The only thing I have to think about regarding my daily workwear is whether my t-shirt is clean, my uniform is all supplied, hi-viz, protective boots, shorts, trousers, cold and wet weather gear; which means someone else is paying for gear that’s going to get a lot of wear, not me. I really don’t see a problem with that. FWIW, I work in vehicle logistics, in and out of cars all day, so gear gets a lot of wear and tear.
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Sounds like the old Soldier of Fortune magazine ads. Or in the Burke books - he used to run phony mercenary ads to generate some cash.
Hey kids - here’s where you go.
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Damn I wish this wasn’t allowed to happen. Garnish their future wages till they pay it back. Tough luck if it takes their entire lives to do it.
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Technically, the domain for US military branches is .mil. .gov is for civilian government.
That looks kinda sketchy. Real sites are like army.mil and navy.mil
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I appreciate your comment but don’t agree.
The context of the comment is as though that is the ONLY reason, said in a funny offhand way as a joke… you know…a jab.
Like I said before, the reasons most people join are myriad, however they are usually based upon need and station. It appeared to me to be punching down at the enlisted rather than punching up at the institution. And I’m surmising it’s because of a bias against the military, due to the context and what I know of the author. And like most bias, it’s usually targeted unconsciously towards the most exposed and often victimized party of the target.
Look at it another way, if the article was instead referring to women in the workforce, and a comment was made how about them working there so they could show off their wardrobe, you would assume there was some bias against women. It would be an indefensible comment.
The reason I’m hammering out this is because it goes beyond empathy and social division of why we are here and now. Most people are where they’re at because of what we used to call fate but we Now understand as institutionalized privileged.
So all I ask is to consider that people in the Matrix are not faceless nor in control often. Often they are the poor Italian son of immigrants who got away from factory jobs using the GI bill to teach at a university like my father.
The relevant difference between those two cases, which renders the comparison extremely flawed, is that women are an oppressed class whereas veterans are not. Context matters.
When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. The hyper-sensitivity in US culture towards any perceived slight against the military is itself a symptom of highly destructive militarism.
While it is true that people join the military for varied reasons, and true that some of them use it for economic advancement, the general narrative of the “soldiertariat” does not seem to be accurate.
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Although there is a slight negative correlation between income and enlistment, it appears that this is primarily due to very low enlistment amongst the extremely wealthy. Working class and middle class people enlist at similar rates.
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The military, particularly at the lower end of the scale, is not actually all that great of a job. Crap pay, crap conditions. Minimally transferable skills for the combat soldiers. Etc.
The image of the military as a working-class social program is largely mythological. However, it is very useful in manufacturing consent for endless war and limitless military funding.
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And white collar crooks in general: banksters, Wall Street fraudsters, robo-signed evicters, patent trollies, barratrous litigants, crooked asset-seizing cops, media conglomerates mass-issuing erronous DMCA complaints, and so many more.
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