You know, maybe more of a kind of theoretical, or heady point, I would make here, but I'm gonna make it anyways and then just kind of give you free reign to tear it apart, since it's been on my mind for a little bit, and you seem like you know what you're talking about.

So, desensitization isn't an explicit course, but it's obviously it's still a factor in the training, right? To be able to be trained how to fight, you have to become used to fighting, pretty simple idea, you train for what you do, you do what you train for. Not necessarily desensitization to murder, mind you, just desensitization to shooting your gun and hitting human sized targets, you know. What happens afterwards is entirely circumstantial. But enough of me shitposting at you, in any case, you already broached that whole deal, and I don't know what the military service entails in terms of conflict de-escalation or whatever.

No, what I really wanted to talk about was passive desensitization through language, through framing. It's pretty common, and easily lambasted media literacy 101 type shit, to look at police headlines and kind of tear them down. A bullet left the officer's gun and struck the suspect, right, rather than, oh, this policeman shot someone, type shit. One uses passive language for the officer, it was just a kind of cosmic event that happened, and the other one uses more active language. Partially as a result of a 24 hour instantaneous news headline news cycle, and partially because reporters are just easily willing to swallow and regurgitate whatever authoritative information they come across, these events are framed in such a way, and are framed, usually, devoid of external context. Events are described with passive language framing them. Events happened, that was it.

Now this is partially because there's a pretense of objectivity, right, you just give the viewers the authoritative information, and what they decide to do with it is up to them. But this pretense is kind of problematic, because, you know, we're not actually critically analyzing any of what's been presented, it's just a random event that happened, and then we push on and kind of uncritically assimilate it into whatever superstructure it is that we've evolved in order to deal with this very quickly. And which frame of mind strikes you as the one people are more likely to evolve in a contextually devoid vacuum? The one that's simple, where they just say "oh, yeah, the officer shot that guy because that guy was bad"? Or the more complicated and emotionally burdening one, where they say "oh, because of the litany of factors that lead everyone to this moment through the long arm of history, that guy got shot by the officer, that kind of sucks and is a tragedy."? So, without any real framing of the issue, with just presenting "objective" information, we can kind of just passively trust the reader to arrive at certain conclusions. If not all the time, right, then we can at least trust the majority of our headline-only stooges to arrive at those conclusions, which is realistically all we wanted to do anyways.

So, that's a point I would also make for the military, right? We don't actually have to charge, or frame things in certain ways, we don't have to actively attempt to desensitize people to whatever they're doing. And actually, it would be worse if we did, because then we would be focusing on it much more, and kind of playing our hand to what's happening here. I dunno about how you feel about the WMDs in iraq, for instance, or the vietnam war, or what have you. Instead of looking at these wars and kind of thinking about them from the top down, though, the viewpoint is forced into that of a pure tool, you are just presented the information, and then you're trained to respond, and the reasoning you're doing internal to the process isn't expounded upon. Sink or swim. People just are expected to evolve whatever opinions and viewpoints will help them to be more functional in the field, because they're presented information that is just kind of, right in front of them, matter of fact, and it's harder to think long term when you're kind of swamped in a constant state of emergency or danger or, to put it more charitably, when you're constantly processing information that's right in front of you.

I've even heard stories, pretty commonly, where people get into the service, and then retroactively come to conclusions that "oh this kind of sucks I don't think we're doing anything good here", and then they still continue to go along with it, because like, of course they do, what else are they supposed to do? They get dishonorably discharged, that's gonna blow for any career prospects, you have to be immoral to do it, and you're abandoning your squad. Are they supposed to pretend to be insane? There's not really any backing out, there. You know, and that's especially going to be the case when the only people who ever know shit about the military are the people who are in the military, you know, the people who are more likely to have evolved opinions that are functional to what it is that they're currently doing.

Also a relative sidenote, but something that stands out to me is the use of acryonyms in the military. It's like, fetishistic, almost. Theoretically, right, this makes it faster to refer to things in emergency situations, but then, people would just use codes for whatever they're doing in those situations anyways, right? So I would think that the only thing it would really serve to do would be to save printer ink. More importantly, though, I think maybe it serves to obfuscate and isolate the military world from the civilian world, even more than it already is. Even to the point where you can start calling things UFOs, and then switch to UAPs, because they're lockheed-martin in-camera phenomena from fighter jets, right, pretty obviously, and then mainstream media is like "guys, we have aliens. They admitted we have UFOs." basically regardless of whatever you're doing. Just because the previously internal, somewhat unprocessed information is public, and then the public can process it however they choose, basically. I dunno, shit just strikes me as weird.

Yet the example of the sim you posted (the exact type I had in mind) is from police training. This is exactly what I was talking about: police using military style training and using it in way that desensitizes officers.

I'm not saying the training is exactly the same as in military, I'm not saying it's as common. I'm saying that cops are trigger happy (as in the original article) because of this type of training. In many countries police are trained to shoot only as a last resort (or don't even carry guns). IDK, maybe it's different in US but most people have natural blockades preventing them from shooting others. That it's so easy for US cops to shoot at people for me means that they are trained to do it. All the effort that goes into this type of training should go into de-escalation training instead.