, rather than the opposite (which I have heard being voiced on several occasions). The downside? The usual stuff: objectification; partial disintegration of male–female relations; women losing out, as most of them aren’t as visual in their sexuality as men are, and thus get less out of watching porn.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Sounds pretty reasonable to me.
At the rate we're going someone's going to suggest something really crazy and out-there, like "responsibly allowing children to drink small amounts of alcohol with food and under adult supervision reduces the likelihood of alcoholism in later life"...
At the rate we're going someone's going to suggest something really crazy and out-there, like "responsibly allowing children to drink small amounts of alcohol with food and under adult supervision reduces the likelihood of alcoholism in later life"...
hundredmillionlifetimes
Banned
vimothy said:
Obviously not doing wellenough for the US Armed Forces. But you already knew that.
Given that many of these kids [and, increasingly, adults] are spending a growing proportion of their everyday lives playing these games, whatever do you suppose their "real life" is?
But you know that old conservative, ultra-montane mantra: "Let's clean up our violent streets and wayward youth by declaring war; that'll put the problem where it belongs: on the battlefields [of Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Haiti etc]".
Guybrush said:
I must say that I thought the article was the height of absurdity, sheer infantilist, ego-maniacal nonsense. How would they even KNOW about instances of rape when, increasingly, the very concept of rape in porno culture is being actively re-defined as "fun", as an acceptable and commonsensical part of daily sexual life that most "sensible" women are only too eager to "freely" participate in. "Look! Nobody's complaining about so-called rape. And anyway, isn't whoredom a lifestyle choice nowadays? They love it!" ...
I also think there are major problems when the porn in question, while potentially (and that's a big, I would say, unprovable potentially) decreasing instances of rape, also serves to normalize it in the constraints of sexual interaction. I've never seen such a great contrast as when I received a DVD of 70's porno trailers and compared it to modern pornography where (in every popular porn) women are featured in virtual rape scenarios that end with them denigrated, thrown out of cars, abandoned, smothered in semen and used as living toilet bowls. Those porns aren't exceptions to the rule anymore, they ARE the rule.
Show me one popular pornographic film from the past, say, 15 years that hasn't been completely reprehensible. And the attitudes are taking hold on the younger generation that's being brought up on them, without question (go out in public...anywhere). Pornography nowadays is almost entirely based on humiliation. Even in the milder cases, there's still the taint. Don't know if significantly deadening male-female interactions on a one-to-one basis and within the culture as a whole is really the preferable option...
...or basically what hundredmillionlifetimes said.
Show me one popular pornographic film from the past, say, 15 years that hasn't been completely reprehensible. And the attitudes are taking hold on the younger generation that's being brought up on them, without question (go out in public...anywhere). Pornography nowadays is almost entirely based on humiliation. Even in the milder cases, there's still the taint. Don't know if significantly deadening male-female interactions on a one-to-one basis and within the culture as a whole is really the preferable option...
...or basically what hundredmillionlifetimes said.