America's Army Comes to the Mac

mrpuffypants writes "Not to leave all of the Mac community out in the rain the U.S. Army has released a Mac version of America's Army. Now get out there and train for Iraq, maggots!"

Comments

"America's Army": Your tax dollars at work

[Zhe Mappel]

Why the army would create a murder simulator and distribute it to kids is a question we ought to be asking as a democracy.

The answer might seem obvious - i.e., you can't have cannons without fodder for them - but recruitment isn't the only reason.

Recruitment may not even be the primary reason. The ranks of Walmart America are very deep; there are plenty of the working poor who can be drawn upon to fight our imperial wars without recourse to a draft that would be politically unpopular with the chattering classes.

No, one of "America's Army"'s unspoken purposes is cultural adjustment, or as the army likes to say, pacification. It's supposed to make you feel good about our noble wars of liberation, to innoculate you against thinking about why the rest of humanity regards them as wrong. You may be certain neither you or yours will ever join the army, but that's sort of the point. Vicarious "patriotism" breeds moral passivity: it becomes that much easier for you to accept the status quo when you have fun pretending to be a hero in "America's Army." They also serve, who only sit and click...

So click away. You paid for this, after all. Unfortunately, somewhere overseas, and much more expensively, so has someone else.