Zinegata

Oh, I actually remember this.

That's the plan, although as Xthetenth points out your mechanics change a bit once you hit the modern era.

 

X also brings up another good point: that we don't have enough skills present here to make a full game. My feeling, then, is that we should work on mechanics, backgrounds, etc and limit our digital aspirations to the creation of a roll resolver or similar. Then again, there is nothing stopping us from going really old school and relying mainly on text.

 

As Sturgeon mentioned, I think we should hash out core mechanics for a bit:

- What platform are we going to use (computer, pen-and-paper, tabletop, cards, hybrids etc)?

- What are we going to use to provide random chance and resolve events?

- What general approach to characters and their growth will we take? (mentioned by Unstart)

- What is our overall philosophy going to be for mechanics? (touched on by Sturgeon)

 

At the same time, I'm going to make another topic to allow people to play around with story and settings. Once we've resolved the core game design and setting, then it's time to work on more fine-grained mechanics, fire up a character or two and test to see if things hold together.

*flashbacks from 10 years ago when Zinegata was very active in The Gaming Den*

The Essence of RPGs

The essential thing to realize about a roleplaying game is that it is ultimately a conflict generation and resolution mechanism. The game must be able to create conflict scenarios, that is then resolved by the players using their characters.

Hence, before beginning development, you need to define what kinds of conflict the system is supposed to generate and resolve. All successful RPGs, at its core, must feature interesting conflicts that players would like to participate in - be it a "dungeon crawl/adventure" conflict (D&D), a "military" conflict (Twilight 2000), a "space opera" conflict (Star Wars) or whatever.

And in general, I'd note that specificity is very important for good RPGs. D20 Modern for instance is mostly forgotten because it didn't have a strong central core conflict - it was basically seen as a D&D port in a quasi-modern setting that didn't necessarily subscribe to the dungeon crawl style of conflict to begin with. Shadowrun by contrast, despite its mechanical clunkiness, has niched itself solidly by defining itself as the RPG that combines both magic and cyberpunk elements in a sorta coherent whole.

Tabletop vs Computer Implementation

In general, tabletop systems are the easiest to develop because the premise of the system is that there is a human Gamemaster to nudge the system along even when the rules fall short. On the other hand, the ease of development means there's also a massive glut of tabletop gaming material out there, plus it's not exactly a growing market. This will apply regardless what your conflict resolution mechanism is - be it dice, special dice, cards, etc.

PC games by contrast are much harder to develop, as the computer game program must come out fully understanding the rules with minimal bugs; and it must also have the resources to generate conflict scenarios. A tabletop Game Master can, with a few hours of preparation, create a dungeon that the players will tackle. A computer can't do this - it must have a pre-loaded scenario or it must have very robust tools for creating random encounters (as eptomized by the random dungeons of rogue-likes).

I've always kind of wanted an update of Twilight 2000, the old pen and paper RPG, the setting was right after the end of WWIII, that had only gone a little nuclear, and you were Americans stranded in middle of Poland after the last US ARMY attack or something.

 

I think it would have a big market, the USA prepper nutballs, and Red Dawn fan boys, plus if it was very FPSish, FPS fans if the game play was good.

 

In my Gaming Den days I actually wrote some fluff and mechanics for an RPG whose premise is that you're playing a Special Forces team operating in a Central Asian Republic torn apart by Civil War, but then Warhammer 40K came out with Deathwatch and being able to play special ops marines dropping on different worlds seemed much more interesting even if the D100 system kinda sucked.

Another related project I've been doing is a block tabletop wargame with the working title of "Just Another War in the Darkest Corner of Africa", which basically simulates a small African country falling apart over resources (diamonds, oil, etc), with both sides possibly supported by foreign powers in the form of special armaments (e.g. A Hind Gunship for rebels with links to Russian oil giants). There's also a civilian death toll / humanitarian crisis element wherein the United Nations and a peacekeeping force may eventually be dispatched to try and stop the killing; albeit there's also the possibility of a "Black Hawk Down" ending if one side manages to bloody the UN forces enough to force a withdrawal.

I realize I really don't like doing Third World War designs because the scenario is unrealistic to me unless nukes start flying; at which point it isn't much of a game. The only scenario I really liked was "Revolt in the East", which posits a mass Warsaw Pact revolt followed by a massive NATO ground intervention. That one is actually interesting since NATO isn't so hopelessly outnumbered and there's reason for both sides not to simply drop nukes.

 

That was an interesting read. Took me two days to get through it though, a lot of it rings true with what Thomas Rick said in his book The Generals.  It takes something as bad as war crimes to get an officer relieved, when they should have been looking at sacking Kunk for running his battalion like shit and losing so many men.

 

 

Since the Green guy was a sociopath, shouldn’t that have gotten him kicked alone?

 

It's actually worse. I was looking through the comments section for more possible sources on my current investigations of Chris Kyle. One of the commentors said that Kunk in fact got away with scapegoating his battalion and is now a full Colonel.

So yeah, not only did Kunk create an environment where war crimes were more likely to happen, he was rewarded for it by dressing down the folks reporting it. Again, this is no surprise to me knowing the culture of impunity around the military and the jilted nature of the US officer corps. Staying in line and maintaining the fantasy of a "clean" army is more important than actually fixing real problems.

 

More interesting to me though is, why should the army screen for 'extreme political views', don't you have a right to be a dumb fuck Nazi if you want to? And if you don't let it affect your job, why can't they serve too. In a system that was working right, if they got out of line they could then be discharged, or is that too much of an idealistic view?

 

 

There also seem to be a lot of parallels with Vietnam, in how a long un popular war eats the system up and the poor new blood brought in can’t bring it back to the way it should be until we not fighting some shitty attrition war, in a shitty, shit hole no one should care about?

 

Let me share with you a story from another sniper veteran from Iraq; part of my compilation on Ramadi.

This sniper took issue with Chris Kyle's story about shooting a woman with a grenade. He took issue not because "he shot a woman" or any other typical liberal bleeding heart argument. He took issue because Kyle claimed that he might go to prison if he got the call wrong. The sniper, with blunt candidness, instead said that Kyle and no other US soldier would ever have gone to prison because they mistakenly shot civilians. Indeed, the sniper recounted an incident where an intelligence officer ordered them to shoot up an armed column of Iraqis; who could clearly see the American soldiers and yet took no hostile action. The result was a bloody firefight with lots of Iraqi dead, only to turn out all the Iraqis they killed were part of the governor's bodyguard. Was the intelligence officer sent to prison or even reprimanded? Nope, in fact as far as they knew he went up the ladder.

And really, knowing that the military practices this kind of culture of impunity, is it really smart to be letting extremists in? What if they start shooting helpless civilians left and right and then misreport it as "enemy combatants" or the CO turns a blind eye because he's so short-handed that he needs even these nutcases. Or, as the above cases show, the rest of the unit is afraid they might get fragged by the psychos in their midst, knowing there likely won't be an investigation? Pat Tillman for instance was killed by friendly fire and it took months for the Army to even admit this. And as far as I can tell, the folks who helped covered it up in fact got promoted while the perpetrators by and large have never been named or punished. 

Because it's the odd duckling and was bullied. So we sympathize.

It's more like a mutant cross bred by mad science, for whom every single moment of existence is agonizing pain and it wheezes for us to put it out of its misery.

Answer me honestly - did you actually read the articles?

Yes, and I've read many, many other articles pointing to the actual systemtic problems of the US military that no one wants to address that runs much deeper than simplistic claims that leadership wasn't worth a damn.

It seems more that it's unprepared for an officer in a relatively high billet to do a resoundingly poor job than a particular lack of people. Kunk failing seemed to be a major source of the wrong people being in a position to suggest what they did. I wonder if a way for the people under him to relay what he was doing up above him would have solved that, and how it could be implemented without totally eroding the chain of command. A recurring theme of that story is people getting orders from up top that aren't based on an accurate appreciation of events and keep compounding mistakes and making problems worse while the lower ranks can't do anything.

The reason why I brought up the officer statistic is because it's one of the fundamental problems of the US military; that leads to the exact sort of problems described in the article.

One officer for six enlisted men is not a healthy ratio. It is the equivalent of a company having more middle managers than actual workers.

What this means in practice is that it is now extremely hard to get promoted in the US military. You have too many Lieutenants wanting to be Captains, too many Captains wanting to be Majors. As a result, there is a general culture within the US military's officer corps to not report problems. They don't want to be the officer who reports a war crime, or be in any way associated with a war crime, because that might get seen as a black mark against them and therefore ruin any chance of promotion.

Don't believe me? Look at General McMasters. This is a guy who led US Army forces at 73 Easting, and he was one of the leading minds behind the counter-insurgency manual for Iraq. Yet he got passed over for promotion multiple times - primarily because he wrote an article questioning the Army's netro-centric doctrine which was proving to be flawed. It took the personal intervention of Petraeus before he finally got his next star.

In short, the top has no appreciation of events on the ground because the officers in between don't want to tell them anything that contradicts their worldview and endager their next promotion. You try and break ranks to tell the truth instead, and you will generally find your career to be finished. Why do you think Kunk was dressing down the platoon anyway? Because of the reported war crimes Kunk's career was in fact virtually finished. He was venting at them for possibly ending his career.

I was absolutely not surprised by the way Kunk behaved or the way Lauzier was cashiered - for the rest of the officer corps that's just two less people to compete against and the culture of impunity moves onward. This is not some isolated incident in one battalion.

The US military employs one officer for every six enlisted men. The military literally has so many officers that each should be only commanding half-squads each.

Hence you can't simply shift the blame to nebulous concepts of "leadership". A very large proportion - indeed most sane analysts of officer-soldier ratio would say an overly large proportion - of the US military are in fact in "leadership" positions. If you say leadership is the problem then 1/7th of the entire military is guilty of the problem; and it's supposedly the portion that's most well-off and educated.

... Why of all possible tanks, why?

Pro tip. Most soldiers go to college after serving. It's difficult to get a four year degree while in. You really are being obtuse here.

And pro tip: It doesnt escape my notice when you're claiming so many poor 17-19 year old recruits without realizing less than 1 in 5 soldiers are even under 21.

So really, who's the one being emotional here?

Also, so you're saying the Army should discriminate against blacks and have lower numbers of enlisted personnel of that make up? The same goes for officers, since blacks make up a higher number there too? Why do you assume they are from an economically disadvantaged background? Just because he's black, that automatically makes him a gang-banger from the hood?

It couldn't be that black soldiers have a sense of pride in being a soldier and are eager to prove themselves worthy of a heritage that has overcome prejudice while seeking to better themselves at the same time?

Also, people of the same economic background generally live in similar neighborhoods. That's how it works in the US. Poor people generally don't live in neighborhoods with waterfront views.

I am not endorsing anything else about what you said; though why would blacks feel the need to better themselves if they arent disadvantaged?

And people of similar income levels living together? Maybe- that's an assertion not a stat, but why jump through that hoop instead of looking directly at preenlistment income?

Less than 1 in 5 are even in the 18 to 21 age bracket and the average age of serving soldiers is nearly 30. Only the USMC is an outlier with an ave age if 25.

http://www.statisticbrain.com/demographics-of-active-duty-u-s-military/

Again, I can read the stats on my own without needing Heritage to butcher it for me.

I REALLY liked Xthetenths comment up above by the way. I don't have the time to respond to it properly.

 

Nor do I have the time to dig up more information which deflates the myth of the US military dredging up the dregs of the socioeconomic underclass as Zin is suggesting.

 

However, since he's relying on fonts of reputable journalism like Salon, I guess it's fair to use this (admittedly dated) study by the Heritage Foundation (conservative think tank alert) which came out back in 2008.

 

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/08/who-serves-in-the-us-military-the-demographics-of-enlisted-troops-and-officers

 

 

Also Zin, I'm not trying to pile on you here. I'm having a debate with a friend as I see it. I don't really care if you're conservative or liberal and I don't think any of us are trying out calling people names based on their politics.

 

This pretty much jives with the information I was gathering for a cover story I was going to do once upon a time back when I needed to worry about writing newspaper articles (i.e. rewriting press releases that my editor kept shoving at me  )

http://www.businessinsider.com/us-military-demographics-2014-8?op=1

Only 20% of US enlisted personnel have college degrees, compared to 33% overall throughout the nation in 2012. Whites are underrepresented and again blacks are overrepresented. I don't need the anyone to make up my numbers for me. I can look at plain data and immediately see the real break points.

Moreover, you're quoting a tudy that looked at neighborhood income levels. Meaning that the study is saying that there is a disproportionate number of enlistees from neighborhoods with high income, not families or individuals with high income. This raises a ridiculous number of red flags given that it's pretty trivial to look at their income levels prior to enlistment if the study was meant to be partial.

It doesn't say anything about how the individual himself may or may not be lacking in cash or resources; and in fact seems to be just following the age old trend of pawning off unemployable kids from supposedly "good" neighborhoods into the military to avoid shame elsewhere.

And again, how does any of this change the very real fact that the US Army, in its own reports, acknowledges they are letting in Neo Nazis and nothing is being done about it? Oh let's just ignore them because we assume the other 90% are assuredly Pat Tillmans?

The whole reason we don't even know is because no one wants to examine the issue critically. Let's just assume they're good guys. Again, that's "culture of impunity" and you keep making my case without realizing it.

First of all, folks really need to stop thinking I care about "liberal" or "conservative" labels when I don't come from a country which has decided a real life parody of Team Fortress' Red Team vs Blue Team is the way to do politics. I merely comment on "liberal media" and such because that's part and parcel of the standard knee jerk reaction to any criticism of "the troops".

Secondly, folks really need to read the whole thing instead of just going "you get the dregs for the most part":

The giant elephant in the room here really is the reality that America is becoming more and more militarist and nobody seems to care or notice. This is why you have a movie on Chris Kyle end up earning $100M despite the fact the man's autobiography has more in common with SS fanfiction and he actually bragged about supposedly murdering several dozen American citizens during Hurrican Katrina to help restore order.

 

When you go "volunteer" military, you actually get the dregs for the most part - the rebel wannabes and the gun nuts - simply because most people are smart enough not to take a military job in the first place. Being in the military doesn't turn these dregs into outstanding citizens automatically no matter how much the military pretends otherwise; and then holding these people up automatically as heroes whose "heroism" is unquestioned due to a culture of impunity (with such arguments as "you weren't there!" or "you didn't risk your life!" even though Alaska fishermen probably had higher casualty rates than most services in the Iraq War) is how we ended up with the Republic falling to Caesar in the first place.

 

So yeah, that's not only appropriate, that's what the future of the US leadership is going to look like - suicidal teens further damaged by war, whose silly and stupid ideas aren't shot down because of vet-worship.

Because really, this is the sort of thing I can show to my friends in the military and they'd just go "Yeah, good thing Zine is calling out the psychos and the blowhards".

What's being addressed by the above rant isn't that the US military is some murder machine churning out drug-addled veterans. The rant instead is a commentary on how the American public has allowed a culture of impunity to surround veterans. Every "veteran" from the wonderful all-volunteer army is a Chris Kyle who saw the 9/11 attacks and wanted to sign up and serve their country. That is an extreme exception to the rule (Pat Tillman being one example), possibly even less common the the gun nuts and rebel wannabes. We only don't have exact stats because the articles we posted show that the US Army is deliberately trying not to track these stats, but given that the Army instituted rules to try and keep Neo Nazis out since the 90s or before 9/11 then it's pretty damn clear they've been trying to get in longer.

Yes, most soldiers signed up because they wanted a college education. Literally all my military friends signed up for that reason. The problem which Downward fails to realize is that it means that these soldiers are in fact not as "volunteer" as the Army makes them out to be. They signed up because they didn't have money or the resources to avoid military service in the first place. This is why the Army recruits disproportionately from African Americans (due to poverty issues) and immigrants (who want citizenship), and not necessarily because they love America. Even the trope of "immigrants fight harder for U-S-A" is hard to sell to someone who knows the Filipino contingent of the US Navy basically runs its quartermaster portion as a sideline business.

Worse, nobody wants to look into it, and every time someone tries to bring it up you just have bashing that "the troops are under fire from evil liberals who don't understand war" or "it's just harmless fun". I just call bullshit on this. The Army simply has a problem and it doesn't want to confront it. This is why its poster boy Pat Tillman ended up killed in a friendly fire incident where his fellow "elite" rangers gunned him down because he was sitting beside allied Afghan troops. This is why Chris Kyle's questionable record is not being brought to light. This is why Abu Gharaib happened. There is a culture of impunity, and again when you stop questioning your military you open the door to your military ruling you.

Pork is divine especially when you figure out how to cook it properly, and I would totally accept it as a valid reason for my ancestors signing up to be slaves of the Spanish Empire than be slaves of the Muslim Sultanates of South East Asia.

Zaloga talked about the cost of the Tiger versus its contemporaries in Reichsmarks (which we all have hashed over as being a very ineffective way to accurately measure the cost of the vehicle). I wish we'd all just agree to use man-hours as the accepted norm.

His quoted RM figures are different from the usual Wehraboo babble, so it at least looks as though he tried to quote figures from the same time period and same level of production maturity; as opposed to the Wehraboos who tend to quote first-run MK IVs with higher cost versus late-run Panthers.

No, you're supposed to look at the supporting evidence. That book you linked? Its thesis was already featured comprehensively in a pretty good article from 2009.

http://www.salon.com/2009/06/15/neo_nazis_army/

And before you go "biased liberal media" the article quotes DoD documents from 2005/6:

A 2005 Department of Defense report states, “Effectively, the military has a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy pertaining to extremism. If individuals can perform satisfactorily, without making their extremist opinions overt … they are likely to be able to complete their contracts.”

In fact, a 2006 report by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command shows that military brass consistently ignored evidence of extremism. One case, at Fort Hood, reveals that a soldier was making Internet postings on the white supremacist site Stormfront.org. But the investigator was unable to locate the soldier in question. In a brief summary of the case, an investigator writes that due to “poor documentation,” “attempts to locate with minimal information met with negative results.” “I’m not doing my job here,” the investigator notes. “Needs to get fixed.”

So really, Walter's anecdote is no mere anecdote. There was in fact a Neo Nazi problem by the 2000s - as filed by reports from the US Army itself, which wasn't resolved and was being even consistently ignored by the brass.

====

Meanwhile, here are the facts of Kyle's book.

First of all, it is a biography, written primarily from his own experiences and recollections. Why we've turned Belton Cooper into a punching bag and haven't done the same to Kyle, I'm not sure, but I'm not too busy hero-worshipping to apply the same level of exacting fact-checking that we've applied to SS fanfiction.

And really, it's not a pretty picture.

The first and most important thing to realize is that Kyle was found to be lying about multiple statements. He in fact was found guilty of libel against Jesse Ventura - not a man known for his credibility - because his fellow SEALs testified against Kyle. 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2014/07/29/jesse-ventura-wins-1-8-million-in-damages-against-chris-kyle-slain-navy-seal-sniper/

This is before we consider the fact that he also claims to have murdered two people in cold blood in Texas (in "self defense") and said he was shooting looters during Katrina. Those who say the latter is just a joke or a tall tale would be well reminded that America just went through a couple of riots because of the possibility that police may have shot unarmed black men. Here we have a US Army sniper claiming the government authorized him to murder looters in cold blood. 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/30/the-complicated-but-unveriable-legacy-of-chris-kyle-the-deadliest-sniper-in-american-history/

But really, all that really pales in comparison to the real problem of Kyle's record: His supposed 160 "official" kill score.

The problem is, I have found zero US Navy sources corroborating these claims, both the official tally of 160 nor his own guesstimate of 220+. In fact, US Special Forces command said this:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/american-sniper/facts/

Ken McGraw, a spokesman for the US Special Operations Command, who said: “If anything, we shy away from reporting numbers like that. It's so difficult to prove. And what does it mean?”

The article then goes on to say that Kyle's co-author claims he had to verify the claims with command, but let's be frank here - we don't accept self-reported SS kill claims. Neither should we accept self-reported claims from US snipers.

Moreover, I have in fact tried to look for other sources to maybe try and corroborate the claims. The problem is that they all lead to even more fantastical stories and blatant inconsistencies. For instance:

http://projects.militarytimes.com/citations-medals-awards/recipient.php?recipientid=307606

One of the first things I looked at was Kyle's Silver Star citation. At first glance, looks good - 90 confirmed kills over 5 months. "Plausible". But then there's also the rough edges - only 32 overwatch missions, implying 3 kills per overwatch? Only five "snipers with scoped weapons" specifically identified? Sounds like someone is just taking Chris' words at face value and applying the loose standards for kills - which is "as long as the spotter and sniper saw someone go down, it's a kill".

So I took a look at the involvement of the SEALs in the above battle - Ramadi 2006 - and found this book:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Sheriff-Ramadi-Winning-al-Anbar/dp/1591141389

Which claims, on the flap cover, this:

 Of the 1,100+ insurgents killed in the Battle, Navy SEALs accounted for a third of them.

At which point any sane SS fanfiction hunter goes "hold it, the SEALs claimed a total of 300-400 kills in Ramadi, stretching to a period beyond Chris Kyle's tour" (Kyle's tour ended in August 2006. The book and the battle stretches to Nov 2007). Is Kyle seriously someone so superhuman that he accounted for 1/3 of all SEAL kills at Ramadi despite participating only in 5 of its 24 months?! Something's fishy here.

And guess what? I managed to get a partial copy of the book (more specifically Google Books) and found Chris Kyle's name wasn't even in the index or in the entire damn book. You have Michael Monsoor, who won the MoH by falling on a grenade and a few other SEALs mentioned, but not Chris Kyle.

http://books.google.com.ph/books?id=C7rbAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA83&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

At which point, I really just have to call bullshit. How the hell can the sniper who supposedly accounted for 1/3 of all SEAL kills in just 5 months of operations be not included or mentioned at all in a book about SEALs in that very battle? 

It just doesn't come together. Worse, when I look at USMC accounts of the battle, there's hardly any mention of SEALs, so even the "Sheriff of Ramadi" version may already be overglorifying the SEAL's overall achievements as it stands.
 

Hence, there really is serious doubts about Kyle's kill count or supposed heroic status. Nobody just has the courage to actually look and call it out. And really, given his public record it looks like he made it up. Or worse, if you transplant his Katrina fantasy to Ramadi, you have Kyle acting like a terrorist sniper gunning down people as it pleased him; which the Navy then papered over with a Silver Star that none of his colleagues ever thought was deserved (again, his own fellow SEALs testified against him over Jesse Ventura). The latter is a particularly disturbing possibility when one considers April '06 coincides with the Marines deciding to loosen the rules of engagement around Ramadi with predictably bad results for the civilians - something that was realized to be a mistake.

So, yeah, sure, let those families with Iraq War vets try and pretend that this "American Sniper" movie is some kind of catharsis. Me, I would find it supremely ironic if the film which they thought "honored" their families was in fact featuring a protagonist who was ultimately a gun-nut fraud that in fact dishonored all of the actual serving members of the military. Life can be real cruel like that; which is why people keep buying lies in the first place.

Replying from mobile, so can't put up a very long post. I will however make these two points:

If you want to debate Kyle's checkered record, fine by me. I can provide sources; or rather show that the US military in fact never officially endorsed his kill claims and everyone is just referring to his book. Accusing me of engaging in libel is also pretty ironic given that Kyle lost his own libel case against Ventura because Kyle's fellow SEALs basically said he was lying. Same as with the US Army resorting to recruiting Neo Nazis since the recruitment pool has dried up - this one actually has a whole book devoted to it.

That all however depends on the second point - which is I will plainly refuse to post in any forum where a mod power trips and edits another person's post in that manner. If it happens again I'll just leave and not wait for the place to collapse like every other forum that has that kind of moderation. If you want a discussion, attack the ideas discussed instead of declaring victory over shitpoasting. Anything else is just a circle jerk power trip.

And really, don't give me the shitty I knew a guy in Iraq line. I knew guys who were there too. This is the exact sort of hubristic "men in uniform are morally superior" nonsense that you play when you refuse to confront the very real trend of growing militarism in American society. If you were truly living in a state that didnt believe in militarism; i shouldnt even have to tell you i knew guys in Iraq.

Yeah. When Zinegata gets it wrong, he really gets it wrong. Like cartoon baseball player swinging at a Bugs Bunny change-up wrong.

To call the guys and gals who volunteer for America's armed services "dregs" is not just insulting but wrong if you look at the actual demographics of folks who join.

Yeah. There are a lot of fucktards who shouldn't be allowed near a sharp plastic fork, let alone grenade launchers and automatic weaponry. But most of the guys are pretty alright, they join for altruistic purposes and they go on to lead productive lives outside of the service.

It's the same lazy prejudice that generalizes all sports athletes as spend-thrift, gang-banging, rapey, wife-beaters because a handful of individuals in the league are idjits.

So bullshit, I call. And respectfully so.

I do not, and refuse to, ever subscribe to the current insipid American fad of holding people who are in the military/police as being in an inherently morally superior position; and that we should instantly assume the better side of their angels. That's how you go from a Republic to Caesarism - if you hold the military man to be the superior man, subject to fewer questions and controls than a civilian, you are in fact a militarist state.

Which is why I have totally no problem calling an all-volunteer army as getting the dregs of society when it's been documented that the Army in fact has to increasingly resort to recruiting outright Neo-Nazis just to keep troop numbers up. In short, if you don't want to believe that someone like Daigensui is much more likely to sign up and be accepted in the military than someone like Walter, then you need to open your eyes and look more closely at how desperate the US Army's recruiting situation has become.

It's an actual, real problem now. You wanna pretend it isn't? Fine by me. Just don't blow up the rest of the world while you're at it.

===

Also, this is also why I haven't comments on the fiasco where 44 of the Philippine's "elite" policemen got killed in an operation to capture some terrorist in Mindanao. You might see a lot of social media now hailing these guys as heroes, but on any other day the Philippine social media would be deeply questioning how corrupt the whole police force is to begin with. In fact it's emerging those guys probably violated a cease fire against orders from the top, possibly to get a share of the bounty money, and that they totally messed up the OP which was why the Moros were able to kill so many of them.

This is where I stop you. This is shitpoasting, and we're not gonna have it here. The reality of American politics vis-a-vis the military and police forces is much more complex than your smash and grab post suggests, and Americans are far from a homogenous block, and have a wide variety of opinions about those in uniform.

Regarding the US Army targeting Neo-Nazis, prove it.

This post stays up, but you are strongly encouraged to control your emotions better next time.

I wish that the US presidency were a sham institution, concealing a king.

I didn't say it was a sham institution. What I said is God help America when the said war-damaged "Iraq vets" start entering Congress based on their record of "military service".

Don't believe they can't get elected based on a sham record? Look at Chris Kyle. Again, the man's kill count is not official. The only sources everyone quotes is his books. US Army special forces command said those numbers aren't official.

Heck, the only other source I've found corroborating the count is the Silver Star citation where they claim he killed 90+ of the enemy in Ramadi. But given that there were so few actual fighters killed in Ramadi (700+) it either means he was present in almost every engagement, he made the numbers up, or worse he did what he said he did in Katrina - which was to setup shop in a sniping position, picked off innocent civilians ala snipers in the Serbian civil war, and engaged in the exact same sort of terrorist sniper tactics that the US supposedly deplores.

But sure, let's just instantly assume he's a "hero" even though his record reads like SS fanfiction. Heck, unlike SS fanfiction he doesn't even pretend that he doesn't think he's a crusader fighting dirty, evil, Muslims.

1. I strongly suspect you haven't met any Iraq War veterans. If you were talking about someone in particular, this would be edging close to libel. Watch it.

2. Don't be an ass. There is a difference between official and claimed kill counts for Chris Kyle.

3. I don't recall reading about any Jewish suicide bombers in World War II, mate.

Well, the ultimate goal of my 40K stuff was to make a Gaunts Ghost-esque series cut out of a small corner of the 40K-verse ala the Sabbat Worlds that has its own Space Marine Chapter, Imperial Guard regiments, and cute sanctioned psykers, but I've been too busy to write new updates. (aside from expanding on the TO&E of one of the feature regiments, which has undergone numerous revisions and is now a 6,000-strong Mechanized Infantry unit)

Behold!

https://www.fanfiction.net/u/4359656/Zine40K

Also, for the older Gundam stuff:

https://www.fanfiction.net/u/61213/Zinegata

Ironically, despite the Gundam stuff being really old and pretty hastily written, I still occassionally see posts looking for them.

Nah, I write 40K and Gundam original side stories.

You guys realize I write fanfiction, yes?

My friends who are more inclined to delve into details of rocketry generally consider Zubrin to be insane, but I must admit greatly liking the idea of a propulsion system whose principle revolves around containing a nuclear explosion within a shielded vessel and spurting the resulting energized propellant out of the rocket's ass.

First of all, if the intent was to troll me to participate here, it worked.

Second, why are people presuming that the Philippine government is sane or sensible to begin with? Sure, we're not a complete basketcase anymore with P-noy but that doesn't stop the rest of the institution, most especially the military, being completely and utterly incompetent.

That the main Filipino pro-military website (timawa.net) is a circle-jerk of gun nuts with no rational concept of what a credible defense looks like and who just wants to spend billions on shiny new jet planes (whose main duty will be to die gloriously sixteen minutes into any serious conflict with China) that could held rebuild Tacloban instead just goes to show how the country's military strategy is nothing but complete fail.