It’s an interesting take.  Of course the grunts get to choose their moral conflicts.  Unless you’re a conscript, but even then you still have a choice.  You can desert and even if you don’t desert it’s still your choice whether you actually aim a gun at anyone and pull the trigger.

Is there any particular reason to blog about banality?

There are literally untold hundreds of millions of blogs on the internet today. If you feel compelled to complain about posts you find banal then you must be a very busy person.

Me, I prefer the “just don’t read or comment on stuff I find uninteresting” approach. But to each his own.

“Waaaaa!”

But I think there’s something more insidious behind your complaint. I’m nearly certain of it, in fact. That you’ve picked this specific article to complain about is curious. If I had to guess (and I’m going to), my guess would be that your complaint was driven more by the specific subject matter, rather than the general banality of it. Indeed, I think it’s likely that “banality” is just a cover for the fact that you don’t like the specific brand of phone at the heart of the story. There are no shortage of haters circulating on the internet, after all, so I’m going to play the odds that you’re one of them.

The alternative explanation — that you just like to complain, and have nothing better to do than harass bb staff — is arguably even less flattering.

Certainly more widely available and probably cheaper.

I’m not the one forcing wounded soldiers to return to the field. I’m not the one dropping bombs, or even merely calling in the strikes. I’m not the one declaring war, or making it. I’m not the one recruiting ignorant kids too young to understand the world, breaking them down, stripping them of their individuality and humanity, putting a gun in their hands, and telling them that their country is proud of them for killing and dying in the name of political expediency. I’m not the one clearing them to return to duty after the bare minimum of time required to physically rehabilitate them, without respect for the agonizingly long process of mental hehabilitation. I’m not the one who sends them back to slog through ruined cities, scorching deserts, forsaken mountains, and wasted battlegrounds after they’ve already been shot full of holes and riddled with shrapnel. I’m not the one leaving countless young men and women feeling lost and confused and violently out of control trying to return to normal life despite their nightmares, flashbacks, creeping paranoia, and all the rest.

You’re right, I have distaste for any military. But given the things that militaries do to people, I can’t understand how you or anyone else can manage to have the love for them that you seem to display.

By voicing my opinion that this sort of content is not up to the usual standards I believe BoingBoing sets for itself in terms of insightful and interesting content, I hope to perhaps convince the blog operators to shy away from banality and return to quality.

If you have issue with the manner in which I am critiquing the content of this blog, please feel free to comment on that in particular. You are an Administator, after all, your job does entail preventing or curtailing abusive behavior.

But if you’re simply annoyed at me for having the audicity to comment negatively about the blog’s content, in effect telling me to either shut up and like it or simply go elsewhere, I can only express darkly amused perplexion.

Single me out for improper behavior if I show it, please. Rebuke me for any abusive and unacceptable interactions with the blog operators or other readers that I may be guilty of. But please do not badger me with your sarcasm and passive aggresive backhanded rhetoric merely for speaking critically of one small segment of BoingBoing’s content.

How is this news?

Well, it’s like those old stories about the soldier saved by the bible in his pocket, except the iPhone is our bible now

Once more with feeling: the grunts don’t get to choose the moral conflicts. They sign up because it’s the best life option they have, or they wanna, or whatever. 

: p