#american military culture

[isaacsapphire]

Interesting on multiple levels, with a variety of real life implications.

[sgt-tombstone]

Don’t know if anyone knows this but in the US Army*, Sergeant is sometimes shortened to something that sounds approximately like “Sar’ent” and I think the fic potential there is hilarious

Either the 141 visits a US Army base or a US Spec Ops team visits Credenhill; either way, they’re working in close proximity for several weeks. A couple of days in, Ghost noticed that Soap is on edge, not seriously or alarmingly so, just enough to poke at a bit, so he pokes.

“It’s these bloody fuckin’ Americans, LT,” Soap grunts. “They better start putting some fuckin’ respect on the G.”

“What the fuck are you talking about, Johnny?”

“Och, you haven’t noticed?” Soap says, holding open the door for them both to step outside. “They don’t pronounce sergeant right.”

“Oh, is that all,” Ghost says breezily. “Well, that’s good then, they fit right in; you don’t pronounce anything right.”

“Haud yer weesht,” Soap says, begrudging fondness softening the edge of the phrase. “Here, watch.”

There’s an American captain approaching and, as inferior officers, both Soap and Ghost salute him as he gets closer. The captain salutes them both with a polite “morning, lieutenant, sar’ent,” and then continues on. As soon as he’s past, though, Johnny turns to Ghost with a comically exasperated expression, one eyelid nearly twitching, and Ghost can’t help the bark of laughter that escapes him.

If he manufactures as many situations for the Americans to address Soap and Gaz just to watch them both lose their minds over the butchered pronunciation, that’s between him and God (and maybe Price, who definitely catches on and, Ghost notices with no small amount of glee, also actively participates)

*I’m not sure if the British Army shortens it too but for the sake of crack, I’m going to pretend like they don’t lmao

[mimi-0007]

Frances Eliza Wills (married name: Frances Thorpe; 12 July 1910 – 18 January 1998) was an American naval officer and one of the first two African American female officers commissioned by the United States Navy. After her years with the WAVES, she worked as secretary to Langston Hughes.

[chamerionwrites]

”Your comfort is not more valuable than another person’s life, let alone hundreds or thousands of other people’s lives” is a very simple and obvious ethical concept and yet USAmericans will regularly stand up and argue the opposite with their whole chests. Peak imperialism brainworms

[compacflt]

wip wednesday: made a HUGE amount of progress this week (for context—purple is unfinished & yellow is finished; last week all of them were purple) … i am in the home stretch here

[empirearchives]

Hat, circa 1814

Military chapeau worn by Colonel Mendez I. Cohen (1796-1879) while he served as a member of Captain Nicholson's Company and General Armistead's command at the Battle of Fort McHenry in 1814. The triangular hat is decorated on the front with a gold emblem of an eagle with a shield, surrounded by gold braids and ribbons.

Courtesy of the Maryland Center for History and Culture

[hussyknee]

Regular reminder that if you don't live in the Global North, nothing they have to say applies to the rest of us. Actually most things they say have little value anyway since the Global South and Eastern folks are afterthoughts to them, much less center us in their social justice.

- The USAmerican cultural hegemony has fuck all to do with us. Be aware of what they're trying to peddle you, but they have more power to harm and radicalise you than you have ever could to harm them. This applies to both the Western left and right wing. They are both equally racist, colonial and imperialist.

- Global North issues around capitalism, exploitation and piracy have nothing to do with us. Consumer activism might work to some extent over there idk, but if anyone brings it up over in the lands of the Black and brown people, you can laugh them out of the country.

- Their queer history is not ours. Congrats to Stonewall and all but that's just some shit that happened in the US. We need to dig past 18 different strata of cultural genocide and colonial garbage to mine our queer histories back into the light, and designing microlabel flags and fighting over colonizer language acronyms have fuck all to do with that either.

- Always pirate everything within reach. Save up and buy from authors and creators you really like (that's what I do – esp when it's a BIPOC creator), but people who can't afford to buy shit in the first place ain't stealing food out of anybody's mouths. Pirating is praxis and always has been since the days of the East India Company.

- Don't buy into the USAmerican theories of race. They aren't universal. "BIPOC" especially is a USAmerican specific term, it is not used in the UK or other settler colonies. Constructs of race and the tribal Other far predated European colonization; race as a colour system that exists today is simply one variation of it. The global apartheid against the mellanated takes many forms, histories and terminology. There are especially no "people of colour" in Asia, Africa, Caribbean and Polynesia. There are only people who live there, and "people of white".

Race is a fake, made-up conceptualization imposed by whoever has power within each region. It's ethnic, cultural and casteist, with no biological basis whatsoever. There is no uniformity, no universalism, no rhyme nor reason to any of it; the only people who know exactly who doesn't belong are the oppressors. I'm seeing concepts like "unambiguously black" floating around the terminally online Western left; any dark-skinned person of the Global South should split their sides laughing at it. Whites have no ambiguity on who the darkies are.

- Read, watch, listen to, play whatever the hell you want, just have the sense to pirate it, and to be very conscious about the narratives they try to smuggle.

- When the US and UK speak, listen with compassionate interest, offer what solidarity you can spare for their downtrodden, and then go back to reading and following your own fucking news. Focus on our own women's and reproductive rights, trans rights, queer histories, rise of fascism, militarisation, anti-blackness, class warfare, nationalist violence, imperialism etc. That is decolonization, that is emancipation from the Western cultural hegemony. Everything else is the bread and circuses of empire, in which both the left and right wing of the West are complicit.

We owe the Global North nothing more than we can each individually afford to extend to them on grounds of common human decency and compassion. Which is a lot more than they will ever reciprocate.

[plangentia]

sorry to any americans but i do not understand marching bands

[shallowrambles]

So I've been thinking. It's funny how enjoying meta is somewhat embedded with trust.

Like, if you're "friends" and have followed a person for a long time, you have more a sense of their values, and it's easier to read their difficult meta because you trust more that they're being charitable/nuanced.

If you don't know them, it's harder to trust that they're not funneling difficult topics into rationalization of liking/supporting gross shit.

[eelhound]

"Being scandalized by Republican hypocrisy sort of feels like getting mad at a dog for peeing on your carpet. If anything, you’re the chump for having any sort of expectations for them.

The far more perverse thing, to me, is the way the idea of 'political violence' has been invoked in the aftermath of [the attempted Trump assassination] as something totally alien and un-American. 'There’s no place in America for this kind of violence,' said President Joe Biden. 'It’s sick,' he continued, saying that this kind of political violence was 'just unheard of.' He later said the violence was 'contrary to everything we stand for as a nation.' Former President Obama shared similar sentiments, saying, 'There is absolutely no place for political violence in our democracy,' urging Americans to 'use this moment to recommit ourselves to civility and respect in our politics.' The headline for the New York Times Editorial Board’s take on events was that 'The Attack on Donald Trump Is Antithetical to America.'

I’m sorry, but what country do these people think they live in? We’ve just spent the last nine months being blasted in the face with images and videos of some of the most unspeakable carnage imaginable coming out of Gaza. Most of it has been carried out using U.S.-made weapons. Political violence is so 'antithetical to America' that on the very same evening that the op-ed was penned, the Israeli military dropped eight massive American-made bombs on the al-Mawasi refugee camp, an area that the Israel Defense Force had previously designated a 'safe zone' for civilians to flee. Israel claimed that two senior members of Hamas may have been hiding among the 80,000 civilians sheltering there. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, 90 people are dead and 300 are wounded. One of the survivors described the scene to Reuters: 'I left the tent and looked around, all the tents were knocked down, body parts, bodies everywhere, elderly women thrown on the floor, young children in pieces.' Not long before reports of this massacre rolled in, Israel Katz, the foreign affairs minister of Israel, issued a condemnation of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, saying 'Violence can never ever be part of politics.' The irony was apparently lost on him.

Many of the people currently condemning political violence don’t actually hate political violence. What they really condemn is violence against politicians. But there is no act of violence more political than dropping bombs on a city of defenseless people because you want their land. Massacres like the one carried out Saturday have been going on for nine months, and, among the political class, they have rarely been condemned with anything nearing the force of the Trump assassination. In fact, the student protesters who spoke out against the war in Gaza — condemning political violence, in other words — were met with state violence themselves, which was cheered on by these same politicians. 

On the contrary, the people right now who are dismayed at political violence are some of its foremost perpetrators. Biden is, of course, selling Israel the weapons they’re using to destroy Gaza and kill scores of its people. Beyond that, President Obama authorized so many drone strikes during his term of office that if he were to apologize to one innocent civilian killed by them each day, it would take him more than three years. Trump, today’s brave victim of political violence, not only expanded those drone assassinations and spoke openly about 'taking out terrorists’ families' but even bragged about ordering the assassination of an American citizen in an act of 'retribution.' 

Even when they’re not directly ordering acts of what we might think of as 'political violence, U.S. leaders oversee a system that inflicts violence on both a national and global scale.

At home, both parties support a for-profit healthcare system that kills tens of thousands of Americans each year who can’t afford medical care. Each week, nearly 150 people (and nearly 1,500 in the wintertime!) still die of COVID-19, in part because treatments for the illness are so unaffordable. The Biden administration has abandoned most efforts to mitigate the virus, including workplace protections, and ended the public health emergency in 2023, which transferred costs of testing, vaccination, and care from government to health insurance companies and individuals. The CDC now tells workers that they no longer need to stay home from work for five days if they catch the illness, and only one state, New York, still requires businesses to pay leave for employees who are sick with COVID. And some state governments have even criminalized wearing masks in public.

The Supreme Court just made it legal for states and cities to jail homeless people sleeping outside. Police, whose departments both parties have showered with increasing amounts of funding, killed more people last year than at any point in the previous decade. The U.S. has so many mass shootings that it averages out to more than one a day, but our leaders have failed to pass even the most basic gun control laws, like an assault weapons ban or universal background checks at the federal level. And after mass shootings, Republican-led state legislators in particular have been more likely to loosen gun restrictions rather than tighten them.

When migrants flee poverty and war to seek relative safety in the United States, they are met with razor wire and buoys with blades affixed in order to maim them. Since the U.S. Border Patrol began its Prevention Through Deterrence program in 1994, the agency reports that 10,000 people have been killed while attempting to cross. Other aid organizations estimate the number to be as high as 80,000. Even those who reach the U.S. safely are often subject to inhumane conditions in immigration detention centers.

The United States provides military support to a majority of the globe’s dictators, which allows them to carry out their own acts of political violence. The U.S. has provided arms to Saudi Arabia as it has carried out a monstrous military campaign in Yemen that has killed more than 150,000 people, including tens of thousands of civilians. U.S. sanctions have inflicted collective punishment on the people living in enemy nations, like Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran, in an effort to foment regime change. One study found that U.S. sanctions on Venezuela, which deprived its people of food and medical supplies, contributed to as many as 40,000 deaths from 2017-2018 within the country. 

Each act of violence described above is a consequence of political actions or political inactions. And I could go on with more examples, going all the way back to the founding of the nation and the genocide of Native Americans. As former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner wrote in Newsweek yesterday, 'America was founded on violence. [...] A nation founded in violence, whose economy is rooted in violence, will have a society that is violent.'  And yet, most of this violence is inflicted on average people, not politicians — which may be one reason our policies are rarely conceived of as 'violent.'

To be clear, I don’t intend to diminish the significance of the attempt on Donald Trump’s life. It was indeed a destructive act of political violence that should be opposed. But the very same people who treat an attack on Trump as some horrifying anomaly — including Trump himself — are perpetrators of vastly greater violence than what occurred on Saturday.

 In response to the assassination attempt against Trump, in an effort to 'lower the temperature,' the Biden campaign pulled its advertisements criticizing Trump from the air. And on condition of anonymity, campaign officials reportedly told Reuters that 'Rather than verbally attacking Trump in the coming days, the White House and the Biden campaign will draw on the president's history of condemning all sorts of political violence including his sharp criticism of the ‘disorder’ created by campus protests over the Israel-Gaza conflict.' (Reuters has since quietly removed this paragraph from the story, though they did not issue a correction or retraction, so the reason is unclear.) Apparently, now that Trump has been shot, he’s no longer a 'threat to democracy,' and they’re instead going to spend precious time bashing voters that Biden already desperately needs to support him. 

This was an election where, in the words of President Biden, 'Personal freedoms are on the ballot.  The right to privacy, liberty, equality, they’re all on the ballot.' But after the assassination attempt, according to Axios, a 'senior House Democrat' says 'We've all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency.' Two days ago, Trump was Hitler Jr. Now, the party that has spent the last nine years claiming to be the only bulwark against fascism is throwing in the towel with fascism on the doorstep. 

It could not be clearer that, to the people in charge, all of this is a game and a joke. But seen from their perspective, the decision of Democratic elites to essentially throw the election in an act of decorum does make a sort of sense. Writer and attorney Dylan Saba put it quite well on X: 'Truly beautiful to see the ruling class come together like this… What’s most important is their personal safety — and the love they have for one another.' 

He’s right! People in Biden’s position will be insulated, more than most, from the consequences of a potential Trump victory. They will not be deported if he wins the election. They’ll be able to pay to get their loved one an abortion if they need one. None of them are transgender and at risk of having their legal personhood revoked. Most of them would probably benefit from Trump’s plan to get rid of the federal income tax in favor of a regressive tariff. 

To the extent that the members of the ruling class care about any of this, it’s only insofar as it affects their personal power and well-being. Just look at how Joe Biden has been acting in the past few weeks as he’s clung to the nomination. When asked how he’d feel if his decision to stay in the race results in Trump returning to power, he said: 'I'll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that's what this is about.'

That really is 'what this is about.' This is about them, their comfort, their egos, and their personal glory — all of it completely divorced from the reality of life for the vast majority of people on this planet. And that’s why an assassination attempt disturbs these people so much more than all the death and destruction that is inflicted on the world each day as a result of their actions. We must remember: the fights that matter are not theirs, they’re ours."

- Stephen Prager, from "'Political Violence' is All Around Us." Current Affairs, 16 July 2024.

[bijoumikhawal]

"Biden is the best choice and he's actually really empathetic and reasonable but also you can't wait for a candidate that won't do genocide and war crimes because to become a presidential candidate you have to be willing to do that" see what you fundamentally don't understand is I'm not waiting for a candidate that won't do war crimes, because I know that. I cannot morally stomach this system, it's a joke to claim its democratic, and AMERICA DELENDA EST. this country is a plague on this Earth

[learningfromlosing]

Happy fourth of july its harder for me to say im american than to say im bisexual

[happi-speech]

The concept if cursing is quite strange to me the more and more I think about it.

Americans just decided there are words that are just forbidden to say bc theyre 'cursed' or too vulgar to utter. But they exist to say? Yet are heavily censored from being heard despite their frequency in informal speech.

Some words arbitrarly get less censorship, like 'ass' and even 'shit' bc theyre seen as vulgar but not too 'cursed', while words like 'fuck' and even vulgar words for genitals and phrases mentioning god like 'goddamit' are censored almost always on public broadcasting stations and media.

Children saying 'curse words' is seen as extremely offensive and is even a right of passage when they reach an arbitrary age threshold when its acceptable or at least expected that they learn to 'curse'. I remember how it felt to utter 'curse words' as a child and how taboo it felt. Now i just dont fucking care, but try to have some decorum when contexts call for more formal speech, like around elders or parents.

American southern English has a thing where certain words, usually interjections and intensifiers, are so charged w vulgarity and moral depravity (i guess bc theyre vain and mortal?) that theyre forbidden to be heard on radio and taught not to say in childhood. This was totally normal to me until I tried to find studies of where 'cursing' as a concept came from thru the etymology of 'curse words'. Theres not much out there.

Does your language or dialect have a concept of 'cursing'?

[mimi-0007]

Happy Veterans Day

[schizononagesimus]

i get why we do it but i hatehatehate when we have polls that are like. non usamericans vs usamericans. because my brain just goes [tv static of having moved intercontinentally not having english as a first language but forgetting my first language out of disuse having a 1st gen parent getting bullied when i went to US schools for talking funny and spelling things "wrong" but getting bullied when i went to school abroad for talking funny and so on and so forth] like i KNOW most people arent me but being third culture is such a fucking concept dude

[vivi-scera]

christopher nolan movies are to me what marvel movies are to everyone else