What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons…
– Wilfred Owen
There you go again; never said we’d do any liberating that is for the citizens to decide themselves. If China goes to war because of their authoritarian leader, the system may unravel & highly likely not be supported by their public. War won’t fix their real estate Ponzi scheme that collapsed ruining a lot of people’s retirement plans.
Take off the rose-tinted glasses and see past propaganda. You don’t know anything about China and their happiness. We are seeing discontent among the working age youth (they stopped publishing stats on it), and they have had plenty of protest squashed. It’s not all bubbly (nor is it the worst possible thing). To be honest we can’t know because authoritarians despise transparency. They are just happy for rubes like you.
Afghanistan was a NATO Article V in response to 9/11. The guys that supported networks like Osma Bin Laden’s & terrorist like him are long gone. NATO reformed the mission in 2015 with the goal of developing an independent, self-sustaining force capable of combating both internal and external threats. It wasn’t the preferred government forces that would be duly elected & accountable to the citizens but hey they got there in a way. Now they can have water wars with Iran, get in scuffles with Pakistan, decide if they want a Chinese highway cutting through remote territory, and fight ISIS-K all on their own. The kids grow up quick and get to go their own path like Iraq.
We exited a war with a more different version of our 2015 goals but we it wasn’t some combat loss you are thinking of. They are fighting terrorism & standing up for themselves as a nation, not for sure how long but it got there. If I see some ballerinas playing on public TV, maybe I’ll change my mind. I just like enjoying my life free from the taste of boot in my mouth and wish the Afghans could have enjoyed that too. But feel free to lick those boots if you want to.
Through the travail of the ages, Midst the pomp and toil of war, I have fought and strove and perished Countless times upon this star. In the form of many people In all panoplies of time Have I seen the luring vision Of the Victory Maid, sublime. I have battled for fresh mammoth, I have warred for pastures new, I have listened to the whispers When the race trek instinct grew. I have known the call to battle In each changeless changing shape From the high souled voice of conscience To the beastly lust for rape. I have sinned and I have suffered, Played the hero and the knave; Fought for belly, shame, or country, And for each have found a grave. I cannot name my battles For the visions are not clear, Yet, I see the twisted faces And I feel the rending spear. Perhaps I stabbed our Savior In His sacred helpless side. Yet, I’ve called His name in blessing When in after times I died. In the dimness of the shadows Where we hairy heathens warred, I can taste in thought the lifeblood; We used teeth before the sword. While in later clearer vision I can sense the coppery sweat, Feel the pikes grow wet and slippery When our Phalanx, Cyrus met. Hear the rattle of the harness Where the Persian darts bounced clear, See their chariots wheel in panic From the Hoplite’s leveled spear. See the goal grow monthly longer, Reaching for the walls of Tyre. Hear the crash of tons of granite, Smell the quenchless eastern fire. Still more clearly as a Roman, Can I see the Legion close, As our third rank moved in forward And the short sword found our foes. Once again I feel the anguish Of that blistering treeless plain When the Parthian showered death bolts, And our discipline was in vain. I remember all the suffering Of those arrows in my neck. Yet, I stabbed a grinning savage As I died upon my back. Once again I smell the heat sparks When my Flemish plate gave way And the lance ripped through my entrails As on Crecy’s field I lay. In the windless, blinding stillness Of the glittering tropic sea I can see the bubbles rising Where we set the captives free. Midst the spume of half a tempest I have heard the bulwarks go When the crashing, point blank round shot Sent destruction to our foe. I have fought with gun and cutlass On the red and slippery deck With all Hell aflame within me And a rope around my neck. And still later as a General Have I galloped with Murat When we laughed at death and numbers Trusting in the Emperor’s Star. Till at last our star faded, And we shouted to our doom Where the sunken road of Ohein Closed us in its quivering gloom. So but now with Tanks a’clatter Have I waddled on the foe Belching death at twenty paces, By the star shell’s ghastly glow. So as through a glass, and darkly The age long strife I see Where I fought in many guises, Many names, but always me. And I see not in my blindness What the objects were I wrought, But as God rules o’er our bickerings It was through His will I fought. So forever in the future, Shall I battle as of yore, Dying to be born a fighter, But to die again, once more. - General George S PattonHow was the star spangled banner written?
Oh I know this one! Francis Scott Key was the badass sitting in jail watching the battle from his cell window and wrote it as the world exploded around him.
(Thank you Jimmy Williams of the 4th grade who got me into detention - teacher made me write an essay on Francis Scott Key. Jimmy thought it was funny, little did he know of the 2 Lemmy points I would eventually get for my endeavors 30 years later - oh ho ho - who is laughing now, Jimmy!?!)
Pretty sure those old timer GOPers are just afraid of people who read and understand art because they are barely literate and slightly insane from lead poisoning. That 5G and it’s Wuhan Virus… (angrily shakes arthritic fist)… will get you every time.
You’ve got 5 whole Lemmy bucks from where I’m standing! Don’t spend them all in one place.
That Jimmy Williams sounds like a good guy. Maybe he didn’t do things on purpose, but maybe he did. Sadly teachers aren’t usually allowed to teach history and instead have to teach “history.” He may have seen an opportunity to get you to see the real thing.
Pretty sure it sprang into existence from the frothing sea foam when America tm cut off England’s balls and threw them into the Boston harber, a la Birth of Venus.
Diverse teams are more effective and deliver better results. A group of people with different backgrounds and experiences will come up with different solutions to a problem than a heterogeneous group. This is a well researched topic. It is why corporate America and the military are pushing for more DE&I.
It’s also precisely why conservatives are rallying against it.
“You seem like the kind of guy who would write poetry on an aircraft carrier” is my new go-to insult.
Sounds like a compliment to me.
Roses are red
Violets are blue
Poetry is hard
Bacon.
Maybe you shouldn’t do poetry on an aircraft carrier…
… says the guy that belongs to a party that fears the freedom of love, and…. books.
The world has not ever known a cowardice of the level that conservatism has currently reached.
I love the irony of the man responsible for holding up officer promotions and DIRECTLY AN UNEQUIVOCALLY DAMAGING MILITARY READINESS FOR A CONFLICT OR EMERGENCY is criticizing service members who do more good for this country on a bathroom break than this shitheel will ever do in his entire life.
And even more so the irony that the Right’s ‘Anti-Woke’ culture is just a woke culture of it’s own on the other axis, but rather than standing for anything it just exist to oppose and stagnate. The sooner all these people retire and go back under what ever rock they came out from under, the sooner things start to improve across the board for the US.
And even more so the irony that the Right’s ‘Anti-Woke’ culture is just a woke culture of it’s own on the other access,
Unexpectedly agree.
but rather than standing for anything it just exist to oppose and stagnate.
And with this too. Just “standing for anything” as I see usually occurs about things that don’t shoot back, but in general yee, that seems to be a correct description of most “right” folks I’ve met.
Really “right” views (as what LOTR hobbits have in the book, for example) I usually encounter from people with chaotic-good alignment who would themselves most likely identify politically as leftists. Because the “right” is occupied by that swamp now.
Like abortion, it’s a losing topic for the GOP. The majority of Americans consider “woke” a positive thing.
Idk to me it’s a no-brainer
American politics (I can’t speak for other companies sorry I meant countries) boil down to: do you want to make consistent, planned, and supported efforts to improve and progress the country or do you want to be the dumb fuck at the back of the stuck elevator yelling about how we should’ve just kept stairs.
Regress or progress. It’s simple. Republicans only care about upholding their status quo. You might think you’re their friends until one day you realize your position was never what you thought it was and there’s always more room for coal in their burning trash pit.
Well, it is. The opposite of woke is asleep.
You do the math.
Don’t forget this is the same rhetoric that right wingers used to compare Russia’s military to the US. Russia is real men, the modern modern military in the world, the best trained, the US is falling behind. The West thought that Ukraine would fall in days in the event of a Russian invasion.
Then an invasion actually happened and the facade was stripped away.
Zero surprise they’re recycling their old talking points for China instead.
Oh, come on, no Russian (with balls turning around the correct axes in the skull, so to say) would believe that, about modern and best trained and falling behind.
The West thought that Ukraine would fall in days in the event of a Russian invasion.
That was sufficiently close, if you remember news and videos from the first weeks. It could have happened for all or most of the Left Bank Ukraine, if the Russian military would be just a bit less shit.
That helicopter assault on Kyiv’s suburbs was rather Hollywood worthy. Ended with wasting best assault troops for nothing, though.
I mean, returning to modern and so on, if an American believes that, then I’m not sure whether they’ve been to Mexico even, not anything in Europe, let alone Eastern Europe.
Zero surprise they’re recycling their old talking points for China instead.
Now about China they may be right. China manufactures lots of things. China has its own consumer electronics. China has everything for a bloody autarchy, though of course it would take decades more to reach that and I don’t see that being useful for them.
China is much more serious than Russia. It really (as in many times confirmed) does things in terms of modern weaponry and control systems which Russia has been doing only on paper, which has become clear now for everybody.
Anyway, it’s better to overreact, no?
The fuck does this dude think soldiers did in the Civil War and World War I?
They had nothing but time and laudanum. You do the fucking math.
Like how a dude penned “In Flanders’ Fields” in WW1, and Canada lost every war since. /s
Cool that republicans are still hyping up China’s and Russia’s militaries instead of their own. Even after we have seen that Russia’s military is not exactly what the ads and propaganda has been showing us for the last decade.
That seems totally non-treasonous.
You mean, you don’t trash and berate everything you “love”
Thing I’ll never understand is how people that constantly moan about how terrible America is and how much better other countries are can possibly be perceived as patriotic.
Tommy Tuberville is the kind of cunt that would imply that strong people can’t feel. Give me the poetic military members that will contemplate their actions, please.
When people say “what’s there not to like about the South?” I point to the fact that this dude got elected and he’s a walking cte.
What’s wrong with writing poetry on an aircraft carrier? I can’t speak to being on an aircraft carrier, but on a submarine you are not in war mode 24/7; there’s time to do ordinary things. (usually).
Let me guess: Tommy here hasn’t ever served in the military, right? All he knows about it is from movies?
Fascists fear free expression
dulce et decorum est pro patria mori
Stop Patrick you’re scaring him!!
Free time? On a sub? There’s got to be something you’re dinq on, so get hot.
The chief’s quarters really need you to push out those Dive quals so they can go to a 15 section rotation.
Well, maybe free time doesn’t happen in the first year, but I was a nuke; quals weren’t all that bad from what I remember.
Talked to quite a few vets. My understanding is that outside of training, the military is like 90% waiting… I’m sorry, “assuming a holding pattern”
As the old joke has it, 99% is killing time. The rest is killing time.
Unless you’re the vessel’s chef, then you’re killing thyme.
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I wouldn’t say 90% but it is significant. “Hurry up and wait” is a common phrase in the military - you don’t exactly have much “free time” (where you could do as you please) but you do have a lot of time wasted because you have to be at this location at 5:30 so you can wait for an evolution at 6 that doesn’t actually involve you doing anything until 7:30. So you just sit around waiting to do shit but can’t go anywhere else. Poetry sounds like a better way to pass the time than what I did in those situations, which was usually nap or BS with the others waiting around.
Don’t forget rock toss!
Tommy tubberville, Worst. Superhero. Ever. He will come up with stupid fantasies about how everyone will kill you unless you give your money to the rich.
What’s wrong with being poetic about your job? One would think it can possibly give you an edge of the true samurai kind?.. Something rather good for a military?
LOL. It’s cute this guy thinks modern warfare is like tribal war with heroes squaring off mano a mano with each other. The US military is terrifying because of its logistics and intelligence apparatus, not its individual soldiers. It is the only country that can send a Burger King field catering unit 1000 miles behind enemy lines. The Russians use scoobydoo vans and dump trucks. The CCP talk big but their “”“”“”““stealth fighter””“” is a stolen SU-30 reskinned with salvaged F-117 skin shot down in Serbia that has a RCS of the old F-18. Its first aircraft carrier was scammed from the Russians too. China is the ultimate cargo cult wrt tech. They copy the form, hoping to eventually understand the mechanisms.
The US military is terrifying because of its logistics and intelligence apparatus, not its individual soldiers.
It may be the best in the world in training individual soldiers too.
China is the ultimate cargo cult wrt tech. They copy the form, hoping to eventually understand the mechanisms.
Well, if it works for consumer electronics and plenty of other tech, then it may eventually happen for aircraft carriers, no?
That’s why he was a football coach. He needed that simulation of old school war.
China has working hypersonic missiles and USA doesn’t. Plus, USA just spent 20 years to lose a war to the Taliban. They’re “terrifying” in that they are good at wreaking death and destruction, but not in the sense that they’ve won any wars since like the 1940s.
China has untested hyper-sonic missiles that still require the Chinese asset to be well inside the detection range of US assets to be launched. Taking away 90% of the advantage a hyper-sonic would offer.
‘Losing’ to the Taliban comes down entirely to the singular US President in recent history who was Pro-Authoritarian, Pro-Tyranny, Pro-China decided to pull out of the conflict at the last minute because he couldn’t throw his Diet Coke at it and since he lost the election he knew his base and the Pro-Authoritarian, Pro-Tyranny, Pro-China crowd would be stupid enough to blame it on the next guy.
So in short you have a bag full of propaganda that isn’t even worth the retail cost of that bag. And since you’re probably Chinese oriented, that bag is probably some plastic lump choking a sea turtle. Good for you.
Are you having a stroke
Are you implying you couldn’t understand that post?
We won the war, it’s the nation building that failed. Something we don’t have to worry about because the rural Chinese would favor a better pension scheme than the crummy deal they have now, and I doubt the CCCP leaders who only favor Bush Jr era business tax cuts would have the best time selling a war to a one-child policy population.
They can just go Dongfeng themselves some more instead of spreading anymore of their authoritarianism anywhere else.
We lost the war. The Taliban beat the US military and forced them out, very pathetic. Also the Chinese people literally are very happy with their government and direction of their country, the idea that America would be greeted as liberators is even more fantastically stupid than when it was said about Iraq or any of Americas other many failed adventures
20 years
20 years
20 years on the other side of the planet with the average citizen so uninterested that weeks would past without a news story on it. How is that not the definition of terrifying? Hell, it was terrifying to Americans who were paying attention.
They lost the war
Clearly so did your mom.
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You like losing wars all the time? I’m sick of it!
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I don’t support any war. Bad for business
Let's have a war! Jack up the Dow Jones!-FEAR
