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Comment by 13thLetter | Hacker News Reader

"My understanding of many of the most recent military engagements by the US is that they are basically sandbox experiments for prototyping new warfare tech and tactics, especially to study things like asymmetric urban warfare in which the distinction between combatant and civilian is difficult."

And my "understanding" of how gravity works is that the Earth is carried around the Sun by a giant invisible rottweiler dog. If I can't back it up, though, I'm not going to get my Rottweiler Theory through peer review. What do you back up your "understanding" with?

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It's based, I think, on interpreting the evidence of the way we prosecuted recent wars, the money flows spent in waging war, and the overlap of military, industrial and political interests.

My understanding differs though. My understanding is that the commenters understanding comes from finding it difficult to believe human beings, especially people seemingly smart enough to reach the top, could be that stupid. If they couldn't be that stupid or misguided, then they must have had some ulterior motive.

I go with the 'yeah, the neocons really were that dumb.'

Actually, I worked in the defense industry for a while, so a lot of it is based on my understanding of that work.

It's not fruitful to dump some 5000 word diatribe about it though. I'm not interested in convincing anyone about it ... and anyone who doubts it or feels I couldn't produce a compelling argument if I was pressed to should absolutely feel free to disagree and I am not at all endorsing my fleeting comments as justification.

But are you SURE you don't want to spend hours justifying your opinion to some random passive aggressive stranger?

Clearly you're not allowed to share your views without being ridiculed unless you cite extensive sources and make some flow charts or something.

[/sarcasm]

I enjoyed reading your insight so thanks for sharing that.

13thLetter: Do you think it's possible to tell someone to elaborate on why they believe something without being an asshole. I mean, if you ask nicely then he could've written something interesting about his experiences. If you act like a passive aggressive douche then you'll just get people defensive and they won't write anything. The whole community loses.

Besides, I think it's pretty pretentious to hold someone's views shared at a messaging forum to uphold to the same standard that they would need to get into a peer-reviewed journal disputing gravity. Do you even THINK before you write?

On the one hand, yeah, you're right, I tend to be too aggressive and rude and I really shouldn't do that, especially on a forum like HN. I genuinely appreciate you telling me that.

On the other hand, let's not forget that this is a very, very strong accusation. It's easy to lose sight of that, since it sounds like the usual world-weary complaining on a forum, but the gist of the statement is that the American government is deliberately making up false pretexts for war and killing foreign citizens and American soldiers, not for national interest or even crude financial gain, but in order to "test" warfighting doctrine. That's something a cartoonishly evil movie villain would do. I'm hardly a fan of the US government's current management, to put it lightly, but if this behavior was true it would make Watergate look like jaywalking and justify mass impeachment at the very minimum. If someone's going to toss it out I'd like there to be something to back it up.

Hey, I appreciate your erm, apology, I guess. You're right, you shouldn't be rude to people, or they will stop talking to you.

I don't know what you expect me to say to your second paragraph though. The guy making those "accusations" has already left the conversation, and I don't really feel like having this discussion with you either.

Anyway, good luck getting to the bottom of this!

You're not comparing apples to apples here.

Gravity is much more of a hard science than the psychological and economic motivations behind war. We're not peering into a sandbox of ants from some omniscient above-view. We're obvserving the actions and reactions of people, which is much more messy.

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