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Can't comment on Nebula so telling you here: in the Nebula version of the video, every line of subtitles has a double space in the center of it, just fyi. I noticed it a few minutes in and it bothered me throughout the rest of the video. Maybe you care enough to fix it maybe not? Just thought you should know.
Friendly reminder that the best interrogator in history was a German man named Hanns Scharff, who frequently got his info out of POW's by treating them with kindess, often doing stuff such as: Telling jokes, giving them homemade meals, occasionally sharing drinks with them, and nature walks, amongst many other actions. He's also partially the reason why I remember the saying, "You attract more flies with honey than you do with vinegar."
Fascinating, actually! The notion that people are just as easily (if not more so) persuaded to cooperate when given positive reinforcement then when punished…
And when we say "German" we mean "Nazi". The top interrogator of a delusional fascist murderstate concluded that torture is useless and they should stop doing it.
iirc there was a guy in al-Qaeda or similar, who gave up valuable information because he had diabetes and one of the interrogators brought him sugar-free cookies.
@@EddieM1994 I wonder if this can be properly considered interrogation. One-on-one experience and compassion are how prejudice and hatred are destroyed. Maybe he just realized he'd been lied to about how evil we were and how we all wanted to eradicate them. I saw a clip of Alex Jones wailing into the camera, crying: "they hate our children so much". There must be some people who genuinely believe that liberals hate their children. I imagine it would be a real blow to their worldview to see liberals protecting and being kind to their children, not caring about the beliefs of their parents.
This reminds me of a phenomenon I've observed for a while. It's when people get so enamored of their own willingness to "make the hard choices"/"do the hard thing"/"be cruel to be kind"/etc. that they reject all information that the hard thing actually is ineffective/has results actively contrary to their aims and the easy thing would be the better thing to do. Outside of torture, this often comes up in the context of how to treat children, addicts, homeless persons, immigrants, prisoners, etc.
It's difficult because the person rejecting softhearted approaches to social problems usually ignores the potential for some really effective softhearted solutions that aren't in general use. Instead, they're looking at the two approaches generally in use: ignoring the problem and letting it fester, or punishing the people doing the behavior to encourage them to change their behavior. It's a "this isn't working, we need to try the other approach" but also ignoring that the nasty approach isn't the only untried approach.
I feel that often happens because they lose track of why they were making the hard choices to begin with, and start to simply do it because it's "the hard choice", even if it's objectively the wrong choice. They've built up some kind of mental block causing a dissonance that leaves them simply unable to face the fact that they've fallen straight into the abyss. "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster . . . when you gaze long into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you"
You see this a lot with exercise, funnily enough. People working too hard, lifting too much, running too fast, etc. Doing what sucks because it sucks, thinking that fact alone means they're doing what's optimal.
This is only tangentially related, but the "make the hard choices" or "get dirty so the world stays clean" mentality has been on my mind recently, specifically in comparison to common attitudes toward defence attorneys. People love to defend cops, troops, etc as people making the hard choices in awful situations in order to keep society safe. "You might not like them, but they're the reason you live in a democracy," they say. Then many of these same people will absolutely excoriate the defence attorney of someone accused of a crime, going so far as to say "Some people don't deserve to have their rights," when it's pointed out that this, too, is a job full of hard choices that is crucial to the functioning of the democracy they hold so dear. It seems that making the hard choices is only heroic when it's dealing out punishment to one's enemies. And that doesn't sound like a hard choice, it sounds like an unpopular choice that grants a simple, shallow catharsis.
@@hughcaldwell1034 eh, I get what you mean but it's not exactly the same, at least not completely. People don't usually have problem with lawyers being defense attorneys to bad people, but rather with crooked lawyers defending bad people in crooked way. It is of course well understood that even the worst people must have right to defend themselves in court, but some lawyers for money are ready to go beyond just "hard choice" of defense itself here. Trying to derail the trail, get obviously guilty violent criminal freed on technicality, or worst of all, try to dig dirt on victim, re-traumatising victim by forcing them to re-tell story of SA/child r*pe/murder attempt etc just to try and catch them on some minor discrepancies etc all that are really despicable practices that go beyond simply criminal defense. Those are not "hard choices" at all, those are straight up immoral practices
the revelation that call of duty contains child torture followed by kevin spacey jumpscare was like a punch to the gut followed by an uppercut to the chin
the fun (?) thing about this video is that it responds to Jacob´s last COD video "Does Call Of Duty Believe In Anything?" by answering that Yes, COD believes in Torture
COD revels in torture. It's the "gritty realness" they love to claim they represent, but it's really just a fictionalized worshiping of the violence that makes american soldiers so "effective", so much better than everyone else because they're the good guys and the violence they inflict is thus good too.
@@Self-Referential Crazy that he used chemical weapons then accused the villain of using chemical weapons in terrorist attack. A few years later US accuses Syria of using chemical weapons.
I find the interrogation between Batman and the the Joker especially interesting here - it was only shown briefly but to me it stands as a direct critique of torture. The Joker tells Batman not to start with the head since it numbs everything and ruins the torture. Batman slams his head down anyway, and the Joker laughs. The torture in the scene doesn't bring any information, the Joker only tells them what he wants to. It seems to only be for Batmans own catharsis, subverting the trope of creating impossible situations in media where torture is the only way forward.
The torture of the Joker is framed as a win for him, by getting batman to stoop that low he was succeeding in his goal of destroying The Batman and everything it stands for. A movie that imo more effectively gets that point out is Prisoners, I won't spoil it but if you've seen it ykwim.
@@shaeisgae8952 It's also a win for the Joker because he uses a smart combination of the truth and lies to manipulate Batman. The locations were accurate, but who was present at each location was swapped, so the person Batman wanted to save was the one who died.
@@gunnarschlichting9886 yeah, also proving the point that torture isn't a good way to get information, joker gave him information because he wanted to, not because he was tortured
@shaeisgae8952 I'll even argue that the scene proves the opposite point - that being tortured can be a good way to give out desired information to one's own benefit. Not only did Joker give information of his own accord, but he did so in a way that directly benefited his situation. He timed and phrased his info to increase urgency and cause Batman, Gordon, and many other officers to immediately leave the area, playing into Joker's plan by giving him the best opportunity to escape jail.
There's another scene in that movie that I had thought about somewhat recently. I think it was sometime before the scene you mentioned, it's the part where Batman drops someone off of a balcony to get information out of him. I don't remember the entire context since it's been so long, but Batman doesn't exactly get the information he wants. What strikes me is that it's followed by another scene where Harvey Dent is trying to torture someone else for the same information, but Batman shows up to stop him. Batman gets to leave that scene with the moral high-ground, as if he didn't just break someone's legs and presumably leave him to fend for himself. Arguably, Batman stops Harvey because he realized it wouldn't be effective, but he'll still end up beating up the Joker to try and get information out of him later in the film.
You guys hear about that young man who was tortured by police into confessing that he murdered his father, only for his father to show up very much alive a few days later, having returned from vacation? Yeah.
@@LucBoeren Google “Thomas Perez Jr Fontana” Of course the taxpayers (through the city) are the ones who end up paying the settlement price 🙄 yet another reminder to never talk to the cops without a lawyer present; they aren’t looking to solve crimes just pin them on whomever is most convenient for them
@@LucBoeren His name was Thomas Perez Jr from Fontana Ca (this is the third time i'm typing this comment because UA-cam seems to be deleting it when I mention other stuff related to the 🐷)
This is how torture is actually effective: The Brazilian dictatorship is considered a success story among totalitarian regimes, as it lasted for nearly 30 years, and none of the leaders were punished in any way after the fact. My countrymen's greatest "innovation" was to favor torture instead of murder as a repression tool, because if people lived, it looked less bad. However, as they were tortured, they most often just self-exiled and very often killed themselves afterward. In a sense, when you torture someone enough, they essentially die (as far as being a political opponent for your regime), while remaining alive. So the torturer don't get as much blame, and their regime doesn't get as much flak internationally. Also, torturers seem to be much prouder of themselves than executioners are (as you can see in Indonesia, where they consider themselves national heroes). Another advantage of torture is that there is no limit to how many people you can torture at once. If you torture someone in front of any number of people, you are effectively torturing everyone who is watching. This happened to my aunt: she was forced to watch a schoolmate of hers (an underaged girl) being tortured by policemen in front of her entire class, and that forever diffused her (and I assume all of her classmates as well) from being an effective opposition to the state. In fact, the statistics that the Brazilian police state "only" tortured 40,000 people are laughable. Not only are these numbers probably an underrepresentation of the number of people who were dragged to basements and tortured for hours, but they completely discount the likely hundreds of thousands of people who received public beatings or sexual assault at the hands of the dictatorship. They also don't even attempt to account for all the people who have been tortured by being forced to watch or be aware of another person's torture, which can be just as much of a torture. In Brazil, the idea of torture being about gathering information was just a thinly-veiled excuse for enforcing and demonstrating the power of the state. It was very effective; Brazilians were a terrified people for 30 years. It's also a grim testament to the power of torture that people can forget. Currently, there seems to be a wave of amnesia affecting the older generations, where they have convinced themselves that it made the country safer, that it wasn't so bad, and that it prevented something worse, like a socialist regime being instilled here (this one is especially inaccurate).
As a Brazilian, I think this comment is sadly spot on. Our history is being rewritten, first by that regime from 1964, now by the sons of those who ran it. It's haunting...
@@redblue5140yeah the ‘torture doesn’t work’ line only applies to a shallow reading of the purposes of torture, torture as a method to gain information doesn’t work, but torture for other purposes can be very effective.
During the first couple of minutes I thought you were literally just going to list and describe every single torture scene one after the other and I’ll be honest I was entirely prepared to watch a 40 minute video of just that from you.
5:20 the fact that it's called PRIMARY call of duty torture spreadsheet implies the presence of a secondary, more in-depth call of duty torture spreadsheet
Or possibly just a secondary CoD torture spreadsheet with details irrelevant to the main spreadsheet. (I saw someone speculate that it was Zombies-related.)
Probably filled to the brim with other columns and questions that *probably* won't be useful, but might be, but even if they are it's not something you'd need to reference more than once or twice.
I think it's a good time to remember that the US Military is actively involved in the development of Call of Duty games as a consultant where they push for the games to be recruitment propaganda.
@@Coffeepanda294 I wish people such as yourself would stop devaluing the word "fascist" to mean "people who do things that I don't like." It's really bad and unproductive rhetoric. The United States military is not fascist, and if the armed forces that is subject and accountable to a democratic government is fascist, then the word fascist has ceased to mean anything. Fascism is not when the government creates bad propaganda.
@@noize8148 You're welcome to actually look up the definition instead of putting words in my mouth. Looking up the 14 characteristics is a good starting place.
I'll never forget Trevor Phillips's line from GTA 5. "Torture is for the benefit of the torturer. Or sometimes the torturee! It's useless as a means of getting information." Whenever it's been actually examined in real life, torture is found to be of extremely dubious value in actually accomplishing the interrogator's goals. But it often works in fiction because of course it does, it's a narrative contrivance to move the plot along. The author has already decided that it's going to work.
“The bad guys talk, while the good guys stay silent.” That’s a great example of CoD acting as US military propaganda. They’d never want to show one of their own beaten to the point of saying anything to make the pain stop.
Im not usually one to say somethings not a psyop😂 but i think theyre some reaching here, torture is another disgusting horror of war same as burning people alive, killing civillians, explosives tearing people limb from limb pretty much everything else that happens in the game. The more real the feel of the game the more peoples curiosity will spike( same with gruesome news storys and hardcore porn) and the more it will sell. It dosent matter how much money the government gives them it will still be in the game
@@The_Sleepiest_Socialist i very much like your attitude🩵. Your right it is nonchalant but so is the killing and other atrocities of the simulated war thats being shown it comes with the territory its not one sided either the same horrible acts happen to the characters side aswell and of course alot of it is supposed to make you route for the character side because its the old cliche of good versus evil and most people want to be on the "good side" which happens to be western countries like the US, UK, etc because thats the majority of the player base
"Us miliatry propoganda" Doesn't a large part of the C.O.D franchise take place with the SAS? The british special forces? Bad guys are often made out to break more easily because they're primarily selfish and self serving. And once the ship appears to be sinking they bail out as fast as possible. People who are quote on quote "good" have a reason not to break because they have interests beyond their own survival.
Its not just acting, the DOD actively consults on Call Of Duty writing, in fact I'd be willing to bet that they actively look for and veto any seen that depicts an American, Western, or otherwise percieved to be Western service member crack under torture.
I forget the exact situation, but I recall that there was at least one Supreme Court case which dealt with the legality of torture. Justice Scalia, when discussing the topic, said this: “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. He saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Are you going to convict Jack Bauer? Say that criminal law is against him? 'You have the right to a jury trial?' Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don't think so. So the question is really whether we believe in these absolutes. And ought we believe in these absolutes." Real-life people use the fictional portrayals of torture to justify using torture, the use of which is then shown in other works of fiction to try and justify it. The ouroboros, in pain and anger, bites its own tail.
John Oliver references that exact quote when he discussed torture and the politics of it on his show. He then described what he saw a better thing Kiefer Sutherland contributed to society: an incident, caught on video, of him drunkenly tackling a Christmas tree in a hotel lobby.
I'll paste this from another comment I left: I honestly believe it's the duty of authors and game developers to not perpetuate the myth of efficacy, at least once they've learned the truth about it. (And I say this as someone who writes pretty dang macabre fiction.) It's also the duty of Supreme Court justices not to have their heads so far up their butts they sniff their own poop and think it's flowers, but I think we'll have better luck with the fiction writers.
I remember Fanon describing, among the psychiatric consequences of torture in Algeria, the case of a police officer that go so used to torture that he caught himself torturing his wife and kids as a mean of settling arguments. And even though he wanted to stop harming his family, when he was told that giving up on torture altogether would be the most effective, he refused.
I never thought about it but the fact that police torture becomes so 'obvious' that other investigative methods atrophy leaving it as the only 'quick' and 'viable' method is so depressing. A self-justifying cruelty machine
I remember how my parents told me about how when they were in college during the early 2000’s the college had a guest speaker who used to do torture for the military. From what my parents remembered, the speaker put heavy emphasis on the fact that the military brain washed him into believing that every situation of torture WAS the ticking bomb scenario and how complex their methods actually were. Torture was not just walking in and punching them till they broke, torture was putting them in a cell without windows and lights that were a little too bright, cuffs that were a little too tight, a mattress that was a little too thin, a stool that was a little too small. Torture didn’t start the moment the interrogator walked in, it began the moment they were detained.
torturing info out of someone and then showing that the information was already known, but hadn't just reached the tortures fast enough. That ironically says quite a bit about the efficacy of torture.
@@nedinnis6752 "ah s**t you actually pulled all my molars and electrocuted me with a car battery" "thanks for the info" *guy bursts in* "sir, the enemy is attacking from the east" "wow, the guy bleeding to death just told me that his friends were attacking from the east."
What you're forgetting is that it is a zero sum game. If they won't tell you nicely, you may as well torture them, just in case they do. Everyone KNEW what the inquisition wanted to know, "where are other heretics?" and so would easily blame anyone they could name, whether or not they were. Because there was nothing scientific about torturing someone over a made up sky friend. It's almost like we've improved all science since the 1500s, and yes torture really is just another science.
Or the one about the guy they tortured whose phone conveniently had all the info they needed on it. Are you telling me you didn't decide to just check that first?
During a Model UN conference my senior year of high school, one kid told us the story about how him and his buddies had driven out to the middle of the woods to waterboard each other. They had gotten all the rags, water jugs, googled the necessary instructions, and took turns pouring the water over each other's heads. What I recall most of all from this conversation is how he ended the story: "I'm glad that we do that to terrorists". Again, no thought it might be misapplied, no thought for the efficacy of it. It's as if he somehow thought that we were in Omelas, and the existence of a child being tortured also meant there was necessarily a utopia around it.
@@thehuman2cs715 The odd part is that isn't even the only story I have about my peers waterboarding each other. The dorms at my college had to institute a "no torture" rule after students started consensually waterboarding each other so they could have an "informed debate" on the practice in class. I know the rule was real, I saw it in the student handbook they handed out. The story goes that an RA walked in on the students waterboarding each other in the bathroom but couldn't figure out a way to ban the practice because there wasn't any rule against it. Thus, the "no torture" rule. I'm a Zillenial fwiw - basically everyone in my age cohort was a baby when 9/11 happened and grew up amidst Iraq and Afghanistan. I think that did shit to people's brains, hearing your parents, teachers, and peers debate whether it was OK to drown people from the time you were a small child.
And like there's a 99% chance it wasn't even legit waterboarding, just some wussy bullshit to make them feel badass for putting a wet towel over their face.
Well, at least this clearly illustrates how the only real motivation behind this is individual sadism. People who want to torture people seek out careers where they can legally torture people. And folks wonder why there's so much overlap between the police and white power groups.
This kid I grew up with joined the military at 18 and had been deployed three times by the time we ran into each other again in college. We became close and it turned out he had been running “night missions” where he said he was basically shooting into darkness a lot of the time. He had really extreme ptsd and he told me a story about what his squad did to this guy who led their friend into a building armed with IEDs. I’ll spare the story suffice to say I think this kind of emotional trauma really feeds into how this question of torture is often framed
@@dannydanumba basically they beat him up but he was restrained. point is I think a lot of the torture was done as revenge, I mean what else are you gonna do against people who aren't really afraid of dying and are blowing themselves up to get to you already? You end up needing to come up with something worse than dying. All the rest of the words spent on it are window dressing I think, they all knew what they were doing.
"Sadistic laziness" seems like the perfect way to describe the nature of how torture is used in the games. It's simply easier to write in a 2 minute, visually exciting, violent scene to gather information than it is to take the same time to explain a painstaking process of gathering intelligence. It's fast, it's satisfying, and also gives the player the fantasy of being given the position of judge, jury, and executioner. It's simply the easier choice that rewards that part of our brain that wants to exact violence on our enemies.
To cite my disillusioned ex-military sports trainer, who in turn cited his trainer from an anti-torture exercize: "You don't torture to gain information - you torture because you feel like it."
My favorite torture scene was in Modern Warfare 2007 when Price's S.A.S. squad captures Al-Assad in his safehouse. They burst in through the door, Price takes out the hostiles, & punches out Al-Assad, then the scene cuts to black. Then you hear punches, & the scene fades in to Price beating the crap out of Al-Assad yelling "NAMES, I WANT NAMES" then Al-Assad gets a phonecall, which Price answers, then he drops the phone, blasts Al-Assad in the head, then Gaz says "who was it sir?" and Price says "Zakhaev...Imran Zakhaev." Then the scene fades to black into the next most iconic mission "All Ghillied Up" What was your favorite torture scene? 🤗
This topic, if handled by any other video essayist, would have gotten us and utter dogwater video. A hitpiece on whatever they barely understand but have decided they want to get rid from existence. But luckily it was Jacob. 0/10 not enough climate alarmism.
There was a whole twitter account for a few years that did nothing but post phrases that could be sung to that theme. One of my favorites (and apt for this video) was "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder"
The revelation of the Bad Guy's weakness to torture vs. the Good Guy's resistance to it was easily the most interesting part of this video. Very well done, as someone who's been playing COD since I was a kid I was always used to it, never batted an eye.
I'm also reminded of Mass Effect 2, where the squad comes across the scene of an NPC torturing prisoners. Some squadmates object to the morality of it all, but even the most rogueish of your teammates criticize the use of torture because *it doesn't work.*
Thane mentions it's useless for getting information, then his loyalty quest gives you the option to torture a guy for information, said information is perfectly accurate if you torture the guy, you receive no consequence for it, and if i remember correctly Garrus has a similar thing in his loyalty quest.
@@ekki1993 as will any video game that attempts to categorize an action's morality, especially between two binaries, it will be flawed. that does not mean moral systems are bad but best as a flavor to add to your character. i often think of Star Wars KOTOR 1 and 2 as well as Fallout New Vegas as games where every flaw of the typical moral system (lack of nuance, moral judgement rather than ethical result) exists but they get around it because its obviously just flavor, unlike the Mass Effect games, you never get locked out of anything for being good, evil, or grey, and when you do, an equal replacement is offered.
@@quinnmarchese6313 Explicitly categorizing morality as a binary and assigning a predefined value to every decision is just bad. It's literally the simplest moral system you can get and it leads to dumb stuff like what you're seeing in this comment chain. Fallout New Vegas has a better moral system. That's the point. You can have a better moral system. And, still, Mass Effect, a game that claims to care about its moral system, keeps having the simplest one possible.
I was trying to process why the gasmask torture felt so cartoonishly impractical and I think its the fact these operatives released a deadly gas in an open air environment just to scare a guy they were gonna kill in a few minutes
You may have failed primary school media literacy so I'll explain it to you... It's because the guy didn't know for sure they were going to kill him anyway. The scaring them is what gets the information.
It should also be noted that Call of duty has the habit of referencing scenes from war movies without considering how different they feel in the context of the game. Th Russian Roulette game, for example, is something that breaks beyond repair Christopher Walken's character in The Hunter. In Black Ops, it's just there to show you that your enemies are twistedly evil and the heroes are badass; they could have just killed your partner without trying to force anyone to play Russian Roulette but someone decided to reference an iconic movie scene regardless of its original meaning
thats cause the cod devs do not know what they are doing. activation treats cod as a product used to attract dumb consumers to empty their wallets. cod is only art in the technical definition i can tell u exactly why there are so many torture scenes in cod, its because its a trope that amateur story tellers use to create tension, and to move the plot along. if u want a game thats similar to cod that ACTUALLY has something to say, look at metal gear solid. a game series that also has a lot of torture scenes
The ticking time bomb theory dumbfounds me with how opposed to basic reality it seems to be. Bomb is going off real soon and the situation is "urgent enough to justify torture" (assuming that is the actual bomber & assuming everything else). So, as the bomber, who presumably knows when it will detonate, you have the knowledge that if you resist the pain for X amount of time, you succeed. Additionally, well presented misleading information is readily slurped up, wasting time, resources, and personnel. It seems like if you want your bomb to successfully detonate, it would be preferable for your captors to torture you, as is it far easier to let information slip when feeling comfortable, especially if you dont believe said info to be relevant or crucial to your success.
The Joker scene in TDK showed it perfectly imo. The torturer just wants any information so they could act. The one revealing the information has all the power in the world in deciding how the ones causing them pain would fuck up majorly. Especially if you're gonna get killed afterwards anyway, what's a better fuck you parting gift than making those people desperate for information act against their own goals?
You'd enjoy watching Unthinkable. It uses that mechanic: The bomber knows when the bombs will go off (but doesn't know the current time), and he either gets killed before the bomb, or the bomb detonates and he gets killed/prison for life. He's essentially testing his own faith: Is my faith strong enough to sustain me through torture?
The scale of the problem you present would re-justify torture though. If we know our victim is mentally acuite enough to give false information _while_ everything in his body screams "make it stop", he's for sure good enough to just not speak (the truth or in general) in a regular discussion. Your conclusion of waiting out the fail-deadly works in both scenarios, so if nothing works, we have the choice to leave him alone, freeing up the resources of... one guy and a bucket of water. Or we get a non-zero chance of information we can act on. And if you don't, you figure out something else. "but what if he slips up while talking", but what if he slips up while torturing? Your argument invalidates interrogation as a whole, which would be a legitimate answer for small things like hideouts, enemy positions etc. But in the context of the ticking time bomb, the outsiders perspective is that you just chose to leave the trolley on it's tracks, "because the lever was stuck" - so push it harder.
@slyseal2091 First off ticking time bombs aren't real scenarios. Many many many many many people have failed if the only thing stopping a bomb from going off is the info of one person in a short time frame. Secondly I think your missing the point, which is that torture provides no incentive to the tortured to give accurate information. You are either going to get hurt and fail your own cause, or get hurt and your cause succeeds. The Allies figured this out and documented it extensively during WWII, but modern militaries are vastly undereducated and quite frankly not incetivized themselves to get information. Eternal war cannot be eternal if all your anti terror ops actually succeed.
what if the terrorist wait until the few last minutes and says the bomb is hidden in a foreign country's embassy, and the Good Guys rush into it, but it's not here, so the bomb blow up, and there's a huge diplomatic incident on top?
The thing about Jacob is that through dozens and dozens and dozens of videos, he never gets lazy with conclusions. So many videos out there provide examples until they run out and then they say "There, that's what I have for you today, wasn't that all very interesting." Jacob still writes conclusions that don't just summarise and contextualise the core arguments. To use a strange analogy, it reminds me of bandage fasteners. You can wrap a bandage around an arm as long as you like, but if you leave the end dangling, it'll come undone. A fastener digs into the end of the bandage and hooks into the rest of it. A bunch of ideas that were all just swimming in your mind suddenly feel secured and understood. It primes you well for doing your own thinking afterwards.
I've been focusing on pruning my subscriptions of channels that are simply time filling summaries of media. Seeing my feed go empty for hours has pushed me out of my comforting feed into doing the things I've been procrastinating.
That's really what essays are meant to be, especially conclusions. The ending is supposed to be the "So what?" section, explaining why this argument even matters in the first place, possibly linked with a call to action for the audience. Other essays that just peter out by the end aren't really good essays, because they're really just long, semi-educational rambles by someone interested in a particular topic. Entertaining, yes, but nothing you can really cite on a college paper.
I agree. I feel like a lot of jacob's videos, I'm watching it and I'm like "this is interesting yeah, I'm enjoying it" but maybe it's not my favorite video/I'm not sure yet where he's going with it, and then the conclusion hits and it makes me go holy fuck
This video is about torture committed _within_ the CoD games, not _by_ them. _(Can someone really into the balancing of CoD multiplayer write a punchline? I'm not really an FPS guy.)_
I mean if you think about it, every player who has played through these torture sequences are themselves being tortured by simply observing it happen (like with that reddit post). So probably in the multi-millions.
When I was 13 I stayed up all night playing the campaign of Black Ops with my friends. I remember the glass punching scene. I chuckled at the line “we got plenty of windows.” This memory disturbs me as an adult, but I don’t blame my childhood self. These games don’t ask you to think. The directing and writing almost always presents a situation as black and white, the moral correctness of the situation never in doubt. In the glass punch scene you literally look through the eyes of the man torturing. You are him, and you wouldn’t be in the wrong, right? This kind of thing is particularly persuasive to those thinking uncritically, many who are barely paying attention as they wait for the next gameplay section or who are kids. It nauseates me how popular this stuff is.
The glass punch scene sits with me for a completely different, equally stupid reason: After making this man chew glass and repeatedly, viciously punching him in the face, causing lacerations that will be bleeding heavily, he proceeds to become your ally and teammate while you go rooting and shooting across the level. He even shares his secret weapon stashes with you, which include experimental prototype weaponry that never made it to mass production. You torture a man, make him chew glass, and then immediately befriend him. The torture is never brought up again. This is one of many sequences where a character in Black Ops is ruthlessly tortured, only to befriend their torturer.
"Getting rid of [torture] from MW's campaign would be like removing Jesus from the Bible" You could make another 40 minute video essay just unpacking that comment.
@@bojack6987 It's not that the comment was surprising -- as you said yourself, it's reddit, it was the total opposite of surprising. Rather, the amount of logical, emotional, and moral assumptions and equivalencies required to equate the necessity of depicting full-blown interactive torture in CoD with the necessity of _depicting fuckin' Jesus of all people_ is so bafflingly absurd it loops around to being brilliant again. (Despite there only being a vanishingly-small chance that any of this nuance was intentional.) I, for one, would _love_ a deep-dive into the social, historical, and cultural contexts required to even understand how such a statement could ever have possibly been unironically made in the first place.
The implication that the torture exists so that others can be... Forgiven, somehow... The implication that the torture absolves the sin eaters of the very sin they eat. It's sick.
The lack of confrontation the series has with the efficacy (or lack there of) of torture is the biggest shortcoming to me. While torture is abhorrent, depicting it in a work of fiction isn't something I'd consider beyond the pale by any means. However, the choice this franchise makes to have torture results be a binary - either you get your Intel or you get nothing - is such a failure of the writing. Getting false or misleading information is, in reality, an extremely common result of torture (as that congressional report you cite calls attention to, it is so common that no information taken from torture can be trusted without thorough corroboration, making the torture itself effectively a waste of time). Yet, unless you just didn't bring it up, the torture victim simple *lying* to make the torture stop and the player being led on a wild goose chase as a result never happens in the entire series. This just seems like such lazy writing to me. It could be an interesting moment as they realize their time has been wasted, their methods failed. This can cause reflection on the efficacy of torture in a way none of the other scenes do, and would still be dramatic and interesting for the player as you are now forced to act upon the real information you presumably got to disprove the lies given under the torture far faster than is comfortable. This strikes me as an interesting, dramatic moment that the call of duty writers have somehow never implemented in their stories. Instead they go with such a lazy depiction of torture. I think your conclusion touched on this very nicely; these depictions are so lazy. In the absence of potentially long and arduous intelligence gathering, call of duty substitutes in brief, highly effective torture scenes. In the absence of interesting writing that causes the heroes to reflect on their darkest deeds, the good guys' methods are always justified by their effectiveness and their ability to mitigate further harm.
And that in a way makes every torture punitive, because if every Intel is this automatic, all performative violence is just to satisfy the bloodlust. The character will get their requested information no matter what in those scenes, so the writers went for the laziest gore to dress it up instead
Torture in movies (except Unthinkable) or games: "oh noes, it's the barbaric act, but WE MUST! Utilitarianism!!! It's effective but also unethical!!" Torture in real life: "Yes I am definitely the culprit, here's the names of my compatriots (actually it's Egypt's male football team), please stop putting me into a tiny box for two days at a time".
Well, there is one instance of false intel coming from an interrogation in the CoD games. Black Ops Cold War's protagonist, Bell, is a former member of the enemy faction who was captured, brainwashed and forced to serve the US in order to find Perseus, the antagonist. This interrogation gets weird, I'm talking MK Ultra namedrop, P.T. corridor weird. But at the end, you have the option to tell Adler, your torturer, false information and lead the team into an ambush. This is an alternate ending, of course, not canon, but I like the fact that you can...well, not betray, but lie to your "allies".
@@asddsa8203 In Katana Zero, something I really like is that not only when you get tortured you give no valuable info, you end up counter-interogating your torturer. Gods Will Be Watching sorta has the same thing.
you gotta think that even if it was as successful as COD portrays it, its exceptionally stupid to execute someone after they seemingly gave you the information you wanted. either they could've given false information and now you've eliminated your only lead. or they give you the correct information and you've just wasted what could've otherwise been a wellspring of new information. or by being as brutal and savage as possible, you've now radicalized civilians who just witnessed you execute their parent/ partner after they gave you what you wanted, proving every bad preconception they've heard about you. I love the conclusion that beyond it being abhorrent, unrealistic, and outright dumb, it's also just lazy unimaginative writing. it's treated as a panacea and follows this almost child like naivete where the bad guys always tell the truth if you just smack them a few times.
@@springshowers4754 the answer is no, and considering he didn’t read my comment either shows he lacks any form of comprehension. We shouldn’t make fun of the illiterate and cognitively challenged
@@simoneidson21 They say anything to stop the pain, you don't know if they're saying the truth. And that's assuming that the person in question even knows anything and isn't just making shit up because they're being agonisingly tortured for no reason.
@simoneidson21 hypothetical question. You're feeling really bad, have no energy to engage in social interaction, and want to avoid a conversation with a person on the street. What's easier? Being honest, and saying you aren't feeling well? Or lying, saying "You're fine" and moving on as quickly as possible?
When I was in 8th grade, we had a civics class where we all found topics to create laws around. Someone chose “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques”(fancy name for Torture). I argued against it citing the inaccuracy and ridiculous doublespeak they were doing with the name. Outvoted. The class passed the guy’s proposal. Never have I felt so crushed and angry leaving school that day.
Don't worry. Every chem major who heard the side effects of consuming dihydrogen monoxide decided it should never be used in anything humans use. Dihydrogen monoxide is water. Conclusion: humans are idiots and smart people aren't always bright
"it's the spanish inquisition. I'm not going to say the line." (1 second of silence) That is a show of sheer power and authority that just brute-forces me into respecting Jacob even more
I guess they must think torture is effective. But according to this video, torture is something used by the torturer for pleasure; pleasure from another person being in pain.
The time bomb hypothetical is like the perfect prime example of why I hate hypotheticals in arguments like this. Even if I answered yes to the question of “would I torture the guy” (which I wouldn’t), what does that prove? That in this one extremely specific example with circumstances so ludicrously set up that it takes an entire paragraph before you can even pose the question and so many suspensions of disbelief that it may as well be an MCU movie, I, a random jackass, would do the morally bad thing? Okay???? We have learned nothing about if torture is a good solution to anything because this situation is literally never going to happen, we’ve just wasted both of our time.
Most people, in crisis, just stand around. Or flee to cover and then just kind of hang out. A minority will flee to cover and make their way toward safety. It takes a lot of training for someone to become useful in a crisis. Without that you can be useful in a team meeting, or at the espresso machine, or in bed, or all the other low-pressure situations civilians generally find themselves in.
TL;DR: its a rationalization argument / A Priori The goal isn't to prove torture is right, but to persuade the listener to think on the speakers level. It communicates premade assumptions of the world in a more easily digestible way than openly stating "the people we torture are evil". It's the difference between a statement and a narrative. The addition of "what would you do?" changes the question from "does this person deserve to be tortured for harming others?" To "Would I torture an evil person to save others?" Making it less likely for the listener to inspect the assumption that the person is in fact evil.
Thought experiments in philosophy are like 70% sophists playing games with language to get people to the result they already wanted, they're not really a great method to get at any deeper truth.
and even in that ticking time bomb situation, torture STILL wouldn't work. the hypothetical terrorist who planted the bomb knows that it is only a matter of time until his plan succeeds (the bomb blowing up), so of course the terrorist will just feed you bad information so that you stop torturing him. he knows that since you have limited time, you will blindly take any information he gives you. if you kill him, it doesn't matter either way since the bomb will blow up
If anyone wants a first person narration of early torture (circa Span. Inquisition) look up Johannes Junius, mayor of a German town accused of witchcraft in the 1620’s. He was tortured and burned at the stake. His is one of only few self told descriptions of the torture suffered by those accused “witches”, and it was only able to escape his cell due to his using the last of his clout as mayor to get a letter to his daughter Veronica telling her of his innocence and suffering. Out of all the things I ended up reading in college it was one of the few that sticks with me keenly to this day, in almost complete detail because it felt so visceral and modern. No matter what, “Nobody escapes, though he were an earl…”
Just read the letter because of this comment. Powerful stuff. It feels wrong to call such a confession "well-written", because he was a real human being, but it really struck me becase it felt--familiar, I suppose? It felt like the timeless suffering of injustice and false accusations of the bigoted against the weak. That poor man... What a wretched way to die.
I understand the feeling of being tired of studying such a dense topic as torture because for some reason my school made us study about massacres around the country (not US, I live in Colombia) and man, studying that shit was HARD, I had to go through pages and pages detailing how 60 mfs went to a town and killed 14 people because their leader was mad with the government, how the people that survived had to leave because their life got ruined and how the government that could have stopped the tragedy DID FUCKING NOTHING. I got traumatized and didn't even got a good grade
While it is scary the lenghts at which we are expected to explore these stuff I actually am kinda glad that we are taught about the grousome parts of our history at class. I have a ton of USAmerican friends and the amount of glazing and justifying their schools do for the crimes of their people is insane. Colombia may not be the best, but I am thankful that I can be taught to be skeptical of it.
torture is one of the ultimate acts of dehumanization. you can only do it on someone if you in some way label them and believe they are inherently "sub human". this is why torture is used as a tool of Empire - against others who look different, have different language or culture or religion, etc - those who oppose or pose an ideological threat to the Empire's objectives. it is not to extract useful information, it is a form of supremacy and control used for millennia to perpetuate Empires, from the inquisition to modern times. I recently read the book "Waiting for the Barbarians" by JM Coetzee and it explored this point interestingly
Torture is used as a tool in plenty of non-colonial regimes. It's very commonly employed by authoritarian regimes against internal political dissidents
@@epicmarschmallow5049 I agree completely and I think it's exactly in keeping with the point I was trying to make! In fact, I said that Empires use torture as a tool of dehumanization against "those who oppose or pose an ideological threat to the Empire's objectives." -- that absolutely includes authoritarian regimes' actions against internal dissidents!!!! Whether it's used as "internal dissidents" or "external threats", the point is that torture is not used to extract useful information, but to dehumanize and terrorize anyone who could pose a threat to the regime's objectives!
It's notable how the length of torture differentiates the suggested brutality of the good guys vs bad guys (and conversely, their mettle and strength of character). Good guys can get away with torturing for very little time, with the narrative exercising restraint on their behalf. Bad guys will essentially safety word out by divulging information quickly and the scene will end long before any really difficult feelings have to come up. You never have to wonder if the good guys would ever go so far as to really mess somebody up because they never have to go that far. By contrast bad guys will torture as long as the story needs them to- hours, days, etc. for maximum effect. Good guys and sympathetic NPCs get pulled out of enemy blacksites and POW camps after literal years in the belly of the beast. Not only are we supposed to feel for the captive hero and awe at their strength of will, maybe wondering what we'd do in that situation, but we are also supposed to understand the inhumanity of the villain for making the torture go on for as long as it does. Ultimately it creates this sort of imaginary line in the mind of the audience that we know the protagonists won't cross, even if we have no idea where that line actually would be and have never been explicitly told anything about it beyond maybe bringing on the cultural assumption that "Guys from the global west more or less representing a conglomeration of the west's armed forces + GI Joe fundamentally believe in freedom and human rights", a line between Good and Evil that the audience can take comfort in as they are asked to witness and partake in brutality
The idea that anyone actually believes that CALL OF DUTY is even slightly realistic in its portrayal of war is by far the most terrifying thing brought up in this video...
The thing is, in every interview I’ve read or seen, the cast and interviewers rave about how realistic it is. Either they’re delusional, or they don’t want to piss of Activision. I’ve even seen it extend to to those “real-life SAS man reacts to Call if Duty” and they talk about how realistic it is which…I doubt.
@@HollyHummingbirdriver When it comes down to 'realism' as in those SAS reacts videos, a lot of it is superficial. It's things like the way your allies clear rooms and the detail and function of your weapons. You'll notice they only tend to react to levels like 'Clean House' where the focus is on realistic military precision, and not say a level like 'Violence and Timing'
@@haysdixon6227to assuage your curiosity a bit, the companion video is a more pleasant vlog style thing where he tries to actively not think or talk about torture while making pie with his girlfriend
The fact that the top comment on that Reddit post was “Maybe you just need to grow a pair” tells you all you need to know about the simplicity and callousness of the average COD player.
It's like the entire franchise's fans peaked in high school and never grew out of that late high school/early college douchbag phase, where they haven't learned how to be a normal person
I read a lot of Tom Clancy and his books feature a fair amount of interrogation scenes with some added torture. However, his books depict that brutal torture is inefficient, especially against government and military officials who are trained to resist those techniques. So, the good and bad guys resort to taking care of their captives in a way that lets them drop their guard and spill the information. A good example is Without Remorse, where an American fighter pilot became a POW in the Vietnam War. A Soviet officer needs to interrogate the pilot for information about American nuclear defense systems, so what he does is befriend the American. The officer shares personal stories about his experience with flying, as well as slowly feeds the American alcohol to the point that the American feels safe enough to talk. It worked, and the Amerian shared all of the information that the Soviet needed.
I remember watching a WW2 US Army training video about that some years ago (because that's something I did when I was a teenager), with captors being trained to act friendly to POWs in order to encourage their cooperation and allow them to provide useful information. Much easier and significantly less difficult than the useless antagonism of torturing prisoners.
The British did something similar in ww2. They put a bunch of high ranking german pows in a luxurious manor and simply let them talk with each other. The thing was, the Brits had put microphones everywhere, so the Germans were willingly giving up valuable intel, and didn’t even know it. It was called Trent Park.
@@thirdcoinedgeOn the Axis side, you have Hanns Scharff, a Luftwaffe interrogator who never used physical means to acquire the information and got the most information out of captured pilots and commanders by… Being friendly with them, taking them out to walks and to see compatriots, and gaining their trust.
A finnish satire illustrated this while poking fun at _24_ . First a police chief repeatedly smacks the suspect "in name of liberty and democracy" and the suspects yields, telling the location of the bomb. However, a younger officer, opposed to torture, picks up a chair and starts to pound the suspect demanding he recants, which he does. The cop then thanks the beaten man for helping him prove the futility of torture.😂
"I'm gonna kill you if you don't tell me what I want to know" "Here's what you want to know" "I'm gonna kill you if you don't change that statement" "Here's my changed statement" 😂😂😂
i feel like theres a genuine response from a lot of long form essayists and commentators to try and combat the brain-rot of shorts/tiktok by actually being well researched and highly educational, not to mention the deserved popularity of John Oliver the last twoish years being HBO's own version of a youtube essayist. Like even videos about the Roblox Oof sound are actually about IP theft (you know the one im talking about)
@@zbsfmpill pocket-tube is, no exaggeration, the perfect name for my favorite genre of video essay. thank you for putting words to my thoughts after all this time
Foucault's "Discipline and Punish" is a great book for further reading on physical punishment. Our prison systems came out of the realization that criminals could be turned into folk heroes if the public sees them withstand their torture or face their execution with dignity, and so the state apparatus of punishment transitioned from making examples out of criminals to locking them away where they can't be seen. I think this is why propaganda about the efficacy of torture on the soul mostly exists today in spy and black ops popular culture because the fantasy can only exist when it is behind closed doors and away from the public. In real life examples, whenever the public witnesses state implemented physical punishments they usually come to the realization that torture is always used on the underprivileged like themselves, and they would be motivated to rebel.
Well the masses being the torture victim isn't really a deep thought, there's less top level people so there's going to be way less top level people being tortured, the masses don't have the power and in the rare instances when they have risen up they do presumably torture the formerly rich and powerful...just not for information but rather for revenge. It really isn't that deep, the reason why CIA torture people in media is because they do it in reality. Your postman doesn't torture you to find out where your neighbour's address is so why would that be depicted? The average person doesn't get to torture the President for a broken campaign promise, the amount of plot that would be required to happen in order to get that to actually occur in a TV show would be so insane it would come across like a farce comedy or absurdist nonsense just to get to that point. Jesse James was never really a folk hero, he just wasn't all that different than the corrupt lawmen who were also going round killing people and stealing money, the average cattle rancher didn't care, the average Bush farmer may have preferred Ned Kelly when he was going after corrupt landowners but they probably didn't once he started rustling their cows no matter how he tried to justify it. But these days even less so would people accept the way that a criminal behaves, other than when they are doing something you yourself are already also doing (for example if you disagree with drugs being illegal etc) and there would be no reason therefore to lock up your common murderer "away from where they can be seen" because people these days have mostly agreed that women aren't your property to murder when they dump you, or sleep with your brother, or any other reason that someone is currently behind bars. I can't think of a more idiotic take than "prison was only invented to stop bad people being respected" when you consider that someone behind bars for stealing my car might be considered to be "a hero" by anyone that knew them. They wouldn't, almost everyone other than people who don't like me because of my race or sexuality, would agree that I didn't deserve to have my car stolen, and that the person who did it is no more noble for having done it or "bearing" the 3 years behind bars for it.
Gardening tip: keep eggshells, and put them in your soil if needed! My grandma used to put whole eggshells in her compost or ground eggshells in her soil so the plants got more calcium. My mom did the same with banana peels for her tomato plants
Crushing dry egg shells and scattering them on top of the soil can also repel slugs without using pellets, since they don't like to crawl over sharp edges.
Is this really true? I'm not sure how much calcium they would need. But I suppose it wouldn't hurt, I assume the quality of the shells doesn't matter under this assumption, but my main issue would be the possibility of rotten egg getting onto the ground/plants and possibly attracting all sorts of bugs.
I remember writing a paper in high school about the efficacy of torture (as part of researching a controversial topic) and whether it could be theoretically justified by results. I went in knowing it was at the least morally abhorrent from nearly every lens possible, but hey, maybe it was effective enough to be worth consideration in the face of catastrophe? Let's just say that line of thought died pretty quickly in the face of the meager scrutiny my 17-18 year old ass could muster.
watched this on Nebula a few days ago, but wanted to comment here: i genuinely think one of the reasons i love your work, Jacob, is that you do not pussyfoot around these issues, and not only that, but you go into such detail about the ethics and your research is so well-done that it's hard not to just be impressed by this level of media analysis. also, you clearly really do not fucking like Call of Duty and i RESPECT IT SO HARD
"They used to do these thangs called... studies. Anyway, this one particular study came out and it said that.... torturin a person don't do shit." -The Ghoul
This reminds me of an observation I read somewhere about old vs new Star Wars that I'll try to expand upon here: Vader tortures Leia in A New Hope and Han in Empire Strikes Back, but he does not get any useful information out of them. Leia is able to resist/lie, and Han is just being used as bait for Luke ("They didn't even ask me any questions"). Palpatine tortures Luke in Return of the Jedi to punish both Luke and Vader, but this backfires and provokes Vader to kill Palpatine. So, torture is ineffective to get information but effective to provoke their loved ones, whether that's part of your plan or not. The sand people torture Shmi in Attack of the Clones, which lures Anakin to find them (as Luke went to Han in ESB), and provokes Anakin to kill them (as he did to Palpatine in RotJ). Palpatine maneuvers his fight with Mace in Revenge of the Sith to make it look like Mace was torturing him to gain sympathy points with the politicians. So, torture always leads to more violence, which you can still use to your advantage. (There is weirdly a lack of interrogative torture in the Bush-era prequels, but a ton of it, especially electrocution, in the Obama-era Clone Wars cartoon. Anakin often tortures Separatists for information or revenge, though they play the Imperial March so you know he's being bad.) But in the new canon, there are a bunch of major examples of interrogative torture being effective. Kylo tortures Poe in The Force Awakens and learns about BB-8. Snoke tortures Rey in The Last Jedi and learns Luke's location. Saw tortures Bodhi in Rogue One and learns he's telling the truth. Vader tortures Cere in Jedi: Fallen Order and learns about Trilla. Dedra tortures Bix in Andor and learns about Cassian. It's such a shame that the new canon uses torture like this, not just because it is unrealistic, irresponsible, and contradicts the original story, but because it is a lazy way to move the plot forward.
Tbf the new star wars movies are loaded with lazy storytelling. "Oh, that dead dude who had zero way to survive is back because sith magic. Oh, you aren't powerful because of your journey and growth, it's because of your last name. Here, I can use the force to magically heal everything, this "dagger" just happens to perfectly match the sky line of the fact spot of this massive planet, need to do a thing? Well just go get the mcguffin-thinger that does exactly that!"
Don't some of those examples involve using the force to pull information from someone's brain directly though? There's not really a real world analogue for that (thank God).
@@maciejglinski6564 No, all except the OGs were before 9/11. It's only the divide between Disney-controlled Star Wars and George Lucas, though in Clone Wars it is shown as effective AND wrong.
"Dedra tortures Bix in Andor and learns about Cassian." Yes, however there's also a scene where Andor is questioned and then almost strangled to death where he literally has nothing to do with the guys the Stormtroopers are chasing. There's also the collective punitive torture of prisoners to speed up production and the eventual use of it to execute an entire floor of prisoners that backfires and emboldens Andor and his cellmates to fight their way out and escape.
In Fallout: New Vegas, there’s an unmarked quest at Camp McCarran where an NCR lieutenant is trying to get information out of a captured Legion centurion. She explains that torture is illegal in the NCR, and asks you to torture the information out of him for her since you’re not a citizen. What I love about the quest is that you can either beat him to get the info or just trick him into thinking you’re sent by the Legion to kill him, and if you trick him into giving the info, you get more XP and caps than if you’d tortured him.
UA-camr and former US Marine Mr. Ballen in a video once explained that the training he underwent to withstand torture was being tied up in a chair while a very aggressive reading of Rudyard Kipling's poem Boots was played on repeat. It does have a rhythm that makes it very distressing to have yelled at you for hours on end, but it sounds... tame when considering what it's supposed to be. Mr. Ballen, in that same video, said that having to find a recording of the poem to play to viewers was anxiety inducing.
unbaked thought but it's interesting how some folks in ttrpgs can stray towards/to torture, and then are shocked when the gm shows just consequences for that (folks treating the pcs as evil, asking players to change their alignment, etc). They take for granted that this is normal, when it is so. not. normal
I wonder if the myth that torture works at all persists because people who have zero experience with the subject assume it's the same as basic duress. Like, normal threats and normal violence outside of any institutional or military context, outside of any interrogation context, even. Perhaps the average person (and popular culture) can only relate to torture as like, "tying a terrorist to a chair and punching in his teeth, that's roughly the same thing as a mugger pointing a gun at a person and demanding their wallet, right? Just a matter of degrees. Threats are mean but they work a lot of the time, so eh torture probably also works a lot of the time." Like you said about how fast torture scenes happen in these games; it feels to me like it comes not from any sort of engagement with actual real world torture, but from childish bullying and arm twisting, just with grown up blood and costumes wallpapered over it. It's like Captain Price isn't performing the moral evil that is actual legitimate Torture on that guy, he's just beating him up and taking his lunch money.
There's something unpleasantly appropriate about the fact that the metaphor for torture was Jesus. Jesus, a man who preached compassion, kindness, anti-violence and tolerance of other peoples, and yet has served as the driving force of some of the most bloody wars in human history. A man who's kindness is ignored, and a cruelty which has its horror ignored.
I Must admit that i have a morbid fascinatation with These types of people the mental gymnastics needed to Turn such a simple straightforward Message completley upside down
Not to mention that He was _tortured to _*_death_* by people who the Bible pretty clearly depicts as being bad guys (sure, it was all for the greater good, but His torturers didn't actually know that)
The idea of religious wars being common needs to stop lol. Outside of the Crusades (even they were more a political and cultural phenomena) religious wars were NOT common. When you send your people to war you wrap the experience in religious fervor, but to sit and say that the war was in the name of their God is ignorant and reductive. So many Americans are scarred from their fundamentalist parents and have reacted by just hating axiomatic religions all together.
the most famous thing about jesus is the kindness he showed through the torture he experienced and ultimately killed him. but it’s what everyone ignores
It is interesting seeing cod fans demand for grounded and serious stories but what they really want are action film plots that pretend to be grounded. Reminds me of how ubisoft keeps making the same stories about toppling vaguely dystopian factions in order to maintain all the YA novel people.
Reminds me of the GoT fandom thinking the constant murder/etc. is realistic to the medieval period (it's not, ACOUP has a great breakdown of why it's not).
While it was only up on screen for a brief moment, The Dark Knight scene with Ledger-Joker I think counts as the exception that proves the rule - that scene is for interrogation, and he DOES lie, and those two people DO die. And then at the climax, with the ferries and the detonators, everyone involved is being punished, and it STILL doesn't work. Nobody dies in that part. Thousands of terrified people, though.
Another franchise that has an interesting relationship with torture is *The Last of Us*. Torture there is framed as an unambiguous evil, and a sign that our nominally good protagonists are going off the deep end. It's shown as effective when you can corroborate it, but there's also a scene where you torture someone for their friend's location, and they give you the location of their hideout... while hiding that their friend is *in the same building you're in* at that point.
Honestly, the notion that torture isn’t an effective method of interrogation feels pretty obvious when given just a bit of thought because it gives a considerably greater benefit to lying than a standard conversational interrogation.
This reminds me of the common trope in media that terrorists rarely have sincere beliefs. Like it's not a clash of ideologies because the enemy's ideology isn't even real, it's disingenuous. That's why they crack under pressure. Which in turn reminds me of the kinds of religious people who think atheists/heathens also believe in God but are just rebelling because they want to sin. Bringing it back around the the Spanish Inquisition, I suppose.
Is that a trope? If anything in media I think it leans the other way. Irl terrorists aren’t all brainwashed suicidal drones, but in fiction they’re shown as almost noble in how devoted they are.
Yeah, in media, members of pseudo-leftist terrorist groups or organizations fighting for - ostensibly - generally "noble" beliefs are often pesented as disingenuous and hypocritical, while religion-flavored extremists are usually portrayed as devoted to the point of apparent insanity. i have some ideas as to why that is, but i'm not confident enough in their validity to share them.
I mean, the only reason people confess to things under torture is to get the pain to stop. That’s why torture is generally unreliable in interrogation. Anyone will crack under severe enough pain
I guess that's why I loved Jujutsu Kaisen so much. To oversimplify, there is a guy who wants to kill all the normal people i order to protect the ones who are "different". Even if he has to abandon his best friend, his former allies, kill his own family. As his best friend is about to kill him, he doesn't back down. That guy was antagonistic but his conviction unbreakable and motives somewhat pure. I prefer this writing over the simple "bad guys are dumb and lose" approach.
Seeing that Reddit post is just so sad. A guy wants to play a cool military shooter game but doesn't like having to torture people and wants to skip. Fellow Redditors consider this unmanly or some shit. Like he's playing the video games wrong for not liking torture.
cod fanboys are aggressively toxic to a delusional degree. these are the same people who are genuinely mad at companies for not hosting a safe space for them to vent by saying the n word to children
Cause it's fiction. It's not on our reality. Ethicacy or not. People are telling him to grow a pair because war is hell. It shouldn't be cleaned up because someone can't handle it. Like someone being against COD because they don't want to kill.
Also if you think about it, torture is very counterproductive because of how it may damage the person being questioned, to the point you'll just eliminate the chance of getting an answer. Let just say you torture your prisioner by waterboarding them or with plastic bags, you may as well be killing their brain since the human brain can deteriorate by being less than 2 minutes without air. So in the end, the person won't even be ABLE to answer your questions. Pain overall has a very damaging result to a human being to the point it'll change a person completely and the thing is, it may never heal again.
Here are the very first thoughts that went through my head during the first scene presented: - wait, these are the good guys? - why won't they just rummage through stuff in the room? The guy has to have SOMETHING connecting to his business partners. - what the hell? execution?? Everything I learn about Call of Duty shocks me. Just a month ago my only knowledge of it was "a first-person shooter franchise that had a mass shooting mission".
yeah, it's kind of a running thing in call of duty. a while back i played through the modern warfare trilogy and there's at least one scene per game where captain price just brutally shoots someone after interrogating them. i *think* it's supposed to be a "look at how cool this guy is, he kills bad guy and doesn't afraid of anything" moment but it just felt really uncomfortable. there's a part in one of the early missions, i believe it's literally the first mission in modern warfare 1, where price tells you to shoot 2 enemy soldiers who are sleeping instead of simply incapacitating or arresting them. if you don't do it fast enough he does it automatically and then drops a one liner. it was really uncomfortable.
Ah yes clearly we should feel bad for the guy who is smuggling chemical weapons. Also by the way that mass shooting mission is framed as bad. You don’t even have to kill anyone to progress
@@giwake Tbf the OG CoD 4 really doesn't present Price or the West's actions as great. Captain Price was in the earlier WW2 CoDs where he was an honourable man accepting the surrender of enemies, and this contrasts with his cold execution in CoD4. Plus the whole nuke going off thing after a US military intervention
@@simoneidson21 would you feel any different if the guy was selling weapons legally? Like, if the protagonists broken into Lockheed Martin's CEO office or something. I'm not talking about whether the bad guy is bad - I'm talking about the good guys not being good in the slightest.
@@giwake I remember a similar scene in Eisenhorn novel - the protagonist, an agent of fascist state, murders a witness after interrogation shows they know nothing. And the author forgets about this immediately - it is not treated as a moment that shows protagonist's evil nature, or anything. Apparently, this kind of thing is more common in militaristic media than I thought (I always assumed it was more about shooting people on the battlefield, rather than this).
I can explain why Ajax broke. He was tortured by Rorke(?), the primary antagonist of COD Ghosts. Rorke was not just a former Ghost but their leader, and considered the best among them. Unlike other betrayers in the series, considered weak for turning against their principles or not having them, he gets turned some form of hilariously effective brainwashing. Basically, you're fighting a member of the "good guy".faction with all the narrative weight you and your's are usually provided. He get's to pull info out of Ajax and is one of the villains that "quick & dirty" torture doesn't work on. It's actually a pretty cool little narrative trick, whether or not you think the actual narrative is any good.
I would have loved if the creator of this video paid attention enough to notice these details in the plot as well, also it's funny how in black ops 1 Mason undergoes torture much more akin to what was described as "ideal" conditions (plenty of time and resources) and in the end it proves entirely innefective untill you escape the chamber and get explained to you what the numbers are via Hudson. Would have even further proved his point, just unfortunate that he didn't pick up on these details.
The fact that they can have variants and subversions on how they present their torture is actually even more scary to me that they can narratively subvert expectations on why a torture went how it did just because they have done so many there is a pattern.
This reminds me of one time a friend of mine on Facebook started watching 24 and documenting, post by post, every time that Jack Bauer kills someone, while pointing out that the show takes place in a single day per season (the total bodycount is over 300 by the end of the series and movie, nine days total)
This awakened knowledge of an indie game I heard about. I forget the name, but the premise is something along the lines of: YOu're part of an Inquisition, sent to a little village in which there's been rumours of a *witch.* The church has tasked you with a very simple task; find the witch and bring them to justice. So, you go around the village, talking to the villagers, asking about the witch, hearing rumours, the gossip, the petty grievances that people have with one and other. And then the torture tools come out. You can coerce people into giving you more information. Until you get what you need. Information on the witch, or a confession. ... here's the thing. You can't prove there is a Witch. There isn't. But anyone will say anything to make the pain stop. Anyone can be "The Witch." There is no fail state. You can't lose. The game just ends when you find the witch, your task being successful.
After Dan Olson's latest video where he goes off the deep end and makes a diorama of the Angry Video Game Nerd's basement, it feels charmingly quaint hearing Jacob Geller talk about how nutty it is that he made a spreadsheet.
“The only times it villainizes characters for their torture is when the *predetermined* morality of those characters already swings villainous” Oh shit, so CoD isn’t only militaristic propaganda; even worse, it’s *Calvinism*
@zXPeterz14 The problem is the games love to portray their protagonists as morally gray like this, but never actually have a real point to make about that beyond the original "we get dirty, so the world stays clean" line. Price's moral ambiguity or his position that said ambiguity is necessary is never questioned or challenged, and is treated as Truth by the franchise.
It’s funny, I’ve always viewed the COD series as an “all bad guys” power fantasy game. I’m only now realizing that you as the player are supposed to see “your” team as morally good, and the idea that most people in fact, do see it that way.
The world is a jumble of civilizations still struggling with tribalism and very restricted thinking. Cooperation is difficult, antagonism is easy. And leaders tend to be tall men who boast about strength, much like hominids grubbing through soil while one of them peers over the tall grass. All the violent diplomacy and war and espionage and reputation-building and economic strangulation is all Bad Things. And the people who do it are not morally clean. The question is whether you want to live in the civilization that does those things and remains strong against adversaries, and suffers little hardship, or if you want to live in the civilization whose name we don't even remember anymore because it was raped to oblivion by its neighbors who actually stand up for themselves. So from that perspective, it's less about seeing your team as morally good, but seeing your team as the one that must win, and you appreciate that they won it for you.
@@googiegress there is not an empire on this earth that has not crumbled. If the motto is kill or be killed then surely you must be aware of this mortality and the simple fact is that all of this is a choice, unless an endless series of unwinnable wars against entropy is somehow a preferable alternative to actually attempting to fix our problems.
@@interiordagoth I agree! I would prefer a fix to everyone's problems. But being the first one to remove your armor just means you're extremely likely to be immediately stabbed. And that sucks, because it's a Catch-22. If everyone disarmed, everyone would be fine. But if anyone doesn't, they could conquer the world.
When people discuss the themes and actions of the COD franchise, I think it is important to remember that the US military is actively involved in the marketing and development of the games. This isn't a matter of what is ok to display in fiction. This is the world's largest military complex actively participating in a campaign to spread concepts and ideals to the minds of potential future recruits. So when discussing characters in this franchise choosing to violate human rights and commit war crimes, we have to remember that this is the US military planting the idea that those actions are ok as long as you are one of the good guys into the mind of future soldiers. We have seen young men who grew up with the franchise commit atrocities time and time again in conflicts the US military keeps getting involved in across the ocean. This is a big deal.
I don't know if I fully agree as some of these games, can sometimes direct the player to reflect on their actions, as well the circumstances portrayed. WAW and BO1 come to mind
@@thebrightestsun4685 "It's okay if we teach our kids specifically that atrocities are fine, because other people already do bad things, so somehow that justifies encouraging MORE evil! Why yes, I am an idiot." -You, 1 day ago.
@@pleasegoawaydude So? This whole "teaching" stuff is the reason why the military in decline on the west (because "peace") while Iran, Russia, China etc. are freely engage in conflicts without "make peace no war" nonsense.
It's worth saying that the first Call of Duty has what I'd describe as implied torture - when you rescue Captain Price from being a prisoner he is visibly injured via the game's health system and limps. The game doesn't explicitly say whether this is from torture or from the plane crash that caused him to be captured in the first place, but given the tropes of war movies I'd suspect it's torture.
To be fair to the first CoDs, they were still following the old model where torture was still considered a bad thing. You see nazis torturing people because of course they would, and the rare instance of the allies doing it, it was the soviets partially because "of course they would" and partially because they were the most brutalized by the nazis so there was some "tough justice" to it. Basically back in the old days torture, at the very least, marked you as morally suspect. You'd never imagine classic Captain Price torturing anyone. It wasn't until CoD decided to """tackle""" controversial topics that they adopted the whole "we get dirty so the world stay clean" philosophy.
“Torture has never been a reliable means of extracting information. It is ultimately self-defeating as a means of control." Once again, Star Trek putting us in our place. Torture is always a means of retribution or catharsis for the torturer, masked as detached "means to the end" methodology.
Star Trek didn't put anyone "in their place" because every lesson they've ever taught is something you should already know if you're a halfway decent person. Don't be a bigot, don't torture people, that's all STANDARD morality
@Tuned_Rockets Honestly, you're right, my comments here have been awful defensive and angry, but that's only because people who have NEVER touched the series seek to rip the lives of the fans apart and make assertions that they're "cool with torture" despite the fact that MUCH of the fanbase doesn't even touch the campaigns anymore. It would be one thing if they were just criticizing the game like Jacob, but they're genuinely making ignorant statements about people they've never met and passing it off as some moral high ground.
@Tuned_Rockets I'm sorry, your right, I don't know if my last comment got deleted but I'm overreacting to ignorant people seeking to rip the lives of CoD fans apart when they've never personally touched the game.
Firstly: it was an absolute masterstroke to use Katana Zero's "Third District" as backing music for this particular analysis. As an avid enjoyer of Katana Zero, I think what may be forgotten in its progression is how interwoven the idea of "war is hell and hell is torture" can be in gaming culture. Katana Zero as a baseline endorses the idea of war veterans, child soldiers in particular, being "stained" and permanently violent because of their own associations with torture. They were tormented, and became stronger. Others are weak, falling prey or victim to the aggressive Chrono-flooded NULL. Also the music is fucken great in that game. No notes. Secondly. I really appreciate your attributions in the Spanish Inquisition and literary works which address it. A lot of "anti torture" literature, if one were being simplistic, tries to say that torture "never" works. It plays this moral game of asking why you would even think to consider that. Why would you want to hurt another person for information, gain, your own protection or the protection of others? is there something wrong and strange about you? Something broken? The fact of the matter is: torture does sometimes work, but as you said, it is ineffective. Breaking a person is, functionally, just a way to make a whole being into a fragmented host. Torment, torture, violation of human rights in pursuit of saving the world, it is wrong to say that the world has not daydreamed about quick-dirty-easy fixes to all the worst problems. [Examples being that people discuss how we "know the names of all the richest people in the world, and where they live" as though it would be so simple. As if we could simply hurt the bad people who make money from big oil and that would fix everything.] But on the flipside, if one accepts that torture is morally wrong, one must also accept that the "good" we have done via torture is also wrong. I think that's where people trip up. We almost want to justify what HAS happened, what we HAVE done, so we don't have to do the work of unpacking what we actually did to reach this point. In a way, a belief that one must have always been good. You cannot "become" good, you cannot be "redeemed" and have an informed opinion based on things like research. No, you were either good and righteous, or you were always a bad person deep down. "Why would you think about hurting another person?" is the moral imposition made by people that think hurting people is justified when THEY do it. "Why would you want to be a violent person?" asks the institution that builds homes on stolen land and imprisons people for innocuous crimes to churn up a workforce. Well, sure, sometimes violence seems like the most applicable answer. To return fire is justified. Until that retort is somehow unconscionable and you are no longer "in the right" or whatever. All-in-all. Fantastic video. I really enjoyed it and I'll be thinking about a lot of these points for a bit. More than I already do, I guess. Deepest condolences for your spreadsheet madness. Suppose I'll have to start watching some of your other stuff too!
The craziest part about the prevalence of torture in COD is that studies about using torture to obtain information from people consistently show that it doesn't work. This is because people being tortured will say anything the torturer wants to make it stop. Also, it they genuinely don't know the information in question, or they really don't want to give it up, they're apt to just make something up so the torture will end.
But what if you use the Joel method (The Last of Us)? The one of torturing two people at the same time in search of corroborating information, that seems a bit effective.
@@rafaelalodio5116 Why not simply question them instead? Tell them the first person to cooperate gets to leave earlier or gets a reward or something. Cut a deal.
@@rafaelalodio5116 Joel's method worked purely by luck. Had the first guy lied to him, Joel never would have found Ellie. It's a video game, just cause it happens in a game doesn't mean it'd work in real life.
Here in Argentina where I'm from, we had a series of military coups by the far right, which resulted in a dictatorship from 1976 to 1983, among other things. During this military government the use of torture was extremely common, and ever since hearing about this, I had always wondered "what kind of people, what kind of mindset one must have to become a torturer". The idea that someone works as causing pain, trauma, that they dedicate their expertise in this horrible field... how can someone choose to do this by their own free will... As time went on, I found some answers to that question, some of which were pointed out in this very video, but still, the idea is still hard for me to fully grasp. And I guess good guy torturers who are rewarded by their actions is just another push in that direction making that decision just a lil bit easier...
I find it quite jarring that Disco Elysium's protagonist, an alcoholic and drug addict with literal conflicting voices in his head, usually uses more ethical methods of gaining information than these supposedly even-keeled soldiers (aside from the threat against the racist lorry driver, I suppose).
Is it weird that my first thought was "I hope Jacob covers Black Ops 1's numbers deprogramming, as well as all of its reiterations through that subseries"? Eh, probably. I played Black Ops at too young an age. Anyway, I often wonder if torture is used as a shorthand for grit and edge, especially in the new MW trilogy, which constantly emphasises how 141 are largely anti-heroes and bad boys, with dark backstories perfect for yaoi roleplay. The torture becomes background noise, part of the set dressing, a means for us to know where we're going and who we're killing.
@@ghosthand3737 That's what I was thinking of. It's kind of surprising how enduring that ship is. I remember seeing a yaoi doujin of that pairing from before the new trilogy, let alone before those characters were introduced. I could probably write for ages about the irony of it all
@@JuliaJulia-vh4xc Ah, as much as I'd want to do it, I have to admit, I'm an amateur. On top of that, I worry I won't do the topic justice. I'm interested in why that element of the fandom has become so prominent, especially in a community that has one foot perpetually in mid-2000s edge and prejudice, at least from the outside looking in. I also want to know if this has always been an aspect of the CoD community prior to MW'22. Because let's be real, from the OG Zombies crew, to Mason and Woods to even characters like Mitchell and Gideon in AW or Hendricks and the Player in BO3, a lot of CoD is ripe for that kind of shipping. So has anyone taken advantage of it, and if not, why not? I don't want it to be "Oh, look at this, isn't this weird?" Because doing so not only is a disservice to the fans of that content within the CoD community, the fanartists and fanfic writers, it's a disservice to the games themselves. Because people don't ship out of boredom. These iterations of Soap and Ghost must have been doing something right for people to go this crazy for em
Want to gift a year of Nebula to a friend? Or tell them to gift a year of Nebula TO YOU? Check out Nebula's new gift cards (with a discount, when you use this link): go.nebula.tv/gift?ref=jacobgeller
Why does this video have 1.2 thousand likes, but only 372 views???
Can't comment on Nebula so telling you here: in the Nebula version of the video, every line of subtitles has a double space in the center of it, just fyi. I noticed it a few minutes in and it bothered me throughout the rest of the video. Maybe you care enough to fix it maybe not? Just thought you should know.
@@jacobsoulsUA-cam is broken
wagoogus
Jacob I just gotta say you're awesome that is all
Friendly reminder that the best interrogator in history was a German man named Hanns Scharff, who frequently got his info out of POW's by treating them with kindess, often doing stuff such as: Telling jokes, giving them homemade meals, occasionally sharing drinks with them, and nature walks, amongst many other actions.
He's also partially the reason why I remember the saying, "You attract more flies with honey than you do with vinegar."
Any books or sources you good recommend on the topic?
Fascinating, actually! The notion that people are just as easily (if not more so) persuaded to cooperate when given positive reinforcement then when punished…
And when we say "German" we mean "Nazi".
The top interrogator of a delusional fascist murderstate concluded that torture is useless and they should stop doing it.
iirc there was a guy in al-Qaeda or similar, who gave up valuable information because he had diabetes and one of the interrogators brought him sugar-free cookies.
@@EddieM1994 I wonder if this can be properly considered interrogation. One-on-one experience and compassion are how prejudice and hatred are destroyed. Maybe he just realized he'd been lied to about how evil we were and how we all wanted to eradicate them.
I saw a clip of Alex Jones wailing into the camera, crying: "they hate our children so much". There must be some people who genuinely believe that liberals hate their children. I imagine it would be a real blow to their worldview to see liberals protecting and being kind to their children, not caring about the beliefs of their parents.
This reminds me of a phenomenon I've observed for a while. It's when people get so enamored of their own willingness to "make the hard choices"/"do the hard thing"/"be cruel to be kind"/etc. that they reject all information that the hard thing actually is ineffective/has results actively contrary to their aims and the easy thing would be the better thing to do. Outside of torture, this often comes up in the context of how to treat children, addicts, homeless persons, immigrants, prisoners, etc.
It's difficult because the person rejecting softhearted approaches to social problems usually ignores the potential for some really effective softhearted solutions that aren't in general use. Instead, they're looking at the two approaches generally in use: ignoring the problem and letting it fester, or punishing the people doing the behavior to encourage them to change their behavior. It's a "this isn't working, we need to try the other approach" but also ignoring that the nasty approach isn't the only untried approach.
I feel that often happens because they lose track of why they were making the hard choices to begin with, and start to simply do it because it's "the hard choice", even if it's objectively the wrong choice. They've built up some kind of mental block causing a dissonance that leaves them simply unable to face the fact that they've fallen straight into the abyss. "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster . . . when you gaze long into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you"
You see this a lot with exercise, funnily enough. People working too hard, lifting too much, running too fast, etc. Doing what sucks because it sucks, thinking that fact alone means they're doing what's optimal.
This is only tangentially related, but the "make the hard choices" or "get dirty so the world stays clean" mentality has been on my mind recently, specifically in comparison to common attitudes toward defence attorneys. People love to defend cops, troops, etc as people making the hard choices in awful situations in order to keep society safe. "You might not like them, but they're the reason you live in a democracy," they say.
Then many of these same people will absolutely excoriate the defence attorney of someone accused of a crime, going so far as to say "Some people don't deserve to have their rights," when it's pointed out that this, too, is a job full of hard choices that is crucial to the functioning of the democracy they hold so dear.
It seems that making the hard choices is only heroic when it's dealing out punishment to one's enemies. And that doesn't sound like a hard choice, it sounds like an unpopular choice that grants a simple, shallow catharsis.
@@hughcaldwell1034 eh, I get what you mean but it's not exactly the same, at least not completely. People don't usually have problem with lawyers being defense attorneys to bad people, but rather with crooked lawyers defending bad people in crooked way. It is of course well understood that even the worst people must have right to defend themselves in court, but some lawyers for money are ready to go beyond just "hard choice" of defense itself here. Trying to derail the trail, get obviously guilty violent criminal freed on technicality, or worst of all, try to dig dirt on victim, re-traumatising victim by forcing them to re-tell story of SA/child r*pe/murder attempt etc just to try and catch them on some minor discrepancies etc all that are really despicable practices that go beyond simply criminal defense. Those are not "hard choices" at all, those are straight up immoral practices
the revelation that call of duty contains child torture followed by kevin spacey jumpscare was like a punch to the gut followed by an uppercut to the chin
Can't a child hold a rifle towards you, too?
@@homelessalcoholic2716 How is that relevant to the scene shown in the video above, where the child is unarmed and captive?
@@zdavis9091 seems less like a defense of the game and moreso another wild thing on the list of wild things
actually i take it back i saw that persons replies on a different comment and they're absolutely trying to defend it
@@homelessalcoholic2716 POV: u r a spokesman for the IOF
the fun (?) thing about this video is that it responds to Jacob´s last COD video "Does Call Of Duty Believe In Anything?" by answering that Yes, COD believes in Torture
COD revels in torture. It's the "gritty realness" they love to claim they represent, but it's really just a fictionalized worshiping of the violence that makes american soldiers so "effective", so much better than everyone else because they're the good guys and the violence they inflict is thus good too.
The intro also confirms his statement that if Price was to use chemical weapons, it would be seen as justified because he's the good guy.
@@Self-Referential Crazy that he used chemical weapons then accused the villain of using chemical weapons in terrorist attack. A few years later US accuses Syria of using chemical weapons.
I find the interrogation between Batman and the the Joker especially interesting here - it was only shown briefly but to me it stands as a direct critique of torture.
The Joker tells Batman not to start with the head since it numbs everything and ruins the torture. Batman slams his head down anyway, and the Joker laughs. The torture in the scene doesn't bring any information, the Joker only tells them what he wants to. It seems to only be for Batmans own catharsis, subverting the trope of creating impossible situations in media where torture is the only way forward.
The torture of the Joker is framed as a win for him, by getting batman to stoop that low he was succeeding in his goal of destroying The Batman and everything it stands for.
A movie that imo more effectively gets that point out is Prisoners, I won't spoil it but if you've seen it ykwim.
@@shaeisgae8952 It's also a win for the Joker because he uses a smart combination of the truth and lies to manipulate Batman. The locations were accurate, but who was present at each location was swapped, so the person Batman wanted to save was the one who died.
@@gunnarschlichting9886 yeah, also proving the point that torture isn't a good way to get information, joker gave him information because he wanted to, not because he was tortured
@shaeisgae8952
I'll even argue that the scene proves the opposite point - that being tortured can be a good way to give out desired information to one's own benefit. Not only did Joker give information of his own accord, but he did so in a way that directly benefited his situation. He timed and phrased his info to increase urgency and cause Batman, Gordon, and many other officers to immediately leave the area, playing into Joker's plan by giving him the best opportunity to escape jail.
There's another scene in that movie that I had thought about somewhat recently. I think it was sometime before the scene you mentioned, it's the part where Batman drops someone off of a balcony to get information out of him. I don't remember the entire context since it's been so long, but Batman doesn't exactly get the information he wants.
What strikes me is that it's followed by another scene where Harvey Dent is trying to torture someone else for the same information, but Batman shows up to stop him. Batman gets to leave that scene with the moral high-ground, as if he didn't just break someone's legs and presumably leave him to fend for himself. Arguably, Batman stops Harvey because he realized it wouldn't be effective, but he'll still end up beating up the Joker to try and get information out of him later in the film.
You guys hear about that young man who was tortured by police into confessing that he murdered his father, only for his father to show up very much alive a few days later, having returned from vacation? Yeah.
They also withheld his medication from him, inducing a psychotic break. Imagine being gaslit into thinking you killed a family member.
Goddamn. That's awful. Source?
@@LucBoeren Google “Thomas Perez Jr Fontana” Of course the taxpayers (through the city) are the ones who end up paying the settlement price 🙄 yet another reminder to never talk to the cops without a lawyer present; they aren’t looking to solve crimes just pin them on whomever is most convenient for them
@@LucBoeren His name was Thomas Perez Jr from Fontana Ca (this is the third time i'm typing this comment because UA-cam seems to be deleting it when I mention other stuff related to the 🐷)
They also convinced him they'd had his dog euthanized.
This is how torture is actually effective:
The Brazilian dictatorship is considered a success story among totalitarian regimes, as it lasted for nearly 30 years, and none of the leaders were punished in any way after the fact. My countrymen's greatest "innovation" was to favor torture instead of murder as a repression tool, because if people lived, it looked less bad. However, as they were tortured, they most often just self-exiled and very often killed themselves afterward.
In a sense, when you torture someone enough, they essentially die (as far as being a political opponent for your regime), while remaining alive. So the torturer don't get as much blame, and their regime doesn't get as much flak internationally. Also, torturers seem to be much prouder of themselves than executioners are (as you can see in Indonesia, where they consider themselves national heroes).
Another advantage of torture is that there is no limit to how many people you can torture at once. If you torture someone in front of any number of people, you are effectively torturing everyone who is watching. This happened to my aunt: she was forced to watch a schoolmate of hers (an underaged girl) being tortured by policemen in front of her entire class, and that forever diffused her (and I assume all of her classmates as well) from being an effective opposition to the state. In fact, the statistics that the Brazilian police state "only" tortured 40,000 people are laughable. Not only are these numbers probably an underrepresentation of the number of people who were dragged to basements and tortured for hours, but they completely discount the likely hundreds of thousands of people who received public beatings or sexual assault at the hands of the dictatorship. They also don't even attempt to account for all the people who have been tortured by being forced to watch or be aware of another person's torture, which can be just as much of a torture.
In Brazil, the idea of torture being about gathering information was just a thinly-veiled excuse for enforcing and demonstrating the power of the state. It was very effective; Brazilians were a terrified people for 30 years.
It's also a grim testament to the power of torture that people can forget. Currently, there seems to be a wave of amnesia affecting the older generations, where they have convinced themselves that it made the country safer, that it wasn't so bad, and that it prevented something worse, like a socialist regime being instilled here (this one is especially inaccurate).
As a Brazilian, I think this comment is sadly spot on. Our history is being rewritten, first by that regime from 1964, now by the sons of those who ran it. It's haunting...
That is depressing. I thought torture never worked but now I can understand why governments do it.
@@redblue5140 It worked for the mentioned fascist regime and it was horrible for the people.
Thanks for sharing this. That's so terrifying.
@@redblue5140yeah the ‘torture doesn’t work’ line only applies to a shallow reading of the purposes of torture, torture as a method to gain information doesn’t work, but torture for other purposes can be very effective.
During the first couple of minutes I thought you were literally just going to list and describe every single torture scene one after the other and I’ll be honest I was entirely prepared to watch a 40 minute video of just that from you.
The crazy thing is I don't think there'd even be enough time in a 40 minute long video.
Good point Madeline celeste
Same. If it's Jacob, I know it's going to be thought provoking and insightful.
im honestly disappointed that it wasn't
Your pfp is Madeline reacting to Jacob’s list of every torture scene in CoD
5:20 the fact that it's called PRIMARY call of duty torture spreadsheet implies the presence of a secondary, more in-depth call of duty torture spreadsheet
Or possibly just a secondary CoD torture spreadsheet with details irrelevant to the main spreadsheet. (I saw someone speculate that it was Zombies-related.)
I think it just means the primary series of Call of Duty games, so none of the many, many other games not made by Infinity Ward and Treyarch.
Why would the primary be more in depth dawg what are you on about
@@zaidlacksalastname4905 learn to read i said the secondary one would be more in depth
Probably filled to the brim with other columns and questions that *probably* won't be useful, but might be, but even if they are it's not something you'd need to reference more than once or twice.
I think it's a good time to remember that the US Military is actively involved in the development of Call of Duty games as a consultant where they push for the games to be recruitment propaganda.
while framing torture as this highly efficient and justifiable process
so those recruits can bring the same philosophy once they end up being cops
Fascists gotta fascist
This!!!!
@@Coffeepanda294 I wish people such as yourself would stop devaluing the word "fascist" to mean "people who do things that I don't like." It's really bad and unproductive rhetoric. The United States military is not fascist, and if the armed forces that is subject and accountable to a democratic government is fascist, then the word fascist has ceased to mean anything.
Fascism is not when the government creates bad propaganda.
@@noize8148 You're welcome to actually look up the definition instead of putting words in my mouth. Looking up the 14 characteristics is a good starting place.
I'll never forget Trevor Phillips's line from GTA 5. "Torture is for the benefit of the torturer. Or sometimes the torturee! It's useless as a means of getting information." Whenever it's been actually examined in real life, torture is found to be of extremely dubious value in actually accomplishing the interrogator's goals. But it often works in fiction because of course it does, it's a narrative contrivance to move the plot along. The author has already decided that it's going to work.
That's because GTA weirdly has good politics
@@davidtaylor142 Sometimes yeah, others it can veer into South Park 'caring about things is cringe' territory
@@username1660 yeah I think it's a little more cohesive in its satire that South Park tho
@@davidtaylor142 plus you don't get to steal a car when you're watching south park
@@davidtaylor142It can be goofy at times but I love it
“The bad guys talk, while the good guys stay silent.”
That’s a great example of CoD acting as US military propaganda. They’d never want to show one of their own beaten to the point of saying anything to make the pain stop.
Im not usually one to say somethings not a psyop😂 but i think theyre some reaching here, torture is another disgusting horror of war same as burning people alive, killing civillians, explosives tearing people limb from limb pretty much everything else that happens in the game. The more real the feel of the game the more peoples curiosity will spike( same with gruesome news storys and hardcore porn) and the more it will sell. It dosent matter how much money the government gives them it will still be in the game
@@andrewmiller5794 But it wouldn’t be portrayed as nonchalantly. It would be portrayed quite chalantly, which I hereby declare to be a word.
@@The_Sleepiest_Socialist i very much like your attitude🩵. Your right it is nonchalant but so is the killing and other atrocities of the simulated war thats being shown it comes with the territory its not one sided either the same horrible acts happen to the characters side aswell and of course alot of it is supposed to make you route for the character side because its the old cliche of good versus evil and most people want to be on the "good side" which happens to be western countries like the US, UK, etc because thats the majority of the player base
"Us miliatry propoganda"
Doesn't a large part of the C.O.D franchise take place with the SAS? The british special forces? Bad guys are often made out to break more easily because they're primarily selfish and self serving. And once the ship appears to be sinking they bail out as fast as possible. People who are quote on quote "good" have a reason not to break because they have interests beyond their own survival.
Its not just acting, the DOD actively consults on Call Of Duty writing, in fact I'd be willing to bet that they actively look for and veto any seen that depicts an American, Western, or otherwise percieved to be Western service member crack under torture.
I forget the exact situation, but I recall that there was at least one Supreme Court case which dealt with the legality of torture. Justice Scalia, when discussing the topic, said this:
“Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. He saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Are you going to convict Jack Bauer? Say that criminal law is against him? 'You have the right to a jury trial?' Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don't think so. So the question is really whether we believe in these absolutes. And ought we believe in these absolutes."
Real-life people use the fictional portrayals of torture to justify using torture, the use of which is then shown in other works of fiction to try and justify it.
The ouroboros, in pain and anger, bites its own tail.
Reminds me of that Onion skit, Supreme Court: Death Penalty is "Totally Badass".
John Oliver references that exact quote when he discussed torture and the politics of it on his show. He then described what he saw a better thing Kiefer Sutherland contributed to society: an incident, caught on video, of him drunkenly tackling a Christmas tree in a hotel lobby.
I'll paste this from another comment I left: I honestly believe it's the duty of authors and game developers to not perpetuate the myth of efficacy, at least once they've learned the truth about it. (And I say this as someone who writes pretty dang macabre fiction.)
It's also the duty of Supreme Court justices not to have their heads so far up their butts they sniff their own poop and think it's flowers, but I think we'll have better luck with the fiction writers.
@@Sky-bx9mn I mean, it’s the Supreme Court, what else can you expect?
@williamjeffries5074 so, so much more, regretfully.
I remember Fanon describing, among the psychiatric consequences of torture in Algeria, the case of a police officer that go so used to torture that he caught himself torturing his wife and kids as a mean of settling arguments. And even though he wanted to stop harming his family, when he was told that giving up on torture altogether would be the most effective, he refused.
which book is that bro?
@@bussyenjoyer6933 It's from The Wretched Of The Earth, specifically in the chapter "Colonial war and mental disorders"
G.O.A.T Fanon
Lame. Asian parents torture their families all the time to settle arguments and "teach lessons"
I am living proof.
I never thought about it but the fact that police torture becomes so 'obvious' that other investigative methods atrophy leaving it as the only 'quick' and 'viable' method is so depressing. A self-justifying cruelty machine
thats the most fancy acab ive seen
"Ah dang, we asked him if he did it and he wouldn't confess, guess I get to whip out the chainsaw. Dang, I'm forced!"
America, baby. We aren't free at all lmao
This is why the constitution wants you to have guns.
another acab communist
I remember how my parents told me about how when they were in college during the early 2000’s the college had a guest speaker who used to do torture for the military. From what my parents remembered, the speaker put heavy emphasis on the fact that the military brain washed him into believing that every situation of torture WAS the ticking bomb scenario and how complex their methods actually were. Torture was not just walking in and punching them till they broke, torture was putting them in a cell without windows and lights that were a little too bright, cuffs that were a little too tight, a mattress that was a little too thin, a stool that was a little too small. Torture didn’t start the moment the interrogator walked in, it began the moment they were detained.
Hannibal Lector behavior 😬
torturing info out of someone and then showing that the information was already known, but hadn't just reached the tortures fast enough. That ironically says quite a bit about the efficacy of torture.
It almost has comedic timing, too, with how instant the confirmation was.
@@nedinnis6752 "ah s**t you actually pulled all my molars and electrocuted me with a car battery"
"thanks for the info"
*guy bursts in* "sir, the enemy is attacking from the east"
"wow, the guy bleeding to death just told me that his friends were attacking from the east."
What you're forgetting is that it is a zero sum game.
If they won't tell you nicely, you may as well torture them, just in case they do.
Everyone KNEW what the inquisition wanted to know, "where are other heretics?" and so would easily blame anyone they could name, whether or not they were. Because there was nothing scientific about torturing someone over a made up sky friend.
It's almost like we've improved all science since the 1500s, and yes torture really is just another science.
Or the one about the guy they tortured whose phone conveniently had all the info they needed on it. Are you telling me you didn't decide to just check that first?
During a Model UN conference my senior year of high school, one kid told us the story about how him and his buddies had driven out to the middle of the woods to waterboard each other. They had gotten all the rags, water jugs, googled the necessary instructions, and took turns pouring the water over each other's heads.
What I recall most of all from this conversation is how he ended the story: "I'm glad that we do that to terrorists". Again, no thought it might be misapplied, no thought for the efficacy of it. It's as if he somehow thought that we were in Omelas, and the existence of a child being tortured also meant there was necessarily a utopia around it.
That is absolutely deranged
@@thehuman2cs715 The odd part is that isn't even the only story I have about my peers waterboarding each other. The dorms at my college had to institute a "no torture" rule after students started consensually waterboarding each other so they could have an "informed debate" on the practice in class. I know the rule was real, I saw it in the student handbook they handed out. The story goes that an RA walked in on the students waterboarding each other in the bathroom but couldn't figure out a way to ban the practice because there wasn't any rule against it. Thus, the "no torture" rule.
I'm a Zillenial fwiw - basically everyone in my age cohort was a baby when 9/11 happened and grew up amidst Iraq and Afghanistan. I think that did shit to people's brains, hearing your parents, teachers, and peers debate whether it was OK to drown people from the time you were a small child.
And like there's a 99% chance it wasn't even legit waterboarding, just some wussy bullshit to make them feel badass for putting a wet towel over their face.
Well, at least this clearly illustrates how the only real motivation behind this is individual sadism. People who want to torture people seek out careers where they can legally torture people. And folks wonder why there's so much overlap between the police and white power groups.
Terrorist lover...
This kid I grew up with joined the military at 18 and had been deployed three times by the time we ran into each other again in college. We became close and it turned out he had been running “night missions” where he said he was basically shooting into darkness a lot of the time. He had really extreme ptsd and he told me a story about what his squad did to this guy who led their friend into a building armed with IEDs. I’ll spare the story suffice to say I think this kind of emotional trauma
really feeds into how this question of torture is often framed
What in the fuck!? Seriously, what in the fuck!?
Like this is just a UA-cam comment but I feel disgusted!
They tortured the guy out of revenge pretty much?
@@dannydanumba basically they beat him up but he was restrained. point is I think a lot of the torture was done as revenge, I mean what else are you gonna do against people who aren't really afraid of dying and are blowing themselves up to get to you already? You end up needing to come up with something worse than dying. All the rest of the words spent on it are window dressing I think, they all knew what they were doing.
"Sadistic laziness" seems like the perfect way to describe the nature of how torture is used in the games. It's simply easier to write in a 2 minute, visually exciting, violent scene to gather information than it is to take the same time to explain a painstaking process of gathering intelligence. It's fast, it's satisfying, and also gives the player the fantasy of being given the position of judge, jury, and executioner.
It's simply the easier choice that rewards that part of our brain that wants to exact violence on our enemies.
To cite my disillusioned ex-military sports trainer, who in turn cited his trainer from an anti-torture exercize: "You don't torture to gain information - you torture because you feel like it."
My favorite torture scene was in Modern Warfare 2007 when Price's S.A.S. squad captures Al-Assad in his safehouse. They burst in through the door, Price takes out the hostiles, & punches out Al-Assad, then the scene cuts to black. Then you hear punches, & the scene fades in to Price beating the crap out of Al-Assad yelling "NAMES, I WANT NAMES" then Al-Assad gets a phonecall, which Price answers, then he drops the phone, blasts Al-Assad in the head, then Gaz says "who was it sir?" and Price says "Zakhaev...Imran Zakhaev." Then the scene fades to black into the next most iconic mission "All Ghillied Up"
What was your favorite torture scene? 🤗
@Based_Gigachad_001 wat
@Based_Gigachad_001This sort of response is the entire reason this video exists at all.
@Based_Gigachad_001no because you don’t have a second braincell to rub against your only one xD
@Based_Gigachad_001 based gigachad with a patrick bateman pfp. that's funny
applying actual media analysis
to THE mainstream military shooter
a SECOND time
this is gonna get jsut as brutal figuratively as literally
This topic, if handled by any other video essayist, would have gotten us and utter dogwater video. A hitpiece on whatever they barely understand but have decided they want to get rid from existence.
But luckily it was Jacob. 0/10 not enough climate alarmism.
a second jacob geller video has hit the call of duty series
can you remind me which video was the first time again?
@@rezician8433that would be "Does Call of Duty Believe In Anything?"
@@jesustyronechrist2330 Which videoessayists are you referring to?
Can't help but sing "Call of Duty Torture Spreadsheet" in my head in the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" cadence
Oh no, it fits the meter.
Best comment on this video
There was a whole twitter account for a few years that did nothing but post phrases that could be sung to that theme. One of my favorites (and apt for this video) was "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder"
Would the ending of the song go: *"Torture in a half-hour! America power!"*
XKCD 1412 moment.
The revelation of the Bad Guy's weakness to torture vs. the Good Guy's resistance to it was easily the most interesting part of this video. Very well done, as someone who's been playing COD since I was a kid I was always used to it, never batted an eye.
I'm also reminded of Mass Effect 2, where the squad comes across the scene of an NPC torturing prisoners. Some squadmates object to the morality of it all, but even the most rogueish of your teammates criticize the use of torture because *it doesn't work.*
Thane mentions it's useless for getting information, then his loyalty quest gives you the option to torture a guy for information, said information is perfectly accurate if you torture the guy, you receive no consequence for it, and if i remember correctly Garrus has a similar thing in his loyalty quest.
@@giova9852 lmao you're right i didnt realize
@@giova9852something something Mass Effect has a bad morality system
@@ekki1993 as will any video game that attempts to categorize an action's morality, especially between two binaries, it will be flawed. that does not mean moral systems are bad but best as a flavor to add to your character. i often think of Star Wars KOTOR 1 and 2 as well as Fallout New Vegas as games where every flaw of the typical moral system (lack of nuance, moral judgement rather than ethical result) exists but they get around it because its obviously just flavor, unlike the Mass Effect games, you never get locked out of anything for being good, evil, or grey, and when you do, an equal replacement is offered.
@@quinnmarchese6313 Explicitly categorizing morality as a binary and assigning a predefined value to every decision is just bad. It's literally the simplest moral system you can get and it leads to dumb stuff like what you're seeing in this comment chain.
Fallout New Vegas has a better moral system. That's the point. You can have a better moral system. And, still, Mass Effect, a game that claims to care about its moral system, keeps having the simplest one possible.
I was trying to process why the gasmask torture felt so cartoonishly impractical and I think its the fact these operatives released a deadly gas in an open air environment just to scare a guy they were gonna kill in a few minutes
To be fair, the gas was in a small canister so it probably would only be confined to that one room
Yeah it is quite comical if you think about it
You may have failed primary school media literacy so I'll explain it to you...
It's because the guy didn't know for sure they were going to kill him anyway.
The scaring them is what gets the information.
@@esmeecampbell7396No need to be rude.
@@esmeecampbell7396Naw, it was still stupid in context. Sorry if that makes you defensive of mid military propaganda that parades itself as a game.
they get dirty and we forget we ever valued being clean goes WAY too hard
Fr, had to pause and let it simmer
It should also be noted that Call of duty has the habit of referencing scenes from war movies without considering how different they feel in the context of the game.
Th Russian Roulette game, for example, is something that breaks beyond repair Christopher Walken's character in The Hunter. In Black Ops, it's just there to show you that your enemies are twistedly evil and the heroes are badass; they could have just killed your partner without trying to force anyone to play Russian Roulette but someone decided to reference an iconic movie scene regardless of its original meaning
thats cause the cod devs do not know what they are doing. activation treats cod as a product used to attract dumb consumers to empty their wallets. cod is only art in the technical definition
i can tell u exactly why there are so many torture scenes in cod, its because its a trope that amateur story tellers use to create tension, and to move the plot along. if u want a game thats similar to cod that ACTUALLY has something to say, look at metal gear solid. a game series that also has a lot of torture scenes
The ticking time bomb theory dumbfounds me with how opposed to basic reality it seems to be. Bomb is going off real soon and the situation is "urgent enough to justify torture" (assuming that is the actual bomber & assuming everything else). So, as the bomber, who presumably knows when it will detonate, you have the knowledge that if you resist the pain for X amount of time, you succeed. Additionally, well presented misleading information is readily slurped up, wasting time, resources, and personnel. It seems like if you want your bomb to successfully detonate, it would be preferable for your captors to torture you, as is it far easier to let information slip when feeling comfortable, especially if you dont believe said info to be relevant or crucial to your success.
The Joker scene in TDK showed it perfectly imo.
The torturer just wants any information so they could act. The one revealing the information has all the power in the world in deciding how the ones causing them pain would fuck up majorly. Especially if you're gonna get killed afterwards anyway, what's a better fuck you parting gift than making those people desperate for information act against their own goals?
You'd enjoy watching Unthinkable.
It uses that mechanic: The bomber knows when the bombs will go off (but doesn't know the current time), and he either gets killed before the bomb, or the bomb detonates and he gets killed/prison for life.
He's essentially testing his own faith: Is my faith strong enough to sustain me through torture?
The scale of the problem you present would re-justify torture though. If we know our victim is mentally acuite enough to give false information _while_ everything in his body screams "make it stop", he's for sure good enough to just not speak (the truth or in general) in a regular discussion. Your conclusion of waiting out the fail-deadly works in both scenarios, so if nothing works, we have the choice to leave him alone, freeing up the resources of... one guy and a bucket of water. Or we get a non-zero chance of information we can act on. And if you don't, you figure out something else.
"but what if he slips up while talking", but what if he slips up while torturing? Your argument invalidates interrogation as a whole, which would be a legitimate answer for small things like hideouts, enemy positions etc. But in the context of the ticking time bomb, the outsiders perspective is that you just chose to leave the trolley on it's tracks, "because the lever was stuck" - so push it harder.
@slyseal2091 First off ticking time bombs aren't real scenarios. Many many many many many people have failed if the only thing stopping a bomb from going off is the info of one person in a short time frame.
Secondly I think your missing the point, which is that torture provides no incentive to the tortured to give accurate information. You are either going to get hurt and fail your own cause, or get hurt and your cause succeeds. The Allies figured this out and documented it extensively during WWII, but modern militaries are vastly undereducated and quite frankly not incetivized themselves to get information. Eternal war cannot be eternal if all your anti terror ops actually succeed.
what if the terrorist wait until the few last minutes and says the bomb is hidden in a foreign country's embassy, and the Good Guys rush into it, but it's not here, so the bomb blow up, and there's a huge diplomatic incident on top?
The thing about Jacob is that through dozens and dozens and dozens of videos, he never gets lazy with conclusions. So many videos out there provide examples until they run out and then they say "There, that's what I have for you today, wasn't that all very interesting."
Jacob still writes conclusions that don't just summarise and contextualise the core arguments. To use a strange analogy, it reminds me of bandage fasteners. You can wrap a bandage around an arm as long as you like, but if you leave the end dangling, it'll come undone. A fastener digs into the end of the bandage and hooks into the rest of it.
A bunch of ideas that were all just swimming in your mind suddenly feel secured and understood. It primes you well for doing your own thinking afterwards.
love this comment. so insightful and puts into words one of those things that i appreciate a lot about jacob geller's essays specifically
I've been focusing on pruning my subscriptions of channels that are simply time filling summaries of media.
Seeing my feed go empty for hours has pushed me out of my comforting feed into doing the things I've been procrastinating.
That's really what essays are meant to be, especially conclusions. The ending is supposed to be the "So what?" section, explaining why this argument even matters in the first place, possibly linked with a call to action for the audience. Other essays that just peter out by the end aren't really good essays, because they're really just long, semi-educational rambles by someone interested in a particular topic. Entertaining, yes, but nothing you can really cite on a college paper.
I agree. I feel like a lot of jacob's videos, I'm watching it and I'm like "this is interesting yeah, I'm enjoying it" but maybe it's not my favorite video/I'm not sure yet where he's going with it, and then the conclusion hits and it makes me go holy fuck
That was a very lovely and poignant example, which I know for a fact I will use at a future date to describe why conclusions are so important.
Can we count your research on this video as the 47th torture that COD committed?
This video is about torture committed _within_ the CoD games, not _by_ them.
_(Can someone really into the balancing of CoD multiplayer write a punchline? I'm not really an FPS guy.)_
I mean if you think about it, every player who has played through these torture sequences are themselves being tortured by simply observing it happen (like with that reddit post). So probably in the multi-millions.
Torture isn’t funny
@@zackatwood2867Nobody said it was?
48th torture is activision making shit games now
When I was 13 I stayed up all night playing the campaign of Black Ops with my friends. I remember the glass punching scene. I chuckled at the line “we got plenty of windows.”
This memory disturbs me as an adult, but I don’t blame my childhood self. These games don’t ask you to think. The directing and writing almost always presents a situation as black and white, the moral correctness of the situation never in doubt. In the glass punch scene you literally look through the eyes of the man torturing. You are him, and you wouldn’t be in the wrong, right? This kind of thing is particularly persuasive to those thinking uncritically, many who are barely paying attention as they wait for the next gameplay section or who are kids. It nauseates me how popular this stuff is.
well said
Well said
The glass punch scene sits with me for a completely different, equally stupid reason:
After making this man chew glass and repeatedly, viciously punching him in the face, causing lacerations that will be bleeding heavily, he proceeds to become your ally and teammate while you go rooting and shooting across the level. He even shares his secret weapon stashes with you, which include experimental prototype weaponry that never made it to mass production.
You torture a man, make him chew glass, and then immediately befriend him. The torture is never brought up again. This is one of many sequences where a character in Black Ops is ruthlessly tortured, only to befriend their torturer.
"Getting rid of [torture] from MW's campaign would be like removing Jesus from the Bible"
You could make another 40 minute video essay just unpacking that comment.
i mean its reddit after all , you cant expect them not to make such a comment sometime
@@bojack6987 It's not that the comment was surprising -- as you said yourself, it's reddit, it was the total opposite of surprising. Rather, the amount of logical, emotional, and moral assumptions and equivalencies required to equate the necessity of depicting full-blown interactive torture in CoD with the necessity of _depicting fuckin' Jesus of all people_ is so bafflingly absurd it loops around to being brilliant again. (Despite there only being a vanishingly-small chance that any of this nuance was intentional.)
I, for one, would _love_ a deep-dive into the social, historical, and cultural contexts required to even understand how such a statement could ever have possibly been unironically made in the first place.
Jesus was tortured to death.
I mean, he came back afterward, but the torture is definitely a common factor.
the commenter has a point actually
The implication that the torture exists so that others can be... Forgiven, somehow... The implication that the torture absolves the sin eaters of the very sin they eat. It's sick.
The lack of confrontation the series has with the efficacy (or lack there of) of torture is the biggest shortcoming to me. While torture is abhorrent, depicting it in a work of fiction isn't something I'd consider beyond the pale by any means. However, the choice this franchise makes to have torture results be a binary - either you get your Intel or you get nothing - is such a failure of the writing. Getting false or misleading information is, in reality, an extremely common result of torture (as that congressional report you cite calls attention to, it is so common that no information taken from torture can be trusted without thorough corroboration, making the torture itself effectively a waste of time). Yet, unless you just didn't bring it up, the torture victim simple *lying* to make the torture stop and the player being led on a wild goose chase as a result never happens in the entire series. This just seems like such lazy writing to me. It could be an interesting moment as they realize their time has been wasted, their methods failed. This can cause reflection on the efficacy of torture in a way none of the other scenes do, and would still be dramatic and interesting for the player as you are now forced to act upon the real information you presumably got to disprove the lies given under the torture far faster than is comfortable. This strikes me as an interesting, dramatic moment that the call of duty writers have somehow never implemented in their stories.
Instead they go with such a lazy depiction of torture. I think your conclusion touched on this very nicely; these depictions are so lazy. In the absence of potentially long and arduous intelligence gathering, call of duty substitutes in brief, highly effective torture scenes. In the absence of interesting writing that causes the heroes to reflect on their darkest deeds, the good guys' methods are always justified by their effectiveness and their ability to mitigate further harm.
And that in a way makes every torture punitive, because if every Intel is this automatic, all performative violence is just to satisfy the bloodlust.
The character will get their requested information no matter what in those scenes, so the writers went for the laziest gore to dress it up instead
Torture in movies (except Unthinkable) or games: "oh noes, it's the barbaric act, but WE MUST! Utilitarianism!!! It's effective but also unethical!!"
Torture in real life: "Yes I am definitely the culprit, here's the names of my compatriots (actually it's Egypt's male football team), please stop putting me into a tiny box for two days at a time".
I'm curious about your thoughts on how GTA 5 handled torture. Do you think they did it better than Call of Duty?
Well, there is one instance of false intel coming from an interrogation in the CoD games. Black Ops Cold War's protagonist, Bell, is a former member of the enemy faction who was captured, brainwashed and forced to serve the US in order to find Perseus, the antagonist. This interrogation gets weird, I'm talking MK Ultra namedrop, P.T. corridor weird. But at the end, you have the option to tell Adler, your torturer, false information and lead the team into an ambush. This is an alternate ending, of course, not canon, but I like the fact that you can...well, not betray, but lie to your "allies".
@@asddsa8203 In Katana Zero, something I really like is that not only when you get tortured you give no valuable info, you end up counter-interogating your torturer. Gods Will Be Watching sorta has the same thing.
you gotta think that even if it was as successful as COD portrays it, its exceptionally stupid to execute someone after they seemingly gave you the information you wanted. either they could've given false information and now you've eliminated your only lead. or they give you the correct information and you've just wasted what could've otherwise been a wellspring of new information. or by being as brutal and savage as possible, you've now radicalized civilians who just witnessed you execute their parent/ partner after they gave you what you wanted, proving every bad preconception they've heard about you. I love the conclusion that beyond it being abhorrent, unrealistic, and outright dumb, it's also just lazy unimaginative writing. it's treated as a panacea and follows this almost child like naivete where the bad guys always tell the truth if you just smack them a few times.
That is realistic. People relent to torture to stop the pain
@simoneidson21 my brother in christ did you watch the video
@@springshowers4754 the answer is no, and considering he didn’t read my comment either shows he lacks any form of comprehension. We shouldn’t make fun of the illiterate and cognitively challenged
@@simoneidson21 They say anything to stop the pain, you don't know if they're saying the truth. And that's assuming that the person in question even knows anything and isn't just making shit up because they're being agonisingly tortured for no reason.
@simoneidson21 hypothetical question. You're feeling really bad, have no energy to engage in social interaction, and want to avoid a conversation with a person on the street.
What's easier? Being honest, and saying you aren't feeling well? Or lying, saying "You're fine" and moving on as quickly as possible?
When I was in 8th grade, we had a civics class where we all found topics to create laws around. Someone chose “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques”(fancy name for Torture). I argued against it citing the inaccuracy and ridiculous doublespeak they were doing with the name. Outvoted. The class passed the guy’s proposal.
Never have I felt so crushed and angry leaving school that day.
I mean it was obviously them doing it for the edgy joke
Don't worry. Every chem major who heard the side effects of consuming dihydrogen monoxide decided it should never be used in anything humans use.
Dihydrogen monoxide is water. Conclusion: humans are idiots and smart people aren't always bright
"it's the spanish inquisition. I'm not going to say the line." (1 second of silence)
That is a show of sheer power and authority that just brute-forces me into respecting Jacob even more
Goku levels of will power. Jacob's the real Giga Chad.
Read this and then he said the line...but didn't say the line.
Scene 47. 😭
What line though? Didn't get it.
@@fahimfaisal7571 "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!"
The mods of /r/callofduty are removing this video every time it gets posted to their subreddit. Sad.
they'd rather talk about how cod infinite warfare was "overhated"
I guess they must think torture is effective. But according to this video, torture is something used by the torturer for pleasure; pleasure from another person being in pain.
@@elbowjuice2627 What does that have to do with anything?
@@HalTheBot ¿?
Why? Is there a rule against criticizing the games?
The time bomb hypothetical is like the perfect prime example of why I hate hypotheticals in arguments like this.
Even if I answered yes to the question of “would I torture the guy” (which I wouldn’t), what does that prove? That in this one extremely specific example with circumstances so ludicrously set up that it takes an entire paragraph before you can even pose the question and so many suspensions of disbelief that it may as well be an MCU movie, I, a random jackass, would do the morally bad thing? Okay????
We have learned nothing about if torture is a good solution to anything because this situation is literally never going to happen, we’ve just wasted both of our time.
Yeah. As Jacob said.
It seems more like they are constructed to make you say a specific thing.
Most people, in crisis, just stand around. Or flee to cover and then just kind of hang out. A minority will flee to cover and make their way toward safety. It takes a lot of training for someone to become useful in a crisis. Without that you can be useful in a team meeting, or at the espresso machine, or in bed, or all the other low-pressure situations civilians generally find themselves in.
TL;DR: its a rationalization argument / A Priori
The goal isn't to prove torture is right, but to persuade the listener to think on the speakers level. It communicates premade assumptions of the world in a more easily digestible way than openly stating "the people we torture are evil". It's the difference between a statement and a narrative.
The addition of "what would you do?" changes the question from "does this person deserve to be tortured for harming others?" To "Would I torture an evil person to save others?" Making it less likely for the listener to inspect the assumption that the person is in fact evil.
Thought experiments in philosophy are like 70% sophists playing games with language to get people to the result they already wanted, they're not really a great method to get at any deeper truth.
and even in that ticking time bomb situation, torture STILL wouldn't work. the hypothetical terrorist who planted the bomb knows that it is only a matter of time until his plan succeeds (the bomb blowing up), so of course the terrorist will just feed you bad information so that you stop torturing him. he knows that since you have limited time, you will blindly take any information he gives you. if you kill him, it doesn't matter either way since the bomb will blow up
Pretty sure "call of duty torture spreadsheet" is just their release schedule and acquisition plans
Oh snap
If anyone wants a first person narration of early torture (circa Span. Inquisition) look up Johannes Junius, mayor of a German town accused of witchcraft in the 1620’s. He was tortured and burned at the stake.
His is one of only few self told descriptions of the torture suffered by those accused “witches”, and it was only able to escape his cell due to his using the last of his clout as mayor to get a letter to his daughter Veronica telling her of his innocence and suffering.
Out of all the things I ended up reading in college it was one of the few that sticks with me keenly to this day, in almost complete detail because it felt so visceral and modern. No matter what, “Nobody escapes, though he were an earl…”
Just read the letter because of this comment. Powerful stuff. It feels wrong to call such a confession "well-written", because he was a real human being, but it really struck me becase it felt--familiar, I suppose? It felt like the timeless suffering of injustice and false accusations of the bigoted against the weak. That poor man... What a wretched way to die.
I understand the feeling of being tired of studying such a dense topic as torture because for some reason my school made us study about massacres around the country (not US, I live in Colombia) and man, studying that shit was HARD, I had to go through pages and pages detailing how 60 mfs went to a town and killed 14 people because their leader was mad with the government, how the people that survived had to leave because their life got ruined and how the government that could have stopped the tragedy DID FUCKING NOTHING.
I got traumatized and didn't even got a good grade
While it is scary the lenghts at which we are expected to explore these stuff I actually am kinda glad that we are taught about the grousome parts of our history at class.
I have a ton of USAmerican friends and the amount of glazing and justifying their schools do for the crimes of their people is insane. Colombia may not be the best, but I am thankful that I can be taught to be skeptical of it.
torture is one of the ultimate acts of dehumanization. you can only do it on someone if you in some way label them and believe they are inherently "sub human". this is why torture is used as a tool of Empire - against others who look different, have different language or culture or religion, etc - those who oppose or pose an ideological threat to the Empire's objectives. it is not to extract useful information, it is a form of supremacy and control used for millennia to perpetuate Empires, from the inquisition to modern times. I recently read the book "Waiting for the Barbarians" by JM Coetzee and it explored this point interestingly
Torture is used as a tool in plenty of non-colonial regimes. It's very commonly employed by authoritarian regimes against internal political dissidents
@@epicmarschmallow5049 I agree completely and I think it's exactly in keeping with the point I was trying to make! In fact, I said that Empires use torture as a tool of dehumanization against "those who oppose or pose an ideological threat to the Empire's objectives." -- that absolutely includes authoritarian regimes' actions against internal dissidents!!!! Whether it's used as "internal dissidents" or "external threats", the point is that torture is not used to extract useful information, but to dehumanize and terrorize anyone who could pose a threat to the regime's objectives!
It's notable how the length of torture differentiates the suggested brutality of the good guys vs bad guys (and conversely, their mettle and strength of character). Good guys can get away with torturing for very little time, with the narrative exercising restraint on their behalf. Bad guys will essentially safety word out by divulging information quickly and the scene will end long before any really difficult feelings have to come up. You never have to wonder if the good guys would ever go so far as to really mess somebody up because they never have to go that far.
By contrast bad guys will torture as long as the story needs them to- hours, days, etc. for maximum effect. Good guys and sympathetic NPCs get pulled out of enemy blacksites and POW camps after literal years in the belly of the beast. Not only are we supposed to feel for the captive hero and awe at their strength of will, maybe wondering what we'd do in that situation, but we are also supposed to understand the inhumanity of the villain for making the torture go on for as long as it does.
Ultimately it creates this sort of imaginary line in the mind of the audience that we know the protagonists won't cross, even if we have no idea where that line actually would be and have never been explicitly told anything about it beyond maybe bringing on the cultural assumption that "Guys from the global west more or less representing a conglomeration of the west's armed forces + GI Joe fundamentally believe in freedom and human rights", a line between Good and Evil that the audience can take comfort in as they are asked to witness and partake in brutality
*Refreshes youtube* "Alright, what's ne- Analyzing Every Torture Scene in Call of Duty? Wack, who would do th- NEW JACOB GELLER VIDEO?!"
omg those were my thoughts exactly
LITERALLY lmao
Oh my God, this has been popping up in my feed for a week and a half (ignored it of course), and I'm just seeing it's a Jacob Geller video.
Sneaky.
The idea that anyone actually believes that CALL OF DUTY is even slightly realistic in its portrayal of war is by far the most terrifying thing brought up in this video...
They hired Oliver "locked up for doing Iran-Contra" North as a consultant, surely COD is not morally compromised
The thing is, in every interview I’ve read or seen, the cast and interviewers rave about how realistic it is. Either they’re delusional, or they don’t want to piss of Activision.
I’ve even seen it extend to to those “real-life SAS man reacts to Call if Duty” and they talk about how realistic it is which…I doubt.
Damn I didn't know that@@djprofiteer
@@HollyHummingbirdriver When it comes down to 'realism' as in those SAS reacts videos, a lot of it is superficial. It's things like the way your allies clear rooms and the detail and function of your weapons. You'll notice they only tend to react to levels like 'Clean House' where the focus is on realistic military precision, and not say a level like 'Violence and Timing'
"But do you see how the realistic graphics is??? It is real!" lol
This is my response to your Nebula companion video: You need to pour water in very slowly when you're making pastry.
yeah it took me a second but clarification is necessary on this one
big brain comment… this is the closest thing to get me to buy nebula I’ve ever seen (in college and very frugal, I probably will eventually)
@@haysdixon6227to assuage your curiosity a bit, the companion video is a more pleasant vlog style thing where he tries to actively not think or talk about torture while making pie with his girlfriend
@@MrRydude17 Thank you, this both assuages _my_ curiosity a bit, while also making the companion video sound even _more_ interesting (and delightful)!
The fact that you can't comment on nebula is something i definitely wish was different about the platform
The fact that the top comment on that Reddit post was “Maybe you just need to grow a pair” tells you all you need to know about the simplicity and callousness of the average COD player.
This. So much this.
Completely drank the kool-aid
Dude. I work in a game store and the COD bros scare me
It's like the entire franchise's fans peaked in high school and never grew out of that late high school/early college douchbag phase, where they haven't learned how to be a normal person
It should be telling you that you need to grow a pair. Utter sissy 😂
I read a lot of Tom Clancy and his books feature a fair amount of interrogation scenes with some added torture. However, his books depict that brutal torture is inefficient, especially against government and military officials who are trained to resist those techniques. So, the good and bad guys resort to taking care of their captives in a way that lets them drop their guard and spill the information. A good example is Without Remorse, where an American fighter pilot became a POW in the Vietnam War. A Soviet officer needs to interrogate the pilot for information about American nuclear defense systems, so what he does is befriend the American. The officer shares personal stories about his experience with flying, as well as slowly feeds the American alcohol to the point that the American feels safe enough to talk. It worked, and the Amerian shared all of the information that the Soviet needed.
Probably more effective.
I remember watching a WW2 US Army training video about that some years ago (because that's something I did when I was a teenager), with captors being trained to act friendly to POWs in order to encourage their cooperation and allow them to provide useful information. Much easier and significantly less difficult than the useless antagonism of torturing prisoners.
The British did something similar in ww2. They put a bunch of high ranking german pows in a luxurious manor and simply let them talk with each other. The thing was, the Brits had put microphones everywhere, so the Germans were willingly giving up valuable intel, and didn’t even know it. It was called Trent Park.
@@thirdcoinedgeOn the Axis side, you have Hanns Scharff, a Luftwaffe interrogator who never used physical means to acquire the information and got the most information out of captured pilots and commanders by…
Being friendly with them, taking them out to walks and to see compatriots, and gaining their trust.
even the books with just his name on, like Splinter Cell outright say that basically thorough investigation and a good hacker are better.
A finnish satire illustrated this while poking fun at _24_ .
First a police chief repeatedly smacks the suspect "in name of liberty and democracy" and the suspects yields, telling the location of the bomb.
However, a younger officer, opposed to torture, picks up a chair and starts to pound the suspect demanding he recants, which he does. The cop then thanks the beaten man for helping him prove the futility of torture.😂
thanks for this story. 😂
Which show is this from? Pasila?
"I'm gonna kill you if you don't tell me what I want to know"
"Here's what you want to know"
"I'm gonna kill you if you don't change that statement"
"Here's my changed statement"
😂😂😂
I keep getting baited with "drama" and "video game analysis" by youtubers, only to learn about history and current affairs, and im not mad about it.
We're dogs and they're hiding the pill of information inside our treat of video game analysis
@@Kikiapinapillpocket-tube
i feel like theres a genuine response from a lot of long form essayists and commentators to try and combat the brain-rot of shorts/tiktok by actually being well researched and highly educational, not to mention the deserved popularity of John Oliver the last twoish years being HBO's own version of a youtube essayist. Like even videos about the Roblox Oof sound are actually about IP theft (you know the one im talking about)
@@zbsfmpill pocket-tube is, no exaggeration, the perfect name for my favorite genre of video essay. thank you for putting words to my thoughts after all this time
Foucault's "Discipline and Punish" is a great book for further reading on physical punishment. Our prison systems came out of the realization that criminals could be turned into folk heroes if the public sees them withstand their torture or face their execution with dignity, and so the state apparatus of punishment transitioned from making examples out of criminals to locking them away where they can't be seen. I think this is why propaganda about the efficacy of torture on the soul mostly exists today in spy and black ops popular culture because the fantasy can only exist when it is behind closed doors and away from the public. In real life examples, whenever the public witnesses state implemented physical punishments they usually come to the realization that torture is always used on the underprivileged like themselves, and they would be motivated to rebel.
Well the masses being the torture victim isn't really a deep thought, there's less top level people so there's going to be way less top level people being tortured, the masses don't have the power and in the rare instances when they have risen up they do presumably torture the formerly rich and powerful...just not for information but rather for revenge.
It really isn't that deep, the reason why CIA torture people in media is because they do it in reality. Your postman doesn't torture you to find out where your neighbour's address is so why would that be depicted? The average person doesn't get to torture the President for a broken campaign promise, the amount of plot that would be required to happen in order to get that to actually occur in a TV show would be so insane it would come across like a farce comedy or absurdist nonsense just to get to that point.
Jesse James was never really a folk hero, he just wasn't all that different than the corrupt lawmen who were also going round killing people and stealing money, the average cattle rancher didn't care, the average Bush farmer may have preferred Ned Kelly when he was going after corrupt landowners but they probably didn't once he started rustling their cows no matter how he tried to justify it.
But these days even less so would people accept the way that a criminal behaves, other than when they are doing something you yourself are already also doing (for example if you disagree with drugs being illegal etc) and there would be no reason therefore to lock up your common murderer "away from where they can be seen" because people these days have mostly agreed that women aren't your property to murder when they dump you, or sleep with your brother, or any other reason that someone is currently behind bars.
I can't think of a more idiotic take than "prison was only invented to stop bad people being respected" when you consider that someone behind bars for stealing my car might be considered to be "a hero" by anyone that knew them. They wouldn't, almost everyone other than people who don't like me because of my race or sexuality, would agree that I didn't deserve to have my car stolen, and that the person who did it is no more noble for having done it or "bearing" the 3 years behind bars for it.
Gardening tip: keep eggshells, and put them in your soil if needed! My grandma used to put whole eggshells in her compost or ground eggshells in her soil so the plants got more calcium. My mom did the same with banana peels for her tomato plants
Crushing dry egg shells and scattering them on top of the soil can also repel slugs without using pellets, since they don't like to crawl over sharp edges.
Is this really true? I'm not sure how much calcium they would need. But I suppose it wouldn't hurt, I assume the quality of the shells doesn't matter under this assumption, but my main issue would be the possibility of rotten egg getting onto the ground/plants and possibly attracting all sorts of bugs.
I remember writing a paper in high school about the efficacy of torture (as part of researching a controversial topic) and whether it could be theoretically justified by results. I went in knowing it was at the least morally abhorrent from nearly every lens possible, but hey, maybe it was effective enough to be worth consideration in the face of catastrophe? Let's just say that line of thought died pretty quickly in the face of the meager scrutiny my 17-18 year old ass could muster.
watched this on Nebula a few days ago, but wanted to comment here: i genuinely think one of the reasons i love your work, Jacob, is that you do not pussyfoot around these issues, and not only that, but you go into such detail about the ethics and your research is so well-done that it's hard not to just be impressed by this level of media analysis.
also, you clearly really do not fucking like Call of Duty and i RESPECT IT SO HARD
Brings to mind the false confessions which help the police arrest people but not to actually find out who committed crimes.
"They used to do these thangs called... studies. Anyway, this one particular study came out and it said that.... torturin a person don't do shit."
-The Ghoul
Was that from fallout?
I was thinking about that exact same quote for the entirety of this video. Really drives the point home.
@@rainestorm6029 The new Fallout Show. It's pretty RAD, pun intended.
5:20 - Wait, that said PRIMARY Call of Duty Torture Spreadsheet
Maybe the data from CoD Zombies was quarantined to a separate sheet
@@FinetalPies Hehe. Great wordplay
5:18
This reminds me of an observation I read somewhere about old vs new Star Wars that I'll try to expand upon here:
Vader tortures Leia in A New Hope and Han in Empire Strikes Back, but he does not get any useful information out of them. Leia is able to resist/lie, and Han is just being used as bait for Luke ("They didn't even ask me any questions"). Palpatine tortures Luke in Return of the Jedi to punish both Luke and Vader, but this backfires and provokes Vader to kill Palpatine. So, torture is ineffective to get information but effective to provoke their loved ones, whether that's part of your plan or not.
The sand people torture Shmi in Attack of the Clones, which lures Anakin to find them (as Luke went to Han in ESB), and provokes Anakin to kill them (as he did to Palpatine in RotJ). Palpatine maneuvers his fight with Mace in Revenge of the Sith to make it look like Mace was torturing him to gain sympathy points with the politicians. So, torture always leads to more violence, which you can still use to your advantage.
(There is weirdly a lack of interrogative torture in the Bush-era prequels, but a ton of it, especially electrocution, in the Obama-era Clone Wars cartoon. Anakin often tortures Separatists for information or revenge, though they play the Imperial March so you know he's being bad.)
But in the new canon, there are a bunch of major examples of interrogative torture being effective. Kylo tortures Poe in The Force Awakens and learns about BB-8. Snoke tortures Rey in The Last Jedi and learns Luke's location. Saw tortures Bodhi in Rogue One and learns he's telling the truth. Vader tortures Cere in Jedi: Fallen Order and learns about Trilla. Dedra tortures Bix in Andor and learns about Cassian.
It's such a shame that the new canon uses torture like this, not just because it is unrealistic, irresponsible, and contradicts the original story, but because it is a lazy way to move the plot forward.
Tbf the new star wars movies are loaded with lazy storytelling. "Oh, that dead dude who had zero way to survive is back because sith magic. Oh, you aren't powerful because of your journey and growth, it's because of your last name. Here, I can use the force to magically heal everything, this "dagger" just happens to perfectly match the sky line of the fact spot of this massive planet, need to do a thing? Well just go get the mcguffin-thinger that does exactly that!"
Don't some of those examples involve using the force to pull information from someone's brain directly though? There's not really a real world analogue for that (thank God).
It is just "written before and after 9/11" isn't it
@@maciejglinski6564 No, all except the OGs were before 9/11. It's only the divide between Disney-controlled Star Wars and George Lucas, though in Clone Wars it is shown as effective AND wrong.
"Dedra tortures Bix in Andor and learns about Cassian." Yes, however there's also a scene where Andor is questioned and then almost strangled to death where he literally has nothing to do with the guys the Stormtroopers are chasing. There's also the collective punitive torture of prisoners to speed up production and the eventual use of it to execute an entire floor of prisoners that backfires and emboldens Andor and his cellmates to fight their way out and escape.
In Fallout: New Vegas, there’s an unmarked quest at Camp McCarran where an NCR lieutenant is trying to get information out of a captured Legion centurion. She explains that torture is illegal in the NCR, and asks you to torture the information out of him for her since you’re not a citizen.
What I love about the quest is that you can either beat him to get the info or just trick him into thinking you’re sent by the Legion to kill him, and if you trick him into giving the info, you get more XP and caps than if you’d tortured him.
I think someone else already said this on your Twitter, but this video answers your earlier one about “What does Call of Duty Believe In?”
Depends on whether you think it actually believes in what it wants you to believe or not, is suppose
They believe in torture and "means to an end" guys
@@zaidlacksalastname4905The heroes of CoD are expys of the villain of A Few Good Men. Which says a lot.
0:04 at first I misheard S.A.S. as "Essayist" and was VERY confused
Genuinely hilarious
UA-camr and former US Marine Mr. Ballen in a video once explained that the training he underwent to withstand torture was being tied up in a chair while a very aggressive reading of Rudyard Kipling's poem Boots was played on repeat. It does have a rhythm that makes it very distressing to have yelled at you for hours on end, but it sounds... tame when considering what it's supposed to be. Mr. Ballen, in that same video, said that having to find a recording of the poem to play to viewers was anxiety inducing.
unbaked thought but it's interesting how some folks in ttrpgs can stray towards/to torture, and then are shocked when the gm shows just consequences for that (folks treating the pcs as evil, asking players to change their alignment, etc). They take for granted that this is normal, when it is so. not. normal
I wonder if the myth that torture works at all persists because people who have zero experience with the subject assume it's the same as basic duress. Like, normal threats and normal violence outside of any institutional or military context, outside of any interrogation context, even. Perhaps the average person (and popular culture) can only relate to torture as like, "tying a terrorist to a chair and punching in his teeth, that's roughly the same thing as a mugger pointing a gun at a person and demanding their wallet, right? Just a matter of degrees. Threats are mean but they work a lot of the time, so eh torture probably also works a lot of the time."
Like you said about how fast torture scenes happen in these games; it feels to me like it comes not from any sort of engagement with actual real world torture, but from childish bullying and arm twisting, just with grown up blood and costumes wallpapered over it. It's like Captain Price isn't performing the moral evil that is actual legitimate Torture on that guy, he's just beating him up and taking his lunch money.
There's something unpleasantly appropriate about the fact that the metaphor for torture was Jesus. Jesus, a man who preached compassion, kindness, anti-violence and tolerance of other peoples, and yet has served as the driving force of some of the most bloody wars in human history. A man who's kindness is ignored, and a cruelty which has its horror ignored.
I Must admit that i have a morbid fascinatation with These types of people the mental gymnastics needed to Turn such a simple straightforward Message completley upside down
Not to mention that He was _tortured to _*_death_* by people who the Bible pretty clearly depicts as being bad guys (sure, it was all for the greater good, but His torturers didn't actually know that)
The idea of religious wars being common needs to stop lol. Outside of the Crusades (even they were more a political and cultural phenomena) religious wars were NOT common. When you send your people to war you wrap the experience in religious fervor, but to sit and say that the war was in the name of their God is ignorant and reductive. So many Americans are scarred from their fundamentalist parents and have reacted by just hating axiomatic religions all together.
the most famous thing about jesus is the kindness he showed through the torture he experienced and ultimately killed him. but it’s what everyone ignores
The things people learned from the myth/story of christ proves "media literacy is dead" is a thing that has been true for centuries, huh
It is interesting seeing cod fans demand for grounded and serious stories but what they really want are action film plots that pretend to be grounded. Reminds me of how ubisoft keeps making the same stories about toppling vaguely dystopian factions in order to maintain all the YA novel people.
Reminds me of the GoT fandom thinking the constant murder/etc. is realistic to the medieval period (it's not, ACOUP has a great breakdown of why it's not).
@@Sky-bx9mn GoT isn't set in real history though. It's in a fantasy world.
@@cookieface80 Yes, that is correct, and part of why it's a problem that a chunk of the fandom thinks it's realistic to the medieval period.
It is more interesting that you think you know a large group of people whom you only "know" through the internet.
@@channel45853 well they tend to not hide what they think
While it was only up on screen for a brief moment, The Dark Knight scene with Ledger-Joker I think counts as the exception that proves the rule - that scene is for interrogation, and he DOES lie, and those two people DO die. And then at the climax, with the ferries and the detonators, everyone involved is being punished, and it STILL doesn't work. Nobody dies in that part. Thousands of terrified people, though.
Another franchise that has an interesting relationship with torture is *The Last of Us*. Torture there is framed as an unambiguous evil, and a sign that our nominally good protagonists are going off the deep end.
It's shown as effective when you can corroborate it, but there's also a scene where you torture someone for their friend's location, and they give you the location of their hideout... while hiding that their friend is *in the same building you're in* at that point.
Honestly, the notion that torture isn’t an effective method of interrogation feels pretty obvious when given just a bit of thought because it gives a considerably greater benefit to lying than a standard conversational interrogation.
This reminds me of the common trope in media that terrorists rarely have sincere beliefs. Like it's not a clash of ideologies because the enemy's ideology isn't even real, it's disingenuous. That's why they crack under pressure.
Which in turn reminds me of the kinds of religious people who think atheists/heathens also believe in God but are just rebelling because they want to sin. Bringing it back around the the Spanish Inquisition, I suppose.
Is that a trope? If anything in media I think it leans the other way. Irl terrorists aren’t all brainwashed suicidal drones, but in fiction they’re shown as almost noble in how devoted they are.
Yeah, in media, members of pseudo-leftist terrorist groups or organizations fighting for - ostensibly - generally "noble" beliefs are often pesented as disingenuous and hypocritical, while religion-flavored extremists are usually portrayed as devoted to the point of apparent insanity. i have some ideas as to why that is, but i'm not confident enough in their validity to share them.
I mean, the only reason people confess to things under torture is to get the pain to stop. That’s why torture is generally unreliable in interrogation. Anyone will crack under severe enough pain
I guess that's why I loved Jujutsu Kaisen so much.
To oversimplify, there is a guy who wants to kill all the normal people i order to protect the ones who are "different".
Even if he has to abandon his best friend, his former allies, kill his own family.
As his best friend is about to kill him, he doesn't back down.
That guy was antagonistic but his conviction unbreakable and motives somewhat pure.
I prefer this writing over the simple "bad guys are dumb and lose" approach.
@@niwaka273 That's just the evil ending in Infamous 2
Seeing that Reddit post is just so sad. A guy wants to play a cool military shooter game but doesn't like having to torture people and wants to skip. Fellow Redditors consider this unmanly or some shit. Like he's playing the video games wrong for not liking torture.
cod fanboys are aggressively toxic to a delusional degree. these are the same people who are genuinely mad at companies for not hosting a safe space for them to vent by saying the n word to children
Because that's some next level pussy activity, art is supposed to make you uncomfortable.
If he rephrased it as cutscenes instead of torture, they'd have is back. Well, I would, maybe not reddit.
ironically the person who made that post probably has more understanding of the efficacy of torture than everyone telling them to grow a pair
Cause it's fiction. It's not on our reality. Ethicacy or not. People are telling him to grow a pair because war is hell. It shouldn't be cleaned up because someone can't handle it. Like someone being against COD because they don't want to kill.
Also if you think about it, torture is very counterproductive because of how it may damage the person being questioned, to the point you'll just eliminate the chance of getting an answer. Let just say you torture your prisioner by waterboarding them or with plastic bags, you may as well be killing their brain since the human brain can deteriorate by being less than 2 minutes without air. So in the end, the person won't even be ABLE to answer your questions. Pain overall has a very damaging result to a human being to the point it'll change a person completely and the thing is, it may never heal again.
Here are the very first thoughts that went through my head during the first scene presented:
- wait, these are the good guys?
- why won't they just rummage through stuff in the room? The guy has to have SOMETHING connecting to his business partners.
- what the hell? execution??
Everything I learn about Call of Duty shocks me. Just a month ago my only knowledge of it was "a first-person shooter franchise that had a mass shooting mission".
yeah, it's kind of a running thing in call of duty. a while back i played through the modern warfare trilogy and there's at least one scene per game where captain price just brutally shoots someone after interrogating them. i *think* it's supposed to be a "look at how cool this guy is, he kills bad guy and doesn't afraid of anything" moment but it just felt really uncomfortable. there's a part in one of the early missions, i believe it's literally the first mission in modern warfare 1, where price tells you to shoot 2 enemy soldiers who are sleeping instead of simply incapacitating or arresting them. if you don't do it fast enough he does it automatically and then drops a one liner. it was really uncomfortable.
Ah yes clearly we should feel bad for the guy who is smuggling chemical weapons. Also by the way that mass shooting mission is framed as bad. You don’t even have to kill anyone to progress
@@giwake Tbf the OG CoD 4 really doesn't present Price or the West's actions as great. Captain Price was in the earlier WW2 CoDs where he was an honourable man accepting the surrender of enemies, and this contrasts with his cold execution in CoD4. Plus the whole nuke going off thing after a US military intervention
@@simoneidson21 would you feel any different if the guy was selling weapons legally? Like, if the protagonists broken into Lockheed Martin's CEO office or something.
I'm not talking about whether the bad guy is bad - I'm talking about the good guys not being good in the slightest.
@@giwake I remember a similar scene in Eisenhorn novel - the protagonist, an agent of fascist state, murders a witness after interrogation shows they know nothing.
And the author forgets about this immediately - it is not treated as a moment that shows protagonist's evil nature, or anything.
Apparently, this kind of thing is more common in militaristic media than I thought (I always assumed it was more about shooting people on the battlefield, rather than this).
I can explain why Ajax broke. He was tortured by Rorke(?), the primary antagonist of COD Ghosts.
Rorke was not just a former Ghost but their leader, and considered the best among them. Unlike other betrayers in the series, considered weak for turning against their principles or not having them, he gets turned some form of hilariously effective brainwashing. Basically, you're fighting a member of the "good guy".faction with all the narrative weight you and your's are usually provided. He get's to pull info out of Ajax and is one of the villains that "quick & dirty" torture doesn't work on.
It's actually a pretty cool little narrative trick, whether or not you think the actual narrative is any good.
that's weirdly neat in a completely unintentional way lol
I would have loved if the creator of this video paid attention enough to notice these details in the plot as well, also it's funny how in black ops 1 Mason undergoes torture much more akin to what was described as "ideal" conditions (plenty of time and resources) and in the end it proves entirely innefective untill you escape the chamber and get explained to you what the numbers are via Hudson. Would have even further proved his point, just unfortunate that he didn't pick up on these details.
@@muki4083 Eh, they were probably already becoming a blur by BO1, let alone Ghosts.
The fact that they can have variants and subversions on how they present their torture is actually even more scary to me that they can narratively subvert expectations on why a torture went how it did just because they have done so many there is a pattern.
This reminds me of one time a friend of mine on Facebook started watching 24 and documenting, post by post, every time that Jack Bauer kills someone, while pointing out that the show takes place in a single day per season (the total bodycount is over 300 by the end of the series and movie, nine days total)
This awakened knowledge of an indie game I heard about. I forget the name, but the premise is something along the lines of:
YOu're part of an Inquisition, sent to a little village in which there's been rumours of a *witch.* The church has tasked you with a very simple task; find the witch and bring them to justice.
So, you go around the village, talking to the villagers, asking about the witch, hearing rumours, the gossip, the petty grievances that people have with one and other.
And then the torture tools come out. You can coerce people into giving you more information. Until you get what you need. Information on the witch, or a confession.
... here's the thing.
You can't prove there is a Witch. There isn't.
But anyone will say anything to make the pain stop. Anyone can be "The Witch."
There is no fail state. You can't lose. The game just ends when you find the witch, your task being successful.
Is it daemonologie?
@@airplanes_aren.t_real that might be it!
@@airplanes_aren.t_real Thanks for the name! ManlyBadassHero has a playthrough on the game, if anyone is curious
@@KittyKatty999 yeah that's where I found it
After Dan Olson's latest video where he goes off the deep end and makes a diorama of the Angry Video Game Nerd's basement, it feels charmingly quaint hearing Jacob Geller talk about how nutty it is that he made a spreadsheet.
“You just have to face the fact that you’ve been torturing yourself.”
“What?”
Lol so true
Yeah I literally muttered out loud, would a depressed person make this when he whipped that bad boy out because it made me think of Dan's latest
“The only times it villainizes characters for their torture is when the *predetermined* morality of those characters already swings villainous”
Oh shit, so CoD isn’t only militaristic propaganda; even worse, it’s *Calvinism*
The more I read about Calvinism, the more convinced I am that its popularity among colonial America is our nation's true Original Sin.
I disagree, the torture in mw2019 was definitely supposed to show that captain price was ready to throw away morales for the mission
@zXPeterz14 The problem is the games love to portray their protagonists as morally gray like this, but never actually have a real point to make about that beyond the original "we get dirty, so the world stays clean" line. Price's moral ambiguity or his position that said ambiguity is necessary is never questioned or challenged, and is treated as Truth by the franchise.
This comment made me laugh
@@victorkowalski9737 Agreed.
As a torture survivor myself I'm sure this will be an enlightening video that I won't regret watching.
1/4th in, feeling only a little stupid for watching this and having flashbacks.
15 minutes in, I'm not watching a kid deal with something so similar to what I dealt with. I'm out fuck this.
Christ, hope you're alright...
@@rootgotter355 endurance got me through everything, I can't stop now
I hope you get counseling or support or something.. please do not watch this.
I must say. I did in fact *NOT* expect the Spanish inquisition
In a video about torture? It was almost a given they would show up at some point!
@@VoxAstra-qk4jz in hindsight, this is a good point lol
@@VoxAstra-qk4jz reverse psychology
Nobody expects the Spanish inquisition!
For real i was expecting Group 935 instead
It’s funny, I’ve always viewed the COD series as an “all bad guys” power fantasy game. I’m only now realizing that you as the player are supposed to see “your” team as morally good, and the idea that most people in fact, do see it that way.
The world is a jumble of civilizations still struggling with tribalism and very restricted thinking. Cooperation is difficult, antagonism is easy. And leaders tend to be tall men who boast about strength, much like hominids grubbing through soil while one of them peers over the tall grass.
All the violent diplomacy and war and espionage and reputation-building and economic strangulation is all Bad Things. And the people who do it are not morally clean. The question is whether you want to live in the civilization that does those things and remains strong against adversaries, and suffers little hardship, or if you want to live in the civilization whose name we don't even remember anymore because it was raped to oblivion by its neighbors who actually stand up for themselves.
So from that perspective, it's less about seeing your team as morally good, but seeing your team as the one that must win, and you appreciate that they won it for you.
Yes, most of the villains are very evil. Because they are villains
Not really, half the plot of mw19 is the main characters realising they aren’t the good guys
@@googiegress there is not an empire on this earth that has not crumbled. If the motto is kill or be killed then surely you must be aware of this mortality and the simple fact is that all of this is a choice, unless an endless series of unwinnable wars against entropy is somehow a preferable alternative to actually attempting to fix our problems.
@@interiordagoth I agree! I would prefer a fix to everyone's problems. But being the first one to remove your armor just means you're extremely likely to be immediately stabbed.
And that sucks, because it's a Catch-22. If everyone disarmed, everyone would be fine. But if anyone doesn't, they could conquer the world.
When people discuss the themes and actions of the COD franchise, I think it is important to remember that the US military is actively involved in the marketing and development of the games. This isn't a matter of what is ok to display in fiction. This is the world's largest military complex actively participating in a campaign to spread concepts and ideals to the minds of potential future recruits. So when discussing characters in this franchise choosing to violate human rights and commit war crimes, we have to remember that this is the US military planting the idea that those actions are ok as long as you are one of the good guys into the mind of future soldiers. We have seen young men who grew up with the franchise commit atrocities time and time again in conflicts the US military keeps getting involved in across the ocean. This is a big deal.
I don't know if I fully agree as some of these games, can sometimes direct the player to reflect on their actions, as well the circumstances portrayed. WAW and BO1 come to mind
You’ve never played Black Ops have you?
so why other armies are commit atrocities then? they don't produce COD games...
@@thebrightestsun4685 "It's okay if we teach our kids specifically that atrocities are fine, because other people already do bad things, so somehow that justifies encouraging MORE evil! Why yes, I am an idiot." -You, 1 day ago.
@@pleasegoawaydude So? This whole "teaching" stuff is the reason why the military in decline on the west (because "peace") while Iran, Russia, China etc. are freely engage in conflicts without "make peace no war" nonsense.
Garrus said it best "After a point, victims admit to anything to make the pain stop."
It's worth saying that the first Call of Duty has what I'd describe as implied torture - when you rescue Captain Price from being a prisoner he is visibly injured via the game's health system and limps. The game doesn't explicitly say whether this is from torture or from the plane crash that caused him to be captured in the first place, but given the tropes of war movies I'd suspect it's torture.
To be fair to the first CoDs, they were still following the old model where torture was still considered a bad thing. You see nazis torturing people because of course they would, and the rare instance of the allies doing it, it was the soviets partially because "of course they would" and partially because they were the most brutalized by the nazis so there was some "tough justice" to it. Basically back in the old days torture, at the very least, marked you as morally suspect. You'd never imagine classic Captain Price torturing anyone.
It wasn't until CoD decided to """tackle""" controversial topics that they adopted the whole "we get dirty so the world stay clean" philosophy.
“Torture has never been a reliable means of extracting information. It is ultimately self-defeating as a means of control."
Once again, Star Trek putting us in our place. Torture is always a means of retribution or catharsis for the torturer, masked as detached "means to the end" methodology.
Star Trek didn't put anyone "in their place" because every lesson they've ever taught is something you should already know if you're a halfway decent person. Don't be a bigot, don't torture people, that's all STANDARD morality
@@homelessalcoholic2716 dude are you okay? you seem very triggered by this comment section
@Tuned_Rockets Honestly, you're right, my comments here have been awful defensive and angry, but that's only because people who have NEVER touched the series seek to rip the lives of the fans apart and make assertions that they're "cool with torture" despite the fact that MUCH of the fanbase doesn't even touch the campaigns anymore. It would be one thing if they were just criticizing the game like Jacob, but they're genuinely making ignorant statements about people they've never met and passing it off as some moral high ground.
@Tuned_Rockets I'm sorry, your right, I don't know if my last comment got deleted but I'm overreacting to ignorant people seeking to rip the lives of CoD fans apart when they've never personally touched the game.
"In spite of all you've done to me, I find you a pitiable man"
6:58
enhanced interrogation techniques ❌
interrogation roughhousing ✔
persuasive horseplay
Silly billy 20 questions.
physical inquery
emphasis questions
Rowdy Romper Rooming
"They get dirty, and gradually we forget that we ever valued being clean" is such a chilling quote
4:56 *THE NUMBERS, GELLER… WHAT DO THEY MEAN?*
Run Zork.
Those comments were creepy. It's worrying how many people think physically and psychologically wounding a tied prisoner is something "manly" or tough.
Ironic considering that in Berserk, Griffith's torturer is a scrawny and wretched creature rather than tough or manly.
They are just weak men who want to feel empowered by harming others.
Firstly: it was an absolute masterstroke to use Katana Zero's "Third District" as backing music for this particular analysis. As an avid enjoyer of Katana Zero, I think what may be forgotten in its progression is how interwoven the idea of "war is hell and hell is torture" can be in gaming culture. Katana Zero as a baseline endorses the idea of war veterans, child soldiers in particular, being "stained" and permanently violent because of their own associations with torture. They were tormented, and became stronger. Others are weak, falling prey or victim to the aggressive Chrono-flooded NULL.
Also the music is fucken great in that game. No notes.
Secondly. I really appreciate your attributions in the Spanish Inquisition and literary works which address it. A lot of "anti torture" literature, if one were being simplistic, tries to say that torture "never" works. It plays this moral game of asking why you would even think to consider that. Why would you want to hurt another person for information, gain, your own protection or the protection of others? is there something wrong and strange about you? Something broken?
The fact of the matter is: torture does sometimes work, but as you said, it is ineffective. Breaking a person is, functionally, just a way to make a whole being into a fragmented host. Torment, torture, violation of human rights in pursuit of saving the world, it is wrong to say that the world has not daydreamed about quick-dirty-easy fixes to all the worst problems. [Examples being that people discuss how we "know the names of all the richest people in the world, and where they live" as though it would be so simple. As if we could simply hurt the bad people who make money from big oil and that would fix everything.]
But on the flipside, if one accepts that torture is morally wrong, one must also accept that the "good" we have done via torture is also wrong. I think that's where people trip up. We almost want to justify what HAS happened, what we HAVE done, so we don't have to do the work of unpacking what we actually did to reach this point. In a way, a belief that one must have always been good. You cannot "become" good, you cannot be "redeemed" and have an informed opinion based on things like research.
No, you were either good and righteous, or you were always a bad person deep down. "Why would you think about hurting another person?" is the moral imposition made by people that think hurting people is justified when THEY do it. "Why would you want to be a violent person?" asks the institution that builds homes on stolen land and imprisons people for innocuous crimes to churn up a workforce. Well, sure, sometimes violence seems like the most applicable answer. To return fire is justified. Until that retort is somehow unconscionable and you are no longer "in the right" or whatever.
All-in-all. Fantastic video. I really enjoyed it and I'll be thinking about a lot of these points for a bit. More than I already do, I guess. Deepest condolences for your spreadsheet madness. Suppose I'll have to start watching some of your other stuff too!
"Do you enjoy hurting other people?"
I once read a manga that summed up torture pretty well.
It basically said that people will say anything to get the torture to stop.
@@talonhax8336 it's called World Trigger. Really underrated for how good it is. I really recommend it
See also: 24
The amount of torture in that show is astonishing.
Given the framing of the show, this is absolutely horrifying
The craziest part about the prevalence of torture in COD is that studies about using torture to obtain information from people consistently show that it doesn't work. This is because people being tortured will say anything the torturer wants to make it stop. Also, it they genuinely don't know the information in question, or they really don't want to give it up, they're apt to just make something up so the torture will end.
But what if you use the Joel method (The Last of Us)? The one of torturing two people at the same time in search of corroborating information, that seems a bit effective.
@@rafaelalodio5116 Why not simply question them instead? Tell them the first person to cooperate gets to leave earlier or gets a reward or something. Cut a deal.
@@rafaelalodio5116 Joel's method worked purely by luck. Had the first guy lied to him, Joel never would have found Ellie. It's a video game, just cause it happens in a game doesn't mean it'd work in real life.
Here in Argentina where I'm from, we had a series of military coups by the far right, which resulted in a dictatorship from 1976 to 1983, among other things. During this military government the use of torture was extremely common, and ever since hearing about this, I had always wondered "what kind of people, what kind of mindset one must have to become a torturer". The idea that someone works as causing pain, trauma, that they dedicate their expertise in this horrible field... how can someone choose to do this by their own free will...
As time went on, I found some answers to that question, some of which were pointed out in this very video, but still, the idea is still hard for me to fully grasp. And I guess good guy torturers who are rewarded by their actions is just another push in that direction making that decision just a lil bit easier...
I find it quite jarring that Disco Elysium's protagonist, an alcoholic and drug addict with literal conflicting voices in his head, usually uses more ethical methods of gaining information than these supposedly even-keeled soldiers (aside from the threat against the racist lorry driver, I suppose).
Harry just subscribes to their entire theory on race and has a mental breakdown about finding that one male suspect attractive.
Interesting fact: Alex Adams, the author of How To Justify Torture, is the brother of Transformers UA-camr Thew Adams.
Makes sense if true, have you ever tried to transform a Revenge of the fallen Mixmaster?
Is it weird that my first thought was "I hope Jacob covers Black Ops 1's numbers deprogramming, as well as all of its reiterations through that subseries"? Eh, probably. I played Black Ops at too young an age.
Anyway, I often wonder if torture is used as a shorthand for grit and edge, especially in the new MW trilogy, which constantly emphasises how 141 are largely anti-heroes and bad boys, with dark backstories perfect for yaoi roleplay. The torture becomes background noise, part of the set dressing, a means for us to know where we're going and who we're killing.
"bad boys, with dark back stories perfect for yaoi roleplay"
lmao that's spot on
@@PurePancakes113 There's a BIG Soap/Ghost yaoi community, like REALLY BIG.
@@ghosthand3737 That's what I was thinking of. It's kind of surprising how enduring that ship is. I remember seeing a yaoi doujin of that pairing from before the new trilogy, let alone before those characters were introduced. I could probably write for ages about the irony of it all
@@0uttaS1TEif you were to make a video essay on that I would watch the shit out of it
@@JuliaJulia-vh4xc Ah, as much as I'd want to do it, I have to admit, I'm an amateur. On top of that, I worry I won't do the topic justice. I'm interested in why that element of the fandom has become so prominent, especially in a community that has one foot perpetually in mid-2000s edge and prejudice, at least from the outside looking in. I also want to know if this has always been an aspect of the CoD community prior to MW'22. Because let's be real, from the OG Zombies crew, to Mason and Woods to even characters like Mitchell and Gideon in AW or Hendricks and the Player in BO3, a lot of CoD is ripe for that kind of shipping. So has anyone taken advantage of it, and if not, why not?
I don't want it to be "Oh, look at this, isn't this weird?" Because doing so not only is a disservice to the fans of that content within the CoD community, the fanartists and fanfic writers, it's a disservice to the games themselves. Because people don't ship out of boredom. These iterations of Soap and Ghost must have been doing something right for people to go this crazy for em
As the villains in Kojimas games state: Torture is a sport, a form of self-expression.
Kojima dead ass predicted memes being used as psyops
That's so true
What is popular with the young is the best psyop
Comics ww1
Cartoons in ww2
Movies In the called war
Now memes @@dannydanumba
@Based_Gigachad_001
- nooo, torture is a violation of human rights!
- haha, electric bondage wheel go brrrr