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So Barron might be "too tall" to serve his country...? and even if he's not I'm sure we'll find out real quick that bone spurs run in the family.
It's so insane that it has always been standard practice for wealthy and powerful men to start wars then refuse to send their own children to fight, but it's especially egregious watching the Trump administration carry this shit out. The level of planning leading up to this to create another endless war seems so obvious in hindsight.
•Hegseth's "anti-woke" military speech
•Elimination of government loans for education (even for nursing and medical school, so only the wealthy can afford an education, let alone a deferment. If you're not born rich you have 2 options: take out private loans at a huge interest rate or join the army. Sign yourself over to the oligarchs one way or the other.)
•Up the country's birth rates (gotta gradually replace them as they die by the thousands at war)
•Openly admitting your goal is to eliminate the entire department of education. Because you don't need an education when your entire path birth to death has already been laid out for you:
You're born to serve while Trump and his oligarchs sit in their country club and move you around like a piece of plastic on a game board.
Life is hard and it seems like people are constantly fighting and dying around you from the moment you're born. It's all you know. Everyone around you is sick, destitute, and miserable. There are no jobs. You have no education. You know nothing but struggle and see no future for yourself.
The army is the only hand reaching out and offering to help pull you up, so you grab it.
Then you either die thousands of miles away from your home or you come back and spend the rest of your life wounded, without a doubt mentally and pretty often physically.
If you try to speak out against it or warn others, you're accused of being "woke." There is no hesitation to show you how little your rights, that you were told you were fighting for, mean to the people who sent you to fight.
Honestly the only perk of feudalism is that the princes would have to go to war. Unfortunately it was prone to make them worse leaders by way of trauma, but hey, sometimes they died.
I always figured knights just kind of walked around hacking up the poor people with sharpened sticks to pieces
Not really. Firstly, knights were heavy cavalry. By the time they're walking in battle shit's gone sideways and there's a decent chance they're injured either by whatever knocked them off their horse, falling off their horse, or the whole process of their horse getting injured or killed and going down. And in that vein, the pointy sticks are about stopping the horse, not the knight. A pike wall (as well as fortifications like ditches) creates areas of denial for knights and danger to their horses. A bunch of poor people with long sticks are how you stop knights.
Medieval warfare in open fields was largely about archer volleys attempting to wear each other down and to damage pike walls enough that they break formation allowing knights to ride in and rout (basically come in and kill everyone). Pike formations outlasted armored knights with the rise in quality and availability of firearms simply being integrated into their formations. This is how you get the Renaissance era walls of people lining up to shoot each other.
At least that's what I remember from various learning of it, definitely not an expert.