For people who see it that way, definitely. But it’s more complex than that, because it’s hard to tell what is actually better. Trump has killed fewer people than Bush, so we might as well call him the better president so far. And ST:D does a great job by innovating on how a Star Trek story can be told.
For Star Trek, I find that through a lens of nostalgia, I pay more attention to the overall tone of a series, and less about whether it was actually watchable.
For Trump, we notice he’s a buffoon, and we notice that by comparison, Bush was obviously smart and civilized. And as Trump hasn’t started a new war yet, and Bush’s shifting of the American Overton window to include torture is hard to outdo, we aren’t reminded of Bush’s crimes that often.
I am afraid that he breaks so many taboos that in the here and now, people will stop watching what he’s really doing.
That makes a lot of sense. For me, not being American, it’s also interesting to observe the “relative motion” of American and Austrian/European culture with respect to each other. Care for a new thread?
Si vis pacem, para bellum. The men at the spearpoint are very rarely raging aggressives and appreciate that war is the last step to be taken in resolving conflicts especially today where so many have direct experience of war and what you lose in it. They are however proud at being the best in what they do: fight wars. That is what they do and it isn’t an exaggeration nor pejorative to use the word that describes them best: warriors.
it’s easy to see that you have little/no direct knowledge of the american military when you state that “the most heroic deed your Warriors ever did” is “to go the neighboring village, kill all men there and take the women as a prize”. Consider that all conclusions arguing from a false base are false.
I should have been more clear. The “neighboring village” thing did not refer to the US military directly, but to the meaning/connotations of the term “warrior”. A “warrior” is precisely the raging aggressive who sees war as the first step and the victory dance as the second.
A “soldier” is the one who prepares for war because he wants peace. That is why most civilized countries prefer to have “soldiers” and ministries/departments/etc. “of defence”. And that is why I think people should not use the word “warrior” (and limit the use of the word “hero”), because it is bound to rub off on actual behaviour sooner or later.
You’re generalising to the point of absurdity on what you with your preconceptions think that a group of people are due to the their self identifying using a word that you load down with entirely different meaning.
Thus a warrior is precisely NOT a raging aggressive who sees war as “the first step and the victory dance as the second”. The american military is proud to be warriors, those who with their experience of warfare who will cut through and defeat those who think of themselves as passive “soldiers”.
As for the word hero, there is no better word to describe men/women who put their lives in danger and too often make the ultimate sacrifice so that we have those essential liberties we prize. Not every member of the U.S armed forces is a hero but there are clearly a higher % of heroes in the armed forces than there are in people on the internet who redefine words to demean others.
You do like dictionaries, don’t you?
You quoted merriam-webster to prove that “warrior” doesn’t mean what I said. Of course merriam-webster is right. It lists the basic meaning of the word. It does not list the connotations, the images that go along with it.
And once again, I am not talking about the fine people serving in the military, I am talking about the words you use to talk about them.
Take the imagery you’re using here. I don’t know how I can make you hear yourself through the ears of a culture different from your own. I can only say statements like that are outside the Overton window here in Austria. We call that militarism, a way of thinking that we blame for up to a hundred million deaths in the 20th century, and that’s only counting the two wars that my country started due to the rampant militarism we had back then.
As for heroes, I said to use the word less. It should not refer to everyone who joins up, nor to everyone who sees action, and not to everyone who gets wounded. And it should not refer to anyone who fights for the wrong cause because he’s “just folloving orders”.
The sad thing is, he might not be. Most people have a very hard time grasping just how different opinions, mindsets and cultures can be. When he lashed out against you, he was probably feeling annoyed at how extreme other people’s opinions are in our echo chamber here :-). And while he’s called you a bigot, so far he’s only claimed that I’m less likely to be a hero than an American soldier. I can live with that. In fact, I hope to live to old age without an opportunity to be either a hero or a war criminal.
And of course, I’m also playing to the audience a bit here. I might have the majority of Americans on BBS on my side this time (I don’t really know, of course), but I seem to see toxic militarism in many things that most Americans will consider entirely normal, so I want to raise some awareness there…
Well, I like them. They keep us from simply inventing our own definitions and let us know what the previously agreed-upon definition is. Something that seems to be frustrating you, it seems.
Which is an interesting side note to how the discussion of Dubya here, as most of it revolves around how little we know of how each respondent defined “favourable”: was it that he’s less of a jerk now that he’s avoiding politics, or a rose-coloured view of his administration over time? I really don’t know.
The thing is, the dictionary lists a word’s meaning, not its connotations. And connotations are a hard thing. They depend on a language, but they also travel between languages. And they depend on culture. But worse yet, our reactions to the connotations also depend on culture.
So imagine you’re trying to explain to somebody how they shouldn’t be using the word “uppity” in the context of American race politics because it has acquired some inappropriate connotations. And they respond with proof that the word is harmless:
I’ve done various combat sports with a fair number of serving military. The few with whom I have discussed this subject made a clear distinction between a soldier, who serves his country to achieve that country’s goals, and a warrior, who serves his own love for the achievements of war. They might play warrior for sport, but on the job they are soldiers and proud of it.
But, I have never served, so it’s all hearsay to me. I do know a number of people who joined the US military because they really wanted to kill some people, and they wanted to be sure they were bad people, who needed to be killed. (I think trusting any recent US government to choose the right people for you to kill is sort of charmingly and horrifyingly naive, but I appreciate the honesty of the people who’ve told me this.)
Incidentally, using “to serve” to mean “to be a soldier in the military” is another figure of speech that used to exist in German as well and seems too militaristic to me now. How is it more of a service than any other equally dangerous job?
But then, Americans generally like to use the word “to serve” more than Austrians and Germans use it’s German equivalent, so maybe that’s nothing.
Quite a shocking anecdote. Have you intentionally been using “naive” as a euphemism, or is that just my overly anti-violent Austrian upbringing again?
In the US, we also use the word “serve” to describe waiting on customers in restaurants and at counters, so it doesn’t really have any explicitly military connotation. If you’re already talking about soldiers, “he served” is a short way to say “he was a member of the armed services” or “he was under the command of one of the variously named branches of the US military”. If you’re talking about meals it would mean “he carved the roast” or “he poured the tea” and if you were talking about tennis it would mean “he hit the ball first”. Referring to military service, you’ll more often hear people say “he was in the Navy” or “he was a Seabee” in real life.
Well, I didn’t mean it as a euphemism, anyway. Like I said, such naiveté is kind of horrifying to me, one of those ‘banality of evil’ type things.
Seems like we’re basically on the same page, after all.
Yeah, maybe I’m overly influenced by the smaller range of meanings that the German word “dienen” has. It means to serve, but not in the gastronomical or tennis-related sense, but “to serve” as in “to serve a master”, and thus comes with all the connotations of old-fashioned obedience and “duty”. Which fits in nicely with an old-fashioned view of the military.
