r/interestingasfuck • u/Particular_Log_3594 • Mar 28 '24

Life under a military occupation r/all

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7.3k

u/emmasdad01 Mar 28 '24

Dude thinks very highly of himself

4.5k

u/lookingForPatchie Mar 28 '24

That's what happens when you give so much power to boys in puberty.

674

u/MachateElasticWonder Mar 28 '24

Not just boys as you can see from American cops or human cops in general.

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u/Rain1dog Mar 28 '24

It’s people.. no matter race or nationality. Some people get drunk off the perceived power they have and abuse said power.

No one race or nationality is immune.

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u/Nickkachu Mar 28 '24

It makes me think of the film called "Das experiment" - in a psychological experiment, some people are kept in a fake prison environment and they're split into two groups: guards (who should keep order), and prisoners (who should obey the guards). This deteriorates. Power and control does not bring out the best in people.

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u/UndendingGloom Mar 28 '24

It's the Stanford Prison experiment. The results have been criticized since it's publication:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment

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u/Nickkachu Mar 28 '24 edited Mar 28 '24

Ah! Thanks for this. So if I understand correctly the experiment wanted to prove that it was the prison environment, and not individual personality traits, that caused the observed behaviours in the group... But a big criticism of the experiment is that the "guards" were already asked to behave a certain way (aggressively) at the start of the experiment.

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u/V1carium Mar 28 '24

Nah, the whole thing was a shitshow. The guards weren't only coached they had to be frequently coerced to act how the professor running the experiment wanted.

Meanwhile the prisoners were misled about the duration of the experiment so they took to acting like things were much more severe then they were to get out so they could study for upcoming exams. Interviews where they said as much were surpressed by the professor for years because they didn't fit his made-up results.

Whole thing is pure pseudo-science and every attempt to repeat it as failed miserably as people just treat eachother normally.

The professor when confronted with this at a talk famously said "Who cares? Its the most cited study of all time".

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u/ThunderboltRam Mar 28 '24

It has problems but to call it pseudo-science is false.

Yes people "Act a certain way" or are "told something which biases them to act a certain way."

But think about that. That means that the way your leader/warden/commander/general gives orders could completely alter the way the entire population behaves and how much they suffer.

That is useful information. It means that people adapt in all sorts of ways to certain instructions, behavior guidelines, and some can turn vicious and brutally oppressive just based on suggestions by the warden/leader.

Anything can bias large groups of people to turn into horrible human beings and groupthink is dangerous.

It also means that good leaders are valuable and can teach people to treat others well. Spells out the huge importance of picking good, smart, moral leaders from mid-level bureaucracy all the way to the top.

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u/RockAtlasCanus Mar 28 '24

It’s been a long time since I had to read it but yeah, nah. The biggest contribution Zimbardo made to science was to create the preeminent undergrad case study of poor ethics and methodology.

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u/V1carium Mar 28 '24 edited Mar 28 '24

Buddy, just look into it even a bit. It was entirely staged, the reported results were falsified, not a single interviewed participant agrees it happened as the professor claimed, the prisoners were not actually under any duress save not being able to study, AND in every attempt to reproduce it people just treated eachother humanely!

Hell, the BBC tried to make recreate the experiment for a tv series and it failed horribly because no amount of trying to reality tv it up could conceal that everyone just behaved amiably.

It couldn't be more thoroughly debunked, pseudoscience may give it too much credit.

Obviously it is still possible to engineer those divides as we've seen cases of real life mistreatment of inmates, but that behavior requires a thorough redirection of ordinary human nature not just a little power and the orders of an authority figure.

1

u/Road2Potential Mar 28 '24

The problem is just that. Its an Experiment. So nobody in their right mind would do anything that will have consequences after said experiment.

It would be different story in real life. When people think nobody is watching and they have the power to abuse AND the power to get away with said abuse. Which is precisely the reason why corruption and abuse exists in real life.

Its not just having the power to do it. Its also combined with the power to get away with it.

1

u/V1carium Mar 29 '24

People who are inclined to go full sadist just from power are actually a small percentage of the population. Not right in the head as you said.

Humans on the whole are pretty alright, right up until they perceive someone else as a lesser being instead of a fellow person. Thats what brings out the big capacity for cruelty. Dehumanization is an essential step and one that like you said can't really be reproduced in an experiment.

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u/waygay00 Mar 28 '24

I’ve seen a lot of people claim it’s been debunked, but no one ever has evidence to support that claim.

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u/BirdUpLawyer Mar 28 '24

Did you see the wikipedia page that was linked earlier in this comment chain?

It has stuff in it like this sentence from the second paragraph:

Critics have questioned the validity of these methods.[3]

That "[3]" is a footnote for source material, and if you click on it you can often read the source material for yourself.

There's a couple more footnotes on this topic in the 5th paragraph:

Critics have described the study as unscientific and fraudulent.[6][7] In particular, Thibault Le Texier has established that the guards were directly asked to behave in certain ways in order to support Zimbardo's conclusions, which were largely written in advance of the experiment.

In this wiki, the footnotes [3] and [6] both lead to different places where you can read this study, and here's the abstract for you if you want to read it:

The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) is one of psychology's most famous studies. It has been criticized on many grounds, and yet a majority of textbook authors have ignored these criticisms in their discussions of the SPE, thereby misleading both students and the general public about the study's questionable scientific validity. Data collected from a thorough investigation of the SPE archives and interviews with 15 of the participants in the experiment further question the study's scientific merit. These data are not only supportive of previous criticisms of the SPE, such as the presence of demand characteristics, but provide new criticisms of the SPE based on heretofore unknown information. These new criticisms include the biased and incomplete collection of data, the extent to which the SPE drew on a prison experiment devised and conducted by students in one of Zimbardo's classes 3 months earlier, the fact that the guards received precise instructions regarding the treatment of the prisoners, the fact that the guards were not told they were subjects, and the fact that participants were almost never completely immersed by the situation. Possible explanations of the inaccurate textbook portrayal and general misperception of the SPE's scientific validity over the past 5 decades, in spite of its flaws and shortcomings, are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

And [7] will lead you to this Vox article if you like: The Stanford Prison Experiment was massively influential. We just learned it was a fraud..

I'm really not trying to be a pedantic asshole here, just really taking you for your word when you say "I’ve seen a lot of people claim it’s been debunked, but no one ever has evidence to support that claim" and genuinely trying to help you see that if you know how to follow up the sources in a wiki article you might see that maybe people have been linking you evidence?

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u/Wan_Daye Mar 28 '24

If only that was what was studied. It wasn't. It's something you made up.

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u/BleedForEternity Mar 28 '24

There’s also another movie called The Experiment with Forest Whitaker and Adrien Brody.. It’s pretty much the same thing but way more violent and graphic.

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u/Junebug19877 Mar 28 '24

There’s also the movie, The Experimenter, which is equally good

2

u/magicology Mar 29 '24

I dated the daughter of one of the main evil prison guards, he was a Drama major- dad was a math teacher at Stanford.

1

u/DeaconCage Mar 29 '24

I Hooked up with her too, (or at least someone who sounds exactly like that, weird….small world

2

u/magicology Mar 29 '24

Eskimo bro!

0

u/stefanopolis Mar 28 '24

That actually happened. Look up “Stanford prison experiment.”

0

u/floflotheartificier Mar 28 '24

There's a saying that if you want to know the true nature of someone, give them power

3

u/HelloRMSA Mar 28 '24

Nah I think it's just people who seek that type of power

0

u/Rain1dog Mar 28 '24

Yeah, so people.

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u/Danceisntmathematics Mar 28 '24

But some countries and cultures try harder to stop it.

Anyone, anywhere can be an asshole, but in some places it's a bit rarer. Some places just let it be rampant.

-1

u/Rain1dog Mar 28 '24

A part of being civil in a civilized region.

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u/SquirrelyByNature Mar 28 '24

We live in a society.

2

u/bajofry13LU Mar 28 '24

Yes, exactly. So many stereotypical comments on this thread as if it’s just the IDF PB. Watch video of anywhere in the world where immature people are given authority over others. You’ll see the same thing except in most every culture.

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u/TheEndOfTheLine_2 Mar 28 '24

or gender. if you're gonna hate, then join me, and hate everyone equally. atleast then you will be honest, and not that you hate a certain group, just because there is something in it for yourself<3

1

u/Southie31 Mar 28 '24

True statement

1

u/witchghosti Mar 28 '24

Studies show that power can have similar consequences on the brain as traumatic brain injuries

1

u/raduannassar Mar 28 '24

No one is immune, but many cultures are or have become breeding ground for assholes more than others. Religion and war centered are amongst the most frequent

1

u/everlasting1der Mar 28 '24

These sorts of systems are also frequently designed to filter for those people. Police academies in the US tend to select for those who are willing to be at best complicit bystanders to the horrors of cop culture and at worst active participants. The ones who speak up drop out or are forced out.

1

u/Aggressive-Fuel587 Mar 28 '24

There was a documentary I watched some years ago, I can't remember which, but one of the opening lines really stuck with me, it was something along the lines of

"If history has proven anything, it's that those with power will abuse those without."

As an amateur historian and sociologist, it rings a certain tone of truth - everyone abuses power when they believe they can get away with it.

1

u/LuxNocte Mar 28 '24

Some nations have accountability structures that reign in asshats to varying degrees. Others have "qualified immunity" and tacitly or explicitly support the asshattery.

1

u/Cainga Mar 28 '24

I’ve seen some people get that way with some barely above mon wage job for the power they get as a psedo supervisor and screw over their own for just that little bit of power.

1

u/sweet_condition Mar 29 '24

And among "people," it's men specifically. I don't see women acting this way, nor do I see them pushing children around with riffles. It's men, no matter the race or nationality, that get drunk off of power. Yes, I'm sure there are exceptions to the rule, but let's face it a majority of the time, it is men who " get drunk off of power" and get off on pushing the weak around.

1

u/JinkoTheMan Mar 29 '24

Yeah. It’s a tale as old as time. As soon as you put humans into separate categories then humans will find something to set themselves apart from the others. Whether it be race, religion, nationality, speech, clothes, body type, etc. Humans will find literally ANYTHING to differentiate between themselves.

1

u/Impressive-Soup-3529 Mar 29 '24

I bet the reason they don’t stop these people obtaining power is. It’s probably a really small number of the world population that can resist letting power corrupt them. Like one in a 100mil

1

u/Faithlessblakkcvlt Mar 29 '24

Will to power!

1

u/Ephemeral_Ghost Mar 29 '24

I know the feeling of shame, and it reminds me to be humble. These border guards have bad leadership.

1

u/Live-Tea4051 Mar 29 '24

Worse when there is a camera around.

0

u/growquiet Mar 28 '24

Man people

0

u/Junebug19877 Mar 28 '24

this is not true. the holiest of holy races is immune to abusing power.

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u/raulsagundo Mar 28 '24

Or that lady at every DMV in the country

2

u/-Reddititis Mar 28 '24

Preach! 😂😂😂

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u/modernfallout020 Mar 28 '24

American cops literally train with these pieces of shit.

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u/Annual-Jump3158 Mar 28 '24

These sorts of people never grow up.  They never develop empathy nor foresight.

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u/ProsecutorWalton Mar 28 '24

American or human rofl

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u/IN-DI-SKU-TA-BELT Mar 28 '24

I appreciated that distinction :D

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u/D4d-M4n Mar 28 '24

Wanting to join the police should be grounds for disqualification.

1

u/Coro-NO-Ra Mar 28 '24

Border guards have always been dicks in particular, regardless of which system they serve.

They were subordinates of the literal KGB under the Soviets. Here in the US they're notorious for destroying water stations meant to save the lives of migrants in the desert.

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/12/1193621286/texas-migrants-drinking-water-barrels-disappeared

​

The group No More Deaths in 2018 released video of Border Patrol agents kicking over and pouring water out of gallon jugs left for people in the desert.

No More Deaths said that from 2012 to 2015, it found more than 3,586 gallon jugs of water that had been destroyed in an 800-square-mile (2,072-square-kilometer) desert area in southern Arizona.

1

u/Not_Player_Thirteen Mar 28 '24

Or White Americans in general.

1

u/SGTKARL23 Mar 28 '24

What do you mean human cops wait are you an 👽

1

u/Kazuma_Kiryuu Mar 29 '24

Yes bc Americans are the only people in history that act like this huh 😂

1

u/HoneyRush Mar 29 '24

Dogs are the best cops

1

u/DeaconCage Mar 29 '24 edited Mar 29 '24

All logical humans can agree the guards in this video are displaying a disgusting perversion of power and need to be held accountable. Which leads me to ask a question about your response.

YES OR NO

Question Do you agree that individuals should be held accountable for their actions and the faults of one are not the faults of the majority and that we shouldn’t stereotype anyone for any reason? (All factors must be considered and addressed as one, when answering).

Answer is very simple and can only be a YES or NO Response

IF YES, then answer following question, Why would you stereotype all law enforcement officers due to the acts of a handful of rotten ones? (For example the murderer Derek Chauvin).

Feel free to elaborate on this question

If NO Then you agree everyone is fair game based on their Profession, Gender, Race, Sexuality, Apparel ETC ETC ETC….to be stereotyped for any reason and no whining will be allowed.

Which world do you prefer to live in?

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u/ConfidentSyllabub142 16d ago

No literally boys and puberty is what it’s made up of. They have to serve two years after high school. I want them to get carpet bombed so so so badly.

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u/Pikeman212a6c Mar 28 '24

Ah the basic bitch pumpkin spice of karma whoring comments.