The military family is a huge thing. I have like half a dozen family members who were or are in the military. The one sides grandparents used to tell all of us kids that you either go to college or join the military. The only way I’d ever join a military force though is if China starts up a foreign legion. Haven’t talked to those people in nearly 2 decades. The military is like a cult so when they get their hooks in someones mind that person will try to initiate their family too. Not to say every veteran is brainwashed, but a lot of them are to some extent for sure.
My take away is that the people who are in there just for the GI Bill are the people who are in there for the shortest period of time. So the people who maintain the culture of the organization and are the most loyal are these JROTC (which ofc is geographically deep south) type people or the ritzier officer class. It would be a mistake to treat “just killing for my degree” as the typical situation, as veteran-friendly orgs like More Perfect Union do
I wasn’t kidding when i called it a cult. They use cult tactics to recruit and brainwash people. That’s what boot camp is. It isn’t really to get you in shape. You cant do that in such a short amount of time anyway. It’s to break your mind and seperate you from any external support system and then build you back up as one of them. It was literally copied from how real cults operate. Even their recruiters use the same tactics of targeting weak and vulnerable people. Lying to them just to get them in the door. So even if you go in just for the GI Bill if you arent careful and strong of mind they’ll break your brain. Even if they don’t make you want to stay they might mess you up in such a way that you don’t feel comfortable leaving either. Like people can find it hard to function in regular society again after spending a few years in the Military. So some just decide to stay.
“I just wanted to pay for college!” is kind of a bullshit argument when you keep in mind that the alternative is taking on student loan debt rather than participating in the deeply evil shit that the US military is doing.
Also it’s a fucking ridiculous tradeoff: Are you willing to shoot an innocent person/drone strike weddings for four years all so you can fuck around in Excel for the rest of your working life?
“They were going to put me in jail for 30 days 😔😔😔” is patently ridiculous but somehow derpy, purehearted US troop narratives still scan to people?? Make it make sense
Needless to say Mr. Tooze did not frame this as eliminating the potential for GI resistance
middle class hitlerites, and it’s the child of registered nurse who is also a single mom.
Can the child of a single mom nurse not be a hitlerite? I mean, what else are we supposed to call people who run the imperial death squads?
https://archive.ph/2x19K another good article related.
I can’t for the life of me get this to open on my device, which is strange since this is not the noided one, but in the meantime, I remembered the Tooze article https://adamtooze.com/2023/07/25/chartbook-229/
Minor point about the quintiles.
They are not misrepresented. The range of different quintiles is usually different. The point is, each quintile contains the name number of data points (neighbourhoods in this case).
So 20% of neighbourhoods have an average between 0 and 33k. And 20% of neighbourhoods have an income between 65k and 246k.
