Pentagon Announces New Screening Effort To Weed Out Extremist Recruits | Talking Points Memo

And to those of you I say: Thank you for your service.

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The core mission of the military is to kill people and break things on command. Voluntary enlistment will chiefly appeal to the morally stunted or grossly immature.

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He tightened the rules for deploying the Nat Guard and yes, he’s CYA now and very much to blame for how late the response from the military was on 1/6/21.

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The core mission of any military is deterrence, not conflict.

You have knights at the castle and a strong set of men-at-arms so that your neighbor doesn’t decide that your fields are nicer and he’d like to take them.

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Screening recruits for extremist sympathies is one thing, but what are they doing to combat those who become radicalized while in the service? When those members are mustered out, they can be radicalized, trained and ready to go. Many places where bases are located are hotbeds of radical beliefs. This is what they are exposed to in their off base free time.

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In the very very rare category of “obscene mathematics jokes”.

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Didn’t they purge the military of “communists” during the McCarthy era? Did that hold up in court?

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Yeah, pretty much. Ginny’s lobbying biz is pretty dodgy, but there is no way whatsoever that anything close to $10 million has hit a Thomas Family bank account without the financial authorities taking notice. And if you’re positing that there’s an offshore account with tens of millions in it waiting for Thomas to retire in another 20 years or whatever, you have a poor sense of human patience.

ETA: If there were a Great Right Wing Plot to Keep Lunatics in the Majority, they would have paid Thomas and Alito to fuck off while Trump was in office so they could have more justices 30 years younger than them.

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“Very very rare”? You obviously didn’t do a math degree… :sunglasses:

ETA: Just a little, family-friendly sampler:

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Call it the SCOTUS Recovery Act. winning!

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That caught my interest as well. The vaccines have been approved on an Emergency basis, so the military can’t require it. Once it goes through the regular process, the military will require it.

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The military can order troops to get vaccines. That’s not an issue. The coronavirus vaccine has only been approved for emergency use. That’s the problem. They can’t require troops to take an experimental treatment.

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Nope, I was on the Humanities side of the house – specifically, Russian. My advisor had a poster tacked up to his office door, with a picture of a scowling cartoon Russian (fur hat, beard, boots, tunic) and the inscription “RUSSIAN LITERATURE IS BETTER THAN SEX”.

Story goes that one of his colleagues from the English department once paused outside, looking at the poster, said “that is patently untrue”, and walked on.

One of the wags in our class, hearing the story, said “but … he’s only read it in the translation!”

Edit: FWIW, Jamie Lee Curtis apparently agrees.

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We’ll get you a chair.

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So how many servicemembers do you know personally?

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Check the tatoos they may have. Some are obviously seditious.

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Bush lowered the requirements for joining the military during Gulf War One. Lower standards, lower quality troops.

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Perhaps in the sense of being positively raw.

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Something that’s been given to a third of the population with excellent results is no longer “experimental.”

ETA: It’s been approved for “emergency use,” and Covid-19 in the military is an “emergency.” You’d be hard-pressed to argue that it doesn’t threaten readiness. Jab 'em!!

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