The Navy Says It's Not Recruiting on Twitch. This Handbook Shows It Is
vice.com
vice.com
> “While we do not actively recruit on Twitch or through such streaming platforms, the esports team members are there to answer questions about their experiences in the Navy. If a user specifically asks an esports team member about joining the Navy, that team member will move that conversation to a private message to first find out if the interested user is over 17, and if that user is over 17 then the recruiter will thank them for their interest and refer them to Navy.com where they can talk to a recruiter.”
Vice prepends this quote with "In an email to Motherboard, the Navy insisted it wasn’t using Twitch to recruit." which seems like a bizarre mischaracterisation to me
For your average person, that may seem like meaningless splitting of hairs, but that’s how it’s discussed in the marketing world.
Amazing a whole article was written about this.
It's clearly for recruiting purposes.
Like I said, it's splitting hairs with words, but it's not some grand conspiracy as per the Vox article.
The vox article clearly shows that they were trying to recruit, even though they say they aren't. It's not a grand conspiracy but it's the same as the military using Hollywood for recruiting.
A better story would have read "How the U.S. Navy leverages Twitch and esports as a marketing channel". Instead, it takes a quote from one of the players, Crosswhite, then labels Crosswhite as representing the whole Navy with the headline: "The Navy Says It's Not Recruiting on Twitch".
What's worse is it tries to sell this controversy, as if the Navy is denying its involvement and Vice unearthed some secret documents, which is just not true.
Here's the quote from the article:
Machinist's mate First Class Andrew “Saltysn1pe” Crosswhite answered a question from the audience about why the Navy was streaming video games. “We’re here to show that we play video games, literally,” Crosswhite said. “We’re not here to recruit. That is not the point of this.” According to Navy documents viewed by Motherboard, that’s not true.
Crosswhite obviously meant that they are not actually recruiting on the channel, but the purpose is undoubtedly marketing for the Navy. I don't think any of the players on the team are that naive — they're supported by the Navy because of the marketing opportunity.
begin quote >>
10 U.S. Code § 503 - Enlistments: recruiting campaigns; compilation of directory information
(b) Compilation of Directory Information.— (1) The Secretary of Defense may collect and compile directory information pertaining to each student who is 17 years of age or older or in the eleventh grade (or its equivalent) or higher and who is enrolled in a secondary school in the United States or its territories, possessions, or the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.
<< end quote
By default, Twitch allows individuals as young as 13 to use their site. Twitch also allows streamers who stream more mature content (language, games meant for individuals 18+) to warn viewers of this content (see https://imgur.com/a/Gv1Yfun for a screenshot of the warning). In fact, Twitch account managers will often reach out to streamers and ask them to enable this feature if their channel has been reported.
As of July 23, 2020 2:03 PM EDT, the US Navy Twitch channel at https://www.twitch.tv/americasnavy does not have this enabled.
I wish more outlets would include the originating artifact of what's being reported on, where allowable, as was done here.
[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/016344370505397...
Allegedly it's made by the same developers as the ARMA series, which if you want to talk about open-ended military simulators... whistles mightily
I don't think I've ever seen a referendum on military spending, much less specific policy, on any ballot.
Unsatisfying answer and I'm not sure it's guaranteed or even likely to produce results in your lifetime but until we get rid of FPTP voting it's the only real answer
And yet that's exactly what the "disenfranchised, angry white rural male" bloc accomplished by voting for Trump, while their opponents mostly sat on their hands because they couldn't have Bernie. There are numerous examples in American politics where popular sentiment has led to radical shifts in policy.
It just happens that in recent history (probably since 9/11), the American public seems to want those shifts to move the country further and further right. Those people are getting what they voted for.
That strikes me as naive and juvenile. It's not useless advice, it just need to be properly contextualized. You're a sharing a nation with hundreds of millions of people, so you cannot expect that your fellow citizens all want the same thing you want. Yes voting is a method of change, but the effect of a singular vote is very small, especially for influencing federal policies.
At the local community or neighborhood level, a single dedicated person can actually make a big difference, but that also requires work, because changing minds takes time and effort.
This is also why federalism should be embraced by everyone. Limit the federal government as much as you can and leave the consequential decisions to states and communities. But local issues aren't sexy enough for many.
There are plenty of other, ever more effective and synergistic ways, of being politically active:
- educating oneself about one's rights, politics and history, and opposing points of view
- making connections with others at all levels of society, business, and government
- raising awareness through talking to others, writing articles, or making videos
- participating in protests or boycotts
- encouraging others to vote
- volunteer to be an election monitor, to make sure elections are conducted fairly and are free from interference
- letter writing to elected officials
- donating to and/or volunteering for the causes, campaigns, and organizations you believe in
- organizing
- running for local office
People tend to get so laser-focused on voting that they forget that there are all sorts of other ways to get involved.
- still getting nowhere
I don't know why I'm even writing this, I'm just really tired of seeing the political class being untouchable (and that's not exclusive to the US).
I remember a guy in my country doing all of what you wrote, getting as far as organizing a political party, which was promptly absorbed into one of the three biggest parties, never to be heard from again.
This isn't democracy. It's der'mocracy (my favorite Russian portmanteau, means shitocracy).
I don't know what this one guy stood for, what he did right, or what he did wrong. He might have been completely incompetent, or maybe his ideas were so far out of the mainstream that he really stood no chance no matter how competent he was.
How many allies did he manage to get? How many people did he manage to reach? How long was he active for?
Also, we need to keep in mind that just because your party doesn't get elected that doesn't mean you've failed. Sometime showing the public that there's an alternative or moving the conversation to include your issue can effect change in the mainstream, which can be a victory in itself, even if your party does not achieve power.
But even if this one guy failed, that does not mean that becoming politically active in a democracy is useless for everyone and that everyone is doomed to fail. The point is to get lots of people involved. You can't do it all by yourself (or it wouldn't be a democracy).
That said, I agree that there are many faults in American democracy, and in other democracies all over the world. That doesn't mean we have to give up on democracy. They could be reformed to be more democratic, through democratic means. But people have to become more educated and more politically active. Simply casting a vote once every 4 years and digging our heads in the sand the rest of the time is not nearly enough.
That's the key point, there has to be a critical mass of people that want to be more educated and politically active. But there's not enough of them. And I don't know how to get more people involved.
The current system is better than anything else we've had, but it looks like people won't be interested in it until it's corrupted beyond repair, at which point they will resort to violence and rapid, hopefully not violent but definitely half-arsed, change. History repeating itself.
(Wow, that's a badly worded sentence)
"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"
"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said Ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in."
I’ll leave how to do that up to you.