• PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S [he/him]
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    3 days ago

    I’m AmeriKKKan. I understand completely how bad it is here.

    Not an excuse.

    If given a choice between “join the military or X”, you pick X unless it’s more unethical than joining the military. Even if it was “join the military or else you literally die”, you need to pick “literally die”, and then that’s just how your story ends, tough noogies, but at least you didn’t work for the baby killing machine.

      • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        People don’t understand how the military is the best social ladder in America and how desperate people are to climb it. I worked at Walmart before the military. After the military my first job was making 6 figures. I went from just over poverty, to in something like the top ~15% of earners.

      • PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S [he/him]
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        2 days ago

        The American economy has been jury-rigged for decades to pipeline disadvantaged youth into the military, and said youth are very close to thve bottom of the list of people responsible for that dynamic.

        Completely and utterly aware of that dynamic, but what parts of “no excuse” and “baby-killing machine” are so difficult for AmeriKKKan people to understand? We all know that there are some things you “just don’t do” because they are monstrous to do! Joining the AmeriKKKan military needs to be one of them!

        said youth are very close to the bottom of the list of people responsible for that dynamic.

        Right but that doesn’t make them not responsible at all for their individual choices, individual actions, or for their part in the baby-killing machine. Obviously the capitalists are the ones most responsible by several orders of magnitude, but that does not mean that working people or poorer people who put their bodies on the line to work for the capitalists’ baby-killing machine are completely innocent. Like you do not lose your moral agency once you fall below the poverty line.

        Like I’m asking for the absolute bare minimum of resisting temptation and liberals in this thread are like “no, soldiers are like innocent little baby lambs who have been shepherded into the military and have no moral agency” and like, fuck right off to hell with that take. Troops are people with the same ability to make moral decisions as any other people, and ostensibly they’re tough people, so they should be able to process this extremely simple if distressing reality that their “”“service”“” was evil and that they have to live with the consequences of their own mistake.

        • altkey (he\him)@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          2 days ago

          I am probably not as harsh talking as you, but I find this blanket forgiveness for our boys in camo kinda worrying too. One day all Lemmy angers at ICE recruits in tacticool gear shooting and kidnapping people, the second day we clap to DEATH DEATH TO IDF, and on the third day we are supposed to mourn an american war pilot who died doing missions in a foreign country on behalf of Trump and Netanyahu.

          A career soldier, not a draftee, who could have chosen not to join the military or, when faced with inevitable active participation - get (dishonorably) discharged, just went with it. Dude, there are a corpus of laws about death and funerals on your job, you thought you would sit it out, or worse, you wanted to outsource your own personal misery to the lands you can’t even point on the map? Or, say, you didn’t choose it but just went with the flow your whole life? What if your best pals could’ve invited you to Abu Ghraib - could you say no? Could you choose anything for yourself? Are you a fucking person at all?

          There is a rehabilitation arc to anyone, even to the worst of the worst if they choose to quit doing bad things and/or work at undoing damage they dealt. Fate wasn’t so fair to this guy as he was caught ready to airbomb iranians, without a second chance, what a bummer. If it wasn’t for that, he could’ve got 6 figures salary and gone through this pain with a personal therapist, reflecting on what he has done and finding his peace at last. No more screaming iranians schoolgirls on fire at night, only quality sleep. Thanks to the sponsor of this podcast, MyPillow.