From: Ross A. Finlayson (extropy@apexinternetsoftware.com)
Date: Mon Sep 16 2002 - 18:38:04 MDT
Kind of heavy on the sarcasm.
I think the other countries laugh in their sleeves at us because we
spend all our money on their defense. Canada has like three planes.
Sometimes they consider us, the United States, a dangerous beast.
I would put half the military budget into the space program and national
infrastructure, after paying off the national debt. Between a quarter
and a half of government spending is military or for military
construction, it should be instead around fourteen percent. Some
military construction is national infrastructure. Most countries spend
much less than that, military spending at fourteen percent put the
Soviet Union out of business.
Some people enlist in the military to have a job to not fall through the
cracks. They're never gonna use ninety percent of the training they
get, and most of them don't even need milspec gear. The career training
is mostly good, the people get out able to get a job.
Speaking of milspec, those are some nice toys. They're also very
expensive, and not purchased by their users.
The list members are probably somewhat self-righteous. To some extent,
it's warranted, that's because everyone wants to feel like they are
morally upstanding, although it sometimes contradicts with their desire
to aggrandize resources, and some are immoral or amoral.
Rome is like the Soviet Union, it fell under the weight of its defense
outlays. The United States really should scale back for the health of
the economy. In terms of security, we're big and bad enough, but not in
invading, because people defending their homes derive so much
self-righteousness from it similarly to how a cornered animal is very
dangerous. Plus, all the saber-rattling just makes them afraid and
angry.
I heard a story about George Bush who flew in World War II, he bailed
out over the Pacific before he should've and doomed other people on his
plane. Oops. Shrub just went AWOL from the National Guard.
Heh, military acronyms. That leads into my google-whacking terms,
bathynym and bathoynym for the expansion of an acronym. There used to
be a result for bathynym.
I hear that there is pretty rampant use of psychoactive drugs like
amphetamines in the military. Those guys who killed their wives had
been getting very high on speed in Afghanistan, and now after the
Taliban has fallen the opium crop production is back where it was.
The United States hasn't been a part of a protracted ground campaign
since Vietnam, which we lost. The Vietnamese didn't win anything. It
was a lose-lose scenario.
Hey, Iraq might have chemical weapons. Some were shipped there from
here in the late eighties and early nineties. Did you know Iraq got
some of their chemical weapons from our government's stockpile?
Back to soldiers, I'm not a soldier. I ask myself, in what ways have I
defended democracy from evil fascists? Well, I would probably fight
fascists. I look with approval on freedom-loving and disapproval on
evil fascists. Fascists don't come advertising themselves to me.
Every taxpayer ever has contributed to the defense of the country and
hopefully democracy just as much as anybody else who didn't die fighting
tooth-and-nail against Hitler. They're the ones who paid for the
bayonet to stab Hitler. They also paid about a billion dollars each for
a few B-2 bombers, which only a handful of people ever get to fly.
There is the G.I. Bill so vets can afford to go to college. It's paid
by the taxpayers. It's a good program, and people should be able to get
a college package from non-military public service, and generally.
G.I.: General Issue.
Let's see, soldiers. Soldiers are tough guys in third-world banana
dictatorships. They might have guns, and the laws in most places are
that most people aren't allowed to maintain automatic weapons. Eeyuck,
Nicaragua.
I think a lot of kids join the army because they played with G.I.Joe
dolls as a child. Have you ever seen a war movie or a movie about
soldiers or vets? How about a movie about construction or factory
workers? In one movie, "Rambo: First Blood", John Rambo, played by
Sylvester Stallone, was a derelict Vietnam veteran, who countered police
brutality. In the sequels he went and rescued P.O.W.s, prisoners of
war, or maybe that was Chuck Norris. There are lots of war movies. In
"Predator", Arnold Shwarzenegger played a mercenary or some kind of
soldier who was sent with his team to scrub a narco-guerrilla camp and
encountered the alien Predator, where in "Terminator" he was a robot.
The movie "Apocalypse Now" has Martin Sheen as a guy sent to find Marlon
Brando. Ah, napalm. Did you know napalm has killed a bunch of
civilians? There just isn't the glamorization of paper-shuffling desk
jobs. Those guys are actors, and were in little or no real danger
during the filming of their films. In "Red Dawn", the Soviets invaded
and were fought off by Patrick Swayze. "Star Wars". There are war
movies like "Platoon" and "Full Metal Jacket", "The Thin Red Line". I
just watched "The Deer Hunter", it's about steelworkers. Three
steelworkers, played by Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, and John
Savage, go to Vietnam, where they're captured and tortured. One made it
back in one piece, another made it back with both legs and an arm
missing. The first ten Vietnamese in the movie died.
Heh, dolls. The Tonton Macoutes were into voodoo.
There were a lot more war movies in the fifties and sixties.
I've shot a gun before. I've shot pistols, rifles, and shotguns. My
accuracy is fair to middling. I've never shot at a living thing. I can
put five arrows in a burlap sack. I'm not good at hand-to-hand combat.
I've played and am quite good at "Half-Life", the game of the year. I'm
also pretty good at "Mechwarrior", and "Shogun: Total War", "StarCraft"
and "Red Alert 2", it's been some time.
There are more cooks in the army than there are ground troops in
Afghanistan. They prepare food provided by the taxpayers, feeding the
hungry grunts on exercise. I heard the exercises are rigged, in the
recent exercises the red team sank the whole navy.
Should soldiers, defending freedom, be respected for their role? Sure,
why not. So should garbagemen. Should soldiers be proud of what they
do? Hopefully.
There are more dangerous things to do than to enlist.
I think most people in military uniform don't handle guns on a regular
basis. It seems accepted that policemen here regularly carry guns. I
enjoy watching some shows of Britain's public constabulary running
around pointing at people, and oppose monitoring of innocents. I don't
enjoy watching "breaking and entering home invasions".
I think drugs should be legal, that is, relegalized, so it would be less
dangerous to be born into a housing project.
Those stunt pilots like the Blue Angels, that looks like some dangerous
stuff. The Air Force in general, with perhaps some Navy aviators, is
the most offensive force since Vietnam, with the most results. Each of
those planes costs millions and millions of dollars, with bombs costing
tens of thousands to a million dollars for a cruise missile. There's a
whole generation of Cold War ground armament rusting, paid in full. A
bunch of it has been sold cheap to little countries, and some to
dictators in little countries.
A million dollars can put a hundred people through college, a few of
which could design a cheaper missile. That's a four-year state college,
$2500 a year, it would only put ten people through a private college.
The cruise missile is not reusable, and is only good at flying and
exploding.
Let's see, I guess I should focus here on patriotism and citizenship, or
patriotism vis-a-vis citizenship. Were you born in the United States?
Congratulations, you're a citizen of the United States unless you've
forgone your citizenship. Unless you become a citizen of another
country it can't be taken away, although you can be tried for treason.
Patriotism doesn't mean blind faith, blind faith doesn't equate to
patriotism. A patriot can even be against the government, when the
government is bad for the country. In fact, the United States' original
patriots rebelled against the British Empire. They were patriots,
prepared to fight against oppression.
Fighting oppression is easy.
Ross
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