My father has commented to me about the weird warrior/war-fighter phrasing that came into vogue in the late 90’s. He remembered as a young soldier in the early 80’s not hearing those terms at all, but during a stint in the National Guard in the years before 9/11 he started hearing that sort of phrasing all the time.
It stuck him as vaguely undemocratic or even slightly barbaric. More suited to some caste in the Middle Ages than a modern all volunteer force of citizens-soldiers.
I think warfighter crept into the lexicon for somewhat understandable reasons, likely because of the increasing frequency of joint operations (i.e., operations involving more than one branch of the military working together) after Vietnam, combined with the long-standing military tradition whereby members of any given branch take great offense if you refer to them using the wrong professional label (i.e., soldier, sailor, ~crayon-eater~ marine, airman, space cadet). That is, we can't just call all of them soldiers because only members of the Army are soldiers, so if for example you call a mixed group of marines and soldiers "soldiers", the marines will make their displeasure known to you, aggressively and in no uncertain terms.
When you're talking about DoD stuff all day long and frequently need to refer generically to the mixed personnel involved in a joint operation, warfighters beats saying Soldier-Sailor-Marine-Airman-Spacecase. All the other alternative phrases for the concept of "person employed by the military in one of the five combat arms branches" are variations on "member" and tend to sound clunky or be overly verbose, like "service member" or "member of the military." Try saying "service members" 50 times per day. Trust me, it gets old fast.
And frankly I don't see the problem with warfighter. Fighting wars is quite literally what they do, and pretending otherwise does a disservice to the truth and risks papering over the deadly seriousness of their work. Warfighter is also quite distinct from "warrior," which carries connotations of a specifically aggressive and barbaric flavor of professional violence purveyor. Like you say, it sounds like some atavistic hereditary soldier caste for whom violence is a sacred vocation joyfully undertaken rather than a solemn duty carried out only with great reluctance and forbearance.
> When you're talking about DoD stuff all day long and frequently need to refer generically to the mixed personnel involved in a joint operation, warfighters beats saying Soldier-Sailor-Marine-Airman-Spacecase. All the other alternative phrases for the concept of "person employed by the military in one of the five combat arms branches" are variations on "member" and tend to sound clunky or be overly verbose, like "service member" or "member of the military." Try saying "service members" 50 times per day. Trust me, it gets old fast.
If only you hadn't found the perfect word in your description of the "problem": they are "personnel".
"personnel" is too broad though as it could include all of the civilian support staff, admin staff, contractors, etc. Sometime you do want a term to collectively include all of these people, but sometimes you want to just refer to the ones actively doing the military bits and not the support bits.
But even that peace keeping will involve active combat, unless the mission fails or the force involved is so capable ot deters opponent. You dont want to end up like the blue helmets in lebanon and more like nordbat in kosovo.
That still means the main point, the reason they are there, will never be peace. They are there to fight, and to fuck your shit up - which is both an image the current administration embraces, and very much not a good look outside the country.
So why did this conversation needed to be kept from malign rogue anti-Trumpers in the NSA (who would be risking very real jail time) but did not require the basic level of OPSEC that would keep the editor of the Atlantic out?
Well Jefferson certainly wasn't ever wrong about anything. He certainly wouldn't have held any beliefs contrary to 20th or 21st century values. /s
Obviously the dude had a lot of good ideas, but just grabbing anything he said and acting like it's gospel is flawed for dare I say a pretty glaring reason...
I'm not saying that Jefferson's words were elevated beyond his peers.
His flaws certainly belie such an assertion.
I'm saying that what Jefferson did was to remove problematic judges.
Congress had, has, and will have the power to reshape the federal judiciary as they choose. They can erase all courts below the supreme, and they can add or remove justices to the highest court as they choose (excepting present members, which are lifetime). Thus the saying "pack the court."
To challenge an executive that has friends in congress is a dangerous proposition for a federal judge.
> To challenge [the legality of an action by] an executive that has friends in congress is a dangerous proposition for a federal judge.
> It could end badly.
This implies that the courts cannot be an effective check and balance on the other branches. Aren't they meant to be?
It depends what you think is meant by the term "effective". Courts foremost serve a truth-finding function and buffer against arbitrary authority being applied to individual people.
It's always been controversial whether a court can disparage a law of broad application or impugn the president directly. The "effectiveness" of those functions was always a little speculative.
Lower courts typically deal with questions of fact and how they intersect with questions of law; higher courts (appeals courts and Supreme Court) typically deal with questions of law (ambiguity/interpretation) exclusively. Courts as an institution don't serve a "truth-finding function" so much as a "law-ambiguity removing function".
> disparage
> impugn
Everyone seems focused on whether a court has the right to, like, insult the president personally. But that's not really the important part of what they're doing. They _of course_ have the right to question whether the law allows what the president is doing -- and questioning this is not disparagement or impugning.
They are meant to be a check and balance on the legislative and executive branch, but those branches are also meant to be a check and balance against the judicial. It's not a one way street. This statement is not intended to address the root current event being discussed.
I guess you could argue back in 1776 AI and aluminum had a roughly equal impact, only for aluminum to over take AI and become far more important by the early 20th century…
Yeah people forget that Sushi was once considered very adventurous to most people, and than a huge percentage of American men only first experienced hot sauce as Tabasco sauce in the army. Other than ethic enclaves I think the American palette was historically considered pretty underdeveloped.
sorry sis but i don't care if he's old or not. monty python is boring and if you gatekeep people using "jokes" from it, you should reconsider your life.
I wonder if a better use would be to establish a new medical school at a university without one. It seems like if society has too few doctors we need additional medical student spots more than a reduction in medical student debt.
Too few doctors thing is problem with different bottlenecks... Mainly being that the US Residency program is funded by the gov't, and is competitive to get into. Many of the lesser schools and especially DO or carribean schools have graduates who are not able to get into residency on first try because there are not enough slots.
You could take that money and open another medical school, and you may well get a pretty good medical school, but you probably won't get one nearly as good as Hopkins'.
That seems fine to me. While it sounds nice, I am skeptical this donation will do much in terms of more equitable access to higher education, precisely because John Hopkins is one of the best med schools around. To get in you already need to be privileged or exceptional and probably both. I'd love to know how many people ever have been accepted into Johns Hopkins and declined to go exclusively because of the cost of tuition; I'd be surprised if it's even like 0.5% of students.
Meanwhile, you don't need to be a genius to better yourself.
Or give the money to a more “working class” med school that trains regular doctors to work in regular practices and hospitals.
Hopkins is the elite - those doctors are going to be the best of the best, and they’re going to be well connected and compensated regardless of where they started.
Yeah it’s always crazy looking down some street perpendicular to the levee and seeing something the size of a skyscraper on its side slide by at 10 mph.
It stuck him as vaguely undemocratic or even slightly barbaric. More suited to some caste in the Middle Ages than a modern all volunteer force of citizens-soldiers.
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