Here’s a possibly-controversial take, but joining the army isn’t really even close to the best analogy for a male-dominated industry where you “sell your body”.
Being a labourer is. Working in industries like construction, but not as a skilled tradesman. It doesn’t carry the same moral weight riley was going for though.
True, but it’s not just about labor.
To join the US military you have to literally sign over your bodily autonomy to join. Once you do then they can pump you full of experimental drugs, or run whatever other ungodly experiments, all they want. I know someone who considered joining then backed out when this allegedly happened.
Anyway, never heard of Riley before but seems nice. Hope she supports our troops and offers military discount for her OnlyFans.
By ungodly experiments, he means your typical round of vaccinations.
Also, there’s a waiver for just about anything in the military. If there’s an actual medical concern with vaccinations, then you can apply for a waiver. The problem is when people confuse an actual medical condition with a conspiracy theory they read on the internet.
US Soldiers are given many vaccines to prepare them for various diseases abroad or weaponized. Historically, refusing could result in sever penalties. I also think it’s been normally questioned whether some vaccines given were experimental or rushed, but could find no explicit proof that’s happened before.
Military personnel sue for use in experimental agent testing.
Experimental drugs given to soldiers during the Gulf war
See also the Burn pits, Agent Orange, CTE and other effects from prolonged exposure to crew weapons use, and the working conditions inside AC-130s and related health effects
To join the US military you have to literally sign over your bodily autonomy to join. Once you do then they can pump you full of experimental drugs, or run whatever other ungodly experiments, all they want.
Doesn’t that just come with being a US citizen. Or being any other citizen
Labourers sell their labour, but they effectively have bodily autonomy, they get to walk away if they want to. That’s largely not true for hired murderers.
Depends on your definition of mortal danger and how OSHA compliant your work site is.
Right, but you’re also not in mortal danger when you’re fitting pipes in Nebraska vs. Baghdad.
Oh man, this is wrong.
In. 2022, there were 500k plumbers in the US, I don’t have exact numbers for how many pipe fitters there were, but it’s a position that’s always in high demand, safe to say that very few of that 500k number are pipe fitters, less than a quarter. So let’s say 100k pipe fitters which is honestly, probably generous.
There were 70 fatal accidents involving pipe fitters. Not injuries, fatal accidents only. That is a ratio of .0006.
The US military boasted 1.3 million members that year, and 270 fatal accidents, and 0 to enemy action. A ratio of .0002.
You are 2/3rd less likely to die in the armed forces then you are pipe fitting.
That’s interesting, but it would be perhaps more interesting to compare the yearly average accross a longer time frame. Also didn’t a bunch of people get lung cancer and die as a result of burn pits? I’m sure people died years later from exposure to other hazards too, not to mention how many people commit suicide after.
Also this isn’t to say pipe fitting isn’t a dangerous job, I am just interested how the statistics would look over a longer time frame and with consideration of deaths that occur after service, but still as a result.
True, you’re far more likely to die working menial laborer jobs than you are in the military.
Laborers are providing direct goods to the people they supply too. The military is far more intangible with prevention being the key factor for it’s expense.
In the United States, there were far more occupational injury deaths among men than women. In 2020, there were 4,377 male occupational injury deaths in the United States, compared to 387 deaths among women.
9 military people die from hostile action in 2020. 317/1017 in accidents. 190 illness. 406 suicide.
https://dcas.dmdc.osd.mil/dcas/app/summaryData/deaths/byYearManner
I highly doubt they consider suicide for occupational hazards too which is strange in hindsight considering the military accounts for it now. One of the few things they do ahead of the woke curve lol. First responders as well.
So in reality you’d need to remove both suicide and illness from the military’s numbers to equal laborers.
363 died in the military then vs 4,774.
Even hostile deaths… 9 in hostile action and 37 homicides… Meanwhile there were 392 workplace homicides. 37,060 nonfatal intentional injuries.
I mean the joke in the military is literally you can’t kill yourself because it’s destruction of government property.
I agree with the point but you can tell your boss to fuck off and stop being a laborer whereas your ass gets thrown in prison if you decide you don’t want somebody else fully in control of what you eat when you sleep where you live and who you kill.
Both are selling your body but one of them you can’t decide to stop selling it.
Any form of physical labour is selling your body sex work is selling your right to refuse sexual consent. I think that makes it a worse situation for the person doing the sex work than other work
If you are doing only fans or similar how are you not consenting? It’s fully on your terms.
I doubt most people in the military would consent to getting their dick blown off by a mine if given the opportunity.
it’s not fully on your terms because if you refuse to provide sexual content for the only fans subscribers you stop getting paid which means that with the coercion of the market you stop having full and uncoerced control over your ability to refuse to give sexual consent to sharing provocative images of yourself
I think if you look at it that way, you could also say working for the military is selling your right to a safe workplace. Like, a lot of other jobs (including sex work) can be dangerous, and often are due to a lack of care from those in power. But the military is necessarily dangerous by its very nature.
yeah which is why I wouldn’t join the army and would advise anyone not to
although sex workers are far more likely to experience PTSD than soldiers
also sex workers are substantially more likely to be killed in a violent attack than soldiers are at 112-225 per 100,000 for sex workers and 51 out of 100,000 for the branch of the army with the highest mortality rate so being a sex worker is more than twice as dangerous as being a soldier
Doing “unskilled labor” is at the very least creating something. Even if that thing is socially useless like a Starbucks location that’s across the street from another Starbucks location, that’s a better outcome than bombing or shooting something.
What I hate with this is that is defines that the army itself is good or bad. But in reality it is what it is used for. If its actually used for defence, then it’s very honorable. When it’s used as a tool to exploit resources to the rich, (aka generally being the aggressor), it’s not.
joining the army in the Imperial core will always be bad and make the troop/vet complicit in the countless deaths and destruction
The original movies were inspired by WWII.
Starship Troopers isn’t real, but that doesn’t mean the right wing militarism it satirises isn’t very much real.
The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t real, but that doesn’t mean the Christian fundamentalism it references isn’t very much real.
1984 isn’t real, but that doesn’t mean that the totalitarianism it references isn’t very much real.
Avatar isn’t real, but that doesn’t mean that the colonialism is references isn’t very much real.
Now, you’re free to find Star Wars stupid or shallow. You’re free to find it childish, because it appeals to a young audience.
But suggesting Star Wars comparisons automatically have no merit simply because ‘it’s not real’ is, to be blunt, stupid.
Hey, im not trying to be rude or anything I just wanna quickly say that honor is a fiction typically used by the rich and powerful to manipulate the young and well-meaning into becoming fucked up stormtroopers for capital.
In modern context, sure. In a wider anthropological historic context, no. My understanding of honor as a social concept, though I do not have proper academic sources to back this, is that it works in lieu of a central force of government enforcing laws and common rule. I.e. non centralized governance such as that of say the Norse people of old, had very strong etiquette of honor, the lack of which implied social status that would be worse to the one living than them dying. That meant weird things like a story of a man who robbed a house, realized they were doing something dishonorable (read illegal), went back and challenged the man who owned the house, killed them in combat and then stole their stuff. Just like laws it imposes rules on people, in this weird case murder in combat is better than theft, but still a rule. I would argue this notion of honor has existed across different societies for a long time, due to general absence of centralized governance, and has in modern times, relatively speaking on an anthropological timeline, been adopted and exploited by centralized powers to further control the populace, in the very real way you talk about.
Even simpler than that. People trying to slot sex work/army/any job into “good/bad” columns aren’t worth your attention.
Except for health insurance CEOs, those definitely bad.
Yeah peaceful militaries like Korea’s or China’s or Cuba’s are ok. Anyone joining the US military though if just in it for the war crimes.
I feel your answer lacks any sort of nuance. People join the military for financial reasons as well. Broke as fuck and need somewhere to stay, get food and possibly get an education or career? Military. Almost doesn’t matter your background, you can probably get in and stay as much as you like. The US system makes the military a good back up option for the poor. I don’t like how the US uses our military, but i also understand that those in there aren’t necessarily happy with their options either. If there existed a alternative system like the military (work, pay, food, housing, education, career), people would probably join that over risking dying or having to kill people.
peaceful militaries
Korea’s or China’s or Cuba’s
Not sure if joking or not
I wouldn’t call North Korea firing missiles over other sovereign countries very peaceful. As well as China doing troop exercises that obviously prepare for the invasion of Taiwan. I’m sure there are more examples.
The DPRK had literally never been to war outside its territory; it’s not a dove but at least it hasn’t invaded multiple sovereign countries like its southern cousin.
China does troop exercises like every single other country in the world.
It literally is, it harms no one and acts as deterrent from the US having another imperialist adventure where they kill 20 percent of Koreans.
Are you talking about that time they launched a missile over the least populated possible part of Japan as part of a test? What are they supposed to do, just not advance their tech? They’re surrounded, they’ve got to launch them over somebody and they did it the safest way they could.
So boot camp, as it is full of military exercises, would count as not peaceful?
China’s military just routinely ethnically cleanses its own people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadian_incident?wprov=sfti1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_regimes?wprov=sfti1
Jfc.
Lol can’t think of a single western country that’s had an “honorable” war post 1945. The US army is unequivocally bad
I mean, even for defence. Your settling, an argument, the rich and powerful people above you are having. You’re settling it with your life.
See, that’s an easy question to answer: Did you, or whoever, join the military while the US, or your country, was being attacked?
If you wait til you are attacked, you may not be trained or ready enough to actually defend your country from the attack. You can still join in times of peace with intentions of defense for the future, helping with disaster relief, and providing international aid.
One can’t join the military in order to prevent attacks and be ready for potential attacks? That doesn’t make any sense. You think armies can just spring into existence the moment an attack occurs?
The people who wrote the US Constitution thought exactly that. There was no provision for standing armies in that document and there is a record of discussion as to why. (See Art1.S8.Cl12)
The idea of preventing attacks is like prosecuting thought crime with deadly force, it just makes you the bad guy and is used to justify aggressive behavior in return.
I would never compare, being a sex worker is obviously incredibly more honorable
But…saying that something is more honorable than something else is comparing them?
EDIT: to be clear, her point is absolutely valid. This isn’t (to misquote a replier) “But I must find way for sex lady be dumb”. Her actual point is spot-on. This particular linguistic evolution just feels weird to me - feels like the new “literally”.
They don’t mean "I’m not making a comparison, but “There is no comparison to be made, one of these things is clearly better”
It means to make a connection, not a comparison. Your connecting the concept of comparison to the concept of equating is equating however.
Besides it being a joke, fuck the troops. Fuck the troops. Fuck the troops. Fuck the troops.
That’s all that matters about what they said
I don’t sell my body because nobody wants it.
No, don’t say that. Everybody has parts that are desirable!
- organ traders
Think about how much you could get if you rented your armpit to a family of four!
How much Kool aid do you need to drink to think a soldiers job is “saving people”? Except for medics that’s pretty much the opposite of the point.
I thought all American soldiers died far away from home so Americans can bake apple pie and sleep on red white and blue bed sheets.
According to former US president Donald Trump, the soldiers that died abroad are all losers and suckers because a good soldier doesn’t die.