Poll: Would you pay $250 to pay for a proper military burial for someone you do not know?

[loc978]

I don't think I would go whole hog and pay $250 to bury a guy I don't know. If there was a dude who had done some impressive stuff, I'd certainly throw the dude a bone if I could.

I don't mean to nasty but the guys who were the first to charge off the boats on D day, didn't actually do much... They allowed other soldiers to advance but all they did was die (was like "operation meat shield" ). If a guy did something that made you go "Daym, dude is THE manly man!" then I think he should have a big ass ceremony.

Although, I think people in WW1 AND WW2 are fucking hero's but these modern day wars seem more like bullies.

This is the most unbelievable thing I have ever read. Do you understand what those soldiers gave up? Everything. They'll never get to experience what a full life is, they might not have wanted to be in that battle, or the war. But their sacrifice was real.

Think about what you have, what you're going to have. Now imagine giving it all up, never getting to experience what life has to offer. Not everyone amounts to something, but everyone has the potential. They gave that potential up so that others could have it instead.

No poor dumb bastard ever became a hero by dying for his country. He did it by making some other poor dumb bastard die for his.

Or to put it another way, they only made that sacrifice because some other soldier was willing to pull the trigger, and they in turn probably killed more than their share. There could be no wars without willing soldiers, and propaganda to the contrary, that's not an oversimplification. It's the unvarnished truth, which is just too horrifying for most people to consider. In the absolute best case scenario, a soldier's job is to commit justifiable homicide in order to defend his own borders. In a more realistic scenario, they're murderers who invade other countries to benefit a few bastards at the top. It's been over 60 years since a soldier in my country's military actually did anything to defend me. Why the hell should I support the murders committed by the modern military because my grandfather actually fought in a war of defense? His was the last generation that did.

Those poor "insurgents" in the middle east, on the other hand...

Captcha: army training, sir!

Oh fuck off with the propaganada, captcha. I'm not in the mood. Although nice going on giving an example of just how much money and effort goes into normalizing this crap.

It's just like you said, respect the individual soldier, he is doing his job. Everyone has to make a living. If you have problems with the army in general, then it's the high command you want to go after. Their the ones who sit in their chair in safe room moving around peoples lives (friendly and enemy) like their chess pieces. I am in full agreement that we haven't been in a needed war since WW2.

So then you're in full agreement that the modern military is nothing but a bunch of hired thugs who, if they had a shred of decency, would lay down their arms and refuse to follow orders? Because right now the job they're doing is not at all worthy of respect, and respecting the individual soldier in this day and age is nothing but accepting the nuremberg defense, in a society where we don't kill soldiers for not following orders, no less. The Nazi's didn't give their soldiers that cushy chance of just sitting in a jail cell, and it was still ruled that "just following orders" was no excuse. That makes it even worse that we don't hold that standard to our own troops.

You can't blame the military without blaming the troops. It just doesn't work that way. It may be a big blame that each person holds a tiny part of, but they still have that tiny part. We have altogether too much respect for the soldier in this country, and not enough of that healthy fear of him that was so common prior to World War II.

Edit: Maybe this will make my stance a bit clearer:

Universal Soldier

He's five foot-two, and he's six feet-four,
He fights with missiles and with spears.
He's all of thirty-one, and he's only seventeen,
Been a soldier for a thousand years.

He'a a Catholic, a Hindu, an Atheist, a Jain,
A Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew.
And he knows he shouldn't kill,
And he knows he always will,
Kill you for me my friend and me for you.

And he's fighting for Canada,
He's fighting for France,
He's fighting for the USA,
And he's fighting for the Russians,
And he's fighting for Japan,
And he thinks we'll put an end to war this way.

And he's fighting for Democracy,
He's fighting for the Reds,
He says it's for the peace of all.
He's the one who must decide,
Who's to live and who's to die,
And he never sees the writing on the wall.

But without him,
How would Hitler have condemned him at Dachau?
Without him Caesar would have stood alone,
He's the one who gives his body
As a weapon of the war,
And without him all this killing can't go on.

He's the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame,
His orders come from far away no more,
They come from here and there and you and me,
And brothers can't you see,
This is not the way we put the end to war.

...that's like blaming prostitutes for the spread of STDs, man (as opposed to our horrifically insufficient healthcare system). People do what they have to to survive. Mind you, I don't think people like myself are automatically deserving of more praise than a prostitute... but neither are we (or the prostitutes) deserving of your scorn. Many soldiers do see the writing on the wall, but that doesn't give us any more options than we had before... and the option you would have us take is tantamount to suicide.

You work with the society you have, not the society you want. Don't like it? Start a revolution... for which you need soldiers. Power concedes nothing, and only the dead have seen the end of war.

Better suicide than murder for pay, man. The military is an inherently evil organization, and the "Necessary" part of "necessary evil" has long since been exceeded. It's not at all like blaming a prostitute for spreading STDs. It's like blaming a hitman for committing a murder. Sure, someone else asked him to do it, but it was his choice to take the payment and carry it out.

Edit: Especially since the "suicide" is figurative, but the murder is literal. Again, the individual soldiers who carried out the holocaust would have been killed themselves had they spoken out (or at least, they would if they were standing alone -- even there, it wouldn't have happened if enough of them had been brave enough to take the bullet instead of firing it). Despite that, they found out the hard way that "I was just following orders" is no excuse. In the US, we don't execute people for refusing to go to war. We might throw them in jail if they're either already members of the military, or, as in Vietnam, if they've been drafted, but we don't kill them. So no, it's really not suicide. If we didn't excuse people who would have been killed themselves if they had decided not to follow their horrific orders, we shouldn't excuse those who would have merely been thrown in jail just because they're our own. Hell, we shouldn't excuse it /especially/ because they're our own.

Really, your definition of murder (unlawful killing... as defined by the society you live in, wrongheaded or not) here is nearly as figurative as my definition of suicide (which was meant as figurative)... unless you happen to be Judge Dredd [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvJiYrRcfQo]. Like it or not (and for the record, I don't either), the many "police actions" the US has executed since our last declared war (December 1941) have been close enough to lawful that no one has been criminally charged for kicking them off. Thusly, no killing in said police actions is murder that has not been prosecuted as such. Doesn't make 'em right... but murder doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.

In my experience, the military is mostly full of desperate people reaching for the all-hallowed "opportunity" that our nation no longer affords the economically disadvantaged. I stand by my prostitute analogy, though it would work just as well had I used low-level street enforcers with a gang... just not hitmen (look to PMCs for those). As with gangs and prostitution, prosecuting street workers who are just doing what they have to to survive will avail you nothing. History is right to blame the architects of these conflicts. The "Universal Soldier" of the poem is nothing more than every desperate person ever.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

I don't think I would go whole hog and pay $250 to bury a guy I don't know. If there was a dude who had done some impressive stuff, I'd certainly throw the dude a bone if I could.

I don't mean to nasty but the guys who were the first to charge off the boats on D day, didn't actually do much... They allowed other soldiers to advance but all they did was die (was like "operation meat shield" ). If a guy did something that made you go "Daym, dude is THE manly man!" then I think he should have a big ass ceremony.

Although, I think people in WW1 AND WW2 are fucking hero's but these modern day wars seem more like bullies.

This is the most unbelievable thing I have ever read. Do you understand what those soldiers gave up? Everything. They'll never get to experience what a full life is, they might not have wanted to be in that battle, or the war. But their sacrifice was real.

Think about what you have, what you're going to have. Now imagine giving it all up, never getting to experience what life has to offer. Not everyone amounts to something, but everyone has the potential. They gave that potential up so that others could have it instead.

No poor dumb bastard ever became a hero by dying for his country. He did it by making some other poor dumb bastard die for his.

Or to put it another way, they only made that sacrifice because some other soldier was willing to pull the trigger, and they in turn probably killed more than their share. There could be no wars without willing soldiers, and propaganda to the contrary, that's not an oversimplification. It's the unvarnished truth, which is just too horrifying for most people to consider. In the absolute best case scenario, a soldier's job is to commit justifiable homicide in order to defend his own borders. In a more realistic scenario, they're murderers who invade other countries to benefit a few bastards at the top. It's been over 60 years since a soldier in my country's military actually did anything to defend me. Why the hell should I support the murders committed by the modern military because my grandfather actually fought in a war of defense? His was the last generation that did.

Those poor "insurgents" in the middle east, on the other hand...

Captcha: army training, sir!

Oh fuck off with the propaganada, captcha. I'm not in the mood. Although nice going on giving an example of just how much money and effort goes into normalizing this crap.

It's just like you said, respect the individual soldier, he is doing his job. Everyone has to make a living. If you have problems with the army in general, then it's the high command you want to go after. Their the ones who sit in their chair in safe room moving around peoples lives (friendly and enemy) like their chess pieces. I am in full agreement that we haven't been in a needed war since WW2.

So then you're in full agreement that the modern military is nothing but a bunch of hired thugs who, if they had a shred of decency, would lay down their arms and refuse to follow orders? Because right now the job they're doing is not at all worthy of respect, and respecting the individual soldier in this day and age is nothing but accepting the nuremberg defense, in a society where we don't kill soldiers for not following orders, no less. The Nazi's didn't give their soldiers that cushy chance of just sitting in a jail cell, and it was still ruled that "just following orders" was no excuse. That makes it even worse that we don't hold that standard to our own troops.

You can't blame the military without blaming the troops. It just doesn't work that way. It may be a big blame that each person holds a tiny part of, but they still have that tiny part. We have altogether too much respect for the soldier in this country, and not enough of that healthy fear of him that was so common prior to World War II.

Edit: Maybe this will make my stance a bit clearer:

Universal Soldier

He's five foot-two, and he's six feet-four,
He fights with missiles and with spears.
He's all of thirty-one, and he's only seventeen,
Been a soldier for a thousand years.

He'a a Catholic, a Hindu, an Atheist, a Jain,
A Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew.
And he knows he shouldn't kill,
And he knows he always will,
Kill you for me my friend and me for you.

And he's fighting for Canada,
He's fighting for France,
He's fighting for the USA,
And he's fighting for the Russians,
And he's fighting for Japan,
And he thinks we'll put an end to war this way.

And he's fighting for Democracy,
He's fighting for the Reds,
He says it's for the peace of all.
He's the one who must decide,
Who's to live and who's to die,
And he never sees the writing on the wall.

But without him,
How would Hitler have condemned him at Dachau?
Without him Caesar would have stood alone,
He's the one who gives his body
As a weapon of the war,
And without him all this killing can't go on.

He's the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame,
His orders come from far away no more,
They come from here and there and you and me,
And brothers can't you see,
This is not the way we put the end to war.

...that's like blaming prostitutes for the spread of STDs, man (as opposed to our horrifically insufficient healthcare system). People do what they have to to survive. Mind you, I don't think people like myself are automatically deserving of more praise than a prostitute... but neither are we (or the prostitutes) deserving of your scorn. Many soldiers do see the writing on the wall, but that doesn't give us any more options than we had before... and the option you would have us take is tantamount to suicide.

You work with the society you have, not the society you want. Don't like it? Start a revolution... for which you need soldiers. Power concedes nothing, and only the dead have seen the end of war.

Better suicide than murder for pay, man. The military is an inherently evil organization, and the "Necessary" part of "necessary evil" has long since been exceeded. It's not at all like blaming a prostitute for spreading STDs. It's like blaming a hitman for committing a murder. Sure, someone else asked him to do it, but it was his choice to take the payment and carry it out.

Edit: Especially since the "suicide" is figurative, but the murder is literal. Again, the individual soldiers who carried out the holocaust would have been killed themselves had they spoken out (or at least, they would if they were standing alone -- even there, it wouldn't have happened if enough of them had been brave enough to take the bullet instead of firing it). Despite that, they found out the hard way that "I was just following orders" is no excuse. In the US, we don't execute people for refusing to go to war. We might throw them in jail if they're either already members of the military, or, as in Vietnam, if they've been drafted, but we don't kill them. So no, it's really not suicide. If we didn't excuse people who would have been killed themselves if they had decided not to follow their horrific orders, we shouldn't excuse those who would have merely been thrown in jail just because they're our own. Hell, we shouldn't excuse it /especially/ because they're our own.

Really, your definition of murder (unlawful killing... as defined by the society you live in, wrongheaded or not) here is nearly as figurative as my definition of suicide (which was meant as figurative)... unless you happen to be Judge Dredd [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvJiYrRcfQo]. Like it or not (and for the record, I don't either), the many "police actions" the US has executed since our last declared war (December 1941) have been close enough to lawful that no one has been criminally charged for kicking them off. Thusly, no killing in said police actions is murder that has not been prosecuted as such. Doesn't make 'em right... but murder doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.

In my experience, the military is mostly full of desperate people reaching for the all-hallowed "opportunity" that our nation no longer affords the economically disadvantaged. I stand by my prostitute analogy, though it would work just as well had I used low-level street enforcers with a gang... just not hitmen (look to PMCs for those). As with gangs and prostitution, prosecuting street workers who are just doing what they have to to survive will avail you nothing. History is right to blame the architects of these conflicts. The "Universal Soldier" of the poem is nothing more than every desperate person ever.

The problem with defining murder as unlawful killing is that it comes from the legal definition of murder. If you define it that way, then no real mass murderer[footnote]Think Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin -- people who really killed massive numbers of people, not just the relative handful that they could kill personally before getting caught[/footnote] in history was guilty of anything, since by the laws of their land, what they were doing was legal -- how could it not be? They wrote them. So no, saying that it's legal therefore it's not murder is not an excuse. The most cold blooded murderers on the planet are the judges, juries, and executioners who put people to death under the color[footnote]Or how about we make that "cover"[/footnote] of law.

Even if it were true that the military is mostly full of desperate people[footnote]and it's not, as much as I'd like it to be true the statistics have shown time and time again that "lack of money" isn't the reason most people sign up, the majority have other options and decide to do it anyway for various reasons, usually some appeal to "patriotism" or family tradition.[/footnote], all that does is illustrate how screwed up our society is. We don't give drug dealers a pass just because they were desperate, and I'd be a lot quicker to believe most of them at least started out that way than I would soldiers. There's no public glory to being a drug dealer. For a minority of the population, sure, but even then it's just glamorization. Soldiers, on the other hand, are practically the angels of the major deity that is the military in this country. They may find out the hard way on exiting that it's mostly lip service with very little actual help coming from the people swearing up and down that they "support the troops", and other such platitudes that they strangely never act upon unless they're one of those families that keeps sending their own children in generation after generation[footnote]and then the material support is in the form of yet another warm body to fill a pair of boots and hold a gun[/footnote], but a new idiot hits the recruitment age every day, and the few dissenting voices are drowned out by the waves of military worship. So it doesn't matter if the vets realize how little that hero worship helps them in later life, only that enough kids keep getting caught up in the waves of propaganda.

 

[SadisticFire]

I wouldn't do... YOu know, Two hundred and fifty dollars. But I would toss in my food for the next couple days. EG 20-40. I like to think I have empathy, but I couldn't ever go "HERE HAVE TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY DOLLARS."

 

[Silverbeard]

What does a burial matter for a fallen fellow? The man is gone and only the bones remain. Does it matter where they lie?
A memorial is a different matter; I'd happily donate money for a public memorial for the dead from a past war- but we have plenty of those already, yes?

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

No. An unnamed soldier who may or may not have done anything significant, my $250 that could be used for living expenses? The corpse doesn't care. The whole burial thing is a massive waste of money anyway. In the case of distinguished people, a plaque or monument or something is fine, but for the average person, even the average soldier, massive waste of money. If it weren't for the precedent being already established, I think most people would be resistant to spending money and land on the dead.

 

[loc978]

Spoiler: snip

I don't think I would go whole hog and pay $250 to bury a guy I don't know. If there was a dude who had done some impressive stuff, I'd certainly throw the dude a bone if I could.

I don't mean to nasty but the guys who were the first to charge off the boats on D day, didn't actually do much... They allowed other soldiers to advance but all they did was die (was like "operation meat shield" ). If a guy did something that made you go "Daym, dude is THE manly man!" then I think he should have a big ass ceremony.

Although, I think people in WW1 AND WW2 are fucking hero's but these modern day wars seem more like bullies.

This is the most unbelievable thing I have ever read. Do you understand what those soldiers gave up? Everything. They'll never get to experience what a full life is, they might not have wanted to be in that battle, or the war. But their sacrifice was real.

Think about what you have, what you're going to have. Now imagine giving it all up, never getting to experience what life has to offer. Not everyone amounts to something, but everyone has the potential. They gave that potential up so that others could have it instead.

No poor dumb bastard ever became a hero by dying for his country. He did it by making some other poor dumb bastard die for his.

Or to put it another way, they only made that sacrifice because some other soldier was willing to pull the trigger, and they in turn probably killed more than their share. There could be no wars without willing soldiers, and propaganda to the contrary, that's not an oversimplification. It's the unvarnished truth, which is just too horrifying for most people to consider. In the absolute best case scenario, a soldier's job is to commit justifiable homicide in order to defend his own borders. In a more realistic scenario, they're murderers who invade other countries to benefit a few bastards at the top. It's been over 60 years since a soldier in my country's military actually did anything to defend me. Why the hell should I support the murders committed by the modern military because my grandfather actually fought in a war of defense? His was the last generation that did.

Those poor "insurgents" in the middle east, on the other hand...

Captcha: army training, sir!

Oh fuck off with the propaganada, captcha. I'm not in the mood. Although nice going on giving an example of just how much money and effort goes into normalizing this crap.

It's just like you said, respect the individual soldier, he is doing his job. Everyone has to make a living. If you have problems with the army in general, then it's the high command you want to go after. Their the ones who sit in their chair in safe room moving around peoples lives (friendly and enemy) like their chess pieces. I am in full agreement that we haven't been in a needed war since WW2.

So then you're in full agreement that the modern military is nothing but a bunch of hired thugs who, if they had a shred of decency, would lay down their arms and refuse to follow orders? Because right now the job they're doing is not at all worthy of respect, and respecting the individual soldier in this day and age is nothing but accepting the nuremberg defense, in a society where we don't kill soldiers for not following orders, no less. The Nazi's didn't give their soldiers that cushy chance of just sitting in a jail cell, and it was still ruled that "just following orders" was no excuse. That makes it even worse that we don't hold that standard to our own troops.

You can't blame the military without blaming the troops. It just doesn't work that way. It may be a big blame that each person holds a tiny part of, but they still have that tiny part. We have altogether too much respect for the soldier in this country, and not enough of that healthy fear of him that was so common prior to World War II.

Edit: Maybe this will make my stance a bit clearer:

Universal Soldier

He's five foot-two, and he's six feet-four,
He fights with missiles and with spears.
He's all of thirty-one, and he's only seventeen,
Been a soldier for a thousand years.

He'a a Catholic, a Hindu, an Atheist, a Jain,
A Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew.
And he knows he shouldn't kill,
And he knows he always will,
Kill you for me my friend and me for you.

And he's fighting for Canada,
He's fighting for France,
He's fighting for the USA,
And he's fighting for the Russians,
And he's fighting for Japan,
And he thinks we'll put an end to war this way.

And he's fighting for Democracy,
He's fighting for the Reds,
He says it's for the peace of all.
He's the one who must decide,
Who's to live and who's to die,
And he never sees the writing on the wall.

But without him,
How would Hitler have condemned him at Dachau?
Without him Caesar would have stood alone,
He's the one who gives his body
As a weapon of the war,
And without him all this killing can't go on.

He's the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame,
His orders come from far away no more,
They come from here and there and you and me,
And brothers can't you see,
This is not the way we put the end to war.

...that's like blaming prostitutes for the spread of STDs, man (as opposed to our horrifically insufficient healthcare system). People do what they have to to survive. Mind you, I don't think people like myself are automatically deserving of more praise than a prostitute... but neither are we (or the prostitutes) deserving of your scorn. Many soldiers do see the writing on the wall, but that doesn't give us any more options than we had before... and the option you would have us take is tantamount to suicide.

You work with the society you have, not the society you want. Don't like it? Start a revolution... for which you need soldiers. Power concedes nothing, and only the dead have seen the end of war.

Better suicide than murder for pay, man. The military is an inherently evil organization, and the "Necessary" part of "necessary evil" has long since been exceeded. It's not at all like blaming a prostitute for spreading STDs. It's like blaming a hitman for committing a murder. Sure, someone else asked him to do it, but it was his choice to take the payment and carry it out.

Edit: Especially since the "suicide" is figurative, but the murder is literal. Again, the individual soldiers who carried out the holocaust would have been killed themselves had they spoken out (or at least, they would if they were standing alone -- even there, it wouldn't have happened if enough of them had been brave enough to take the bullet instead of firing it). Despite that, they found out the hard way that "I was just following orders" is no excuse. In the US, we don't execute people for refusing to go to war. We might throw them in jail if they're either already members of the military, or, as in Vietnam, if they've been drafted, but we don't kill them. So no, it's really not suicide. If we didn't excuse people who would have been killed themselves if they had decided not to follow their horrific orders, we shouldn't excuse those who would have merely been thrown in jail just because they're our own. Hell, we shouldn't excuse it /especially/ because they're our own.

Really, your definition of murder (unlawful killing... as defined by the society you live in, wrongheaded or not) here is nearly as figurative as my definition of suicide (which was meant as figurative)... unless you happen to be Judge Dredd [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvJiYrRcfQo]. Like it or not (and for the record, I don't either), the many "police actions" the US has executed since our last declared war (December 1941) have been close enough to lawful that no one has been criminally charged for kicking them off. Thusly, no killing in said police actions is murder that has not been prosecuted as such. Doesn't make 'em right... but murder doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.

In my experience, the military is mostly full of desperate people reaching for the all-hallowed "opportunity" that our nation no longer affords the economically disadvantaged. I stand by my prostitute analogy, though it would work just as well had I used low-level street enforcers with a gang... just not hitmen (look to PMCs for those). As with gangs and prostitution, prosecuting street workers who are just doing what they have to to survive will avail you nothing. History is right to blame the architects of these conflicts. The "Universal Soldier" of the poem is nothing more than every desperate person ever.

The problem with defining murder as unlawful killing is that it comes from the legal definition of murder. If you define it that way, then no real mass murderer(Think Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin -- people who really killed massive numbers of people, not just the relative handful that they could kill personally before getting caught) in history was guilty of anything, since by the laws of their land, what they were doing was legal -- how could it not be? They wrote them. So no, saying that it's legal therefore it's not murder is not an excuse. The most cold blooded murderers on the planet are the judges, juries, and executioners who put people to death under the color(Or how about we make that "cover") of law.

Even if it were true that the military is mostly full of desperate people(and it's not, as much as I'd like it to be true the statistics have shown time and time again that "lack of money" isn't the reason most people sign up, the majority have other options and decide to do it anyway for various reasons, usually some appeal to "patriotism" or family tradition.), all that does is illustrate how screwed up our society is. We don't give drug dealers a pass just because they were desperate, and I'd be a lot quicker to believe most of them at least started out that way than I would soldiers. There's no public glory to being a drug dealer. For a minority of the population, sure, but even then it's just glamorization. Soldiers, on the other hand, are practically the angels of the major deity that is the military in this country. They may find out the hard way on exiting that it's mostly lip service with very little actual help coming from the people swearing up and down that they "support the troops", and other such platitudes that they strangely never act upon unless they're one of those families that keeps sending their own children in generation after generation(and then the material support is in the form of yet another warm body to fill a pair of boots and hold a gun), but a new idiot hits the recruitment age every day, and the few dissenting voices are drowned out by the waves of military worship. So it doesn't matter if the vets realize how little that hero worship helps them in later life, only that enough kids keep getting caught up in the waves of propaganda.

...second attempt, lost my first reply to the forum goblins... going to truncate.

Murder: legal term, colloquial use applies only to metaphorical use, not killing. Global society is still society, Hitler et cetera were deemed murderers on that scale. It's a plutocracy, as history is written by the victors, certainly not fair. Nothing is in this world, get used to it.

Military propaganda: most people have more pragmatic reasons than they let on. No other applicable skills, no longer enough jobs to go around, especially in rural areas. Best not to demonize people for the ignorant culture they're raised in... you'll only convince them that they're right and you're evil. Fucked up society? Agreed.

"Drug dealers aren't glorified"... bullshit. They're often heroes where they come from, keeping the only functioning economy at their rung of society going. Give more back to their communities than corporate "philanthropists".

hope that was intelligible. It was certainly a lot shorter.

Lost connection again, but copied text this time. Escapist is shitty tonight. Attempt 3.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Spoiler: snip

I don't think I would go whole hog and pay $250 to bury a guy I don't know. If there was a dude who had done some impressive stuff, I'd certainly throw the dude a bone if I could.

I don't mean to nasty but the guys who were the first to charge off the boats on D day, didn't actually do much... They allowed other soldiers to advance but all they did was die (was like "operation meat shield" ). If a guy did something that made you go "Daym, dude is THE manly man!" then I think he should have a big ass ceremony.

Although, I think people in WW1 AND WW2 are fucking hero's but these modern day wars seem more like bullies.

This is the most unbelievable thing I have ever read. Do you understand what those soldiers gave up? Everything. They'll never get to experience what a full life is, they might not have wanted to be in that battle, or the war. But their sacrifice was real.

Think about what you have, what you're going to have. Now imagine giving it all up, never getting to experience what life has to offer. Not everyone amounts to something, but everyone has the potential. They gave that potential up so that others could have it instead.

No poor dumb bastard ever became a hero by dying for his country. He did it by making some other poor dumb bastard die for his.

Or to put it another way, they only made that sacrifice because some other soldier was willing to pull the trigger, and they in turn probably killed more than their share. There could be no wars without willing soldiers, and propaganda to the contrary, that's not an oversimplification. It's the unvarnished truth, which is just too horrifying for most people to consider. In the absolute best case scenario, a soldier's job is to commit justifiable homicide in order to defend his own borders. In a more realistic scenario, they're murderers who invade other countries to benefit a few bastards at the top. It's been over 60 years since a soldier in my country's military actually did anything to defend me. Why the hell should I support the murders committed by the modern military because my grandfather actually fought in a war of defense? His was the last generation that did.

Those poor "insurgents" in the middle east, on the other hand...

Captcha: army training, sir!

Oh fuck off with the propaganada, captcha. I'm not in the mood. Although nice going on giving an example of just how much money and effort goes into normalizing this crap.

It's just like you said, respect the individual soldier, he is doing his job. Everyone has to make a living. If you have problems with the army in general, then it's the high command you want to go after. Their the ones who sit in their chair in safe room moving around peoples lives (friendly and enemy) like their chess pieces. I am in full agreement that we haven't been in a needed war since WW2.

So then you're in full agreement that the modern military is nothing but a bunch of hired thugs who, if they had a shred of decency, would lay down their arms and refuse to follow orders? Because right now the job they're doing is not at all worthy of respect, and respecting the individual soldier in this day and age is nothing but accepting the nuremberg defense, in a society where we don't kill soldiers for not following orders, no less. The Nazi's didn't give their soldiers that cushy chance of just sitting in a jail cell, and it was still ruled that "just following orders" was no excuse. That makes it even worse that we don't hold that standard to our own troops.

You can't blame the military without blaming the troops. It just doesn't work that way. It may be a big blame that each person holds a tiny part of, but they still have that tiny part. We have altogether too much respect for the soldier in this country, and not enough of that healthy fear of him that was so common prior to World War II.

Edit: Maybe this will make my stance a bit clearer:

Universal Soldier

He's five foot-two, and he's six feet-four,
He fights with missiles and with spears.
He's all of thirty-one, and he's only seventeen,
Been a soldier for a thousand years.

He'a a Catholic, a Hindu, an Atheist, a Jain,
A Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew.
And he knows he shouldn't kill,
And he knows he always will,
Kill you for me my friend and me for you.

And he's fighting for Canada,
He's fighting for France,
He's fighting for the USA,
And he's fighting for the Russians,
And he's fighting for Japan,
And he thinks we'll put an end to war this way.

And he's fighting for Democracy,
He's fighting for the Reds,
He says it's for the peace of all.
He's the one who must decide,
Who's to live and who's to die,
And he never sees the writing on the wall.

But without him,
How would Hitler have condemned him at Dachau?
Without him Caesar would have stood alone,
He's the one who gives his body
As a weapon of the war,
And without him all this killing can't go on.

He's the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame,
His orders come from far away no more,
They come from here and there and you and me,
And brothers can't you see,
This is not the way we put the end to war.

...that's like blaming prostitutes for the spread of STDs, man (as opposed to our horrifically insufficient healthcare system). People do what they have to to survive. Mind you, I don't think people like myself are automatically deserving of more praise than a prostitute... but neither are we (or the prostitutes) deserving of your scorn. Many soldiers do see the writing on the wall, but that doesn't give us any more options than we had before... and the option you would have us take is tantamount to suicide.

You work with the society you have, not the society you want. Don't like it? Start a revolution... for which you need soldiers. Power concedes nothing, and only the dead have seen the end of war.

Better suicide than murder for pay, man. The military is an inherently evil organization, and the "Necessary" part of "necessary evil" has long since been exceeded. It's not at all like blaming a prostitute for spreading STDs. It's like blaming a hitman for committing a murder. Sure, someone else asked him to do it, but it was his choice to take the payment and carry it out.

Edit: Especially since the "suicide" is figurative, but the murder is literal. Again, the individual soldiers who carried out the holocaust would have been killed themselves had they spoken out (or at least, they would if they were standing alone -- even there, it wouldn't have happened if enough of them had been brave enough to take the bullet instead of firing it). Despite that, they found out the hard way that "I was just following orders" is no excuse. In the US, we don't execute people for refusing to go to war. We might throw them in jail if they're either already members of the military, or, as in Vietnam, if they've been drafted, but we don't kill them. So no, it's really not suicide. If we didn't excuse people who would have been killed themselves if they had decided not to follow their horrific orders, we shouldn't excuse those who would have merely been thrown in jail just because they're our own. Hell, we shouldn't excuse it /especially/ because they're our own.

Really, your definition of murder (unlawful killing... as defined by the society you live in, wrongheaded or not) here is nearly as figurative as my definition of suicide (which was meant as figurative)... unless you happen to be Judge Dredd [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvJiYrRcfQo]. Like it or not (and for the record, I don't either), the many "police actions" the US has executed since our last declared war (December 1941) have been close enough to lawful that no one has been criminally charged for kicking them off. Thusly, no killing in said police actions is murder that has not been prosecuted as such. Doesn't make 'em right... but murder doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.

In my experience, the military is mostly full of desperate people reaching for the all-hallowed "opportunity" that our nation no longer affords the economically disadvantaged. I stand by my prostitute analogy, though it would work just as well had I used low-level street enforcers with a gang... just not hitmen (look to PMCs for those). As with gangs and prostitution, prosecuting street workers who are just doing what they have to to survive will avail you nothing. History is right to blame the architects of these conflicts. The "Universal Soldier" of the poem is nothing more than every desperate person ever.

The problem with defining murder as unlawful killing is that it comes from the legal definition of murder. If you define it that way, then no real mass murderer(Think Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin -- people who really killed massive numbers of people, not just the relative handful that they could kill personally before getting caught) in history was guilty of anything, since by the laws of their land, what they were doing was legal -- how could it not be? They wrote them. So no, saying that it's legal therefore it's not murder is not an excuse. The most cold blooded murderers on the planet are the judges, juries, and executioners who put people to death under the color(Or how about we make that "cover") of law.

Even if it were true that the military is mostly full of desperate people(and it's not, as much as I'd like it to be true the statistics have shown time and time again that "lack of money" isn't the reason most people sign up, the majority have other options and decide to do it anyway for various reasons, usually some appeal to "patriotism" or family tradition.), all that does is illustrate how screwed up our society is. We don't give drug dealers a pass just because they were desperate, and I'd be a lot quicker to believe most of them at least started out that way than I would soldiers. There's no public glory to being a drug dealer. For a minority of the population, sure, but even then it's just glamorization. Soldiers, on the other hand, are practically the angels of the major deity that is the military in this country. They may find out the hard way on exiting that it's mostly lip service with very little actual help coming from the people swearing up and down that they "support the troops", and other such platitudes that they strangely never act upon unless they're one of those families that keeps sending their own children in generation after generation(and then the material support is in the form of yet another warm body to fill a pair of boots and hold a gun), but a new idiot hits the recruitment age every day, and the few dissenting voices are drowned out by the waves of military worship. So it doesn't matter if the vets realize how little that hero worship helps them in later life, only that enough kids keep getting caught up in the waves of propaganda.

...second attempt, lost my first reply to the forum goblins... going to truncate.

Murder: legal term, colloquial use applies only to metaphorical use, not killing. Global society is still society, Hitler et cetera were deemed murderers on that scale. It's a plutocracy, as history is written by the victors, certainly not fair. Nothing is in this world, get used to it.

Military propaganda: most people have more pragmatic reasons than they let on. No other applicable skills, no longer enough jobs to go around, especially in rural areas. Best not to demonize people for the ignorant culture they're raised in... you'll only convince them that they're right and you're evil. Fucked up society? Agreed.

"Drug dealers aren't glorified"... bullshit. They're often heroes where they come from, keeping the only functioning economy at their rung of society going. Give more back to their communities than corporate "philanthropists".

hope that was intelligible. It was certainly a lot shorter.

Lost connection again, but copied text this time. Escapist is shitty tonight. Attempt 3.

Drug dealers aren't glorified /by an entire society to the point that it's suicide to speak out against them[footnote]And I don't mean to their face -- yeah, a drug dealer might shoot you if you you said something to his face. However, you wouldn't have to worry about being ostracized from parts of society above the bottom rung for saying it in general.[/footnote]/, soldiers are. I'm not ashamed to say I wouldn't be posting this stuff publicly under my real name -- not of myself, that is. Of the society that makes it so dangerous to criticize its warrior caste, however...

I do agree that the drug dealers give back more to their community than the corporate raiders do. Hell, depending on the company in question, your average wartime company of soldiers may have less blood on its hands than some of those bastards, and for a better reason.

I disagree strongly about murder. A circular definition is no definition at all, this is something whoever wrote that law should have learned around the sixth grade, where you have to write definitions in your own words without using the word itself for exactly that reason.

 

[loc978]

Spoiler: snip

I don't think I would go whole hog and pay $250 to bury a guy I don't know. If there was a dude who had done some impressive stuff, I'd certainly throw the dude a bone if I could.

I don't mean to nasty but the guys who were the first to charge off the boats on D day, didn't actually do much... They allowed other soldiers to advance but all they did was die (was like "operation meat shield" ). If a guy did something that made you go "Daym, dude is THE manly man!" then I think he should have a big ass ceremony.

Although, I think people in WW1 AND WW2 are fucking hero's but these modern day wars seem more like bullies.

This is the most unbelievable thing I have ever read. Do you understand what those soldiers gave up? Everything. They'll never get to experience what a full life is, they might not have wanted to be in that battle, or the war. But their sacrifice was real.

Think about what you have, what you're going to have. Now imagine giving it all up, never getting to experience what life has to offer. Not everyone amounts to something, but everyone has the potential. They gave that potential up so that others could have it instead.

No poor dumb bastard ever became a hero by dying for his country. He did it by making some other poor dumb bastard die for his.

Or to put it another way, they only made that sacrifice because some other soldier was willing to pull the trigger, and they in turn probably killed more than their share. There could be no wars without willing soldiers, and propaganda to the contrary, that's not an oversimplification. It's the unvarnished truth, which is just too horrifying for most people to consider. In the absolute best case scenario, a soldier's job is to commit justifiable homicide in order to defend his own borders. In a more realistic scenario, they're murderers who invade other countries to benefit a few bastards at the top. It's been over 60 years since a soldier in my country's military actually did anything to defend me. Why the hell should I support the murders committed by the modern military because my grandfather actually fought in a war of defense? His was the last generation that did.

Those poor "insurgents" in the middle east, on the other hand...

Captcha: army training, sir!

Oh fuck off with the propaganada, captcha. I'm not in the mood. Although nice going on giving an example of just how much money and effort goes into normalizing this crap.

It's just like you said, respect the individual soldier, he is doing his job. Everyone has to make a living. If you have problems with the army in general, then it's the high command you want to go after. Their the ones who sit in their chair in safe room moving around peoples lives (friendly and enemy) like their chess pieces. I am in full agreement that we haven't been in a needed war since WW2.

So then you're in full agreement that the modern military is nothing but a bunch of hired thugs who, if they had a shred of decency, would lay down their arms and refuse to follow orders? Because right now the job they're doing is not at all worthy of respect, and respecting the individual soldier in this day and age is nothing but accepting the nuremberg defense, in a society where we don't kill soldiers for not following orders, no less. The Nazi's didn't give their soldiers that cushy chance of just sitting in a jail cell, and it was still ruled that "just following orders" was no excuse. That makes it even worse that we don't hold that standard to our own troops.

You can't blame the military without blaming the troops. It just doesn't work that way. It may be a big blame that each person holds a tiny part of, but they still have that tiny part. We have altogether too much respect for the soldier in this country, and not enough of that healthy fear of him that was so common prior to World War II.

Edit: Maybe this will make my stance a bit clearer:

Universal Soldier

He's five foot-two, and he's six feet-four,
He fights with missiles and with spears.
He's all of thirty-one, and he's only seventeen,
Been a soldier for a thousand years.

He'a a Catholic, a Hindu, an Atheist, a Jain,
A Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew.
And he knows he shouldn't kill,
And he knows he always will,
Kill you for me my friend and me for you.

And he's fighting for Canada,
He's fighting for France,
He's fighting for the USA,
And he's fighting for the Russians,
And he's fighting for Japan,
And he thinks we'll put an end to war this way.

And he's fighting for Democracy,
He's fighting for the Reds,
He says it's for the peace of all.
He's the one who must decide,
Who's to live and who's to die,
And he never sees the writing on the wall.

But without him,
How would Hitler have condemned him at Dachau?
Without him Caesar would have stood alone,
He's the one who gives his body
As a weapon of the war,
And without him all this killing can't go on.

He's the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame,
His orders come from far away no more,
They come from here and there and you and me,
And brothers can't you see,
This is not the way we put the end to war.

...that's like blaming prostitutes for the spread of STDs, man (as opposed to our horrifically insufficient healthcare system). People do what they have to to survive. Mind you, I don't think people like myself are automatically deserving of more praise than a prostitute... but neither are we (or the prostitutes) deserving of your scorn. Many soldiers do see the writing on the wall, but that doesn't give us any more options than we had before... and the option you would have us take is tantamount to suicide.

You work with the society you have, not the society you want. Don't like it? Start a revolution... for which you need soldiers. Power concedes nothing, and only the dead have seen the end of war.

Better suicide than murder for pay, man. The military is an inherently evil organization, and the "Necessary" part of "necessary evil" has long since been exceeded. It's not at all like blaming a prostitute for spreading STDs. It's like blaming a hitman for committing a murder. Sure, someone else asked him to do it, but it was his choice to take the payment and carry it out.

Edit: Especially since the "suicide" is figurative, but the murder is literal. Again, the individual soldiers who carried out the holocaust would have been killed themselves had they spoken out (or at least, they would if they were standing alone -- even there, it wouldn't have happened if enough of them had been brave enough to take the bullet instead of firing it). Despite that, they found out the hard way that "I was just following orders" is no excuse. In the US, we don't execute people for refusing to go to war. We might throw them in jail if they're either already members of the military, or, as in Vietnam, if they've been drafted, but we don't kill them. So no, it's really not suicide. If we didn't excuse people who would have been killed themselves if they had decided not to follow their horrific orders, we shouldn't excuse those who would have merely been thrown in jail just because they're our own. Hell, we shouldn't excuse it /especially/ because they're our own.

Really, your definition of murder (unlawful killing... as defined by the society you live in, wrongheaded or not) here is nearly as figurative as my definition of suicide (which was meant as figurative)... unless you happen to be Judge Dredd [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvJiYrRcfQo]. Like it or not (and for the record, I don't either), the many "police actions" the US has executed since our last declared war (December 1941) have been close enough to lawful that no one has been criminally charged for kicking them off. Thusly, no killing in said police actions is murder that has not been prosecuted as such. Doesn't make 'em right... but murder doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.

In my experience, the military is mostly full of desperate people reaching for the all-hallowed "opportunity" that our nation no longer affords the economically disadvantaged. I stand by my prostitute analogy, though it would work just as well had I used low-level street enforcers with a gang... just not hitmen (look to PMCs for those). As with gangs and prostitution, prosecuting street workers who are just doing what they have to to survive will avail you nothing. History is right to blame the architects of these conflicts. The "Universal Soldier" of the poem is nothing more than every desperate person ever.

The problem with defining murder as unlawful killing is that it comes from the legal definition of murder. If you define it that way, then no real mass murderer(Think Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin -- people who really killed massive numbers of people, not just the relative handful that they could kill personally before getting caught) in history was guilty of anything, since by the laws of their land, what they were doing was legal -- how could it not be? They wrote them. So no, saying that it's legal therefore it's not murder is not an excuse. The most cold blooded murderers on the planet are the judges, juries, and executioners who put people to death under the color(Or how about we make that "cover") of law.

Even if it were true that the military is mostly full of desperate people(and it's not, as much as I'd like it to be true the statistics have shown time and time again that "lack of money" isn't the reason most people sign up, the majority have other options and decide to do it anyway for various reasons, usually some appeal to "patriotism" or family tradition.), all that does is illustrate how screwed up our society is. We don't give drug dealers a pass just because they were desperate, and I'd be a lot quicker to believe most of them at least started out that way than I would soldiers. There's no public glory to being a drug dealer. For a minority of the population, sure, but even then it's just glamorization. Soldiers, on the other hand, are practically the angels of the major deity that is the military in this country. They may find out the hard way on exiting that it's mostly lip service with very little actual help coming from the people swearing up and down that they "support the troops", and other such platitudes that they strangely never act upon unless they're one of those families that keeps sending their own children in generation after generation(and then the material support is in the form of yet another warm body to fill a pair of boots and hold a gun), but a new idiot hits the recruitment age every day, and the few dissenting voices are drowned out by the waves of military worship. So it doesn't matter if the vets realize how little that hero worship helps them in later life, only that enough kids keep getting caught up in the waves of propaganda.

...second attempt, lost my first reply to the forum goblins... going to truncate.

Murder: legal term, colloquial use applies only to metaphorical use, not killing. Global society is still society, Hitler et cetera were deemed murderers on that scale. It's a plutocracy, as history is written by the victors, certainly not fair. Nothing is in this world, get used to it.

Military propaganda: most people have more pragmatic reasons than they let on. No other applicable skills, no longer enough jobs to go around, especially in rural areas. Best not to demonize people for the ignorant culture they're raised in... you'll only convince them that they're right and you're evil. Fucked up society? Agreed.

"Drug dealers aren't glorified"... bullshit. They're often heroes where they come from, keeping the only functioning economy at their rung of society going. Give more back to their communities than corporate "philanthropists".

hope that was intelligible. It was certainly a lot shorter.

Lost connection again, but copied text this time. Escapist is shitty tonight. Attempt 3.

Drug dealers aren't glorified /by an entire society to the point that it's suicide to speak out against them (And I don't mean to their face -- yeah, a drug dealer might shoot you if you you said something to his face. However, you wouldn't have to worry about being ostracized from parts of society above the bottom rung for saying it in general.), soldiers are. I'm not ashamed to say I wouldn't be posting this stuff publicly under my real name -- not of myself, that is. Of the society that makes it so dangerous to criticize its warrior caste, however...

I do agree that the drug dealers give back more to their community than the corporate raiders do. Hell, depending on the company in question, your average wartime company of soldiers may have less blood on its hands than some of those bastards, and for a better reason.

I disagree strongly about murder. A circular definition is no definition at all, this is something whoever wrote that law should have learned around the sixth grade, where you have to write definitions in your own words without using the word itself for exactly that reason.

agreed on most of it then... but...
"The unlawful killing, with malice aforethought, of another human"(wikipedia)

"the crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethought"(mirriam-webster)
and
"The killing of another human being under conditions specifically covered in law. In the U.S., special statutory definitions include murder committed with malice aforethought, characterized by deliberation or premeditation or occurring during the commission of another serious crime, as robbery or arson (first-degree murder) and murder by intent but without deliberation or premeditation (second-degree murder)" (dictionary.com)

...are not circular definitions... but do all require law to define them. Like it or not, unlawful killing is murder; lawful killing is not. "Personal definitions" are a cop-out.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Spoiler: snip

I don't think I would go whole hog and pay $250 to bury a guy I don't know. If there was a dude who had done some impressive stuff, I'd certainly throw the dude a bone if I could.

I don't mean to nasty but the guys who were the first to charge off the boats on D day, didn't actually do much... They allowed other soldiers to advance but all they did was die (was like "operation meat shield" ). If a guy did something that made you go "Daym, dude is THE manly man!" then I think he should have a big ass ceremony.

Although, I think people in WW1 AND WW2 are fucking hero's but these modern day wars seem more like bullies.

This is the most unbelievable thing I have ever read. Do you understand what those soldiers gave up? Everything. They'll never get to experience what a full life is, they might not have wanted to be in that battle, or the war. But their sacrifice was real.

Think about what you have, what you're going to have. Now imagine giving it all up, never getting to experience what life has to offer. Not everyone amounts to something, but everyone has the potential. They gave that potential up so that others could have it instead.

No poor dumb bastard ever became a hero by dying for his country. He did it by making some other poor dumb bastard die for his.

Or to put it another way, they only made that sacrifice because some other soldier was willing to pull the trigger, and they in turn probably killed more than their share. There could be no wars without willing soldiers, and propaganda to the contrary, that's not an oversimplification. It's the unvarnished truth, which is just too horrifying for most people to consider. In the absolute best case scenario, a soldier's job is to commit justifiable homicide in order to defend his own borders. In a more realistic scenario, they're murderers who invade other countries to benefit a few bastards at the top. It's been over 60 years since a soldier in my country's military actually did anything to defend me. Why the hell should I support the murders committed by the modern military because my grandfather actually fought in a war of defense? His was the last generation that did.

Those poor "insurgents" in the middle east, on the other hand...

Captcha: army training, sir!

Oh fuck off with the propaganada, captcha. I'm not in the mood. Although nice going on giving an example of just how much money and effort goes into normalizing this crap.

It's just like you said, respect the individual soldier, he is doing his job. Everyone has to make a living. If you have problems with the army in general, then it's the high command you want to go after. Their the ones who sit in their chair in safe room moving around peoples lives (friendly and enemy) like their chess pieces. I am in full agreement that we haven't been in a needed war since WW2.

So then you're in full agreement that the modern military is nothing but a bunch of hired thugs who, if they had a shred of decency, would lay down their arms and refuse to follow orders? Because right now the job they're doing is not at all worthy of respect, and respecting the individual soldier in this day and age is nothing but accepting the nuremberg defense, in a society where we don't kill soldiers for not following orders, no less. The Nazi's didn't give their soldiers that cushy chance of just sitting in a jail cell, and it was still ruled that "just following orders" was no excuse. That makes it even worse that we don't hold that standard to our own troops.

You can't blame the military without blaming the troops. It just doesn't work that way. It may be a big blame that each person holds a tiny part of, but they still have that tiny part. We have altogether too much respect for the soldier in this country, and not enough of that healthy fear of him that was so common prior to World War II.

Edit: Maybe this will make my stance a bit clearer:

Universal Soldier

He's five foot-two, and he's six feet-four,
He fights with missiles and with spears.
He's all of thirty-one, and he's only seventeen,
Been a soldier for a thousand years.

He'a a Catholic, a Hindu, an Atheist, a Jain,
A Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew.
And he knows he shouldn't kill,
And he knows he always will,
Kill you for me my friend and me for you.

And he's fighting for Canada,
He's fighting for France,
He's fighting for the USA,
And he's fighting for the Russians,
And he's fighting for Japan,
And he thinks we'll put an end to war this way.

And he's fighting for Democracy,
He's fighting for the Reds,
He says it's for the peace of all.
He's the one who must decide,
Who's to live and who's to die,
And he never sees the writing on the wall.

But without him,
How would Hitler have condemned him at Dachau?
Without him Caesar would have stood alone,
He's the one who gives his body
As a weapon of the war,
And without him all this killing can't go on.

He's the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame,
His orders come from far away no more,
They come from here and there and you and me,
And brothers can't you see,
This is not the way we put the end to war.

...that's like blaming prostitutes for the spread of STDs, man (as opposed to our horrifically insufficient healthcare system). People do what they have to to survive. Mind you, I don't think people like myself are automatically deserving of more praise than a prostitute... but neither are we (or the prostitutes) deserving of your scorn. Many soldiers do see the writing on the wall, but that doesn't give us any more options than we had before... and the option you would have us take is tantamount to suicide.

You work with the society you have, not the society you want. Don't like it? Start a revolution... for which you need soldiers. Power concedes nothing, and only the dead have seen the end of war.

Better suicide than murder for pay, man. The military is an inherently evil organization, and the "Necessary" part of "necessary evil" has long since been exceeded. It's not at all like blaming a prostitute for spreading STDs. It's like blaming a hitman for committing a murder. Sure, someone else asked him to do it, but it was his choice to take the payment and carry it out.

Edit: Especially since the "suicide" is figurative, but the murder is literal. Again, the individual soldiers who carried out the holocaust would have been killed themselves had they spoken out (or at least, they would if they were standing alone -- even there, it wouldn't have happened if enough of them had been brave enough to take the bullet instead of firing it). Despite that, they found out the hard way that "I was just following orders" is no excuse. In the US, we don't execute people for refusing to go to war. We might throw them in jail if they're either already members of the military, or, as in Vietnam, if they've been drafted, but we don't kill them. So no, it's really not suicide. If we didn't excuse people who would have been killed themselves if they had decided not to follow their horrific orders, we shouldn't excuse those who would have merely been thrown in jail just because they're our own. Hell, we shouldn't excuse it /especially/ because they're our own.

Really, your definition of murder (unlawful killing... as defined by the society you live in, wrongheaded or not) here is nearly as figurative as my definition of suicide (which was meant as figurative)... unless you happen to be Judge Dredd [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvJiYrRcfQo]. Like it or not (and for the record, I don't either), the many "police actions" the US has executed since our last declared war (December 1941) have been close enough to lawful that no one has been criminally charged for kicking them off. Thusly, no killing in said police actions is murder that has not been prosecuted as such. Doesn't make 'em right... but murder doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.

In my experience, the military is mostly full of desperate people reaching for the all-hallowed "opportunity" that our nation no longer affords the economically disadvantaged. I stand by my prostitute analogy, though it would work just as well had I used low-level street enforcers with a gang... just not hitmen (look to PMCs for those). As with gangs and prostitution, prosecuting street workers who are just doing what they have to to survive will avail you nothing. History is right to blame the architects of these conflicts. The "Universal Soldier" of the poem is nothing more than every desperate person ever.

The problem with defining murder as unlawful killing is that it comes from the legal definition of murder. If you define it that way, then no real mass murderer(Think Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin -- people who really killed massive numbers of people, not just the relative handful that they could kill personally before getting caught) in history was guilty of anything, since by the laws of their land, what they were doing was legal -- how could it not be? They wrote them. So no, saying that it's legal therefore it's not murder is not an excuse. The most cold blooded murderers on the planet are the judges, juries, and executioners who put people to death under the color(Or how about we make that "cover") of law.

Even if it were true that the military is mostly full of desperate people(and it's not, as much as I'd like it to be true the statistics have shown time and time again that "lack of money" isn't the reason most people sign up, the majority have other options and decide to do it anyway for various reasons, usually some appeal to "patriotism" or family tradition.), all that does is illustrate how screwed up our society is. We don't give drug dealers a pass just because they were desperate, and I'd be a lot quicker to believe most of them at least started out that way than I would soldiers. There's no public glory to being a drug dealer. For a minority of the population, sure, but even then it's just glamorization. Soldiers, on the other hand, are practically the angels of the major deity that is the military in this country. They may find out the hard way on exiting that it's mostly lip service with very little actual help coming from the people swearing up and down that they "support the troops", and other such platitudes that they strangely never act upon unless they're one of those families that keeps sending their own children in generation after generation(and then the material support is in the form of yet another warm body to fill a pair of boots and hold a gun), but a new idiot hits the recruitment age every day, and the few dissenting voices are drowned out by the waves of military worship. So it doesn't matter if the vets realize how little that hero worship helps them in later life, only that enough kids keep getting caught up in the waves of propaganda.

...second attempt, lost my first reply to the forum goblins... going to truncate.

Murder: legal term, colloquial use applies only to metaphorical use, not killing. Global society is still society, Hitler et cetera were deemed murderers on that scale. It's a plutocracy, as history is written by the victors, certainly not fair. Nothing is in this world, get used to it.

Military propaganda: most people have more pragmatic reasons than they let on. No other applicable skills, no longer enough jobs to go around, especially in rural areas. Best not to demonize people for the ignorant culture they're raised in... you'll only convince them that they're right and you're evil. Fucked up society? Agreed.

"Drug dealers aren't glorified"... bullshit. They're often heroes where they come from, keeping the only functioning economy at their rung of society going. Give more back to their communities than corporate "philanthropists".

hope that was intelligible. It was certainly a lot shorter.

Lost connection again, but copied text this time. Escapist is shitty tonight. Attempt 3.

Drug dealers aren't glorified /by an entire society to the point that it's suicide to speak out against them (And I don't mean to their face -- yeah, a drug dealer might shoot you if you you said something to his face. However, you wouldn't have to worry about being ostracized from parts of society above the bottom rung for saying it in general.), soldiers are. I'm not ashamed to say I wouldn't be posting this stuff publicly under my real name -- not of myself, that is. Of the society that makes it so dangerous to criticize its warrior caste, however...

I do agree that the drug dealers give back more to their community than the corporate raiders do. Hell, depending on the company in question, your average wartime company of soldiers may have less blood on its hands than some of those bastards, and for a better reason.

I disagree strongly about murder. A circular definition is no definition at all, this is something whoever wrote that law should have learned around the sixth grade, where you have to write definitions in your own words without using the word itself for exactly that reason.

agreed on most of it then... but...
"The unlawful killing, with malice aforethought, of another human"(wikipedia)

"the crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethought"(mirriam-webster)
and
"The killing of another human being under conditions specifically covered in law. In the U.S., special statutory definitions include murder committed with malice aforethought, characterized by deliberation or premeditation or occurring during the commission of another serious crime, as robbery or arson (first-degree murder) and murder by intent but without deliberation or premeditation (second-degree murder)" (dictionary.com)

...are not circular definitions... but do all require law to define them. Like it or not, unlawful killing is murder; lawful killing is not. "Personal definitions" are a cop-out.

The better way of looking at it is killing is murder by default, but there can be mitigating circumstances that make it either a lesser crime (like manslaughter) or fully excusable (like killing in self defense). Basically don't start from the legal forms of killing and define murder from there, start with murder and then separate the lesser types of killing from it. Besides, I'd imagine that's closer to how the average person understands it to begin with. Which makes sense, because the law isn't where right and wrong come from. Quite the contrary, it's an imperfect attempt to codify pre-existing ideas of what is and is not okay.

 

[MalkavianLunatic]

If I had the money to spare, I would donate it to help bury remains, whether or not they're military. My city already has enough trouble when it comes to storing the remains of those who have no family or friends. Unfortunately, in this economy and with this idiotic shutdown, I don't see this receiving all that many donations, and that's not counting those that feel it isn't their place or problem, which that's perfectly alright; that's their feeling on it. It's just sad to think that there are people who lost their lives and their remains are relegated to someone's attic to be forgotten.

However, I would also say that these kind people, searching for donations and help in performing a great deed of respect for the dead, should maybe also look into cremation and other options. Still, I say good for them and tip my hat to them.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Again, the individual soldiers who carried out the holocaust would have been killed themselves had they spoken out (or at least, they would if they were standing alone -- even there, it wouldn't have happened if enough of them had been brave enough to take the bullet instead of firing it). Despite that, they found out the hard way that "I was just following orders" is no excuse.

Not true. Yes, the Nuremberg defence of "Just following orders" wasn't accepted, but the vast majority of people weren't brought to trial, just their leaders and most notorious ones.

Many, many people didn't need a defence because they weren't brought to trial.

(OTOH, groups like Mossad spent a lot of time hunting them down)

 

[Evil Smurf]

If I had the money to give, I'd pay to help everyone. However, don't taxes deal with this sort of thing?

 

[loc978]

Spoiler: snip

I don't think I would go whole hog and pay $250 to bury a guy I don't know. If there was a dude who had done some impressive stuff, I'd certainly throw the dude a bone if I could.

I don't mean to nasty but the guys who were the first to charge off the boats on D day, didn't actually do much... They allowed other soldiers to advance but all they did was die (was like "operation meat shield" ). If a guy did something that made you go "Daym, dude is THE manly man!" then I think he should have a big ass ceremony.

Although, I think people in WW1 AND WW2 are fucking hero's but these modern day wars seem more like bullies.

This is the most unbelievable thing I have ever read. Do you understand what those soldiers gave up? Everything. They'll never get to experience what a full life is, they might not have wanted to be in that battle, or the war. But their sacrifice was real.

Think about what you have, what you're going to have. Now imagine giving it all up, never getting to experience what life has to offer. Not everyone amounts to something, but everyone has the potential. They gave that potential up so that others could have it instead.

No poor dumb bastard ever became a hero by dying for his country. He did it by making some other poor dumb bastard die for his.

Or to put it another way, they only made that sacrifice because some other soldier was willing to pull the trigger, and they in turn probably killed more than their share. There could be no wars without willing soldiers, and propaganda to the contrary, that's not an oversimplification. It's the unvarnished truth, which is just too horrifying for most people to consider. In the absolute best case scenario, a soldier's job is to commit justifiable homicide in order to defend his own borders. In a more realistic scenario, they're murderers who invade other countries to benefit a few bastards at the top. It's been over 60 years since a soldier in my country's military actually did anything to defend me. Why the hell should I support the murders committed by the modern military because my grandfather actually fought in a war of defense? His was the last generation that did.

Those poor "insurgents" in the middle east, on the other hand...

Captcha: army training, sir!

Oh fuck off with the propaganada, captcha. I'm not in the mood. Although nice going on giving an example of just how much money and effort goes into normalizing this crap.

It's just like you said, respect the individual soldier, he is doing his job. Everyone has to make a living. If you have problems with the army in general, then it's the high command you want to go after. Their the ones who sit in their chair in safe room moving around peoples lives (friendly and enemy) like their chess pieces. I am in full agreement that we haven't been in a needed war since WW2.

So then you're in full agreement that the modern military is nothing but a bunch of hired thugs who, if they had a shred of decency, would lay down their arms and refuse to follow orders? Because right now the job they're doing is not at all worthy of respect, and respecting the individual soldier in this day and age is nothing but accepting the nuremberg defense, in a society where we don't kill soldiers for not following orders, no less. The Nazi's didn't give their soldiers that cushy chance of just sitting in a jail cell, and it was still ruled that "just following orders" was no excuse. That makes it even worse that we don't hold that standard to our own troops.

You can't blame the military without blaming the troops. It just doesn't work that way. It may be a big blame that each person holds a tiny part of, but they still have that tiny part. We have altogether too much respect for the soldier in this country, and not enough of that healthy fear of him that was so common prior to World War II.

Edit: Maybe this will make my stance a bit clearer:

Universal Soldier

He's five foot-two, and he's six feet-four,
He fights with missiles and with spears.
He's all of thirty-one, and he's only seventeen,
Been a soldier for a thousand years.

He'a a Catholic, a Hindu, an Atheist, a Jain,
A Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew.
And he knows he shouldn't kill,
And he knows he always will,
Kill you for me my friend and me for you.

And he's fighting for Canada,
He's fighting for France,
He's fighting for the USA,
And he's fighting for the Russians,
And he's fighting for Japan,
And he thinks we'll put an end to war this way.

And he's fighting for Democracy,
He's fighting for the Reds,
He says it's for the peace of all.
He's the one who must decide,
Who's to live and who's to die,
And he never sees the writing on the wall.

But without him,
How would Hitler have condemned him at Dachau?
Without him Caesar would have stood alone,
He's the one who gives his body
As a weapon of the war,
And without him all this killing can't go on.

He's the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame,
His orders come from far away no more,
They come from here and there and you and me,
And brothers can't you see,
This is not the way we put the end to war.

...that's like blaming prostitutes for the spread of STDs, man (as opposed to our horrifically insufficient healthcare system). People do what they have to to survive. Mind you, I don't think people like myself are automatically deserving of more praise than a prostitute... but neither are we (or the prostitutes) deserving of your scorn. Many soldiers do see the writing on the wall, but that doesn't give us any more options than we had before... and the option you would have us take is tantamount to suicide.

You work with the society you have, not the society you want. Don't like it? Start a revolution... for which you need soldiers. Power concedes nothing, and only the dead have seen the end of war.

Better suicide than murder for pay, man. The military is an inherently evil organization, and the "Necessary" part of "necessary evil" has long since been exceeded. It's not at all like blaming a prostitute for spreading STDs. It's like blaming a hitman for committing a murder. Sure, someone else asked him to do it, but it was his choice to take the payment and carry it out.

Edit: Especially since the "suicide" is figurative, but the murder is literal. Again, the individual soldiers who carried out the holocaust would have been killed themselves had they spoken out (or at least, they would if they were standing alone -- even there, it wouldn't have happened if enough of them had been brave enough to take the bullet instead of firing it). Despite that, they found out the hard way that "I was just following orders" is no excuse. In the US, we don't execute people for refusing to go to war. We might throw them in jail if they're either already members of the military, or, as in Vietnam, if they've been drafted, but we don't kill them. So no, it's really not suicide. If we didn't excuse people who would have been killed themselves if they had decided not to follow their horrific orders, we shouldn't excuse those who would have merely been thrown in jail just because they're our own. Hell, we shouldn't excuse it /especially/ because they're our own.

Really, your definition of murder (unlawful killing... as defined by the society you live in, wrongheaded or not) here is nearly as figurative as my definition of suicide (which was meant as figurative)... unless you happen to be Judge Dredd [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvJiYrRcfQo]. Like it or not (and for the record, I don't either), the many "police actions" the US has executed since our last declared war (December 1941) have been close enough to lawful that no one has been criminally charged for kicking them off. Thusly, no killing in said police actions is murder that has not been prosecuted as such. Doesn't make 'em right... but murder doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.

In my experience, the military is mostly full of desperate people reaching for the all-hallowed "opportunity" that our nation no longer affords the economically disadvantaged. I stand by my prostitute analogy, though it would work just as well had I used low-level street enforcers with a gang... just not hitmen (look to PMCs for those). As with gangs and prostitution, prosecuting street workers who are just doing what they have to to survive will avail you nothing. History is right to blame the architects of these conflicts. The "Universal Soldier" of the poem is nothing more than every desperate person ever.

The problem with defining murder as unlawful killing is that it comes from the legal definition of murder. If you define it that way, then no real mass murderer(Think Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin -- people who really killed massive numbers of people, not just the relative handful that they could kill personally before getting caught) in history was guilty of anything, since by the laws of their land, what they were doing was legal -- how could it not be? They wrote them. So no, saying that it's legal therefore it's not murder is not an excuse. The most cold blooded murderers on the planet are the judges, juries, and executioners who put people to death under the color(Or how about we make that "cover") of law.

Even if it were true that the military is mostly full of desperate people(and it's not, as much as I'd like it to be true the statistics have shown time and time again that "lack of money" isn't the reason most people sign up, the majority have other options and decide to do it anyway for various reasons, usually some appeal to "patriotism" or family tradition.), all that does is illustrate how screwed up our society is. We don't give drug dealers a pass just because they were desperate, and I'd be a lot quicker to believe most of them at least started out that way than I would soldiers. There's no public glory to being a drug dealer. For a minority of the population, sure, but even then it's just glamorization. Soldiers, on the other hand, are practically the angels of the major deity that is the military in this country. They may find out the hard way on exiting that it's mostly lip service with very little actual help coming from the people swearing up and down that they "support the troops", and other such platitudes that they strangely never act upon unless they're one of those families that keeps sending their own children in generation after generation(and then the material support is in the form of yet another warm body to fill a pair of boots and hold a gun), but a new idiot hits the recruitment age every day, and the few dissenting voices are drowned out by the waves of military worship. So it doesn't matter if the vets realize how little that hero worship helps them in later life, only that enough kids keep getting caught up in the waves of propaganda.

...second attempt, lost my first reply to the forum goblins... going to truncate.

Murder: legal term, colloquial use applies only to metaphorical use, not killing. Global society is still society, Hitler et cetera were deemed murderers on that scale. It's a plutocracy, as history is written by the victors, certainly not fair. Nothing is in this world, get used to it.

Military propaganda: most people have more pragmatic reasons than they let on. No other applicable skills, no longer enough jobs to go around, especially in rural areas. Best not to demonize people for the ignorant culture they're raised in... you'll only convince them that they're right and you're evil. Fucked up society? Agreed.

"Drug dealers aren't glorified"... bullshit. They're often heroes where they come from, keeping the only functioning economy at their rung of society going. Give more back to their communities than corporate "philanthropists".

hope that was intelligible. It was certainly a lot shorter.

Lost connection again, but copied text this time. Escapist is shitty tonight. Attempt 3.

Drug dealers aren't glorified /by an entire society to the point that it's suicide to speak out against them (And I don't mean to their face -- yeah, a drug dealer might shoot you if you you said something to his face. However, you wouldn't have to worry about being ostracized from parts of society above the bottom rung for saying it in general.), soldiers are. I'm not ashamed to say I wouldn't be posting this stuff publicly under my real name -- not of myself, that is. Of the society that makes it so dangerous to criticize its warrior caste, however...

I do agree that the drug dealers give back more to their community than the corporate raiders do. Hell, depending on the company in question, your average wartime company of soldiers may have less blood on its hands than some of those bastards, and for a better reason.

I disagree strongly about murder. A circular definition is no definition at all, this is something whoever wrote that law should have learned around the sixth grade, where you have to write definitions in your own words without using the word itself for exactly that reason.

agreed on most of it then... but...
"The unlawful killing, with malice aforethought, of another human"(wikipedia)

"the crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethought"(mirriam-webster)
and
"The killing of another human being under conditions specifically covered in law. In the U.S., special statutory definitions include murder committed with malice aforethought, characterized by deliberation or premeditation or occurring during the commission of another serious crime, as robbery or arson (first-degree murder) and murder by intent but without deliberation or premeditation (second-degree murder)" (dictionary.com)

...are not circular definitions... but do all require law to define them. Like it or not, unlawful killing is murder; lawful killing is not. "Personal definitions" are a cop-out.

The better way of looking at it is killing is murder by default, but there can be mitigating circumstances that make it either a lesser crime (like manslaughter) or fully excusable (like killing in self defense). Basically don't start from the legal forms of killing and define murder from there, start with murder and then separate the lesser types of killing from it. Besides, I'd imagine that's closer to how the average person understands it to begin with. Which makes sense, because the law isn't where right and wrong come from. Quite the contrary, it's an imperfect attempt to codify pre-existing ideas of what is and is not okay.

Still strikes me as a bit of a cop-out. Denial of facts in favor of an emotional response. Murder has nothing to do with "right or wrong" (which are subjective), only with legal or illegal.

**edit** if most people truly understand it that... incorrectly... I suppose the definitions should be updated. Pretty sure that's not the case, though.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Spoiler: snip

I don't think I would go whole hog and pay $250 to bury a guy I don't know. If there was a dude who had done some impressive stuff, I'd certainly throw the dude a bone if I could.

I don't mean to nasty but the guys who were the first to charge off the boats on D day, didn't actually do much... They allowed other soldiers to advance but all they did was die (was like "operation meat shield" ). If a guy did something that made you go "Daym, dude is THE manly man!" then I think he should have a big ass ceremony.

Although, I think people in WW1 AND WW2 are fucking hero's but these modern day wars seem more like bullies.

This is the most unbelievable thing I have ever read. Do you understand what those soldiers gave up? Everything. They'll never get to experience what a full life is, they might not have wanted to be in that battle, or the war. But their sacrifice was real.

Think about what you have, what you're going to have. Now imagine giving it all up, never getting to experience what life has to offer. Not everyone amounts to something, but everyone has the potential. They gave that potential up so that others could have it instead.

No poor dumb bastard ever became a hero by dying for his country. He did it by making some other poor dumb bastard die for his.

Or to put it another way, they only made that sacrifice because some other soldier was willing to pull the trigger, and they in turn probably killed more than their share. There could be no wars without willing soldiers, and propaganda to the contrary, that's not an oversimplification. It's the unvarnished truth, which is just too horrifying for most people to consider. In the absolute best case scenario, a soldier's job is to commit justifiable homicide in order to defend his own borders. In a more realistic scenario, they're murderers who invade other countries to benefit a few bastards at the top. It's been over 60 years since a soldier in my country's military actually did anything to defend me. Why the hell should I support the murders committed by the modern military because my grandfather actually fought in a war of defense? His was the last generation that did.

Those poor "insurgents" in the middle east, on the other hand...

Captcha: army training, sir!

Oh fuck off with the propaganada, captcha. I'm not in the mood. Although nice going on giving an example of just how much money and effort goes into normalizing this crap.

It's just like you said, respect the individual soldier, he is doing his job. Everyone has to make a living. If you have problems with the army in general, then it's the high command you want to go after. Their the ones who sit in their chair in safe room moving around peoples lives (friendly and enemy) like their chess pieces. I am in full agreement that we haven't been in a needed war since WW2.

So then you're in full agreement that the modern military is nothing but a bunch of hired thugs who, if they had a shred of decency, would lay down their arms and refuse to follow orders? Because right now the job they're doing is not at all worthy of respect, and respecting the individual soldier in this day and age is nothing but accepting the nuremberg defense, in a society where we don't kill soldiers for not following orders, no less. The Nazi's didn't give their soldiers that cushy chance of just sitting in a jail cell, and it was still ruled that "just following orders" was no excuse. That makes it even worse that we don't hold that standard to our own troops.

You can't blame the military without blaming the troops. It just doesn't work that way. It may be a big blame that each person holds a tiny part of, but they still have that tiny part. We have altogether too much respect for the soldier in this country, and not enough of that healthy fear of him that was so common prior to World War II.

Edit: Maybe this will make my stance a bit clearer:

Universal Soldier

He's five foot-two, and he's six feet-four,
He fights with missiles and with spears.
He's all of thirty-one, and he's only seventeen,
Been a soldier for a thousand years.

He'a a Catholic, a Hindu, an Atheist, a Jain,
A Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew.
And he knows he shouldn't kill,
And he knows he always will,
Kill you for me my friend and me for you.

And he's fighting for Canada,
He's fighting for France,
He's fighting for the USA,
And he's fighting for the Russians,
And he's fighting for Japan,
And he thinks we'll put an end to war this way.

And he's fighting for Democracy,
He's fighting for the Reds,
He says it's for the peace of all.
He's the one who must decide,
Who's to live and who's to die,
And he never sees the writing on the wall.

But without him,
How would Hitler have condemned him at Dachau?
Without him Caesar would have stood alone,
He's the one who gives his body
As a weapon of the war,
And without him all this killing can't go on.

He's the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame,
His orders come from far away no more,
They come from here and there and you and me,
And brothers can't you see,
This is not the way we put the end to war.

...that's like blaming prostitutes for the spread of STDs, man (as opposed to our horrifically insufficient healthcare system). People do what they have to to survive. Mind you, I don't think people like myself are automatically deserving of more praise than a prostitute... but neither are we (or the prostitutes) deserving of your scorn. Many soldiers do see the writing on the wall, but that doesn't give us any more options than we had before... and the option you would have us take is tantamount to suicide.

You work with the society you have, not the society you want. Don't like it? Start a revolution... for which you need soldiers. Power concedes nothing, and only the dead have seen the end of war.

Better suicide than murder for pay, man. The military is an inherently evil organization, and the "Necessary" part of "necessary evil" has long since been exceeded. It's not at all like blaming a prostitute for spreading STDs. It's like blaming a hitman for committing a murder. Sure, someone else asked him to do it, but it was his choice to take the payment and carry it out.

Edit: Especially since the "suicide" is figurative, but the murder is literal. Again, the individual soldiers who carried out the holocaust would have been killed themselves had they spoken out (or at least, they would if they were standing alone -- even there, it wouldn't have happened if enough of them had been brave enough to take the bullet instead of firing it). Despite that, they found out the hard way that "I was just following orders" is no excuse. In the US, we don't execute people for refusing to go to war. We might throw them in jail if they're either already members of the military, or, as in Vietnam, if they've been drafted, but we don't kill them. So no, it's really not suicide. If we didn't excuse people who would have been killed themselves if they had decided not to follow their horrific orders, we shouldn't excuse those who would have merely been thrown in jail just because they're our own. Hell, we shouldn't excuse it /especially/ because they're our own.

Really, your definition of murder (unlawful killing... as defined by the society you live in, wrongheaded or not) here is nearly as figurative as my definition of suicide (which was meant as figurative)... unless you happen to be Judge Dredd [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvJiYrRcfQo]. Like it or not (and for the record, I don't either), the many "police actions" the US has executed since our last declared war (December 1941) have been close enough to lawful that no one has been criminally charged for kicking them off. Thusly, no killing in said police actions is murder that has not been prosecuted as such. Doesn't make 'em right... but murder doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.

In my experience, the military is mostly full of desperate people reaching for the all-hallowed "opportunity" that our nation no longer affords the economically disadvantaged. I stand by my prostitute analogy, though it would work just as well had I used low-level street enforcers with a gang... just not hitmen (look to PMCs for those). As with gangs and prostitution, prosecuting street workers who are just doing what they have to to survive will avail you nothing. History is right to blame the architects of these conflicts. The "Universal Soldier" of the poem is nothing more than every desperate person ever.

The problem with defining murder as unlawful killing is that it comes from the legal definition of murder. If you define it that way, then no real mass murderer(Think Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin -- people who really killed massive numbers of people, not just the relative handful that they could kill personally before getting caught) in history was guilty of anything, since by the laws of their land, what they were doing was legal -- how could it not be? They wrote them. So no, saying that it's legal therefore it's not murder is not an excuse. The most cold blooded murderers on the planet are the judges, juries, and executioners who put people to death under the color(Or how about we make that "cover") of law.

Even if it were true that the military is mostly full of desperate people(and it's not, as much as I'd like it to be true the statistics have shown time and time again that "lack of money" isn't the reason most people sign up, the majority have other options and decide to do it anyway for various reasons, usually some appeal to "patriotism" or family tradition.), all that does is illustrate how screwed up our society is. We don't give drug dealers a pass just because they were desperate, and I'd be a lot quicker to believe most of them at least started out that way than I would soldiers. There's no public glory to being a drug dealer. For a minority of the population, sure, but even then it's just glamorization. Soldiers, on the other hand, are practically the angels of the major deity that is the military in this country. They may find out the hard way on exiting that it's mostly lip service with very little actual help coming from the people swearing up and down that they "support the troops", and other such platitudes that they strangely never act upon unless they're one of those families that keeps sending their own children in generation after generation(and then the material support is in the form of yet another warm body to fill a pair of boots and hold a gun), but a new idiot hits the recruitment age every day, and the few dissenting voices are drowned out by the waves of military worship. So it doesn't matter if the vets realize how little that hero worship helps them in later life, only that enough kids keep getting caught up in the waves of propaganda.

...second attempt, lost my first reply to the forum goblins... going to truncate.

Murder: legal term, colloquial use applies only to metaphorical use, not killing. Global society is still society, Hitler et cetera were deemed murderers on that scale. It's a plutocracy, as history is written by the victors, certainly not fair. Nothing is in this world, get used to it.

Military propaganda: most people have more pragmatic reasons than they let on. No other applicable skills, no longer enough jobs to go around, especially in rural areas. Best not to demonize people for the ignorant culture they're raised in... you'll only convince them that they're right and you're evil. Fucked up society? Agreed.

"Drug dealers aren't glorified"... bullshit. They're often heroes where they come from, keeping the only functioning economy at their rung of society going. Give more back to their communities than corporate "philanthropists".

hope that was intelligible. It was certainly a lot shorter.

Lost connection again, but copied text this time. Escapist is shitty tonight. Attempt 3.

Drug dealers aren't glorified /by an entire society to the point that it's suicide to speak out against them (And I don't mean to their face -- yeah, a drug dealer might shoot you if you you said something to his face. However, you wouldn't have to worry about being ostracized from parts of society above the bottom rung for saying it in general.), soldiers are. I'm not ashamed to say I wouldn't be posting this stuff publicly under my real name -- not of myself, that is. Of the society that makes it so dangerous to criticize its warrior caste, however...

I do agree that the drug dealers give back more to their community than the corporate raiders do. Hell, depending on the company in question, your average wartime company of soldiers may have less blood on its hands than some of those bastards, and for a better reason.

I disagree strongly about murder. A circular definition is no definition at all, this is something whoever wrote that law should have learned around the sixth grade, where you have to write definitions in your own words without using the word itself for exactly that reason.

agreed on most of it then... but...
"The unlawful killing, with malice aforethought, of another human"(wikipedia)

"the crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethought"(mirriam-webster)
and
"The killing of another human being under conditions specifically covered in law. In the U.S., special statutory definitions include murder committed with malice aforethought, characterized by deliberation or premeditation or occurring during the commission of another serious crime, as robbery or arson (first-degree murder) and murder by intent but without deliberation or premeditation (second-degree murder)" (dictionary.com)

...are not circular definitions... but do all require law to define them. Like it or not, unlawful killing is murder; lawful killing is not. "Personal definitions" are a cop-out.

The better way of looking at it is killing is murder by default, but there can be mitigating circumstances that make it either a lesser crime (like manslaughter) or fully excusable (like killing in self defense). Basically don't start from the legal forms of killing and define murder from there, start with murder and then separate the lesser types of killing from it. Besides, I'd imagine that's closer to how the average person understands it to begin with. Which makes sense, because the law isn't where right and wrong come from. Quite the contrary, it's an imperfect attempt to codify pre-existing ideas of what is and is not okay.

Still strikes me as a bit of a cop-out. Denial of facts in favor of an emotional response. Murder has nothing to do with "right or wrong" (which are subjective), only with legal or illegal.

**edit** if most people truly understand it that... incorrectly... I suppose the definitions should be updated. Pretty sure that's not the case, though.

What facts, though? That murder is apparently illegal because it's not legal? That's how the legal definition scans. I find "murder is illegal because it's illegal. There are forms of killing that are legal, but definitionally they are not murder because murder is killing for illegal reasons" a much bigger copout than "if you kill someone, you have committed murder unless there are mitigating circumstances."

 

[loc978]

Spoiler: snip

I don't think I would go whole hog and pay $250 to bury a guy I don't know. If there was a dude who had done some impressive stuff, I'd certainly throw the dude a bone if I could.

I don't mean to nasty but the guys who were the first to charge off the boats on D day, didn't actually do much... They allowed other soldiers to advance but all they did was die (was like "operation meat shield" ). If a guy did something that made you go "Daym, dude is THE manly man!" then I think he should have a big ass ceremony.

Although, I think people in WW1 AND WW2 are fucking hero's but these modern day wars seem more like bullies.

This is the most unbelievable thing I have ever read. Do you understand what those soldiers gave up? Everything. They'll never get to experience what a full life is, they might not have wanted to be in that battle, or the war. But their sacrifice was real.

Think about what you have, what you're going to have. Now imagine giving it all up, never getting to experience what life has to offer. Not everyone amounts to something, but everyone has the potential. They gave that potential up so that others could have it instead.

No poor dumb bastard ever became a hero by dying for his country. He did it by making some other poor dumb bastard die for his.

Or to put it another way, they only made that sacrifice because some other soldier was willing to pull the trigger, and they in turn probably killed more than their share. There could be no wars without willing soldiers, and propaganda to the contrary, that's not an oversimplification. It's the unvarnished truth, which is just too horrifying for most people to consider. In the absolute best case scenario, a soldier's job is to commit justifiable homicide in order to defend his own borders. In a more realistic scenario, they're murderers who invade other countries to benefit a few bastards at the top. It's been over 60 years since a soldier in my country's military actually did anything to defend me. Why the hell should I support the murders committed by the modern military because my grandfather actually fought in a war of defense? His was the last generation that did.

Those poor "insurgents" in the middle east, on the other hand...

Captcha: army training, sir!

Oh fuck off with the propaganada, captcha. I'm not in the mood. Although nice going on giving an example of just how much money and effort goes into normalizing this crap.

It's just like you said, respect the individual soldier, he is doing his job. Everyone has to make a living. If you have problems with the army in general, then it's the high command you want to go after. Their the ones who sit in their chair in safe room moving around peoples lives (friendly and enemy) like their chess pieces. I am in full agreement that we haven't been in a needed war since WW2.

So then you're in full agreement that the modern military is nothing but a bunch of hired thugs who, if they had a shred of decency, would lay down their arms and refuse to follow orders? Because right now the job they're doing is not at all worthy of respect, and respecting the individual soldier in this day and age is nothing but accepting the nuremberg defense, in a society where we don't kill soldiers for not following orders, no less. The Nazi's didn't give their soldiers that cushy chance of just sitting in a jail cell, and it was still ruled that "just following orders" was no excuse. That makes it even worse that we don't hold that standard to our own troops.

You can't blame the military without blaming the troops. It just doesn't work that way. It may be a big blame that each person holds a tiny part of, but they still have that tiny part. We have altogether too much respect for the soldier in this country, and not enough of that healthy fear of him that was so common prior to World War II.

Edit: Maybe this will make my stance a bit clearer:

Universal Soldier

He's five foot-two, and he's six feet-four,
He fights with missiles and with spears.
He's all of thirty-one, and he's only seventeen,
Been a soldier for a thousand years.

He'a a Catholic, a Hindu, an Atheist, a Jain,
A Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew.
And he knows he shouldn't kill,
And he knows he always will,
Kill you for me my friend and me for you.

And he's fighting for Canada,
He's fighting for France,
He's fighting for the USA,
And he's fighting for the Russians,
And he's fighting for Japan,
And he thinks we'll put an end to war this way.

And he's fighting for Democracy,
He's fighting for the Reds,
He says it's for the peace of all.
He's the one who must decide,
Who's to live and who's to die,
And he never sees the writing on the wall.

But without him,
How would Hitler have condemned him at Dachau?
Without him Caesar would have stood alone,
He's the one who gives his body
As a weapon of the war,
And without him all this killing can't go on.

He's the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame,
His orders come from far away no more,
They come from here and there and you and me,
And brothers can't you see,
This is not the way we put the end to war.

...that's like blaming prostitutes for the spread of STDs, man (as opposed to our horrifically insufficient healthcare system). People do what they have to to survive. Mind you, I don't think people like myself are automatically deserving of more praise than a prostitute... but neither are we (or the prostitutes) deserving of your scorn. Many soldiers do see the writing on the wall, but that doesn't give us any more options than we had before... and the option you would have us take is tantamount to suicide.

You work with the society you have, not the society you want. Don't like it? Start a revolution... for which you need soldiers. Power concedes nothing, and only the dead have seen the end of war.

Better suicide than murder for pay, man. The military is an inherently evil organization, and the "Necessary" part of "necessary evil" has long since been exceeded. It's not at all like blaming a prostitute for spreading STDs. It's like blaming a hitman for committing a murder. Sure, someone else asked him to do it, but it was his choice to take the payment and carry it out.

Edit: Especially since the "suicide" is figurative, but the murder is literal. Again, the individual soldiers who carried out the holocaust would have been killed themselves had they spoken out (or at least, they would if they were standing alone -- even there, it wouldn't have happened if enough of them had been brave enough to take the bullet instead of firing it). Despite that, they found out the hard way that "I was just following orders" is no excuse. In the US, we don't execute people for refusing to go to war. We might throw them in jail if they're either already members of the military, or, as in Vietnam, if they've been drafted, but we don't kill them. So no, it's really not suicide. If we didn't excuse people who would have been killed themselves if they had decided not to follow their horrific orders, we shouldn't excuse those who would have merely been thrown in jail just because they're our own. Hell, we shouldn't excuse it /especially/ because they're our own.

Really, your definition of murder (unlawful killing... as defined by the society you live in, wrongheaded or not) here is nearly as figurative as my definition of suicide (which was meant as figurative)... unless you happen to be Judge Dredd [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvJiYrRcfQo]. Like it or not (and for the record, I don't either), the many "police actions" the US has executed since our last declared war (December 1941) have been close enough to lawful that no one has been criminally charged for kicking them off. Thusly, no killing in said police actions is murder that has not been prosecuted as such. Doesn't make 'em right... but murder doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.

In my experience, the military is mostly full of desperate people reaching for the all-hallowed "opportunity" that our nation no longer affords the economically disadvantaged. I stand by my prostitute analogy, though it would work just as well had I used low-level street enforcers with a gang... just not hitmen (look to PMCs for those). As with gangs and prostitution, prosecuting street workers who are just doing what they have to to survive will avail you nothing. History is right to blame the architects of these conflicts. The "Universal Soldier" of the poem is nothing more than every desperate person ever.

The problem with defining murder as unlawful killing is that it comes from the legal definition of murder. If you define it that way, then no real mass murderer(Think Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin -- people who really killed massive numbers of people, not just the relative handful that they could kill personally before getting caught) in history was guilty of anything, since by the laws of their land, what they were doing was legal -- how could it not be? They wrote them. So no, saying that it's legal therefore it's not murder is not an excuse. The most cold blooded murderers on the planet are the judges, juries, and executioners who put people to death under the color(Or how about we make that "cover") of law.

Even if it were true that the military is mostly full of desperate people(and it's not, as much as I'd like it to be true the statistics have shown time and time again that "lack of money" isn't the reason most people sign up, the majority have other options and decide to do it anyway for various reasons, usually some appeal to "patriotism" or family tradition.), all that does is illustrate how screwed up our society is. We don't give drug dealers a pass just because they were desperate, and I'd be a lot quicker to believe most of them at least started out that way than I would soldiers. There's no public glory to being a drug dealer. For a minority of the population, sure, but even then it's just glamorization. Soldiers, on the other hand, are practically the angels of the major deity that is the military in this country. They may find out the hard way on exiting that it's mostly lip service with very little actual help coming from the people swearing up and down that they "support the troops", and other such platitudes that they strangely never act upon unless they're one of those families that keeps sending their own children in generation after generation(and then the material support is in the form of yet another warm body to fill a pair of boots and hold a gun), but a new idiot hits the recruitment age every day, and the few dissenting voices are drowned out by the waves of military worship. So it doesn't matter if the vets realize how little that hero worship helps them in later life, only that enough kids keep getting caught up in the waves of propaganda.

...second attempt, lost my first reply to the forum goblins... going to truncate.

Murder: legal term, colloquial use applies only to metaphorical use, not killing. Global society is still society, Hitler et cetera were deemed murderers on that scale. It's a plutocracy, as history is written by the victors, certainly not fair. Nothing is in this world, get used to it.

Military propaganda: most people have more pragmatic reasons than they let on. No other applicable skills, no longer enough jobs to go around, especially in rural areas. Best not to demonize people for the ignorant culture they're raised in... you'll only convince them that they're right and you're evil. Fucked up society? Agreed.

"Drug dealers aren't glorified"... bullshit. They're often heroes where they come from, keeping the only functioning economy at their rung of society going. Give more back to their communities than corporate "philanthropists".

hope that was intelligible. It was certainly a lot shorter.

Lost connection again, but copied text this time. Escapist is shitty tonight. Attempt 3.

Drug dealers aren't glorified /by an entire society to the point that it's suicide to speak out against them (And I don't mean to their face -- yeah, a drug dealer might shoot you if you you said something to his face. However, you wouldn't have to worry about being ostracized from parts of society above the bottom rung for saying it in general.), soldiers are. I'm not ashamed to say I wouldn't be posting this stuff publicly under my real name -- not of myself, that is. Of the society that makes it so dangerous to criticize its warrior caste, however...

I do agree that the drug dealers give back more to their community than the corporate raiders do. Hell, depending on the company in question, your average wartime company of soldiers may have less blood on its hands than some of those bastards, and for a better reason.

I disagree strongly about murder. A circular definition is no definition at all, this is something whoever wrote that law should have learned around the sixth grade, where you have to write definitions in your own words without using the word itself for exactly that reason.

agreed on most of it then... but...
"The unlawful killing, with malice aforethought, of another human"(wikipedia)

"the crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethought"(mirriam-webster)
and
"The killing of another human being under conditions specifically covered in law. In the U.S., special statutory definitions include murder committed with malice aforethought, characterized by deliberation or premeditation or occurring during the commission of another serious crime, as robbery or arson (first-degree murder) and murder by intent but without deliberation or premeditation (second-degree murder)" (dictionary.com)

...are not circular definitions... but do all require law to define them. Like it or not, unlawful killing is murder; lawful killing is not. "Personal definitions" are a cop-out.

The better way of looking at it is killing is murder by default, but there can be mitigating circumstances that make it either a lesser crime (like manslaughter) or fully excusable (like killing in self defense). Basically don't start from the legal forms of killing and define murder from there, start with murder and then separate the lesser types of killing from it. Besides, I'd imagine that's closer to how the average person understands it to begin with. Which makes sense, because the law isn't where right and wrong come from. Quite the contrary, it's an imperfect attempt to codify pre-existing ideas of what is and is not okay.

Still strikes me as a bit of a cop-out. Denial of facts in favor of an emotional response. Murder has nothing to do with "right or wrong" (which are subjective), only with legal or illegal.

**edit** if most people truly understand it that... incorrectly... I suppose the definitions should be updated. Pretty sure that's not the case, though.

What facts, though? That murder is apparently illegal because it's not legal? That's how the legal definition scans. I find "murder is illegal because it's illegal. There are forms of killing that are legal, but definitionally they are not murder because murder is killing for illegal reasons" a much bigger copout than "if you kill someone, you have committed murder unless there are mitigating circumstances."

That... is a very garbled argument. Murder is a type of killing, qualified by being unlawful. Murder is illegal because without that qualifier, it's merely killing. Fairly simple definition, one I knew at age 10.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Spoiler: snip

I don't think I would go whole hog and pay $250 to bury a guy I don't know. If there was a dude who had done some impressive stuff, I'd certainly throw the dude a bone if I could.

I don't mean to nasty but the guys who were the first to charge off the boats on D day, didn't actually do much... They allowed other soldiers to advance but all they did was die (was like "operation meat shield" ). If a guy did something that made you go "Daym, dude is THE manly man!" then I think he should have a big ass ceremony.

Although, I think people in WW1 AND WW2 are fucking hero's but these modern day wars seem more like bullies.

This is the most unbelievable thing I have ever read. Do you understand what those soldiers gave up? Everything. They'll never get to experience what a full life is, they might not have wanted to be in that battle, or the war. But their sacrifice was real.

Think about what you have, what you're going to have. Now imagine giving it all up, never getting to experience what life has to offer. Not everyone amounts to something, but everyone has the potential. They gave that potential up so that others could have it instead.

No poor dumb bastard ever became a hero by dying for his country. He did it by making some other poor dumb bastard die for his.

Or to put it another way, they only made that sacrifice because some other soldier was willing to pull the trigger, and they in turn probably killed more than their share. There could be no wars without willing soldiers, and propaganda to the contrary, that's not an oversimplification. It's the unvarnished truth, which is just too horrifying for most people to consider. In the absolute best case scenario, a soldier's job is to commit justifiable homicide in order to defend his own borders. In a more realistic scenario, they're murderers who invade other countries to benefit a few bastards at the top. It's been over 60 years since a soldier in my country's military actually did anything to defend me. Why the hell should I support the murders committed by the modern military because my grandfather actually fought in a war of defense? His was the last generation that did.

Those poor "insurgents" in the middle east, on the other hand...

Captcha: army training, sir!

Oh fuck off with the propaganada, captcha. I'm not in the mood. Although nice going on giving an example of just how much money and effort goes into normalizing this crap.

It's just like you said, respect the individual soldier, he is doing his job. Everyone has to make a living. If you have problems with the army in general, then it's the high command you want to go after. Their the ones who sit in their chair in safe room moving around peoples lives (friendly and enemy) like their chess pieces. I am in full agreement that we haven't been in a needed war since WW2.

So then you're in full agreement that the modern military is nothing but a bunch of hired thugs who, if they had a shred of decency, would lay down their arms and refuse to follow orders? Because right now the job they're doing is not at all worthy of respect, and respecting the individual soldier in this day and age is nothing but accepting the nuremberg defense, in a society where we don't kill soldiers for not following orders, no less. The Nazi's didn't give their soldiers that cushy chance of just sitting in a jail cell, and it was still ruled that "just following orders" was no excuse. That makes it even worse that we don't hold that standard to our own troops.

You can't blame the military without blaming the troops. It just doesn't work that way. It may be a big blame that each person holds a tiny part of, but they still have that tiny part. We have altogether too much respect for the soldier in this country, and not enough of that healthy fear of him that was so common prior to World War II.

Edit: Maybe this will make my stance a bit clearer:

Universal Soldier

He's five foot-two, and he's six feet-four,
He fights with missiles and with spears.
He's all of thirty-one, and he's only seventeen,
Been a soldier for a thousand years.

He'a a Catholic, a Hindu, an Atheist, a Jain,
A Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew.
And he knows he shouldn't kill,
And he knows he always will,
Kill you for me my friend and me for you.

And he's fighting for Canada,
He's fighting for France,
He's fighting for the USA,
And he's fighting for the Russians,
And he's fighting for Japan,
And he thinks we'll put an end to war this way.

And he's fighting for Democracy,
He's fighting for the Reds,
He says it's for the peace of all.
He's the one who must decide,
Who's to live and who's to die,
And he never sees the writing on the wall.

But without him,
How would Hitler have condemned him at Dachau?
Without him Caesar would have stood alone,
He's the one who gives his body
As a weapon of the war,
And without him all this killing can't go on.

He's the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame,
His orders come from far away no more,
They come from here and there and you and me,
And brothers can't you see,
This is not the way we put the end to war.

...that's like blaming prostitutes for the spread of STDs, man (as opposed to our horrifically insufficient healthcare system). People do what they have to to survive. Mind you, I don't think people like myself are automatically deserving of more praise than a prostitute... but neither are we (or the prostitutes) deserving of your scorn. Many soldiers do see the writing on the wall, but that doesn't give us any more options than we had before... and the option you would have us take is tantamount to suicide.

You work with the society you have, not the society you want. Don't like it? Start a revolution... for which you need soldiers. Power concedes nothing, and only the dead have seen the end of war.

Better suicide than murder for pay, man. The military is an inherently evil organization, and the "Necessary" part of "necessary evil" has long since been exceeded. It's not at all like blaming a prostitute for spreading STDs. It's like blaming a hitman for committing a murder. Sure, someone else asked him to do it, but it was his choice to take the payment and carry it out.

Edit: Especially since the "suicide" is figurative, but the murder is literal. Again, the individual soldiers who carried out the holocaust would have been killed themselves had they spoken out (or at least, they would if they were standing alone -- even there, it wouldn't have happened if enough of them had been brave enough to take the bullet instead of firing it). Despite that, they found out the hard way that "I was just following orders" is no excuse. In the US, we don't execute people for refusing to go to war. We might throw them in jail if they're either already members of the military, or, as in Vietnam, if they've been drafted, but we don't kill them. So no, it's really not suicide. If we didn't excuse people who would have been killed themselves if they had decided not to follow their horrific orders, we shouldn't excuse those who would have merely been thrown in jail just because they're our own. Hell, we shouldn't excuse it /especially/ because they're our own.

Really, your definition of murder (unlawful killing... as defined by the society you live in, wrongheaded or not) here is nearly as figurative as my definition of suicide (which was meant as figurative)... unless you happen to be Judge Dredd [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvJiYrRcfQo]. Like it or not (and for the record, I don't either), the many "police actions" the US has executed since our last declared war (December 1941) have been close enough to lawful that no one has been criminally charged for kicking them off. Thusly, no killing in said police actions is murder that has not been prosecuted as such. Doesn't make 'em right... but murder doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.

In my experience, the military is mostly full of desperate people reaching for the all-hallowed "opportunity" that our nation no longer affords the economically disadvantaged. I stand by my prostitute analogy, though it would work just as well had I used low-level street enforcers with a gang... just not hitmen (look to PMCs for those). As with gangs and prostitution, prosecuting street workers who are just doing what they have to to survive will avail you nothing. History is right to blame the architects of these conflicts. The "Universal Soldier" of the poem is nothing more than every desperate person ever.

The problem with defining murder as unlawful killing is that it comes from the legal definition of murder. If you define it that way, then no real mass murderer(Think Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin -- people who really killed massive numbers of people, not just the relative handful that they could kill personally before getting caught) in history was guilty of anything, since by the laws of their land, what they were doing was legal -- how could it not be? They wrote them. So no, saying that it's legal therefore it's not murder is not an excuse. The most cold blooded murderers on the planet are the judges, juries, and executioners who put people to death under the color(Or how about we make that "cover") of law.

Even if it were true that the military is mostly full of desperate people(and it's not, as much as I'd like it to be true the statistics have shown time and time again that "lack of money" isn't the reason most people sign up, the majority have other options and decide to do it anyway for various reasons, usually some appeal to "patriotism" or family tradition.), all that does is illustrate how screwed up our society is. We don't give drug dealers a pass just because they were desperate, and I'd be a lot quicker to believe most of them at least started out that way than I would soldiers. There's no public glory to being a drug dealer. For a minority of the population, sure, but even then it's just glamorization. Soldiers, on the other hand, are practically the angels of the major deity that is the military in this country. They may find out the hard way on exiting that it's mostly lip service with very little actual help coming from the people swearing up and down that they "support the troops", and other such platitudes that they strangely never act upon unless they're one of those families that keeps sending their own children in generation after generation(and then the material support is in the form of yet another warm body to fill a pair of boots and hold a gun), but a new idiot hits the recruitment age every day, and the few dissenting voices are drowned out by the waves of military worship. So it doesn't matter if the vets realize how little that hero worship helps them in later life, only that enough kids keep getting caught up in the waves of propaganda.

...second attempt, lost my first reply to the forum goblins... going to truncate.

Murder: legal term, colloquial use applies only to metaphorical use, not killing. Global society is still society, Hitler et cetera were deemed murderers on that scale. It's a plutocracy, as history is written by the victors, certainly not fair. Nothing is in this world, get used to it.

Military propaganda: most people have more pragmatic reasons than they let on. No other applicable skills, no longer enough jobs to go around, especially in rural areas. Best not to demonize people for the ignorant culture they're raised in... you'll only convince them that they're right and you're evil. Fucked up society? Agreed.

"Drug dealers aren't glorified"... bullshit. They're often heroes where they come from, keeping the only functioning economy at their rung of society going. Give more back to their communities than corporate "philanthropists".

hope that was intelligible. It was certainly a lot shorter.

Lost connection again, but copied text this time. Escapist is shitty tonight. Attempt 3.

Drug dealers aren't glorified /by an entire society to the point that it's suicide to speak out against them (And I don't mean to their face -- yeah, a drug dealer might shoot you if you you said something to his face. However, you wouldn't have to worry about being ostracized from parts of society above the bottom rung for saying it in general.), soldiers are. I'm not ashamed to say I wouldn't be posting this stuff publicly under my real name -- not of myself, that is. Of the society that makes it so dangerous to criticize its warrior caste, however...

I do agree that the drug dealers give back more to their community than the corporate raiders do. Hell, depending on the company in question, your average wartime company of soldiers may have less blood on its hands than some of those bastards, and for a better reason.

I disagree strongly about murder. A circular definition is no definition at all, this is something whoever wrote that law should have learned around the sixth grade, where you have to write definitions in your own words without using the word itself for exactly that reason.

agreed on most of it then... but...
"The unlawful killing, with malice aforethought, of another human"(wikipedia)

"the crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethought"(mirriam-webster)
and
"The killing of another human being under conditions specifically covered in law. In the U.S., special statutory definitions include murder committed with malice aforethought, characterized by deliberation or premeditation or occurring during the commission of another serious crime, as robbery or arson (first-degree murder) and murder by intent but without deliberation or premeditation (second-degree murder)" (dictionary.com)

...are not circular definitions... but do all require law to define them. Like it or not, unlawful killing is murder; lawful killing is not. "Personal definitions" are a cop-out.

The better way of looking at it is killing is murder by default, but there can be mitigating circumstances that make it either a lesser crime (like manslaughter) or fully excusable (like killing in self defense). Basically don't start from the legal forms of killing and define murder from there, start with murder and then separate the lesser types of killing from it. Besides, I'd imagine that's closer to how the average person understands it to begin with. Which makes sense, because the law isn't where right and wrong come from. Quite the contrary, it's an imperfect attempt to codify pre-existing ideas of what is and is not okay.

Still strikes me as a bit of a cop-out. Denial of facts in favor of an emotional response. Murder has nothing to do with "right or wrong" (which are subjective), only with legal or illegal.

**edit** if most people truly understand it that... incorrectly... I suppose the definitions should be updated. Pretty sure that's not the case, though.

What facts, though? That murder is apparently illegal because it's not legal? That's how the legal definition scans. I find "murder is illegal because it's illegal. There are forms of killing that are legal, but definitionally they are not murder because murder is killing for illegal reasons" a much bigger copout than "if you kill someone, you have committed murder unless there are mitigating circumstances."

That... is a very garbled argument. Murder is a type of killing, qualified by being unlawful. Murder is illegal because without that qualifier, it's merely killing. Fairly simple definition, one I knew at age 10.

It's a semantic difference, but an important one -- if law were a science it would be called "applied semantics." If you define murder as "unlawful killing," all that has to be done to make murder okay is to change the law -- after all, by that definition, it is the law itself that makes something murder. To go back to the hitler example, his law wasn't "it's okay to murder jews." It was "Jews are to be killed." He didn't legalize murder, he made killing jews an explicitly legal thing, while keeping more general murder laws on the books[footnote]Edit: What's more, he did it in a way that would work with the definition of murder you're espousing -- where legal forms of killing are the default, and murder is anything that doesn't fit into one of the other categories[/footnote]. You avoid this problem by making it so murder is the default state when killing a person, with exceptions that make it not murder /in the eyes of the law./ If you define it that way, it's entirely possible to say something like "I can't support this because it's just legalized murder." If you define murder as "unlawful killing," by definition there's no such thing as legal murder, and you can't call, for example, an execution (or even, under the right circumstances, a genocide) state sanctioned murder. Even though it totally is from any sane standpoint.

 

[loc978]

Spoiler: snip

I don't think I would go whole hog and pay $250 to bury a guy I don't know. If there was a dude who had done some impressive stuff, I'd certainly throw the dude a bone if I could.

I don't mean to nasty but the guys who were the first to charge off the boats on D day, didn't actually do much... They allowed other soldiers to advance but all they did was die (was like "operation meat shield" ). If a guy did something that made you go "Daym, dude is THE manly man!" then I think he should have a big ass ceremony.

Although, I think people in WW1 AND WW2 are fucking hero's but these modern day wars seem more like bullies.

This is the most unbelievable thing I have ever read. Do you understand what those soldiers gave up? Everything. They'll never get to experience what a full life is, they might not have wanted to be in that battle, or the war. But their sacrifice was real.

Think about what you have, what you're going to have. Now imagine giving it all up, never getting to experience what life has to offer. Not everyone amounts to something, but everyone has the potential. They gave that potential up so that others could have it instead.

No poor dumb bastard ever became a hero by dying for his country. He did it by making some other poor dumb bastard die for his.

Or to put it another way, they only made that sacrifice because some other soldier was willing to pull the trigger, and they in turn probably killed more than their share. There could be no wars without willing soldiers, and propaganda to the contrary, that's not an oversimplification. It's the unvarnished truth, which is just too horrifying for most people to consider. In the absolute best case scenario, a soldier's job is to commit justifiable homicide in order to defend his own borders. In a more realistic scenario, they're murderers who invade other countries to benefit a few bastards at the top. It's been over 60 years since a soldier in my country's military actually did anything to defend me. Why the hell should I support the murders committed by the modern military because my grandfather actually fought in a war of defense? His was the last generation that did.

Those poor "insurgents" in the middle east, on the other hand...

Captcha: army training, sir!

Oh fuck off with the propaganada, captcha. I'm not in the mood. Although nice going on giving an example of just how much money and effort goes into normalizing this crap.

It's just like you said, respect the individual soldier, he is doing his job. Everyone has to make a living. If you have problems with the army in general, then it's the high command you want to go after. Their the ones who sit in their chair in safe room moving around peoples lives (friendly and enemy) like their chess pieces. I am in full agreement that we haven't been in a needed war since WW2.

So then you're in full agreement that the modern military is nothing but a bunch of hired thugs who, if they had a shred of decency, would lay down their arms and refuse to follow orders? Because right now the job they're doing is not at all worthy of respect, and respecting the individual soldier in this day and age is nothing but accepting the nuremberg defense, in a society where we don't kill soldiers for not following orders, no less. The Nazi's didn't give their soldiers that cushy chance of just sitting in a jail cell, and it was still ruled that "just following orders" was no excuse. That makes it even worse that we don't hold that standard to our own troops.

You can't blame the military without blaming the troops. It just doesn't work that way. It may be a big blame that each person holds a tiny part of, but they still have that tiny part. We have altogether too much respect for the soldier in this country, and not enough of that healthy fear of him that was so common prior to World War II.

Edit: Maybe this will make my stance a bit clearer:

Universal Soldier

He's five foot-two, and he's six feet-four,
He fights with missiles and with spears.
He's all of thirty-one, and he's only seventeen,
Been a soldier for a thousand years.

He'a a Catholic, a Hindu, an Atheist, a Jain,
A Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew.
And he knows he shouldn't kill,
And he knows he always will,
Kill you for me my friend and me for you.

And he's fighting for Canada,
He's fighting for France,
He's fighting for the USA,
And he's fighting for the Russians,
And he's fighting for Japan,
And he thinks we'll put an end to war this way.

And he's fighting for Democracy,
He's fighting for the Reds,
He says it's for the peace of all.
He's the one who must decide,
Who's to live and who's to die,
And he never sees the writing on the wall.

But without him,
How would Hitler have condemned him at Dachau?
Without him Caesar would have stood alone,
He's the one who gives his body
As a weapon of the war,
And without him all this killing can't go on.

He's the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame,
His orders come from far away no more,
They come from here and there and you and me,
And brothers can't you see,
This is not the way we put the end to war.

...that's like blaming prostitutes for the spread of STDs, man (as opposed to our horrifically insufficient healthcare system). People do what they have to to survive. Mind you, I don't think people like myself are automatically deserving of more praise than a prostitute... but neither are we (or the prostitutes) deserving of your scorn. Many soldiers do see the writing on the wall, but that doesn't give us any more options than we had before... and the option you would have us take is tantamount to suicide.

You work with the society you have, not the society you want. Don't like it? Start a revolution... for which you need soldiers. Power concedes nothing, and only the dead have seen the end of war.

Better suicide than murder for pay, man. The military is an inherently evil organization, and the "Necessary" part of "necessary evil" has long since been exceeded. It's not at all like blaming a prostitute for spreading STDs. It's like blaming a hitman for committing a murder. Sure, someone else asked him to do it, but it was his choice to take the payment and carry it out.

Edit: Especially since the "suicide" is figurative, but the murder is literal. Again, the individual soldiers who carried out the holocaust would have been killed themselves had they spoken out (or at least, they would if they were standing alone -- even there, it wouldn't have happened if enough of them had been brave enough to take the bullet instead of firing it). Despite that, they found out the hard way that "I was just following orders" is no excuse. In the US, we don't execute people for refusing to go to war. We might throw them in jail if they're either already members of the military, or, as in Vietnam, if they've been drafted, but we don't kill them. So no, it's really not suicide. If we didn't excuse people who would have been killed themselves if they had decided not to follow their horrific orders, we shouldn't excuse those who would have merely been thrown in jail just because they're our own. Hell, we shouldn't excuse it /especially/ because they're our own.

Really, your definition of murder (unlawful killing... as defined by the society you live in, wrongheaded or not) here is nearly as figurative as my definition of suicide (which was meant as figurative)... unless you happen to be Judge Dredd [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvJiYrRcfQo]. Like it or not (and for the record, I don't either), the many "police actions" the US has executed since our last declared war (December 1941) have been close enough to lawful that no one has been criminally charged for kicking them off. Thusly, no killing in said police actions is murder that has not been prosecuted as such. Doesn't make 'em right... but murder doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.

In my experience, the military is mostly full of desperate people reaching for the all-hallowed "opportunity" that our nation no longer affords the economically disadvantaged. I stand by my prostitute analogy, though it would work just as well had I used low-level street enforcers with a gang... just not hitmen (look to PMCs for those). As with gangs and prostitution, prosecuting street workers who are just doing what they have to to survive will avail you nothing. History is right to blame the architects of these conflicts. The "Universal Soldier" of the poem is nothing more than every desperate person ever.

The problem with defining murder as unlawful killing is that it comes from the legal definition of murder. If you define it that way, then no real mass murderer(Think Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin -- people who really killed massive numbers of people, not just the relative handful that they could kill personally before getting caught) in history was guilty of anything, since by the laws of their land, what they were doing was legal -- how could it not be? They wrote them. So no, saying that it's legal therefore it's not murder is not an excuse. The most cold blooded murderers on the planet are the judges, juries, and executioners who put people to death under the color(Or how about we make that "cover") of law.

Even if it were true that the military is mostly full of desperate people(and it's not, as much as I'd like it to be true the statistics have shown time and time again that "lack of money" isn't the reason most people sign up, the majority have other options and decide to do it anyway for various reasons, usually some appeal to "patriotism" or family tradition.), all that does is illustrate how screwed up our society is. We don't give drug dealers a pass just because they were desperate, and I'd be a lot quicker to believe most of them at least started out that way than I would soldiers. There's no public glory to being a drug dealer. For a minority of the population, sure, but even then it's just glamorization. Soldiers, on the other hand, are practically the angels of the major deity that is the military in this country. They may find out the hard way on exiting that it's mostly lip service with very little actual help coming from the people swearing up and down that they "support the troops", and other such platitudes that they strangely never act upon unless they're one of those families that keeps sending their own children in generation after generation(and then the material support is in the form of yet another warm body to fill a pair of boots and hold a gun), but a new idiot hits the recruitment age every day, and the few dissenting voices are drowned out by the waves of military worship. So it doesn't matter if the vets realize how little that hero worship helps them in later life, only that enough kids keep getting caught up in the waves of propaganda.

...second attempt, lost my first reply to the forum goblins... going to truncate.

Murder: legal term, colloquial use applies only to metaphorical use, not killing. Global society is still society, Hitler et cetera were deemed murderers on that scale. It's a plutocracy, as history is written by the victors, certainly not fair. Nothing is in this world, get used to it.

Military propaganda: most people have more pragmatic reasons than they let on. No other applicable skills, no longer enough jobs to go around, especially in rural areas. Best not to demonize people for the ignorant culture they're raised in... you'll only convince them that they're right and you're evil. Fucked up society? Agreed.

"Drug dealers aren't glorified"... bullshit. They're often heroes where they come from, keeping the only functioning economy at their rung of society going. Give more back to their communities than corporate "philanthropists".

hope that was intelligible. It was certainly a lot shorter.

Lost connection again, but copied text this time. Escapist is shitty tonight. Attempt 3.

Drug dealers aren't glorified /by an entire society to the point that it's suicide to speak out against them (And I don't mean to their face -- yeah, a drug dealer might shoot you if you you said something to his face. However, you wouldn't have to worry about being ostracized from parts of society above the bottom rung for saying it in general.), soldiers are. I'm not ashamed to say I wouldn't be posting this stuff publicly under my real name -- not of myself, that is. Of the society that makes it so dangerous to criticize its warrior caste, however...

I do agree that the drug dealers give back more to their community than the corporate raiders do. Hell, depending on the company in question, your average wartime company of soldiers may have less blood on its hands than some of those bastards, and for a better reason.

I disagree strongly about murder. A circular definition is no definition at all, this is something whoever wrote that law should have learned around the sixth grade, where you have to write definitions in your own words without using the word itself for exactly that reason.

agreed on most of it then... but...
"The unlawful killing, with malice aforethought, of another human"(wikipedia)

"the crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethought"(mirriam-webster)
and
"The killing of another human being under conditions specifically covered in law. In the U.S., special statutory definitions include murder committed with malice aforethought, characterized by deliberation or premeditation or occurring during the commission of another serious crime, as robbery or arson (first-degree murder) and murder by intent but without deliberation or premeditation (second-degree murder)" (dictionary.com)

...are not circular definitions... but do all require law to define them. Like it or not, unlawful killing is murder; lawful killing is not. "Personal definitions" are a cop-out.

The better way of looking at it is killing is murder by default, but there can be mitigating circumstances that make it either a lesser crime (like manslaughter) or fully excusable (like killing in self defense). Basically don't start from the legal forms of killing and define murder from there, start with murder and then separate the lesser types of killing from it. Besides, I'd imagine that's closer to how the average person understands it to begin with. Which makes sense, because the law isn't where right and wrong come from. Quite the contrary, it's an imperfect attempt to codify pre-existing ideas of what is and is not okay.

Still strikes me as a bit of a cop-out. Denial of facts in favor of an emotional response. Murder has nothing to do with "right or wrong" (which are subjective), only with legal or illegal.

**edit** if most people truly understand it that... incorrectly... I suppose the definitions should be updated. Pretty sure that's not the case, though.

What facts, though? That murder is apparently illegal because it's not legal? That's how the legal definition scans. I find "murder is illegal because it's illegal. There are forms of killing that are legal, but definitionally they are not murder because murder is killing for illegal reasons" a much bigger copout than "if you kill someone, you have committed murder unless there are mitigating circumstances."

That... is a very garbled argument. Murder is a type of killing, qualified by being unlawful. Murder is illegal because without that qualifier, it's merely killing. Fairly simple definition, one I knew at age 10.

It's a semantic difference, but an important one -- if law were a science it would be called "applied semantics." If you define murder as "unlawful killing," all that has to be done to make murder okay is to change the law -- after all, by that definition, it is the law itself that makes something murder. To go back to the hitler example, his law wasn't "it's okay to murder jews." It was "Jews are to be killed." He didn't legalize murder, he made killing jews explicitly not murder, while keeping more general murder laws on the books. You avoid this problem by making it so murder is the default state when killing a person, with exceptions that make it not murder /in the eyes of the law./ If you define it that way, it's entirely possible to say something like "I can't support this because it's just legalized murder." If you define murder as "unlawful killing," by definition there's no such thing as legal murder, and you can't call, for example, an execution (or even, under the right circumstances, a genocide) murder. Even though it totally is from any sane standpoint.

"Any sane standpoint?" You're still applying a moral qualifier to murder. The definition of murder has nothing to do with morality. Anyone using the term "legalized murder" doesn't know the definition of murder. Hardly unheard of, but still incorrect. Hitler changed a law locally, that change was trumped by international law, enforced by invasion and occupation. There's no "problem" in the definition.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Spoiler: snip

I don't think I would go whole hog and pay $250 to bury a guy I don't know. If there was a dude who had done some impressive stuff, I'd certainly throw the dude a bone if I could.

I don't mean to nasty but the guys who were the first to charge off the boats on D day, didn't actually do much... They allowed other soldiers to advance but all they did was die (was like "operation meat shield" ). If a guy did something that made you go "Daym, dude is THE manly man!" then I think he should have a big ass ceremony.

Although, I think people in WW1 AND WW2 are fucking hero's but these modern day wars seem more like bullies.

This is the most unbelievable thing I have ever read. Do you understand what those soldiers gave up? Everything. They'll never get to experience what a full life is, they might not have wanted to be in that battle, or the war. But their sacrifice was real.

Think about what you have, what you're going to have. Now imagine giving it all up, never getting to experience what life has to offer. Not everyone amounts to something, but everyone has the potential. They gave that potential up so that others could have it instead.

No poor dumb bastard ever became a hero by dying for his country. He did it by making some other poor dumb bastard die for his.

Or to put it another way, they only made that sacrifice because some other soldier was willing to pull the trigger, and they in turn probably killed more than their share. There could be no wars without willing soldiers, and propaganda to the contrary, that's not an oversimplification. It's the unvarnished truth, which is just too horrifying for most people to consider. In the absolute best case scenario, a soldier's job is to commit justifiable homicide in order to defend his own borders. In a more realistic scenario, they're murderers who invade other countries to benefit a few bastards at the top. It's been over 60 years since a soldier in my country's military actually did anything to defend me. Why the hell should I support the murders committed by the modern military because my grandfather actually fought in a war of defense? His was the last generation that did.

Those poor "insurgents" in the middle east, on the other hand...

Captcha: army training, sir!

Oh fuck off with the propaganada, captcha. I'm not in the mood. Although nice going on giving an example of just how much money and effort goes into normalizing this crap.

It's just like you said, respect the individual soldier, he is doing his job. Everyone has to make a living. If you have problems with the army in general, then it's the high command you want to go after. Their the ones who sit in their chair in safe room moving around peoples lives (friendly and enemy) like their chess pieces. I am in full agreement that we haven't been in a needed war since WW2.

So then you're in full agreement that the modern military is nothing but a bunch of hired thugs who, if they had a shred of decency, would lay down their arms and refuse to follow orders? Because right now the job they're doing is not at all worthy of respect, and respecting the individual soldier in this day and age is nothing but accepting the nuremberg defense, in a society where we don't kill soldiers for not following orders, no less. The Nazi's didn't give their soldiers that cushy chance of just sitting in a jail cell, and it was still ruled that "just following orders" was no excuse. That makes it even worse that we don't hold that standard to our own troops.

You can't blame the military without blaming the troops. It just doesn't work that way. It may be a big blame that each person holds a tiny part of, but they still have that tiny part. We have altogether too much respect for the soldier in this country, and not enough of that healthy fear of him that was so common prior to World War II.

Edit: Maybe this will make my stance a bit clearer:

Universal Soldier

He's five foot-two, and he's six feet-four,
He fights with missiles and with spears.
He's all of thirty-one, and he's only seventeen,
Been a soldier for a thousand years.

He'a a Catholic, a Hindu, an Atheist, a Jain,
A Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew.
And he knows he shouldn't kill,
And he knows he always will,
Kill you for me my friend and me for you.

And he's fighting for Canada,
He's fighting for France,
He's fighting for the USA,
And he's fighting for the Russians,
And he's fighting for Japan,
And he thinks we'll put an end to war this way.

And he's fighting for Democracy,
He's fighting for the Reds,
He says it's for the peace of all.
He's the one who must decide,
Who's to live and who's to die,
And he never sees the writing on the wall.

But without him,
How would Hitler have condemned him at Dachau?
Without him Caesar would have stood alone,
He's the one who gives his body
As a weapon of the war,
And without him all this killing can't go on.

He's the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame,
His orders come from far away no more,
They come from here and there and you and me,
And brothers can't you see,
This is not the way we put the end to war.

...that's like blaming prostitutes for the spread of STDs, man (as opposed to our horrifically insufficient healthcare system). People do what they have to to survive. Mind you, I don't think people like myself are automatically deserving of more praise than a prostitute... but neither are we (or the prostitutes) deserving of your scorn. Many soldiers do see the writing on the wall, but that doesn't give us any more options than we had before... and the option you would have us take is tantamount to suicide.

You work with the society you have, not the society you want. Don't like it? Start a revolution... for which you need soldiers. Power concedes nothing, and only the dead have seen the end of war.

Better suicide than murder for pay, man. The military is an inherently evil organization, and the "Necessary" part of "necessary evil" has long since been exceeded. It's not at all like blaming a prostitute for spreading STDs. It's like blaming a hitman for committing a murder. Sure, someone else asked him to do it, but it was his choice to take the payment and carry it out.

Edit: Especially since the "suicide" is figurative, but the murder is literal. Again, the individual soldiers who carried out the holocaust would have been killed themselves had they spoken out (or at least, they would if they were standing alone -- even there, it wouldn't have happened if enough of them had been brave enough to take the bullet instead of firing it). Despite that, they found out the hard way that "I was just following orders" is no excuse. In the US, we don't execute people for refusing to go to war. We might throw them in jail if they're either already members of the military, or, as in Vietnam, if they've been drafted, but we don't kill them. So no, it's really not suicide. If we didn't excuse people who would have been killed themselves if they had decided not to follow their horrific orders, we shouldn't excuse those who would have merely been thrown in jail just because they're our own. Hell, we shouldn't excuse it /especially/ because they're our own.

Really, your definition of murder (unlawful killing... as defined by the society you live in, wrongheaded or not) here is nearly as figurative as my definition of suicide (which was meant as figurative)... unless you happen to be Judge Dredd [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvJiYrRcfQo]. Like it or not (and for the record, I don't either), the many "police actions" the US has executed since our last declared war (December 1941) have been close enough to lawful that no one has been criminally charged for kicking them off. Thusly, no killing in said police actions is murder that has not been prosecuted as such. Doesn't make 'em right... but murder doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.

In my experience, the military is mostly full of desperate people reaching for the all-hallowed "opportunity" that our nation no longer affords the economically disadvantaged. I stand by my prostitute analogy, though it would work just as well had I used low-level street enforcers with a gang... just not hitmen (look to PMCs for those). As with gangs and prostitution, prosecuting street workers who are just doing what they have to to survive will avail you nothing. History is right to blame the architects of these conflicts. The "Universal Soldier" of the poem is nothing more than every desperate person ever.

The problem with defining murder as unlawful killing is that it comes from the legal definition of murder. If you define it that way, then no real mass murderer(Think Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin -- people who really killed massive numbers of people, not just the relative handful that they could kill personally before getting caught) in history was guilty of anything, since by the laws of their land, what they were doing was legal -- how could it not be? They wrote them. So no, saying that it's legal therefore it's not murder is not an excuse. The most cold blooded murderers on the planet are the judges, juries, and executioners who put people to death under the color(Or how about we make that "cover") of law.

Even if it were true that the military is mostly full of desperate people(and it's not, as much as I'd like it to be true the statistics have shown time and time again that "lack of money" isn't the reason most people sign up, the majority have other options and decide to do it anyway for various reasons, usually some appeal to "patriotism" or family tradition.), all that does is illustrate how screwed up our society is. We don't give drug dealers a pass just because they were desperate, and I'd be a lot quicker to believe most of them at least started out that way than I would soldiers. There's no public glory to being a drug dealer. For a minority of the population, sure, but even then it's just glamorization. Soldiers, on the other hand, are practically the angels of the major deity that is the military in this country. They may find out the hard way on exiting that it's mostly lip service with very little actual help coming from the people swearing up and down that they "support the troops", and other such platitudes that they strangely never act upon unless they're one of those families that keeps sending their own children in generation after generation(and then the material support is in the form of yet another warm body to fill a pair of boots and hold a gun), but a new idiot hits the recruitment age every day, and the few dissenting voices are drowned out by the waves of military worship. So it doesn't matter if the vets realize how little that hero worship helps them in later life, only that enough kids keep getting caught up in the waves of propaganda.

...second attempt, lost my first reply to the forum goblins... going to truncate.

Murder: legal term, colloquial use applies only to metaphorical use, not killing. Global society is still society, Hitler et cetera were deemed murderers on that scale. It's a plutocracy, as history is written by the victors, certainly not fair. Nothing is in this world, get used to it.

Military propaganda: most people have more pragmatic reasons than they let on. No other applicable skills, no longer enough jobs to go around, especially in rural areas. Best not to demonize people for the ignorant culture they're raised in... you'll only convince them that they're right and you're evil. Fucked up society? Agreed.

"Drug dealers aren't glorified"... bullshit. They're often heroes where they come from, keeping the only functioning economy at their rung of society going. Give more back to their communities than corporate "philanthropists".

hope that was intelligible. It was certainly a lot shorter.

Lost connection again, but copied text this time. Escapist is shitty tonight. Attempt 3.

Drug dealers aren't glorified /by an entire society to the point that it's suicide to speak out against them (And I don't mean to their face -- yeah, a drug dealer might shoot you if you you said something to his face. However, you wouldn't have to worry about being ostracized from parts of society above the bottom rung for saying it in general.), soldiers are. I'm not ashamed to say I wouldn't be posting this stuff publicly under my real name -- not of myself, that is. Of the society that makes it so dangerous to criticize its warrior caste, however...

I do agree that the drug dealers give back more to their community than the corporate raiders do. Hell, depending on the company in question, your average wartime company of soldiers may have less blood on its hands than some of those bastards, and for a better reason.

I disagree strongly about murder. A circular definition is no definition at all, this is something whoever wrote that law should have learned around the sixth grade, where you have to write definitions in your own words without using the word itself for exactly that reason.

agreed on most of it then... but...
"The unlawful killing, with malice aforethought, of another human"(wikipedia)

"the crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethought"(mirriam-webster)
and
"The killing of another human being under conditions specifically covered in law. In the U.S., special statutory definitions include murder committed with malice aforethought, characterized by deliberation or premeditation or occurring during the commission of another serious crime, as robbery or arson (first-degree murder) and murder by intent but without deliberation or premeditation (second-degree murder)" (dictionary.com)

...are not circular definitions... but do all require law to define them. Like it or not, unlawful killing is murder; lawful killing is not. "Personal definitions" are a cop-out.

The better way of looking at it is killing is murder by default, but there can be mitigating circumstances that make it either a lesser crime (like manslaughter) or fully excusable (like killing in self defense). Basically don't start from the legal forms of killing and define murder from there, start with murder and then separate the lesser types of killing from it. Besides, I'd imagine that's closer to how the average person understands it to begin with. Which makes sense, because the law isn't where right and wrong come from. Quite the contrary, it's an imperfect attempt to codify pre-existing ideas of what is and is not okay.

Still strikes me as a bit of a cop-out. Denial of facts in favor of an emotional response. Murder has nothing to do with "right or wrong" (which are subjective), only with legal or illegal.

**edit** if most people truly understand it that... incorrectly... I suppose the definitions should be updated. Pretty sure that's not the case, though.

What facts, though? That murder is apparently illegal because it's not legal? That's how the legal definition scans. I find "murder is illegal because it's illegal. There are forms of killing that are legal, but definitionally they are not murder because murder is killing for illegal reasons" a much bigger copout than "if you kill someone, you have committed murder unless there are mitigating circumstances."

That... is a very garbled argument. Murder is a type of killing, qualified by being unlawful. Murder is illegal because without that qualifier, it's merely killing. Fairly simple definition, one I knew at age 10.

It's a semantic difference, but an important one -- if law were a science it would be called "applied semantics." If you define murder as "unlawful killing," all that has to be done to make murder okay is to change the law -- after all, by that definition, it is the law itself that makes something murder. To go back to the hitler example, his law wasn't "it's okay to murder jews." It was "Jews are to be killed." He didn't legalize murder, he made killing jews explicitly not murder, while keeping more general murder laws on the books. You avoid this problem by making it so murder is the default state when killing a person, with exceptions that make it not murder /in the eyes of the law./ If you define it that way, it's entirely possible to say something like "I can't support this because it's just legalized murder." If you define murder as "unlawful killing," by definition there's no such thing as legal murder, and you can't call, for example, an execution (or even, under the right circumstances, a genocide) murder. Even though it totally is from any sane standpoint.

"Any sane standpoint?" You're still applying a moral qualifier to murder. The definition of murder has nothing to do with morality. Anyone using the term "legalized murder" doesn't know the definition of murder. Hardly unheard of, but still incorrect. Hitler changed a law locally, that change was trumped by international law, enforced by invasion and occupation. There's no "problem" in the definition.

It is when it's a local law. Under US law an execution is not murder. The laws of most other Western nations, which have long since banned executions, would disagree. Which set of laws are correct? Answer? The one that doesn't define "murder" in such a recursive fashion.

 

[loc978]

Spoiler: snip

I don't think I would go whole hog and pay $250 to bury a guy I don't know. If there was a dude who had done some impressive stuff, I'd certainly throw the dude a bone if I could.

I don't mean to nasty but the guys who were the first to charge off the boats on D day, didn't actually do much... They allowed other soldiers to advance but all they did was die (was like "operation meat shield" ). If a guy did something that made you go "Daym, dude is THE manly man!" then I think he should have a big ass ceremony.

Although, I think people in WW1 AND WW2 are fucking hero's but these modern day wars seem more like bullies.

This is the most unbelievable thing I have ever read. Do you understand what those soldiers gave up? Everything. They'll never get to experience what a full life is, they might not have wanted to be in that battle, or the war. But their sacrifice was real.

Think about what you have, what you're going to have. Now imagine giving it all up, never getting to experience what life has to offer. Not everyone amounts to something, but everyone has the potential. They gave that potential up so that others could have it instead.

No poor dumb bastard ever became a hero by dying for his country. He did it by making some other poor dumb bastard die for his.

Or to put it another way, they only made that sacrifice because some other soldier was willing to pull the trigger, and they in turn probably killed more than their share. There could be no wars without willing soldiers, and propaganda to the contrary, that's not an oversimplification. It's the unvarnished truth, which is just too horrifying for most people to consider. In the absolute best case scenario, a soldier's job is to commit justifiable homicide in order to defend his own borders. In a more realistic scenario, they're murderers who invade other countries to benefit a few bastards at the top. It's been over 60 years since a soldier in my country's military actually did anything to defend me. Why the hell should I support the murders committed by the modern military because my grandfather actually fought in a war of defense? His was the last generation that did.

Those poor "insurgents" in the middle east, on the other hand...

Captcha: army training, sir!

Oh fuck off with the propaganada, captcha. I'm not in the mood. Although nice going on giving an example of just how much money and effort goes into normalizing this crap.

It's just like you said, respect the individual soldier, he is doing his job. Everyone has to make a living. If you have problems with the army in general, then it's the high command you want to go after. Their the ones who sit in their chair in safe room moving around peoples lives (friendly and enemy) like their chess pieces. I am in full agreement that we haven't been in a needed war since WW2.

So then you're in full agreement that the modern military is nothing but a bunch of hired thugs who, if they had a shred of decency, would lay down their arms and refuse to follow orders? Because right now the job they're doing is not at all worthy of respect, and respecting the individual soldier in this day and age is nothing but accepting the nuremberg defense, in a society where we don't kill soldiers for not following orders, no less. The Nazi's didn't give their soldiers that cushy chance of just sitting in a jail cell, and it was still ruled that "just following orders" was no excuse. That makes it even worse that we don't hold that standard to our own troops.

You can't blame the military without blaming the troops. It just doesn't work that way. It may be a big blame that each person holds a tiny part of, but they still have that tiny part. We have altogether too much respect for the soldier in this country, and not enough of that healthy fear of him that was so common prior to World War II.

Edit: Maybe this will make my stance a bit clearer:

Universal Soldier

He's five foot-two, and he's six feet-four,
He fights with missiles and with spears.
He's all of thirty-one, and he's only seventeen,
Been a soldier for a thousand years.

He'a a Catholic, a Hindu, an Atheist, a Jain,
A Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew.
And he knows he shouldn't kill,
And he knows he always will,
Kill you for me my friend and me for you.

And he's fighting for Canada,
He's fighting for France,
He's fighting for the USA,
And he's fighting for the Russians,
And he's fighting for Japan,
And he thinks we'll put an end to war this way.

And he's fighting for Democracy,
He's fighting for the Reds,
He says it's for the peace of all.
He's the one who must decide,
Who's to live and who's to die,
And he never sees the writing on the wall.

But without him,
How would Hitler have condemned him at Dachau?
Without him Caesar would have stood alone,
He's the one who gives his body
As a weapon of the war,
And without him all this killing can't go on.

He's the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame,
His orders come from far away no more,
They come from here and there and you and me,
And brothers can't you see,
This is not the way we put the end to war.

...that's like blaming prostitutes for the spread of STDs, man (as opposed to our horrifically insufficient healthcare system). People do what they have to to survive. Mind you, I don't think people like myself are automatically deserving of more praise than a prostitute... but neither are we (or the prostitutes) deserving of your scorn. Many soldiers do see the writing on the wall, but that doesn't give us any more options than we had before... and the option you would have us take is tantamount to suicide.

You work with the society you have, not the society you want. Don't like it? Start a revolution... for which you need soldiers. Power concedes nothing, and only the dead have seen the end of war.

Better suicide than murder for pay, man. The military is an inherently evil organization, and the "Necessary" part of "necessary evil" has long since been exceeded. It's not at all like blaming a prostitute for spreading STDs. It's like blaming a hitman for committing a murder. Sure, someone else asked him to do it, but it was his choice to take the payment and carry it out.

Edit: Especially since the "suicide" is figurative, but the murder is literal. Again, the individual soldiers who carried out the holocaust would have been killed themselves had they spoken out (or at least, they would if they were standing alone -- even there, it wouldn't have happened if enough of them had been brave enough to take the bullet instead of firing it). Despite that, they found out the hard way that "I was just following orders" is no excuse. In the US, we don't execute people for refusing to go to war. We might throw them in jail if they're either already members of the military, or, as in Vietnam, if they've been drafted, but we don't kill them. So no, it's really not suicide. If we didn't excuse people who would have been killed themselves if they had decided not to follow their horrific orders, we shouldn't excuse those who would have merely been thrown in jail just because they're our own. Hell, we shouldn't excuse it /especially/ because they're our own.

Really, your definition of murder (unlawful killing... as defined by the society you live in, wrongheaded or not) here is nearly as figurative as my definition of suicide (which was meant as figurative)... unless you happen to be Judge Dredd [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvJiYrRcfQo]. Like it or not (and for the record, I don't either), the many "police actions" the US has executed since our last declared war (December 1941) have been close enough to lawful that no one has been criminally charged for kicking them off. Thusly, no killing in said police actions is murder that has not been prosecuted as such. Doesn't make 'em right... but murder doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.

In my experience, the military is mostly full of desperate people reaching for the all-hallowed "opportunity" that our nation no longer affords the economically disadvantaged. I stand by my prostitute analogy, though it would work just as well had I used low-level street enforcers with a gang... just not hitmen (look to PMCs for those). As with gangs and prostitution, prosecuting street workers who are just doing what they have to to survive will avail you nothing. History is right to blame the architects of these conflicts. The "Universal Soldier" of the poem is nothing more than every desperate person ever.

The problem with defining murder as unlawful killing is that it comes from the legal definition of murder. If you define it that way, then no real mass murderer(Think Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin -- people who really killed massive numbers of people, not just the relative handful that they could kill personally before getting caught) in history was guilty of anything, since by the laws of their land, what they were doing was legal -- how could it not be? They wrote them. So no, saying that it's legal therefore it's not murder is not an excuse. The most cold blooded murderers on the planet are the judges, juries, and executioners who put people to death under the color(Or how about we make that "cover") of law.

Even if it were true that the military is mostly full of desperate people(and it's not, as much as I'd like it to be true the statistics have shown time and time again that "lack of money" isn't the reason most people sign up, the majority have other options and decide to do it anyway for various reasons, usually some appeal to "patriotism" or family tradition.), all that does is illustrate how screwed up our society is. We don't give drug dealers a pass just because they were desperate, and I'd be a lot quicker to believe most of them at least started out that way than I would soldiers. There's no public glory to being a drug dealer. For a minority of the population, sure, but even then it's just glamorization. Soldiers, on the other hand, are practically the angels of the major deity that is the military in this country. They may find out the hard way on exiting that it's mostly lip service with very little actual help coming from the people swearing up and down that they "support the troops", and other such platitudes that they strangely never act upon unless they're one of those families that keeps sending their own children in generation after generation(and then the material support is in the form of yet another warm body to fill a pair of boots and hold a gun), but a new idiot hits the recruitment age every day, and the few dissenting voices are drowned out by the waves of military worship. So it doesn't matter if the vets realize how little that hero worship helps them in later life, only that enough kids keep getting caught up in the waves of propaganda.

...second attempt, lost my first reply to the forum goblins... going to truncate.

Murder: legal term, colloquial use applies only to metaphorical use, not killing. Global society is still society, Hitler et cetera were deemed murderers on that scale. It's a plutocracy, as history is written by the victors, certainly not fair. Nothing is in this world, get used to it.

Military propaganda: most people have more pragmatic reasons than they let on. No other applicable skills, no longer enough jobs to go around, especially in rural areas. Best not to demonize people for the ignorant culture they're raised in... you'll only convince them that they're right and you're evil. Fucked up society? Agreed.

"Drug dealers aren't glorified"... bullshit. They're often heroes where they come from, keeping the only functioning economy at their rung of society going. Give more back to their communities than corporate "philanthropists".

hope that was intelligible. It was certainly a lot shorter.

Lost connection again, but copied text this time. Escapist is shitty tonight. Attempt 3.

Drug dealers aren't glorified /by an entire society to the point that it's suicide to speak out against them (And I don't mean to their face -- yeah, a drug dealer might shoot you if you you said something to his face. However, you wouldn't have to worry about being ostracized from parts of society above the bottom rung for saying it in general.), soldiers are. I'm not ashamed to say I wouldn't be posting this stuff publicly under my real name -- not of myself, that is. Of the society that makes it so dangerous to criticize its warrior caste, however...

I do agree that the drug dealers give back more to their community than the corporate raiders do. Hell, depending on the company in question, your average wartime company of soldiers may have less blood on its hands than some of those bastards, and for a better reason.

I disagree strongly about murder. A circular definition is no definition at all, this is something whoever wrote that law should have learned around the sixth grade, where you have to write definitions in your own words without using the word itself for exactly that reason.

agreed on most of it then... but...
"The unlawful killing, with malice aforethought, of another human"(wikipedia)

"the crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethought"(mirriam-webster)
and
"The killing of another human being under conditions specifically covered in law. In the U.S., special statutory definitions include murder committed with malice aforethought, characterized by deliberation or premeditation or occurring during the commission of another serious crime, as robbery or arson (first-degree murder) and murder by intent but without deliberation or premeditation (second-degree murder)" (dictionary.com)

...are not circular definitions... but do all require law to define them. Like it or not, unlawful killing is murder; lawful killing is not. "Personal definitions" are a cop-out.

The better way of looking at it is killing is murder by default, but there can be mitigating circumstances that make it either a lesser crime (like manslaughter) or fully excusable (like killing in self defense). Basically don't start from the legal forms of killing and define murder from there, start with murder and then separate the lesser types of killing from it. Besides, I'd imagine that's closer to how the average person understands it to begin with. Which makes sense, because the law isn't where right and wrong come from. Quite the contrary, it's an imperfect attempt to codify pre-existing ideas of what is and is not okay.

Still strikes me as a bit of a cop-out. Denial of facts in favor of an emotional response. Murder has nothing to do with "right or wrong" (which are subjective), only with legal or illegal.

**edit** if most people truly understand it that... incorrectly... I suppose the definitions should be updated. Pretty sure that's not the case, though.

What facts, though? That murder is apparently illegal because it's not legal? That's how the legal definition scans. I find "murder is illegal because it's illegal. There are forms of killing that are legal, but definitionally they are not murder because murder is killing for illegal reasons" a much bigger copout than "if you kill someone, you have committed murder unless there are mitigating circumstances."

That... is a very garbled argument. Murder is a type of killing, qualified by being unlawful. Murder is illegal because without that qualifier, it's merely killing. Fairly simple definition, one I knew at age 10.

It's a semantic difference, but an important one -- if law were a science it would be called "applied semantics." If you define murder as "unlawful killing," all that has to be done to make murder okay is to change the law -- after all, by that definition, it is the law itself that makes something murder. To go back to the hitler example, his law wasn't "it's okay to murder jews." It was "Jews are to be killed." He didn't legalize murder, he made killing jews explicitly not murder, while keeping more general murder laws on the books. You avoid this problem by making it so murder is the default state when killing a person, with exceptions that make it not murder /in the eyes of the law./ If you define it that way, it's entirely possible to say something like "I can't support this because it's just legalized murder." If you define murder as "unlawful killing," by definition there's no such thing as legal murder, and you can't call, for example, an execution (or even, under the right circumstances, a genocide) murder. Even though it totally is from any sane standpoint.

"Any sane standpoint?" You're still applying a moral qualifier to murder. The definition of murder has nothing to do with morality. Anyone using the term "legalized murder" doesn't know the definition of murder. Hardly unheard of, but still incorrect. Hitler changed a law locally, that change was trumped by international law, enforced by invasion and occupation. There's no "problem" in the definition.

It is when it's a local law. Under US law an execution is not murder. The laws of most other Western nations, which have long since banned executions, would disagree. Which set of laws are correct? Answer? The one that doesn't define "murder" in such a recursive fashion.

The answer is "both are correct". The minutiae of the definition depends on where you live... and can be changed, quite retroactively, by outside forces. Why is that so hard? This has all been semantics over a legal term... one that seems to be evoking one hell of a crusader response in you.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Spoiler: snip

I don't think I would go whole hog and pay $250 to bury a guy I don't know. If there was a dude who had done some impressive stuff, I'd certainly throw the dude a bone if I could.

I don't mean to nasty but the guys who were the first to charge off the boats on D day, didn't actually do much... They allowed other soldiers to advance but all they did was die (was like "operation meat shield" ). If a guy did something that made you go "Daym, dude is THE manly man!" then I think he should have a big ass ceremony.

Although, I think people in WW1 AND WW2 are fucking hero's but these modern day wars seem more like bullies.

This is the most unbelievable thing I have ever read. Do you understand what those soldiers gave up? Everything. They'll never get to experience what a full life is, they might not have wanted to be in that battle, or the war. But their sacrifice was real.

Think about what you have, what you're going to have. Now imagine giving it all up, never getting to experience what life has to offer. Not everyone amounts to something, but everyone has the potential. They gave that potential up so that others could have it instead.

No poor dumb bastard ever became a hero by dying for his country. He did it by making some other poor dumb bastard die for his.

Or to put it another way, they only made that sacrifice because some other soldier was willing to pull the trigger, and they in turn probably killed more than their share. There could be no wars without willing soldiers, and propaganda to the contrary, that's not an oversimplification. It's the unvarnished truth, which is just too horrifying for most people to consider. In the absolute best case scenario, a soldier's job is to commit justifiable homicide in order to defend his own borders. In a more realistic scenario, they're murderers who invade other countries to benefit a few bastards at the top. It's been over 60 years since a soldier in my country's military actually did anything to defend me. Why the hell should I support the murders committed by the modern military because my grandfather actually fought in a war of defense? His was the last generation that did.

Those poor "insurgents" in the middle east, on the other hand...

Captcha: army training, sir!

Oh fuck off with the propaganada, captcha. I'm not in the mood. Although nice going on giving an example of just how much money and effort goes into normalizing this crap.

It's just like you said, respect the individual soldier, he is doing his job. Everyone has to make a living. If you have problems with the army in general, then it's the high command you want to go after. Their the ones who sit in their chair in safe room moving around peoples lives (friendly and enemy) like their chess pieces. I am in full agreement that we haven't been in a needed war since WW2.

So then you're in full agreement that the modern military is nothing but a bunch of hired thugs who, if they had a shred of decency, would lay down their arms and refuse to follow orders? Because right now the job they're doing is not at all worthy of respect, and respecting the individual soldier in this day and age is nothing but accepting the nuremberg defense, in a society where we don't kill soldiers for not following orders, no less. The Nazi's didn't give their soldiers that cushy chance of just sitting in a jail cell, and it was still ruled that "just following orders" was no excuse. That makes it even worse that we don't hold that standard to our own troops.

You can't blame the military without blaming the troops. It just doesn't work that way. It may be a big blame that each person holds a tiny part of, but they still have that tiny part. We have altogether too much respect for the soldier in this country, and not enough of that healthy fear of him that was so common prior to World War II.

Edit: Maybe this will make my stance a bit clearer:

Universal Soldier

He's five foot-two, and he's six feet-four,
He fights with missiles and with spears.
He's all of thirty-one, and he's only seventeen,
Been a soldier for a thousand years.

He'a a Catholic, a Hindu, an Atheist, a Jain,
A Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew.
And he knows he shouldn't kill,
And he knows he always will,
Kill you for me my friend and me for you.

And he's fighting for Canada,
He's fighting for France,
He's fighting for the USA,
And he's fighting for the Russians,
And he's fighting for Japan,
And he thinks we'll put an end to war this way.

And he's fighting for Democracy,
He's fighting for the Reds,
He says it's for the peace of all.
He's the one who must decide,
Who's to live and who's to die,
And he never sees the writing on the wall.

But without him,
How would Hitler have condemned him at Dachau?
Without him Caesar would have stood alone,
He's the one who gives his body
As a weapon of the war,
And without him all this killing can't go on.

He's the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame,
His orders come from far away no more,
They come from here and there and you and me,
And brothers can't you see,
This is not the way we put the end to war.

...that's like blaming prostitutes for the spread of STDs, man (as opposed to our horrifically insufficient healthcare system). People do what they have to to survive. Mind you, I don't think people like myself are automatically deserving of more praise than a prostitute... but neither are we (or the prostitutes) deserving of your scorn. Many soldiers do see the writing on the wall, but that doesn't give us any more options than we had before... and the option you would have us take is tantamount to suicide.

You work with the society you have, not the society you want. Don't like it? Start a revolution... for which you need soldiers. Power concedes nothing, and only the dead have seen the end of war.

Better suicide than murder for pay, man. The military is an inherently evil organization, and the "Necessary" part of "necessary evil" has long since been exceeded. It's not at all like blaming a prostitute for spreading STDs. It's like blaming a hitman for committing a murder. Sure, someone else asked him to do it, but it was his choice to take the payment and carry it out.

Edit: Especially since the "suicide" is figurative, but the murder is literal. Again, the individual soldiers who carried out the holocaust would have been killed themselves had they spoken out (or at least, they would if they were standing alone -- even there, it wouldn't have happened if enough of them had been brave enough to take the bullet instead of firing it). Despite that, they found out the hard way that "I was just following orders" is no excuse. In the US, we don't execute people for refusing to go to war. We might throw them in jail if they're either already members of the military, or, as in Vietnam, if they've been drafted, but we don't kill them. So no, it's really not suicide. If we didn't excuse people who would have been killed themselves if they had decided not to follow their horrific orders, we shouldn't excuse those who would have merely been thrown in jail just because they're our own. Hell, we shouldn't excuse it /especially/ because they're our own.

Really, your definition of murder (unlawful killing... as defined by the society you live in, wrongheaded or not) here is nearly as figurative as my definition of suicide (which was meant as figurative)... unless you happen to be Judge Dredd [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvJiYrRcfQo]. Like it or not (and for the record, I don't either), the many "police actions" the US has executed since our last declared war (December 1941) have been close enough to lawful that no one has been criminally charged for kicking them off. Thusly, no killing in said police actions is murder that has not been prosecuted as such. Doesn't make 'em right... but murder doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.

In my experience, the military is mostly full of desperate people reaching for the all-hallowed "opportunity" that our nation no longer affords the economically disadvantaged. I stand by my prostitute analogy, though it would work just as well had I used low-level street enforcers with a gang... just not hitmen (look to PMCs for those). As with gangs and prostitution, prosecuting street workers who are just doing what they have to to survive will avail you nothing. History is right to blame the architects of these conflicts. The "Universal Soldier" of the poem is nothing more than every desperate person ever.

The problem with defining murder as unlawful killing is that it comes from the legal definition of murder. If you define it that way, then no real mass murderer(Think Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin -- people who really killed massive numbers of people, not just the relative handful that they could kill personally before getting caught) in history was guilty of anything, since by the laws of their land, what they were doing was legal -- how could it not be? They wrote them. So no, saying that it's legal therefore it's not murder is not an excuse. The most cold blooded murderers on the planet are the judges, juries, and executioners who put people to death under the color(Or how about we make that "cover") of law.

Even if it were true that the military is mostly full of desperate people(and it's not, as much as I'd like it to be true the statistics have shown time and time again that "lack of money" isn't the reason most people sign up, the majority have other options and decide to do it anyway for various reasons, usually some appeal to "patriotism" or family tradition.), all that does is illustrate how screwed up our society is. We don't give drug dealers a pass just because they were desperate, and I'd be a lot quicker to believe most of them at least started out that way than I would soldiers. There's no public glory to being a drug dealer. For a minority of the population, sure, but even then it's just glamorization. Soldiers, on the other hand, are practically the angels of the major deity that is the military in this country. They may find out the hard way on exiting that it's mostly lip service with very little actual help coming from the people swearing up and down that they "support the troops", and other such platitudes that they strangely never act upon unless they're one of those families that keeps sending their own children in generation after generation(and then the material support is in the form of yet another warm body to fill a pair of boots and hold a gun), but a new idiot hits the recruitment age every day, and the few dissenting voices are drowned out by the waves of military worship. So it doesn't matter if the vets realize how little that hero worship helps them in later life, only that enough kids keep getting caught up in the waves of propaganda.

...second attempt, lost my first reply to the forum goblins... going to truncate.

Murder: legal term, colloquial use applies only to metaphorical use, not killing. Global society is still society, Hitler et cetera were deemed murderers on that scale. It's a plutocracy, as history is written by the victors, certainly not fair. Nothing is in this world, get used to it.

Military propaganda: most people have more pragmatic reasons than they let on. No other applicable skills, no longer enough jobs to go around, especially in rural areas. Best not to demonize people for the ignorant culture they're raised in... you'll only convince them that they're right and you're evil. Fucked up society? Agreed.

"Drug dealers aren't glorified"... bullshit. They're often heroes where they come from, keeping the only functioning economy at their rung of society going. Give more back to their communities than corporate "philanthropists".

hope that was intelligible. It was certainly a lot shorter.

Lost connection again, but copied text this time. Escapist is shitty tonight. Attempt 3.

Drug dealers aren't glorified /by an entire society to the point that it's suicide to speak out against them (And I don't mean to their face -- yeah, a drug dealer might shoot you if you you said something to his face. However, you wouldn't have to worry about being ostracized from parts of society above the bottom rung for saying it in general.), soldiers are. I'm not ashamed to say I wouldn't be posting this stuff publicly under my real name -- not of myself, that is. Of the society that makes it so dangerous to criticize its warrior caste, however...

I do agree that the drug dealers give back more to their community than the corporate raiders do. Hell, depending on the company in question, your average wartime company of soldiers may have less blood on its hands than some of those bastards, and for a better reason.

I disagree strongly about murder. A circular definition is no definition at all, this is something whoever wrote that law should have learned around the sixth grade, where you have to write definitions in your own words without using the word itself for exactly that reason.

agreed on most of it then... but...
"The unlawful killing, with malice aforethought, of another human"(wikipedia)

"the crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethought"(mirriam-webster)
and
"The killing of another human being under conditions specifically covered in law. In the U.S., special statutory definitions include murder committed with malice aforethought, characterized by deliberation or premeditation or occurring during the commission of another serious crime, as robbery or arson (first-degree murder) and murder by intent but without deliberation or premeditation (second-degree murder)" (dictionary.com)

...are not circular definitions... but do all require law to define them. Like it or not, unlawful killing is murder; lawful killing is not. "Personal definitions" are a cop-out.

The better way of looking at it is killing is murder by default, but there can be mitigating circumstances that make it either a lesser crime (like manslaughter) or fully excusable (like killing in self defense). Basically don't start from the legal forms of killing and define murder from there, start with murder and then separate the lesser types of killing from it. Besides, I'd imagine that's closer to how the average person understands it to begin with. Which makes sense, because the law isn't where right and wrong come from. Quite the contrary, it's an imperfect attempt to codify pre-existing ideas of what is and is not okay.

Still strikes me as a bit of a cop-out. Denial of facts in favor of an emotional response. Murder has nothing to do with "right or wrong" (which are subjective), only with legal or illegal.

**edit** if most people truly understand it that... incorrectly... I suppose the definitions should be updated. Pretty sure that's not the case, though.

What facts, though? That murder is apparently illegal because it's not legal? That's how the legal definition scans. I find "murder is illegal because it's illegal. There are forms of killing that are legal, but definitionally they are not murder because murder is killing for illegal reasons" a much bigger copout than "if you kill someone, you have committed murder unless there are mitigating circumstances."

That... is a very garbled argument. Murder is a type of killing, qualified by being unlawful. Murder is illegal because without that qualifier, it's merely killing. Fairly simple definition, one I knew at age 10.

It's a semantic difference, but an important one -- if law were a science it would be called "applied semantics." If you define murder as "unlawful killing," all that has to be done to make murder okay is to change the law -- after all, by that definition, it is the law itself that makes something murder. To go back to the hitler example, his law wasn't "it's okay to murder jews." It was "Jews are to be killed." He didn't legalize murder, he made killing jews explicitly not murder, while keeping more general murder laws on the books. You avoid this problem by making it so murder is the default state when killing a person, with exceptions that make it not murder /in the eyes of the law./ If you define it that way, it's entirely possible to say something like "I can't support this because it's just legalized murder." If you define murder as "unlawful killing," by definition there's no such thing as legal murder, and you can't call, for example, an execution (or even, under the right circumstances, a genocide) murder. Even though it totally is from any sane standpoint.

"Any sane standpoint?" You're still applying a moral qualifier to murder. The definition of murder has nothing to do with morality. Anyone using the term "legalized murder" doesn't know the definition of murder. Hardly unheard of, but still incorrect. Hitler changed a law locally, that change was trumped by international law, enforced by invasion and occupation. There's no "problem" in the definition.

It is when it's a local law. Under US law an execution is not murder. The laws of most other Western nations, which have long since banned executions, would disagree. Which set of laws are correct? Answer? The one that doesn't define "murder" in such a recursive fashion.

The answer is "both are correct". The minutiae of the definition depends on where you live... and can be changed, quite retroactively, by outside forces. Why is that so hard? This has all been semantics over a legal term... one that seems to be evoking one hell of a crusader response in you.

Then you're arguing that "murder" has no English definition, only a legal one contingent on local laws. I'm not sorry to say most English speakers would disagree with that.

Edit: And excuse me for having a strong moral (there's that word again) objection to killing people without a damned good (you might say immediately imperative) reason. Yeah, I'll crusade against murder. Especially where it's condoned by society and the state. Not to do so is to be complicit in it when your government does something stupid like starting a war of aggression or executing a criminal who had long since been subdued and separated from society, both of which my government does on a disturbingly regular basis.