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Net Addiction Gets Finnish Soldiers Out Of Army
nerdb0t writes "Reuters is reporting that the Finnish Defense Forces have allowed some men to be excused from military service because of 'Internet Addiction.' The service period is 6 months - but that's too long away from the internet for these guys. Is this a joke? Is this a legitimate illness? Hm..where can I apply for disability..."
They don't get pardoned forever. It seems they got 'E' which means 'go home and grow a little'. So they need to come back and do their service 2-3 years later.
For record you can get 'E' just by requesting it, these guys were forced to 'E' due to addiction =)
(status of different letters in Finnish Defence Forces:
A - primary letter given to everyone, capable of active service
B - Some problem, maybe bad allergy or old injury
C - No service during peace time
D - No service (even if it's war time)
E - Service postponed )
The alternatives to that are:
- 13 months of civil service
- getting the conscription delayed long enough that you're too old for the army
- getting a certificate from the doctor that you have a disability that prevents you from going to the army
But delayed and told to come back later after couple of years. At least according to the local Finnish media.
(Totally crazy anyway. This is Finland for heavens sake, not some pansy-ass Sweden ;)
People drop out of the military for many reasons. Most people can't cope with the sense of authority that the army instills. All of these are sent home to grow up for a couple of years - net addiction is not an excuse, it just means that you're psychologically unfit at the moment.
Military service is mandatory in Finland, and min. service time is 180 days, max. 362 days. You can also carry out the service as civil service (395 days) and in some cases as unarmed military service (330 days if I remember correctly).
www.mil.fi
Those that refuse to enter even civil service can be sentenced to (usually a minimum security) prison for 197 days (max.).
We use cell phones more than the internet, at least for now, so keeping in touch really isn't the thing internet is used for (cheap broadband is available in the south, the rest will have to pay their asses off on dialup or expensive broadband.)
The alcoholism isn't a problem for the military, since the drinking occurs on the soldiers' free time.
The thing about finnish military service is it's mandatory. If you don't want to do the punishment of 13 months of civil service, it's at least 6 months in the army. If you refuse both, you go to jail. Amnesty considers Finland one of the few countries that take prisoners because of their ideology.
The way to avoid service is to come up with a reason for them not to want you. The most common would probably be mental illness of sorts. There are countless stories about people doing the weirders stuff to convince their superiors they should be dismissed.
I think that would explain the net addiction. Somebody came up with a new way to avoid doing their time for another two years.
Yep, this is standard practice in the Finnish army. If you break down and say you can't take it anymore, for whatever reason, you can get out. But you'll have to come back after a few years (the assumption being that you have grown up a bit).
http://reference.allrefer.com/encyclopedia/F/Finn
However, with this bullshit, you wonder how they would fair now...
You know that they make Nokia phones there, along with many other consumer goods. It is capitalism, but a form of capitalism wherein all citizens get more benefits from capitalism. Finland has a strong welfare state. Half of all Finns live in government owned housing.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Technically it's defence forces, not army. We dont attack other countries=)
And about growing up...well it's sorta mean to say "grow up" and many use it to finish their studies. Doctors have very easy time in service, as do priests etc.
Probably in this case they were sent home to get rid of their addiction.
...and it has been happening for few years.
It's really not just their addiction that excuses them from serving their country.
I think the main reason is their lack of interest and ofcourse they are in a such a bad shape that it's impossible to manage the armyduties.
I mean that if you sit in front of your computer for 12 hours a day and then you suddenly have to wear 30-40 kilos backpack and told to march 10 kilometres.
/* If everybody would be like me the world would be much better place to be - at least in my mind. */
Umm, the conscripts serve 362 days at most. If you want to become an officer, you have several routes to choose from.
1. Go to the military academy (Officers)
2. School yourself in some civlian field and join later with your crendentials (i.e. electric engineers and the like) (Warrant officers)
3. Sign up after the army (NCOs).
It's entirely possible to make a career out of the army. Just because the conscription term is max. 362 days doesn't exclude anyone from staying longer as long as they work for the military.
Well, as Reuter's piece tells, 82% of Finnish men complete their military service. That's quite a high percentage and enough for a credible defense.
The Finnish performance in WW2 was mainly due to four factors. One, Stalin didn't send enough troops to the Finnish front so the Finnish army wasn't completely overrun. Two, the winter '39-'40 was very cold, even by Finnish standards, so the Soviet mechanical advantage was lost. Three, the Finnish army was very good in the use of artillery. Four, defending your homeland gives you some extra boost compared to simply invading some other country. I don't think that the "quality of the soldiers" was that much different.
:)
However, the recent studies have shown that most young Finnish people would jump to the arms if Finland were invaded, so I don't think this net addiction thing has any effect on that
Most developed countries that practise conscription (manditory military service for all or at least all male citizens) anymore don't do it to maintain a serious force. The face of warfare has changed, as the latest Gulf conflict really demonstrated, such that lots of cannon fodder with machine guns, which is about all conscripts are good for, can't hold a candle to technology. Well you can't have a conscript flying a plane or driving a tank, that takes a volunteer.
Doesn't mean it's worthless though. It's an "in case shit", to borrow a Chris Rock phrase, policy. Suppose someone was trying to invade Finland and NATO just wasn't able to send immediate help. Maybe it's WWIII or something. Whatever, just suppose. If everyone has had basic training, when you draft them it takes much less time to get them up to speed. You don't have to train them from scratch, or send them totally untrained against the enemy, you just give them a quick refresher and they can fight.
This goes double for countries with Finland that have, shall we say, inhospitable terrain.
Thing is, even if Finaland made every able citizen in their country serve in the military full time, they'd still not have a real military force to speak of only 1 million people and at conscript level abilityies. Never mind you'd destroy the economy doing that. So they don't, they have a small perminant military for the little things that need it, and then give everyone a little training, just in case.
Switzerland takes theis to the extreme, actually requiring all their households to have a government issued machine gun, which their citizens learn how to use during manditory military service. That combine with the terrain would make Switzerand an iron clad bitch to invade. That, and the finincal cooperation, were the two reasons the Nazis didn't invade.
It's not a real common practice these days, but it still works.
> All finnish men have to do their military service, which is 180, 270 or 360 days.
Hmm, sounds exactly like the army propaganda, not mentioning the alternatives at all. The civil service lasts for 395 days and there's also the choice of serving around 200 days in prison (which is what I did).
I agree with the rest of your post, though. It is a total hell trying to live as a productive member of the society when you can't sleep during the nights. Been there, done that.
"If I can't have a revolution, what is there to dance about?" - Albert Meltzer
Actually, the quality of soldiers was different, or rather the quality of the leadership. The Finns still had a lot of officers who had training and field experience from the old Imperial Russian army, but on the Russian side that talent had all been lost in the revolution, and even after that Stalin's purges had taken a heavy toll on the Red Army. Stalinism massively hurt almost everything important to any Soviet efforts, from science to the military, when the political leadership interfered with everything and replaced competent people with idiots that made bigger promises.
And...
Four, defending your homeland gives you some extra boost compared to simply invading some other country.
The Soviets had also expected there to be a lot of Finnish communists who would defect and greet the Red Army as some great liberator, but there weren't because the Soviets had already killed them. There had been a lot of communists in Finland, but most of them had moved to the Soviet Union (this was not a big deal for a Finnish communist: there were a lot of ethnic Finns living in the Soviet Union, so it was just the border between a capitalist bourgeois democracy and the great socialist wonderland) and the paranoid Soviets had, of course, executed almost all of them as spies or unreliables. (The rumors that not all was well in the wonderland then, naturally, contributed a lot to the Finnish will to fight; for the Finns, it was not just Finland that was at stake, but the fate of Finns as a people.)
Totalitarianism has a real habit of working against itself...
Technically, a person can become addicted to anything.
There are two kinds of addiction. One is psychological, and the other is physiological. In other words, you can have a direct mental (emotional, whatever) dependence on something, or your body can be dependant on something. Sometimes a psychological addiction can cause physical withdrawl symptoms, too, and just because you're psychologically addicted doesn't mean there isn't a physical side effect/benefit.
People allow addictions to continue in their lives because they're an escape from the mundane details and unpleasant things about life that they don't like. Caffine, the Internet, sex, routine, alcohol, spending money, being dumb, smoking, singleness - people get addicted to all these things, because they help the person avoid having to think about the real issues of life.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I think the rally driver bit can be explained by the fact that the countryside is full of small gravel roads which, in addition, are covered in snow and ice half of the year. The kids who are unfortunate enough to live there have nothing else to do so they end up driving around in old non-licensed cars. There even exists a term for these cards: peltoauto (field card). I never heard the word before I went to the army and actually met people from the Finnish periphery (kind of a tautology...)
F1 is more of a mystery. The drivers seem to be coming from places with paved roads. Go-karting? Anyway, we have produced more than those two F1 drivers (I'd argue any F1 driver is by definition a world class driver): Keke Rosberg (1982 world champion), Mika Hakkinen, J.J. Lehto, Mika Salo, and Kimi Raikkonen.
You can't shut us down! The Internet is about the free exchange and sale of other people's ideas!
Some of these people are likely to be using it just as an excuse, and if they get called back again in a few years they'll use another one until they have a family and then have a valid excuse... I know it's not Finland but I knew a guy from Sweden who got called up for their "compulsory" national service. He said that if you don't want to do it, all you had to do in the interview was say things like "I don't like people" and that they'd let you off, because you wouldn't be suitable in their eyes. So I get the impression it's just a formality thing and as long as not too many people are dodging out they're OK with it. Most people generally DO want to do it, it's not just Army work, it can be as a firefighter and things like that too.
Switzerland takes theis to the extreme, actually requiring all their households to have a government issued machine gun.
No, not all households. Only the active military have their gun (not machine-gun) at home. The peculiarity is that they are "active" until the age of 40 or something, going back to training for about 1 to 3 weeks every year, plus a few Saturdays going to shooting training.
That, and the finincal cooperation, were the two reasons the Nazis didn't invade.
I don't believe the miltary had anything to do with Switzerland not being invaded by Germany.
To put it simply: you don't attack your own bank.
BTW, the 2 countries which used to be poor and became rich after the World Wars are Switzerland and the US.
We're completely volunteer. In order to end up in the military here, you have to take yourself down to a recruiter's office, take a few tests, fill out a bunch of paperwork, and swear the enlistment oath in front of an officer.
Sure, we have selective service, but that hasn't been activiated since almost the vietnam war, and it isn't likely too.
Of course, my reaction was, "What, a military without internet access?"
Why can't they get it during off duty hours?
I don't read AC A human right
Finns take the defense of their tiny country quite seriously! For those of you who may not remember, a quick refresher on one of history's most forgotten wars- The Winter War, 1939-1940.
;)
Soviet Russia sent 23 divisions (460,000 troops) and 2,000 tanks into Finland in an act of naked agression, seeking little more than land expansion. They were told not to stop until they reached Sweden. They were so sure of victory that one of their divisions had a military band complete with instruments for their victory performance in Helsinki, after which they would install a puppet government.
Finland, with a whopping population of 3.6 million, managed to field 160,000 troops.
The final result:
-The Soviets suffered 400,000 casualties
-Stalin suffered a humiliating defeat, and was forced to sign the "Peace Agreement" March 13 1940.
Finland lost 10% of it's land, but survived as a free independent country. The Soviet army was recalled in defeat, with Stalin nervous about developments elsewhere in Europe as Hitler's war machine spun up.
To this day, even with Perestroika, Glasnost, and the "collapse" of the Soviet Union, the citizens of the tightly culturally interconnected scandanavian countries (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland) maintain a deep mistrust of Russia and it's motives for -anything-.
Do NOT mock the Finish army!
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
The service time is at it's shortest 6 months for crew. For some crew it will be 9(medics) months or 12(drivers) months. For every from corporal() up it will be 12 months.
:D - Even though I had to spend 12 months() I managed to spend the last 6 mostly in airconditioned office(5 comps, unlimited web, tv-card, fridge, sauna, gym, billiards table) developing web education and keeping servers running with 2 person crew. So the time off from net was not that long. :D
Every year about 10 % get sent home to grow up for few years before coming back. Point being that they didn't get off - just delayed.
Of course true player's got things under control
He actually joined the officer corp. So it wouldn't have been a sarge saying that.
he and a friend decided that it would be much more interesting not running around in forests, but rather learning how to tell others to do so.