“...Had you said some - a minority - of fighter pilots are jerks, it might be different...”
I should be giving thanks that I did not have to rely on Mr Rogers for a precis of operators’ manuals.
In his rush to vilify, he failed to note that I did not mention any percentages, about who were the jerks and who weren’t. I merely said I never met any I would trust.
“...If you met more than one or two, your comment was either stupid or dishonest...”
MR is free to draw any conclusions he wants to, but I did meet hundreds, and worked extensively with dozens - starting in the mid-1980s and continuing through November 1999.
Many pencils were pushed. The towering contempt MR delights in displaying for the lesser mortals is impossible to miss. I’d remind him that without all the “shoe clerks,” his fighter-pilot overlords wouldn’t have one ounce of fuel to burn, not one AIM-9 to launch, not one single wrench to tighten the lug nuts on the F-15E (F-4, or whatever) he rode in.
One cannot resist asking some questions:
If the fighter pilots really are the exalted overlords they claim to be, why should any of them care what we lesser mortals think?
Why should he care?
What reward can they possibly grant him, in exchange for his hysterical defense?
You really ARE a pathetic pencil-pushing weenie, aren’t you!