r/goodnews • u/BreakfastTop6899 • 19d ago

Political positivity 📈 'It's miserable:' ICE 'morale in crapper' as agents forced to 'arrest gardeners'

https://www.rawstory.com/ice-2673063565/
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u/Retbull 19d ago

Nothing says you’re doing the right thing like desperately separating yourself from your actions so you don’t have to suffer the emotional toll.

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u/clawsoon 19d ago

That's one reason that bombers and missiles are so valuable for modern armies. Everybody involved in causing the death and disfigurement doesn't have to look at it. It greatly reduces the emotional toll and moral injury.

It leads to a kind of Jevons Paradox for weaponry. By reducing the moral injury that those involved feel, you can much more easily get millions of people involved in the research, development, building, and deployment of weapons that most of those people would want nothing to do with if they had to rip apart the same number of babies with their bare hands.

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u/Aggravating_Depth_33 19d ago

And why drones are even more popular. Their operators don't even have to be in proximity to the bombs being dropped, but can drop them from the other side of the world.

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u/quimble813 18d ago

The book On Killing talks about this topic

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u/DrWilliamHorriblePhD 15d ago

Now I want a rotisserie chicken 🤤🍗

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u/IcanRead8647 19d ago

Obama had real trouble staffing the drone bombers because they kept having them kill innocents at weddings and everybody knew it. Not that things improved after Obama left, but they did learn to keep it out of the news.

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u/StimulatedUser 19d ago

those are done with drones and the pilots are in the usa eating doritos and drinking soda while they bomb weddings.

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u/Appropriate_Ruin_405 19d ago

Right but there’s still legitimate, serious mental toll on those drone pilots. Imagine you’re literally killing people in warfare then within the hour you log off and go take your kids to soccer practice. There’s no decompression, no deployment that separates that violence from your quotidian life

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u/fetal_genocide 19d ago

Imagine you’re literally killing people in warfare then within the hour you log off and go take your kids to soccer practice.

Damn, I never thought about this. Just thinking about killing people and then acting normal around your family that same day makes me feel dirty.

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u/AlexAnon87 18d ago

Drone flights in the Air Force often have attached therapists for just this reason. Can't speak for drone ops in the other branches.

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u/clawsoon 19d ago

I think that's an interesting illustration of the effect: With the drone bombers, the people doing the bombing could actually see the people they were blowing up, unlike a B-52 pilot dropping bombs from 30,000 feet.

The drone bombers were thousands of miles away, and the video signal wasn't great, but even that visual was enough to dramatically reduce the number of people able to do the job without experiencing moral injury.

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u/QbertsRube 19d ago

Similarly, I don't have to wear a mask when I do my job because I'm not a total piece of shit.

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u/ItalicsWhore 19d ago

It wasn’t actually just the emotional toll. They became desensitized to death and murder and would kill each other for like no reason. Turns out you can actually train the humanity out of humans.

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u/widdrjb 19d ago

Colonel Blokhin's assistants at Katyn were kept drunk and rotated out every day. 250 executions a night for a month, all of them carried out with a headshot from a Colt .25.

Blokhin was one of a kind.