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Comment by AardvarkAnon | Hacker News Reader

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> Everyone needs to take a look at the comments on the latest recruitment ad on YouTube to gauge the sentiment of young American men towards the government and military:

> https://youtube.com/watch?v=Lwx-2R9swDg

> It really is a sight to behold. You need to see it. An endless stream of condemnation.

Looks like a bunch of antisemites and racists found the video and hit it with their comments at once. The further down the page you get, the more concentrated it becomes, presumably because the more mask-off stuff is less ambiguous and appeals to a narrower audience. But anyhow, it goes from tongue-in-cheek jokes to SJWs to eventually anecdotes about unspecified 'subhumans' as you scroll down.

Given the fact that this is your only post and you have 'anon' in your name, I doubt you posted the link in good faith. The function of your comment, either way, is to direct attention to the views of those trolls and paint them as some kind of 'voice of a generation'. Pretty transparent. You're not subtle.

>Looks like a bunch of antisemites and racists found the video and hit it with their comments at once.

Not too sure about that. Seems like a positive sign that people are not putting up with all the BS surrounding Israel anymore. This is what gives me a shred of hope: that thanks to the internet, people are questioning existing alliances and asking why? In the distant future as terrible states such as Israel and Saudi Arabia continue to fail to rehabilitate their image my hope is that the tides will change in Western leadership in how they tolerate these states. They clearly do not practice western ideals so it makes no sense to waste, money, lives, and political reputation on them.

To be clear: I agree with the general anti-war attitude and I've never supported any decision the US has made to go to war in my lifetime. I think the US alliance with Saudi Arabia is disgraceful and I am an anti-Zionist.

But the comments on that video paint Israel not as a shameful alliance or a settler-colonial state but as an entity conspiratorially pulling the strings whenever the US is involved in a war elsewhere. It's not a substantive or veridical critique, and it would be alarming if that were in fact the predominant critique of US involvement in wars overseas as GP insinuates.

>But the comments on that video paint Israel not as a shameful alliance or a settler-colonial state but as an entity conspiratorially pulling the strings whenever the US is involved in a war elsewhere. It's not a substantive or veridical critique, and it would be alarming if that were in fact the predominant critique of US involvement in wars overseas as GP insinuates.

Israel definitely has some say in US foreign policy through their pull with the religious right and the influential pro-Israel lobby.

> Confirming 3, everyone needs to take a look at the comments on the latest recruitment ad on YouTube to gauge the sentiment of young American men towards the government and military:

Because we all know the vocal minority commenting on youtube videos is a sample-set free of biases.

That YouTube video specifically appears to have been raided by 4chan so I would be careful drawing conclusions from the comments.

How can you gauge sentiment of a broad group from a self-selecting sample?

All the ones commenting on youtube are the drug using overweight people you mean? The ones that actually wanted to serve “the country” already enlisted.

It's bad statistics to assume a sample is representative of a population unless the sample selection method is very strong. Comments left on a specific youtube video says almost nothing about the population of young Americans.

This reminds me of when I turned 18. I was pissed. Signing up for selective service while the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were going strong. I was worried there could be a draft and I'd end up in jail. Recruiters would call my house and I'd bitch them out about how I wasn't going to go invade another country and murder civilians. Just typing this out really reminds me how much I despise our military. The US is a shithole country

I'm curious about your opinions here. Do you think the war in Afghanistan was unjustified from the very beginning?

My faith in humanity will never recover after Colin Powell died. No way to judge him anymore for agitating “definite proof of WMD” at the UN Security Council in 2003 which were not found on the field. Since the UN didn’t succeed to trial Colin Powell in time, I consider the UN itself is at fault.

Yes

Do you think the US was not justified in destroying the terror camps that Al-Qaeda was operating in Afghanistan after the US was attacked on 9/11?

No. They didn't destroy the American flight schools. But even if they wanted to destroy the training camps, they did a hell of a lot more than that.

Imagine the federal government invading Idaho after the OKC bombing because McVeigh was up in the woods by Coeur d'Alene

In that analogy, what do you think would happen to Idaho if the Idaho government tried to refuse the feds from arresting the terrorists responsible?

How does our society accept the evil shit done in our name? Why do we participate in and encourage warmongering and violations of human rights throughout the world? Because we're selfish and benefit from it? Society is fucked

And while I'm ranting, one more thought. Republicans are so concerned about "groomers", go after the military recruiters in the schools. That needs to be shut down

It gets worse. Some American high schools have some form of military recruitment in a building on the same plot of land.

https://www.google.com/maps/@39.1119257,-77.5784644,3a,75y,2...

https://www.google.com/maps/place/LCHS+Annex,+NJROTC/@39.111...

I mean, only a fool would mistake Youtube comments for real life. Was is the pro-Nazi comments that resonated with you and made you feel like you weren't alone?

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