military worship in this country is out of fucking control
excuse me?
military worship in this country is out of fucking control
Yea you’re right, we shouldn’t honor the people willing to risk their life to save ours and defend our country … oh
Military worship in this country is out of fucking control
I’m in the military and yes it’s out of fucking control. Most of the people I know in the military feel the same way. You civilians need to calm the fuck down. Most of us joined in our teens or early twenties. For a lot of us it was because we needed a job, and we didn’t see any other options, and this job has good benefits, especially for an uneducated young person in America. We get healthcare and education!! That’s some tempting fucking fruit. But this is a JOB. Some people in the military become heroes, that’s true. Jumping on grenades, defusing bombs, dragging a wounded person from the middle of a firefight. They usually end up dead in the process. Those people deserve respect, in my opinion. They give their lives for their friends, no matter whether or not you agree with the policies that put them there in the first place. But a lot of people in America reflexively claim that everyone in the military is a hero, full stop. This isn’t true and it lets people look the other way when something is actually wrong in the military, because it’s the military, they’re heroes, they can do no wrong.
We’re doing a job, and a lot of us are never really put in harm’s way. I work in a climate controlled lab for 8 hours a day, for instance. Really grueling. Such a hero. This fawning lip service of an infallible military doesn’t do us any good. I know people who have bought into it, who have heard so many people tell them that they’re heroes that they actually believe it, and they are the stupid and dangerous ones. Joining the military does not make you a hero, and calling us heroes might make you feel all warm and fluffy and red white and blue but it doesn’t do anything for the people that end up on the streets with PTSD or come home with life-changing injuries or in a box. We’re human beings, not some concept that you can just mindlessly adulate and then feel better about yourself.
☝️🏽☝️🏽☝️🏽☝️🏽
oh boy just in time for the 4th of July
Speaking as a disabled veteran: it’d be one thing if the fucking hero worship MEANT ANYTHING. But it’s a bunch of empty loud words about how Brave and Noble everyone in the military is (nah some of us are assholes) and then when it comes to, oh I don’t know, paying a soldier enough to feed their family without food stamps, or giving disability compensation without a NIGHTMARE fight with the country that claims to “care” so much. Plus the whole “sending us off to kill other people to make rich men richer while innocents die for it” thing. It’s not “defending freedom” to shove our troops into everyone’s business in countries that happen to have oil and such
Military worship isn’t only annoying, it’s a hollow lie that’s basically dangerous to everyone
So they go around the world bombing and killing people and then expect us to feel sorry for them?? Nah son, you deserve it.
me if i ever find out any of my neighbors are veterans
Hmmm. I mean, just because the army as an institution is flawed and damaging doesn’t mean everyone in it is a terrible person. To paint every single veteran with the same brush is reductive and to make light of the debilitating mental disorders many have just seems wrong. Like yes, fuck the military as an institution completely 100%, but blaming disabled ex-front-line infantry maybe isn’t the best direction for our anger, perhaps.
A lot of veterans are poor people who were intentionally targeted by scouting programs coming to their schools starting at age 13, and most of them are worse off coming back than they were to start with… let’s be courteous to folks with PTSD
Don’t be an ableist fuckface. Intentionally triggering someone is disgusting.
I thought people on this godforsaken website at least understood this one basic principal, but apparently not, so let me make it crystal clear:
IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO BE SELECTIVELY PROGRESSIVE
You can hate Ann Coulter. But if you suggest that she deserves to be raped, you are a misogynist.
You can hate Woody Allen. But if you say he’s part of a Jewish conspiracy or joke about putting him in an oven, you are an antisemite.
You can hate Michael Vick. But you call for him to be lynched or call him the N-word, you are an anti-black racist.
You can hate Caitlyn Jenner. But if you misgender her, or make comments about her genitalia, you are a transphobe.
And you can hate the military. But if you deliberately try to trigger veterans with PTSD, you are an ableist piece of shit.
You do no get to pick and choose which people to treat fairly when it comes to acknowledging and combatting prejudice.
Not liking a person is not a free pass to disregard anti-prejudicial words and actions. Either you respect marginalized peoples as a whole (even if you don’t like an individual), or you don’t respect them at all. There is no middle ground.
If anyone really like, agrees with harassing veterans with PTSD or anything similar, unfollow me right the fuck now. I don’t want you following me.
You don’t have to like the military, it’s massively fucked up but y’all needs understand that most people in the military are victims of propaganda and are usually poor or part of a minority who are taken advantage of in order to join.
^^^ All of these comments tbh
Mhmm
They offered the ASVAB at my HIGH SCHOOL. They CAME INTO MY SCHOOL and said “If you guys take the military aptitude test, you get free donuts and you miss the first half of the day.” They brought in hot dogs.
They brought food to a place where half of us were in poverty if not more, and they said, all you have to do is take a little test and you’ll get a snack, you don’t have to come in to school on time (an extra full hour of sleep that morning!). So we did. By the hundreds.
My younger brother, a year behind me in school, scored “the highest we’ve ever seen in the whole damn state, son,” and for the next. Three. Fucking. Years. They harassed him. He got phone calls from every goddamn branch of the military. People would show up at our house at random, trying to recruit him. They’d tell him horror stories about how much better it is to enlist than be drafted (as if there’d been a draft in our lifetime!). They called our Mom at work. They sent recruiters to talk to our stepfather, who’d been in the Army, to try to get a handle on my brother’s weak points.
THREE FUCKING YEARS OF THIS.
My brother is the second child of six. My brother was thirteen by the time he had his own pillow for the first time. My brother was hungry all the time, dizzy from hunger some days–and oh, sidenote, my mother, stepfather and father are all abusive assholes who’d as soon hit you as look at you.
Guess what year my brother graduated?
If you guessed “May, 2002,” or “almost immediately after 9/11,” ding ding ding ding!
The ONLY REASON my brother didn’t join the military, in the end, is that his girlfriend at the time said “If you enlist, I will never speak to you again.” Her dad was a military man, and he was also an abusive shithead, so in her head the two were inextricable. But if she’d said “go for it?” Or if she hadn’t said anything at all?
Something like half of the males in my fucking graduating class enlisted.
It was better than starving.
And a great number of those are dead now.
I hate the US military industry. I’m disgusted by the things our military does. But by god I don’t blame our veterans for what was done to them.
Rich people don’t enlist.
The ones who join the military are the ones who are hopeful that for once they’ll know that they’re getting a meal, not just today but tomorrow too.
Don’t join the fucking military.
I mean, some of us have family whose choices boiled down to ‘military or coal mine,’ very literally, with zero exaggeration. A better answer is: there need to be enough economic choices that no one HAS to join the military, and military recruiters should be forbidden to prey on economically imperiled children in JHS and HS.
But if those choices don’t exist, and people have family who need food, housing or health care, just saying “then perish” is kinda shit.
I’d rather starve than join the military but I’d do an awful lot to make sure @mistresskabooms can eat and get her health care.
🤷♂️
Can someone, like @vaspider , explain why they hate the military?
I’m looking at joining, as I can’t go afford college, not even the community ones, and I’m looking at either becoming a Nurse or an interpreter, and I’m worried about what could be asked of me and whether or not this is worth it.
The United States military is one of the most blatant and obvious tools of our imperialist and systematic oppression of non-white, non-Christian people. Most people who enlist are like you, thinking it’s their best option, and in some cases, like most of @fox-bright‘s graduating class, that seems true.
But the military uses people up. Modern military training, even for nurses and interpreters, is specifically oriented at breaking you psychologically so that you stop seeing the “other side”, whoever they may be, as human beings. People have PTSD just from coming through basic training, and that’s on purpose. They don’t want you to have enough willpower left to say no to an order to shoot someone. They don’t want human beings, they want living weapons, and the entire process is focused on breaking you down psychologically from human being to weapon. Even a nurse or an interpreter will go through this training, and will be instilled with the same prejudices toward whoever command decides is the enemy.
Don’t get me wrong, they want you smart and able to think. At this point, they probably could just make tanks and such robotic, but that’s not the point. They want you able to respond to new situations and new threats like a thinking person. They just want you thinking the way they want you to, responding the way they want you to. So they break you until your normal reactions to situations are broken down and overridden by the reactions they want you to have.
I don’t like the United States military because it makes victims of everyone, including the people serving in it. I have several friends who are veterans. Every last one of them has come out of it broken. They’ve done things they can never undo and seen things they can never unsee, and all in the name of following orders of old white men who view them as nothing more than investments of resources instead of people. They all have a hard time learning to be people again once they get out, and many never do.
Also, you’re probably never going to see that GI Bill school money. There are so many hoops you have to jump through to get it, and the fact that you’re now trying to go to school like a regular student but you very likely have PTSD that makes it hard to focus on studies, exceedingly few veterans ever see that money, and even fewer actually finish school and get a degree with it.
Thank you, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget this.
does anyone have any idea if this is similar for the Brit Military?
Some relatives have been recommending I join “because you do so much better in a structured environment”
The Army is discharging immigrant reservists and recruits who enlisted in the military with a promised path to citizenship, the Associated Press reports:
The AP was unable to quantify how many men and women who enlisted through the special recruitment program have been booted from the Army, but immigration attorneys say they know of more than 40 who have been discharged or whose status has become questionable, jeopardizing their futures.
“It was my dream to serve in the military,” said reservist Lucas Calixto, a Brazilian immigrant who filed a lawsuit against the Army last week. “Since this country has been so good to me, I thought it was the least I could do to give back to my adopted country and serve in the United States military.”
Some of the service members say they were not told why they were being discharged. Others who pressed for answers said the Army informed them they’d been labeled as security risks because they have relatives abroad or because the Defense Department had not completed background checks on them.
Spokespeople for the Pentagon and the Army said that, due to the pending litigation, they were unable to explain the discharges or respond to questions about whether there have been policy changes in any of the military branches.
military worship in this country is out of fucking control
excuse me?
military worship in this country is out of fucking control
Yea you’re right, we shouldn’t honor the people willing to risk their life to save ours and defend our country … oh
Military worship in this country is out of fucking control
I’m in the military and yes it’s out of fucking control. Most of the people I know in the military feel the same way. You civilians need to calm the fuck down. Most of us joined in our teens or early twenties. For a lot of us it was because we needed a job, and we didn’t see any other options, and this job has good benefits, especially for an uneducated young person in America. We get healthcare and education!! That’s some tempting fucking fruit. But this is a JOB. Some people in the military become heroes, that’s true. Jumping on grenades, defusing bombs, dragging a wounded person from the middle of a firefight. They usually end up dead in the process. Those people deserve respect, in my opinion. They give their lives for their friends, no matter whether or not you agree with the policies that put them there in the first place. But a lot of people in America reflexively claim that everyone in the military is a hero, full stop. This isn’t true and it lets people look the other way when something is actually wrong in the military, because it’s the military, they’re heroes, they can do no wrong.
We’re doing a job, and a lot of us are never really put in harm’s way. I work in a climate controlled lab for 8 hours a day, for instance. Really grueling. Such a hero. This fawning lip service of an infallible military doesn’t do us any good. I know people who have bought into it, who have heard so many people tell them that they’re heroes that they actually believe it, and they are the stupid and dangerous ones. Joining the military does not make you a hero, and calling us heroes might make you feel all warm and fluffy and red white and blue but it doesn’t do anything for the people that end up on the streets with PTSD or come home with life-changing injuries or in a box. We’re human beings, not some concept that you can just mindlessly adulate and then feel better about yourself.
marvel is disney’s forever cash cow! it appeals to children, teens, and sweaty adults! it’s all quite loud and colorful, with the same safe formula every time, but with different directors and tweaks to make it whatever the fuck memorable each time. plus the reliance on violence to push the plot will give them those dank US military checks until explosions go extinct. truly we live in horrific times but i don’t really care
thank u all for letting me know the military quit cutting checks for the MCU after Avengers because they got offended bc the fictional magic men are an alternative to the american military. i’m sorry i was misinformed but more importantly that’s really, really, really, really, really fucking funny
“Moviegoers and comic fans know that S.H.I.E.L.D., led by Samuel L. Jackson’s super-spy Nick Fury, is an international peacekeeping/global surveillance/crisis response/quasi-military organization. But its relationship with the United States is murky. And that basically stopped the U.S. military, which is normally eager to cooperate with the film industry on blockbuster movies, from teaming up with the Avengers.
“We couldn’t reconcile the unreality of this international organization and our place in it,” Phil Strub, the Defense Department’s Hollywood liaison, tells Danger Room. “To whom did S.H.I.E.L.D. answer? Did we work for S.H.I.E.L.D.? We hit that roadblock and decided we couldn’t do anything” with the film.”
As usual, all names have been changed or redacted to protect people’s privacy.
In the fall of 1969, my Dad was hit by a car and suffered a serious concussion, causing him to miss midterms and put his grade in a hole he wouldn’t be able to recover from, as this was the days before a lot of professorial accountability. Like a sensible person, he decided to Withdraw for the semester and focus on recovering and maybe take a part-time job to pay for spring tuition, because you could do that back then.
“Son,” My grandfather asked, sitting on the couch with Dad shortly after he was discharged from the hospital. “What about your college deferment? I’m worried about you getting drafted.”
“Dad,” Dad said, filling in job applications. “I’m legally blind without my glasses! I’d be a danger to anyone around me with a gun. Even if I get drafted there’s no way in hell I’d pass the medical exam.”
“Don’t swear in my house.” Said Grandpa, under the entirely mistaken impression that the US Military was run with any sort of competence.
Literally a week later my Dad’s draft papers came in, and he reported to his local draft board, driver’s license and doctor’s note in hand to prove He Is Legally Blind Without His Glasses, only to be waved through without so much as a sideways glance by anyone resembling a doctor.
“They must be desperate.” My dad concluded when he got home that night to pack.
The news was devastating to the family, as both his parents had siblings to WWII. Grandpa was ready to beg, bribe and otherwise compromise his intensely catholic morals to get Dad out, and Grandma prayed to any available saint that would save her son from the fate of her brothers. She had quite the collection of saints in her sewing room, some forty figurines and dozens more candles and images, along with some stained glass she’d made herself of saints, landscapes and animals, including a large hummingbird that lived on the sewing room window since they’d moved into the house.
Dad pleaded with them to not do anything they’d regret, and returned to the base for basic training.
Dad’s drill sergeant was a man whose real name was “Ross” but insisted on being called “Bulldog” or “SIR!” by everyone depending on rank. Dad supposed this might have been a defense mechanism as Bulldog had an intensely jowled and acne-scarred face that did greatly resemble a fighting dog well past their prime. The image was not helped by the fact that he was constantly smoking rose-flavored tobacco in a pipe that had seen better centuries, and consequently smelled like a terrible combination of trailer park and the women’s perfume counter at Macy’s.
Bulldog was also… not great about following protocol, which is a terrible failing in a Drill sergeant, but Dad supposed at that point in the war Bulldog had become horribly depressed by the sheer numbers of young men he was sending to their deaths and had kind of stopped giving a fuck about their safety and his own.
Which lead to an incident about three weeks into Dad’s training camp when in the middle of a Weapons Qualification lesson, Bulldog pulled Dad’s glasses off and bellowed “YOU WON’T HAVE THOSE COKE BOTTLES WHEN THOSE [incorrect slurs, because there’s no such thing as an informed bigot] BLAST YOUR ASS TO KINGDOM COME.” before stomping off to go change the paper targets, leaving Dad standing there with an M-1, squinting in what he hoped was the general direction of the targets.
To give you an idea of HOW bad my dad’s vision is, I once asked him at what distance things got blurry, and he responded by taking off his glasses, putting his hand up to his face, and slowly moving it back. He stopped about eight inches from his face and nodded.
“So I can see my hand from here but I can’t distinguish my fingers. I think that green blob over there is your mother.”
“I’m in the living room.” called mom. “You’re looking at the blender.”
So it should come as no surprise that as soon as Dad heard someone shouting “Ready! Aim! Fire!” He did precisely that.
Hummingbirds are often mistakenly characterized as Delicate Little Rainbows that are a gift Direct from Heaven when the truth is they’re really Vicious Little Bastards thrown out of Hell for being too Nasty.
You would be too if you could eat nothing but frappuccinos and the occasional chicken nugget, everything around you was at least the size of a pickup truck and regarded you as a tasty snack, and you were forced to defend your fridge from not only equally vicious rivals but goddamn insects that are bigger than you are.
Being a hummingbird is awful under normal circumstances, and now there are maniacs with loud machines and projecties as big as you are stomping around and yelling and well-
At that exact moment, one of the nesting hummingbirds, having grown progressively more exasperated with the activity on the base, dive-bombed my father, hurling it’s tiny body directly into his ear and slicing the lobe up, and making him jerk slightly as he fired.
He missed Sergeant Bulldog by mere inches. Dad still isn’t sure if the Hummingbird caused him to miss or put him closer to accidental manslaughter, but it mattered little as Bulldog grabbed him by the head, shrieking in spittle-flying fury-
“ARE YOU FUCKING BLIND?” He roared.
“YES!!” screamed my father, also hysterical. “SIR THAT’S WHAT THOSE ‘COKE BOTTLES’ ARE FOR SIR!”
Bulldog stopped, suddenly and uncomfortably confronted with the nature of causality. He only let it stymie him for a moment. “GET YOUR IDIOT ASS TO THE MEDIC, I’LL DEAL WITH YOU LATER!”
At the medical center, an extremely befuddled doctor dilated Dad’s eyes, took pictures because Dad had the worst case of myopia he’d ever seen and wanted to put him in a medical journal, and asked him:
“What the HELL are you doing here?”
“Very nearly shooting people sir.”
“Well, we can’t have you shooting people while you’re in the army! I’ll get your medical discharge started.”
Dad decided not to comment on that statement, thanked the doctor, and wandered blindly back to his bunk.
It took them a full thirty days to process Dad’s discharge, perhaps largely due to the fact that actually FINDING the captain was a task for hercules- The man had an almost phobic aversion to his office and a tremendous love of whiskey so actually locating the man and early enough in the day that he was still sober enough to sign anything was a race against time and a battle against the wits of a man determined to get out of work, which is when humanity is at its peak intelligence.
In the meantime, it simply wouldn’t do to let dad bike the five miles back to his home and come back for the paperwork, nor let him sit quietly and not accidentally maim anyone, so he was put on garden duty.
Supervised by recently-suspended-from-instruction Sergeant “Bulldog” Ross.
By the second day Bulldog had mostly run out of steam, perhaps out of a sense of really, whose fault was that? So He would mostly stand in Dad’s general vicinity, waxing philosophical on the nature of war, government and whatever else he could be crotchety about that day while continuously smoking his rose-flavored tobacco in his pipe. Dad planted a frankly absurd number of flowers, trying to make a planted display that would spell out the name of the base in eight-foot letters, just in case someone has managed to miss all 824,594,359 signs beforehand.
On day five, perhaps attracted by the bright colors or the stench of artificial rose, the Hummingbirds found the new garden.
At first, it was timid little trips to the edge farthest from Dad and Bulldog, testing this new territory for both risk and bounty, but upon finding it full of sugary goodness, they became bold, getting closer and closer to Dad, zipping in as soon as he got up to get the next flat of flowers, then not waiting for him to finish planting them before they were up in his face, squeaking angrily for him to get out of the way of their lunch.
One male objected to Dad and Bulldog’s presence particularly strongly, dive-bombing and buzzing angrily at them, an ounce and a half of glittery impotent rage. After a month, he’d gotten quite aggressive, and one day flew directly up to Bulldog’s face to chitter curses at him eye-to-eye, only for Bulldog to take out his pipe and blow a cloud of smoke at him, laughing as the bird tumbled over backwards in midair.
Agitated with the sudden noxious cloud, or perhaps merely a violent psychopath in its own right, the bird flew back, then straight up into the air for a good fifty feet before going into a dive, aimed directly at Bulldog’s face.
Dad doesn’t recall actually moving, only a sense that he ought to do something, and launched himself out of the dirt, arms outstretched to clap and force it off course-
“SHIT! What the hell was that for?” Demanded Bulldog.
“Well, the hummingbird looked like it was going to attack you, Sir. So I stopped it.”
“How noble. What are you standing there like an idiot for?”
“…I think I caught it sir.” Said Dad, staring at the tiny bill poking out from between his gloves. The two of them leaned in close as dad very slowly opened his gloves and peered inside.
The hummingbird immediately forced it’s tiny head out to peep furious profanities at them both.
“How is it,” Bulldog wondered aloud as the hummer continued to curse the both of them for the next seven generations. “That you can’t see to hit the broad side of a barn but can pull a shitty little bird right out of the air?”
“I’m wearing my glasses, Sir.”
Bulldog looked up at him, glaring with such intensity his face ceased to be a face at all and transformed into a dali-esque collection of wrinkles.
“Fuck you. Now go take that damn thing to the other side of the base so it doesn’t come back.”
“Yes sir.” Dad nodded, nearly saluting out of reflex before remembering that he was holding a live and very angry bird. It took him several hours to get to the other side of the base, with literally everyone stopping to ask him what the hell he was doing, well I have this bird sir and I was told to release it on the other side of the base- how in hell did your blind ass catch a hummingbird, well I had my glasses on- Fuck you, go ditch that thing already.
At three o’clock on the dot the very next morning, two MPs woke up my dad and told him he needed to report to the front office right away, no time to get dressed, right away right now.
They marched him directly to the main office, barefoot and in his Pajamas to be greeted by not only Sergeant “Bulldog” ross, but nearly every officer on the base, including the lieutenant and the Captain, all of whom were… attempting to stand at attention with varying degrees of success, most weaving slightly, some snorting with poorly-concealed laughter, and the entire room reeking of booze.
“GENTLEMEN!” hiccuped the lieutenant, before shaking himself and continuing, “WE ARE GATHERED HERE TODAY TO HONOR OUR ‘COMRADE’ -snort, giggle- IN ARMS -louder derisive laughter- FOR HIS BRAVERY AND SERVICE IN THE FACE OF EXTREME DANGER-”
“IN THE BEAK OF EXTREME DANGER!” Howled one of the assembled officers.
“-AND FOR HIS SERVICE IN DEFENDING AN OFFICER OF THE UNITED STATES ARMY. I AM ~SO~ PLEASED THAT WE HAVE CAPTAIN [REDACTED] HERE WITH US TO PRESENT THIS MEDAL.”
He turned to the Captain, who took out a small box and motioned Dad forward. Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be a chocolate box from See’s Candies.
“[REDACTED], in honor of your brave and frankly improbable service in the defense of Euge- sorry, Sergeant Ross, and the capture of a dangerous wild animal, we award you this medal- The Flying Purple Bastard.”
He opened the chocolate box to reveal this*:
(Image Description: A piece of cardboard cut out approximately in the silhouette of a hummingbird, by someone with only a passing familiarity with what hummingbirds look like. The cardboard has been haphazardly covered in tinfoil and cartoon eyes drawn on. It’s attached to a scrap of ribbon and a safety Pin.)
Which was then pinned crookedly to Dad’s nightshirt, after accidentally stabbing him a bit, saluted him as someone attempted to play the bugle but made a rather melodious farting noise instead, then slapped Dad in the face with a manilla folder full of papers and shouted. “DISMISSED!”
“Dismissed, sir?”
“Those are your discharge papers.” Said Bulldog. “Get the fuck out of here.”
“Yes, Sir!”
At which point Dad biked home in the rain, and thus ends my father’s military career.
*Pictured here is actually The Flying Purple Bastard 2.0, as the original was destroyed when partially eaten and fully regurgitated by one of the cats.
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