Heroism vs. Jingoism

 Idiots & Assholes (Politics)
May 302012
 

Another Memorial Day has come and gone.  Usually I avoid the hype and just enjoy my day off, which I did…but I also came across this issue which exploded over the weekend and got everyone’s panties in a tight little bunch.  A commentator on MSNBC questioned America’s practice of calling every dead soldier a “hero”, wondering if such a thing tends to (perhaps unintentionally) glorify war.  And oh, did he get raked over the coals for that!  Imagine:  speaking an opinion, asking a sensitive question, right there for all to hear!  Why, he oughta be burned in effigy!

It’s an interesting question, though, and one I’ve asked myself many times:  does getting killed in the line of duty automatically make you a hero?  Maybe…or maybe not, depending on the circumstances.  What if someone is killed by stepping on a mine while walking down some road in Afghanistan–is that heroic?  His/her family and friends would likely say “Of course it’s heroic, you insensitive asshole!”  But is it really?  I wonder.  How heroic is that compared to, say, a fireman hauling two kids out of a burning building?  Or troops fighting an actual threat to our country rather than a war based on lies and greed for oil?  Are there degrees of heroism in cases like this?  Probably.

Also, some think that simply being in the military automatically makes one a hero–even though joining the military is usually a choice people make.  But if everyone’s a hero, then nobody is.  Know what I mean?  It’s like those wussy parents who don’t want their precious spawn to hear the word “loser” when their team loses a game, because “everyone’s a winner!”  Well, then nobody’s a winner.  So maybe we’re using this term “hero” a little too broadly.

But that’s just my brain blathering questions about stuff.  What do I know?  I’ve never been in the military, so obviously (as someone on Facebook snippily inferred) I’m not entitled to any opinion on the matter.  I don’t claim to have an answer because there really isn’t one, just peoples’ opinions and interpretation of the hero thing.  It’s an interesting discussion, don’t you think?  Too bad you risk being burned at the stake for asking these questions, like this poor guy did–as if the subject can never be discussed, as if nobody can ever pose questions about the military and its effect on our society because the military is beyond question.  That’s not a good road to start down.

A-Bomb cake controversy

 General Blatherings, Unfuckingbelievable!
Sep 132010
 

Fascinating!  At first I thought this couldn’t possibly be real, but apparently it is.  I found a couple of original newspaper articles about it (here and here) on Google News which are quite interesting.

The entire function would have occurred without notice had it not been for the presence of a photographer from the prestigious Harris & Ewing Studio.[1] What triggered the controversy was a picture that the commander of the Task Force, Vice Admiral William H.P. Blandy, and his wife posed for with Rear Admiral Frank J. Lowry. In it, the so-called “Atomic Admiral” is seen cutting into an elaborately engineered “mushroom cloud”-topped cake (with token assistance from Mrs. Blandy) while Lowry looks on with a smile. The unusual pastry was there in the first place because of an order to an East St. Louis, Illinois bakery by Lieutenant John T. Holloway, a member of Blandy’s staff. “It was strictly a business request,” said Eugene Kuehn to the Associated Press at the time. Kuehn, with the help of a bakery supply salesman named L.Y. Stephens, designed the strange looking dessert and had it delivered by car to Washington.[

via CONELRAD Adjacent

Lamer-than-average duck

 Idiots & Assholes (Politics)
Jan 152007
 

Last week Bush once again proved that he’s dumber than a box of hair by sentencing 20,000 more troops to serve time in Iraq.  The best part?  He actually said that the deployment would “help break the cycle of violence and hasten the day U.S. troops were able to come home.”  Hmmm, let’s see how this math checks out:  Sending more troops + escalating the war = more U.S. soldier deaths.  Well!  In this sense he’s right about more troops coming home–they just won’t be, you know, alive.

What’s wrong with this picture?

 General Blatherings
Nov 032006
 

A woman from Flagstaff, AZ (around where I grew up) was serving in Iraq recently.  She refused to participate in the torturing of prisoners, and ended up committing suicide a couple of days later.  Or did she?  Something about the details smells mighty fishy to me:

According to KNAU, an Army investigation found that Peterson had objected to interrogation techniques that were being used on prisoners.  …She was subsequently assigned to monitoring Iraqi guards at the base gate and was sent to suicide prevention training, stated the KNAU report.  And on Sept. 15, Army investigators concluded she shot and killed herself with her service rifle, according to KNAU.

The KNAU report also stated that Army spokespeople for Peterson’s unit refused to describe the interrogation techniques and that all records of the techniques have been destroyed.

So she protests the torturing of prisoners, gets reassigned to guard duty, shoots herself in the head, and all records of the torture methods she witnessed were destroyed.  Oh, and her parents weren’t even told that it was a suicide–the only way they found out was when a Flagstaff radio station filed a request for the documents under the Freedom of Information Act.  Does all this sound…suspicious to anyone?  Because, you know, the military would never try to obfuscate the facts.

I also noticed how the military translated her (alleged) suicide into “noncombat weapons discharge.”  (Much like they took “shell shock” and diluted it down into “post-traumatic stress disorder.”)  Gee, how informative.  Sounds like good ol’ military thinking to me, though:  distort, obfuscate, change the wording and hope it goes away.

Yes, something is definitely wrong here.

The feud is over!

 General Blatherings
Oct 102006
 

Hey, depressed Americans!  Forget the War in Iraq, forget those alleged Korean nukes, forget those closeted Republican boychasing geezers.  Here’s some news to wipe it all away, creating a shiny new world of limitless possibilities where humankind lives together in harmony with nature and spirit. This can only mean…Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie have renewed their friendship and are shooting another season of “The Simple Life.”

Mr Murray said for the next season of the programme he plans to put the pair on a deserted island with a group of survivalists.  The decision was reached after they agreed to appear side-by-side again.  “They reached out to each other in universal disdain for the island concept and rekindled their friendship,” he said.

Wow!  Nothing makes a nation of retards happier than stupid spoiled whores on T.V.  Praise Jesus and pass the remote!

Don’t Break the Chain!

 Holy Shit! (Religion), Patriotic Peepeecaca
Jul 212006
 

Some poor soul out there got out his digital crayon and scrawled this pathetic prayer chain email to spam all his friends with.  It’s got all the usual “Yay USA!  Screw France!” stuff, with some other nonsense about the ACLU. And, of course, people spammed others with it, unwilling to “break the chain.”  Sigh.  Too bad they didn’t realize that this one’s a hoax and nobody can prove its claims.  Tee hee!

Hoax or not, I’ve seen dozens of others like it.  I’m not as offended by the shmaltzy content as much as the chain letter aspect.  The idea that “breaking the chain” will result in a bad outcome is one of the oldest and stupidest junk-mail hoaxes ever, and it’s even more moronic in email form.  It’s like those things you were handed by some kid in high school: “Pass this around! Don’t break the chain or you’ll end up like Mrs. Pitlick of Dillhole, KY who ignored this letter and was killed in her own bed during a freak accident involving a blimp and some monkeys.”

Feh.  This kind of patrio-religious dildonics reminds me of how Chuck Palahniuk referred to prayer chains in one of his books:  “A spiritual pyramid scheme.  As if you can gang up on God.  Bully him around.”

America being SWATted

 General Blatherings
Mar 242006
 

Wow, what a frightening story.  Apparently the the use of SWAT teams and military-style force on U.S. citizens is increasing exponentially.  These “special teams” are being called in for situations that do not justify this kind of force, and yet there they are, often killing people without cause or raiding the wrong houses.  Excessive force is skyrocketing, if the figures in this story are accurate.

Professor Peter Kraska, an expert on police militarisation from Eastern Kentucky University, says that in the 1980s there were about 3,000 Swat team deployments annually across the US, but says now there are at least 40,000 per year.

…The problem is that when you talk about the war on this and the war on that, and police officers see themselves as soldiers, then the civilian becomes the enemy.

Jesus H. Christ!  He’s got a point, though.  We’re constantly declaring war on something:  war on drugs, war on poverty, Bush’s war on terrrr, war on cancer, war on hunger.  (Notice there’s no war on war.)  “Declaring war” is apparently our culture’s solution to everything, as opposed to “solving” or “helping” or “finding a cure.”  And everyone is a target:  a group of Tibetan monks was recently raided by a SWAT team (take that, ya hippies!), and even the FDA has its own paramilitary teams who go out and bust people who are doing research it doesn’t like.

John Gnagey, executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association, told the BBC:  “What we find is that when Swat teams go out, shootings go down.  We don’t see it as escalating anything.  We see it as reducing violence.” [emphasis added]

Um, you’re reducing violence for whom, the unarmed guy in this story shot and killed “by accident”?  I’m far from an expert, but the Posse Comitatus Act prohibits  the use of military force on U.S. citizens…and while these incidents may not involve the actual military, they appear to involve military-style tactics and equipment, which is close enough for me.

Anyway, zillions of people with far better knowledge of the topic have already written about this stuff, but I haven’t paid attention to it for a long time until recently.  Some of what I’ve read sounds a bit paranoid and anecdotal (“Dude, the army is patrolling South Central Phoenix!  Like, I saw ‘em!”), but who knows.  When I see stories like this as well as news stories easily found online, it makes me wonder where it’s all going to end up.

Three cheers for Helen Thomas

 Idiots & Assholes (Politics)
Mar 222006
 

Whoah.  Have y’all read about Helen Thomas grilling the President the other day?  Why doesn’t this happen more often?  Oh, those questions she asked!  It starts with “…why did you really want to go to war? …You have said it wasn’t oil–quest for oil, it hasn’t been Israel, or anything else.  What was it?”  Watching Bush stammer and fumble, trying desperately to pull an answer out of his ass, will make you liberal-minded folks cackle with delight.  She may as well have thumped him on the head with a rubber mallet.  Wonderful.

His answers were rushed and muddled as he was obviously taken by surprise.  First he completely ignores her question and insetad rattles off the same stuff we already know, using the same wording he’s used countless times–so much that it comes out automatically:  Al Qaeda trained in Afghanistan and “planned the attacks that killed thousands of innocent Americans.”  Well, no shit.  She asked you about Iraq, you feeble little titmouse.  From there it goes downhill…basically he says “I also saw a threat in Iraq,” but offers little else in the way of justifying the war.  Hmmph.

Bob Cesca wrote a blistering post on Ariana Huffington’s site about this…he sifts through Bush’s remarks with a delicious sense of “Gotcha!”  It’s great reading, and it’s what we lefties have been thinking all along.

Stick this instead

 General Blatherings
Feb 132006
 

Looking for an answer to all those yellow Support Our Troops ribbons?  Too embarrassed to buy one of those Support Our Poops ones?  Well, here’s a nice alternative:  the QuestionWar Ribbon.  Because, you know, you can support the troops and still object to what they are being made to do by corrupt government scumbags certain people in power.

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