Is it just me or is distaste for Libertarianism contradictory to discordianism?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

"Infantry" is code for "too stupid to do anything but die", sadly.

TGRR,
Infantry Grunt 1987-1996.

Congratulations on not getting killed.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

shit, no.
i wouldn't go into the US military unless things were vastly different.  And if i did, i would go into the AF to be an officer, like both my grandfathers and my father. bomb the shit out of the subhuman enemy... that's what we pay the big bucks for.  not to muck about in the dirt.
my rolleyes was based on a couple friends and some friend's siblings that i know.
they may be suckers (in my estimation), but they certainly aren't unintelligent, or badwrong for doing it....

so, your statement was your own view, and not a sarcastic impression of what the 'top brass' might think, as that screeching nogood pesky guy indicated?

No, it's basically how the military machine views infantry. However, in a volunteer army, during times of war being fought on the ground, signing up to be infantry is pretty fucking retarded, in my estimation.

Two words: foot soldiers.

Anyone with any viable skills to avoid being a foot soldier can and should utilize those skills. For a long time, the US didn't have much use for foot soldiers because we weren't at war, and when we did engage in "police actions" it rarely involved ground forces, but right now there's a pretty heavy need for them so a higher proportion are being signed up as infantry. "Too stupid to do anything but die" can be, if you wish, translated to "lacking skills to keep them out of the highest-risk, most disposable position in the military".

[Cain]

Way to get the thread back on topic, Cain.

Led by Thatcher, western governments told the countries of the former Soviet Bloc that if they wanted prosperity, they had to import the free market.  The notion that one set of policies could have the same beneficial results in the widely different former countries of the Soviet Bloc was absurd, but it was of a piece of the mindset of the International Monetary Fund that had imposed similar policies on highly dissimilar countries, such as Indonesia, Nigeria and Peru.  Along with the bureaucrats of the IMF, emissaries were dispatched to the post-communist lands, carrying the same draft constitutions in their briefcases.  No matter how discrepant the countries they descended on, these neo-liberal ideologues tried to impose the same model on them all.

The IMF is also an international loan shark, loaning billions to these same countries for "infrastructure" and "development." This money ends up getting embezzled at just about every step of the bureaucracy, which leaves little to improve infrastructure and help out anyone who doesn't work for the government. Then that government is in massive debt to the IMF forever. The IMF and its neo-liberal policies are great for maintaining colonialism now that it can't be done directly.

IMF loans are just means to another end.

The conditionals which allow countries to apply for those loans send a nation into economic shock, bringing the prices of companies placed there way below what they would normally be in a functioning economy.

One of the conditions of the IMF's loan system is privatization of government owned companies.  So guess who gets to buy previous government monopolies, on the cheap, and then, once the regulatory system is gutted (another IMF conditional), ramp up the prices until the plebs bleed?

The loans, while useful, are really only bait in this process, a dangling, shiney object which opens up doors to buying some serious real estate and infrastructure.

[Elder Iptuous]

Nigel,
the umbrage comes from equating lack of skills to stupidity.  i've known some skilled idiots and unskilled intellectuals.
and there are some that view seeking the dangerous, but necessary, position of foot soldier as being honorable in some sense, and would pass up other, less dangerous, positions that they may be perfectly suited for.
does that make sense?

[Verbal Mike]

there are some that view seeking the dangerous, but necessary, position of foot soldier as being honorable in some sense, and would pass up other, less dangerous, positions that they may be perfectly suited for.
does that make sense?

Well, yeah, if you're stupid.

[Elder Iptuous]

Well, yeah, if you're stupid.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Nigel,
the umbrage comes from equating lack of skills to stupidity.

Anyone who thinks the modern infantry isn't a skilled trade has no clue what they're talking about.  Fucking seriously.  It takes a year at the unit just to make a barely competent infantryman.  Eight million little skills that you've never had experience with ANYWHERE, even if you're a hunting nut, etc...but now I am told that cleaning a machine gun at night, or moving a squad through a swamp with no discernable landmarks, or plotting artillery support, or setting an FPL, removing landmines without the kaboom, treating a bullet wound or gas casualty, or...well, fuck it.  You don't know, you don't WANT to know, you simply want to sneer at someone for a PERCEIVED lack of intelligence or skills.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

"Infantry" is code for "too stupid to do anything but die", sadly.

TGRR,
Infantry Grunt 1987-1996.

Congratulations on not getting killed.

Apparently, I was too stupid to die.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Nigel,
the umbrage comes from equating lack of skills to stupidity.

Anyone who thinks the modern infantry isn't a skilled trade has no clue what they're talking about.  Fucking seriously.  It takes a year at the unit just to make a barely competent infantryman.  Eight million little skills that you've never had experience with ANYWHERE, even if you're a hunting nut, etc...but now I am told that cleaning a machine gun at night, or moving a squad through a swamp with no discernable landmarks, or plotting artillery support, or setting an FPL, removing landmines without the kaboom, treating a bullet wound or gas casualty, or...well, fuck it.  You don't know, you don't WANT to know, you simply want to sneer at someone for a PERCEIVED lack of intelligence or skills.

I'm not talking about lack of skill. I'm talking about signing up to be a foot soldier during wartime, and not having the skills or background to get out of it. I already clarified in an earlier post that "too stupid to do anything but die" is the impression I get of how infantry is viewed by the people signing them up. If you doubt that, look up "cannon fodder" and ask me if I made it up.

I ALSO clarified that my own personal take on it is that you have to be either suicidal or retarded to sign up to be in the group who takes the heaviest casualties, during a fucking ground war.

They teach you skills once you're in, sure. Training is one thing. It being hard has no bearing on whether it's smart, and if you had any special skills to get you the fuck out of doing that, would you still have signed up for it? Would you sign up for it now, knowing you'd get sent to Afghanistan to have your legs shot off? If yes, there's something not all there in your head. IMO.

You can call that sneering if you like, but fuck you. I have a lot of respect for what soldiers do, on one hand, but on the other hand I think joining the Army is completely fucking insane and stupid, especially during wartime. Yeah, my dad is a career soldier, an airborne Ranger special ops etc etc, and the guy is very intelligent and one of the most badass people you could ever meet, but he's also not all there in the head in some peculiar way I can't quite define.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I ALSO clarified that my own personal take on it is that you have to be either suicidal or retarded to sign up to be in the group who takes the heaviest casualties, during a fucking ground war.

Infantry doesn't take the heaviest casualties.  Hasn't since WWI.

[Cain]

Signals Corps or your equivalent does, doesn't it?  I'm pretty sure they have one of the highest death rates in the British Army, but given our current military malaise, that doesn't necessarily mean much.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Signals Corps or your equivalent does, doesn't it?  I'm pretty sure they have one of the highest death rates in the British Army, but given our current military malaise, that doesn't necessarily mean much.

In LIC, it tends to be spread evenly amongst everyone EXCEPT the infantry (why would they attack the one unit equipped to fight them?).  Inside of infantry units, integral RTOs (radiomen) take it the hardest, followed by officers and medics.

In big honking wars, it's the artillery and transport geeks that take it in the neck, followed by aircraft support jerks.

[Cain]

Makes sense.  Insurgents aren't stupid, and if I was running a decent sized state's military, I'd want to take out your logistics and targeting/long range capacity too.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Makes sense.  Insurgents aren't stupid, and if I was running a decent sized state's military, I'd want to take out your logistics and targeting/long range capacity too.

Also, why fight the people trained to fight you, when you can just drive an extra 4 blocks and attack the mailroom?

Same propaganda victory, less risk.

[Cain]

Precisely.  I mean, I'm sure some insurgents do, but that is how evolution works.

Also, I found this an amusing riposte against the libertarians of Reason (from an anarchist, no less):

I think we can all admit that while the boys at Reason are good on SWAT excesses and legalizing the devil weed, their, uh, libertarian economics leaves a lot to be desired. A miasma of hands-off, "market economy" platitudes, it confuses corporate state capitalism with the free exchange of goods and labor as surely as MSNBC confuses the Dow with "the economy." This leads to some curious analytical exercises, such as this WaPo op-ed in which Welch and Gillespie argue rightly that Barack Obama is a spendthrift who has aped his immediate predecessor in creating a state of incessant national crisis to justify a series of hastily constructed, ill-considered emergency measures, even as they yearn, like a pair of swear-to-god, gen-you-whine Democratic bloggers, for a return to the baller days of America under "the man from Hope," that priapic demiurge, William Jefferson Clinton, the first Black president, himself.

Well, I am overstating, but in praising Clinton's "generally free-market economic policies," they are intent on overlooking the central role of Clinton and Alan Greenspan in our current economic woes, the creditization and bubbleization of the American economy, the exponential growth of "financial services," the creation of the subprime industry, the recasting of private real estate as little more than a twice-held gambling chit, with which homeowners could buy ever more junk for the ever-growing houses in which they ever-more-temporarily resided, with which mortgage-backers and -holders could leverage ever-more-preposterous Ponzi-scheme investment strategies, to the tune of billions, hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars. Of course, at Reason Magazine you can still read John Stossel on how the government forced banks to lend money to poor niggers, thus destroying the universe. Which is a measure of something or other, but not economic acumen, nor common sense.

Many self-professed libertarians, like Welch and Gillespie, praise the so-called deregulatory actions of Bill Clinton as his saving grace, when of course his government did what all recent American governments have done. If "deregulation" meant embracing a studied neutrality in matters of production, exchange, and trade, then it would be praisworthy. Instead, it simply means corporate favoritism, acting to lower the costs and responsibilities of the ownership class that they might still make their bonuses at the end of the fiscal year. Obama's zillion dollar subsidy to the financial sector that Bill Clinton created from the dust of the earth and one of Michael Milken's ribs is no break from the "free-market" instincts of his Democratic ancestor. It's just . . . America can't get high from a key bump anymore, and needs the dealer-in-chief to lay out some fatter rails.