This sounds conspicuously like the conservative version of the people who say "All men secretly desire to rape women."
Thesis
Antithesis
Synthesis/new Thesis
Antithesis
Synthesis/new Thesis
etc...
Aside, I think it's insane to argue that men "love war" while at the same time admitting knowledge of Vietnam. Weak men like to feel tough by pretending to like war, as if a politician would exert themselves more or less by calling in a strike.
If this were true PSTD would not actually happen. Wouldn't the cure just be more exposure, if you could get used to it?
>War is a call to power and a purpose.
We're a long time past when the raiding hordes would actually be profiting from their own raiding. Like it or not we live in a country so rich that we have essentially nothing significant to gain by pillaging: the cost for us to conduct warfare is greater than the entire productivity of the nations we invade, even before the bombs start lowering their GDP. As a result it's starting to get close to a century since the last time the US or an allied country fought a war with a purpose stronger than tenuous political chessplaying. Evidence for this: what fraction of our currently deployed armed forces have a lot to say about the political situation where they are fighting? Apparently the answer is almost none, because they're not there to talk about geopolitics. As a result the sense of purpose is isolated in nicely lit rooms while the direct costs are allocated to people who don't focus on the broader goals.
It seems that Futurism is back in vouge, but we'd better remember that the reason it fell out the first time was the fact that an actual war got started. The only two environments where that view can sustain itself are rooms full of warlords who profit and loose in actual war, and rooms full of intellectuals who profit and loose from nothing and who expect to survive in any case.
The problem is that at some point, you come home and you realize the switch can't be switched off. It's just a part who you are now. It's now the way you're wired: The first time you go to the movies as a civilian with the switch turned on, you realize you're surrounded by strangers in the darkness for an hour and a half of intense visual and auditory stimulation. Walking down the street to the restaurant, you're actually on patrol, and nothing's more dangerous than a dismounted patrol through the city. You start leaving all the lights on in the house at night, because the things that killed your friends often came out of the darkness. You can't sleep, because of the lights, and because you're hypervigilant and every little noise signals it's time to dispense violence. And if there's one thing that compounds the problem, it's a lack of sleep. This is how you end up in situations where somebody knocks on the door when you're laying on the couch chasing naps that never come, and the mailman smiling at you when you open the door has no idea you're holding a loaded firearm in the hand he can't see. And worse yet, lots of people in this situation drink until they pass out, just to try and get some sleep. But this switch doesn't get turned off when you're drinking at the bar. And on top of that, all the people and all that noise makes things worse, and.......
The problem is that indeed, you've gotten used to it. All of that has been your reality for long enough that you can't turn it off. But our culture has no place for people like this. Our culture is definitely not used to this, and won't get used to this. Relationships cannot handle the strain, so they disintegrate. And employers don't put up with that shit, no matter how cool they are. And lots of people don't try to get help, even in places where the VA normally does a good job and knows how to handle these problems. So in the end, completely alienated by the rest of their communities, some kill themselves. Others end up on the street. Others spend the rest of their lives teetering on the edge of sanity, trying to play a trivial, vapid game with trivial, vapid rules that are always at odds with the life-or-death rules of combat they're wired for. And this is actually why people don't understand unless they've been over there.
The only people who love war are corrupted individuals. They have no morals.
Says a person who has never truly faced a grave moral test in his life.
I have known many veterans of horrific combat from Okinawa through Afghanistan. They all will tell you they loved it in some bizarre, insane fashion.
Yet these same people are the most trustworthy, truly moral people I have ever known. They have touched the abyss, and you and I have not. They understand things we never will.
Going on deployment and finding something that improves you is like going to a bar/casino in Las Vegas and finding Mormonism. Sure, it can happen, but it's not what happens.
War is not just action and adrenalin. It is also rape and toddlers dying of hunger. It is ethnic massacres.
Not everyone thinks or feels like you. That doesn't necessarily make them morally corrupt individuals.
Perhaps this is also a too-general claim :)
For example - homosexual men are statistically more likely to belong to larger families. Evolutionary biologists believe that this is due to the presence of childless gay men benefiting the children of their siblings,thus genes that at first blush seem to be "for" non reproduction survive in the pool. (Someone should notify the Boy Scouts that they've got it exactly backwards).
What you can't do is generalise about individuals from their group membership (unless that membership is voluntary, and even that is fraught).
http://www.freedomkeys.com/ar-racism.htm
But yeah, looking at history, it really does seem like a lot of people, across racial, religious and cultural boundaries, loved war.
Also, not to support that view, but the amount of sexual violence that has historically accompanied war is startling. There's obviously something to it.
Rape has been used as an instrument of war for all of recorded history - as a demonstration of domination; as a means of punishment and repression - and also - just because the men can.
Combating the use of rape and sexual violence in conflict is something that we are trying very hard to make progress on ... but it is a very difficult (maybe even impossible) task; human nature being what it is.
Nobody asked me if I wanted to be bombed.
No, sorry. I know you want to feel justified for doing so. But no.
I also regularly clean the shower.
No it isn’t. There are loads of studies saying this, here is one. http://jcm.asm.org/content/early/2013/12/19/JCM.02876-13
Enter on one side, the purists: "sterile means absolutely, positively no germs"
Enter on the other side, the realists: "if I pull open my festering sore, and you piss on it, will I get your illness?"
The purists say, "well maybe, the probability is not zero, you can't say that is sterile"
The realists say, "Run the experiment it 1000 times, and if no one gets infected, what do you call that? What do you call it if 1 out of 1000 gets infected?"
What do you say?
I'd like to offer the counter-point that for those people who enjoy peeing together (as a kink) the shower seems like a great place to pee together.