Gamespot doing literal propaganda for the US Army

... what straw man? You said you don't care about the issue and others shouldn't because things like this have gone on... as I told you, as people learned about this going on and have gotten upset about that. You are the one that directly said that was a "whataboutism" when its not. Its people learning about issues and caring about them. You didn't make any point there.

Meanwhile this:

But I promised some whataboutism and I am gonna deliver. I have a REALLY hard time getting up in arms about letting the military (effectively a bad company) advertise when so much air time is still given to a company headed by an asshole who platforms animal cruelty (Gearbox), games developed by and for straight up white supremacists (Triternion), companies that have a history of targeting hate groups (THQ Nordic), and companies that are vomiting qanon levels of conspiracy bullshit in so many of their games (Ubi. hey, that is why a malicious group with a very public but effective playbook sounded so familiar!).

Is textbook whataboutism.

Telling people not to care about issues cause other issues exist is whataboutism and a straw man argument. You're deploying these terms against me while using those styles of argument here lol.

@brainscratch: Just to be clear, those ads are selected and distributed by ad companies using algorithms. GB has very little input on what ads are shown on their page. It is different than someone writing while managing the official twitter account of the company.

I am not as horrified as other people here. Sure, it is a little tone deaf, and the way it dodged editorial speaks poorly about the company culture, but I have seen army propaganda up the wazoo when using American media.

This is a mostly shameful thread. Disappointing.

US Army culture is so weird.

there's always one of these guys here. just popping in to a thread about a serious cultural dilemma to say some purposefully unspecified aspect of the thread is beneath them. thanks for the input dude

lmao "nuanced". It's fucking GameSpot editors working in banners to their videos saying "check out the army" and "check out the Army's twitch channel", and a social team directly linking to sign up more soldiers to attack your own citizens.

I don't bat an eyelid when the squaddies from Catterick Garrison set up shop in the town centre. I won't bat an eyelid over this.

Some people join the armed forces to get their shit together.

Just under six years active duty, two years spent in Iraq, and all of you people who never served weighing in with your opinion on this: you're right. This is gross as hell. Fuck this.

The first I heard of this was GameSpot editors on Twitter voicing their opposition to this.

Why is army recruitment considered so bad these days?

@shindig: That some people find purpose in service is not in doubt, but I have to ask - How do you feel if it's CEX taking money to let a cadet wander round looking like a member of staff(But in cadet uniform). Maybe with a badge that says they are a "Special GAMES Ambassador" so that when they ask a kid in a small shop if they know the special move on that game, or if they've played that unreleased game the kid knows the shop thinks this is ok. "My uniform? Yeah it's ok. Me and my friends have to wear them all the time - but we play games when we're not at work. But get this - some of us totally get to play games FOR WORK."

Paying a visible brand to target a message on a service you have to sign up for, is not putting up a gazebo and asking passersby if they've considered their future.

@oursin_360: Well, they can openly lie to potential recruits without any legal repercussions, for one. We have been in a war without a set goal for 20 years and the military has been burning through good will at a rapid pace. There is only so long you can be at war before a generation of voting adults exists that didn’t really sign onto the 2 decade old conflict. Plus all the war crimes that they don’t like people talking about.

It’s not that our military is the worst, because they aren’t. It is that they have created this entire marketing wing of the military industrial complex that has moved into every aspect of media. People are tired of it and no longer give the military the deference they used to.

And this is not the first time this has happened. During Vietnam military recruiters were barred from many colleges because both the colleges and students didn’t want them there. Also the military didn’t like all the anti-war protesting, and by extension, blamed the colleges for it.

PS: you also get the weird people who get made if you even critique the military.

Nah, everyone has a choice when it comes to this kind of thing, you find out its happening and you threaten to walk unless its stopped or you're complicit in it, there is no nuance in this issue whatsoever.

@oursin_360: Part of it is that a lot of us REALLY do not approve of the overreach and interventionist tendencies of the US government and those tend to be driven by the US Military. And, as is the tendency with occupying forces, we tend to have accumulated more than a few war crimes in the process which also, for whatever reason, tends to make people cranky.

Part of it is also that ostensibly the national guard can be brought in to handle riots and the like. To my knowledge they have not yet (all those hate crimes and violence are just normal cops and border patrol...) but it very much is on the mind of people.

And a lot of it is that the military has a long history of very shady recruitment techniques (ask basically any person who served and they will have a joke about being lied to by their recruiters), sneak it in to a lot of places they really shouldn't, and had some recent scandals regarding violating the first amendment in the interest of scamming folk and suppressing people pointing out those war crimes.

Interesting, that's crazy they had to recruit during the draft? There was definitely a lot of military hate at that time, which turned over onto the soldiers who returned.

If there is any war crimes happening right now by the US then it definitely needs to be brought to light, I haven't heard about anything since Bush era (at least by us).

What do they lie to recruits about?

Everyone I know who served, friends and family, have never said anything bad about their service and came out with careers and opportunities. I haven't really met anybody who felt like they were tricked or something?

Also is their hate for the ROTC, and military schools like west point too? Or is it just the use of pop culture to advertise recruitment?

@petesix0: It makes me wonder if they had some E3 booth space or something lined up before the pandemic hit. In this manner, it looks a lot more clumsy.

The one good thing I will say about the National Guard is that there national commanders seem very opposed to being used to “put down riots” or any type of prolonged involvement in police actions. These even forced the Boarder Patrol to stop dressing up like military units in Portland. The folks at the top seem to be acutely aware of how quickly the population will turn on the military if it gets involved with domestic policing actions. And let’s be honest, most of them are better trained than the cops these days. Especially on the use of force. That doesn’t make them special, it just makes our cops shit.

@oursin_360: the Obama administration bombed civilians, they were just drone strikes. And that war in Yemen we helped out with.

In regards to lying, the issue is that a recruit has no legal recourse if s/he is mislead by a recruiter. Like if they lie/misrepresent the GI bill, which has separate sections for regular army and the national guard. My brother had a bunch of problems getting his community college classes paid for, which was part of the reason he joined.

@oursin_360: Just last year, Trump intervened in the cases of three members of the military accused of war crimes. One of them was a Navy SEAL. SEALs are among the most proficient trained killers in the world. It is likely that every member of a SEAL team has killed people. It was other SEALs who reported Eddie Gallagher's conduct--that is significant. Trained killers whose profession requires them to take lives and be quiet about it viewed their fellow SEAL's conduct as criminal.

The scale of the war crimes committed in more recent years may have been smaller than those committed in the Bush era. They may not be as iconic. But they're still happening.

It should be noted that many veterans agree that war criminals ought to be prosecuted. Veterans, like any group of people, are not a monolith. Just because someone served doesn't mean they unquestioningly support the military.

You mean they were SANCTIONED war crimes? Or just cases of war crimes by individuals that were treated as such? When you say intervene, did Trump pardon them or condemn them? And I don't take his actions as representative either way of the military at large tbh.

@oursin_360: Like it or not (and I really don't), that orange fuckface is very representative of the entire United States. We, through republicans, elected him and thus he represents us.

Aside from that: You are basically making the "a few bad apples" argument. For a lot of reasons people tend to REALLY not be fans of that. But it also only applies if said "bad apples" are cracked the hell down on at every step. Rather than protected and shuffled around until their colleagues finally snap and blow as many whistles as they can.

A reminder that we are all literally online where it takes just as long to google a thing as it does to ask about it in a post.

https://www.npr.org/2019/11/15/780029994/trump-pardons-2-service-members-accused-of-war-crimes-and-restores-anothers-rank

And although the top brass of the military didn’t want Trump to do this, a section of rank and file members loved it.

Edit: also the few bad apples argument only works if the bad apples are aggressively removed. From my experience, folks in the military are far more likely to circle the wagons around a bad actor and defend them from “civilians who just don’t understand”.

I don't have any poll to back this up, but I'm pretty sure that most long-serving American military commanders at the top, in all types of armed forces, know that public perception can turn on them and try to use their position with some degree of responsibility (or at least they try to really suppress public awareness of their wrongdoing when it occurs). They're not idiots; they're keenly aware how everything to do with the Vietnam War and the Kent State shootings was bad for military PR for literally decades.

However, while they are not idiots, the commander in chief is perhaps the single dumbest person to ever hold the office, and unfortunately these commanders sometimes have to bow to his orders or risk losing their post. So even if there are good intentions at the top of the national guard, they're just going to get steamrolled by the strongman stupidity of the executive branch.

I just looked it up, man that's just hard to believe. I still don't think the majority of leadership in the military condone or think that is okay, or he wouldn't have been tried in the first place. Either way, with stuff like that happening I can see why their is a new tide of military hate going on. I kinda stay away from politics these days, for my own mental health, so I only read about certain things now.

Anyway, I was genuinely curious, and thanks for the info. I hope we can all find a way to get through this era and it just becomes a blip on the radar towards something much better.

@bisonhero: From my experience most rank and file military folks don’t want anything to do with police actions or stuff like that. But there are a few of them that are all about it. These are normally the same folks that get super bent out of shape if you say one bad thing about the military, are not all in on the hero worship, and pitch a fit if you imply that they work for civilians. Needless to say, my brother avoids introducing me to his military buddies.

@oursin_360: This is going to sound very familiar for reasons that should ring a bit true but:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/us/navy-seals-crimes-of-war.html

Even removing fuckface from the equation. Those seals reported the "bad apples" multiple times. They were outright warned not to do it. The only reason ANYTHING happened is that they broke the chain of command and included external orgs. And this is not at all atypical of scandals and problems.

Yeah, there are some real bad apples in the military. And there is a huge infrastructure set up to protect them and keep them from facing the consequences of their actions and stop the good people from making a difference. That goes beyond "there are a few bad people" into "this is a bad organization" to a lot of us.

And again, if you are seeing parallels to another organization of heavily armed people with a history of civilian abuse...

Yeah, the military and veteran communities tend to circle the wagons to defend their own. It's also worth noting that in some cases, it's not the actual war crime that people take issue with. It's the fact that that sort of thing (war crimes) tend to make it harder for American interests, both in terms of strategic partnerships/policy AND in terms of how the locals will treat the troops on the ground.

As the "few bad apples" argument has come up, I'd like to point out that it is possible to believe that there are good people--even MOST people--in a given organization while also recognizing that the entire institution is flawed. Separating individuals from the institution is a mental exercise I practice daily, because I couldn't function otherwise. Not every soldier is a raging imperialist. The US military is still a tool of white supremacist imperialism.

I'm proud of the GameSpot employees who stood up and spoke out about this partnership in order to affect change. And I'm gonna put my ad dollars where my post is and go check out a bunch of GameSpot content now.

@bladeofcreation: You know, the funny thing about the "few bad apples" defense people like to trot out in regards to both the police and the military, is that the actual saying is "a bad apple spoils the bunch." It's like they forgot the second half of that proverb which literally means that a small number of corrupt individuals can taint an entire organization, even if most members are "good"

Glad to see a lot of young people today have their eyes opened and not falling for the same manipulations that were used by the military in recruiting for the last couple of decades. Maybe there is some hope for the future after all.

Grotesque by every sense of the word. Fuck off with this.

Glad some of the Gamespot staff spoke out against this.

Very well put, thank you for this!

Maybe what you should be focusing on is that HALF of the federal budget funded by YOUR taxpayer money in being spent on funding this and every other terrible thing your military does. If you guys had a working democracy you could reduce that.

The aggressive push into gaming by the US military, especially on Twitch, would be beyond terrifying and grotesque if not for the fact that they have been trolled viciously at every turn.

I think the ACLU nailed them for banning users from their twitch chat for asking about whether they'd be taught to level hospitals or vaporize a funeral or some other flavour of atrocity committed with "precision" by someone with a 360 controller sitting in a demountable in Arizona. They didn't seem to like it when their supposed values where enforced against them.

For anyone interested, I recommend listening to the podcast "Blowback" because we haven't even begun to process the Iraq war yet.

@expensiveham: Alright well shit I’ll get right on it I guess.

When you see who they're recruiting, I don't feel so bad.

@dudeglove: I'd like to call the ICC and report a war crime.

People are so ridiculous now. This website is owned by CBS, and it's the National Guard. Get a grip guys.

I wonder how much it bothers folks in this thread to cite the Afghanistan war as the reason they are against this, and then have to look at a chart of the troop numbers by president, and then consider the primary opposition to removing troops entirely.

@north6: Are you suggesting that the Democrats have a hand in perpetuating the forever war?

Just to circle back around to the kinds of people doing this propaganda, the Navy Recruiters on Twitch played Among Us for a little while. Two of them were named Nagasaki and Japan 1945, and they named the black player character Gamer Word.

https://twitter.com/iboudreau/status/1304950099970318336

golly, but if the DEMOCRATS are SUPPORTING the war...what do I do with my completely imaginary worldview/his strawman???

I might need more context for that. Were they taking name suggestions from the chat?

How would using those names because the chat suggested them be any better than coming up with them themselves?? what??

@shindig: I'm having a hard time with what level of context would improve that situation.

Yeah i'm not sure what more context is needed. Those names show up, they laugh about them and continue the game as if nothing has happened.

I for one can't believe that *checks notes* sailors would say anything offensive in public.

In public, while acting as official representatives of the military, to an audience that is encouraging the behavior.

It being completely unsurprising isn't really the point, though it does make it more depressing.

@shindig: Saw it mentioned before. Sounded like that was just what the other players (referred to as "close friends") named their characters of their own volition.

Sounds like platforming a few asshole friends (which obviously would NEVER happen...) but the actual clip (hopefully in this link? https://twitter.com/JordanUhl/status/1304955415122370560 ) provides a bit more context to the "laugh about them". Aspect. Recruiter saw what their friends/"friends" had named things, seemed to laugh at the absurdity, and tried to move on. Comes across more as "wow that is fucked up" laughter which tends to go poorly when it is normal "edginess" and comes across REALLY bad when it is by the sister orgs of the people who dropped the bombs.

This strikes me as fairly standard unregulated toxic Twitch behavior, but like even in a best case scenario of oh we're just tryin' to have our game here ha ha that sure is fucked up.. it's their stream they hold the keys here.