I still fondly remember my friend Bob Niederider from high school in the '80s. One day an Army recruiter came to talk to our history class, and at the end he asked if anybody had any questions. Bob raised his hand and said “yeah I have a question: does napalm still stick to kids?” I didn’t really appreciate this at the time - and the recruiter certainly didn’t, either.
Nice.
When I was in high school and I replied to the appearance of an army recruiter in my social studies class I objected to his presence there with the phrase, “surely you don’t think it’s appropriate for you to be here recruiting impressionable youth to bomb brown people in the name of fascism?” My teacher made me stand in the hallway and gave me a “0” on the days quiz. There was no fucking quiz.
Their recruiting offices were set up directly across the street from my daughter’s high school right next to the Burger King where all the seniors went to lunch.
Shady as fuck
They also exclusively target lower to middle class areas because rich people have options, and the capitalist oligarchy love that poverty to cannon fodder pipeline.
Which is conveniently the real reason they are trying to ban abortion. Because poor kids without options are easy to recruit as cannon fodder
Army is a bunch of parasites on the face of the Earth. Parasites that set the rules, as any ruler turning against them will be overthrown.
Army doesn’t make any productive labor; instead, it siphons trillions of dollars making the machines intentionally designed to kill people - and puts them to use.
Society loses literally nothing without armies. They don’t “protect” you from anything but other armies, and without armies and wars and threats we could move way further as a humanity.
Don’t let anyone brainwash you into accepting this monstrosity. Army is bullying their own countries, bullying and extorting each and every one of us. They are the real enemy. And they will do everything in their power to distract you from that.
Seeing the army recruitment at comic Con always skeeves me out. I see them talking to 16-17 year old socially awkward kids who don’t know any better. Really predatory.
I just thought the Comic-Con would have been a terrible recruiting ground. The military want people that follow orders. They actively discourage intelligence.
They don’t though. Certain jobs don’t need you to be a genius, but the military really wants all the smart people they can get.
And yeah, when you’re in, it’s about 50:50. You’ll meet some of the smartest, generous, friendly people you’ll ever know. And you’ll meet some aggressive, angry, stupid knuckledraggers too.
The US military wants all the smart people that they can get because they don’t have any working for them.
I can almost guarantee you wouldn’t even score high enough on the Asvab to qualify for the most difficult jobs in the military.
Some of us are dumb enough to know that whatever IQ you have, joining the military industrial complex killing machine for our capitalists overlords is morally bankrupt and dumb.
The military isn’t all bad. Our role in WW2 was pretty righteous. What we do with Ukraine is helping to fight evil.
As much as we’ve screwed up Iraq, it’s hard to say if they’d have been better off staying under Saddam.
Helping South Korea and defending NATO is pretty good.
I see some National Guard in here. Helping Ruby Bridges get to school was good work. The National Guard often swoops in to help in natural disasters.
Half our Navy is made up of giant, floating hospitals.
Serial killers aren’t all bad either. They keep the homeless population in check and Ted Bundy was a leader in his community. /s
The military is like the “orphan crushing machine.” No one asks why it exists. We’re just supposed to accept that it’s necessary. And in some ways it is. But shouldn’t we strive for a world without a need for military.
Some might say, “well, that’s what America is doing. It’s the strongest military to maintain peace.” But this logic is flawed. When your military becomes so big, it’s never going to dissolve itself when necessary for peace. It becomes a power unto itself.
Eisenhower warned us about the military industrial complex but we didn’t listen.
I went to highschool and university in the US - I was lucky that I got a scholarship and that covered pretty much all my tuition costs.
But I had a friend, one year older than me, who joined and served in the US army for something like 2 years just so he could get his university costs covered and to save some money for living expenses.
It may not be intentional, but the high cost of higher education is an excellent recruiting tool for the US military.
It may not be intentional
Nothing is unintentional.
Wasn’t there some tweet of a US general that said to not get rid of high college costs because they would get less soldiers signing up?
Imma be real with you, every country that has a military recruits from schools. Lots of countries don’t even ask, they just make you go in anyway. America isn’t an oddity at this.
I’ll go against the grain here.
I joined not long after high school because I wasn’t gonna be able to pay for college, not that I was a good student anyway.
Spent most of my 4 year Air Force enlistment in the UK doing what I wanted - sysad, basically. Never deployed.
Got out and worked for increasingly higher pay and now I make $250k+ without a college degree.
I joined not long after high school because I wasn’t gonna be able to pay for college, not that I was a good student anyway.
Should you not be pissed off that this was one of the very few options you had in order to have a chance at success later in life because of your economic situation rather than touting this as a good idea?
More options are better, usually, so sure, I would have liked the option not to join.
But like I said, I’m a terrible student and still haven’t gone back to use my education benefit even though it would cost me nothing but time.
I’m simply providing a counter to the sentiment “I don’t wanna die for some oil company”.
To be honest, I think it every time I see people complaining about their prospects. Rather than bitch about it online, I did something to upgrade my socioeconomic status.
Army recruiters in your school that somehow use social media to contact you?
Institutionalised creepiness.
