one of the most recent times I came back from overseas, after a few weeks of just existing, learning and working outside of Burgerland, I remember waiting at a gate for a connecting flight and there was a digital recruitment poster featuring the USMC scout sniper school, featuring the SS sig rune and a patch with the skull/totenkopf on it. certainly a jarring moment for me, to be reminded of where I was coming “home” to.

I had been traveling with a group of scientists, mostly older and more educated than me. white libs almost exclusively, and we had been in a socialist country where they felt compelled to look for any sign of militarism (there were literally none, hardly even a police presence).

I pointed out the poster to them and said, “well we’re back in the states with all this normal death cult shit” and like nobody even blinked. they just shrugged like it was normal, if maybe slightly aggressive to feature literal Nazi symbolism on a military recruiting poster. one guy, who was a spouse (just along for the ride) and had credentials in social science nodded and laughed/agreed, but he and I were the group’s weirdos who bother learning things in life that aren’t profitable in the labor market.

not really, military propaganda is really effective when its in a movie, eg top gun maverick , has seen a surge of recruit meeting qouta for the first time in years, the reason, top gun.

The first movie my current boss (20 year army infantry guy with significant brainworms) and I ever discussed was starship troopers. It’s like we watched a completely different movie.

His take was, when he was in the army he shouldn’t vote because “that’s like voting for your own boss” which I guess is bad somehow. After watching the movie, his take is that you should only be able to vote if you’ve been in the military, but only after you get out (honorably of course) because of course he can’t purge that initial brainworm, just modify it slightly with another contradiction.

It was like talking to a brick wall trying to explain the satire

Edit: forgot to add, he also didn’t think he should vote while he was in because that’s the thing that would make him complicit with the warcrimes they committed. Not, you know, just following orders which is a perfectly valid moral defense to him.

seen the film a few times but something I didn’t notice before was that the ship they pilot is called the Rodger Young

Born in the small town of Tiffin, Ohio, in 1932, Young suffered a sports injury in high school that led to his becoming nearly deaf and blind. Despite this, he was able to pass the exams necessary to enter the Ohio National Guard. Soon after the United States entered World War II, Young’s company was activated as part of the U.S. Army. Soon after his activation, in 1943, Young was killed on the island of New Georgia in Solomon Islands while helping his platoon withdraw from a Japanese ambush. For his actions, he was posthumously awarded the United States’ highest military decoration, the Medal of Honor.

so much of the movie is about the death drive

Local theaters

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me, joker laughing uncontrollably until being removed from the theater