On Jul 11, 11:09*am, " wrote:
On Jul 11, 11:20*am, "Roger Long" wrote: "Capt. JG" wrote

total bozos with delusions of grandeur.

Don't get me started on my brief membership in the Civil Air Patrol.

...

I think it's the uniforms. *If you dress folks up like extras from
some kind of farcical operetta about vaguely fascist aquatic clowns
the guys who show up for a second day of work are likely to be acting
to type... *The CAP, CG Aux and Power Squadron all do some good work
and have the potential to be wonderful resources but they seem to
attract a lot of guys who really ought to go join the benevolent order
of costume parties and I think they are the worse for it...

--Tom.

Hi Tom
You bring up an interesting concept that was rather startlingly
described in 1971 (Zimbardo).

Phillip Zimbardo's (1971) Prisoners Experment held at Stanford
revealed a rahter ugly side of humans. The results suggest that given
certain roles:

"...Prisoners (students) and guards (students) rapidly adapted to
their roles, stepping beyond the boundaries of what had been predicted
and leading to dangerous and psychologically damaging situations. One-
third of the guards were judged to have exhibited "genuine" sadistic
tendencies, while many prisoners were emotionally traumatized and two
had to be removed from the experiment early. Finally, Zimbardo
terminated the experiment because he realized that his experiment was
unethical..."

In other words give a guy a gun and a uniform and they start acting
like an ass hole. But some argue only ass holes are attracted to
American style law inforcment.

Bob