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zoux posted:Is the current insane lionization of US military service members solely a response to the "they spit on me when I came back from Nam" myth? When did this hero worship start exactly? I think it's just a thing that is steadily building up. I wouldn't attribute it to any particular event. Personally I'd blame the media. 
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Aug 23, 2018 17:09
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Cessna posted:True; I think both Reagan and 9/11 were big points on the graph here. I defer to people older than me on this. I'm a late 80s baby. So for me it all started with 9/11. Yellow ribbons everywhere, Actually knowing service members who had to go to Afghanistan or Iraq or both. The slap fights that took place over "Supporting our troops" once the war(s) became a divisive political topic and the use of support as a political mechanism for displaying how "American" you are and how "Un-American" someone else is Constant recognition of veterans at sporting events etc. etc.
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Aug 23, 2018 17:13
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Growing up in the late 80s/early 90s, there was so much Vietnam focused media on TV (Tour of Duty, China Beach, the Wonder Years) and screen (Rambo II, Platoon, Hamburger HIll, that one movie where Chuck Norris and a bunch of abandoned Vietnam POWs bust into a congressional committee right as the chairman says "There are no more POWs in Vietnam) and all of it focused on the personal trials of the actual soldiers on the ground, usually at the squad level, and almost all of it had this backdrop of protesters hating the troops coming back and how that was wrong. That certainly colored my opinion on the Vietnam War until I got older and learned more about it.
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Aug 23, 2018 17:13
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Fangz posted:They looked at the change in voting patterns across the suspension of mandatory military service in France, looking at how the voting patterns for men changed vs how it changed for women - given that women never had military services, a change in voting behaviour in that period that only applied to men would be put down as an effect of mandatory military service. (So they assume that otherwise, the two genders would change mostly in lockstep) Those who took part in compulsary military service were more right wing and especially had negative attitudes to immigrants, voted more often, considered themselves more patriotic, but did not take part in more voluntary civic activities and wanted to pay less tax. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm The papers authors dismiss any sort of generational effect with that assumption. Maybe something that happened in France in the late '60s and early '70s that would change domestic politics or affect opinions on immigrants Slim Jim Pickens fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Aug 23, 2018 |
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Aug 23, 2018 17:15
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm It's not unreasonable. Look at https://www.washingtonpost.com/resi...5P4TX6OGW64.png While women vote democrat more often than men, in the short term at least when the blue squiggle goes up for women it also goes up for men. The two curves, in the absence of stuff that affect only one gender, look like shifted versions of each other. If you have a sudden shift in one gender's political views at exactly the same time as a change in policy that only affects that gender, it's not out there to put it down as an effect of that change in policy. quote:The papers authors dismiss any sort of generational effect with that assumption. Maybe something that happened in France in the late '60s and early '70s that would change domestic politics or affect opinions on immigrants The shift here is taking place across three years. They also do include age effects, provided age affects men and women equally. Further if it is generational change you'd probably see the opposite of the 'fading effect' they observed - that being that military service seems to have a large effect on rightwingness soon after the end of an individual's service, fading out in later life. The way they did the analysis means that if men and women's opinions separate a lot, then that would translate to diminished significance of their result. The point was that the change in this short period time was especially huge, unlike that seen in other periods of time. On the one hand you might put it all down to a coincidence, OTOH I'd note their methodology can be too cautious, because they ignore the idea that men who are conservative due to military service will likely influence the wider society - including women - around them as well. Fangz fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Aug 23, 2018 |
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Aug 23, 2018 17:20
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Ice Fist posted:I defer to people older than me on this. I'm a late 80s baby. So for me it all started with 9/11. Sure, all of that is true. Consider a decade earlier. In the Vietnam era military service and veterans were seen to be bad deals. "Only losers went to Vietnam" was a common sentiment. Look at the pop-culture portrayal of Vietnam vets - they were all traumatized, deranged psychos who would be triggered to violence by the sound of a helo flying overhead. No one in their right mind would sign up for that, and joining the army in the 70's was considered only slightly preferable to living on the street. Look at the laws we have that give veterans preferences for jobs - those laws were a direct response to the prior era, where it was "veterans need not apply." Reagan - and look, I think he was a bad President for many reasons - but one thing he did change was public attitudes towards the military. I think today there's too much hero-worship for veterans (and I'm a veteran myself). But in the early 80's the change was more along the lines of turning the general attitude towards "maybe all veterans aren't crazy kill-bots."
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Aug 23, 2018 17:39
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Cessna posted:Sure, all of that is true. I'm interested to know how this plays out in garrison towns in the US. There's a lot of pro-army sentiment in the UK, although not the the level of the US as far as I can see. But anywhere near a barracks you can also expect a bars and clubs to be pretty unfriendly to squaddies.
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Aug 23, 2018 20:27
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us "garrison towns" are usually in the gently caress middle of nowhere so the base provides pretty much all of the economic activity of the town
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Aug 23, 2018 20:30
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Mr Enderby posted:I'm interested to know how this plays out in garrison towns in the US. There's a lot of pro-army sentiment in the UK, although not the the level of the US as far as I can see. But anywhere near a barracks you can also expect a bars and clubs to be pretty unfriendly to squaddies. True. What I wasn't as much "unfriendly" as it was "out to rip off." There's a stereotype about young jarheads who get their first weekend in Oceanside (the town next to Camp Pendleton) who come back to base with a ten year old Ford Mustang that they just bought at 30% interest with the aging stripper they just married throwing up in the back seat. Some stereotypes have a basis in fact...
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Aug 23, 2018 20:39
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Mr Enderby posted:I'm interested to know how this plays out in garrison towns in the US. There's a lot of pro-army sentiment in the UK, although not the the level of the US as far as I can see. But anywhere near a barracks you can also expect a bars and clubs to be pretty unfriendly to squaddies. I grew up on or near RAF bases and remember thinking the level of military worship in the US was ridiculous, even the first time I went which was pre-9/11. Just random bumper stickers, signs and poo poo you could buy in shops about supporting the troops or a member if the family bring in the forces. We went to the NEX in Norfolk VA and stopped at a military themed Burger King on the way back. It was really loving weird.
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Aug 23, 2018 20:40
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Mr Enderby posted:I'm interested to know how this plays out in garrison towns in the US. There's a lot of pro-army sentiment in the UK, although not the the level of the US as far as I can see. But anywhere near a barracks you can also expect a bars and clubs to be pretty unfriendly to squaddies. Depends on the town. In San Angelo, Goodfellow AFB was basically the entire economy of the town so near the base people were pretty friendly to the guys who consistently had money to burn. When I was in Monterey, it felt like we stuck out like a sore thumb but not necessarily unwelcome, except for that one time I got tossed out of a bar. And in Hawaii, attitudes run the gamut because some people really don't like the military here but the bars I go to aren't near the base, they're near UH Manoa. On Monterey, a big part was that the only two military institutions is the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center and the Navy Post-Graduate School and while I normally try to hide my military affiliation when out of uniform, being in a group with a bunch of white dudes who can speak fluent Pashto and Chinese makes it obvious we weren't civilians.
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Aug 23, 2018 20:50
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Fangz posted:EDIT: I mean, look at anti-nazi jokes in Nazi Germany. They certainly way outnumbered pro-nazi jokes, but that shouldn't disguise the fact that being under nazi germany did make the regime more and more normal in regular people's eyes. Fascists are also very bad at humor.
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Aug 23, 2018 21:01
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Aug 23, 2018 21:03
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Anti-imperialists only want one thing and it's disgusting.
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Aug 23, 2018 21:52
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Fangz posted:I think it's just a thing that is steadily building up. I wouldn't attribute it to any particular event. Personally I'd blame the media. Pro-army rule is extremely strange considering the hysteria Texas had when a training exercise is going on
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Aug 23, 2018 21:55
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I too would be a lot more pro-"strong leader" when Pres. Obama is in office (2011) than when Trump is (2017)...
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Aug 23, 2018 22:02
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Cessna posted:I too would be a lot more pro-"strong leader" when Pres. Obama is in office (2011) than when Trump is (2017)...
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Aug 23, 2018 22:06
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Cessna posted:I too would be a lot more pro-"strong leader" when Pres. Obama is in office (2011) than when Trump is (2017)... People often assume that "strong" implies "competent". History doesn't bear this out. Incompetent leaders often become autocratic, because of their own failure to delegate. Chairman Mao was very "strong" when it came to making sure he had the last word on agricultural policy. Doesn't mean that he knew poo poo about farming.
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Aug 23, 2018 22:08
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Comrade Gorbash posted:The question there is specifically “having a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with congress or elections," which makes it pretty clear what they're after. Ah, hell, that's what I get for only looking at the graph. I figured it was referring to Executive power. Never mind, then. Mr Enderby posted:People often assume that "strong" implies "competent". History doesn't bear this out. Incompetent leaders often become autocratic, because of their own failure to delegate. Chairman Mao was very "strong" when it came to making sure he had the last word on agricultural policy. Doesn't mean that he knew poo poo about farming. True, also agreed.
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Aug 23, 2018 22:11
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This sounds broadly like what happens in the UK, but it's spiced through with some Wellington-style "scum of the earth" mentality. People talk about soldiers like they're orcs, rather than just young men engaged in the traditional British activity of drinking twenty five pints of cider and fighting their friends.
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Aug 23, 2018 22:13
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Cessna posted:I too would be a lot more pro-"strong leader" when Pres. Obama is in office (2011) than when Trump is (2017)... Their definition of 'Strong' changed sharply in 2008 and then in 2016.
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Aug 23, 2018 22:30
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Taerkar posted:Their definition of 'Strong' changed sharply in 2008 and then in 2016. Hm, I wonder what the difference is...? 
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Aug 23, 2018 22:35
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There's not even a data point in 2008 though. I would bet that one thing that affected it was that Obama didn't control congress and couldn't get anything through which made the pro-Obama people really mad. I could see that driving up the "we need a strong leader who doesn't need congress!" attitude. There aren't enough data points to really draw any strong trends though. A lot happened between 2006 and 2011.
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Aug 23, 2018 22:40
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There's also a wildly disproportionate amount of servicemen from non-state US Territories and possessions. Maybe it's because there are all those military bases out in the pacific.Nebakenezzer posted:Pro-army rule is extremely strange considering the hysteria Texas had when a training exercise is going on That's what happens when a group of politicians have banded around a vague opposition to any and all public programs. They wind up having to form an alliance with people who think there are some kind of mind-control chemicals in the water, because they can find a justification for opposing anything. And of course, the fact that they assume the army just being present domestically is some kind of huge violation against basic human decency really belies their intent when they turn around and go all hawkish about projecting military force abroad.
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Aug 23, 2018 22:40
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Instead of getting the Crimea audiobook, I instead got Killers of the King. (The titular king being Charles I of England and Scotland.) I've been listening it for a bit now and the New Model Army's Irish escapades sound kind of, um, horrifyingly brutal.  Am I just naive or is beating a surrendering officer to death with their own prosthetic leg a bit much even by 17th century standards?
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Aug 23, 2018 22:47
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Siivola posted:Instead of getting the Crimea audiobook, I instead got Killers of the King. (The titular king being Charles I of England and Scotland.) I've been listening it for a bit now and the New Model Army's Irish escapades sound kind of, um, horrifyingly brutal.
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Aug 23, 2018 22:51
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Siivola posted:Instead of getting the Crimea audiobook, I instead got Killers of the King. (The titular king being Charles I of England and Scotland.) I've been listening it for a bit now and the New Model Army's Irish escapades sound kind of, um, horrifyingly brutal. Oliver Cromwell is definitely one of histories lesser known complete monsters.
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Aug 23, 2018 23:02
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Hunt11 posted:Oliver Cromwell is definitely one of histories lesser known complete monsters. Depends on how Irish you identify as being
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Aug 24, 2018 02:50
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HEY GUNS posted:this is why ideologues are not the greatest people to have around Fanatics make unreliable friends. --Garrett, Thief
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Aug 24, 2018 02:51
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Hunt11 posted:Oliver Cromwell is definitely one of histories lesser known complete monsters. His head makes for a fantastic school text book cover on British history though.
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Aug 24, 2018 03:09
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Nebakenezzer posted:Fanatics make unreliable friends. --Garrett, Thief All extremists should be shot. - Me.
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Aug 24, 2018 03:19
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The New Model Army was pretty brutal in Ireland, sure, but were they unusually brutal? The war in Ireland was pretty nasty by the standards of the English Civil War, but about 13 years before Drogheda was taken, Imperial and Catholic League forces under Pappenheim and Tilly pretty much destroyed Magdeberg. I know that Hey Guns knows more than me about this, but over the course of the of the war, didn't Bohemia lose about 2/3 of its population, Wurtemburg like 3/4, and Brandenburg about half. To single Cromwell out as some singular monster when on the continent at the same time worse stuff was happening seems unusual.
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Aug 24, 2018 03:25
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I could yell west out my window to hear what Rabh has to say too on the matter. Not sure if he'd reply, not seen him post in a while  .
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Aug 24, 2018 03:27
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Fangz posted:It's not unreasonable. Look at It is not affiliation that is being counted in the French survey, but turnout. And I don't contest that finding, but turnout is not inherently partisan. Fangz posted:The shift here is taking place across three years. They also do include age effects, provided age affects men and women equally. Further if it is generational change you'd probably see the opposite of the 'fading effect' they observed - that being that military service seems to have a large effect on rightwingness soon after the end of an individual's service, fading out in later life. There is no shift involving the dataset between 1988 and 1991, they only use it to cross-reference answers about political beliefs with whether or not the participant has served. I don't know where you are seeing a shift. The only dataset comparing different age cohorts is of the differences in turnout, in 2002 vs 2012 The authors try to indirectly estimate the how service increases far-right tendencies, and its rather convoluted. They take voting data from 2012, and try to draw a correlation between an increase in turnout in a district, whether or not there is more than one far-right candidate in the district, and the likelihood of a voter having been a conscript, and how long ago their conscription term was. It seems to me that this is just a strange way to organize voters by their age. The proportion of French males who were conscripted is about 70% for the entire time they take their dataset from, so the probability is largely meaningless. The "fading" effect that they choose to ascribe to military services is highly suspect, because it's inseparable the generational divide in French conservatives that is plainly observable in direct polls. The Front National is simply too irreligious and devout Catholics don't like them very much. Older French people are more likely to be practicing Catholics, and the difference in religiosity in France for people who grew up in the '60s is world's apart from those who grew up in the '80s. This also ignores the significant efforts of Marine Le Pen to legitimize the Front National, who was the party leader in 2012, compared to her father, who ran in 2002 and constantly presented himself as a toxic slug. People aren't very motivated to vote for slugs, no matter how racist they both are. Fronting these right-wing attitudes onto military service also fails to explain the Front National's relative popularity among people born well after conscription. These kinds of lean statistical analyses excise too much information from the results they're trying to establish. Essentially, what is being observed is that French men that are about 40-50 nowadays are more right-wing than later generations. Slim Jim Pickens fucked around with this message at 03:39 on Aug 24, 2018 |
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Aug 24, 2018 03:33
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As far as stories of returning veterans being harassed and spat on by protesters, that was from a deliberate propaganda campaign after the Pentagon got spooked by veterans joining the anti-war movement and the military fracturing along racial lines during the late 60's and early 70's. It got pretty bad, places like Travis air base, where the returning veterans actually landed, had full blown race riots.
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Aug 24, 2018 04:06
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Fangz posted:They looked at the change in voting patterns across the suspension of mandatory military service in France, looking at how the voting patterns for men changed vs how it changed for women - given that women never had military services, a change in voting behaviour in that period that only applied to men would be put down as an effect of mandatory military service. (So they assume that otherwise, the two genders would change mostly in lockstep) Those who took part in compulsary military service were more right wing and especially had negative attitudes to immigrants, voted more often, considered themselves more patriotic, but did not take part in more voluntary civic activities and wanted to pay less tax. It seems like an interesting conclusion, but I think it's dangerous to extrapolate this kind of research from one country to another, especially as we have many examples of militaries that became radically more leftwing than the general population. This was extremely common in post-colonial Africa, as well as to some extent the Middle East, where the army was a hotbed of anti-Monarchical Arab nationalism and socialism. In a lot of these examples we have very simple explanations for how African militaries become radically leftist: They were educated in the Soviet Union or France in the nineteen-sixties. One example would be Siad Barre, who led a coup against the corrupt civilian government of Somalia, who was educated in the Soviet Union and who with his officers sought to create a socialist government. In other cases the radicalism has a more complicated etiology, as for example with the Derg military regime in Ethiopia which rapidly radicalized following the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974. In cases like that of the Free Officers in Egypt who overthrew King Farouk and installed Gamal Nasser as President, the army was clearly strongly ideological but its position on the left right spectrum is not clear. While they and the Nasserist state they created were definitely NOT conservatives, and while they admired the Soviets for the anti-imperialism, military strength, and rapid economic development, they also generally opposed Marxism, and atheism, even as they espoused the necessity of socialism. In some cases we can have pretty strong reason to believe ideological radicalism within certain armed forces was accidental. For example in the case of Syria, by the 1960s the army began to take on a radical Alawite sectarian bent, with Alawites monopolizing almost all positions of any importance and exclusively promoting from within their own community. This was not, as many have often written, the result of a colonial French divide and conquer strategy, but the product of vicious infighting within what had been the Sunni elite, who cyclical purged one another in a series of coups and counter-coups until the ignored and presumed harmless minority officers were all that were left. There were a lot of other examples of post-colonial militaries developing a strong nationalistic identity oriented around a single minority ethnicity. Often this was simply a product of chance, with soldiers recruited around the colonial administrative from whoever happened to live their, or from a single community essentially picked at random at the whims of the local officials (there was never much sense behind the british classification of peoples as martial races). Following independence these ethnic skews were reinforced by parochial patronage networks, producing a strong sense of military solidarity and identity. Basically what I'm trying to get at is these things can go a lot of ways. Frankly I think its likely life defining experiences like higher education and military service effect future beliefs, however if you are gong to make that argument you need strong a priori explanations for the processes. There's so many chance and hidden variables that could produce the effect you can't just look at the empirical data, and you shouldn't extrapolate across continents.
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Aug 24, 2018 05:58
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That French policy may not have applied in the 1960s. But they were absolutely using minorities in French colonial forces as early as post WW1. IIRC the druze revolt was put down largely by Armenian, Kurdish, and Alawite colonial troops in addition to French troops. I dont have my sources readily available but divide and conquer was absolutely a real strategy.
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Aug 24, 2018 06:51
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Epicurius posted:The New Model Army was pretty brutal in Ireland, sure, but were they unusually brutal? The war in Ireland was pretty nasty by the standards of the English Civil War, but about 13 years before Drogheda was taken, Imperial and Catholic League forces under Pappenheim and Tilly pretty much destroyed Magdeberg. I know that Hey Guns knows more than me about this, but over the course of the of the war, didn't Bohemia lose about 2/3 of its population, Wurtemburg like 3/4, and Brandenburg about half. To single Cromwell out as some singular monster when on the continent at the same time worse stuff was happening seems unusual. I've noted before that civil wars are often more... civil because both sides tend to share the same nationality, language and (broadly) religion. Guess which is the part of the Civil War where this isn't true?
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Aug 24, 2018 10:51
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Ghetto Prince posted:As far as stories of returning veterans being harassed and spat on by protesters, that was from a deliberate propaganda campaign after the Pentagon got spooked by veterans joining the anti-war movement and the military fracturing along racial lines during the late 60's and early 70's. That poo poo happened on ships too. I forget which one but there was a protest by a bunch of black sailors on one of the carriers that was borderline riot / mutiny. Maybe Carl V?
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Aug 24, 2018 11:30
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Cyrano4747 posted:That poo poo happened on ships too. I forget which one but there was a protest by a bunch of black sailors on one of the carriers that was borderline riot / mutiny. Carl Vinson wasn't commissioned until 1982, post- Vietnam. There were many incidents on USN ships, but the largest/most well known was on the USS Kitty Hawk in late 1972. The crew's time at sea was extended - never a popular move - and the African-American sailors, tired of being assigned the worst jobs, rioted. The captain and XO managed to restore order, but it was a bad time for everyone involved. Best books on the subject: Black Sailor, White Navy by Sherwood and Troubled Water by Freeman. Cessna fucked around with this message at 14:40 on Aug 24, 2018 |
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Aug 24, 2018 14:35
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