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wasnt that bad wasnt too funny but whatever im in the army if that matters
Anyone feel this way toward the Military? Vol.Bill Hicks
- Thread in 'General' Thread starter Started by still1rise,
- Start date
- 8,978
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- Feb 25, 2008
wasnt that bad wasnt too funny but whatever im in the army if that matters
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Just because you're in the military doesn't mean you're right or doing some positive.
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Just because you're in the military doesn't mean you're right or doing some positive.
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(Before reading; if you do not want to read to much, skip the last big chunk, which is mostly side commentary and is therefore post script, if you really do not like reading then please read the second chunk only, a summary of the first chunk. If you cannot read these instructions, consider paying attention in class and obtaining a fancy skill called literacy)
He is grossly misrepresenting what the US military and it is offensive to say that members of this Nation's all volunteer military are all dumb for choosing to volunteer.
Yes they do kill people, usually with extraordinary precision, in dirty places with extreme climates and/or topography and they are fighting an enemy that deliberately does all that he can in order to blend into the non combatant population, to blur the line between the two and to deceive goad US military personnel into killing some whom the Western media deems a noncombatant (in the Islamic world, the state run/dominated media services will call any kill, of any one, including bin Laden a murder of innocents) all so that people in Manhattan and Cambridge and Hollywood and Paris and elsewhere, where they believe that all wars are the result of Western greed/Imperialism or a lack of communication between the West and those who want to destroy it, can mock the best citizens that this country has.
I hate these prolonged occupations, they are unnecessary, wasteful, expensive and allows our military to be confronted indirectly and over a long period of time. In other words, we are fighting a asymmetrical war on terms that the terrorists love. We are a consensual society, not a perfect democracy by any means, but we are a society whose government is ultimately based on the consent of the governed. We, as the Western body politic in general and the American body politic in particular, have no patience or tolerance for long wars and for generally good reasons, long wars far away from home tend to benefits certain American elites but cost our society more than it can gain so we rationally oppose the long, overseas war and we demand a clear and coherent explanation of how the US military acting as the peace corp (who happen o carry weapons and happen to be fired upon the people to whom they are extending the charity of school, road, hospital and well building) for an open ended mission in the most corrupt, reactionary society on the planet is in the interest of ordinary Americans. Democracy has spread but it has largely been because people in Asia and Latin America and Africa and Eastern Europe have see Western affluence and when they are not hampered with religious chauvinism, as is the case in the Islamic dominated world, those formerly non Western or those societies on the periphery of the West in the past (Latin America and Eastern Europe) societies have, to varying degrees adopted or are in the process of adopting a free and consensual society of their own.
Even if the rest of the World, including most of the Islamic World become liberal Democracies and relatively free market, Afghanistan and Pakistan will likely be the final hold outs, they are horsemen from a culture where cooperation and fair play, rule of war, Hippocratic medicine, democracy, explaining natural phenomenon through reason and every Western idea that has gained some traction in many places, when in some Geographical edges of the Islamic World and among a Westernized minority in the Islamic World, all have the smallest likelihood to succeed and the ability for Western values to take root their have been diminished due to this Western occupation and the accidental deaths of civilians; the few soldiers, who snap or go rogue and commit the atrocities that will always exist, to some degree, in any war; the fact that we have to support Hamid Karzai, a hated and corrupt figure (Afghanistan has been rated as the most corrupt nation on planet Earth in multiple years) who skims off of his own ethnic group and out right extorts the other half, the minorities of the country and finally, we are in the position of vaporizing their opium poppies, the peasants' livelihood (and even as someone opposed to the war on drugs, given the US mission, we have to do that because the poppies fund the Taliban and give them money so they can buy AK's and the means to make IED's). Let it be the Taliban who rule with the ion fist and who exploit the peasants an rape their boys and their girls and enslave them and destroy their opium harvest and let them starve instead of allowing our soldiers and our country to be the bad guy.
Our military has now been charged with social work on a global scale and the best military in the World, the US military and its closest allies' forces cannot, within any less than 50 years install, at gun point a functioning democracy in the heart of the Hindu Kush, in a a country that is not regarded as nation by its inhabitanats, in a country where half of the people are Pashtun (the real life Dothdraki) and the other half are other horse tribes, dozens of ethnic groups, who live and die through thousands of years of stealing from each other.The things that I hate about the main objective, bring democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan is that it leads to a prolonged occupation. These often smart (The officers all have university education and many have post graduate degrees and they earned those degrees, the US militart has alarge budget but it does not buy doctorate for its officers like the parents of many on the coast, who hate the military, tend to do) and always brave men and women in uniform deserve better than to have to shovel up the giant mess that has been left by thousand of years of hatred and internal strife and foreign invasion
In summation, I am against these prolonged wars because our troops deserve either a better misssion or peace. They do not deserve to be placed in a situation that they were not designed to solve and that may prove to be a problem without a solution of any kind and certaintly not of a military nature. The killing of Usama bin Laden should be the blueprint for how the US will deal with Islamic Fascism moving forward, with precise and targeted killing and no invasions and occupations of entire countries.
The US military has the ability to strike with extreme precsion because they are smart and most of them, especially the officers are not only better educated but have a better understanding how the world works than comedians and most politicians. US military leaders may not be the most clever of people (by clever I mean the ability to play ith words wel land to make victory look like defeat and vise verse, the ablity to deliver biting quips, the ability to use law courts to advance the casues of an evil regime, the ability to craft a lovely image that is completely at odds with the facts ect.). Luckily, what they may lack in terms of bein gclever they make up with candor, the ability to make sober and judicious assesments of a situation and most importantly they are wise. Men and women who have seen Death and the consequences of failure or inatentaiveness or of simpe bad luck laying of waste the best laid plans will allow some to accrue wisdom that is far beyond that possesed by almost any one else in their age group, A year of front line combat is a lifetime of learning through experience, the toughest and one of the finest of teachers.
BTW, I have no objections to the Iraq, Afghan and Libyans wars because those wars it will enrage those, who already hate us and will always hate us simply for existing in the manner that we do, nor that these military adventures are branded as illegal based on completely irrelaven tand uneforcable inetrnational law, which is one of the most powerful weapons at the disposal of Eastern tyrants who can appeal to the ICC or the UN or the EU or another Eastern power like Pakistan or China or Iran or the Srab league (this is especially true when they want to slam Israel because the Arab league creates the apperance of mulilateralism, it would be as if the Fifty states of the USA got to have fifty seats at the UN General Assembly and could issue regular condomnation of bin Laden or of Chinese hUman rights abuses and make it look like 50 completely unique view points reached the same conclusion. The Arab polities around the World do not agree on a lot of things but they hate Israel just like how New York State and Alaska both would vote to condemn Usama bin Laden's acts on 9/11/2001 and at other times) or another Western power like France or Russia when it suits them and when international norms are to their detriment they ignore them, with nary an apology or explanation.
Also, this war really does show the cultural and geographic divide within the US regarding the military. Most of the enlisted men and officers are from the Interior of the Country, they have a tragic and constrained view of the world (also known as reality) and people on the coasts not only have no military service experience but no close relatives or any relatives or friends or anyone from their neighborhood nor do they even see a military based or a ship of war nor an aircraft of war or someone returning home in either a coffin or with his camouflage on or in his dress uniform. Clever comedians and pundits from the Pacific, Atlantic (the Northern part of it) and Great Lakes (especially Lake Michigan) coasts and those from neo hippy mountain towns and cities like Ojai, Ca and Denver, Co can poke fun at people who volunteer, knowing full well that they will incur some risk to their lives. It is not stupidity but rather a difference in World view.
Those who join the military are people whose civilian life tended to involve difficultly and hardship and tended to not involve hardship. Those who have such a low opinion of the military tend to be people who have a trust fund or at least enough affluence that they believe that the very notion that they are bad people is questionable while those who serve in the military come from farms or town that had their livelihoods taken suddenly and without any pity. Those who disdain the military tend to be those who, from their multimillion dollar estates in the Hills of West Los Angeles, after finishing a $500 Yoga class and before showering and going out to get a $100 per plate dinner and see a $200 ticket per show to see either some play a about quirky lesbians who try to run a bagel shop in Topanga Canyon Blvd. or some blow hard comedian who says that men and women act differently and that American soldiers are dumb (I am sure that he will curse a lot because there is such a heavy social and political taboo against people who curse at comedy clubs and on private, premium cable channels in the year 2011, how biting and bold that comedian's satire it was). Those who join tend to not live such a pampered existence and that there are harsh and painful consequences, they may have gotten beaten up in school because they had a stutter or their father might have lost his job and they had to sell their house and move into an apartment and share one of the two bedrooms with all of his brothers and sisters. Loses and damages are felt much less in the abstract by these working class Mid Western and Southern citizen soldiers.
When you come from such different Worlds, when you have a an HS education only, you have not learned the art being a sophist and for most of the officers, they get their bachelors degrees in math and science where being clever is not the same thing as getting the problem right, either that or they have studied history and see how easily societies can perish from internal and external threats, how countries that thought that they were secure find themselves over run and they women raped, their children made into slaves and they murdered and in many cases murdered and tortured to death.
Our friends in NYC and LA and DC might even lament that their is no Taliban Army and no vast nuclear stocks and therefore no MADD (Mutually Assured Destruction which probably sparred the World a Third great World War because as authoritarian as the USSR was, it was from the Western tradition, somewhat and they did value their own lives that they were not willing to risk Armageddon in order to do what they though would happen by osmosis, workers in Western Democracies demanding bigger and bigger government) from them unlike the good old days of that Soviet Superpower. Oddly enough though, while those same people, who believed that the Soviet state was superior socially, politically, economically and militarily also thought it was crazy, irrational and a latter day witch hunt (and of course, the period in the late 1940's through the 1950's when Communism within positions of influence in American foreign policy was literally likened to a witch hunt in The Crucible, and it has become, along with arguing over the BCS system and considering but ultimately not frying the Thanksgiving Turkey, a ritual of autumn and right of passage for wealthy coastal teens to, from the grand perch of hind sight and security, smirk at conservatives and at the multitude of people of both political parties, post WW2, who investigated the Communist presence in the State department and elsewhere in the journalistic and scientific communities during a very perilous and uncertain time in our history, but I digress and that is why I but this is at the end as a post script.
He is grossly misrepresenting what the US military and it is offensive to say that members of this Nation's all volunteer military are all dumb for choosing to volunteer.
Yes they do kill people, usually with extraordinary precision, in dirty places with extreme climates and/or topography and they are fighting an enemy that deliberately does all that he can in order to blend into the non combatant population, to blur the line between the two and to deceive goad US military personnel into killing some whom the Western media deems a noncombatant (in the Islamic world, the state run/dominated media services will call any kill, of any one, including bin Laden a murder of innocents) all so that people in Manhattan and Cambridge and Hollywood and Paris and elsewhere, where they believe that all wars are the result of Western greed/Imperialism or a lack of communication between the West and those who want to destroy it, can mock the best citizens that this country has.
I hate these prolonged occupations, they are unnecessary, wasteful, expensive and allows our military to be confronted indirectly and over a long period of time. In other words, we are fighting a asymmetrical war on terms that the terrorists love. We are a consensual society, not a perfect democracy by any means, but we are a society whose government is ultimately based on the consent of the governed. We, as the Western body politic in general and the American body politic in particular, have no patience or tolerance for long wars and for generally good reasons, long wars far away from home tend to benefits certain American elites but cost our society more than it can gain so we rationally oppose the long, overseas war and we demand a clear and coherent explanation of how the US military acting as the peace corp (who happen o carry weapons and happen to be fired upon the people to whom they are extending the charity of school, road, hospital and well building) for an open ended mission in the most corrupt, reactionary society on the planet is in the interest of ordinary Americans. Democracy has spread but it has largely been because people in Asia and Latin America and Africa and Eastern Europe have see Western affluence and when they are not hampered with religious chauvinism, as is the case in the Islamic dominated world, those formerly non Western or those societies on the periphery of the West in the past (Latin America and Eastern Europe) societies have, to varying degrees adopted or are in the process of adopting a free and consensual society of their own.
Even if the rest of the World, including most of the Islamic World become liberal Democracies and relatively free market, Afghanistan and Pakistan will likely be the final hold outs, they are horsemen from a culture where cooperation and fair play, rule of war, Hippocratic medicine, democracy, explaining natural phenomenon through reason and every Western idea that has gained some traction in many places, when in some Geographical edges of the Islamic World and among a Westernized minority in the Islamic World, all have the smallest likelihood to succeed and the ability for Western values to take root their have been diminished due to this Western occupation and the accidental deaths of civilians; the few soldiers, who snap or go rogue and commit the atrocities that will always exist, to some degree, in any war; the fact that we have to support Hamid Karzai, a hated and corrupt figure (Afghanistan has been rated as the most corrupt nation on planet Earth in multiple years) who skims off of his own ethnic group and out right extorts the other half, the minorities of the country and finally, we are in the position of vaporizing their opium poppies, the peasants' livelihood (and even as someone opposed to the war on drugs, given the US mission, we have to do that because the poppies fund the Taliban and give them money so they can buy AK's and the means to make IED's). Let it be the Taliban who rule with the ion fist and who exploit the peasants an rape their boys and their girls and enslave them and destroy their opium harvest and let them starve instead of allowing our soldiers and our country to be the bad guy.
Our military has now been charged with social work on a global scale and the best military in the World, the US military and its closest allies' forces cannot, within any less than 50 years install, at gun point a functioning democracy in the heart of the Hindu Kush, in a a country that is not regarded as nation by its inhabitanats, in a country where half of the people are Pashtun (the real life Dothdraki) and the other half are other horse tribes, dozens of ethnic groups, who live and die through thousands of years of stealing from each other.The things that I hate about the main objective, bring democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan is that it leads to a prolonged occupation. These often smart (The officers all have university education and many have post graduate degrees and they earned those degrees, the US militart has alarge budget but it does not buy doctorate for its officers like the parents of many on the coast, who hate the military, tend to do) and always brave men and women in uniform deserve better than to have to shovel up the giant mess that has been left by thousand of years of hatred and internal strife and foreign invasion
In summation, I am against these prolonged wars because our troops deserve either a better misssion or peace. They do not deserve to be placed in a situation that they were not designed to solve and that may prove to be a problem without a solution of any kind and certaintly not of a military nature. The killing of Usama bin Laden should be the blueprint for how the US will deal with Islamic Fascism moving forward, with precise and targeted killing and no invasions and occupations of entire countries.
The US military has the ability to strike with extreme precsion because they are smart and most of them, especially the officers are not only better educated but have a better understanding how the world works than comedians and most politicians. US military leaders may not be the most clever of people (by clever I mean the ability to play ith words wel land to make victory look like defeat and vise verse, the ablity to deliver biting quips, the ability to use law courts to advance the casues of an evil regime, the ability to craft a lovely image that is completely at odds with the facts ect.). Luckily, what they may lack in terms of bein gclever they make up with candor, the ability to make sober and judicious assesments of a situation and most importantly they are wise. Men and women who have seen Death and the consequences of failure or inatentaiveness or of simpe bad luck laying of waste the best laid plans will allow some to accrue wisdom that is far beyond that possesed by almost any one else in their age group, A year of front line combat is a lifetime of learning through experience, the toughest and one of the finest of teachers.
BTW, I have no objections to the Iraq, Afghan and Libyans wars because those wars it will enrage those, who already hate us and will always hate us simply for existing in the manner that we do, nor that these military adventures are branded as illegal based on completely irrelaven tand uneforcable inetrnational law, which is one of the most powerful weapons at the disposal of Eastern tyrants who can appeal to the ICC or the UN or the EU or another Eastern power like Pakistan or China or Iran or the Srab league (this is especially true when they want to slam Israel because the Arab league creates the apperance of mulilateralism, it would be as if the Fifty states of the USA got to have fifty seats at the UN General Assembly and could issue regular condomnation of bin Laden or of Chinese hUman rights abuses and make it look like 50 completely unique view points reached the same conclusion. The Arab polities around the World do not agree on a lot of things but they hate Israel just like how New York State and Alaska both would vote to condemn Usama bin Laden's acts on 9/11/2001 and at other times) or another Western power like France or Russia when it suits them and when international norms are to their detriment they ignore them, with nary an apology or explanation.
Also, this war really does show the cultural and geographic divide within the US regarding the military. Most of the enlisted men and officers are from the Interior of the Country, they have a tragic and constrained view of the world (also known as reality) and people on the coasts not only have no military service experience but no close relatives or any relatives or friends or anyone from their neighborhood nor do they even see a military based or a ship of war nor an aircraft of war or someone returning home in either a coffin or with his camouflage on or in his dress uniform. Clever comedians and pundits from the Pacific, Atlantic (the Northern part of it) and Great Lakes (especially Lake Michigan) coasts and those from neo hippy mountain towns and cities like Ojai, Ca and Denver, Co can poke fun at people who volunteer, knowing full well that they will incur some risk to their lives. It is not stupidity but rather a difference in World view.
Those who join the military are people whose civilian life tended to involve difficultly and hardship and tended to not involve hardship. Those who have such a low opinion of the military tend to be people who have a trust fund or at least enough affluence that they believe that the very notion that they are bad people is questionable while those who serve in the military come from farms or town that had their livelihoods taken suddenly and without any pity. Those who disdain the military tend to be those who, from their multimillion dollar estates in the Hills of West Los Angeles, after finishing a $500 Yoga class and before showering and going out to get a $100 per plate dinner and see a $200 ticket per show to see either some play a about quirky lesbians who try to run a bagel shop in Topanga Canyon Blvd. or some blow hard comedian who says that men and women act differently and that American soldiers are dumb (I am sure that he will curse a lot because there is such a heavy social and political taboo against people who curse at comedy clubs and on private, premium cable channels in the year 2011, how biting and bold that comedian's satire it was). Those who join tend to not live such a pampered existence and that there are harsh and painful consequences, they may have gotten beaten up in school because they had a stutter or their father might have lost his job and they had to sell their house and move into an apartment and share one of the two bedrooms with all of his brothers and sisters. Loses and damages are felt much less in the abstract by these working class Mid Western and Southern citizen soldiers.
When you come from such different Worlds, when you have a an HS education only, you have not learned the art being a sophist and for most of the officers, they get their bachelors degrees in math and science where being clever is not the same thing as getting the problem right, either that or they have studied history and see how easily societies can perish from internal and external threats, how countries that thought that they were secure find themselves over run and they women raped, their children made into slaves and they murdered and in many cases murdered and tortured to death.
Our friends in NYC and LA and DC might even lament that their is no Taliban Army and no vast nuclear stocks and therefore no MADD (Mutually Assured Destruction which probably sparred the World a Third great World War because as authoritarian as the USSR was, it was from the Western tradition, somewhat and they did value their own lives that they were not willing to risk Armageddon in order to do what they though would happen by osmosis, workers in Western Democracies demanding bigger and bigger government) from them unlike the good old days of that Soviet Superpower. Oddly enough though, while those same people, who believed that the Soviet state was superior socially, politically, economically and militarily also thought it was crazy, irrational and a latter day witch hunt (and of course, the period in the late 1940's through the 1950's when Communism within positions of influence in American foreign policy was literally likened to a witch hunt in The Crucible, and it has become, along with arguing over the BCS system and considering but ultimately not frying the Thanksgiving Turkey, a ritual of autumn and right of passage for wealthy coastal teens to, from the grand perch of hind sight and security, smirk at conservatives and at the multitude of people of both political parties, post WW2, who investigated the Communist presence in the State department and elsewhere in the journalistic and scientific communities during a very perilous and uncertain time in our history, but I digress and that is why I but this is at the end as a post script.
- 6,835
- 16,632
- Joined
- Jun 28, 2004
(Before reading; if you do not want to read to much, skip the last big chunk, which is mostly side commentary and is therefore post script, if you really do not like reading then please read the second chunk only, a summary of the first chunk. If you cannot read these instructions, consider paying attention in class and obtaining a fancy skill called literacy)
He is grossly misrepresenting what the US military and it is offensive to say that members of this Nation's all volunteer military are all dumb for choosing to volunteer.
Yes they do kill people, usually with extraordinary precision, in dirty places with extreme climates and/or topography and they are fighting an enemy that deliberately does all that he can in order to blend into the non combatant population, to blur the line between the two and to deceive goad US military personnel into killing some whom the Western media deems a noncombatant (in the Islamic world, the state run/dominated media services will call any kill, of any one, including bin Laden a murder of innocents) all so that people in Manhattan and Cambridge and Hollywood and Paris and elsewhere, where they believe that all wars are the result of Western greed/Imperialism or a lack of communication between the West and those who want to destroy it, can mock the best citizens that this country has.
I hate these prolonged occupations, they are unnecessary, wasteful, expensive and allows our military to be confronted indirectly and over a long period of time. In other words, we are fighting a asymmetrical war on terms that the terrorists love. We are a consensual society, not a perfect democracy by any means, but we are a society whose government is ultimately based on the consent of the governed. We, as the Western body politic in general and the American body politic in particular, have no patience or tolerance for long wars and for generally good reasons, long wars far away from home tend to benefits certain American elites but cost our society more than it can gain so we rationally oppose the long, overseas war and we demand a clear and coherent explanation of how the US military acting as the peace corp (who happen o carry weapons and happen to be fired upon the people to whom they are extending the charity of school, road, hospital and well building) for an open ended mission in the most corrupt, reactionary society on the planet is in the interest of ordinary Americans. Democracy has spread but it has largely been because people in Asia and Latin America and Africa and Eastern Europe have see Western affluence and when they are not hampered with religious chauvinism, as is the case in the Islamic dominated world, those formerly non Western or those societies on the periphery of the West in the past (Latin America and Eastern Europe) societies have, to varying degrees adopted or are in the process of adopting a free and consensual society of their own.
Even if the rest of the World, including most of the Islamic World become liberal Democracies and relatively free market, Afghanistan and Pakistan will likely be the final hold outs, they are horsemen from a culture where cooperation and fair play, rule of war, Hippocratic medicine, democracy, explaining natural phenomenon through reason and every Western idea that has gained some traction in many places, when in some Geographical edges of the Islamic World and among a Westernized minority in the Islamic World, all have the smallest likelihood to succeed and the ability for Western values to take root their have been diminished due to this Western occupation and the accidental deaths of civilians; the few soldiers, who snap or go rogue and commit the atrocities that will always exist, to some degree, in any war; the fact that we have to support Hamid Karzai, a hated and corrupt figure (Afghanistan has been rated as the most corrupt nation on planet Earth in multiple years) who skims off of his own ethnic group and out right extorts the other half, the minorities of the country and finally, we are in the position of vaporizing their opium poppies, the peasants' livelihood (and even as someone opposed to the war on drugs, given the US mission, we have to do that because the poppies fund the Taliban and give them money so they can buy AK's and the means to make IED's). Let it be the Taliban who rule with the ion fist and who exploit the peasants an rape their boys and their girls and enslave them and destroy their opium harvest and let them starve instead of allowing our soldiers and our country to be the bad guy.
Our military has now been charged with social work on a global scale and the best military in the World, the US military and its closest allies' forces cannot, within any less than 50 years install, at gun point a functioning democracy in the heart of the Hindu Kush, in a a country that is not regarded as nation by its inhabitanats, in a country where half of the people are Pashtun (the real life Dothdraki) and the other half are other horse tribes, dozens of ethnic groups, who live and die through thousands of years of stealing from each other.The things that I hate about the main objective, bring democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan is that it leads to a prolonged occupation. These often smart (The officers all have university education and many have post graduate degrees and they earned those degrees, the US militart has alarge budget but it does not buy doctorate for its officers like the parents of many on the coast, who hate the military, tend to do) and always brave men and women in uniform deserve better than to have to shovel up the giant mess that has been left by thousand of years of hatred and internal strife and foreign invasion
In summation, I am against these prolonged wars because our troops deserve either a better misssion or peace. They do not deserve to be placed in a situation that they were not designed to solve and that may prove to be a problem without a solution of any kind and certaintly not of a military nature. The killing of Usama bin Laden should be the blueprint for how the US will deal with Islamic Fascism moving forward, with precise and targeted killing and no invasions and occupations of entire countries.
The US military has the ability to strike with extreme precsion because they are smart and most of them, especially the officers are not only better educated but have a better understanding how the world works than comedians and most politicians. US military leaders may not be the most clever of people (by clever I mean the ability to play ith words wel land to make victory look like defeat and vise verse, the ablity to deliver biting quips, the ability to use law courts to advance the casues of an evil regime, the ability to craft a lovely image that is completely at odds with the facts ect.). Luckily, what they may lack in terms of bein gclever they make up with candor, the ability to make sober and judicious assesments of a situation and most importantly they are wise. Men and women who have seen Death and the consequences of failure or inatentaiveness or of simpe bad luck laying of waste the best laid plans will allow some to accrue wisdom that is far beyond that possesed by almost any one else in their age group, A year of front line combat is a lifetime of learning through experience, the toughest and one of the finest of teachers.
BTW, I have no objections to the Iraq, Afghan and Libyans wars because those wars it will enrage those, who already hate us and will always hate us simply for existing in the manner that we do, nor that these military adventures are branded as illegal based on completely irrelaven tand uneforcable inetrnational law, which is one of the most powerful weapons at the disposal of Eastern tyrants who can appeal to the ICC or the UN or the EU or another Eastern power like Pakistan or China or Iran or the Srab league (this is especially true when they want to slam Israel because the Arab league creates the apperance of mulilateralism, it would be as if the Fifty states of the USA got to have fifty seats at the UN General Assembly and could issue regular condomnation of bin Laden or of Chinese hUman rights abuses and make it look like 50 completely unique view points reached the same conclusion. The Arab polities around the World do not agree on a lot of things but they hate Israel just like how New York State and Alaska both would vote to condemn Usama bin Laden's acts on 9/11/2001 and at other times) or another Western power like France or Russia when it suits them and when international norms are to their detriment they ignore them, with nary an apology or explanation.
Also, this war really does show the cultural and geographic divide within the US regarding the military. Most of the enlisted men and officers are from the Interior of the Country, they have a tragic and constrained view of the world (also known as reality) and people on the coasts not only have no military service experience but no close relatives or any relatives or friends or anyone from their neighborhood nor do they even see a military based or a ship of war nor an aircraft of war or someone returning home in either a coffin or with his camouflage on or in his dress uniform. Clever comedians and pundits from the Pacific, Atlantic (the Northern part of it) and Great Lakes (especially Lake Michigan) coasts and those from neo hippy mountain towns and cities like Ojai, Ca and Denver, Co can poke fun at people who volunteer, knowing full well that they will incur some risk to their lives. It is not stupidity but rather a difference in World view.
Those who join the military are people whose civilian life tended to involve difficultly and hardship and tended to not involve hardship. Those who have such a low opinion of the military tend to be people who have a trust fund or at least enough affluence that they believe that the very notion that they are bad people is questionable while those who serve in the military come from farms or town that had their livelihoods taken suddenly and without any pity. Those who disdain the military tend to be those who, from their multimillion dollar estates in the Hills of West Los Angeles, after finishing a $500 Yoga class and before showering and going out to get a $100 per plate dinner and see a $200 ticket per show to see either some play a about quirky lesbians who try to run a bagel shop in Topanga Canyon Blvd. or some blow hard comedian who says that men and women act differently and that American soldiers are dumb (I am sure that he will curse a lot because there is such a heavy social and political taboo against people who curse at comedy clubs and on private, premium cable channels in the year 2011, how biting and bold that comedian's satire it was). Those who join tend to not live such a pampered existence and that there are harsh and painful consequences, they may have gotten beaten up in school because they had a stutter or their father might have lost his job and they had to sell their house and move into an apartment and share one of the two bedrooms with all of his brothers and sisters. Loses and damages are felt much less in the abstract by these working class Mid Western and Southern citizen soldiers.
When you come from such different Worlds, when you have a an HS education only, you have not learned the art being a sophist and for most of the officers, they get their bachelors degrees in math and science where being clever is not the same thing as getting the problem right, either that or they have studied history and see how easily societies can perish from internal and external threats, how countries that thought that they were secure find themselves over run and they women raped, their children made into slaves and they murdered and in many cases murdered and tortured to death.
Our friends in NYC and LA and DC might even lament that their is no Taliban Army and no vast nuclear stocks and therefore no MADD (Mutually Assured Destruction which probably sparred the World a Third great World War because as authoritarian as the USSR was, it was from the Western tradition, somewhat and they did value their own lives that they were not willing to risk Armageddon in order to do what they though would happen by osmosis, workers in Western Democracies demanding bigger and bigger government) from them unlike the good old days of that Soviet Superpower. Oddly enough though, while those same people, who believed that the Soviet state was superior socially, politically, economically and militarily also thought it was crazy, irrational and a latter day witch hunt (and of course, the period in the late 1940's through the 1950's when Communism within positions of influence in American foreign policy was literally likened to a witch hunt in The Crucible, and it has become, along with arguing over the BCS system and considering but ultimately not frying the Thanksgiving Turkey, a ritual of autumn and right of passage for wealthy coastal teens to, from the grand perch of hind sight and security, smirk at conservatives and at the multitude of people of both political parties, post WW2, who investigated the Communist presence in the State department and elsewhere in the journalistic and scientific communities during a very perilous and uncertain time in our history, but I digress and that is why I but this is at the end as a post script.
He is grossly misrepresenting what the US military and it is offensive to say that members of this Nation's all volunteer military are all dumb for choosing to volunteer.
Yes they do kill people, usually with extraordinary precision, in dirty places with extreme climates and/or topography and they are fighting an enemy that deliberately does all that he can in order to blend into the non combatant population, to blur the line between the two and to deceive goad US military personnel into killing some whom the Western media deems a noncombatant (in the Islamic world, the state run/dominated media services will call any kill, of any one, including bin Laden a murder of innocents) all so that people in Manhattan and Cambridge and Hollywood and Paris and elsewhere, where they believe that all wars are the result of Western greed/Imperialism or a lack of communication between the West and those who want to destroy it, can mock the best citizens that this country has.
I hate these prolonged occupations, they are unnecessary, wasteful, expensive and allows our military to be confronted indirectly and over a long period of time. In other words, we are fighting a asymmetrical war on terms that the terrorists love. We are a consensual society, not a perfect democracy by any means, but we are a society whose government is ultimately based on the consent of the governed. We, as the Western body politic in general and the American body politic in particular, have no patience or tolerance for long wars and for generally good reasons, long wars far away from home tend to benefits certain American elites but cost our society more than it can gain so we rationally oppose the long, overseas war and we demand a clear and coherent explanation of how the US military acting as the peace corp (who happen o carry weapons and happen to be fired upon the people to whom they are extending the charity of school, road, hospital and well building) for an open ended mission in the most corrupt, reactionary society on the planet is in the interest of ordinary Americans. Democracy has spread but it has largely been because people in Asia and Latin America and Africa and Eastern Europe have see Western affluence and when they are not hampered with religious chauvinism, as is the case in the Islamic dominated world, those formerly non Western or those societies on the periphery of the West in the past (Latin America and Eastern Europe) societies have, to varying degrees adopted or are in the process of adopting a free and consensual society of their own.
Even if the rest of the World, including most of the Islamic World become liberal Democracies and relatively free market, Afghanistan and Pakistan will likely be the final hold outs, they are horsemen from a culture where cooperation and fair play, rule of war, Hippocratic medicine, democracy, explaining natural phenomenon through reason and every Western idea that has gained some traction in many places, when in some Geographical edges of the Islamic World and among a Westernized minority in the Islamic World, all have the smallest likelihood to succeed and the ability for Western values to take root their have been diminished due to this Western occupation and the accidental deaths of civilians; the few soldiers, who snap or go rogue and commit the atrocities that will always exist, to some degree, in any war; the fact that we have to support Hamid Karzai, a hated and corrupt figure (Afghanistan has been rated as the most corrupt nation on planet Earth in multiple years) who skims off of his own ethnic group and out right extorts the other half, the minorities of the country and finally, we are in the position of vaporizing their opium poppies, the peasants' livelihood (and even as someone opposed to the war on drugs, given the US mission, we have to do that because the poppies fund the Taliban and give them money so they can buy AK's and the means to make IED's). Let it be the Taliban who rule with the ion fist and who exploit the peasants an rape their boys and their girls and enslave them and destroy their opium harvest and let them starve instead of allowing our soldiers and our country to be the bad guy.
Our military has now been charged with social work on a global scale and the best military in the World, the US military and its closest allies' forces cannot, within any less than 50 years install, at gun point a functioning democracy in the heart of the Hindu Kush, in a a country that is not regarded as nation by its inhabitanats, in a country where half of the people are Pashtun (the real life Dothdraki) and the other half are other horse tribes, dozens of ethnic groups, who live and die through thousands of years of stealing from each other.The things that I hate about the main objective, bring democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan is that it leads to a prolonged occupation. These often smart (The officers all have university education and many have post graduate degrees and they earned those degrees, the US militart has alarge budget but it does not buy doctorate for its officers like the parents of many on the coast, who hate the military, tend to do) and always brave men and women in uniform deserve better than to have to shovel up the giant mess that has been left by thousand of years of hatred and internal strife and foreign invasion
In summation, I am against these prolonged wars because our troops deserve either a better misssion or peace. They do not deserve to be placed in a situation that they were not designed to solve and that may prove to be a problem without a solution of any kind and certaintly not of a military nature. The killing of Usama bin Laden should be the blueprint for how the US will deal with Islamic Fascism moving forward, with precise and targeted killing and no invasions and occupations of entire countries.
The US military has the ability to strike with extreme precsion because they are smart and most of them, especially the officers are not only better educated but have a better understanding how the world works than comedians and most politicians. US military leaders may not be the most clever of people (by clever I mean the ability to play ith words wel land to make victory look like defeat and vise verse, the ablity to deliver biting quips, the ability to use law courts to advance the casues of an evil regime, the ability to craft a lovely image that is completely at odds with the facts ect.). Luckily, what they may lack in terms of bein gclever they make up with candor, the ability to make sober and judicious assesments of a situation and most importantly they are wise. Men and women who have seen Death and the consequences of failure or inatentaiveness or of simpe bad luck laying of waste the best laid plans will allow some to accrue wisdom that is far beyond that possesed by almost any one else in their age group, A year of front line combat is a lifetime of learning through experience, the toughest and one of the finest of teachers.
BTW, I have no objections to the Iraq, Afghan and Libyans wars because those wars it will enrage those, who already hate us and will always hate us simply for existing in the manner that we do, nor that these military adventures are branded as illegal based on completely irrelaven tand uneforcable inetrnational law, which is one of the most powerful weapons at the disposal of Eastern tyrants who can appeal to the ICC or the UN or the EU or another Eastern power like Pakistan or China or Iran or the Srab league (this is especially true when they want to slam Israel because the Arab league creates the apperance of mulilateralism, it would be as if the Fifty states of the USA got to have fifty seats at the UN General Assembly and could issue regular condomnation of bin Laden or of Chinese hUman rights abuses and make it look like 50 completely unique view points reached the same conclusion. The Arab polities around the World do not agree on a lot of things but they hate Israel just like how New York State and Alaska both would vote to condemn Usama bin Laden's acts on 9/11/2001 and at other times) or another Western power like France or Russia when it suits them and when international norms are to their detriment they ignore them, with nary an apology or explanation.
Also, this war really does show the cultural and geographic divide within the US regarding the military. Most of the enlisted men and officers are from the Interior of the Country, they have a tragic and constrained view of the world (also known as reality) and people on the coasts not only have no military service experience but no close relatives or any relatives or friends or anyone from their neighborhood nor do they even see a military based or a ship of war nor an aircraft of war or someone returning home in either a coffin or with his camouflage on or in his dress uniform. Clever comedians and pundits from the Pacific, Atlantic (the Northern part of it) and Great Lakes (especially Lake Michigan) coasts and those from neo hippy mountain towns and cities like Ojai, Ca and Denver, Co can poke fun at people who volunteer, knowing full well that they will incur some risk to their lives. It is not stupidity but rather a difference in World view.
Those who join the military are people whose civilian life tended to involve difficultly and hardship and tended to not involve hardship. Those who have such a low opinion of the military tend to be people who have a trust fund or at least enough affluence that they believe that the very notion that they are bad people is questionable while those who serve in the military come from farms or town that had their livelihoods taken suddenly and without any pity. Those who disdain the military tend to be those who, from their multimillion dollar estates in the Hills of West Los Angeles, after finishing a $500 Yoga class and before showering and going out to get a $100 per plate dinner and see a $200 ticket per show to see either some play a about quirky lesbians who try to run a bagel shop in Topanga Canyon Blvd. or some blow hard comedian who says that men and women act differently and that American soldiers are dumb (I am sure that he will curse a lot because there is such a heavy social and political taboo against people who curse at comedy clubs and on private, premium cable channels in the year 2011, how biting and bold that comedian's satire it was). Those who join tend to not live such a pampered existence and that there are harsh and painful consequences, they may have gotten beaten up in school because they had a stutter or their father might have lost his job and they had to sell their house and move into an apartment and share one of the two bedrooms with all of his brothers and sisters. Loses and damages are felt much less in the abstract by these working class Mid Western and Southern citizen soldiers.
When you come from such different Worlds, when you have a an HS education only, you have not learned the art being a sophist and for most of the officers, they get their bachelors degrees in math and science where being clever is not the same thing as getting the problem right, either that or they have studied history and see how easily societies can perish from internal and external threats, how countries that thought that they were secure find themselves over run and they women raped, their children made into slaves and they murdered and in many cases murdered and tortured to death.
Our friends in NYC and LA and DC might even lament that their is no Taliban Army and no vast nuclear stocks and therefore no MADD (Mutually Assured Destruction which probably sparred the World a Third great World War because as authoritarian as the USSR was, it was from the Western tradition, somewhat and they did value their own lives that they were not willing to risk Armageddon in order to do what they though would happen by osmosis, workers in Western Democracies demanding bigger and bigger government) from them unlike the good old days of that Soviet Superpower. Oddly enough though, while those same people, who believed that the Soviet state was superior socially, politically, economically and militarily also thought it was crazy, irrational and a latter day witch hunt (and of course, the period in the late 1940's through the 1950's when Communism within positions of influence in American foreign policy was literally likened to a witch hunt in The Crucible, and it has become, along with arguing over the BCS system and considering but ultimately not frying the Thanksgiving Turkey, a ritual of autumn and right of passage for wealthy coastal teens to, from the grand perch of hind sight and security, smirk at conservatives and at the multitude of people of both political parties, post WW2, who investigated the Communist presence in the State department and elsewhere in the journalistic and scientific communities during a very perilous and uncertain time in our history, but I digress and that is why I but this is at the end as a post script.
b smooth 202
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SMH^
Look at me, I can type big long paragraphs with big words! (without a drop of substance)
All you ever do is defend the deflated/defeated status quo of the western world with your meticulous jargon.
See how he talks about these people?
Why don't you talk about youself and why you type your essays on NT to protect your own views? What would those people say about your lifestyle and upbringing and how they reflect your views Mr "Economist"? Keep in mind I don't apply to any of those things in that paragraph either.
So unless your grandfather and father did 20+ serving this country you can't tell me %$#%.
You keep referring to liberals as war dodgers, but what about the cowards who make these policies and send the middle class and lower classes to fight for their class interests
It really is simple. That's why your over-complicated passages piss me off as they only serve to confuse people while reminding yourself that you aren't in the same position as us. For now at least.
Look at me, I can type big long paragraphs with big words! (without a drop of substance)
All you ever do is defend the deflated/defeated status quo of the western world with your meticulous jargon.
See how he talks about these people?
Why don't you talk about youself and why you type your essays on NT to protect your own views? What would those people say about your lifestyle and upbringing and how they reflect your views Mr "Economist"? Keep in mind I don't apply to any of those things in that paragraph either.
So unless your grandfather and father did 20+ serving this country you can't tell me %$#%.
You keep referring to liberals as war dodgers, but what about the cowards who make these policies and send the middle class and lower classes to fight for their class interests
It really is simple. That's why your over-complicated passages piss me off as they only serve to confuse people while reminding yourself that you aren't in the same position as us. For now at least.
b smooth 202
Banned
- 10,295
- 106
- Joined
- Dec 21, 2004
SMH^
Look at me, I can type big long paragraphs with big words! (without a drop of substance)
All you ever do is defend the deflated/defeated status quo of the western world with your meticulous jargon.
See how he talks about these people?
Why don't you talk about youself and why you type your essays on NT to protect your own views? What would those people say about your lifestyle and upbringing and how they reflect your views Mr "Economist"? Keep in mind I don't apply to any of those things in that paragraph either.
So unless your grandfather and father did 20+ serving this country you can't tell me %$#%.
You keep referring to liberals as war dodgers, but what about the cowards who make these policies and send the middle class and lower classes to fight for their class interests
It really is simple. That's why your over-complicated passages piss me off as they only serve to confuse people while reminding yourself that you aren't in the same position as us. For now at least.
Look at me, I can type big long paragraphs with big words! (without a drop of substance)
All you ever do is defend the deflated/defeated status quo of the western world with your meticulous jargon.
See how he talks about these people?
Why don't you talk about youself and why you type your essays on NT to protect your own views? What would those people say about your lifestyle and upbringing and how they reflect your views Mr "Economist"? Keep in mind I don't apply to any of those things in that paragraph either.
So unless your grandfather and father did 20+ serving this country you can't tell me %$#%.
You keep referring to liberals as war dodgers, but what about the cowards who make these policies and send the middle class and lower classes to fight for their class interests
It really is simple. That's why your over-complicated passages piss me off as they only serve to confuse people while reminding yourself that you aren't in the same position as us. For now at least.
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Gill Baka Esq. LLC.
formerly grimlock
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Gill Baka Esq. LLC.
formerly grimlock
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cedric ceballos 1995 lakers
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i'll say it to this day, you gotta take the good with the bad when it comes to freedom of speech. freedom of speech gives you the right to say stupid stuff, but 9 out of 10 times that stupid stuff will be taken like a joke. i could go ahead and tell someone i hope their mom dies of breast cancer because i have the freedom of speech to do so, but it's still a foul, horrible thing to say, and i would deserve to get my face punched in for saying it.
it is what it is with the military though, even if you disagree with the war in iraq and war on terror, you should at least respect the decision these dudes and females made to join the service. some of them are there for the money some of them are there because in their eyes their serving the country, at the end of the day they made the decision to enlist.
at the end of the day if the U.S had a minimal or much smaller military, dudes would eventually try to attack the country more if the military was small or weak. weak countries get taken over all the time, that's just how the world works.
it is what it is with the military though, even if you disagree with the war in iraq and war on terror, you should at least respect the decision these dudes and females made to join the service. some of them are there for the money some of them are there because in their eyes their serving the country, at the end of the day they made the decision to enlist.
at the end of the day if the U.S had a minimal or much smaller military, dudes would eventually try to attack the country more if the military was small or weak. weak countries get taken over all the time, that's just how the world works.
cedric ceballos 1995 lakers
Banned
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- Jul 1, 2009
i'll say it to this day, you gotta take the good with the bad when it comes to freedom of speech. freedom of speech gives you the right to say stupid stuff, but 9 out of 10 times that stupid stuff will be taken like a joke. i could go ahead and tell someone i hope their mom dies of breast cancer because i have the freedom of speech to do so, but it's still a foul, horrible thing to say, and i would deserve to get my face punched in for saying it.
it is what it is with the military though, even if you disagree with the war in iraq and war on terror, you should at least respect the decision these dudes and females made to join the service. some of them are there for the money some of them are there because in their eyes their serving the country, at the end of the day they made the decision to enlist.
at the end of the day if the U.S had a minimal or much smaller military, dudes would eventually try to attack the country more if the military was small or weak. weak countries get taken over all the time, that's just how the world works.
it is what it is with the military though, even if you disagree with the war in iraq and war on terror, you should at least respect the decision these dudes and females made to join the service. some of them are there for the money some of them are there because in their eyes their serving the country, at the end of the day they made the decision to enlist.
at the end of the day if the U.S had a minimal or much smaller military, dudes would eventually try to attack the country more if the military was small or weak. weak countries get taken over all the time, that's just how the world works.
james earl zones
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Originally Posted by rashi
Soldiers fight for our freedom?
This always confuses me. My freedoms were at less of a risk before these recent "wars".
can't embed on phone.
james earl zones
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Originally Posted by rashi
Soldiers fight for our freedom?
This always confuses me. My freedoms were at less of a risk before these recent "wars".
can't embed on phone.
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Why don't you talk about youself and why you type your essays on NT to protect your own views? What would those people say about your lifestyle and upbringing and how they reflect your views Mr "Economist"? Keep in mind I don't apply to any of those things in that paragraph either.
So unless your grandfather and father did 20+ serving this country you can't tell me %$#%.
You keep referring to liberals as war dodgers, but what about the cowards who make these policies and send the middle class and lower classes to fight for their class interests
It really is simple. That's why your over-complicated passages piss me off as they only serve to confuse people while reminding yourself that you aren't in the same position as us. For now at least.
Not attacking you Rex but I got the same vibe from your reply.
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Why don't you talk about youself and why you type your essays on NT to protect your own views? What would those people say about your lifestyle and upbringing and how they reflect your views Mr "Economist"? Keep in mind I don't apply to any of those things in that paragraph either.
So unless your grandfather and father did 20+ serving this country you can't tell me %$#%.
You keep referring to liberals as war dodgers, but what about the cowards who make these policies and send the middle class and lower classes to fight for their class interests
It really is simple. That's why your over-complicated passages piss me off as they only serve to confuse people while reminding yourself that you aren't in the same position as us. For now at least.
Not attacking you Rex but I got the same vibe from your reply.
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