What's your opinion on the military?

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Personally I think the military sucks - no offense to anyone who's in it or has people they know in it, but I think the entire institution is a scam. Especially the US military. Aside from a few nutjobs, there is nobody 'out to get us' - 99% of the world kisses our behinds because they have to due to our sheer power. By joining the military, you are really just lining the pockets of the elite.

Plus, I'm a pacifist against violence of any kind so the patriotic rah rah sentiment annoys and disgusts me.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, even slackers.Evidence, please?Evidence, please?Evidence, please?Ahh ... that explains everything ... never mind, then.

Just remember this, however...

"Gentle people sleep soundly in their beds, knowing that rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do them harm."

You're Welcome,

PO1 Fnord, USN

Are you asking about the American military specifically, or just the concept of military in general?

Both really.

And the person above me is just a typical war hawk. I will soon defend my statements with references.

Tried it.
Too stressful.
Not my thing, but I respect those who want to do it.

Yet, certainly, the wise learn many things from their enemies; for caution preserves all things. From a friend you could not learn this, but your foe immediately obliges you to learn it. For example, the states have learned from enemies, and not from friends, to build lofty walls, and to possess ships of war. And this lesson preserves children, house, and possessions.

I am against a bloated military industrial complex that maintains itself in perpetuity by its own influence on world affairs, however

I love the soilders, but dont like how the military treats them like pea soup in a food fight.
The miltary is continiously recycing the same soilders over and over without giving them or their families the mental health care they need.
Then after they are injured to the point they no longer serve, they are dependant on the VA which provides crappy services as best and outright neglect at worst.
Those who choose to not go to the VA, must use medicare as their primary insurance and tricare secondary, but with drastic cuts to medicare that already occured, not the ones that they are proposing, it is really hard to find a doctor that takes medicare now days. If you ask the doctor if you can just pay out of pocket, they said medicare wont let them do that either, so you are limited to the doctors who are usually so crappy and dangerously ignorant that they take medicare only because no one else will have anything to do with them.

Then on top of that, you have the military giving soilders Anthrax vacenes with squaline in it, which without a doubt, causes horrible various autoimmune diseases in a drug experiment that the soilders have no legal right to decline partipation in. This is the cause of gulf war syndrome. So when they go to the VA to get treatment for these autoimmuune diseases, they are demoralized and told they are crazy and these symptoms are in their heads. Many die from these auto immune diseases alone and left for dead by the country they were trying to defend.

I think of all this when I see a "support the troops" bumper sticker on some mini van.
Like I said, I love the soilders, my dad was one....his country forgot him in the end.

But they wouldn't do that if we didn't have the military, would they?

I have no problem with the military itself, but I don't like the way the U.S. is trying to police the world, which isn't necessarily the fault of the military itself.

We're always going to need a military because everybody else has one. Sure it might be kind of stupid and if everybody got rid of theirs, the world would be that much closer to a utopia, but the reality is not everybody is a pacifist.

I love the soldiers who actually believe they are defending their people ... I do not love the soldiers who think everyone owes them a thank you. But I'm not the kind who would spit on the soldiers, I am more against the military as an institution. Just like they don't care about the brown people they order their troops (who are basically children) to slaughter, in the end they don't care about their boys either.

The 'i love the troops but not the war' thing makes sense, but saying you SUPPORT the troops is a different thing. that makes no sense. unless you support war or actually believe they are protecting our lives and freedom (which they are not). If we REALLY needed a $900 billion military budget, why did the Iraq and Afghan wars kill hundreds of thousands while terrorism at most has killed maybe about 6,000 Westerners?

If America had no military tomorrow, yeah, that might be an issue, since China etc would pounce on the opportunity.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiTeVRzksaM&feature=channel_video_title[/youtube]

It sounds to me like you're against a Military Industrial Complex. Not the military itself.

I understand the need for self defense in general, but yeah, I'm against the MIC and also against Nationalism in general (i think supporting the idea of a national army in some sense implies you care more about your own ethnicity than about others) and also against the blind hero worship that goes with military service. i think local areas should have their own militias and that they should as often as possible combat any possible enemies non-lethally.

why the f*ck should I automatically admire a person just because they're in the army? especially if the war they are fighting in (most of them are) is unjust? being part of 'something bigger than you' isn't in itself heroic, if that were true, than being in the Manson family would earn you a medal. it's all just propaganda and pomp and circumstance most people buy into.

I love the people that serve our country (and they do deserve our respect for giving up many citizen rights when they defend our country, Once a person is enlisted, they are not just a citizen anymore, they are "property" of the US miltary.)
But I do hate war itself. Some wars are nessisary, others are just political. WWII was a nessisary war, however, the war in the middle east is in someways nessisary to what happened with 9/11, but I am sure it could be shortened and to the point, if our leaders were not so interested in wartime powers that a president has which a peacetime president does not have.

However to say that all wars could be solved peacefully is bull**** cause there was no negociating with Hilter...it just was not going to happen. I know that a signing a petition would have only made you an easy target for his political machine. Any peaceful disobedience would have caused you to witness your family being tortured and killed. There was no easy way out of it with this maniac...war was the only choice to save the entire world from going into the next dark ages. He could have easily taken over the world with his brand of total control of the minds of his subjects. Even today with terrorists, dont kid yourself, they are a real threat to the world, maybe not to the point of Hitler was, but they need to be stopped, however, I dont think we should give up all our privacy and human rights to fight the war on terror.
You cant reason with people who are willing to die and kill many others with them for their god, so they can get 72 virgins in heaven...obviously this person is beyond any scope of reason. The only thing you can do is not let them die a "martyr"
I serously doubt a caremail petition is going to sway them either. All they care about is destroying any ally of Israel whom they want to wipe off the planet.
However I believe this war could be done much faster, and more effectively, and with more respect to our troops and without burning the constitution in the process.

donnie_darko wrote:
Personally I think the military sucks - no offense to anyone who's in it or has people they know in it, but I think the entire institution is a scam.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion, even slackers.


Ad hominem.


donnie_darko wrote:
Especially the US military. Aside from a few nutjobs, there is nobody 'out to get us' ...
Evidence, please?

Saddam WMD's were a scam, North Korea is pretty much harmless (to us), Al-Qaeda is likely a hoax

donnie_darko wrote:
... 99% of the world kisses our behinds because they have to due to our sheer power.
Evidence, please?

There are 200 countries in the world, the vast majority (prob 180-190) of them are our allies or at least not our enemies. Even China is more of a friend than a foe at this point.
donnie_darko wrote:
By joining the military, you are really just lining the pockets of the elite.
Evidence, please?

the bankers make huge profits on interest from rising national debt. plus the ultimate goal of the war likely is not to eliminate radical Islam but to set up puppet states in the Mideast and eventually make them like another Hawaii.

donnie_darko wrote:
Plus, I'm a pacifist against violence of any kind so the patriotic rah rah sentiment annoys and disgusts me.
Ahh ... that explains everything ... never mind, then.

Just remember this, however...

"Gentle people sleep soundly in their beds, knowing that rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do them harm."

You're Welcome,

PO1 Fnord, USN
_________________

You're welcome.

references:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 461214.ece
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Who_are_allie ... ted_States
http://www.counterpunch.org/foley09152005.html

I don't like the military because I hate large scale war. And when there are conflicts, there are no goodies or baddies they're still fighting at the end of the day, but the military being so patriotic they think they are fighting some sort of good fight and no one gives a s**t if the opposing side lose soldiers. They always say on the news how the Middle East conflicts affects our (and the USA's) troops, amd who have died or have been lucky to have gone back home after years. But I want to see how it affects both sides, I have a feeling that way more Afghan, Iraqi etc soldiers have died than those from the USA and UK.

I couldn't agree more, nothing is more annoying than a sense of entitlment.





Where do you get this stuff?

Last edited by MDD123 on 21 May 2011, 10:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.