In my opinon, that could easily be warped rightward into Führerprinzip, or leftward into Dictatorship of the Proletariat. I’ll pass, thank you.
Who said anything about cowardice? It’s just that when I see that kind of rancor, where one thinks it would just be fine to see a bunch of people go and kill a bunch of other people, I’m surprised they’d stop at merely paying for the brawl. I’d want to be a part of something like that, if I were so eager to see such people killed.
Similarly, when I hear about a member of “the greatest generation” who somehow never served, I think it’s fair to at least wonder, even if only privately, why they’re so happy to take credit for beating back the Nazis or talk like some kind of hero, and yet they never actually took on the level of personal risk that others did. Not saying they’re cowards, just that maybe they should make more of a concerted effort to distance themselves from being labeled as “the greatest” when in fact most of them did next to nothing for the war. Feel-good measures like scrap metal drives and victory gardens notwithstanding.
I was eager to see Osama bin Laden killed too. Lots of people were, and most of them couldn’t / didn’t volunteer for military service. shrug
Wait, so are you sad that you’re too old to enlist (which is factually false, by the way, unless you’re older than 39), or does your age have nothing to do with why you don’t join the military?
That’s a fair point. I guess I’d differentiate between wanting to see a mass murderer killed vs wanting to see a whole bunch of people wiped out, and the generational war that such an endeavor would likely entail. I mean, Afghanistan’s bad enough, but Iran? That could get really messy, and I don’t think we have the same kind of cause as we did to go after either OBL or the Japanese after Pearl Harbor. If g-you want to open that can of worms against Iran, I think g-you should be prepared to go yourself.
The sad face was mostly at the realization I’m getting old. It was ambiguous and not terribly relevant to the point at hand, which is that you apparently want to rehash your name-calling thread that went over like a lead balloon last time.
Yes, you’re correct about my mistake on the age limit. I didn’t realize it was older for the Air Force. Thanks for that information. My age was only one factor in my decision regarding military service, and one that only recently became even a partial impediment anyways.
Well if you change your mind and decide that you’d like to serve in the US military, me and other Doper vets would be happy to give you our perspective and advice.
Certainly going to war with the IRGC entails risks, probably more, or at least different ones, than a single raid into nuclear-armed-but-nominally-allied Pakistan. And you’re right that it doesn’t have the level of justification provided by 9/11 or Pearl Harbor (but that’s true of almost all the wars we’ve entered in the last few decades).
I can see reasonable “we shouldn’t start shit with Iran” arguments on the merits:
- that it might be Iraq-War-levels-or-worse of messy and drawn out
- that they haven’t provided as clear a casus belli as Japan did in WWII or Al Qaeda did on 9/11
- etc
I find arguments that one shouldn’t opine about such matters unless one is / has served in the military significantly less convincing.
That’s great. I’ll keep it in mind if I suddenly get interested in a career in the Air Force.
I find that one shouldn’t express a personal desire to kill other people without just cause, and yet expect (or even hope for) other people to do the killing without one’s personal involvement. It smacks of a desire for cold-blooded murder (as opposed to just plain old murder, which is still bad).
And to be clear, even if you had stated a desire to personally participate in the killing, I would still take issue with your statement. Just slightly less in the same way I think a would-be second degree murderer probably isn’t quite as bad as a would-be first degree murderer, other things being equal.
Or, alternatively, if you had come down and slammed me with a revenge motive (ie: they provided the materials and expertise insurgents used to kill my friends) then I would weigh that in my opinion too, and we’d be a lot closer together than you might think. Though I’d still say another war would be going a bit too far at this juncture, and the cost to people on both sides would be… excessive.
Sad face, I never did this thing because I was never interested, can I have credit for something anyway?
The Greatest Generation weren’t any greater than any other generation. They just responded to great adversity and threats from outside the country. They rose to the occasion in a heroic way. Which I think any generation would do facing the same forces.
You’re certainly entitled to your opinions on the matter. FWIW, EFPs are one of the reasons I feel the way I do about the Iranians. The ‘war bonds for killing the IRGC’ was meant to contrast with the relatively high bar I set in the preceding paragraph of that post (something dire like another German conquest of Europe or nukes going off in American cities).
Can I make a suggestion though: that we drop the discussion about whether we should or should not go to war with Iran, and whether someone without prior service should be allowed to opine on such matters. They’re not really relevant to the OP.
ETA: if you’d like to discuss the merits (or lack thereof) of war with Iran in another thread on that topic, I’d be happy to.
Well, if you’re a millennial, then yes. Because everyone gets a trophy!
Or so I’ve been told, when hearing people talkin’ 'bout my generation. 
In fact, Harry Truman gained a great deal of publicity - leading to his joining FDR’s last ticket as VP - because of his Truman Committee, which was a Senate investigation into profiteering off military contracts during WWII. While Truman used the committee’s work to underscore his own reputation for being an honest and decent man, that reputation was only possible because of all of the graft and corruption that was uncovered. We like to think of that time as a period of patriotic devotion, but profit was a driving force even back then.
While people like to talk about ‘kids today’ and ordinary people making huge sacrifices, what about the top 1% (who are mostly not the kids today)? During WW2, the top income tax rate peaked at 94 percent in 1944, on taxable income over $200,000 ($2.5 million today). It stayed high through the 70% (over 70%), but from the 80s to today it has dropped to just over 40%.
If you’re looking at replicating huge national effort made during World War II, rather than griping that about millennials won’t be keen on buying war bonds, you might want to look at whether the ultra rich would be willing to allow tax rates even as high as during the postwar boom years, much less the 90+% sustained during the war itself.
One of these two statements is incorrect. No millennials are currently barred from enlisting on account of their age. You can join the Navy or the Air Force at up to age 39. Millennials were born between 1981 and 1996, inclusive, which means Millennials’ age range is between 22 and 38.
So if you are a millennial, dude, change that 
into a :D, it’s not too late for you!
Here you buy into the notion that somehow climate change doesn’t constitute an existential threat, but the Nazi war machine did. Thus demonstrating the effectiveness of the right-wing propaganda machine in dividing us, and of corporate propaganda in disabusing the notion of real threats such as climate change.
“Is climate change an existential threat or not?” would probably be an interesting topic of discussion, but it’s probably not appropriate for this thread either.
I’ll let you argue it out with yourself. Let me know which one of you wins.