Scylla, Falwell and Robertson already did that. As annoyed as WB got over “fundie”, it’s not as degrading or soul-destroying as “fag” or “nigger.” “Fundie” is an unpleasant name, but “fag” negates your worth as a human being. I know you don’t understand, but trust me, it’s so.
Esprix:
Oh sure, go ahead and demean the psychopaths for no reason why don’t you, you heartless bigot.
(wondering if I need to put a wink smiley in there,)
Well said.
From your previous quote, it seems this was a false supposition of mine. You came off pretty strong with your ealier comments, and I’ve misconstrued your meaning. Hmmm. Should I apologize, or blame you and say “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”
Sorry.
Yup. So don’t come down too hard on the bomb writer, because as they say in the Bible (and I know how you love supporting Bible quotes) “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do”
Sterra:
Really? I think you’re wrong. I don’t think anybody’s that stupid.
I myself blame Britney Spears’ midriff. 
gobear:
You’re right. I don’t understand what it means to you. I know what other words mean to me when they get used though, and all I’ll say is this:
You could come over to my house, and I could teach my daughter that your name is “Fag,” and she’d call you that.
If you sit her on your back and read her a book and are nice to her, she’ll call you “Fag” with the sincere love and affection that only a two year old could muster.
When she says "Daddy Stinks! (her Mom taught her that,) it’s the best compliment in the world the way she says it.
So, if I taught my daughter such a thing, it wouldn’t be the word that demeans you, and it wouldn’t be my daughter, it would have been me, since I would have been the only one with bad “intent.”
It’s the intent that matters. That’s all I’m saying.
I don’t understand why we get so hung up on this.
We do it so often that I begin to doubt myself and wonder if maybe I’m all wrong about it, and it is the word itself that’s bad.
I think about it some more, and all my reason tells me I’m right. It’s not the word. The only meaning that matters is in the intent of the speaker or writer of it.
I sincerely beleive that if you let it become the word itself that hurts you, the gulf widens a littel more, and it becomes a little harder for real understanding to take place.
I’ll get off my soapbox now.
Oh, I’m sure he’s real sensitive to gay issues. :rolleyes: I also think matt’s original point was that it was a poor reflection on the military’s anti-gay attitudes (or tacit acceptance thereof) than on one individual person’s homophobia.
I find it odd that you’re defending someone’s choice of words when you don’t know his intent, either, especially considering that every single gay person on this board has expressed extreme offense at the use of the word in such a manner; i.e., we still equate “fag” with a derogatory slur, even when you defend it as “just another cuss word.”
FWIW, apology accepted.
Esprix
Lighten up, people.
It’s an exhausted kid with a limited volcabulary letting off some steam. He’s probably been working 16-20 hour days for weeks, pulling hard-core maintenance on aircraft and ordnance. He’s probably sore and his hands are worn out and blistered and cracked from turning wrenches.
Shit happens. There’s a war on. Get some freaking perspective.
**
He was just pretending to be a cross dresser. In later episodes the Psychologist offered Klinger his Section 8. But when he told Klinger that he was putting “homosexual” as part of the reason for the Section 8 Klinger changed his mind. From that episode on they dropped the whole cross dressing schtick.
**
I don’t know about you but I certainly don’t expect much sensitivity on any subject from the military. Their basic function is to break things and kill people. Not that I think it is ok to write “fag” on bomb.
Marc
Ah. War negates the severity of anything else, such as homophobia. I keep forgetting.
matt_mcl,
I think my point is that in a lot of ways “professionalism” from the military involves being able to hate blindly. I mean, the reason why I will most likely never join the military is because I have never been mad enough at anybody to even hit them, let alone kill them. From my perspective it seems that the people the most effective at their jobs in the military, the jobs of killing, would be the ones who are able to muster up the hate that allows a person to kill someone else. An army that is constantly doubting and feeling bad every time it kills someone is not an effective army. Hatred is professional.
I disagree. Hatred makes you do foolish things. The professionals in the military know the neccesity for their actions and should not need the raw energy of hate to spur them on.
I may be mistaken about this, but do all soldiers “know” the necessity of their actions? Are all military actions necessary? As a soldier, except under extreme circumstances, it’s your job to do what you’re told. If someone says, “hey, you’re going into this country and shoot the people who are connected to the government,” you do it. To say that every order to open fire is a necessity, or even that most of them are is just not true. Except for cases of self-defense, a military solution is usually one of many possible paths to take. I think hatred is probably the most effective way to enable a soldier to do his or her job in the face of possible doubts about a particular course of action. Just think, “hey, these bastards deserve it, they’re filthy (insert nationality/religion/economic philosophy here).”
Forgive the digression, but I couldn’t help noticing this in the OP:
The British Armed Forces have what?! Officially?
I am trying really, really hard not to become one of those obnoxious American Anglophiles, but sometimes it seems that fate is against me.
I don’t know about all soldiers, but professional soldiers soldiers are fairly well briefed. Vague hate filled orders led to massacres such as Mai Lai. My friends who served in the Gulf War were all given fairly good reasons for their presence there. In the current US military there does exist considerable flexibility in how to respond in any given situation. US pilots are obligated to fly their missions, but if they feel that their targets are not legitimate they do not have to release their weapons.
But I feel we are veering away from the legitimate point that Matt has.
Yeah, just like those damn faggots, hmmm?
Esprix
There are worse reasons…
Esprix
Well, I see your point as well, and I almost put sexual orientation in that list, but as of yet I’m not aware of any overt war against gays.
I fear that you may have missed my point though. Let me try to lay out more clearly what I mean (no attempt to be condescending here, just an effort to communicate more effectively).
a) Obeying orders to kill people is a primary responsibility of a soldier in war time.
b) This job is made easier on a personal level if said soldier can feel hatred (not necessarily justified) towards the given target.
c) It is in the military’s best interest not to squelch all hatred, as it is most likely a tool that enables many people to do their job. This includes hatred towards folks who might not be the current target/bad guy.
d) This is the reason why I would be less inclined to be too critical of the soldiers responsible for the writing on this bomb (note that if this was written on government property in another organization I would come down hard on the responsible parties). There is just a part of me that feels strange about condemning the hatred in the people we pay to hate.
Why not focus their hatred on those that deserve it? As you say, we’re not at war with faggots, we’re at war with Osama bin Laden and his terroristic organization. Allowing wholesale hatred against anyone and everyone undermines what the military is supposed to be defending in the first place.
Esprix
Eonwe:
All 3 of these are ridiculously false. We don’t train fanatics, we train soldiers.
Psychotics and sociopaths don’t make good soldiers, and hate is a disadvantage.
Scylla
Well, I am certainly willing to back down, as I am sort of formulating these opinions as I go, or at least trying to express them for the first time.
But hey, this is the pit, I don’t need tons of citations and all that jazz, and besides, I’ll make this step one in “Eonwe gets a spine and stops folding because other people call his comments ‘ridiculously false.’”
Far from false. Although I should have added something which I mentioned in a previous post, “except in times of self-defense.” Yes, the military serves many humanitarian ends. Yes, they do other things like enforce no fly zones, police actions, and keep the peace in various theaters overseas. But, in times of war, ie, when soldiers are fighting eachother, the goal is to get the other guy. We do not, for example, give the Taliban a list of times and locations for bombings so that they can be sure to get all of their people out of various buildings/camps/instillations. That would be counter productive. We want them to be there.
This is also quite true. Are you suggesting that feeling hatred towards somebody does not make it easier for you to be violent towards that person?
I’d be willing to give on the first part of this. It is my opinion that it is in the military’s best interest… but the second part of this is basically the same as point number two. And I am not talking about sociopathic behavior as a rule; not all who hate are sociopaths, not all who wander are lost (sorry, stream of consciousness quote thrown in there). I’m saying that getting everyone in the army to take sensitivity training and teaching them not to hate people and make generalizations based on whatever criteria they feel like will just make it harder when GI Joe or whoever is standing there with a gun in his hand and starts to think, “hey, just 'cause this guy’s a Muslim in the Taliban army doesn’t mean he’s a bad guy. Maybe he’s got a wife and kids at home, maybe he’s just been brainwashed by this stupid government, maybe he enjoys flying kites on the weekends and contemplates philosophy, maybe…” whoops, too much thinking and now you’re dead.
Yes, being in a mindless rage is a disadvantage, but some well placed hate can be incrediably effective, especially if you’re not the one making important decisions.
Oh, and Esprix,
I agree with you about focusing the hatred (jeez, sound like a therapist here… “ok, now think of someone you don’t like, and focus that hatred, concentrate… now, release it all in one barbaric yalp”… but I also think that assuming I am right about the military not really wanting to fight hatred within the ranks (as long as it does not interfere with usual operations), that that’d be a really hard thing to do. But, maybe who cares about how hard it is, they’ve got a big budget, they must be able to fund some classes about who it’s ok to hate and who it’s not ok to hate.
Oh, I almost missed my favorite part of your post Esprix
I absolutely agree. I just want to add here that I am not trying to suggest that I approve of the way the military operates, I’m just speculating on how it does run.
Eonwe:
Killing the other guys is not the Primary objective of the soldier.
The primary objective is to defeat them. To do this soldiers are directed to attain tactical objectives. Even in the horrific “total war” scenario, the objective is not to kill enemy soldiers, but rather to wound them and their infrastructure and force the enemy to care for them, thus draining resources.
In a way the tactics of war are like Chess. The most inefficient and costly way to win is to get into a direct war of attrition with the enemy. You want to attain key strategical objectives with as little bloodshed as possible since any time there is fighting, your soldiers are going to get whacked too.
Proof of this in this conflict is that are bombing is targetted at things like radar and supply depots, and communications and transport centers not at civilians.
Even the MRE’s that were dropped serve a strategical advantage. What we take away with one hand, we give to another, and the fact that we’re dropping food in there has the potential to cause political unrest.
The goal of all this bombing is not to kill bad guys, but to demoralize them and make them as innefective and uncoordinated as possible so that when we do begin a ground attack we encounter a confused and demoralized enemy, and win with the minimum actual fighting possible.
Hating the enemy is bad, because if you demonize them, you build them up to be big scary boogeymen, and once a soldiers been in combat, he learns pretty quickly that combat consists of people just like him on both sides, getting hurt. You want your soldiers to have a realistic outlook on what they are doing because reality is going to hit them pretty hard on the battlefield.
Writing on the bombs isn’t an act of hate, it’s an act of reassurance and confidence. Soldiers have done such since classical times and perhaps before.
Watch the old cartoons from WWII. They’re pretty tasteless and even offensive in their depictions of Japanese and Germans, but the caricatures described were not intended to instill hate, but rather to make them look foolish.
Making your soldiers hate the big bad evil Afghanis is a bad idea. Making your soldier think that he’s smarter, tougher, better trained and equipped, and that his enemy is a dangerous fool who is nonetheless worthy of ridicule is a smart tactic, especially when there’s some truth to parts of it.
The gallows sense of humor has been the soldiers friend for a long time.