Well then most of us on the forum are assholes, I would think.
Some of the time, yes. Some of the time. But not all of the time.
I’m receptive to his question because I’m really sick and tired of the fetishizing of the military in the US. And how “inappropriate” it is to not participate, never mind actually saying something to somebody. Just prior to the pandemic somebody actually threatened to punch me for not standing up at a Bruins game when they trotted out some asshole in a uniform in between periods. (And this was in a luxury box with people I do business with and where I wasn’t looking to cause a scene. But basically was forced to tell this guy to go fuck himself and hope it didn’t escalate.) The country is sick with this shit.
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Maybe we could have found a way to discuss issue this that didn’t lead to a thread that’s dedicated to putting one of the regs on blast?
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Doesn’t seem like he started this thread, did he? (I’m not exactly sure how it started and lack the context of whatever happened in the other thread.)
It started with a reply to this post, which goofyballer split into a separate thread. Skydiver describes her Air Force job and says AMA.
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Thanks. Well my opinion is that this was a perfectly legit question for an AMA about a job in the US military. (Although it could obviously have been phrased better.)
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It does fall under the umbrella of “anything”, but it comes across as an attempt to score points and not an attempt to seek an answer that one is legitimately curious about.
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Is scoring points and making a point the same thing? I doubt he cares about scoring points, but seems clear he wanted to make a point.
If someone said “I’m a poker pro ama” I think it would be in poor form to post “how does it feel to prey on people, take their money and be a net negative for society?”
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Uh, yeah, he sort of did. Or at least the derail. Regardless, we now have a thread that’s dedicated to shitting on one of the regs, and that just seems bad for the community imo.
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Seems like the thread would be more appropriately described as being dedicated to shitting on the person who asked the question. Anyway, I’m going to stop responding for a while as I’m making every other post at the moment which is never a good thing. But so far my opinion remains unchanged.
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It feels horrible.
Man, turns out I have less in common than I thought with a lot of the posters here. This thread makes me feel bad.
Good now use that feeling to change your world view for the better
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I’m sure everyone ITT is a fine and dandy person. Can we all agree that it is deeply weird for a Rhodes scholar Harvard Graduate with a great job at McKinsey to join the military in 2009? Like, we can agree that this person wasn’t exploited or taken advantage of and is probably just a little freak?
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I mean Pete was just trying to build his resume for political office. What do the voters like, oh man, they like troops. I’ll become a troop. So he got a direct commission as an intelligence officer (hmmm, seems like something a CIA officer would do) and ships out to Afghanistan. And keeps an exact count of the number of times he ventured outside the wire, information which he has at hand during his presidential campaign. Very cool, definitely something real combat soldiers do.
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Airplanes are cool.
Black ones:
White ones:
And the ones that are shades of grey:
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all warplanes matter
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It’s not like this thread was started in a vacuum, directed at nobody in particular. It was extracted as a derail in another thread because jalfrezi decided to go after skydiver.
Say what you want of the US military as it has been used over the last 50 or so years, or military fetishization in our society. But there are clearly plenty of selfless and heroic people who serve.
Maybe they do so out of being under- or mis-informed when they enlisted, maybe they never develop that understanding, or maybe some of them enlisted after 9/11 when they felt it was their duty regardless because we had been attacked and the good outweighed the bad.
Never the less, skydiver is pretty clearly someone who has a desire to serve the public good in a variety of ways, and while people are welcome to disagree with some of her views, it’s pretty awful to accuse her of being on team rah rah carpet bomb the middle east for imperialistic reasons.
We can criticize the national attitude on the use of the military without criticizing everyone who has ever served. We can have philosophical discussions about the culpability of those who served. We can do those things without attacking individuals whose motives seem pure.
It was phrased how it was phrased on purpose. Let’s not play dumb.
I felt bad about taking people’s rent money at 1/2, but I knew they were degenerate gamblers who were going to lose it anyway. At higher stakes in my current games, I’m mostly taking money from people who are paying an amount they can afford to for gambling entertainment, or taking their winnings from elsewhere. I try to give back in various ways so that I’m not a net negative. This includes donating money and time, but also just taking advantage of my flexible schedule when I can to be supportive of friends and family when possible. That feels extremely good.
(I know you didn’t direct that at anyone and meant it as an example that applies to a ton of us, but I’m very big on poker pros having the opportunity not to be a net negative and thus decided to answer.)
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