Why I don't support the troops.

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I personally support the troops here in Canada, having grown up in a military
family, my dad was in PPCLI or Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry.
Now I don't not support the war in Iraq and I am not totally convinced Canada
should be in Afghanistan, since I think its a waste of our people dying in a
country where foreign troops are not welcome. The west really should not be
trying to bring democracy to any countries where the concept is completly
alien to them. Look at the mess in Iraq, it was better off with that mad man
Saddam Husein running it, now what do those people have, a country in ruins,
and leadership that get its orders from multinational corporations.
Before I get flamed, I do support a strong military, that is seperate from the
whims of a few politicians.

I don't like the whole "pick the other guy's post apart" style of writing, so I'll simply address your "points" in order.

Any assumptions I made about your politics were made based off of what you wrote. I did not read every post you've ever made, I don't think that's necessary to an online debate. I was making the observation that your argument was nearly identical to the ones put forward by people I went to school with, some of whom have since moved on, some of whom have not. Hopefully you will be one of the former. Perhaps you are not a pacifist, but from your posts you are an isolationist, and that is nearly as bad. Instead of trying to reason with someone who wants to kill you, you simply want to put your head in the sand. Fair enough, it's your head...

You seem to yield the point about calling the majority of our troops sociopaths, which is good, you were wrong. There is some romanticism to the military though, you do get to travel the world and see interesting places. And not just the ones you get to bomb flat. My ex's father traveled all over Europe with the navy, something he never would have been able to do otherwise. As to emphasizing the blowing up of things, what's the harm in that? I like to blow things up, though for me fireworks and guns are mostly sufficient. Wouldn't you rather have people blowing stuff up under supervision in foreign countries then randomly at home? Shooting and blasting are legitimate tools of warfare, it's not like it's false advertising to emphasize them in recruiting commercials. After that though, you indulge in some white guilt about the "system" screwing people so that they have no choice but to join the army. If you are referring to the welfare system, then I somewhat agree with you , it screwed a lot of people over. But to say that they have no other choice is ignorant. There are always jobs, the military just has a better benefits package than most of them. Even dead end jobs can lead somewhere, my boss's boss's boss (the operations manager of a local chain) started at 16 at Burger King and stayed there for 20 years working his way through management, it can happen. People always have options, no one is forced into the army.

Glad to hear you too hate the fat man, it's a good start. You were practically quoting F/911 though, so I wasn't sure.

"Several" people meet your criteria and you judge a whole group? Way to go on the research, I know a tobacco firm that's hiring if you're looking for work. I'll say it again, make the same statements that you did but substitute "black" or "Mexican" for troops and see what people say.

Contrary to the opinions of some people on this board, killing people is not why you keep an army handy. I don't have the exact figure handy, but I believe only 25% of troops are what you would call combat troops. The rest are infrastructure, logistics, engineers, that whole tail that wags the dog. Armies exist for national defense, and projecting power. That's it. How they accomplish that is a variety of methods, killing other people in other armies is just one of those methods. As armies become more and more technologically advanced, they've needed to kill less and less of each other in order to win wars. A single Civil War battle killed more people than the entire Iraqi conflict, because back then the only way to win was to kill more of the enemy than he killed of you. Things are different now, there are other ways to win. That's all just a complicated way of saying that the military does many other things other than kill.

What I'm saying is that your opinion is based on ignorance and a few biased observations. You've chosen to judge members of the military based on a few encounters, and impugned them as a group as either thugs and bums, or too ignorant and stupid to know any better when they signed up. Your post makes me think of you as someone who would have spit on troops returning from Vietnam, maybe yelled "baby killers!" while you were at it. Maybe this was not the intention of your post, but that is what I get from it. No one expects you to hero worship the troops, but expecting a little respect is hardly Jingoism.

And if you aren't Muslim, Sharia is pretty horrific.

Sharia is great if you're a Muslim man. Not so great for women and children.

Dox: since you don't like that posting style, I'll emulate your organization.

I'm not an isolationist. As I have said, I realize that military force is necessary in some cases- the two that I've mentioned specifically were WWII and Korea.

My issue with the displays in recruiting materials wasn't that it was unrealistic, it was who they seemed to be trying to attract with it.

White guilt? Ha, you should hear me discuss affirmative action sometime. By referring to my comments on the economic draft as white guilt, you would have to assume that all poor people are black. The "system" perhaps was not the best word; just these people got screwed, in whatever manner. Yes, there are other opportunities, but for many this is just about the only way to get a college education.

F/911? I've seen it, and I really never could understand the point of it. The fat guy doesn't really even say anything... he just kinda makes fun of Bush. And not very well either.

All the logistics, infrastructure, etc you mentioned are there to facilitate the combat troops, and there purpose is to kill. True, in modern times our military might is great enough that we generally just need to intimidate, but the premise of an army is still at least displaying the potential to kill people and threatening to do so. I believe that's what you called "projecting power."

"National defense" is a pretty nebulous term. Our nation isn't really being defended all that well, what with the open borders and all. We aren't currently under invasion (and haven't been anytime in the recent past) so what do you even mean by national defense?

But why haven't we been under attack in the recent past? True, third world countries like Canada and Mexico aren't going to invade us anytime soon, but our projected strength also keeps allied countries like Taiwan and Japan safe from the Chinas and North Koreas of the the world. A strong military is one of the few legitimate things you can do with a government. Everything else is just throwing money into a giant bureaucratic hole in the ground. Nearly everything that the government does with the exception of national defense could be and should be done cheaper by private industry. Not the the military doesn't waste colossal amount of money, but they at least do it for a legitimate purpose. Not to mention that money in the defense budget at least has some positive effect on the economy. Someone has to sell the military all those weapons, and that someone has to pay a bunch of people to design and build all of those weapons. It's one of those funny circular things, people being taxed on income that was provided by taxes. Say what you will about the evil military industrial complex, it does pay a lot of people. I'm not so happy with the sort of corruption that has been showing up lately, no bid contracts and the like, but I'm not against making money off of warfare. I've got a few concept designs for improved weapons on my drawing board, so I'd be awful hypocritical if I was.

Moving on, as you yourself pointed out, having a real big stick to shake at people often negates the need to actually swing the stick. But you need to have that stick in the first place. You can't threaten people with the stick you could have in a few years of building and training, you need it now. So in effect, having a strong military saves lives, in the wars you don't have to fight because everyone is scared of you. National defense is nebulous, but having a scary military to threaten belligerents with is always helpful. Half of projecting power is threatening to go blow things up, but threats don't work so well if you can't actually do it.

Which brings us to... Those rough and ready men at arms. For some of them, going to some remote locale and doing things to the inhabitant that they are not going to like is their job. They have to go do bad things in worse places, so we can sleep securely at night, that's what they do. It does take a certain sort to go do those things, we should cut them a little slack if they don't measure up to our standards of polite discourse and etiquette. I rather like the concept of the foreign legion, no questions asked if do your part, and you get a new identity after 10 years. I sort of like the idea of crews of 'bangers rolling around Baghdad blasting on Fedayeen, it would probably be more rehabilitating than prison... I wanted to go into special forces myself when I was in high school, but my psych problems kept me out. I wasn't diagnosed then, but the anti depressants I was taking disqualified me from military service. I wanted to join because I did and do think that there are far too many bad men still breathing, and wanted to do something about it. I figured special forces would give me the best chance of going after the kind of people who were making me angry, and not just the grunts of some country who's leadership was acting stupid that week. Sadly, that was not to be, but I digress. Suffice it to say, I don't think that the intestinal fortitude to kill another man in service of one's country disqualifies one from respect.

Canada's not a third world country. They actually are quite prosperous. The Canadian dollar is currently more valuable than the American.

Have you studied economics at the college level? I personally am no fan of Keynesianism, and the government may be introducing money into the economy with military expenditures, but that is (at least if we had a responsible government) generally money that the government had taken out of the economy through taxation. Had they left it alone, it could have employed people more efficiently. Really, you're advocating the redistribution of wealth from society at large to arms dealers.

OK, I'm fine with having a strong standing army ready to go as a contingency. Don't know why we have to protect all these other countries though, shouldn't we at least get something in return? Maybe a throwback to old international relations in terms of a tributary state... we protect them militarily, they give us the better side of trade agreements, or something along those lines.

We seem to have rather different perspectives on the prospect of military service. I personally was not terribly upset to hear that the military would probably reject me for my autism, especially given the occasional rumours of a draft. I personally must say I am not well-suited to military service, and besides would not be willing enough to obey orders without question.

No, it doesn't disqualify one from respect (I stated this even in my OP to some extent) but it doesn't automatically entitle one to it either. At least, not to any greater extent than all humans deserve some degree of respect.

Mexico is a second world country.

Ahh, progress. We've gone from a post essentially indiscriminately bashing soldiers to they deserve the same respect as anyone else. I wasn't seriously calling Canada third world by the way, the Canucks on this board are just fun to get riled up.

I never haver have supported troops going to tin-pot wars because of some misguided leaders' obsession with subjugating those so called enemies into their way of thinking. Two prime examples of this are Vietnam and Iraq. The 'police action' which dragged us into Vietnam in the 60s was a direct result of the leadership of America trying to stop a so called threat of communism (they thought Kruschev was behind it, but it was China. Meanwhile the Sth Vietnamese were no darlings either, and what happened after all that time? the North won. Wasted a lot of lives in the process, and everyone ended up hating those that went. Iraq on the other hand was the legacy of a failed attempt by Junior's old man to get rid of Hussein (whom the Yanks had been aiding for years before anyway). So the actual war lasts roughly a month, the Iraquis themselves finally get off their collectives and take control, Saddam s**ts himself and goes underground and it turns out that the insurgents don't want you there anyway. Meanwhile, our guys are never given any front line dury, just overlook jobs or "Dad's Army" type tasks. Good enough to be called up, but not good enough ;for the real work. Oh, and why haven't you gotten Bin Laden yet? Answer is simple; he is either dead and those tapes are old, or he is so much smarter and is laughing at Bush etc from some deep dark cave somewhere. My guess is that by the type he is found, both answers will be true.