I grew up in a Navy town. I am the son of a Marine combat veteran and drill instructor. My brother was (a fuck-up) in the Marines. My best man was a Naval Aviator for twenty years. A grandfather was a WW2 vet, one great grandfather a WWI vet, and another was in one of the last cohorts of horse-mounted cavalry in the American southwest. I had multiple friends who served, and military culture was everywhere growing up. I got as far as the Enlistment processing center before I told my dad I was joining up, and in the last wise act his MAGA ass ever did, he marched me into the recruiting office to “voluntarily separate for personal reasons.” I have no particular bone to pick with the average American servicemember, so believe me when I say…
A bunch of them are dumb as shit.
Even among those who aren’t, most who stay in longer than one contract have an authoritarian streak to some degree, and/or they know they’re at the peak of their “social capital” and possibly their earning potential too.
When I was in, I had a shipmate who said there were basically three types of people who stayed in the military.
Group 1: Small percentage, but they literally loved it, loved what they did, just felt right in uniform.
Group 2: Those who wanted/needed the insurance, education benefits, etc for themselves or their loved ones/families.
Group 3: Those who had no other options, and were juuuuuuust competent enough to not be kicked out every enlistment.
My best man is pretty close to number 1. He flew helicopters, and there just aren’t that many opportunities to even have that job in civilian life. His dad did twenty as a P3 navigator.
That said, he’s still got that certain “no nonsense do your job” mentality that precludes a lot of curiosity or questioning the chain of command, especially once he climbed up it a bit.
One of my old coworkers was a nuclear tech on a submarine and he fit this description well. I had only been in the job a couple of weeks (of a 3 month training process in a pretty technical job) and he actually came to me for help with something simple he couldn’t figure out. I was able to figure it out pretty quickly for him but he’d already been in the role for a couple of years by that point.
We laughed when he applied at a competing company and actually got the job with a big raise because we knew they’d just screwed themselves and hired him solely based on what was listed on his resume. That company actually tanked and was bought out by a larger company a few years later, which he probably had a small part in accomplishing.
We also found it a bit alarming that someone of this caliber would be allowed to work with nuclear devices.
Speaking as a veteran, no one accused service members of being smart.
Depends on the branch and job, one of the smartest humans I’ve ever met was a network tech for the Air Force
Election deniers are specifically recruiting veterans and service members this year to exploit their social capital and bring legitimacy to the cause, argued Human Rights First, a nonprofit human rights organization. In a report, the nonprofit urged veterans to be wary of calls to “restore election integrity” or “catch the cheaters in real time” and instead leverage their credibility to counter conspiracies about the democratic process.
The pdf of the study is here.
Let’s not forget that there were former police and military among the Jan 6th rioters. Anyone can be sucked into the Q-ult.
They should write “unsubstantiated conspiracies”.
Conspiracies regularly happen, and pretending they don’t or equivocating the heavily documented and testified to cigarette industry working together to publish articles and statements advocating the harmless nature of cigarettes with some baseless claim that Obama is a lizard person is misleading and entirely unhelpful.
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The thing that always needs to be considered upon hearing a conspiracy theory: the entity or entities allegedly engaging in a conspiracy that has remained secret for an appreciable period must be hyper-competent enough to keep said secrets, and if that entity fucks up regularly, it becomes increasingly unlikely.
Or to put it another way, a successful conspirator cannot be both some evil mastermind and some incompetent fuck up at the same time if you want your theory to make any sense.
Unless you want to play games about that being staged to make you believe they’re incompetent, in which case I wish you a great time in Wonderland.
That’s what happens if the “news” they get is not trustworthy from the start.
Raegan set us on this course with the abolishment of the truth doctrine, among other things
That was one of the many bad things Reagan brought to the US. Back then I thought that Republicans cannot choose worse presidents, but hey, did history prove me wrong. Again and again.
In a test designed to see whether readers could differentiate between real and false information online, about 90% succeeded.
That is way higher than I expected.
