Quote:
Originally Posted by XLMuffnTop
I don't think she was diminishing your experience or calling you a liar, she was providing insight into her knowledge and information on the subject at hand.
This was exactly my intent.
misspixie, if you are interpreting my post as diminishing your experience and calling you a liar, then I will point out that you diminished my experience and called me a liar first.
Are you calling XLMuffnTop and her husband liars and diminishing her experience of her husband's and others experience in Boot Camp?
I'm not. I'm not even saying that the verbal abuse isn't and hasn't been a part of the military bootcamp experience - now or 25 years ago. Just that the military is moving away from these tactics, because they've learned that it doesn't work as well as other methods. This is consistent with my education and work experience in the various fields of psychology and law enforcement.
I understand why the military is moving away from these techniques, because I know from my education and experience in law enforcement and human behavior that it only works in a very limited number of circumstances, and that the effects tend to be temporary - and based on whether or not the authority figure is currently present. It all falls apart when the authority figure is absent. If people are doing what you say because you're shaking a stick at them (or worse) they'll stop as soon as you're out of sight.
My brother unfortunately learned that experience the hard way in the middle east when in his unit the chain of command broke down and even though he hadn't the rank to do so, he took charge of the situation. I don't know much about the situation other than that it was extremely horrific (resulting in severe physical and emotional damage to my brother, probably one of the main factors in his resulting PTSD and bodily injury). Because doing so saved lives, my brother was given an assortment of medals and recognition. However if it had ended differently he could have been court marshalled for breaking the chain of command. My brother has a lot of surviors' guilt from the incident, which is why he refuses to talk about it much. All we really know is that he took over the situation in which the rightful leader couldn't do the job and that he had to ignore bad orders from superior officers in order to do so. If many lives hadn't been saved, he would have been punished rather than rewarded.
None of that is relevant to a weight loss competition. Especially since the pool of applicants for the military is very different than for that of the military. The military doesn 't take 500 lb, 50 year old men with heart disease and diabetes and throw them into bootcamp.
Heck if you're a 6' tall 17 year old male, the military won't take you if you're under 140 lbs or over 190 lbs.
The military doesn't recruit old, out-of-shape, super morbidly obese, diabetic citizens. Try to even get into the military in great shape if you're over 35.
The military is a horrible comparision, even if bootcamp and hazing experiences were still every bit as abusive and brutal as they were 40 years ago.
You wouldn't put a 10 year old or a 60 year old through old-style military boot camp. The military doesn't ever put old, unfit folks through bootcamp. They don't even take young, healthy, reasonably fit but signicantly overweight individuals.
I've known at least half a dozen friends and family members who were medically discharged from the military because health problems so minor that they didn't appear during the routine physicals but only became apparent during boot camp. I came in contact with dozens more in my work as a probation officer (many of my probation clients were young men who were trying to get into the service either as a direct condition of their probation or to meet the employment conditions). One of the reasons bootcamp is so incredibly physically demanding and stressful (emotionally and physically) is to weed out the people who will be unfit mentally and physically for military service. They don't want problems revealing themselves during active service.
Almost all of the disqualifiers these folks experienced were inconsequential in comparison to those that many TBL contestants have been diagnosed with from the beginning. Conditions that even in a healthy-weight individual that would have precluded them from military service (let alone conditions that became apparent only in boot camp).
The military does not require a man with stress fractures in his feet to continue unadapted bootcamp or active duty.
If we're going to compare TBL to the extreme experience of military bootcamp (whether of today or decades past) let's compare it to the full experience and use the same criteria that the military uses for acceptance of people into the bootcamp in the first place.
The military doesn't take out-of-shape folks and make them fit. They take young, healthy, and already fit people and make them fitter.
It's not a fair comparison - and that's all I'm saying. What military boot camp is or isn't, isn't the issue in the least. None of the TBL contestants would ever be considred for military service for even a fraction of a second. So the comparison is completely ludicrous.