I couldn’t get it to work earlier. sorry
This is a refutation of our maintaining recruiting standards.
If there is a distinction, it’s one without a difference. If, as you maintain, combat troops don’t have much say in where they eventually get deployed, why would a fresh recruit have any choice in whether he ends up toting a rifle or a spatula?
That’s why I think moral decision time comes when you enlist, or, barring that, when you volunteer for Iraq.
I’m sorry that your mistakes weigh so heavily upon your conscience, but trying to spread the blame around really won’t do anything for your guilt.
So *all *enlistees are murdering scum, right?
I’m not trying to spread any blame around. Why not become a tax protester, and go to jail rather than have your money pay for supplying those murdering American enlistees? Seriously. Whether you like it or not, your money pays for the bullets that murder Iraqis. How can you live with yourself?
When a person enlists, he chooses his job. The Army does not just arbitrarily assign jobs to people as needed. A person enlists for a specific job. If he enlists for infantryman, he is choosing to carry a rifle. If he enlists for cook, he will undoubtably sling hash with a spatula.
Are you unaware of this? Or were you making some other point?
That’s not the point. The point is that you’re judging people that simply are not equipped to examine the situation the same way you can. You are not going to go hungry, or flip burgers for the forseeable future if you choose not to enlist. You had the chance to go to college and improve your lot in life. For poor people, sometimes the military is the only fair chance they’ve got. Paying for college is simply not an option for them. You can’t get blood from a turnip, and even if you could, that turnip may have to feed your family for the rest of the week.
To people in that situation, yeah, they hear talk on the news about Iraq…but they also see the recruiter with his sharply pressed uniform, regular paychecks, medical benefits, money for college, etc…and they are willing to assume the risk of getting sent to Iraq (or on some other ill conceived epedition) in order to grab those benefits for themselves. It’s not some political statement, it’s just trying to make something of yourself by lawful means. Politicians come and go. Maybe the new batch will be wiser than the old ones. Maybe not. Either way, bills gotta get paid.
Only if you regard both sides as being in the same moral position, which I don’t. We invaded them, without provocation; we killed tens of thousands of them and devastated their country on all levels.
The ones that the world and the CIA believed that even if they existed, were a trivial threat ? The ones that if they existed were rapidly decaying and had no means of delivery to America ?
Al Qaeda and Saddam were enemies. Saddam would never have given them any weapons, and I’m sure they were delighted when we did their work for them, by deposing and killing Saddam and destroying Iraqi secularism. Not to mention providing plenty of propaganda fodder and recruits for them. The war in Iraq was a massive victory for Al Qaeda.
And would that justify becoming an assassin for organized crime or robbing banks and massacring all the patrons or poisoning a city’s worth of people and demanding money or you’ll kill another city’s worth ? Poverty is not a license for mass murder.
How did you learn to write without knowing how to read? It’s a pretty neat trick.
I’ve heard this, but I’ve also heard that it’s mostly recruiting bullshit, at least in the Army and Navy - that if you sign up to be, say, a mechanic, but it turns out they’ve got enough mechanics and they need somebody to catch IED’s in Sadr City, you’re pretty much fucked. Which is how they got AF and Navy guys to guard prisons and shit.
Am I wrong?
Why do you not protest this mass murdering by refusing to pay your taxes? Taxes which go to arm, train, and reward these murderers. Other, gentler protesters have led the way for you. Why not put up,or shut up?
I read this, dumbass, where you compared enlistees with scum that is among the vilest on Earth. You do realize that the tide does not come along and erase your scribblings in the sand, right?
If you’ve got a problem with what I wrote, then address it directly, instead of trying to draw me in to your oh-so-clever trap of pretending I said something I didn’t.
I’m not the one pretending that voluntarily participating in a war of imperialist aggression is honorable, you thick fuck.
Have I not been addressing you? Is your *gerbil *stealing time at your computer.?
Did you compare our troops to the Jangiweed, or not? Are they vicious, murdering, torturing rapists or not? And I mean by design, not do one or two of them do it. (Note correct spelling. One of those reading tricks.)
Where have I mentioned honor? Why don’t you use those impressive reading skills and find it for me.
What I have said is that claiming that each enlisted man and woman is culpable in murder is stupid, illogical, hypocritical and insane. If you can find honor for yourself in such a claim then knock yourself out, Sparky. Get back to me when you have actually done something to back up your words. You know, something that might involve a slight element of personal risk. When you get to prison for tax evasion, I’ll be your pen pal.
Would some mod please close this?
I’d still be somewhat interested in an intelligent discussion of this, but these idiots have made sure that ain’t gonna happen in THIS thread.
Not in any thread. The pro military people won’t tolerate any opinion besides worship of anyone in uniform.
Believe me, one need not be “pro-military” - whatever that means - to think you an ass.
As far as I can tell, you shit on every thread you enter.
Extremist bullshit as you spew makes it all the more difficult to obtain any type of reception for more reasoned positions along the same end of the continuum where you squat.
If IRL you conduct yourself anything like you appear on these boards, you must lead a pitiful existence.
Right, that’s what the sixties Anti-Vietnam protests were about! You’re a disengenous prick, IMO.
This would only make sense if our jackass poster der Trihs actually gave a damn about anyone (including himself). He’s so full of loathing for all the things around him that he really doesn’t care about the Iraqi’s anymore than he does the US soldiers.
They do make a handy hook for him to hang his hatred on though.
The 60s were a loooong time ago, and America is far more militaristic today, and there’s no draft. You’ll note that you see far less protest against Iraq than you did against Vietnam; Americans are more pro military these days, and lacking a draft most are at no personal risk.
Really. Because I’m not pro mass murder I loathe everyone, including myself. :rolleyes: And no, killing soldiers in Iraq isn’t murder; it’s destroying an enemy soldier.
I highly doubt that America is “far more militaristic” today than it was in the first few years of Viet Nam. Perhaps you could compare America in the year after 9/11 and America in 1966-1968 or so. And America today is perhaps more comparable to what it was in the last few years of Viet Nam.
As far as making assumptions about “far less protest against Iraq than you did against Vietnam”–you’re just projecting. Protests were a phenomena of the times. They just aren’t as fashionable these days. Seriously.
Yeah, nowadays people don’t protest by walking down the street with a sign saying “All American soldiers are vile, murdering scum”, they post it anonymously on the internet.
Asshole.
I realize I’m a little late to this thread, and no, I haven’t read it in it’s entirety, as I am just now thrumming with absolute and boundless rage after the first five posts. Still, I find it supremely ironic that this Der Trihs, this speck of insignificant amoebic excrement, this sewer-dwelling, maggot slurping, scabbed over, syphillitic piss hole of a human being has the right to say the contemptable, ungrateful, despicable and utterly myopic things he and or she has to say is BECAUSE OF MILITARY ENLISTEES.
It is, I dare say, a very, VERY good thing I do not know who or where this person is.
Enjoy your freedom, you oblivious, horrible, miserable, diseased puddle of yeast-laden pus.