This is the result of taking the moral high ground, it gives you no long term strategic victories at all.
Yes, but we will defend our right to convince ourselves we're on the high ground with the blood of our sons.
According to classical conditioning, this behavior is easily explained. Meaning, because there are a lot of negative reinforcements and punishment awaiting people that prioritize strategic long term interests over short term feel good morality, there will be more people that indulge in short term feel good morality PR stuff. This isn't a "plan" or a coherent action that went "wrong". This is the US military being manipulated and conditioned by its enemies, foreign and domestic.
It is harder to use foresight to look deep into the future, calculate the available choices that you see, and decide upon the best one. If you play chess, Laer, you would know exactly the process of which I speak. Yet chess for all its complexity, is cubes and triangles compared to the complexity of the real world and the human variable. For pawns may only be in one place at a time, but humans are quantum free will machines, that can be in two states (of existence) at once quantum wise. Calculating moves in chess itself is hard and worthwhile, calculating moves involving human b eings in the real world is infinitely harder and infinitely more worthwhile.
That's my point, in a free environment people would be motivated in calculating long term interests, risks, and benefits, Laer. Because the reward would positively reinforce such a behavior. Now a days however, you have people that will come down hard on any military guy that steps out of the preconditioned behavioral model of "America the sappy happy morally superior retard".
Remember General Mattis, Laer? He said it was fun to shoot wife beaters and terrorists, and guess what he got. International media scorn and the disapproval of the White House itself. Yet General Mattis is one of the premier fighting men of the Marine Corps, attested to by Grim Beorn himself, Marine contributor to Blackfive.net which is itself a funhouse of pro-military folks.
We have too many classically conditioned hamsters in power, Laer. The field of critical importance really isn't over "do we execute or do we not execute terrorists", that is not the question. The question should be "how long should we allow foreign and inimical influences to control our fundamental strategic calculations and decisions"? Until we lose? Until we give up? Until millions more die? How long.
There is such a thing as counter-propaganda, Laer, and reverse conditioning and extinction (extinction in behavioral science is defined as the ability to disappear a conditioned response).
Great comment, Y. It's like why we eat almonds instead of acorns. Oaks were never domesticated because the reward (acorns) was too far away because oaks grow slowly, and the risks too high (most acorns are bitter). We eat almonds because you can get nuts in four years and it wasn't too hard to genetically weed out the bitter ones.
Commenting by HaloScan
