> secondly, if folks are banking on service members' fear of death, that's
> manipulative bullshit. see Chuck0's page for a good example of how not to
> be a manipulative asshole when it comes to the .mil.
Look, I don't want this taken the wrong way. I come from a military family – a Brazilian one, you can take a guess at what that means – and have nothing but fond memories of my grandfather, whose job as military attaché in Washington was to buy weapons to wipe guerrillas out. He was a lovely guy who happened to know everything there was to know about machineguns. My uncle, who is the head of the Military Police in Brasilia, is an affable and jovial guy who couldn't hurt a flea in his spare time. I would like to allow everyone the right I reserve myself, that is, to have my family around and be able to love them.
However, I really don't see how there is any justification for someone joining the army, and by the same token, why we should be nice on the army folks. Soldiers steal jobs, they ruin our society, they ruin everyone else's society and most of the time they are perfectly happy with the decisions they have made. Those are their own decisions. We owe them the respect of not patronising them with this talk of gullible people being suckered by the government. They know very well what they do, in fact, they love it - and not just in any throway sense of 'love'. They are very much personally to blame, as of course, is the fucked up society that produces people like that. Hence, pretty much all this talk is opportunistic, in fact highly moralistic and unconvincing. It's not even good manipulation.
At some point, you have to wish your family dead: until you realise this, you haven't quite understood what is wrong with war and armies.
Thiago
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