for some grand noble cause as defined by their particular cultural group. Militarism has become a cult and is to be found all over the world. When I was a kid, there was no "warrior" class. It is fairly new; a PR stunt to attract people to volunteer. The difference between this nation and, say a place like N. Korea, is that our government no longer conscripts people. Now you volunteer to fight wars as a career. Truthfully, I have a hard time sometimes with elevating people for seeking war rathet than promoting peace.

the pro soldier stuff people post on facebook. What is the motive behind it? If you were not there you can't really imagine it and those in the pictures couldn't really explain it to you. I don't get it but it makes me feel weird somehow. It is almost like posting pictures of car wrecks.
I want to tell people to stop it but I guess it makes them feel good.
It isn't about so others can live or honor or your freedom. It is about something we don't want to admit. It is about promoting religion or growing the wealth of the 1% or enriching the stockholders of the MIC or somebody's power trip. We are the pawns why is that so hard to get?

In some ways, those kinds of pictures could be seen as invasive, even cruelly so, but I think they are emblematic of people trying to grope towards an understanding they can't really ever reach. I was thinking about that the other day when the pix were posted online of the guy who got 490 lashes or whatever in Saudi Arabia. There's nothing we can do about it, there's nothing we intend to do about it, so what purpose is served in showing it? Hard to think up a non-sinister reason for that. The idea that people are so lacking in imagination and empathy that they have to see a picture of a person bleeding out to know it's horrible, seems pretty lame to me.

But ultimately, I have to accept that that is probably a rather uncharitable thought on my part. The alternative would be to believe that the baseline of emotion is ghoulish voyeurism. While that doubtless does exist in some people, I think more often it's an attempt to empathize and lend comfort. How misguided it might be, is hard to say. Most combat veterans are very reluctant to talk about their experiences, and I would imagine somewhere in there is the feeling that "I tried to keep this stuff away from you, stop digging at it!" But the pshrinks assure us that opening up about such experiences is the first step in the road to coming to grips with them. Although WWI and II veterans, for the most part, functioned adequately without this loving concern for their feelings.

As far as the sequence in this link goes, though, I got the impression that the compiler was trying to draw a contrast between civilan experiences ("girly things&quot and military ones. To show, in fact, that we can't really understand the latter unless we have experienced them ourselves, because what we experience doesn't really compare. I daresay they could be interpreted differently, but that's my take on it.

-- Mal

That's why I have a huge problem with this sequence. It says that these women's experiences are shallow and vapid compared to these men's experiences. The entire sequence drips with misogyny or at least holds in contempt young, conventionally attractive, presenting as Hetero/cis, relatively privileged women and their expressions of their social and emotional selves.

I'm not saying that women (and men) at college age aren't shallow and vapid. But so is everyone. Give me forty-five minutes and shutterstock, and I can probably make the same sequence out of white executives or middle-aged couples. But the auteur didn't pick white execs or middle aged couples.

But here's the thing: the oldest activity in the world is stabbing each other with pointy sticks. It's really not that profound. It never has been. It's not ennobling. That's a lie we tell ourselves so that we can send off half a generation every couple of generations. It's the way we distract our excess youth when we have no means to provide them meaningful employment and no other way to keep them from fighting amongst themselves in the bars and streets. Don't fight each other, go attack that one over there. The technology has changed, but the philosophy never does.

The young men in that sequence should be doing keg stands and walking with their lovers and learning friendship and making silly pictures. They shouldn't be bleeding and coming home traumatized or not at all. But elevating the horror while expressing contempt... There's nothing incomprehensible about it.

I obviously saw pathos in the military images, not glorification. But just as obviously, they can be seen that way. My interpretation was that the "girly" images were depicting what should be, the military ones showing the sad contrast with what is. You might argue that the tag line "... that others might live" supports your interpretation more than mine, but it's just ambiguous enough to be interpreted as irony. However, your interpretation is just startling enough to me to give me grounds to wonder if I've been an idiot again.

-- Mal

It is pro humanity but not pro war. Kind of contrasts superficial shit with real shit. Soldiers always talk of the whiplash between being in the suck and going home. Civilian life feels inconsequential and unimportant. It is all nonsense. Note there are some German soldiers in there. They ain't saying yay Nazi fatherland.

Images of young people doing typical young person things, juxtaposed with images of young men in wartime.