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.
Comment on The woke liberals are making our wars gay
RobotToaster@mander.xyz 3 weeks ago
Reminds me of one of the worst academic papers I’ve ever seen www.tandfonline.com/doi/…/14616742.2015.1075317
hyphen0175@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Fuckfuckmyfuckingass@lemmy.world 3 weeks 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.
idiomaddict@lemmy.world 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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.
AFallingAnvil@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
In fairness, nukes kinda are the ultimate making hell more hell and so Maxim’s idea worked to a degree.
Fuckfuckmyfuckingass@lemmy.world 3 weeks 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.
tyranny@crazypeople.online 2 weeks ago
well said
Flatfire@lemmy.ca 3 weeks 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.
DagwoodIII@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
“The Forever War” by Joe Haldeman.
The author was a Vietnam vet and physics professor. The novel was written in the 1970s. One of the ideas is that in the future all soldiers will be gay/lesbian and heterosexuals in the ranks will be looked down on.
Fun book
gandalf_der_13te@feddit.org 3 weeks 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
notabot@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
gandalf_der_13te@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
that’s crazy good! wow
gandalf_der_13te@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
wtf did i just read. lmao. this gotta be some ragebait papers.
lagg_mine@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Omg, PLEASE tell me this is satire!?
FinjaminPoach@lemmy.world 3 weeks 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