Avatar is getting flack because it’s anti-American and portrays Marines as “Lunatics”. Apparently, it’s also spurning depression and suicidal thoughts as well. Oh FTC, where art thou (sarcasm)?
Whether you enjoyed the movie or not is another question entirely, but these remarks are certainly unwarranted.
I guess, but at least IMHO it’s counterintuitive to get into a figurative fist-fight over Avatar. It’s one thing to argue civilly, it’s an entirely different matter when you decide to drop the gloves. I don’t understand why people get so combative in arguments. But, I guess it’s just another trait I’ve picked up from the Austrian School: It rarely makes sense to be overtly hostile in arguments, you become incoherent and walk away with nothing substantive.
Seeing as how I always wanted to go into the Marines after High School, but decided to wait till after I completed college. The ads now being run in theaters usually lead to an outburst of derisive heckling from me.
Tell me about it. Navy Seals worship was an orgasmic duty, when I was a young, festering neocon. I even bought the Socom trilogy, and went around IEDing my terrorist teammates. It was a hell of a learning experience.
I think we both know why we sailed that way, but I’m in interested in explicitly hearing your motivation for a military career.
Well, I would say 9/11 certainly “inspired” me to a “higher calling”. But, other than that, I don’t know. It always seemed “cool” to be broken down and pieced back together, the Marine way. Supplement that with all the action novels I was reading back in the day (still do, just with a different outlook) and everything that I surrounded myself with, it was hard not to be pushed in that direction.
The SOCOM trilogy was AMAZING! I remember in 6th grade playing the original SOCOM all day long. Same with the second, third eh not so much.
With that being said though, I still work out like a fiend, I just don’t particularly care for a career in the military anymore.
Those games, like Call of Duty, are military propaganda. That is all they are. A means of indoctrinating young kids in their free time outside the educational institutions into the empire’s foreign policy and their role within it.
I do. The killing blow to my neoconservatism was delivered, when I read Economics in One Lesson and Meltdown. Starting with the broken window fallacy (so simple yet vital as learning your ABCs), I had begun to develop my economical and ethical objection to the state’s flexing muscle. Having been stuck in the superficial left-right paradigm for so long, reading through this site’s material was like finding the meaning to life. IME: If you can articulately communicate these ideas to people, then they stand there in shock and awe. The key to conversion is to apply the material that is relevant to people’s values.