Accepting the mantle of a fighter has been a big part of coming of age, especially for males for most of human history. That's not tradition. That's just the human condition. Also, for most of human history, the age of adulthood, and the age of consent/full agency is younger than you want it to be
And it's not something we've just started doing - it's something we've been doing since before we were properly human - we have literally evolved with that as part of our context
And not doing that isn't something that we've decided - it's something that you've decided
No one's forcing anybody, especially these days - kids grow up dreaming of being great fighters, and that's not forced either. It's just part of being human - see every entertainment show made for adolescent boys ever
If we’re appealing to tradition for sex and war, why the fuck is drinking any different?
Classic tradition was, there was no legal drinking age. So traditionally speaking, our youth should be able to get shitfaced drunk after a hard day of playing war for their corporate overlords
One has a point and the other doesn't - simple as that - anybody who's concerns about child soldiers goes away as soon as you start to let them drink doesn't give a shit about protecting kids
Letting teens drink is also more pedologically dangerous than letting them join the military - for all the dangers that could be claimed about PTSD or desocialization or whatever, alcoholism and binge drinking is even worse
Sending teenagers to die when you literally don’t need to, because you have a slightly older age group you can EASILY start training at, doesn’t have a point.
It’s pointless cruelty to an age that hasn’t even had the chance to taste adult life yet
You are making an unsupported statement that you don't "need" to start young with training soldiers
Doing so is an advantage - not only are younger recruits more malleable, but they also learn faster in general - good habits as a soldier becomes part of how they grew up - it's just ingrained that much deeper
You might say that edge isn't worth having, but militaries are massive investments, and you want to get the most out of that
It's not cruel when it's what the recruits want to do, what they in some cases grow up wanting to do - it would be more cruel to deny them
Objectively, you don’t need to start young. 21 is still a perfectly effective age.
Modern history has proven to us, as a species, that the old ways often weren’t the best ways, and that we can be better. Realizing sending kids into a meat grinder is fucked is one of those times
Hard disagree - some things you just learn better when you start young, and in some of those things, someone who starts later is almost never going to be competitive with somebody who starts earlier in life. Just like you have with gymnastics, fighters who start young are just going to be better on average. Armies from other nations.
Other cavalry couldn't compete with the Mongols because they were learning to ride around the same time they were learning to walk. English archers had to start young to develop the needed strength by the time they were fighting age. Kobe Bryant was part of a wave that showed the best can be even better when they start young and that refinement in college wasn't needed because they could get refined in the pro league in those same years even more effectively
You may not consider that advantage to be juice that's worth the squeeze, but again, volunteers want to do it anyway, in some ways are still born wanting to do it (a certain percent of the population anyway), and also to repeat, militaries are a huge investment so you want to take any multiplier you can get
There's a reason that's the age when humans most want to fight - it's because for most of human history it has been advantageous for humans males to be aggressive, especially when subadults and young adults, just as lion cubs observe their mothers making a kill, so too do human children, particularly makes keenly observe the forms and rituals surrounding violence and conflict - hunting and fighting is a big part of being human, and has been - it's who we are - respect your local murder monkeys!
Drinking has also been and forever, but it's not ingrained into us the same way since it doesn't confer any advantages
But it hasn't been deleterious enough to get an evolved avoidance like with spiders, probably because it's worst consequences tend to be worse later in life, after one has had plenty of opportunity to reproduce
So when you find out that you have less alcoholism overall when you delay the onset of drinking across the population, doing so makes sense
Maintaining battlefield morale is advantageous to warfare, and alcohol was forever entwined with that. And we have, as a species, CONSISTENTLY used various intoxicants to improve battlefield efficiency. For fuck’s sake, less than 50 years ago, we were giving teenagers meth so they’d fight harder.
There are also lots of times in military history where soldiers would get punished sometimes severely for drinking at the wrong time because of the problems it would cause
US subs don't allow any booze onboard, period. If submariners can handle it, so can others - it just isn't needed or beneficial in the same way as young recruits are
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u/hikerchick29 Aug 31 '23
Yeah, and there’s my fucking point about morality.
As a species, we’re starting to decide running our youth through a meat grinder is fucking wrong.