It’s tough to get off the dopamine hits of online engagement. I don’t blame jaf for being an addict anymore than I blame a heroine addict.
Obviously we’ve all had to reckon with what we’ve done morally. And many people who were in the military have very publicly reckoned with it. Better people tend to do it more and worse people tend to do it less. I just object to the idea that simply being part of the military makes you responsible for the larger organizations worst behavior anymore than I think a local parish priest who never molested anyone, knew of anyone being molested, or did anything worse than having an affair in his 40’s with some other lonely middle aged person, is personally responsible for the sexual abuse shell game the catholic church has been playing for probably over a thousand years.
I don’t think you were responsible for more than the things you actually did.
I’m sorry but to think about this any other way is just a portal to the mental illness dimension. I can’t think of a better way to jam yourself into a moral cage and stop yourself from doing anything but trying to mitigate your own moral suffering 24/7. The only upside you get from it is that you can tell yourself you’re better than people who won’t live in a cage like yours.
It’s counter productive. Extremely counter productive. I know a lot about this, I’ve seen it a lot. These people were my dad’s victim of choice.
Yeah, but only some heroin addicts are assholes.
If the thing you’re addicted to is being an asshole…
A discussion on the cult of personality surrounding the military and its potential unhealthiness is a discussion worth having. It’s something that’s not brought up because even people who are normally anti-war consider it taboo.
The military isn’t in the business of molding boys into men. It’s interested in exploiting people who have grown up being told that risking your life for your country is one of the noblest things a person can do. It wants to find poor people who have few options in life and put them in harm’s way in order to further American imperialism.
It’s unfair to berate 17 year olds who grow up in those situations. They’re victims of shady recruiters who set up shop in high schools around the country looking for impressionable teenagers to suck into the armed forces.
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Again, straw man.
Serving who and to what ends though? That’s the question. If we relabel invasions to be serving, and civilian deaths to be collateral damage, we’ll have quite a challenge convincing our fellow citizens to stop participating in the invasions and killing.
Again, context matters if we are going to label people’s actions as heroic or selfless. If 100k Chinese “service members” occupied Austin, TX, would you consider there to be “plenty of heroic and selfless” soldiers in their midst? If while they were occupying and plundering the resources of your community would you consider it helpful to your desired outcome(no more occupation and looting) if the Chinese citizens at home in China were calling the occupiers “heroes and selfess”?
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And as far as I’m concerned they served. They were told to do something hard for their country and to take stupid risks for the rest of us. The fact that some asshole took that motivation and used to to do evil is disgusting and I’ve got plenty of moral judgement for the asshole… but I’m not putting any of that on the guy down range. It feels gross because it is gross.
Try to recall that spitting on veterans is such an exceptionally stupid thing to do from a PR perspective that they claimed it was happening to tar the left in the Vietnam era… and it worked.
This whole line of thinking is such a trap… god it’s such a nasty trap.
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I agree, it sucks that we can’t have that conversation because it was used as a personal attack. Hay Man!
Not a strawman. I mean why do you think they go to high schools to recruit? It’s not because appealing to actual adults is more effective.
You seem to really be uninterested in any discourse. Your main focus appears to be lashing out at anybody who doesn’t completely agree with you. I suppose it gives you a rush to make you feel as though you’re morally superior to us evil Americans. But in the end, America learned everything it knows about empire-making from its former colonizers.
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No surprise, as you’ve shown no ability to admit you’re wrong about things or to grow and adapt your character to grow out of old fashioned biases. Instead you hurl personal insults, and double and triple down.
As a result, I’m sure we’ll end up doing this again sometime.
Some of them sure. Everyone gets graded in their own context. That’s literally what intersectionality is about? Most of them would just be random teenagers who joined the Chinese military, and if I was in the resistance and it was my job to kill a few of them I’d probably feel bad about it. Even inside Austin city limits. Because they thought they were doing the right thing and had people who loved them… and I brutally ended that persons life.
I totally agree that glorification of the military is a bad idea, mostly because of the type of behavior it encourages from our politicians.
Most of you are not morally evil, of course, another straw man.
Who was your line about about berating 17 year olds directed to? I thought it was me, but could be wrong.
This reminds me of when Sam Harris was talking with someone and he insisted that the term “collateral damage” was a neutral term when discussing the Iraq War. He didn’t understand the point at hand, that using a euphemism created by Donald Rumsfield and company to minimize civilian casualties was not neutral language. When we describe our reality using the lexicon of the oppressors, we are reinforcing the reality that they are trying to press upon us.
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I’m just going to quote something that’s 100% spot on, if you don’t mind…
You couldn’t have chosen more appropriate initials if you’d tried.
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Collateral damage definitely predated Rummy
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This is true. And service is absolutely a term loaded with meaning. I think that meaning is supremely useful as a memetic device and want to repurpose it. I would also love to repurpose collateral damage when describing the impact policies have on the stock market.
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Yeah I’m pretty sure that’s a Vietnam or earlier era euphemism for slaughtering civilians.
I appreciate the correction.