Too fat to fight!

[Magister Lajciak]

I've got a crazy idea: why don't we just accept that our lardy shape is a consequence of the peace and propserity we enjoy. And celebrate it?

 

Well we do accept that it is a consequence of peace and prosperity, but it is leading to major public health issues, so attempting to change the trend might be a good idea.

 

I'm surprised how many kids fail PE in High School nowadays too. My wife tells me she has about a 60% passing rate, granted she is at a tough school, but that is really sad. An example of an assignment is doing a mile in 10 minutes. You can get that done with a slow jog, and kids still fail it!

 

I believe 10 minutes is for full credit. So you would still get decent marks if you were in the 12 min. Range. But theyh do this every week, there should be some progress. Id huff my way through a mile right now, but after a couple weeks id start improving.

 

I don't know, I mean they are kids and not yet fully developed, so it is difficult to judge whether it should be tough for them or not based on our adult experience. For an adult, it should not be hard to do a mile in 10 minutes. On the other hand, they have also had less time to grow as lazy and fat as the rest of us, so maybe they should be even better at it on average. It is really difficult to tell.

 

I can't do a mile in under 10 minutes and I'm not even fat.

 

You probably could do it and are just underestimating yourself. Although if you haven't been doing any running at all, you might underpreform by failing to pace yourself properly and starting out too fast and becoming too tired before finishing thus having to slow down disproportionately, or starting too slow and realizing it too late and not having enough time to catch up. Still, running a 10 minute mile should probably not be a major problem for somebody who is not overweight (let's say by the BMI definition at the 25 cut-off point).

 

Indeed, I speak from experience on this one. I decided to test myself in terms of how fast I can run certain distances after many years of not doing any sports (and even many years before I wasn't into sports - I tended to be pretty sedentary). For 1 mile, I got about 6 minutes 40 seconds during my first attempt and I did have the pacing problem I described above. Anyway, I am not really fat, but I am not exactly lean either. I have a beer belly (though I don't drink beer) and am at approximately BMI 24, which is not that far from the 25-limit after which one is considered overweight. Given that, I can see how people who are actually obese might have problems with the 10-minute mile, but I think people who are not even overweight would be able to run it without major problems even if they were pretty much completely inactive for an extensive period of time (years) beforehand and were never really active to begin with.

 

I'm surprised how many kids fail PE in High School nowadays too. My wife tells me she has about a 60% passing rate, granted she is at a tough school, but that is really sad. An example of an assignment is doing a mile in 10 minutes. You can get that done with a slow jog, and kids still fail it!

 

That is pitiful. I can run 5K(3.1 miles) in 19:33.

 

He, he, but they are kids! Maybe they have not yet fully developed...

 

Your time for a 5K is nice, but I assume you either run regularly or at least do other sports on a regular basis that keep up your cardio-vascular fitness. Most people are sedentary these days. On the other hand, I suppose that's the point - people are unfit because they are sedentary, so this is what we ought to be trying to change...

 

Body fat has nothing to do with fighting capabilities, the Maori are fat and they are renown warriors. Plus they are from the time when you had to walk everywhere and still be fit enough to club your enemy, none of today's "lift a gun and get there by chopper"

 

I mostly agree that modern armies do not require large amounts of personnel with much physical fitness. After all, the majority of troops these days do things like supply, logistics, planning, operating remotely-operated machines (e.g. UAVs), cyber-warfare, electronic warfare, analysis of intelligence and so on and so on - all crucially important functions to modern warfare, but not really dependent on physical fitness.

 

That said, light infantry forces, special forces and other a bunch of other military outfits still need physically fit individuals with an emphasis on endurance and there fatness does not help at all. However, it really should not be a problem for the military to find sufficient numbers of fit people for those positions.

 

In the future, robots will fight for us anyway.

 

Yes, they probably will, but they do not do so now (well, they are used, but cannot fully replace live soldiers yet) and we cannot be sure when or if they will. It is also possible that PDAs will (fully effectively) translate languages, does that mean we should stop all linguistic instruction? Maybe we will even have superbly intelligent machines that will displace scientists - should we stop all science education? I think you see where I am taking this - there is some (different) likelihood that these things will come to pass, but they are not fully here yet and the technology is not at the stage where we can say with a sufficient degree of certitude that they will actually come.

 

I would not worry about this too much. I can guarantee you the young folks joining the US Marines will be in olympic level physical condition after 13 weeks at Parris Island followed by five weeks at Camp Geiger. Or eighteen weeks at MCRD San Diego and Camp Pendleton. No matter how sloppy fat or weak you are when you showed up, if you graduate you will be very fit. Of course only about 60-65% do graduate.

 

Let's not exaggerate with the "olympic level physical condition". There are Marines who will reach that, but those that join in relatively poor physical condition will not even remotely approach it. Plenty of Marines will greatly exceed the standards, but the actual requirements are not that demanding: http://usmilitary.about.com/od/marines/l/blfitmale.htm This is a good thing - there is little point in excluding people who are sufficiently fit just because they are not Olympians - the Marines would needlessly deprive themselves of a large pool of otherwise talented people.

[RPGmasterBoo]

When the socialists were in power here during the Yugoslav years high schools had "pre-military training" just like any other class, consisting of physical and military exercises. Lovely thing, a pity it was dropped.

 

The state today doesn't want militarily capable people, armed people and it does everything to eradicate physical violence, yet it still expects to find individuals to fight its wars. Ridiculous considering how much it has done to subdue the martial spirit in the average person.

I really hated it, all that marching, learning military tactics, and falling into formation.

 

It really shouldn't be surprising that the State has both emasculated citizens and force unreasonable standards since Americans are living contradictions.

 

You're supposed to hate it.

[Walsingham]

Lajcek:

 

- Yes we could try to beat the trend. But all obesity is doing is making us die from different things. Beat obesity and we'll only die of something else. For example, if we beat obesity by all running ten miles a day we'd have tremendous hearts, but out joints and backs would be completely ****ed. You see it with soldiers. Although I'll grant you never see people dying of joint pain.

 

- I think you massively underestimate how much of ordinary soldiering can be done by a robot. Delivering indirect fire (artillery), communications, logistics bulk supply are all things robots are already involved in. But if you accept the purpose of warfighting infatry as being to exist as a certain scale, and require other infantry to remove them then why shouldn't robots do the job?

 

Look at this way: the principle way arseholes beat democracies is by inflicting miniscule casualties (by traditional standards) on their soldiers. It means we are unable to use military force as part of foriegn policy, even though it would be very convenient to do so. But if you replace the poor sodding infantry with robots, no more letters home to mum.

 

I think the whole thing is utterly terrifying, and their should be a moratorium on using robots because it encourages warfighting, and robots themselves have zero conscience which multiplies the risk of atrocity.

[Moose]

So what you're saying is robots need the vote?

[Walsingham]

So what you're saying is robots need the vote?

 

What I meant to say is that I for one welcome our new terrifying robot overlords.

[Wrath of Dagon]

They are a purer, better species than we are.