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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Can a good person choose to join the military without being stupid or naive?
- Yes
- No
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Not everybody in the military is at the frontline killing people. So of course.
But yeah the overall cult surrounding the military and American nationalism in general has made the country ripe for a dictatorship to form for some time. It disturbs me. That said, the propaganda machine that enters high schools looking for impressionable 17 year olds who need an alternate to post-graduate unemployment is what should be shamed not its victims.
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Do you see a difference between 17-year-olds who enlist and those who seek to enter a service academy?
I can only remember one sad story of someone busting at 1/2, being asked if they were coming back and almost crying that they couldn’t afford too.
I think I’m at 3x for stacking people and them asking for their money back/a loan.
Once a guy bought in with exclusively loonies, that was a fun 5 minutes wasted.
I busted a guy who I later found out showed up every two weeks and lost his whole paycheck, who had a wife and kids. He was playing blind so… Yeah. It was sad but if it wasn’t me it was going to be someone else, and if he won at poker he was probably going to dust it off at blackjack.
I’ve been asked for a rebate a few times after felting someone. I’ve been asked for a loan several times by people who were broke, but never by someone I had just taken money off of (at least not that I recall).
Only times I’ve been asked for a loan after felting someone, they were regs in a bigger game and I knew they had a cash bankroll to cover it and just didn’t have it on them, it was a loan request to keep playing that session, not for rent/food/etc.
I was playing with a guy who lived two hours away and was four hours late returning a car he had borrowed from his roommate. He proudly announced that he was back to even and had enough money to pay his share of the rent, which he was also late with. Needless to say, I busted him.