RoR: Forum

Oh yes, these people don't have an agenda, now do they?

Post 1

Saturday, October 18, 2008 - 4:00pm

Michael may have an agenda. He is considering pacifism - "rethinking violence."

I don't believe those statistics for a minute. Anyone who has experienced the horrific chaos and terror of a battlefield is NOT thinking about conscience or parsing moral principles. They are taking an action or frozen with fear. The action is running, hiding or fighting. The principles deeply held and the character they formed in the years before will say a lot about what they do and to what degree they can hear their reason over the screams of self-survival from the organism within.

Post 2

Saturday, October 18, 2008 - 4:50pm

Even if Marshall's premise (75% of WW2 veterans did not fire at the enemy) is accurate, his conclusion (75% chose not to fire at the enemy) doesn't follow. A fair number of them never saw combat. Others were in auxiliary positions (driving, piloting, manning radars, etc; yet others were doing jobs (dropping bombs from planes, for example) that, while destructive, were not individual decisions to fire. If you think about it a bit you'll see plenty of ways a researcher out to prove a preconceived conclusion could load his questions to get the result he wants.

A quick Googling of "S L A Marshall" suggests that the guy was something of a charlatan and that even the factual premise is questionable.

Post 3

Saturday, October 18, 2008 - 9:30pm

Steve, have you experienced the horrific chaos and terror of a battlefield?

Post 4

Saturday, October 18, 2008 - 9:57pm

Johnathan, no I haven't. When I was working as a therapist I had several clients that had. One of my friends from when I was young came back from Vietnam not quite the same. My Dad saw combat in WW II and after 6 years, 3 theaters of action, two purple hearts and bronze star he came back home and wouldn't talk about what he saw till he was 70. One of my grad school professors was the last man alive in a machine gun pit during the Korea War - he specialized in the psychology of violence - years after he worked through the PTSD. I'm very happy to have avoided that experience.

Post 5

Sunday, October 19, 2008 - 9:42am

Me neither. My grandfather survived Pearl Harbour and Gaudalcanal, but he died when I was one, so I never heard about his experiences. My uncle served in Veitnam, but prefers not to talk about the experience. One of my best friends was in Iraq, but as an avionics techinician, he never saw combat.

Your statement makes sense, but I was just wondering if you were speaking from first hand experience.

Post 6

Sunday, October 19, 2008 - 11:25pm

Would the fact that many WWII soldiers were conscripts have anything to do with these statistics? Are these statistics the same with an all-volunteer army? Do they measure how people in combat behave in life-or-death situations, versus situations where you could survive without firing your weapon? Were they measuring only the behavior of survivors of combat, and thus introducing sampling bias, or did they include the behavior of those who were subsequently killed? It seems like there is a big difference between someone who fires their gun at an enemy soldier about to kill them -- in self-defense -- versus someone who keeps their head down and refuses to expose themself to the risk of firing at an enemy who is firing back.

That is, refusing to fire in self-defense is worlds apart from taking avoidable risks with your life in a war where you were conscripted and don't agree with the coercion that placed you in that situation. Lumping these two categories together in a single statistic, and then implying they are relevant to an all-volunteer military, leads to some less than useful data for drawing conclusions.

But I suspect, without having actually watched the movie, that such questions aren't being explored in detail.

Post 7

Monday, October 20, 2008 - 2:16am

The so-called "research" of Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall fell into disrepute. My university library has several editions of his book and also of one critical of it. I will check them out and get to them, but not before the end of the year. I have other work ahead of that.

Last night, I found secondary sources, including articles from Newsweek and a tertiary (www.warchronicle.com) that cites the seminal explose study in the journal of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies. That is another citation that I can track from the school library.

That said, Marshall's other works remain unassailed. Pork Chop Hill, Night Drop, River and the Gauntlet and The D-Day Invasion of Europe are considered fine journalism. That is the problem. As a journalist, Marshall told stories. A scientist does not. Moreover, the fact that Marshall's work has been questioned at root for twenty years should have been known to the publicists for the movie.

To reply --

Kurt: Of course they have an agenda. Who does not? Perhaps the key question in science is knowing when your agenda is standing in the way of your facts. The scientific method requires that you first form a hypothesis to be tested. That hypothesis can become, as you say, an "agenda."

But there is nothing inherently wrong with an agenda. You can't have a meeting without one. The word has become a semiote with hidden meanings. "Selfishness" is another example. I just checked out from the library a couple of books I used for a class paper on ethics in business. Morality and Rational Self-Interest, edited by David Gauthier was hilarious. A dozen modern academic philosophy professors tried to determine whether someone could be both "selfish" and "moral." So, too, with agenda.

I have an agenda here, as Steve Wolfer notes. My goal is to bring into question and then to discredit the notion -- that is all it is; it lacks objective truth -- that destroying people who threaten you is a rational course of action. "Fight or flight" is the animal response. As a rational, volitional being, a human faces more alternatives.

Steve Wolfer: As a psychologist, you do recognize that your patients had pathological reactions to unhealthy experiences. War is hell. Have you ever had an inventor or artist tell you that they could not talk about their creations or insights? Men do not talk about war for a reason. It was horrible. As Ayn Rand noted, saying that there were no atheists in the foxholes ignores the question of who created the foxholes in the first place. Mysticism and collectivism are known not to be antidotes to themselves.

Peter Reidy: You misunderstand the claim. Marshall was refering specifically to combat troops, soldiers in combat. He interviewed them in groups and collected their statements. Then he published those findings. His subjects were not in the quartermaster's corp. They were combat troops.

Jonathan Fauth: Cogent question.

Jim Henshaw: Again, the very questions that an objective researcher would have asked himself.

It seems -- again from secondary sources (more on that) -- that Marshall believed in heroes and heroics. His minor premise was that the ordinary soldier expects action to be carried by a few heroes and it is. At least, that seems to be his (hidden) agenda.

Jim Henshaw: thanks, also, for noting that you did not watch the movie. RoR is not the only shooting gallery in which guns go off half-cocked. For an assortment of rational-empiricists, our discussions often lack a foundation of research, which is why they are so opinionated, of course.

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 10/20, 2:17am)

Post 8

Monday, October 20, 2008 - 3:17am

CNN /crime
Army probes five slayings linked to soldiers in Colorado brigade
updated 10:48 a.m. EDT, Sun October 19, 2008
DENVER, Colorado (AP) -- Fort Carson soldiers returning from deployment in Iraq are suspects in at least five slayings, and officials want to know why.

The issue of homicides by combat-stressed veterans gained national prominence in January, after The New York Times reported that at least 121 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans had committed a killing in the United States or been charged in one.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/10/19/soldiers.slayings.ap/index.html

My father was wounded in Korea. He taught hand-to-hand combat at Fort Benning and other places for a dozen or more years and even sent a couple of his boys to the Olympics. He was never accused of murder... or even assault... he was a pretty quiet kind of guy, really... The effects of violence are not well understood because human psychology is not well understood. Who "turns" violent -- or expresses "innate" violence -- or successfully "buries" violent experiences -- are complex questions. Clearly, the problem comes down to the individual. The deeper question is whether anyone should ever experience war, being a witness to mass violence, being rewarded for killing. The key issue is whether those 121 accused would have had other outcomes had they not been in combat.

Consider this: The Black Death killed 25% of the people in Europe -- but 75% survived. Does that mean that it is permissible to have cities infested by rats with fleas with germs? Were the 25% merely aberrant individuals with a mysterious predeliction for disease? Consider that rodents and people have a long history together: store grain, you get mice. Would "conscientious objection" to bubonic plague be condemned as being equivalent to the abandonment of cities?

Violence is a disease. Some people will succumb to it. You can treat it after the fact, or you can prevent it.

Post 9

Monday, October 20, 2008 - 10:53am

Michael,

You said, "Violence is a disease."

Violence is NOT a disease. It is a choice. If no one initiated violence there would never be violence.

You are opposed to a minimal government based upon individual rights - in favor of anarchy. You appear to be opposed to individual rights - or at least the right of self-defense. You are now abandoning the concept of volition - at least in the case of violence. As time passes I begin to wonder if there are any basic principles that you share with Objectivists.

Post 10

Monday, October 20, 2008 - 5:06pm

SW: Violence is NOT a disease. It is a choice. If no one initiated violence there would never be violence.

It is amazing how often we need to really define terms in order to establish what we agree on, or do not.

Is it your assumption that a disease is caused by an external vector? Pneumonia is a disease, but obesity is not. People choose to be fat by overeating the wrong foods and not exercising. No one chooses to be pneumonic.

So, alcoholism is not a disease because people choose to drink and people who have have then chosen not to. Schizophrenia is not a disease, either. Aside from the difficulty in defining "schizophrenia", delusions and hallucinations both visual and "auditory" (there is no word for that, is there?), are choices that people make because some people have chosen not to have them? Then, no neurosis can be a disease, either? No obsessions or compulsions are diseases. In fact, there are no psychological diseases at all because none are caused by "germs" by bacteria, viruses, etc.

What do you call them, then, "disorders"?

But if that is the label, what is a "gastro-intestinal disorder"? Is that the result of only bad choices and habits of mind, rather than germs or bad food or whatever? And, what about bad food? Don't people choose to eat it? Don't people choose not to boil water, making cholera a volitional disorder?

If you look up disorder of the <body part> you can find them easily enough. Are they all volitional?

What vocubulary do you prefer to discuss this? And to what end?

My point stands: violence damages the perpetrator and is contrary to self-interest.

Do you want to discuss that, or argue it, or refute it, or do you want to go around on a meta-discussion on the vocabulation of unhealth.

SW: You appear to be opposed to individual rights - or at least the right of self-defense.

What do you mean "appear" -- am I or am I not? A or non-A. Do not weasel out with "board of directors talk." If you have an objective perception, then state it unequivocally.

I have stated mine. I am not opposed to the right of self-defense. I am in favor of self-defense. I advocate defending yourself against all manner of harms, including the self-induced harm of violence.

Do you think that violence is like smallpox, that a little dose will innoculate you against it? I think that violence is like arsenic, that even a little bit is poison.

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 10/20, 5:16pm)

Post 11

Tuesday, October 21, 2008 - 1:54am

Michael,

You say in the post above, "I am not opposed to the right of self-defense." And, "I advocate defending yourself against all manner of harms..."

But a short time ago, you said, "I believe that property is not worth killing or dying for, not my own, and certainly not someone else's." And, "I believe that the entire concept of protection and defense needs to be rethought."

Clearly I'm NOT the one using weasel-words!

You don't believe in government, you don't believe in self-defense (not in a form that an Objectivist would recognize), and you would rather discuss initiated violence from the view point of illness than as a choice. Do you have so little respect for those of reading this as to think we would somehow magically forget that we are discussing a moral issue, and that is why it is discussed as a matter of choice.

Take a look at the pitiful state of the argument you put forth:
"I believe that violence is the last resort of the incompetent." Given the context of that statement it can be understood to apply to a man defending his life from a mugger - Michael, that's a great job of trashing the moral difference between the initiation of violence and defending one's life.

And what should one make of this ramble? "Now -- lest I be accused of wussiness and pacifism -- we are all fallible creatures, by nature. The zebra gets eaten. Sometimes, the lion gets her jaw broken by the zebra and she starves to death. Errors happen. We are all fallible creatures. So, if some bank robber gets killed robbing a bank, we can all be feel sorry for ourselves that we were fallible, but them's the breaks for the robber, too. Tough luck, all the way around." Is that Michael claiming that law of the jungle should be accepted? That moral law is not to be sought or applied? "We are all fallible creatures" is your philosophy of life - your moral underpinning?

And when you said, "...it is much better to avoid a robbery than to counter one with opposite and superior force.' If one is discussing a particular pragmatic outcome, or a plan of action, that might be the case. I lock my doors and take other precautions to avoid theft, but that is NOT the same as giving in morally. As a moral standard, that is craven capitulation to evil.

And more... "The expense of buying a gun and learning to use it could be better invested." Not if a gun is what would protect you from thugs.

And when you characterize others as "philosophizing gun-toters" you sound more like an ass braying than an intelligent man making an argument.

I'm finding that my interest in discussing these things with you is rapidly evaporating.

Post 12

Tuesday, October 21, 2008 - 7:26am

Steve quoting Marotta:

I believe that property is not worth killing or dying for, not my own

That statement alone is anti-life, and not surprisingly anti-intellectual considering its pacifist tone. It is a denial of man's need for a material existence. Without property to own man could not live. According to the pacifist, if someone was about to steal your home, your crops, your water, your medicine at gun point, it's not worth killing the armed robber to keep what is rightfully yours. Better to give up all your property and thus your ability to live than to take the life of a criminal who threatens your existence. Every communist revolution was nothing more than mass murder carried out by means of denying individuals the right to own property. Marotta in such a context would be the first to lie down in the mud and let his communist overlords take everything he owns and let himself starve rather than fight.

Someone remind me again why this Pacifist/Anarchist than now spams this forum on a regular basis is not relegated to the dissent forum?

Post 13

Tuesday, October 21, 2008 - 7:05pm

I remember Rand saying somewhere that all rights were property rights - referring to the fact that they all flow from the premise that we own our life.

Post 14

Tuesday, October 21, 2008 - 7:29pm

I am an Objectivist. Reasoning from the law of identity and letting reality be the final arbiter via empirical evidence, with man's happiness qua man as my standard and the highest human achievement as my goal, I am attempting -- while listening to Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto -- to discover a better way to prevent looting and killing.

I am a security professional. I earned a bachelor of science degree, summa cum laude, in criminology. I have four years of experience with four different kinds of agencies. There is no doubt that the private sector is more than simply "efficient" compared to government agencies.

There are hints and evidences in the operations and their consequences that there are gains to be had of the same quality and quantity that differentiate a Honda from a Trabant. At the same time, even within the private sector, the "guardian mentality" of security causes inefficient, ineffective and counter-productive outcomes. Again, I see a better way to do business.

Property is not worth a human life. Who steals my purse, steals trash. The right to property (title) is worth defending -- if need be at the cost of the life of the looter, though not the life of the defender.

Taking a human life has consequences for the killer, even when it is "justified." Therefore, to protect yourself from this grave harm, it is in your best interests to avoid taking a life whenever possible. Thus, the resort to violence is caused by a lack of competence in effecting self-interest.

Our mixed-premise culture allows business owners to ignore the fact that they put a low value on the life of another person who carries their money. The next time you read about an armored car guard killed in a hold-up, understand that the guard probably made $7.50 per hour. Even if he made $10, that is a bad deal... all the way around...

Those are just some of the many reasons that I am thinking through the problems of defense.

This Topic is about soldiers -- many of them volunteers -- who discovered that they could not take a human life, or, having done so, want never to do it again. Often in history, the soldiers have been conscripts. That, then, is a double injustice.

If all of that threatens you, then you need to ask yourself why.

Post 15

Tuesday, October 21, 2008 - 8:39pm

Michael, you should not refer to your beliefs as Objectivism. You may agree with the epistemology and metaphysics, but there is a gap that has opened up between your beliefs and Objectivist ethics. You aren't an Objectivist while your statements on self-defense, and therefore individual rights, are so deeply ambiguous. And you aren't close in politics. Not while you advocate anarchy. I'm not threatened by anything you say. I'm saddened that you don't think more clearly on these basic issues. If you wish to strike off in bold new directions, rethinking any of the basic principles, that is your right. And, as you say, reality will be the final arbiter. In the mean time you should have the courage and honesty to admit that your beliefs in these areas are yours alone and do not coincide with Ayn Rand's basic principles.

You said, "Property is not worth a human life. ... The right to property (title) is worth defending." Title is of no use if can not be asserted to practical end. Title is one of the means to the end of possessing, using and disposing of property. If you are unwilling to defend the property, you will be a sad sight, standing there, holding in your hand the title to a piece of property you no longer own.

Post 16

Wednesday, October 22, 2008 - 6:22am

John - I like reading MM's views even when I disagree. You have to understand that he is at least creating and posing interesting questions and alternate ways to consider things. I still don't agree most of the time, but he is not spamming and not someone who should be in dissent.

Post 17

Wednesday, October 22, 2008 - 7:02am