"Warfighter" seems to be trying to distinguish between those service members who are in combat roles and those who are in non-combat roles.
Any service member who's not a medic or a chaplain is a combatant, according to the Law of Armed Conflict. Besides, neither mortars nor rocket propelled grenades nor roadside bombs distinguish between the folks in infantry and the folks in logistics.
So "warfighter" is redundant. Moreover, it's not fully descriptive of everything today's service members are asked to do, because they also help respond to humanitarian crises.
It's jargon, and I'm not convinced there's any point in using it.
Someone who works in admin, intel, logistics, or any other job behind a desk is a service member but not a warfighter. Warfighter is not meaningless jargon; it's the right word in this context and what we use (Defense contractor and former Marine, here).
Funny you mention logistics. Lori Piestewa worked logistics. Roslyn Schulte was an intel specialist.
Their jobs didn't involve desks. Their jobs placed them in harm's way.
I'm curious how long you've been out, because these days, anyone who (a) wears a uniform and (b) goes downrange is a warfighter by definition. And these days, anyone who wears a uniform ends up going downrange; it's just a question of when.
Prosecutors didn't fail to pursue charges, they knew they could not charge him with a crime, so they didn't.
He shot another human being dead. Even professional police officers face inquiries when they do that.
It was entirely a politically motivated hatchet job pushed by Holder's DOJ in pursuit of the Obama Administration's gun control agenda and to mollify the Democratic party's black constituency.
The trial was a necessary step. When one person takes another person's life, the government has a responsibility to ensure that killing is justifiable and, if not, remove the killer from society.
I'm not arguing that the justice system didn't work here, because I think it did -- but it needed that kick in the pants. It needed a court proceeding. When someone's dead, you can't afford to just take the killer's word for what happened.
A lot of people want to believe in some fantasy narrative where Zimmerman is hunting black kids
I'm not one of those people, because I don't think Zimmerman's doing anything of the sort. Whether the justice system is doing that, however, is another story. Frontline's Sarah Childress writes:
Whites who kill blacks in Stand Your Ground states are far more likely to be found justified in their killings. In non-Stand Your Ground states, whites are 250 percent more likely to be found justified in killing a black person than a white person who kills another white person; in Stand Your Ground states, that number jumps to 354 percent.
Stand Your Ground laws are a Wild West solution looking for a problem. As I believe you point out, the law wasn't even relevant here -- and that should argue strongly to how unnecessary the law really is.
People make bad decisions which can cost them their lives, and in a sense its a tragedy, yes, but not a tragedy in the sense that "we have to make sure noone can defend themselves with lethal force".
Thing is, when you do defend yourself with lethal force, there needs to be some sort of court proceeding to validate whether it was justified. The initial outcries related to the Zimmerman case were that prosecutors failed to even pursue charges. And then when they finally did go with charges, they overstepped and tried to prosecute for murder, when at best they could only have proven manslaughter.
You mean those human beings "...endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights"?
Indeed I do. Because while you're quick to point out the one reference to a "Creator" in the Declaration of Independence, you'll find no mention of God at all in the Constitution, and only two mentions of religion.
The first is in Article VI, Section 3: "The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."
The second is, of course, the First Amendment, which both prohibits the restriction of free exercise of religion and prohibits establishment of an official government religion.
Incidentally, these same founding fathers stood behind the statement, found in the Treaty of Tripoli, that "The United States is in no way founded upon the Christian religion."
Don't worry, I won't charge you for the schooling.
Just as well; I'd have just had to ask for my money back.
But we've seen on a few occasions where people who are neither brilliant nor even smart have been responsible for some big disasters in modern U.S. history. Sept. 11 was a failure of the intelligence apparatus on a massive scale, in part because people at the top level weren't paying attention. The intelligence community's ineptitude (or malice) got the U.S. quagmired in Iraq for nearly a decade. The Challenger and Columbia disasters came after managers dismissed engineers' warnings.
Yeah, like those dangerous radical-extremist founding fathers believing in individual liberty, rights coming from God alone, and a very limited central government with few powers being the only sure way to minimize government abuse of power & corruption.
You, sir, are an idiot. The founding fathers viewed those rights as inherent to being a human being -- not coming from God, because then someone claiming to act on God's behalf could take them away.
The rest of your rant isn't even worth a response.
Let's think about what groups might talk about "states' rights": neo-Confederates and other white supremacists. In the context of an Air Force equal opportunity adviser's work, recognizing dog whistles like that is part of the job.
Some of the traits listed in the original training document include "irresponsive sweeping generalizations" and "inadequate proof behind assertions"...
All those empty FEMA camps and the US military's (Army/NG) recruitment push for "Internment Specialists" are sounding more and more ominous.
Precisely. Good example. Because you see, this document is solely to help folks uniformed servicemembers recognize extremist behavior. That's why you don't see anyone talking about this outside the right-wing paranoiasphere.
Fuck you. Flying is a necessary part of a normal life.
No it isn't. It's an optional part of a life that you consider to be normal, but other methods of transportation predate flight and are still viable.
That said, I'd like to see Congress spend as much time an effort to defund the TSA as they do to defund the Affordable Care Act. But where are the political points to be scored by doing something that's so commonsense?
Washington Post is reporting 42 dead confirmed at an aid station for Morsi supporters, 60 dead estimated by the Egyptian government, and over 2000 esimated by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Sounds like the Muslim Brotherhood has outsourced its statistical analysis to the American Tea Party.
Sarcasm doesn't do well with the wall-of-text format. There's only so many words you can read in your mind's inner "sarcastic tone" before it just feels screechy.
Like the online version of listening to Gilbert Gottfried...
Disagree. Police officers are humans. Humans have judgement. Drones are unmanned. No danger of human life being ended when someone fires on a drone (just cost/damage).
Except, as I mentioned earlier, when someone fires on a drone, misses, and that bullet heads downward. It's got to land somewhere, and by virtue of landing somewhere, it could put someone at serious risk injury or death.
No moreso than a police officer firing at an American citizen, so long as the American citizen fired first.
To be fair, you'd have to demonstrate the drone was in danger of actually being shot down or that someone else's life was in danger from the act of firing into the air. But that wouldn't be too hard if you're in a populated area firing at the sky, because there's a small but significant chance that bullet's going to land on somebody.
Slashdot Mirror
Airgapped intranet, if it's that damned important. Works pretty well for the DOD.
Yeah, because the *reputation* of the software companies doesn't matter at all. (roll eyes)
Sometimes the pirate group's reputation is better than the software company's.
"Warfighter" seems to be trying to distinguish between those service members who are in combat roles and those who are in non-combat roles.
Any service member who's not a medic or a chaplain is a combatant, according to the Law of Armed Conflict. Besides, neither mortars nor rocket propelled grenades nor roadside bombs distinguish between the folks in infantry and the folks in logistics.
So "warfighter" is redundant. Moreover, it's not fully descriptive of everything today's service members are asked to do, because they also help respond to humanitarian crises.
It's jargon, and I'm not convinced there's any point in using it.
Someone who works in admin, intel, logistics, or any other job behind a desk is a service member but not a warfighter. Warfighter is not meaningless jargon; it's the right word in this context and what we use (Defense contractor and former Marine, here).
Funny you mention logistics. Lori Piestewa worked logistics. Roslyn Schulte was an intel specialist.
Their jobs didn't involve desks. Their jobs placed them in harm's way.
I'm curious how long you've been out, because these days, anyone who (a) wears a uniform and (b) goes downrange is a warfighter by definition. And these days, anyone who wears a uniform ends up going downrange; it's just a question of when.
Lower class kid with no aspirations or talent who needs to suckle at the big green welfare machine's tit into maturity is more like it.
You must've been Army, because that doesn't describe any junior enlisted airman I ever met.
"Warfighter" is jargon. "Service members" is the general term for anyone in the military.
Prosecutors didn't fail to pursue charges, they knew they could not charge him with a crime, so they didn't.
He shot another human being dead. Even professional police officers face inquiries when they do that.
It was entirely a politically motivated hatchet job pushed by Holder's DOJ in pursuit of the Obama Administration's gun control agenda and to mollify the Democratic party's black constituency.
The trial was a necessary step. When one person takes another person's life, the government has a responsibility to ensure that killing is justifiable and, if not, remove the killer from society.
I'm not arguing that the justice system didn't work here, because I think it did -- but it needed that kick in the pants. It needed a court proceeding. When someone's dead, you can't afford to just take the killer's word for what happened.
A lot of people want to believe in some fantasy narrative where Zimmerman is hunting black kids
I'm not one of those people, because I don't think Zimmerman's doing anything of the sort. Whether the justice system is doing that, however, is another story. Frontline's Sarah Childress writes:
Whites who kill blacks in Stand Your Ground states are far more likely to be found justified in their killings. In non-Stand Your Ground states, whites are 250 percent more likely to be found justified in killing a black person than a white person who kills another white person; in Stand Your Ground states, that number jumps to 354 percent.
Stand Your Ground laws are a Wild West solution looking for a problem. As I believe you point out, the law wasn't even relevant here -- and that should argue strongly to how unnecessary the law really is.
People make bad decisions which can cost them their lives, and in a sense its a tragedy, yes, but not a tragedy in the sense that "we have to make sure noone can defend themselves with lethal force".
Thing is, when you do defend yourself with lethal force, there needs to be some sort of court proceeding to validate whether it was justified. The initial outcries related to the Zimmerman case were that prosecutors failed to even pursue charges. And then when they finally did go with charges, they overstepped and tried to prosecute for murder, when at best they could only have proven manslaughter.
You mean those human beings "...endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights"?
Indeed I do. Because while you're quick to point out the one reference to a "Creator" in the Declaration of Independence, you'll find no mention of God at all in the Constitution, and only two mentions of religion.
The first is in Article VI, Section 3: "The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."
The second is, of course, the First Amendment, which both prohibits the restriction of free exercise of religion and prohibits establishment of an official government religion.
Incidentally, these same founding fathers stood behind the statement, found in the Treaty of Tripoli, that "The United States is in no way founded upon the Christian religion."
Don't worry, I won't charge you for the schooling.
Just as well; I'd have just had to ask for my money back.
... Or maybe just more bluntly honest.
But we've seen on a few occasions where people who are neither brilliant nor even smart have been responsible for some big disasters in modern U.S. history. Sept. 11 was a failure of the intelligence apparatus on a massive scale, in part because people at the top level weren't paying attention. The intelligence community's ineptitude (or malice) got the U.S. quagmired in Iraq for nearly a decade. The Challenger and Columbia disasters came after managers dismissed engineers' warnings.
The "don't hire brilliant people" quotation is just stupid. No one that would have to be responsible for their words would say that.
Actually, that quote precisely captures the thought process behind way too many U.S. government hiring processes.
Yeah, like those dangerous radical-extremist founding fathers believing in individual liberty, rights coming from God alone, and a very limited central government with few powers being the only sure way to minimize government abuse of power & corruption.
You, sir, are an idiot. The founding fathers viewed those rights as inherent to being a human being -- not coming from God, because then someone claiming to act on God's behalf could take them away.
The rest of your rant isn't even worth a response.
Let's think about what groups might talk about "states' rights": neo-Confederates and other white supremacists. In the context of an Air Force equal opportunity adviser's work, recognizing dog whistles like that is part of the job.
Some of the traits listed in the original training document include "irresponsive sweeping generalizations" and "inadequate proof behind assertions" ...
All those empty FEMA camps and the US military's (Army/NG) recruitment push for "Internment Specialists" are sounding more and more ominous.
Precisely. Good example. Because you see, this document is solely to help folks uniformed servicemembers recognize extremist behavior. That's why you don't see anyone talking about this outside the right-wing paranoiasphere.
Which I don't get, because Microsoft has actually done pretty well in the PC gaming arena. Age of Empires, anyone? Freelancer?
Fuck you. Flying is a necessary part of a normal life.
No it isn't. It's an optional part of a life that you consider to be normal, but other methods of transportation predate flight and are still viable.
That said, I'd like to see Congress spend as much time an effort to defund the TSA as they do to defund the Affordable Care Act. But where are the political points to be scored by doing something that's so commonsense?
And elsewhere, people laugh hysterically when they hear an American blathering about the "freest country in the world".
And that's only if they can make it past the ridiculous Southern American accent.
Stuff. That. Matters.
Washington Post is reporting 42 dead confirmed at an aid station for Morsi supporters, 60 dead estimated by the Egyptian government, and over 2000 esimated by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Sounds like the Muslim Brotherhood has outsourced its statistical analysis to the American Tea Party.
The study addresses cell phone use after 9 p.m. on weeknights. But how much traffic is on the road at that time of night compared to, say, rush hour?
Dr. Who has been done to death!
And death, and death, and death, and death, and ...
And I suppose 640k is enough for anybody, too?
Sarcasm doesn't do well with the wall-of-text format. There's only so many words you can read in your mind's inner "sarcastic tone" before it just feels screechy.
Like the online version of listening to Gilbert Gottfried ...
Disagree. Police officers are humans. Humans have judgement. Drones are unmanned. No danger of human life being ended when someone fires on a drone (just cost/damage).
Except, as I mentioned earlier, when someone fires on a drone, misses, and that bullet heads downward. It's got to land somewhere, and by virtue of landing somewhere, it could put someone at serious risk injury or death.
I like pr0n as much as the next guy but a Slashdot groupthink seems to be developing that any entity restricting porn is bad evil censorship.
That would be because it is censorship.
No moreso than a police officer firing at an American citizen, so long as the American citizen fired first.
To be fair, you'd have to demonstrate the drone was in danger of actually being shot down or that someone else's life was in danger from the act of firing into the air. But that wouldn't be too hard if you're in a populated area firing at the sky, because there's a small but significant chance that bullet's going to land on somebody.