Bro, what
People on Lemmy can be so wild
Everyone in here is just a fake bot to test how committed and right I am. They only ever disagree with me to play devil’s advocate and don’t actually mean it.
And if they are real they just haven’t realized how smart I am or they would be agreeing with me anyways, they are just dumb which I will be condescending but act like I’m being generous for talking to them at all about it.Social media I so easy and I am winning it so hard!
People on Lemmy can be so wild
I don’t see it
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This is what happens when people are terminally online.
it must be nice to be so morally upstanding and pure. i only wish i could aspire to the perfection most terminally online people claim to possess.
all it takes is not signing up to be a mercenary for the state. pretty low bar
you should stop paying your taxes since they fund the mercenaries.
we agree, you see how bs how we have no control over how taxes are spent when it comes to military. military industrial complex lobbies for war, AIPAC lobbies for genocide, and we have to pay for it or go to jail.
They literally set up their biggest recruitment centers in the poorest areas of the country offering “a way out” that isn’t the prison pipeline while being one of the biggest propaganda outfits in history.
Multiple things can be true at once. The military can be guilty of unimaginable amounts of cruelty while individual soldiers can also be victims exploited by the systems of poverty that those on top have perpetuated and continue to benefit from.
You’ve literally got elites starving people, handing some of them some table scraps in exchange for cracking some skulls for them and these people talk like every single one of them is just as bad and there’s no possibility that they’re getting exploited too.
Eew! They’re using nuance in here! Ick.
Oh my! I completely forgot! I should have put a content warning on this… I knew I was forgetting something. Sorry about that… No hard feelings right? :3
Also people forget the power of propaganda. Many soldiers talk about how they were duped about fighting terrorists, only to find innocent civilians.
Right? Wonder how long it’ll take though for someone to come in and non sequitur this into “oh so since they’re propagandized we should just forget all the atrocities American soldiers committed?”
did they disobey orders or shot those civilians? that’s the difference, if they disobey those orders then get discharged that’s fine. they duped them. but if they pull the trigger fuck em, as criminal as the state that sent them. no Nuremberg defense bullshit
only 10% of military members are combat troops.
90% are doing shit like driving trucks, mechanics, logistitcs, intel, guards on bases, MP, etc.
i’ve know dozens and dozens of military people. only a handful were ever in combat.
also, i live in one of the richest zip codes in the country… they have recruitment centers here to. There is one right next to where I buy my $7 lattes. one of my well-off nephews aspires to join the military.
Basically what I said in the original thread… Why we’re screenshoting and recommenting is beyond me
Um… because I wasn’t involved in the “original thread” and only found this through this thread?
Yes I am aware
I was posting for the void
Ah, fair.
A lot of us were fucking kids who didn’t know what we were getting into, and the military is so goddamn big that a lot of us still leave without having seen the dark side of this shit. PFC Snuffy sitting pretty in SK for air defense, or Staff Sergeant Bob Roberts running support for Peshmerga in Syria are gonna have a very different outlook than someone who was tossed on the ground in Iraq, or who operated drones against ‘insurgents’ in whatever fucking country in the sandbox drew our ire today and doesn’t even see the ‘collateral damage’ numbers until the fucking debrief.
Shit, even there it takes a lot to wipe the scales from your eyes.
I despise this tendency of online lefties. What we’re up against is so huge and so faceless that they tend to just lash out at any little piece of it they can reach no matter what it is or even if that piece is victimized by that system too. Even if that piece they can reach is on their side. But they’ll dress it up in purity tests and how those people need to do better. It’s their fault actually.
More of us need to keep in mind the words of the late Michael Brooks. “Be ruthless to systems, be kind to people.”
a massive insecurity complex that creates a massive moral superiority complex, fueled by simplistic narratives that don’t reflect a complex reality and where reality is rejected in favor of a morally pure world where they are the only source of goodness and all other people are evil or enablers of evil. also being totally allergic to facts, common sense, and any possibility that they might be wrong.
not any different than the MAGA supporters
they are actually worse to each other than anyone else. constantly witch hunting for who is the most idealogical ‘pure’ and who is a ‘traitor’ to the cause. they are all mini-Trumps wannabes.
Aren’t corporations people? And didn’t people decide to make corporations people?
Which people do we need to be kind to? Which systems, that are also people, do we need to be ruthless to?
Find me one actual human leftist that thinks corporations or institutions are people. I’ll wait. 🤡🤡🤡
It’s cute that you think that I was talking about just lefties when typically only idiotic right wingers buy that bullshit.
Can you show me in my post where I used that term? I will also wait.
Ah well, you’re trying at least…
Honey, you responded to a comment talking about a tendency of “online lefties” that ended in saying “more of us” meaning lefties need to keep in mind the words of the late Michael Brooks, A LEFTIST COMMENTATOR.
YOU might not have been talking about lefties, but the conversation you inserted yourself into was. So you walked into the Wendy’s and are getting mad that they won’t serve you a Crunchwrap Supreme. Fucking clown thought he ate with that. 🤣🤣🤣
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the main character of the game.
I see why that conversation hurt you personally. but if you harmed people because of your orders then you’re not innocent in your story.
Most of the people American soldiers have killed have been fucking kids, too. Sorry, it more than cancels out. You were the fucking kids with the fucking guns. Genuinely, what do you want from people? If you reject state violence, then surely you don’t want to be celebrated for what you did. Should we just pretend it didn’t even fucking happen?
You’ve literally got elites starving people, handing some of them some table scraps in exchange for cracking some skulls for them and these people talk like every single one of them is just as bad and there’s no possibility that they’re getting exploited too.
The only war is class war. The self-described communists would recognize that, if they weren’t imperial fascists in disguise.
Agree, those behind recruitment for targeting, misleading and brainwashing good people, those behind military command for destabilising whole regions for nothing but profit, and those behind the economic system pushing so many young people to see enlisting as the only viable way to provide for their family have a huge role and are ultimately the real source of the scene depicted in the comic. But as you said, multiple things can be true at once, and this doesn’t absolve the guy on the trigger side of their individual responsibility
Absolutely, as long as that first part is remembered when it comes time to figure out what “justice” looks like for those people. It doesn’t absolve them of responsibility but there are such things as mitigating factors.
Yeah, I mean, if they get people with either ‘let’s get you a gun so you can start killing people’ or ‘your country needs protection or it will be destroyed by a country on the other side of the world’ you know these were folk already down on their luck, stuck in a system and/or pre-fucked.
Can’t really develop a habit of regularly questioning your orders in the military tho.
The killing would stop way too early & we apparently just can’t have that.Not an excuse. If I kill my elderly innocent neighbor and steal everything they own because I’m in danger of falling behind on rent it explains but doesn’t excuse my actions. That is on top of the “poverty draft” being mostly a myth at this point.
The fact that your first thought was “falling behind on rent” and not “haven’t eaten in days and my kids are starving” tells me you know nothing about being in poverty. Pray tell, what do you mean by the “poverty draft” being a myth? Do you mean they don’t deliberately target them? Do we need to have the conversation about incentive structures and feedback loops again? You don’t need a deliberate choice to target poor people for the incentives to line up that way.
Edit: Regardless, do you think they just throw recruits into the murder? They exploit them, get them dependent on the structure, indoctrinate them first. By the time murdering the neighbor comes they’ve already been made to feel like it’s impossible to say no. Why the sugar frosted fuck do you think we need so many fucking videos reminding service members they CAN REFUSE UNLAWFUL ORDERS?
You know nothing about me I’ve been homeless for years at a time fuck off with that shit. What I mean by calling it a myth is that the average military recruit is slightly richer than the average American and that those in extreme poverty and the least likely to join only rivalved by the ultra rich. Soldiering is a middle class profession currently. How is anything you say an excuse youre excusing mass murderers and genocidal racist war criminals and presenting them as the primary victims of their own actions makes me throw up.
Soldiering is a middle class profession currently
https://www.military-ranks.org/army-pay
Starts at $24k per year. Not to worry, though, once you’re a sergeant with 14 years experience it caps out at $48k, and once you’ve reached literally the highest rank of enlisted man it is possible to achieve, of which there is only one in the entire army, it goes up to $118k!
(You do get a signing bonus, too, which since you’re a middle-class person and not being taken advantage of, you’ll stick into an investment account to start saving up for your middle-class life, instead of buying a new Dodge Charger. All those new recruits with their investment accounts are practically a meme at this point.)
Bless.
Motherfuckers around here parrotting lies just because they mesh well with their pre-establushed hate boner.
Starts at $24k per year.
Plus food, housing, medical. More bennies if you knock up one of the local strippers. Money for education, sweet home loan terms, preferential hiring…
Meanwhile, full-time work at Federal minimum is $15k a year. Biggest benefit is that you get to keep your soul.
This also means more to lose if you try to disobey what you think is an unlawful order but when you get to the court martial it’s found to be lawful. Weird, it’s like we understand that these kind of imbalanced power dynamics make people feel like they just have to accept what they’re given and can’t say no in some contexts but not others…
did you know that selling your soul comes at a price?
I think I’m going to stop making fun of your point of view now, I think the point is made
“They are victimized and exploited by the system too.”
“How dare you present these mass murderers as the primary victims.”
You win. You’re the better leftist than me honey. I can’t beat that shit.
Throw a Z on that helmet and then what do they think? Rhetorical question.
I was in that original thread, and posted about Shooting and Crying being a common propaganda tactic to DARVO things and make people feel sympathetic for the soldiers. Shooting and Crying was pioneered by… Drumroll please… The IDF. So you can fuck right off with that.
They think the same thing this is posted by anarchists not “tankies” it’s possible to oppose both you know.
I really wish more people understood that saying something anti-american does not automatically make you pro-china or pro-russia. Killing people halfway across the world in countries you’re not even at war with is not ok, and doing it for the money is possibly even worse. I know many are desperate, and most want to defend their country instead of shooting other poor people in some desert. But in the end, each soldier is responsible for accepting being part of that senseless violence, of being the one to pull the trigger, in exchange for money.
Instead of putting the blame on individual soldiers, how about we instead focus on the people ordering the senseless violence to begin with? When we constantly need former service members coming out and making public statements about how soldiers don’t have to follow unlawful orders, doesn’t that say something about the structure they’ve cultivated in that organization?
“Be ruthless to systems, Be kind to people.”
When they are in these situations, an individual soldier is little more than an expensive weapon the people at the top are pointing at someone or something. If one of them malfunctions, they get replaced.
Yes, this doesn’t absolve them of responsibility. “Just following orders” is not a defense for war crimes. But if you’ve watched former service members discuss how disobeying unlawful orders works, you’ll know “You’re asking me to do something illegal” also isn’t a get out of jail free card. It is a defense for when you face punishment for violating that order. A defense crucially that can fail if the order is found to be lawful. So if you’re a soldier that say comes from desperation and might be looking at losing literally everything to a dishonorable discharge if the court martial doesn’t find in your favor and says that you were in fact disobeying a lawful order? Can you maybe see why someone like that might feel like they have no choice but to pull that trigger?
I’m not saying it’s right. I’m not saying they don’t bear some responsibility. I’m saying maybe they might bear less responsibility than the people that put them in that position to begin with and maybe we should show some goddamned compassion to people who in that impossible moment feel like they only have one way out.
.zip does have .ml alts i can confirm.
I love the infighting. MF I’m on world because it’s vanilla and I wanted somewhere that meshed with everywhere else.
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they post is complaining about my comments.
I’m a little hurt they cut my comment off. You really are funny.
Hey, it’s a butthurt invader who wants us to reassure him that he’s a good person after he abdicated his moral responsibility to a homicidal nation state. Yes! You’re a good person!! You’re a very good person!!
Hey, it’s a butthurt invader who wants us to reassure him that he’s a good person after he abdicated his moral responsibility to a homicidal nation state. Yes! You’re a good person!! You’re a very good person!!
thanks for affirming my decision to make an alt on this
you seem to have no guilt whatsoever, proving the point of that meme.
Username checks out
they were butthurt because they are veterans, and are sad that someone didn’t kiss the soil they walked on. all they military armour and he can’t protect his feelings from reality
You registered on Lemmy just for this? Or were you arguing with one of those users while on another account?
Coincidences happen so I thought I’d wander in and ask.
Neither. I saw it browsing on my main account, which I prefer uncontroversal. But this is a personal issue for me, so I didn’t feel like staying quiet either.
don’t sign to kill people on the other side of the globe for rich people oil portfolio.
Unhinged how? I just see normal people, and soldiers.
