Aestu wrote:
It's fucking Wal-Mart. By definition it lays outside the bounds of civilized society.
Aestu wrote:
Whether or not this was a Wal*Mart had no bearing on my interpretation. If the store were a Target or a K-Mart, my observation that there is a code of conduct regarding how people are supposed to behave in public that no one adheres to or chooses to enforce would have remained the same.
What's your basis for saying people at Wal*Mart are any more "ignorant" than you?
Aestu wrote:
It is in the interest of management to ensure security has broad discretionary powers and act assertively to quash any potential difficulties, no matter how unfairly.
Wal-Mart is infinitely more worried about an altercation spiraling out of control, disrupting normal business operation, and potential legal tangles than they are about one disgruntled dude not shopping there again. They have more to lose from A than B, and every policy Wal-Mart has is a study in quantity over quality.
Anyone with the ability to Google, which is pretty much everyone here, could tell you that the only thing "broad discretionary powers" in the hands of rent-a-cops guarantees for management is a hefty price tag when settlements in civil trials are agreed upon or verdicts are handed down. Given that you've already mentioned "legal tangles," I can't imagine that a manager wouldn't want to intervene when a customer is confronted by another customer and a member of their security staff when one of the pair is hurling racial epithets at the customer.
I'm terribly amused that someone, like yourself, who is constantly in a snit over the behavior of police is so cavalier about the behavior of their lesser, wanna-be brethren. I'm not, however, surprised, since your only interest is in spitting bile at your betters whenever the opportunity should arise, but it just shows how your opinions aren't based in any sort of principle, but are instead flexible depending on who you wish to injure and/or champion in a given situation. Your silly diatribes about how you'll one day have your vengeance upon the cops who arrested you for acting like a belligerent jackenape make for some delicious irony when placed next to your excuses for the security guard here in this thread.
Aestu wrote:
I made no such implication, and Tuhl didn't imply that was the nature of his inquiry.
Your actual issue is that you like most military people are trying to make an entire way of life based on authoritarianism and organized violence sound honorable and morally correct, and you're upset that the kinds of inquires you don't like run headfirst into the brutal, amoral and utterly futile nature of the military lifestyle.
That's not to say that any and all military people are necessarily evil, but others don't need to tread eggshells for fear of upsetting your cognitive dissonance.
The underlying implication of your responses is "fuck Dotzilla, he was in the military, and deserves to be spit on, because I said so." Military service, of course, being yet another one of those forms of people actually doing something other than spouting nonsense on the internet that shows that the participant(s) is actually making a change in the world, for good or ill, that just pisses all over your delusion that your very existence and "intelligent" insights cast into the electronic nether somehow make the world a better place.
We live in a world that is governed by the use of force. The military is a necessary evil in such a world. The authoritarianism is necessary, not only because you can't have everyone with a gun, tank, or plane running about willy-nilly doing whatever they please, but because that authoritarianism imposes a necessary degree of civility on duties that are generally not civilized. It is the choke-collar on the dogs or wars. The violence is organized, in part, to reduce casualties and "collateral damage." It is organized because it's not meant to be the unrestrained violence of savages. There is honor in it, whether you ascribe to the ideals of honor in combat handed down from antiquity or not.
Not surprisingly, combat/war brings out the worst in people,
like the shooter that went on a rampage in Afghanistan, but no one holds men that behave like monsters up as heroes.
However, there are those men that we hold up as an example of what not just soldiers, but human beings, should aspire to be. You find nothing "morally correct" about the military and its members, but how often have we put that military and the men who constitute it into combat to protect oppressed populaces, stop the spread of tyranny, or just to provide aid?
The military is a lamentable necessity. While you always employ 'cognitive dissonance' as some sort of insult (while never showing enough introspection to see how often you're guilty of it yourself), it's a necessity for those who served and had to perform the most onerous and personally damaging of tasks. That 'cognitive dissonance' you dismiss is proof of the morality of those service members. If they were amoral, as you suggest, there would be no remorse. There would be no human and/or moral component involved with what they did, it would simply be rationalized away with no emotional impact as their having killed an enemy.
If you and others don't feel as if you should have to "tread on eggshells," so be it. It's a free country. It makes perfect sense that you would feel/think that way, since that attitude reflects the same lack of concern for others, that same deficit of common courtesy, the same "fuck you I'm more important," that Dotzilla described in that wretched woman in a Wal*Mart. The only difference between you and she is education, volume, and grammar.
Your Pal,
Jubber
