This is a very honest retelling of how this derail started!
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I removed the curse words from both sides. Do you disagree that that is the content of this thread?
If by “mistake” you mean placing the blame for all war atrocities committed since the Civil War equally on ever member of the armed services then maybe it’s how it started…
Except of course no one ever meant that - but continue anyway.
Sorry, you’re correct, you only blamed them for the atrocities in Iraq.
Do you have any regrets about being part of an armed forces that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children?
I would hate to be seen as exaggerating the facts for effect…
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Good god is this thread ever the perfect example of everything wrong with idealists. The mindset that created this thread is totally incompatible with ever getting anything done.
I also can’t imagine the level of self certainty I’d need to pass moral judgement on people using this little information. I’m perfectly happy passing moral judgement in really clear cut cases. Paul Ryan for instance was born into a situation significantly more unfortunate than the one I was born into… he ended up in foster care and got adopted… then went to college on a scholarship for orphans. He later cast one of the votes to get rid of that same scholarship. The guys not just a Republican, a Libertarian, and an intellectual fraud… he’s also a bigger traitor to his class than the token black Republicans are. Candace Owens was born fucking rich at least.
But you want to start claiming that broad swathes of the workforce are evil because their employers overall do bad stuff? Yeah count me out on that. Every single person who wants to pass judgement on service members and talk about moral culpability better not have an IQ over 100, parents with college degrees, or literally any other advantage a person could have besides MAYBE being white. Otherwise your privilege is so desperately in need of being checked it defies imagination.
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How? How is saying “if you joined the military, you participated in some heinous shit, even if you had a very minor role in it” incompatible with getting things done? What things could we get done if we only coddled soldiers more?
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Shut the fuck up. You’re a fucking lawyer. I’m not for glorifying the troops, and thankfully most of them aren’t either.
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I’m quoting these statements because they are relevant examples from this thread, but I’d like to hear people’s opinions in a general sense, not specifically to do with any individual forum member.
The language we use defines how we view the world. Soldiers have been re-branded as “service members”, while the act of going to war is labeled as “serving your country” by…blessing foreigners with “democracy”, I suppose. The who, what, where, how, and why of the military is layer upon layer of euphemistic double-speak: “collateral damage”, department of “defense”, operation “Iraqi freedom”.
To call someone selfless or heroic is to judge the context in which their actions were taken. The statement that there are “clearly plenty of heroic and selfless people” in the military, is loaded with assumptions about the reality of what the military does, the individuals acting as part of it, and how we should judge what is being done.
Consider an historical example, the conquistadors. A group of people, fully armed and willing to make good on their threat of violence, arrive uninvited and proceed to “serve” the lord by baptizing and then enslaving or killing the inhabitants as they steal the resources of the land. Or a hypothetical where instead of US troops in Iraq, there are hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops “serving their country” by occupying your town/city in your homeland. Dropping bombs on your family/clan/tribe. Taking the natural wealth of your community.
Would we consider these historical or hypothetical soldiers to be “clearly heroic and selfless”? Assuming that we don’t, then by what criteria are we saying that one set of invaders are heroic and selfless, and others are not?
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People become soldiers for the same kinds of reasons they do other jobs. I don’t personally think there’s much value in blaming normal people for the systemic outcomes of their personal economic choices because it’s terrible messaging and actively makes them resistant to positive change.
I can’t think of a phrase that has done more work for keeping white supremacy going in this country than ‘white guilt’.
Guilt is for specific individuals who you are blaming for systemic issues. You always absolve the masses in exchange for the positive change. There’s no possible scenario where telling the troops (particularly with the build up propaganda glorifying them which is so strong in the culture that fighting it head on is pointless and a waste of time) is going to save anyone or accomplish anything.
Not only is the argument morally wrong, ethically problematic because of the inherent hypocrisy, it’s also straight up counterproductive. Like I don’t know how you can make a worse argument than ‘the troops are morally responsible for the sins of United States foreign policy’.
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Yup, I literally called them all evil and at no point did I ever say anything like
Bummer when someone hacks your account.
So your first assumption of why zarapochka likes skydiver is because they’re both women?
Not because skydiver is an activist, not because she manages to stay friendly and positive toward people attacking her constantly, not because she’s gotten more involved in the political process than just about anyone on a forum of hundreds of political junkies (GermanGuy holds public office, so I think she’s #2).
No, none of those reasons are the first you bring up. It’s gotta have gender woven in?
You should probably think about why that is.
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You shut the fuck up.
Hey asshole, I’d like to say nice try but I can’t.
Females are in a small minority of scientists so yeah, it is cool when they succeed in that field. Or do you disagree?
I don’t feel like this was the gist of my post, so we may be talking past each other a bit here. For the record, I don’t think the moral or ethical quagmire that US foreign and military policy has placed us in will be solved by shaming the rank and file. However, we do ourselves no favors in our efforts to pull ourselves out of the morass when we choose to glorify the rank and file as heroes or selfless.
Systemic change will necessarily involve changing the paradigm, and that will involve changing how we describe the world. If we want to end the invasions, then we have to get people to not be invaders. Calling the invaders heroes is horrible messaging.
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Awesome posting. This whole line of thinking is very directly linked to how and why things happen like CNN turning into war propaganda the second shooting starts.
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Of course I agree, but I don’t automatically assume that’s the reason, or the only reason, zarapochka likes skydiver. It may well be, but there are plenty of other obvious reasons that it may be the case.
Even if there were not so many readily apparent reasons, we should not assume that the reason one woman thinks another woman is cool is based almost entirely on gender.
Dude you’re just as full of shit as he is in this thread. Maybe if you and the rest of your generation spent more time figuring out how to make being a decent human being the right individual choice for people instead of judging people the world wouldn’t be such a massive mess.
Look I’m an insanely judgemental person myself, so I see the appeal in it… but this whole thing the far left activists in this country have grabbed onto where normal people should take it upon themselves to make sacrifices for the greater good while no one else is doesn’t work at all.
Johnny has been fucking perfect on COVID. He’s gotten a 100% on the morality test. That doesn’t matter, in the slightest, because the rest of the population did not… and here we are. These problems are not solvable at an individual level. The only reason you individual responsibility and guilt types aren’t a complete waste of time is that occasionally in the middle of your sacrificing you find a way to make one of those sacrifices tolerable enough that we might be able to nudge some more normies into doing that.
So if you overprivileged assholes want to spend a bunch of time judging a bunch of people who are, on average, much less fortunate than you for making the rational economic choice… and then figuring out how to make peace with that with their personal beliefs so that they don’t have to live with serious guilt the rest of their damn lives (which sounds a lot like PTSD)… you’re just wrong about this. This is not the way. This is not productive and it is not accurate. It is straight up mentally ill and you should be trying to fight it every day.
Have some fucking humility and abandon the moral high ground. It’s a trap.
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Man, this thread has run its course.
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For one, it’s much easier to win friends and influence people if you don’t start out by telling them how horrible they all are.
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