ravan

In today's email: Swiss Teams Boot Camp – Wed. 8/13 & 8/20

This is an invitation to some kind of bridge class.

They've named it to be reminiscent of the miserable experience inflicted on military recruits and draftees. This is fundamentally a brain-washing process, intended to produce compliance with military needs. It consists of a mix of insult, physical exhaustion, and often other physical abuse.

It also involves some amount of actual training and physical conditioning.

Apparently normal young men react to this by bonding with both the organization and their fellow victims, rather than by using the weapons training they receive to deal appropriately with either their immediate abusers (sergeants, etc.), the people in charge of their bad experience (chief local officer), or the people in charge of the whole system (political leaders, top generals, and similar).

If they are rational, this would presumably be because they reckon their chances of surviving their military experience are higher than their chances of surviving fighting back against it. And some *do* ultimately "frag" their officers, when they have a good chance of getting away with it.

But mostly they don't seem to be rational - this appears to be an effective indoctrination technique, even with unwilling draftees. The victims wind up as obedient military serfs, even glorying in their role.

OK, so far so human. But why label anything to remind people of this example of injustice, unfairness, and all round evil, when you want them to voluntarily sign up for it, perhaps even pay for it?

Will my next unsolicited email involve an invitation to a "concentration camp"?