I'm just curious about what people here think. A lot of people I know irl are passionate about this but I don't see it talked about here much. Add nuance to your answer with a post if you wish.
US soldiers
I'm just curious about what people here think. A lot of people I know irl are passionate about this but I don't see it talked about here much. Add nuance to your answer with a post if you wish.
Sorry this is US-centric, I just have no idea what the culture surrounding the military is like elsewhere and don't have any context to ask about it. Feel free to discuss things in your country though.
also 'horny and finding a way to get laid'
I voted both just people and dupes of the system. Some seem rather brainwashed, most are just normal people in my experience.
At this point, the US military is a mercenary army. All the soldiers are paid to fight.
You can argue all day long about their motivations, but basically, they are mercenaries.
The US experimented for a time with a draft to meet staffing needs, and then again with an all-volunteer army, but neither resulted in a high-quality fighting force. Both of the previous methods resulted in too many recruits with mental problems of the sort you would expect when advertising for a job which involves firing weapons and killing people. This was a serious problem for the military (ref. Arlo Guthrie’s “Group W”) but it mostly went away when they switched to raising wages high enough to attract the kind of people they wanted and firing the occasional unsuitable person who got through screening.
The US military now has the most advanced, most egalitarian hiring practices of any organization that I’m aware of. They hire to meet performance goals and do not discriminate on race, creed, sex, color, etc. It is a truly professional organization with rewards based on merit.
@ashlesha, based on the available choices, your question seems to be asking how people feel about US soldiers. When considering this, it is important to separate the people in the organization from society’s goals for the organization.
The people are just people, perhaps just a bit above the average in the population because the low tail of the Gaussian is cut off.
The goals of the organization are to use force to steal and defend resources for the benefit of the people who pay them.
All sovereign countries have militaries for this purpose.
Imagine a water hole. It has all the water needed for all the creatures and tribes who visit it. One day, one tribe decides to build a fence around the water and charge other tribes for access to the water. They enforce this practice with coercion and violence. In time, other tribes might choose to either fight back (build their own army at some cost) or just accept the claims of the tribe to the water as being their “personal property” as “valid” if the cost of access is not too great.
Personal property is a concept that is enforced by violence and force. Everything is fine if there are enough resources to go around, in which case, no one needs to go to the expense of maintaining a coercive force. But once the needs of the population outstrip the supply of resources, then you begin to see militaries appear.
Are the soldiers heroes defending freedom? Are they evil murderers? Are they sad dupes of the system? Are they just people? Yes.
Incidentally, this points out the basic flaw in libertarian thinking. Libertarians object to taxes because taxes are coercion. And yet they have no problem with the idea of private property, which also exists only through coercion. I have no respect at all for guys who take only the benefits and conveniently leave it to others to do the hard work, just because they haven't, or prefer not to, fully think out the consequences of their beliefs.
Heroes defending freedom because - even if they are being taken advantage of, so is the rest of the country, and it's weird not to support the people who'll physically defend you, and counterproductive. Everyone is in the same boat if you want to think about it as getting shafted, ie the 99% vs the 1% percent etc.
Eh there are some of them who'd make more money outside of the military, such as the doctors... doctors in the military make like 120k, out of the military it's like 200k and usually more like 250-300k
yeah there's this myth that the Army takes advantage of the poor by funneling them into the most dangerous positions but its actually not true. there's a disproportionately higher amount of middle and upper class white people in combat arms and greater minority and poor representation in the support MOSes (compared to general population). of course any Soldier might be exposed to danger so MOS is no guarantee, still it seems like the richer and whiter you are the more you join for ideological reasons vs pure mobility. but this is a good thing because it allows a step upward in social mobility for the poorer people without directly forcing them to kill or be killed, as was more often the case in the past. of course this is right about where people would say the white people joining combat arms when they strictly speaking aren't forced into financially are doing it because they're racist murderers, so its a sort of damned if you do damned if you don't scenario. either the system its forcing its poor to fight for them or its not but its just chock full of psychopaths. anyway, I think the armed forces are generally stocked by regular people, with all the good and bad and ambiguity that entails. from my experience its the least racist environment I've ever been in, its actually a real model of racial harmony society could stand to learn from. a lot of the people think they're doing members of the armed forces some kind of service for feeling bad for them or by way of pointing out what a corrupt organization it is, but that wasn't my experience nor do I think most Soldiers want people to look at them that way. I think they take real pride in keeping the enemy at bay. also the reason a professional army is best is because its been proven to be most effective. professional Soldiers just out perform conscripts across every metric. there was a point where the draft was costing more than it was saving in ineffectiveness, and it was more of an ideological thing to keep it rather than do away with it. mercenary implies members fight for the highest bidder, but I really do not think the average american Solider would, say, fight for china for an extra %10. so I don't buy this conscript->mercenary narrative
All my friends that have been in the military just did it for the masculine badassery. Doesn't make them heroes or monsters, just people looking for action and challenge. Obviously the military is a very broad organization so there is going to be a lot of different motivations and attitudes between specific people.
Lol, I was debating including the last option bcuz it's too obvious or something but seemed silly to leave out the answer that I would give myself & I thought that considering the people I know irl maybe people here actually wouldn't choose it. A lot of my family would probably consider this poll itself sacrilege or something - the idea that 'murderer' or 'dupe' would even be on the table as options would be incredibly offensive to them. So the results are interesting to me. Also interesting in that I find in my limited exposure to people who have actually been in the military they tend have a pretty nuanced pov and aren't as gung-ho about the superhuman nobility of soldiers as some others.
Voted just people, it depends because every person has their own unique reasons for joining. Some are well intentioned, a minority mean harm and most are probably looking to better their lives IMO.
I think whether the influence is positive, neutral or negative depends a lot on the nation of the military the person is joining. The American army is unfortunately primarily used for nefarious purposes as evidenced by the Iraq and Afghanistan war.
Resource control and acquisition is vital for the US. It is not surprising though as the US is the top of the food chain military, economically and technologically for the moment and near future.
This will eventually change, but not for some time. Naturally, the most dominant nation will abuse that power in some form. It doesn't make it right, but it is what it is.
So joining the American military comes with more indirect consequences than other nations, but of course it is not the only one that uses its military for nefarious purposes.
On a side note, Black mirror season 3 episode 5 touches on this issue heavily in a metaphorical manner. It is worth checking out for anyone interested in this subject.
“We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.” Randy Pausch
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It's not an appropriate thing to say but many of them actually are evil murderers at a core level also, we really are sold this fantasy of them and we consent to it because we know they are serving our purposes. The idealistic fantasy is definitely not reality...
I have a sibling in the military, and I wondered after looking at his first photo he sent me in years whether he was a psychopath. Could be something to this.Originally Posted by rat200Turbo
I don't think in terms of good and evil in the case of psychopaths, though. It's not like they can or would change themselves. So, yes, like you said, they can be useful and sometimes good to have around. That's probably why their existence in the human race persists.
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