Posted by nomilk 9/7/2025
Man, fuck these people. Meanwhile hollywood will churn out another hundred films about how Captain America would never let something like this happen because murdering innocents is not a line America would ever cross.
FWIW, Captain America's character arc throughout the MCU, at least (which is what I'd assume we mean by "Hollywood"), has largely been to realize that he can't actually trust the government and that not only is the government now corrupt (becoming so during his time skip), but it has always been just as bad: the "good government" he believed in from WWII was propaganda, it turned out SHIELD was a so deeply infiltrated with enemy spies that it was effectively an arm of HYDRA... even the UN's attempts at diplomacy inherently result in moral compromises that he refuses to accept, and, by the end, he ended up as a fugitive. I think you'd be hard pressed to watch these movies and think that Captain America's existence demonstrates that America would never cross such lines.
it's also a total coincidence that the original origin had Stark demonstrating his weapons in Vietnam, and being captured by communist war-lord Wong Chu.
It's so strange that all this great writing seems somehow connected to the current affairs of the United States at the time.
The fakey Lockheed Martin logo and typescript for Stark Industries is also a nice fuck-you, but the fans think it's endearing.
Any kind of semblance of "Oh the superhero now mistrusts authority" is there simply to make the actual propgadandized bullshit more palatable and believable, and you'll be damn sure that after the traitors are ousted in the movie it'll be good old Uncle Sam and the US whatever-corp waiting for the real super heroes when it's all through.
The DoD sure puts out some great fiction writing.
1) First of all, you're talking about an imaginary universe with a character literally named "Captain America". Just to put this in the right perspective.
2) A single Google would show you that the Middle East often engages (AND has historically engaged) in all of that, and lots of other bad-actordom (please do not tu-quoque me here about the sins of the United States, I know about its meddling consequences). Do you know why? It's because the Quran endorses it. Do you want the quotes they use to justify it to this day? It's the same quotes that the Barbary Pirates quoted at Thomas Jefferson and John Adams when they traveled to Morocco to ask why their peaceful trade ships kept getting attacked... which shocked them... and which ended up in them forming the US Navy. So yes, the US military was literally created to fight the Islamic terrorism of its day. That is not propaganda, that is historical fact. (Source- This is wild, btw, if you weren't aware of it: https://www.masshist.org/publications/adams-papers/index.php... Find the paragraph that begins with "We took the Liberty...") Just to give you an idea how deep the rabbit hole goes here, and that it's not all just "durr hurr brown people bad" (I mean... that might be some of it, but it's absolutely not ALL of it). In short, the "Middle East trope" was largely earned, not applied... and the US was founded on good principles by good people (who, uh, owned slaves sometimes. Yes, it's complicated. I know.). (Related side note - the Crusades were largely a response to Islamic jihadic conquests. But I digress.)
3) F-35 criticism- No contest. I didn't realize that, actually. And I'm a 4 year USAF vet, so... I should have.
4) Regarding "choice of enemy"... funny story I read about this lately related to that is that the lead designer of the Call of Duty games is having trouble traveling overseas without a security attache because of the enemies he picked in his past games, lol. If you're curious, I can find the link. But the unfortunate truth is that the dramas set up in these media have to have SOME plausible semblance to reality. (I will return to this in a moment.)
5) "Any kind of semblance of "Oh the superhero now mistrusts authority" is there simply to make the actual propgadandized bullshit more palatable and believable" This is not a falsifiable claim, and I'll demonstrate why: A) If the movie depicts the US as flawless, you will see it as propaganda. B) If the movie depicts the US as flawed, you... Also see it as propaganda? See the problem yet? If there are no conditions under which a Marvel movie is not "United States propaganda" to you, then it is not falsifiable, end of story. It also completely misses any satirical elements, which were surely present.
Now, to my last point...
Ich sprech fliessend Deutsch. My mom is from Heidelberg and my dad is from Bremen and they emigrated to the US and I am a firstborn American with some particular German sensitivities that we likely share (couldn't help noticing your gmx.com email address). And so we get to the problem of Every Single US-Produced Historical Videogame using Nazis As The Enemy. Contributes to negative German stereotypes. I feel that. As a US citizen who is also German (100% German ancestry, actually), I want to apologize for that. There's gotta be some part of you that this pains, because it does me. Germans should be known for waaaaay better things they've contributed to the world, than that (Ordnung über alles! lol). So, I'm sorry. Perhaps that fed into some of your rage here. If so, I'd understand... possibly more than most. (I've also been called a Nazi more than once.)
I mean, you're bending the truth a little. The US Navy was created to fight thieves and murderers on ships, who happened to be Muslim. There was no ideological component to the conflict. That someone can cite a passage from a book to justify robbing you doesn't mean that his robbing you is inspired by the book.
>funny story I read about this lately related to that is that the lead designer of the Call of Duty games is having trouble traveling overseas without a security attache because of the enemies he picked in his past games, lol.
Sounds extremely dubious. For one, there's not a designer. It's always been at least two different companies working on alternating titles; right now it's three or four. Second, who would even recognize him, by either face or name?
>B) If the movie depicts the US as flawed, you... Also see it as propaganda? See the problem yet? If there are no conditions under which a Marvel movie is not "United States propaganda" to you, then it is not falsifiable, end of story.
For example, if the US government wasn't a player at all (it's not aware of the conflict, it's totally powerless to do anything about it [for or against], etc.), it would not be propaganda. Or it could depict a realistic US government, as not a monolithic entity, but a massive swath of people with different motivations, principles, and knowledge. Hell, imagine this: two different branches of the government want to help with the problem but they refuse to cooperate out of mistrust and their solutions work against each other, cancelling each other out, and a third, smaller branch makes a small but key contribution to the heroes' effort.
I'm sorry, what? I literally don't follow. If someone robs my home because of what it says to do in an unquestionable book that they've been raised on, how is that not literally inspired by the book? This is nonsense. People do things all the time (good and bad) because of what they believe is true in books. Would you not fault those books if they state something wrong that causes people to commit harm? I mean... Trepanation? Bloodletting? Countless other things that were believed to be true, were acted on because of that, but were actually wrong?
Have you actually read the relevant passages?
(I more or less agree with your other statements.)
Yes, if I beg the question, I also can reach any conclusion I like. But someone doesn't rob because of what any book says. They rob you because they want what you have and they think they can get away with it. I assure you, if you put a sign on the front of the house saying "beware of the leopard" and the robber hears growling noises coming from inside, he will not rob you, no matter how righteous his unquestionable book says robbing you is.
(If he does, then I'll grant you in such a case there's an ideological component to it.)
>People do things all the time (good and bad) because of what they believe is true in books.
That's not how human nature works. It's not like before Muhammad came around pillaging didn't exist. What do you think vikings were, or the sea peoples? I haven't read the passage, and I don't need to. It doesn't matter what it says. The Old Testament says that Hebrews could take slaves from their neighboring nations. Leviticus didn't invent slavery. All the book did was condone a practice that already existed. At the most what the passage did was let people feel better about what they were doing (and we know they knew slavery was awful, because they had different practices for the in-group than for the out-group), if nothing else because their own countrymen would not punish them for it.
Take everything I said about the Hebrews and apply it to the Muslim pirates.
>I mean... Trepanation? Bloodletting? Countless other things that were believed to be true, were acted on because of that, but were actually wrong?
Now you're just conflating things. Trepanation and bloodletting were performed because it was mistakenly believed they would help the patient. Someone who enslaves you, robs you, or murders you because his holy book tells him is the righteous thing to do is under no mistaken impression that he's doing you a favor.
If you had to make the decision in the moment how would you weigh compromising the chance to prevent thousands or millions of deaths for advanced warning of nuclear or other attack using your ability to install that monitoring equipment now or in future, versus the lives of potentially hostile people who show up in your mission area?
You have to live with the moral cost, and human conflict means these choices have to be made.
If North Korean spies murdered fisherman off the coast of California on a failed mission, you bet there would be blowback
If they were simply noticed, the US govt might be able to and be incentivized to downplay it. Similar to downplaying whatever drones were flying over NJ
Maybe nothing happens. How likely is nothing? And if your presence finds it ways to the authorities, what's the cost? Likely, NK will patch what might be your best chance at advance warning.
As fishing is dangerous and many never return, their plausibly 'accidental' deaths provide cover to keep the secrecy and your future access intact.
Now the story leaks out from inside - what are the consequences? I don't know.
It's forbidden to kill civilians. You can only kill non-civilians, and there's nothing allowing you to hide the bodies of civilians or interfere with their burial rites.
s/ the US / "some bureaucratic process within the military"
which is almost certainly politically influenced, as many decisions at this level are
In this case, I don't think the bureaucracy reflects the will of the people
I think it might be legal to hide the body, but if you do so you must do something to ensure that it can be recovered, either informing the enemy afterwards or some other measure to that effect.
If IHL were deeply ingrained in international political behaviour and absolutely established I could see deviations from it where such deviations could be justified on moral grounds as acceptable, but since the law is hardly even established it is more important that it be followed than that it minimizes suffering in the now.
Furthermore, I don't think that it mattered. Everyone places his tactical concerns very highly in the moment, but over time they are often irrelevant. Do you really think it matters now, whether that information was available or not?
I don't really believe there's anything useful that can be achieved when it comes to the North Korea's nuclear weapons. They have them, they'll probably try to build more of them. That sucks, but there's nothing that can be done.
I don't think we should be having wars and killing each other. I don't think we should need to. Hopefully one day we won't and we will stand together as 1 species united in purpose and prowess and exploring together.
For NK, projecting strength is so important. But belligerence is all they have, they don't really want to be fighting, they want to be rich and having fun. Past humiliation and present partnerships coerce them towards war. Surrender is improbable, and for them joining the world can only be done on terms where everyone respects their strength. Tho maybe it will change, and they will hunger for what we have, more than they are afraid to stand as equals lest they be seen as weak.
I think what can be done is to bring everyone together so no country needs nuclear weapons pointed at another country. But until then you need advantage in case of hostility and conflict.
If you could stop NK doing that, would you pull the trigger? Would you make a targeted kill of a person who compromised that mission by discovering it?
The moment the seals fired the rifles the mission was over, a complete failure.
So the obvious alternative was to abort without killing everyone. The vaunted seals can't escape from a fishing boat? Nothing was accomplished by this mission other than killing a bunch of fishermen. For shame.
You don't have a right to kill civilians and being discovered can never be a justification for doing so.
You can only kill actual combatants.
So what? Then you fight the people proven to be hostile or run away. At no point is executing innocents an option that should be on the table in that situation. If things go wrong and escalate to a life threatening situation for you, then that's one the risks YOU consented to. It's not a risk that civilians are responsible for.
Maybe you get killed, or there is political fallout, but both of those situations are a better outcome than killing civilians.
Propaganda wouldn't be a movie in which the villain is the government of the country that the main hero also belongs to, and remains with at the conclusion of the movie.
OTOH, the trope of the hero's government being the villain is very much a trope in the conspiracy thriller genre, which has been around for more than 50 years.
i'm pretty sure this was the plan in case they got caught : kill everybody and flee
You're probably not a native speaker: the proper past tense of teach is "taught".
And you're of course right! I'm also an outsider to the US. It seems to me that "kill first think later" is the modus operandi of all kinds of US armed forces, from the police to the army and the navy.
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To alleviate doubt, I originally submitted with modified title to include the word 'wiretap' (the aspect I found interesting, figured would be be similar for HN audience).
But the topic is clearly interesting for other reasons too.
The killing of the fishermen (which appeared to be potentially NK soldiers) was the cause of the failure and not the covering up of a failure.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/10/politics/pentagon-cia-counter...
As a civilian, I understand the intention. But, unless all are warriors of equal rank, I don't want the public voting on how the military will be run minute-by-minute, nor do I think it's helpful for the public ( i.e. our adversaries in a very real sense ) to have access to information of classified operations. That sounds like a recipe for an authoritarian / tyrannical government to absolutely steamroll us...which would negate the advantages of a democracy in the first place.
Putting special ops up to democratic vote is absurd.
> The White House declined to comment.
> This account is based on interviews with two dozen people, including civilian government officials, members of the first Trump administration and current and former military personnel with knowledge of the mission. All of them spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the mission’s classified status.
The NYT story has this to say regarding provenance.
But, in summary, we should take the New York Times' word for it?
Bwahahahahaaaah!
The US has threatened the ICC with violence to prevent criminal charges against US military members.
So in short, no.
> Gallagher was convicted in July of posing with the dead body of a teenage Islamic State captive he had just killed with a hunting knife. He was granted clemency by the president in November in a decision that angered military chiefs.
> fellow platoon members told of a ruthless leader who stabbed the captive to death for no reason then forced his troops to pose for a photograph with the corpse.
0: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/27/eddie-gallag...