I’ll just say I find the hyperbole horribly distasteful.
Ok. I felt like it might be shocking, but distasteful is your opinion. I'm sure others might agree with you. If the setting of my analogy was the bubonic plague, or the sack of Constantinople, would that have been more acceptable? I chose the analogy that I did specifically because its one I'm very familiar with, and because in the course of learning about it one of the lessons was that desperate people do desperate things.
I didn't in any way, in my opinion, diminish the horrible things people had to suffer through after we (the US) unleashed that hell on a civilian population. It was awful.
I only mention it because the setting of the analogy I was trying to make was in the wake of that attack. The point of it was that desperate people don't always think logically, or respond to logical arguments, because they're desperate. That argument is true for people looking at med school funding. The scales aren't even close to equivalent, which is why its hyperbole, but the point is still the same: desperate people make desperate decisions.
BUT, argue the point and not the way in which the point was made rather than ad hominem arguments.
You are still laying blame externally as if we had no choice in our positions as military physicians.
We DO have a choice as to whether or not we join the military, but the whole point is that in many, many cases those decision are made under duress. You are severely downplaying the pressure on a student when they're trying to decide how to pay for medical school. It doesn't help that the military takes advantage of that duress. That's the point of the analogy. Students in that position very often feel like it's the military or giving up on their hard work and dreams. The best way we could serve them is by letting them know what other options they have, so that they can make decisions about the military without feeling like it's their only realistic option. I'm laying the blame on the system that we have (the costs), the pressure associated with the decision, the lack of available information (regarding not only military medicine, but also regarding alternative options), the true inability to "really understand" what you're getting yourself in to as a 22-23 year old kid from a lower or middle class upbringing, AND also the military's complete lack of responsibility in how they advertise to that demographic. I'm certainly not the first person to make that argument, and it's not because of collusion.
I try to provide productive discussion for people who may feel stuck in their voluntary commitment but instead of tangenting in a productive route we nosedive in to insensitive hyperboles and blaming recruiters.
You try to pretend that people with no possible way to truly understand what military service entails should somehow be able to just figure that out. I think that's completely unrealistic. So while you may disagree with blaming recruiters (who in fact deserve a modicum of blame. If not the actual recruiters, then the recruiting apparatus itself. That is by no means an isolated opinion, even to military medicine), I disagree with the idea that a desperate person can just do a little reading and completely understand what military medicine means. -especially- when they have a recruiter point blank telling them that it's just like being a civilian physician. That's a bold faced lie that is told day-in and day-out, and to dismiss it as something that a student should just realize is a lie, and so it's OK, is irresponsible. Your inability to understand why someone might not be able to get a full picture of what military medicine is like just from reading a forum or that people tend to downplay known risks when they feel cornered is exactly why things "nosedive into insensitive hyperboles."
I would also say that "hey, man, suck it up" isn't a productive argument. "hunt the good stuff" was dumb when I heard it from the Army. It's fine, but you need to be able to at least justify the bad stuff, otherwise you're just hoping you can brainwash yourself.
