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miscellaneous musings

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Method of Madness:
That and it's just generally enjoyable.

GarandMarine:
Have some boot camp anecdotes, I wrote them up for a Marine Corps thread, but they're pretty funny.

We had a recruit in our platoon the DI called Stump, short guy by any standard. Well one day late in 1st Phase, Stump approaches our Drill Hat, and reports that he has lost his sling keeper. "Well. This recruit would like a new one." "...You'd like a new one huh?" Drill Instructor Gunnery Sergeant Cobb's voice is calm at this point. "Well recruit, I don't have one, so what you're going to do is, when we go to chow tonight, I don't want you to take any food. I want you to get a big pile of spoons. No forks or knives those might fuck up your guts. Then I want you to eat those spoons, so tonight, in the squad bay, you'll shit out metal pellets, then after lights out, you can forge yourself a new sling keeper. Understand?" Stump gave his best "Yes Sir!" with a confused look on his face and hopped back in formation.

Right around that same time one of the other recruits, Z, was a couple seconds behind on pretty much every drill movement and order we received. So Gunny Cobb stops the formation. "Recruit Z. Is the hamster on the wheel?" "Sir?" "You heard me. Is the hamster on the wheel? See, I don't think he is. Name your hamster recruit." "Sir, this recruit's hamster's name is Gordy." Gunny Cobb leaps into Recruit Z's face with a knife hand "Well you tell Gordy to stop fucking hydrating, and get the fuck back on the wheel!" and from then on, Gunny would correct Recruit Z, and remind him to tell Gordy to stop hydrating and get on the wheel.

My other favorite boot camp story, the one where we all, as a platoon and our DIs truly lost our shit laughing. We're up at Edson Range aboard Camp Pendleton, Drill Instructor Gunnery Sergeant Cobb put on his black belt the day before, and he and Senior Drill Instructor Gunnery Sergeant Starky, now a Chief Drill Instructor for those fucks over at G Company, are both away, which means we're left with Drill Instructor Staff Sergeant Raphael and Swan respectively. Let the games begin. We're forming up for chow. "Get out of my barracks right now. Zero! Get in my barracks right now. Zero. Formation outside right now." and so on, when Swan yells "Run to the chow hall right now!" we scramble towards the chow hall "Zero! Formation right now!" scramble back. The DIs have a new game. So we do that for a little bit, in and out of the barracks trying to get online or get a formation, we're all mostly having fun at this point, it had been a relatively slow day, then SSgt Raphael yells "Run to MCRD right now!" and everyone stops for a second and looks at each other like "Where the fuck is MCRD from here?" and the whole platoon scatters to the four winds. SSgt yells "Zero!" and pulls his cover down and steps back inside the barracks with SSgt Swan because they're both laughing too hard and most of the platoon is "frozen" laughing our collective asses off.

*Zero is the command word to instantly and immediately freeze in place, if you're in midair you're expected to hover.

GarandMarine:
For this reason, We made it a law for the children of Israel that the killing of a person for reasons other than legal retaliation or for stopping corruption in the land is as great a sin as murdering all of mankind. However, to save a life would be as great a virtue as to save all of mankind. Our Messengers had come to them with clear authoritative evidence but many of them (Israelites) thereafter started doing wrong in the land.

-The Quran, sūrat l-māidah 5:32

I learned this verse by memory before I enlisted (along with reading from a guide on critical verses from the Quran itself) when I went to boot camp America was still deep in the middle of the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, being on the ground and fighting inside of six months from your ship date wasn't uncommon, and I determined if I was going to fight people who were determined to kill me for their beliefs I wanted to know more about those beliefs. I grew up with muslim friends, the S sisters who took martial arts with me, the class was mostly male, and involved hand to hand contact as expected in full spectrum martial arts, I later learned after I gained seniority and discussed such things with my instructor, that it took a lot of personal effort on the S sister's father's part to accept this different cultural norm. I didn't think of the S sisters as muslim of course, I thought of them as my friends and training partners (and when I was in a sour mood after getting whupped on, as both were extremely proficient fighters as "the bitch with the round house from hell" and "the bitch with the right cross that will make you see god" respectively). So I studied, because propaganda and thinking about things too lightly go hand and hand on strolls towards the uglier side of humanity.

There are many reprehensible rules, outdated social mores, standards and ideals on display in the Quran. I won't shy away from that. Those same darker ideas have been stretched and twisted further still, Jihad in the proper usage referring far more to the struggle any individual must face  to keep true to their religion or self imposed morality as opposed to say... machine gunning a satirical French newspaper.

I memorized this verse, which I found on accident while doing my readings, as touchstone, a reminder that there's good in this particular group, and most groups too. It seems relevant recently with the conversations I've been overhearing in public and seeing on FB and some other forums recently.

hedgie:
I think that the key to reading any religious or philosophical text is taking what bits of wisdom one can get from them and disregarding the rest.  They're all based, of course, in the time that they were written, and thus, contain the prejudices of the time.

Method of Madness:

--- Quote from: GarandMarine on 10 Jan 2015, 04:18 ---other than legal retaliation or for stopping corruption in the land
--- End quote ---
The problem here is with the bolded part. That can be used to justify almost anything. Of course, you have that sort of cherry picking lines and interpreting them to justify awful behavior in every religion.

(Of course, I don't think there should be an "other than" at all other than defending oneself or others directly, but that's another topic.)

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