Military recruiting continues to trend down in the U.S. but one area of growth against that was legal immigrants and children of illegal immigrants.
I’d wager we’ll have a lot fewer of those folks to recruit in the coming years.
Watching Total Forgiveness on dropout right now, this is very apropos lol
Unless you’re trans
Surprising number of people come out as trans in the military. The fucking Airforce has a shocking number of them. It’s a very strange place that has a curious way of cracking your egg, despite what would seem to be a host of disincentives.
Might have something to do with the way the military has become a magnet for the technically savvy and experimental, because they’ve got such enormous stockpiles of hardware and (ahem) armies of people needed to engineer and maintain it all. The military is overflowing with broke smart people, stashed all over the mechanics bays and flight decks and logistics offices of its sprawling bureaucracy.
Someone was just telling me yesterday about how so many ROTC students get promised tuition paid for, only to find out later for some stupid reason they were disqualified. They made it seem like it’s a very common thing.
Wait, a military recruiter was a slimy lying bastard? Couldn’t be!
*You would?
(sorry)
Or
You will!
I mean, it’s not like we see our intellectual best come from the military. Most of them become fucking pigs and abusers.
I mean, there are plenty of boring desk jobs in the military too.
Yep, you can sit behind your screen and click on the wedding where the drone should strike.
Or the humanitarian missions delivering food or supplies sometimes. Most of the time it’s sit around and look threatening enough that trade is protected. That’s not really a defense, it’s ultimately a tool protecting American capital and propping up a failing system, just saying that most of the expense doesn’t go to murdering brown people.
Or the humanitarian missions delivering food or supplies sometimes.
Former Green Beret Recounts Horrors at ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’ Aid Sites
:-/
We played this game in Afghanistan and Iraq as well. Not to mention Haiti, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, … the list goes on. Great book on it that came out recently - The Fort Bragg Cartel - which initially revolved around US military officers trafficking Afghani heroin sold by the Northern Alliance back to the States under the cover of aid convoys and relief efforts. But it goes down a rabbit hole of cut-out organizations and black ops networks employed by the US for all sorts of sabotage, spying, and assassination work.
Most famously, there was the fake CIA vaccination campaign that was used to hunt Osama bin Laden, and poisoned millions of people against the idea of western medical aid workers as benevolent agents.
most of the expense doesn’t go to murdering brown people
At its heart, every one of these campaigns is intended to facilitate the murder of foreign adversaries (most commonly, brown people - try not to dig too deeply into why). Whatever kindness they provide is only to facilitate some act of terror in the near or distant future.
I mean, there have been at least a few instances of humanitarian missions that actually help, even if there has to be some sort of military justification for it like “building goodwill” or having it combined with some joint military readiness exercise with the host nation. There was that Haiti earthquake in 2021 (and 2010), the relief supplies to Mozambique following the cyclone, Haiti again with Hurricane Matthew in 2016, the Nepal earthquake, that typhoon in the Philippines in 2013, a cyclone in Bangladesh, the Indian Ocean tsunami back in 2004, plus Operations Support Hope, Restore Hope, or Provide Comfort for Rwanda, Somalia, or the Kurds in Iraq+Turkey. I’m not sure you could count Operation Pacific Angel, though it’s arguably more helpful in that it’s building capacity instead of just giving direct aid, and Operation Christmas Drop seems almost silly I guess (even though sometimes it’s medical supplies instead of toys). It’s hard to paint those efforts as ultimately about killing people (it’s possible though, I might just be ignorant).
Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of nasty shit too, whether it’s destabilizing OPEC member nations or their relations to drive down oil prices or just fucking up Afghanistan with no good plan and no real reason, it’s not like I’d consider it a positive force overall even in a macro geopolitical sense, let alone the stupid unsanctioned bullshit its smaller factions take part in (and the CIA, as always, can just fuck right off), I just wouldn’t characterize “every one” of the campaigns to be about murder.
Yeah, but when you enlist do you get to pick?
It depends. You can generally choose a career field to specify in your contract, and you’re not directly shooting people for the vast majority of career fields. That’s not to say your actions won’t support killing people in some way, most career fields are there to support the ones that do, but there’s ones in cybersecurity for instance whose goal is generally more aligned to providing support to other nations or industries that might’ve been hacked. Outside of general areas though, it’s not like the mission is decided by anyone other than the U.S. President or Congress (or continuing obligations from prior agreements).
Most of the time it’s sit around and look threatening enough that trade is protected.
What? where would that be?
And in no way that is protecting trade the biggest part of their horrible activities.
Unless it’s drug trade like cocaine in the contra scandal or heroin from Afghanistan.Most of the expense/time (proportionately) is the Navy patrolling the various trade corridors and oceans with near routine exercises/drills from nearby nations against it, preventing disruptions and theoretically enabling the dying/dead “Pax Americana,” ultimately for US capital’s benefit (in tangent with the stability of the US dollar as the former de facto reserve currency). It’s the real reason the US is content with spending all the money on the military, not just a projection of power but a real return on investment (even more so now that taxes are getting more and more regressive and corps pay less than ever). The murder is almost secondary when it comes to that, a petty demonstration of what they’re capable of. Pretty gross tbh.
Was Adolf eichmann a murderer? He never pulled a trigger.
He never pulled a trigger.
He joined the SS in 1932 and was tasked with event security for political rallies which routinely became violent. And then he rose through the ranks of an organization dedicated to covert violence very quickly. So, I wouldn’t bank on that.
My point is that he killed, whether he was holding a gun or a pen; he caused people to die on purpose. He is a mudderer. I don’t give a shit if he ever pulled a trigger, and deserved much worse than the hanging he got. As do his modern counterparts.
he caused people to die on purpose. He is a mudderer.
We can definitely talk about Social Murder as a phenomenon.
But I think it’s a bit too cutesy by half to assert a man climbed his way up the ranks of the SS in the middle of an insurrection in order to lead its mass extermination division managed it without ever getting his hands dirty.
I don’t give a shit if he ever pulled a trigger
I think we’re going to see folks who come out of the ICE recruitment of the Trump Two era who will also rise through the ranks and become mass murderers. I think we’ve already got guys like that - Ron DeSantis famously oversaw torture at Guantanamo Bay as attendant legal counsel - in positions of power.
They’ll all be able to look you in the face with dead fucking eyes and say “Prove I did anything wrong”. And I think quite a few liberals will nod and shrug and say “I guess the Rule of Law says we can’t do anything now that all the folks who could contradict this claim are in an unmarked grave”.
This is the wedge that lets these creeps crawl into power to begin with. Willful ignorance of the crimes of this country only serve to give sociopaths a ladder to climb.
And im saying they should all be voted for. And if they’re vile enough, like desantis, any family who didnt disown tbem should be voted for.
The ‘I joined bcs I needed an education’ was the first excuse.
This is the follow up.
They have to rationalise it to themselves.
As if there’s any reason to justify joining the worst and most prolific killing machine on the planet.To be fair it’s not the worst killing machine. Its nit like top 50% and itvus the most expensive, but it usually gets a pretty good amount of killing done.
What are you talking about?
No country even comes close.For pure numbers killed, i think russia wins. For efficiency per body dropped… When was the last time the Americans fully, like, won a war? Because it wasnt in my or my parents’ lifetime.
And they got their asses handed to them pretty badly by guys who didnt all have shoes a couple times since their last win.
Russia hasn’t got a death count near the US.
The US has lost everything after WW2, and there they played a small role despite the Hollywood fantasy depictions.
(I forgot the heroic victory against Grenada)russia hasn’t
Oh im counting deaths on voth sides.
I don’t know if it’s still like this, but the national guard being called up currently, are probably paying out of their own pocket to be there. These local call-ups aren’t usually paid that well.
It would be better if they would kill the people making college tuition hard to get instead of killing people so their oppressors could gain even more power.
That would take effort and risk.
Bombing brown people from a distance is much easier.Okay, but, and hear me out; what if i just actively pursued the most abhorrent results and went full ‘cruelty squad’ here?
good deal
