The members of the military share characteristics consistent with cult members. They are sent to a boot camp where an ideology is imposed upon them to get them to act in ways they otherwise wouldn’t. It’s straight up indoctrination. I wouldn’t get mad if a Scientologist was shitting on me for not being one of them. They’re brainwashed.
Doesn’t mean that being that way makes them all innocent. Some were aware going in and liked that the military gave them the chance to kill. Others were naively signing themselves away to be tools of the government after being hooked by that commercial of a Marine slaying a dragon.
No, that’s wrong. I’ve been rightly slated here for not taking more trouble over how I approached my questioning of sky, and I’ve taken that on board and admitted it wasn’t what I would have liked. I have no problem with admitting that at all.
What I do have a problem with is people like you who think they can bully and coerce the response they want out of someone, and you will never get that out of me. It has nothing to do with who, and everything to do with how (though of course the former tends to shape the latter).
That’s a fair point. How do you feel about Irish soldiers of whom there have been quite a few? I assume they kicked in some doors too?
Look I’m not trying to give cover to some petty tyrant who went above and beyond the call of duty to make your life more miserable. Those are choices those people made that they own morally. I’m saying everyone gets judged in their own context.
You really think some young British soldier who is all in on king, god, and country is the man at fault for your door being kicked in?
In other news if my wife cheats on me it’ll be her I’ll be upset with. Me and the dude she cheated with don’t have a quarrel unless he actively wants one. She’s the one who hurt me, not him. He just wanted to get his dick wet probably.
Every single moral transaction has to be attributed in some way if you’re trying to build out a moral system. I don’t think giving the component parts of a system much responsibility is a good idea. We need systems to get stuff done and we need tons of people who execute tiny pieces of those systems to make everything work. They’re all just people doing their day to day.
As you rise up you take on more and more responsibility for how things work and you take on more and more moral liability. That’s just how the math of it works out for me.
This comes down to how we define fetishizing the military. If people participate in the invasion, occupation, and subsequent subjugation of our fellow humans, is it fetishizing to say that there are “clearly plenty of people who are selfless and heroes” among the invaders? I would answer that yes, that is an example of fetishizing the participants and their actions. Would you not?
My framework does a pretty good job of vilifying military assholes actually. See all of us, and I do mean all of us, make tons of decisions at work. A cop gets to decide if he’s going to let someone off with a warning or not. A lieutenant gets to decide if his men are going to kick in marty’s door or not (for I assume no good reason). A private decides whether to check a building the risky way by looking in at close range or the safe way by just ventilating it with his rifle first.
It goes on and on. At every level there are plenty of moral decisions to sort whether an individual is a good person or not. But the more granular you can get the better. You want to attribute things at the correct level so that you don’t accidentally tell some low normal dude with PTSD and knee problems that he’s a bad person. He might be a bad person, but it won’t be because he joined the military.
That’s a fair opinion to have, particularly from your point of view. My counter point is propaganda and economic desperation are powerful things. From the perspective of the person getting their door kicked in that’s not much comfort and a very poor argument.
EDIT: In this context, negative should be interpreted to mean how you personally view them as a desirable candidate and not with regards to their electability.
is military service an inherent negative on a political candidate’s résumé?
This depends a lot on the candidate and the circumstances around their service. Political candidates tend to be elite people with lots of options which makes this usually a windmill yes. I’m even more suspicious of people claiming to be liberal or further left who were in the military. They’d better be extremely working class and that college degree better be from the GI Bill basically.
I think having been a prosecutor who wasn’t one of the recent reform candidates is a windmill yes. I’m sorry but if you guys want to talk about the Nuremburg defense maybe look at prosecutors who send poor people off to serve thousands of man years of prison time before we start judging some enlisted member of the military.
I’d rather the thread not be locked. I find the conversation interesting and the subject is one that is worth discussing, although I agree that the personal attacks are needless.
