If You Support Peace, US Soldiers Are Enemy Combatants

Imagine the kind of person who signs up to kill people. Maybe they are bad people, and maybe the killer thinks that he is doing it for the best reasons. Even still. Imagine what kind of person would find that attractive.

If you need help with imagining this kind of person, take a look at a similar example. There is a known epidemic of sociopathy, racism, authoritarianism, and unnecessary violence in the American police. This is partially due to systemic factors, and partially because it attracts that kind of people. Yet the police are not, as a whole, required to kill people. If they do, it is a relatively rare, unfortunate eventuality which leaves many of them scarred for life. Most police officers never need to kill anyone, although they are aware of the possibility.

Imagine the state of the police if standard operating procedure was to either summarily execute all suspects, or to capture them for the end of torturing them into revealing information that will lead to more effective killing. Imagine if the police, in the pursuit of this duty, regularly killed innocent women and children and argued that this was unavoidable outcome. And imagine that this happens a hundred thousand times a year, and is the known and open procedure of the police.

What kind of people would be attracted to this position?

But this thought experiment is not strictly necessary. Evidence is a better proof than theory, and we have it in spades. The evidence indicates that members of the United States military are largely racist sociopaths. We see this in surveys of military members and their lack of likelihood to abhor murder, we have it in official testimony from former soldiers, we have it anecdotally in the stories that soldiers share when away from kept, embedded journalists, and we have it sprayed across the walls in the blood of tens of thousands of human beings.

We also see it in their arguments for their decision to join and remain in the military. The hunger to deliver punishment. The abdication of all personal moral responsibility to a code invented by others. The worship of weapons. The notion that their economic self-interest trumps all other considerations. The fact that they consider it unthinkable to accept negative consequences for their own decisions. Their nonchalance at murder, torture and manslaughter. And of course, open racism and bloodlust. Even when they complain, the pathological narcissism is palpable. They complain about their difficulty finding a job, about their insufficient medical care, about their mental illnesses, suicides and injuries, their dead and crippled friends and family. The concept of extending even a thought to the state of their more numerous victims whose similar problems are far more egregious does not even cross their minds.

Every single member of the military today signed up during a time of war. Every single one knew what they were getting into. We like to pretend that the military system creates these people, but like attracts like.

Yet of course the system they are attracted to does exacerbate the problem. To bring up the police again: while a very racist organization, blacks, hispanics and other minorities are represented in the ranks of police officers. There are no Iraqis or Afghanis in the ranks of the United States military, and a vanishingly small number of even Iraqi- or Afghani-Americans. There are no consequences for soldiers either. We know from testimonials that rules of engagement, such as they were, were considered a joke and soldiers regularly frame innocent murder victims when such events are not simply and explicitly swept under the rug by command. When police nonfatally beat Rodney King and got away with it, Los Angeles burned in outrage. When Marines went on a murder rampage in Haditha, killing 24 innocent people and defiling their corpses and got off scot-free, no one cared. When Calley and his men slaughtered 500 Vietnamese civilians, the only outrage was that he was punished too severely.

Society lets them get away with it with their worship and ceaseless apologism. The military is the most beloved institution in America, and troops are given constant praise from the entirety of the even relatively mainstream ideological spectrum from Michael Moore to Rush Limbaugh. We pretend that their sometimes difficult situations - situations that they put themselves in - make them worthy of respect in the absence of considerations of ethics. We thank them for their service without even so much as asking what service that might precisely be. We regurgitate grade-school cliches about their defending our freedom with no critical thought whatsoever and we make excuses based on theories of race and class background that lack any substantiation.

If you want a better world, you will not support the troops. You will look upon them with the contempt they so richly deserve, and remind yourself that their deaths and disfigurement at the hands of foreign fighters is the only mechanism ever demonstrated to have slowed the US war machine. A soldier committing suicide is not a tragedy; it is the closest thing that passes for justice in the world as it is.

Discussion of If You Support Peace, US Soldiers Are Enemy Combatants on tHE r H i z z o n E:

#1
Your hatred of soldiers, like the transgendered, arises not from sober analysis but from your need to essentialize and deride groupings of people, a pattern that most likely has it's roots in insecurities formed during your adolescence hth.
#2
troops r cool imo
#3
i dont hate the transgendered. i Hate troops
#4
all americans must die or convert to islam
#5
I don’t get the point of this troop-shaming exercise. Uneducated, violent and sexist men have been a feature of every army ever throughout history.
#6
troops 18-25 are actually better educated than their age group
#7
first non-troll poster itt
#8
the only difference between troops and normal americans is troops are trained to kill. 99%of everyone we know would become the type of person you hate goatstein. i've seen it happen to really liberal ppl and rednecks
#9
what, in your opinion, is the difference between vietnam era troops etc... who were drafted and the modern military? what about conscripted europeans who fight in afghanistan/iraq, etc...?
#10
troops are freakin Awesome. great guys. good and important and worthwhile people
#11
i support our tropps and their mission in spreading democracy and peace. peace isn't free, many people overlook this fact.
#12
the surge in enlistment during the economic crisis proves that soldiers are not inherently malign thrill seekers but ordinary folk attempting to improve themselves by joining one of the few organizations which actively attempts to improve its members. there really isn't anything remarkable about the malleablity of people when they go under the total control of the military

"Soldiers are not born; soldiers are made."

Edited by soicowboy ()

#13
yea man we all have the potential to become monsters thank god we did away with any pretense of a modern national army based on conscription and substituted it with a system where we volunteer our mental/social well-being to murder for Uncle Sam (and build schools or w/e nonsense makes life better for being a subjugating force).
#14
KILLL


Edited by mustang19 ()

#15

deadken posted:

troops are freakin Awesome. great guys. good and important and worthwhile people



they contribute greatly to society, unlike many anti-war advocates who are mostly unemployed and smoke weed all day. think about how many advances in technology have occurred as a result of the military. i'd say that the united states military is unquestionably a force of good in this world.

#16

1488 posted:

the surge in enlistment during the economic crisis proves that soldiers are not inherently malign thrill seekers but ordinary folk attempting to improve themselves by joining one of the few organizations which actively attempts to improve its members. there really isn't anything remarkable about the malleablity of people when the go under the total control of that organization as it has been refined throughout the entirety of human history to do,

"Soldiers are not born; soldiers are made."



the "surge in enlistment" derives from the death rate dropping after the ethnic cleansing of iraq; your own self-interest does not justify murder for hire. thanks for calling

#17
Conscripted army>volunteer army. But lol, aesthetics and sacrifice and all that nonsense.
#18

EmanuelaOrlandi posted:

the only difference between troops and normal americans is troops are trained to kill. 99%of everyone we know would become the type of person you hate goatstein. i've seen it happen to really liberal ppl and rednecks



actually the real difference is some people find it attractive to join a racist organization that murders hundreds of thousands of people, and others do not. your friend's "liberalism" (deriving, i assume, from his support of identity politics) is a grain of rice on one side the scale

#19

EmanuelaOrlandi posted:

what, in your opinion, is the difference between vietnam era troops etc... who were drafted and the modern military? what about conscripted europeans who fight in afghanistan/iraq, etc...?



in vietnam, the argument could be made at least that there was a significant race/class aspect to enlistment, and that consequences of failure to join the military were more onerous. everything else is similar

#20
how many americans do you think identify the armed forces as a 'racist' organization?
#21
follow up, how many americans do you think care about the war in Afghanistan (other than the fact that they're tired of hearing about it on the news)?
#22
uh, op, it's Workers, Peasants and Soldiers
#23

Goethestein posted:

Imagine the kind of person who signs up to kill people. Maybe they are bad people, and maybe the killer thinks that he is doing it for the best reasons. Even still. Imagine what kind of person would find that attractive.

If you need help with imagining this kind of person, take a look at a similar example. There is a known epidemic of sociopathy, racism, authoritarianism, and unnecessary violence in the American police. This is partially due to systemic factors, and partially because it attracts that kind of people. Yet the police are not, as a whole, required to kill people. If they do, it is a relatively rare, unfortunate eventuality which leaves many of them scarred for life. Most police officers never need to kill anyone, although they are aware of the possibility.

Imagine the state of the police if standard operating procedure was to either summarily execute all suspects, or to capture them for the end of torturing them into revealing information that will lead to more effective killing. Imagine if the police, in the pursuit of this duty, regularly killed innocent women and children and argued that this was unavoidable outcome. And imagine that this happens a hundred thousand times a year, and is the known and open procedure of the police.

What kind of people would be attracted to this position?

But this thought experiment is not strictly necessary. Evidence is a better proof than theory, and we have it in spades. The evidence indicates that members of the United States military are largely racist sociopaths. We see this in surveys of military members and their lack of likelihood to abhor murder, we have it in official testimony from former soldiers, we have it anecdotally in the stories that soldiers share when away from kept, embedded journalists, and we have it sprayed across the walls in the blood of tens of thousands of human beings.

We also see it in their arguments for their decision to join and remain in the military. The hunger to deliver punishment. The abdication of all personal moral responsibility to a code invented by others. The worship of weapons. The notion that their economic self-interest trumps all other considerations. The fact that they consider it unthinkable to accept negative consequences for their own decisions. Their nonchalance at murder, torture and manslaughter. And of course, open racism and bloodlust. Even when they complain, the pathological narcissism is palpable. They complain about their difficulty finding a job, about their insufficient medical care, about their mental illnesses, suicides and injuries, their dead and crippled friends and family. The concept of extending even a thought to the state of their more numerous victims whose similar problems are far more egregious does not even cross their minds.

Every single member of the military today signed up during a time of war. Every single one knew what they were getting into. We like to pretend that the military system creates these people, but like attracts like.

Yet of course the system they are attracted to does exacerbate the problem. To bring up the police again: while a very racist organization, blacks, hispanics and other minorities are represented in the ranks of police officers. There are no Iraqis or Afghanis in the ranks of the United States military, and a vanishingly small number of even Iraqi- or Afghani-Americans. There are no consequences for soldiers either. We know from testimonials that rules of engagement, such as they were, were considered a joke and soldiers regularly frame innocent murder victims when such events are not simply and explicitly swept under the rug by command. When police nonfatally beat Rodney King and got away with it, Los Angeles burned in outrage. When Marines went on a murder rampage in Haditha, killing 24 innocent people and defiling their corpses and got off scot-free, no one cared. When Calley and his men slaughtered 500 Vietnamese civilians, the only outrage was that he was punished too severely.

Society lets them get away with it with their worship and ceaseless apologism. The military is the most beloved institution in America, and troops are given constant praise from the entirety of the even relatively mainstream ideological spectrum from Michael Moore to Rush Limbaugh. We pretend that their sometimes difficult situations - situations that they put themselves in - make them worthy of respect in the absence of considerations of ethics. We thank them for their service without even so much as asking what service that might precisely be. We regurgitate grade-school cliches about their defending our freedom with no critical thought whatsoever and we make excuses based on theories of race and class background that lack any substantiation.

If you want a better world, you will not support the troops. You will look upon them with the contempt they so richly deserve, and remind yourself that their deaths and disfigurement at the hands of foreign fighters is the only mechanism ever demonstrated to have slowed the US war machine. A soldier committing suicide is not a tragedy; it is the closest thing that passes for justice in the world as it is.

Front page.

#24

Goethestein posted:

troops 18-25 are actually better educated than their age group



yeah, like i said, uneducated

#25

EmanuelaOrlandi posted:

how many americans do you think identify the armed forces as a 'racist' organization?



I'm Just Going to Join this Organization That Kills Millions of Nonwhites, No Racism Here

#26

Goethestein posted:

The military is the most beloved institution in America, and troops are given constant praise from the entirety of the even relatively mainstream ideological spectrum from Michael Moore to Rush Limbaugh.


http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2013/01/04/michael-moore-right-to-make-anti-military-comments-exactly-what-defend-ex/

#27
good idear

front page article
#28
forwarding this article onto my new pals at the recruiting center, sergeant o'bryant and staff sergeant gribbins
#29
[account deactivated]
#30
I've literallyspit on troops irl. Just doing my part.
#31

ilmdge posted:

I've literally irl spit on troops.



story please

#32

Goethestein posted:

EmanuelaOrlandi posted:
how many americans do you think identify the armed forces as a 'racist' organization?


I'm Just Going to Join this Organization That Kills Millions of Nonwhites, No Racism Here



you're a member of planned parenthood?

#33

mustang19 posted:

ilmdge posted:

I've literally irl spit on troops.

story please

there's a cute girl i know that really wanted to spit on soldiers but was afraid of being hit by them, and i told her she didn't have to worry because the same bizarre code of honor that allows troops to murder children in iraq tells them they can't hit a girl, but she was still scared so she put all this padding under her shrt to make her look pregnant and it owned so hard, she spit on them and the look on those dumb sheep's faces was one of total perplexion and you could actually see them searching for a course of action, you could read their transparent thoughts right in their eyes, but the problem with the fake pregnancy thing was that it would always give them an outlet, they'd always get on a soapbox and start talking about how it was thanks to them that her child would be able to be free so once she got a little more comfortable she ditched that safety net and now she just gets all nasty with them, screams at them and spits on them and dares them to beat the shit out of her, she a cute girl like 5'1 or something but totally full of venom like you wouldn't believe and she's a fixture now when these troops are coming thru dc and is really the best there is now at educating those dumb apes, and one time one of them actually did snap and slap her in the face and it gave her a busted lip and the whole crowd was like gasping tghat he would hit a woman and she loved every second of it and he was owned. btw huey this is karen im talking about rofl so you can just imagine what its like.

#34
[account deactivated]
#35
“Heh, check out how dumb and brutal these soldiers are, they wouldn’t even hit a pregnant woman who was spitting on them”
#36
[account deactivated]
#37

ilmdge posted:

mustang19 posted:

ilmdge posted:

I've literally irl spit on troops.

story please

there's a cute girl i know that really wanted to spit on soldiers but was afraid of being hit by them, and i told her she didn't have to worry because the same bizarre code of honor that allows troops to murder children in iraq tells them they can't hit a girl, but she was still scared so she put all this padding under her shrt to make her look pregnant and it owned so hard, she spit on them and the look on those dumb sheep's faces was one of total perplexion and you could actually see them searching for a course of action, you could read their transparent thoughts right in their eyes, but the problem with the fake pregnancy thing was that it would always give them an outlet, they'd always get on a soapbox and start talking about how it was thanks to them that her child would be able to be free so once she got a little more comfortable she ditched that safety net and now she just gets all nasty with them, screams at them and spits on them and dares them to beat the shit out of her, she a cute girl like 5'1 or something but totally full of venom like you wouldn't believe and she's a fixture now when these troops are coming thru dc and is really the best there is now at educating those dumb apes, and one time one of them actually did snap and slap her in the face and it gave her a busted lip and the whole crowd was like gasping tghat he would hit a woman and she loved every second of it and he was owned. btw huey this is karen im talking about rofl so you can just imagine what its like.



im horney

#38

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

“Heh, check out how dumb and brutal these soldiers are, they wouldn’t even hit a pregnant AMERICAN woman who was spitting on them”

cuz you'd better believe those guys that yuck it up about kids bring crushed under their wheels and gay guys being bombed from helicopters wouldn't mind socking her good if they were inthe Theatre of War.

#39
put a ring on taht shit bro
#40

ilmdge posted:

Ironicwarcriminal posted:
“Heh, check out how dumb and brutal these soldiers are, they wouldn’t even hit a pregnant AMERICAN woman who was spitting on them”
cuz you'd better believe those guys that yuck it up about kids bring crushed under their wheels and gay guys being bombed from helicopters wouldn't mind socking her good if they were inthe Theatre of War.



Well yeah, soldiers are taught to dehumanize the enemy, what a scoop

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