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I've heard it said that Marine is in fact an acronym for "My Ass Rides In Navy Equipment, Sir" Is there any truth to that?
Officially, No.

Unoffically, Hell yes.

Granted, I'm a former Swabbie(slang for "Sailor") so I'm probably biased.

Do I respect the marines? Sure. Will I make jokes about them eating crayons if left with them up supervised? Also yes.

It's a weird dynamic.

To be fair, I'll dump on the US Navy plenty if given reason to. Their insane obsession with acronyms, to start with.
 

Gordon_4

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Officially, No.

Unoffically, Hell yes.

Granted, I'm a former Swabbie(slang for "Sailor") so I'm probably biased.

Do I respect the marines? Sure. Will I make jokes about them eating crayons if left with them up supervised? Also yes.

It's a weird dynamic.
I figure its like the Navy is the posh older brother, and the Marines are the rougher and paradoxically bigger, little brother.
 

Buyetyen

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Officially, No.

Unoffically, Hell yes.

Granted, I'm a former Swabbie(slang for "Sailor") so I'm probably biased.

Do I respect the marines? Sure. Will I make jokes about them eating crayons if left with them up supervised? Also yes.

It's a weird dynamic.
Every now and again, I've had someone who happened to be a veteran get shitty with me and pull the veteran card to try and shut me up. "I served in the Marines, damnit!" My response was typically, "Oh, I'm sorry, were you not smart enough for the Navy?"

Juvenile? Sure. Did it get a reaction? Oh hell yes.
 
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Every now and again, I've had someone who happened to be a veteran get shitty with me and pull the veteran card to try and shut me up. "I served in the Marines, damnit!" My response was typically, "Oh, I'm sorry, were you not smart enough for the Navy?"

Juvenile? Sure. Did it get a reaction? Oh hell yes.
Anyone who tries to pull rank like that is a fucking idiot and honestly I'd have reacted the same way.

As a vet, I hate that kind of shit, guys who try to get special attention/privs like that. Dude, having served doesn't make you special(well, some of them are very "special", just not in the way they think).

Especially the dudes who are like "I was <Insert Rank> in <Insert Branch of the military> and that means I'm right" like it means something in the civilian world, which to a vast majority of people it doesn't. In the military, a general pulling rank means something. Outside of it, an ex-general trying to pull rank looks childish.
 
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I figure its like the Navy is the posh older brother, and the Marines are the rougher and paradoxically bigger, little brother.
I'm not sure I'd use "Posh" to describe the Navy. Unless by that you mean "We have better stuff and more funding", in which case yes.

But having lived and worked with Sailors at sea, yeah, I wouldn't go as far as to call them "posh". I'm just going to say there's a reason I throw out f-bombs at random and it was far worse when I was on ship. Sailors are very, very good at peppering in swear words. It's a skill you pick up very quickly.

I had to teach myself to tone it down a lot when I went to naval recruiting duty, because you're not supposed to swear in front of the people you're recruiting(PR reasons and such)
 
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Gordon_4

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I'm not sure I'd use "Posh" to describe the Navy. Unless by that you mean "We have better stuff and more funding", in which case yes.

But having lived and worked with Sailors at sea, yeah, I wouldn't go as far as to call them "posh".
Its relative really. I think I associate the Navy with 'posh' because I read and watched Hornblower so while I know that rank and file sailors really can be rank, there were also loads of would be blue bloods who used the word 'sir' like it was a comma or a full stop. Or would describe two argumentative colleagues as 'Two men who could not agree on the colour of an orange'. Where I feel a Marine would call them both 'cranky bastards'.
 
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Its relative really. I think I associate the Navy with 'posh' because I read and watched Hornblower so while I know that rank and file sailors really can be rank, there were also loads of would be blue bloods who used the word 'sir' like it was a comma or a full stop. Or would describe two argumentative colleagues as 'Two men who could not agree on the colour of an orange'. Where I feel a Marine would call them both 'cranky bastards'.
In that case, sure. In context, yeah, it makes sense, especially since in the Olde timey Royal Navy(the British Army was similar) you pretty much had to be well off to afford an officer commission(and by god were those expensive and limited), which often implied nobility(which also meant you were probably educated). Whereas now you basically just need a 4 year degree to apply for an officer position, at least as far as the USN is concerned, so there's less blue blood-ness in the USN. I'd also mention that, unlike armies(and navies) of a century or so ago, the military isn't seen as a prestigious career for someone who is from a rich family as it once was, at least not in the US.

Are officers held to a higher standard then enlisted? Yeah. Though I suspect not as much as they used to be when a guy with a noble title was also a ship captain or you had to be somewhat well off to be able to get sent to the military academy.

I don't know about the modern day Royal Navy personally though I'm gonna hazard a guess the commissioning process for RN officers no longer requires absurd sums of money to invest in a commission and rather uses something a bit more merit based by comparison. I'd be happy to be educated on the subject if someone here is knowledgeable.
 
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Thaluikhain

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When a British officer completes training at Sandhurst, they had to basically do a bunch of job interviews to get into the regiment they want, but some regiments will automatically accept someone if they have family in there already.

By contrast, Royal Marines officers are always going to be in the Royal Marines, and part of their training is done with the potential enlisted ranks that are also training.
 
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Ag3ma

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I don't know about the modern day Royal Navy personally though I'm gonna hazard a guess the commissioning process for RN officers no longer requires absurd sums of money to invest in a commission and rather uses something a bit more merit based by comparison. I'd be happy to be educated on the subject if someone here is knowledgeable.
You can go to officer training school in the British armed forces and skip straight in around, oh, lieutenant or captain or something. Which, in a sort of a way, might not be a million miles away from the idea of buying a commission. It certainly allows for a degree of exclusiveness, with entry requirements that may de facto disqualify a certain proportion of the less desirable working class.
 
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You can go to officer training school in the British armed forces and skip straight in around, oh, lieutenant or captain or something. Which, in a sort of a way, might not be a million miles away from the idea of buying a commission. It certainly allows for a degree of exclusiveness, with entry requirements that may de facto disqualify a certain proportion of the less desirable working class.
That's true in the US military as well. You can apply to one of the military academies and if you get in, you'll do a 4 year college/miliary program before being commissioned as an officer. Or you can have a college degree, and then go to a 3 month officer candidates school before getting commissioned.

It's exclusive to some degree, just not nearly as much as it was in the past. Getting accepted to a military academy is apparently quite an undertaking, not unlike getting accepted to a top tier university, so I'm told. Most of this I know because when I did Naval Recruiting we needed to have some knowledge of officer recruiting and commissioning programs(though we had specialized officer recruiters we referred people to) and for a while I was interested in applying for a commissioning program myself(but did not follow up on).
 
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Eacaraxe

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Which-- if true-- would mean we could ironically credit the US with more progress in "denazifying" Ukraine than Russia.
Of course, we know that was never even a remote interest of the Russian government, but still.

Anyways. The US frequently attaches anti-corruption requirements to overseas aid (with varying levels of success... and also varying levels of sincerity). This wouldn't be out of the ordinary. All of those who resigned had questionable spending habits that pointed towards bogstandard profiteering. The neo-fascist angle doesn't seem to have any compelling substance to it.
Nah, not really. You know as well as I do the US is more than happy to work with kleptocrats, fascists, and neofascists so long as they're the lowest bidder and/or best represent US interests abroad, and keep their...proclivities...underneath at least a vestigial facade of deniability. Though nowadays even that's a stretch, given the entirety of US mass media has been propagandized over the past decade, and the US population is the most credulous on the planet.
 

Silvanus

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Nah, not really. You know as well as I do the US is more than happy to work with kleptocrats, fascists, and neofascists so long as they're the lowest bidder and/or best represent US interests abroad, and keep their...proclivities...underneath at least a vestigial facade of deniability. Though nowadays even that's a stretch, given the entirety of US mass media has been propagandized over the past decade, and the US population is the most credulous on the planet.
No argument here with regards to the motivations and (lack of) red lines of the US. But if you're opining that the fired officials are linked to fascist paramilitaries (though there's precious little evidence of anything beyond bogstandard profiteering), and also that they were fired at the US's request, then that's the functional conclusion that rises from those premises: that the US would therefore have done more to "denazify" than Russia.

It would be an added little irony, the cherry on top of the transparent dishonesty and idiocy of Russia's stated goal.
 
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Eacaraxe

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No argument here with regards to the motivations and (lack of) red lines of the US. But if you're opining that the fired officials are linked to fascist paramilitaries (though there's precious little evidence of anything beyond bogstandard profiteering), and also that they were fired at the US's request, then that's the functional conclusion that rises from those premises: that the US would therefore have done more to "denazify" than Russia.
Depends how likely Ukraine is to implode at war's end. Do you expect the Azov movement or Right Sector to simply lay down arms and peacefully coexist with ethnically-Russian Ukrainians once the war's over, however it might? Least of all after eight years of war they helped perpetuate (and feeding Putin his precious casus belli), and now that they've been handed all the first-world weaponry and materiel they would ever need? When basically their whole-ass stated goal is to ethnically cleanse Ukraine of Russians?

I keep calling them the next al-Qaeda for a reason.
 

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Russia's Belka! We all knew it!

(Or Estovakia, or Yuktobania, or meh.)
Well, considering Russia uses "Red Line(s)" like every other week, maybe we shouldn't be shocked if Russia eventually nukes itself 7 times.

Let me check where the Red Lines are this week......searching.....oh yes, Russia big mad about western tanks. Putin big mad.


So another day that ends in day I guess.

Don't worry, he'll be dropping those bombs....any fucking minute......just wait for it.........
 
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Depends how likely Ukraine is to implode at war's end. Do you expect the Azov movement or Right Sector to simply lay down arms and peacefully coexist with ethnically-Russian Ukrainians once the war's over, however it might? Least of all after eight years of war they helped perpetuate (and feeding Putin his precious casus belli), and now that they've been handed all the first-world weaponry and materiel they would ever need? When basically their whole-ass stated goal is to ethnically cleanse Ukraine of Russians?

I keep calling them the next al-Qaeda for a reason.
Considering they number a scant couple of thousand at the very highest estimates (and even then they were since decimated during the battle of Mariupol, almost certainly leaving them in the hundreds), and they attempted precisely nothing significant on a national scale between Russia's invasion in 2014 and Russia's latest invasion, I'd call this far-fetched, if not intentionally overblown for war propaganda purposes.

I'd be a little more concerned with the fascist paramilitary that has grown exponentially since the latest Russian invasion began, into the tens of thousands, landing not only official endorsement but also a military tech centre in the capital city; that is deployed to half a dozen conflicts overseas, rather than just defence of their own country's borders, where it has been responsible for numerous ethnic massacres: Wagner. Or the Kadyrovites, who stand as the ruling power in Chechnya, and carry out round-ups and summary execution for gay people. Then we have the fact that destruction of Ukrainian national identity, forced deportation en masse, "filtration camps", and other classic tools of ethnic/cultural "cleansing" have been heartily adopted by the Russian authorities themselves.

Azov and Right Sector are utter footnotes in the shadow of the sheer size, reach, financial/military power, and track record of war criminal activity of Wagner and Kadyrov. But the concern just... well, isn't there, among tankies purportedly invested in combating fascism. Mostly because the denazification angle is mostly a ruse: you can tell by how often figures like Medvedev, or the state media, seamlessly switch from talking about "denazification" to "de-Satanisation" and "de-Ukrainianisation". It's the same thing for them, and it always was.
 
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Ag3ma

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Depends how likely Ukraine is to implode at war's end. Do you expect the Azov movement or Right Sector to simply lay down arms and peacefully coexist with ethnically-Russian Ukrainians once the war's over, however it might?
So what's your actual end goal here?

Do you think Russia was (and is, if it wins big enough yet) going to let Ukrainians carry on being Ukrainian, with a government that respected Ukrainian democratic will and allowed them substantial freedoms? Would Russia coercing Ukraine into a vassal state be a better end point for human rights and liberty? A lot of this boils down to asking whether we think Russia is more honest, respectful, responsible towards individual human beings within and outside its borders than the West, irrespective of the West's own plentiful misdeeds. I'm more than a little disturbed by anyone who thinks Russia is a better proposition than the USA or EU for human rights.

War is traumatic. And you're absolutely right that it will end in extreme bitterness and civil discord between ethnic Russians and Ukrainians, and this will result in enduring civil violence of some sort. But it will if Russia wins, it will if Ukraine wins, and it will if there's a stalemate. Ethnic hostility was inevitable the minute Russia used force against Ukraine in Crimea, accelerated after the cryptoinvasion of Donbas, and far more so with the general invasion. That's just what conflict does.

If the West sits this out, in the long run Ukraine almost certainly falls because it has neither the economy nor arms industry to sustain a protracted war as Russia can. Is your position that we should let Ukraine fall and Russia oppress its ~45 million people? And why - just so there's a minimum of blood on the West's hands?
 
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Seanchaidh

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I'm more than a little disturbed by anyone who thinks Russia is a better proposition than the USA or EU for human rights.
Zelensky has stated that he envisions post-war Ukraine to be modeled more on Israel than the EU, which sounds just swell for human rights.