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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • gAlienLifeform@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldGI Rights Hotline
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    4 days ago

    a) Those moral objections aren’t going to be worth much when you get put in a high pressure moment by your shithead bosses and your training kicks in and you’re just following orders because everything happened so fast

    b) These soldiers are human beings who have a fundamental human rights not to be enslaved to their job. If serving in Donald Trump’s army is causing them psychological torment (and how could it not), they should be allowed to leave.

    c) If enough people leave, it’s going to start to degrade the capacity of the American government to martial marshall force, and that’s a good thing for us.


  • gAlienLifeform@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldGI Rights Hotline
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    4 days ago

    it doesn’t really matter what the letters stand for.

    This is American English we’re talking about here, so of course the answer is ridiculously convoluted and involves everyone getting it wrong for so long that wrong eventually became right

    It was originally an initialism used in U.S. Army paperwork for items made of galvanized iron.[2] The earliest known instance in writing is from either 1906[3] or 1907.[2]

    During World War I, U.S. soldiers took to referring to heavy German artillery shells as “G.I. cans”.[2][3] During the same war, “G.I.”, reinterpreted as “government issue”[2] or “general issue”,[3] began being used to refer to any item associated with the U.S. Army,[3] e.g., “G.I. soap”.[3] Other reinterpretations of “G.I.” include “garrison issue” and “general infantry”.[3]

    The earliest known recorded instances of “G.I.” being used to refer to an American enlisted man as a slang term are from 1935.[2] In the form of “G.I. Joe” it was made better known due to it being taken as the title of a comic strip by Dave Breger in Yank, the Army Weekly, beginning in 1942.[2] A 1944 radio drama, They Call Me Joe, reached a much broader audience. It featured a different individual each week, thereby emphasizing that “G.I. Joe” encompassed U.S. soldiers of all ethnicities.[4] They Call Me Joe reached civilians across the U.S. via the NBC Radio Network and U.S. soldiers via the Armed Forces Radio Network. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower would notably reference the term “G.I. Joe,” who he described as the main hero of World War II, in his May 1945 V-E address.




  • What was the population in 2019? Don’t we need that to understand that deaths outpace population growth?

    I’m pretty sure the experts and agencies they talked to in this article have numbers for 2019.

    If the newer population number is an undercount, how do we know the first clause in the sentence is true?

    Because the reasons for that undercounting haven’t changed between 2019 and 2023, so the degree of undercounting is probably about the same, so even if the census numbers are an estimate they are still generally comparable, at least enough to say that (for example) an estimated 10-15% growth in the population experiencing homelessness and (for example) a 200% growth in deaths are out of whack with each other.





  • Fair enough, but, like, 100 archers against 1000 people ends poorly for the archers if the people are willing to take some casualties, and a keep wall is only good so long as nobody inside decides to unlock a door or people outside can’t get a ladder set up somewhere for a few minutes

    Yes, there have been successful revolutions since the 1850s, but they’re definitely a lot harder than they used to be, and I think they now really do require some sort of defection from the ruling classes or military over to the opposition in a way that you didn’t really need for, say, the French revolution, where an angry mob of peasant women could just force their way into the kings castle and tell him how things were gonna be going forward

    I’m not saying it’s impossible, and I’m definitely not saying people should give up protesting all the bullshit going on right now, but I do think meta social contract between the rulers and the ruled has changed a lot since the 18th century because of technological progress