I mean that you constantly repeat various things that tend to be basically right wing scaremongering.
Let me die on shibboleths where reality falls on deaf ears
The main problem I would have with an EU wide centrally controlled army is that armies tend to have better recruitment among certain demographics, and those demographics vary by region. Somewhere is going to bleed more just because it's people view military service as more desirable than somewhere else does and that's going to lead to resentment down the line.
You can always assess what factors incentivize those certain demographics though and adjust accordingly
The interesting thing is that in the UK, racial minorities are under-represented compared to the general population, to the extent that they want to boost attractiveness of service to minorities in order to reach diversity quotas.
The reasons that America veers the other way could relate to the history - there was no black slavery era in England anything like that in the USA, and the UK has much more of a safety net for the poor compared to America. USA has a fairly large pool of poor black labor who've traditionally done the shittiest jobs, so sending them off to war would be a predictable outcome of that. If anyone fits that role in English history, it's Scots and Irish, not blacks.
If anyone fits that role in English history, it's English, but that's not the full picture either.
For starters what qualifies as a shitty job in Britain changes over history, perfect example being the Royal Marines. Time ago, the Royal Marines were seen as an ok service equally as gruelling as the rest, but it was seen as a dead end-job with almost no chance of progressing beyond a certain point. Couldn't be more different from the prestige the RM has today, where it's seen as one of the best in the world
until the government cuts their operational budget.The other thing to consider is that in British history, there was no conscription until the world wars, which resulted in the British Army and Royal Navy having different recruitment patterns from say France or America. For the army, the majority of recruits would've come from poor young Englishmen (this is around the time when the UK's agricultural revolution causes a severely drastic baby boom), while the officers would've come from the upper class until significant reforms in the late 19th century. The Royal Navy was particularly odd, because they couldn't conscript landsmen, so had to either get skilled sailors from recruitment or press-ganging, which leads to the rather odd case in history wherein one country's armed forces were conscripting another country's men. Good example would be Nelson's flagship at Trafalgar, which was crewed by 441 English, 145 Irish, Scots & Welsh, 6 folk from the smaller British islands, 21 Americans, 36 Europeans, 9 West-Indians, 2 Indians, 1 Brazilian & 1 West African - in the early 19th century.
One of the chief recruitment strategies to build up the Army & Navy was the cultural aspect, in particular the notion of pride; loadsa young men enlisting out of pride to win glory by valour, especially after aristocratic traditions are fielded out in favour of meritocratic ones. Yet to this day there's still a lot of talk about how the UK's volunteer army fucked the UK up considerably in the long run, because the moment modern warfare is invented, it meant the UK lost its bravest and most dutiful men in the trenches for nothing.
But that's still not the full story either, because that's just the
UK. There's a funny historical cartoon from WWII after the French surrendered and the UK was facing Germany, Italy & Japan alone, and it features two Tommies standing on the shore of the channel. One goes "guess we're on our own," while the other goes "yeah it's just you, me and 1.5 billion of us." Wherever the British Empire went it recruited from the locals, and even recruited from the locals who weren't part of the Empire;
millions of soldiers, sailors & support staff came from the Americas, Caribbean, West, South & East Africa, Arabia, India, Malaysia and China. For the most part in the Army, they worked in their own national regiments, and stopped working for the UK after their home nations got independence. Instances of ethnic minorities integrated within the Royal Navy is common throughout UK history, but like the Colonial Army units there were racial barriers to promotion & gallantry awards that took two world wars to knock down, which all explains the disconnect between the historical and contemporary forces & diversity.
Currently in the UK the Armed Forces have high prestige, however there is a major barrier in that the Army in particular is looked down upon as unintellectual (which is a major issue for a professional Western fighting force), and is also not that comparable compared to say the USA - because the USA has to continually cycle through a million men whereas the UK maintains a much smaller army of tens of thousands of men. The volume of men needed means the recruitment pressures the USA and UK will face will be different, and as such the UK doesn't really have the issue of a stratified army caused by force of circumstance (although I have heard that the Armed Forces experience a lot of mental health cases caused by people enlisting in order to escape personal circumstances). The problems are altogether more to do with retention - recruiting in the UK is difficult, but keeping volunteers in the force is something else. I've heard harrowing shit about 50% of Naval Officers leaving for the private sector once their mandatory period of service was up, or of the Army losing tens of thousands of men to quitting, disciplinary or medical discharge in a year. Bless them for trying, but good luck trying to appeal to people who have no roots in the pot when you can't even convince the people you have to stay :/
Doesn’t mean nuffin’, just another example of how much lying the Leave side had to do to get their way.
I'm not bothered since the Remain side had David Cameron and Osborne using taxpayer money to outspend their own legal limits. They're getting tagged for a potential £600k overspend while Cameron spent £9,000,000 on just two days of campaigning, which is more than Leave was allowed for the entire year and a half of campaigning. Right cheeky
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Topic: The friendly and polite Europe related terrible jokes thread (Read 1101950 times)