shrug Stay ignorant then. No skin off my nose.
-XT
Terry Pratchett has a character who watches a battlefield for the first time realize how different it is from the paintings of famous battles. “Entrails, for instance, never seemed to appear in the paintings. Perhaps the artists just weren’t very good at them.”
This 21st century version is no less dishonest. Taking a painless, bloodless (and entrail-less) amusement park ride and trying to link it with combat in young people’s minds is, frankly, propaganda. The ride doesn’t provide anything worthwhile to help a prospective recruit make up his or her mind. It’s trivializing the terror of combat and suffering of war to even suggest that it’s in any way linked to roller coaster rides.
I’ve worn green, although I was spared combat. Even in deepest peacetime, soldiering is hard, dirty, dangerous work. If we want the kids to sign up (and I salute those who do so), we owe it to them to make sure they have the best possible idea of what they’re in for. This ride doesn’t help in that regard. At all.
Give the troops a worthwhile mission, and recruitment will be just fine. This agitprop is unworthy.
Let me help you out here. If I say that Barak Obama is a nigger, that is a fact. But it’s also an insult. The two are not mutually exclusive. You’ve had it explained to you by military people that the phrase is an insult, and in the context you used it I can see why it would be.
I AM an ex military person. Yes, there is an internal tendency to use the phrase to refer to those who are considered the most expendable, but it’s clear as day that I was commenting on how the administration perceives and uses the military as a whole and any offense taken is purely manufactured, disingenuous horseshit. I’m not Barack Obama. I’m not apologizing for semantic, fucking gotcha ya bullshit. I’m not even the one who first brought that phrase into this thread. I just pointed out that Paul in Saudi’s own definition applied perfectly well to the soldiers in Iraq:
See? The soldiers in Iraq, as we all know, are under-equipped (unless they’re all lying about not having enough armor), they were certainly not trained for a sustained occupation, and there is no doubt that their lives are being given away cheaply. Where am I wrong, and what part of agreeing with that definition insults the troops?
My mistake about the context-- it was in the OP, not your post. But that’s even worse since there is no reference to the Iraq war at all. When the insulting nature of the phrase was pointed out, though, you said it wasn’t an insult.
Besides, if the objection of this recruiting technique is tied to the Iraq war, would you or the OP be OK with it if we weren’t at war right now?
Oh please. No one is every perfectly trained or equipped. It’s clear that Paul in Saudi wasn’t referring to the troops in Iraq.
What else are they recruiting for?
Because it was obviously not intended to be insulting to the troops. The OP commented on the government attracting “its next generation of cannon fodder.” Clearly, it was a comment about the attitude of the government toward its troops and clearly any offense taken is totally phony.
I think they need to stay away from minors, regardless, but if America was really in danger or if the conflict really had moral clarity, then of course my attitude would be different.
Especially not th troops in Iraq.
That wasn’t clear to me at all, but what difference does it make? I asked him if his definition didn’t fit the troops in Iraq. In my opinion, they do.
Not that I’m disputing you here, but it’s interesting that you say you are ex-military yet you think the way you do. There is a disconnect there somewhere…either we served in different militaries or different universes is all I can say.
It’s debatable if the soldiers in Iraq are under-equiped or not. However, under-equipped does not equal ill-equipped. Cannon Fodder are cheaply and inexpensively equipped with crap arms and equipment because they are essentially disposable troops of no real worth (thus they are ‘fodder’ for the ‘cannon’…i.e. their job is to soak up casualties by causing the enemy to expend valuable ordanance on them for the gain of the army).
Again, this is debable…and again, completely beside the point. Cannon Fodder are poorly trained (if at all) for little or no cost…because, again, they are merely there as a soak off. The American soldier (Sailor, Marine, etc) is HIGHLY trained at great cost. They are given some of the finest equipment in the world and taught extensively how to use it.
Again, I’m not disputing your claim to being ex-military…but what military did you serve in exactly that you don’t know this?
Complete horseshit. You (and I and probably most of the folks in this thread) may not agree on how those lives are being spent…but they most certainly are not being thrown away cheaply. And it’s not only insulting but flat out wrong that you claim it’s so. It speaks to basically letting yourself get carried away by the rhetoric.
YOu are pretty much wrong across the board…and it’s insulting even though it’s obvious you are ignorant of why and how it’s wrong and why and how it’s an insult. To us John’s example, it’s STILL wrong if I call someone a nigger, even if I don’t understand what the term actually means or why it’s so insulting.
-XT
Would they let 43 year old me play?
I’m too old to enlist but that sounds like fun.
On the one hand, I agree with this assessment.
On the other hand, this sounds so freaking cool and I would totally go. (On the third hand, I am a full grown adult, not a teenager, and not easily manipulated.)
How is Diogenes or anyone else misusing the term “cannon fodder”? He’s got it exactly right, and it isn’t a word that members of the military own. Have conservatives become so PC that they can’t handle standard definitions of terms?
Here are definitions very much like any I came across in checking this out:
1 : soldiers regarded or treated as expendable in battle
2 : an expendable or exploitable person, group, or thing <celebrities who have become cannon fodder for the tabloids>
Google “cannon fodder.” It’s pretty straightforward, and perfectly apt to describe the current situation in Iraq. If it weren’t, there would be a pretty clear answer as to when we can bring the troops in Iraw back home.
I’m a 19 year old teen who plays the computer game for what it is (a recruiting tool that happens to be a free FPS), and I enjoy it. I’d like to play the big one that I’ve seen coming.
I was in the Navy, which is qute a different military context than the Army, but I don’t know what you mean by “how I think.” I think that troops should not be put in harm’s way without a reason. Is that not how people think in your military?
I’m just taking their own word for it.
In my opinion, this is exactly how the troops in Iraq are being treated.
This is just masturbation. The phrase has no such precise meaning.
The US Navy and you sound like a training film. The primary connotation of the word is expendability. but beyond that, it’s been crystal clear from the start that we’re talking about the civilian leadership’s attitude towards the ground troops. Bush et al are TREATING them as cannon fodder.
The hell they aren’t. Since there isn’t a single reason for a single one of them to die, their lives are absolutely being thrown away like toilet paper. Not a single casualty there has been justified.
It’s neither insulting nor wrong.
I haven’t insulted the troops. I’ve insulted those who TREAT them so cheaply. I’m insulting those leaders who value them as no better than cannon fodder. I have not been ambiguous about this. I do not buy that anyone has sincerely thought I’ve intended any insult to the troops and the analogy to the “N-word” (while kind of a stretch, in my view) would be more accurate if it was said that “a lot of people think of Barack Obama as a n…” Both the OP and I were talking about how the government VIEWS the troops, not what the troops really are.
Well, it’s more likely than not that anyone who is 14 years old now will be serving under President Obama if he enlists. At any rate, it won’t be Bush.
I’m with the poster, above, who said we shouldn’t present war in an entertainment setting.
That’s an absurd exaggeration.
I’m no more against this kind of recruiting than I’m against presenting the idea to children that they can be anyone they want when they grow up, even the President! The reality is that the vast majority of people will not, in fact, be even capable of being the President when they grow up, let alone get the opportunity.
Which is to say that I think there should be more realism presented to people at all ages.
I also think that this recruitment approach is not new, as has been pointed out. For those of you that disagree with it, teach your kids how not to fall for it, then thank whoever for the approach working with other kids so that yours doesn’t get caught in a draft. Make no mistake, the government will find a way to get the people it wants for the military and preferentialy getting people without the education/forsight through this method may be better than the alternative.
That last paragraph sounds like I’m deriding people in the military, and I am most certainly not meaning to. I’m ex-Army myself and proud of my service.
-Eben
I think Six Flags encouraging our children to be soldiers is less harmful than Disney encouraging our daughters to be princesses.
It does sound pretty cool… but I have it beat. I get to go to the West Point History Department’s Historical Weapons Shoot in a few weeks. An old undergraduate buddy of mine is on the faculty and invited me and my wife to come up and shoot real, honest-to-God machine guns and pistols and muskets.
How cool is that?
I try to use this one to my advantage - I tell my daughter that princesses say please and thank you and are always kind and helpful. And they always eat their vegetables.
That’s always what you want to the issue to be about. “It’s the leadership, stupid.”
Indeed. That what makes this (the war in Iraq) a political issue. It is ‘we’ who ordered the troops there and ‘we’ who put ‘us’ into power to give those orders that the finger is being pointed at.
As much as I find the marketing and packaging of the military to be disturbingly commercialized with superficial and semantically vacuous catch phrases like “Be All You Can Be”, “It’s Not Just A Job–It’s An Adventure,” and the laughably Vonnegut-esque contradictio in terminis “I Am An Army Of One,” how is this any different from the popular portrayal of military life and adventure from time immemorial? This is just another example of the extention of of consumer culture into every aspect of life–an undesirable product promoted by skillful marketing, complete with brand management. But kids have been playing “army” and adults have been providing them toys and making entertainments about war since toys and movies have been in existence.
If the military were really to be honest about life in the services, they’d make potential recruits read Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 just to get a real feel of the absurdity of military bureaucracy and the arbitrary lack of fairness of combat–and nobody would join except for the Clevengers and Scheisskopfs of the world, and Og knows that there aren’t enough of them to populate a military.
Stranger
On the cannon fodder issue: I personaly find it offensive in the sense that the fodder themselves are implied to be nothing more than property. Take that as you will.
Is military service with it’s mortality rate and compensation significantly different than other high-risk occupations? Crab fishing comes to mind…
Glorification of dangerous occupations is as American as can be. Is the problem that non-dangerous occupations don’t get glorified or is it just that it’s hard to understand why someone would do something dangerous for a living?
-Eben