All in the Family featured the curmudgeonly Archie Bunker. Archie was television’s most famous grouch, blunt, blustering, straightforward and untouched by the PC crowd. He was the archetype of the conservative male. Michael desprately tried to reeducate him, but he persisted in his breviloquence.



Looking back at the last 40 years, we realize: ARCHIE WAS RIGHT!

4/23/2015

Libertarian Revisionism

One of my well documented complaints against the Libertarian movement is what I call the 3 "P"'s.  Another is what I view as personal historical revisionism.  Here is a prime example:

I Made a Very Bad Mistake  Josh Holmes regrets joining the army.

Apparently Joshua Holmes joined the army is now and forevermore will be irreversibly butt hurt over the experience.  Boo Freaking Hoo. Lew Rockwell, which I read several times a week, is known for being anti war.  I'm OK with that stance and as a rule I think the US military policy should revert to what George Washington advised us to do.  Butt out of other peoples business. 

My beef is simple.  Josh volunteered for the US Army.  Nobody made him go.  I don't know what Josh's reasons were.  Maybe he wanted someone to foot the bill for college.  Maybe he wanted to see the world.  Maybe he wanted to do something manly to demonstrate that he was grown up.  I don't know all his reasons, but I do see his action.  He joined the army.

What's more he did two tours in the sandbox.

Which tells me no matter what he claims now, after his first trip he wanted a second one.

The army is an organization designed to kill people and break things.  That's what they do, they're the army, not the girl scouts.  Although under Obama I can see how there could be some confusion.  I don't think anyone is confused about the mission.  In fact I think his support for that mission is why Josh signed up.

Now that its over Josh feels bad about getting his college benefits for free.  Not exactly free, he had to do some stuff that he now regrets.  He just doesn't regret it enough to turn down his GI Bill or Vet Benefits. 

8 comments:

  1. Res,
    Sadly, morons like that are commonplace. I blame our "public" "education" system. I stopped reading Lew Rockwell years ago, when they lost their minds over the war (and when they booted Brad Edmonds). Pretty much ditto for Vox, but at least Vox is just a shade more intellectually more consistent.

    For the record; my position (unchanged since 2003) is that going into Iraq was sheer genius - it's the best thing W ever did.

    -Bill

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    1. I have no problem being anti-war as a philosophical position.

      I have a problem with wanting to go, then going, then trying to pretend you were some how misused or mistreated when you got back. The guy now teaches some form of firearms training. Wanna bet he touts his military experience to drum up customers and creditability for his classes?

      He's all about having his cake and eating it too.

      That's my gripe. He knew what the army was about before he went in. That's when he should have reflected on his choice and the moral implications of what he was doing.

      Delete
    2. How can you be anti-war as a philosophical position? That makes no sense. Even the Amish acknowledge that they'd all be dead if not for non-Amish.

      -Bill

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    3. Being anti war can take on different views.

      Extreme pacifism (no fighting for any reason) is a logical position, although not one I could hold.

      Moderate pacifism, the refusal to take human life, can be a religious POV or simply a personal one. A moderate pacifist may still serve his country in a non-combat role.

      Josh wants to pretend he occupies some sort of moral high ground by claiming it was a "bad war". I'm calling BS on that. Josh didn't profess any form of pre-enlistment philosophical or religious reservation to fighting in a war or serving in the military in general.

      What he is trying to do is make some sort of "just war" claim and say he was deceived into serving. I'm not buying what he is selling. He joined up because he wanted to. He went infantry because he wanted to. He saw combat because he wanted to.

      He did every last bit of what he did, because he volunteered for it. It's nobodies fault but his own.

      Delete
  2. WaterBoy10:07 AM

    Res Ipsa: "Which tells me no matter what he claims now, after his first trip he wanted a second one."

    Not necessarily. If he enlisted for a four-year period and got sent to Iraq early in his enlistment, he could have gotten sent the second time without reenlisting.

    Not that it negates the fact that he did enlist voluntarily in the first place -- just that the second one wasn't necessarily wanted.

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    1. What your saying about deployment schedules may be correct. I've been told that enlisted men were being rotated on a 1 and done policy for infantry troops. That may not have been the case for him or he may not have served both tours in the infantry, or my information may not have applied to the period he was in.

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  3. Ok, there are two points here; pacifism, and this idiot's self-serving "I only wanted to help people" nonsense. And; we're in agreement here, I'm not disagreeing, it just kinda bothers me to see pacifism presented as a rational viewpoint.

    Any pacifist position is actually anti-Christian, or anti-Western. Pacifism as we know it is a recent invention designed to undercut Western culture. Pacifism is not a logical position, or Biblical.

    As far as the Josh article goes; I have volumes of thoughts about it. First, note that he deployed in 2006, so he must have enlisted during the first phase of the Iraq war. There's no way he didn't know what he was signing up for. And if he did have some delusions about it, OSUT would have knocked those notions out of his head, and he would have been given plenty of opportunities to either profile out, or reclass to truck driver, or whatever the Army needed (infantry school has about a 15% dropout rate). If he has any brains, he should have easily qualified for one of the aviation positions, combat engineer, or some of the other MOS's that are chronically short (infantry is nearly always full, everybody wants to be infantry).

    And he just offhandedly drops every lefty canard;
    "the insurgents adopted IEDs as their chief weapon for resisting U.S. occupation". Occupation?

    "Here I was, wearing a uniform, carrying a gun, how could I condemn him for using violence to protect his home from foreign invaders?"

    "When I think of Iraq I am sorry for all the carnage and fear that we visited on those downtrodden, impoverished people. I feel indignation toward the rulers who lied to gin up support for this war of choice, who never once put themselves in harm’s way or took responsibility for the suffering they caused. Like Vietnam before it, Iraq will always be a reminder of the dangers that come from an uncritical trust in authority."

    WE visited? How about the foreign insurgents? How about Iran? How about the terrorists that were trying desperately to prevent elections? How about Saddam Hussein? And what's this about "lying"? We found all kinds of WMD's. And like Vietnam before it, we won the war and then left our allies to be butchered, due to an uncritical trust in utopian anti-colonial socialist dreamers.

    -Bill

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  4. That's part of my gripe. He's rewriting what he knew, what he did and why he did it. If you want to help people you join a missionary society. If you want to kill people and break things you join the army.

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