I despise anyone who becomes a soldier of their own free will. The moment you enlist, you accept that you could be obliged to kill, and that you will have no control over whether that killing will be justified.
In other words, you accept the possibility that you could become a murderer.
“I had to join this gang that kills 160 in a girls schools on the first day of our unprovoked war because I really wanted to go to university”
This is what I want to hear in my imaginary court so I can have a laugh while sentencing this fucker to his deserved hanging.
Don’t forget giving young people in legal trouble an alternative to having a crime on their record or going to prison. Just enlist instead and all will be forgotten!
Without a military or nuclear weapons, what is preventing other countries from taking advantage at the first chance they get?
Criticize the U.S. all you want. But the country is full of valuable resources that other countries want. Take away the U.S.'s ability to defend themselves and the risk of foreign nations taking advantage will spike dramatically. Nukes are basically the ultimate “don’t even think about it” sign.
sorry full of valuable resources? what, corn? dataservers? pedophiles?
the U.S. is not some piggy bank waiting to be cracked. Realistically, the current US military exists to defend America from all the nations it’s pissed off by invading them in the past. It’s a self-fullfilling system.
If you have nukes and are the only sick fucks ever top use it why do you need to ‘defend’ yourself everywhere in the world unprovoked.
get fucked with your BS. You’re parroting regime propaganda.
Even they at least became less hypocritical in naming it the Dep of War, not defense.
Maybe follow that lead if you want to be a little warcriminal imperialist bootlicker.
Every fucking day there’s some fucker online that makes me despise that cancer country even more.
Absolute scum of the earth
I never specifically said “joining US military is bad”, I said joining the military in general is a bad thing. And neither did I talk about nukes, which are the ultimate evil.
I also never demanded to remove the military capabilities of one country, leaving it open for other countries to attack. I never talked about these things, about balance of power, about mutually assured destruction and all these geostrategic aspects of military logic.
All I said was - if you are a person who joins your country’s military, I despise you. Period. This is a statement I made completely disregarding all these other aspects you mention, and it is completely logically valid on its own.
You failed to get the point I was making. Just because the military is a driving factor to technological progress, doesn’t mean it’s a good thing all of a sudden. And all that progress could also have been made by science. Wernher von Braun didn’t care who funded his research into rockets.
Thats the trick. If a country doesn’t have a military and they have something like resources other countries want. The become puppets of the countries that have militaries. The exceptions are small countries that don’t have enough of anything anyone wants for others to bother taking it. They don’t tend to do so well usually.
Yeah i’m sure it’s a curse, and not centuries of colonialism, imperialism, uneven trade etc etc.
The Third World is not poor. You don’t go to poor countries to make money. There are very few poor countries in this world. Most countries are rich! The Philippines are rich! Brazil is rich! Mexico is rich! Chile is rich—only the people are poor. But there’s billions to be made there, to be carved out, and to be taken—there’s been billions for 400 years! The Capitalist European and North American powers have carved out and taken the timber, the flax, the hemp, the cocoa, the rum, the tin, the copper, the iron, the rubber, the bauxite, the slaves, and the cheap labour. They have taken out of these countries—these countries are not underdeveloped—they’re overexploited!
The “resource curse” is just people trying to pretend imperialism isn’t responsible. Norway has plenty of oil and they have a high quality of life, because nobody invaded them.
Plenty of these countries had leaders who wanted to use their resources to help the people, but the powers that be, most often the US, didn’t want that. And so for example Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran, a peaceful, democratically elected progressive, was overthrown by the CIA, and he was replaced by a monarch who could be easily bribed and would use the oil to enrich himself. And when that monarch caved to domestic pressure and participated in an oil embargo, US support was withdrawn and he was overthrown and the current government came to power.
There’s no “mystery” or “curse.” It’s just imperialism. The story generally goes that these resources were stolen by force during colonialism and remained in foreign hands after independence and the country still functions as a neocolony, leading to poverty and exploitation, or war and instability if they challenge it.
Very much so. So ewhere there is a balance of having enough to be a stable country, but not so much to draw attention. But it’s a very small point to balance on.
Correct. If there is one, then others have to exist to balance them out. Only with none can we all exist without militaries. And that really should be a goal.
Not true for the USN. They hand you a contract that you sign. You only have to do what is contained in that contract. To change your job they have to get you to sign a new contract. I was never close to combat, and neither would any other Navy Nuke, though they actually left the school for the fleet. I skipped that step. There are tons of non-combat jobs in the US military that will never be anywhere close to combat. Logistics is why our military works.
That being said, it’s worse than you are making it out to be. A lot of the people who signed up for combat roles were looking to kill people before they ever signed the contract.
You join the USN, you help with the logistics, someone you’ve helped in some way or another presses a button somewhere, a cruise missile is fired, obliterates a target and a few bad guys, some civilians die as collateral damage - to me, you’ve helped kill these civilians even though, admittedly, you’ve only played a very minor role. I very much doubt there are any contracts at the USN that 100% exclude that possibility and I’m not giving anyone a benefit of the doubt.
I have a good friend that is a cardiologist in the air force. Joined the military when he got into med school to cover his tuition and the get guaranteed residency. He’s never been deployed over seas, never been in a war area, and never designed a process or item that has led to an indirect killing. An exception could be if he saved someone that went back to kill someone, but that would be true for all doctors military or not, so that’s not a valid comparison.
There are many military jobs that are simple office jobs like accounting. Not everyone of them is linked to battle.
If you think these more mundane jobs indirectly lead to military related casualties, you better start hating on your local grocery store, because odds are they have given supplies to a soldier that eventually indirectly killed someone. Or probably any public service a soldier could use, because indirectly, that may help the soldier kill someone.
Holy reaching Batman. That’s quite a reach from serving in the military doesn’t ackchually serve the military in some cases to your grocery is probably serving the military.
No wonder yankistanis like getting dominated by your government. Keep kissing that boot though and wondering why the government turned fascist, it’s probably the local groceries fault.
Working for the military makes you a war enabler. Best case. You help making it possible for some government asshole to wage war. Worst case, you become a murderer.
So whether you’re in battle or not only decides if you’re a murderer or helping murderers.
None of these possibilities are acceptable. Period.
Paying your taxes makes you a much bigger war enabler than the non combat military. And with taxes, you not only enable your country to go to war. You enable other countries to do so too, as your gov pays for weapons to give them.
The fact is, noone is innocent. And the people truely causing the wars for thier own interest just want us to blame each other instead of them. Clearly, you are giving them what they want.
Um… If they really had a choice, the vast majority would not join the military. There are exceptions of course. But most feel they have no other options. Just like technically you don’t have to pay your taxes (you can file a form to have nothing withheld from your paycheck). But it is the best choice if you want to make a living. So still, very much valid.
Feeling you have no other option (despite a lot of other jobs being on offer) and totally not having any other option (because they’ll put you in jail for not paying taxes) are two completely different things.
With all due respect, but there is no reason to join the army unless they force you to. Even when Germany still had mandatory military service and they wanted to draft me in 1997, I opted to wipe old peoples’ butts in an old people’s home instead because that was the only way out. Don’t you dare tell me there is no other option.
The grocery’s job doesn’t rely upon the imperial pillaging of other places to make economic sense. “Non combat roles” in the military do. The military doctor’s job is to get the boys back out doing more slaughter. That’s the point. If they didn’t do that they wouldn’t be doing their job. Other doctors, that’s not the point…it could be some distant effect, sure, but for a military doctor it’s direct. Other doctors see patients who are not involved in imperialist slaughter of innocents. Military doctors do not.
This is like Von Braun saying “I was only an SS officer developing military weapons for the science! I wasn’t like…info it, you know, you can’t hold it against me.” Accountants for the Nazis should have quit, and it’s okay to say they’re awful people and complicit in the holocost. Anyone who works for the US military is complicit in the imperialist crimes of that organization. I’m sorry if that’s you or people you love. If it is, you should do something about it.
I happen to be German, by the way. My grandfather was forced into the Wehrmacht, he tried fleeing the battlefield, he got executed.
Anyone who works for the military enables politicians to wage war. And no soldier will ever be able to 100% prove their actions never led to anyone getting hurt.
Soldiers know and accept that and that’s why I despise them.
I wish society would frown upon people choosing to become soldiers like they do upon prostitutes. But instead, all this glorification and militarism makes them think being a soldier is a commendable thing.
In my view, prostitutes should get the medals. They literally make love, not war.
Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun,
A man whose allegiance
Is ruled by expedience.
Call him a Nazi, he won’t even frown.
“Ha, Nazi Schmazi,” says Wernher von Braun.
Don’t say that he’s hypocritical,
Say rather that he’s apolitical.
“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department,” says Wernher von Braun.
Some have harsh words for this man of renown,
But some think our attitude
Should be one of gratitude,
Like the widows and cripples in old London town
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.
There are tons of contracts in the USN that absolutely guarantee that you will never see anywhere close to combat. All Nukes only serve on Carriers and Subs. Corpsmen (Navy Doctors and nurses) tend the wounded. You KNOW what you are signing up to do before they ever even send you to MEPS for medical testing. The only people that might not have specifically signed up for firing a weapon is whoever launches the missiles that we shoot from our frigates. I don’t know if “Gunner” is still a job, but I would assume it is since the Navy has all the big guns.
I can’t speak to what happens in the fleet. I went to Navy Nuke school, learned to operate power plants, and they gave me a new extremely lucrative contract to stay there and teach other people to operate power plants.
I also cannot speak for The Army, Air Force, or Marines. Though with the first and third, it’s hard to imagine that one wouldn’t know that they are signing up to potentially kill people.
I despise anyone who becomes a soldier of their own free will. The moment you enlist, you accept that you could be obliged to kill, and that you will have no control over whether that killing will be justified.
In other words, you accept the possibility that you could become a murderer.
That’s why the US likes to keep a well stocked under class which makes the Army one of the few options to get out of abject poverty.
“I had to join this gang that kills 160 in a girls schools on the first day of our unprovoked war because I really wanted to go to university”
This is what I want to hear in my imaginary court so I can have a laugh while sentencing this fucker to his deserved hanging.
Don’t forget giving young people in legal trouble an alternative to having a crime on their record or going to prison. Just enlist instead and all will be forgotten!
I wonder what would happen if we didn’t have a military at all
but think of the stock market!
This is what I look like when listening to the new Gorillaz album.
What kind of fantasy world are you living in?
I prefer that even more
We wouldn’t see images like the Iranian girl’s rucksack smeared with blood.
Good point. But let me ask you this:
Without a military or nuclear weapons, what is preventing other countries from taking advantage at the first chance they get?
Criticize the U.S. all you want. But the country is full of valuable resources that other countries want. Take away the U.S.'s ability to defend themselves and the risk of foreign nations taking advantage will spike dramatically. Nukes are basically the ultimate “don’t even think about it” sign.
sorry full of valuable resources? what, corn? dataservers? pedophiles?
the U.S. is not some piggy bank waiting to be cracked. Realistically, the current US military exists to defend America from all the nations it’s pissed off by invading them in the past. It’s a self-fullfilling system.
If you have nukes and are the only sick fucks ever top use it why do you need to ‘defend’ yourself everywhere in the world unprovoked.
get fucked with your BS. You’re parroting regime propaganda.
Even they at least became less hypocritical in naming it the Dep of War, not defense.
Maybe follow that lead if you want to be a little warcriminal imperialist bootlicker.
Every fucking day there’s some fucker online that makes me despise that cancer country even more.
Absolute scum of the earth
Your conscience is projecting
I never specifically said “joining US military is bad”, I said joining the military in general is a bad thing. And neither did I talk about nukes, which are the ultimate evil.
I also never demanded to remove the military capabilities of one country, leaving it open for other countries to attack. I never talked about these things, about balance of power, about mutually assured destruction and all these geostrategic aspects of military logic.
All I said was - if you are a person who joins your country’s military, I despise you. Period. This is a statement I made completely disregarding all these other aspects you mention, and it is completely logically valid on its own.
because we wouldn’t have the internet. the US military contributed significantly to the development of today’s internet.
they can stick the entire internet up their ass if it’s used to post idiotic exclamations like yours
Would we have the Autobahn if Hitler hadn’t built it?
probably with some time delay, the germans love a good race (/s)
apart from that, the military did some significant research into a lot of technology, including airplanes (and rockets), internet, nuclear energy.
You failed to get the point I was making. Just because the military is a driving factor to technological progress, doesn’t mean it’s a good thing all of a sudden. And all that progress could also have been made by science. Wernher von Braun didn’t care who funded his research into rockets.
What do you think the drones are for?
Thats the trick. If a country doesn’t have a military and they have something like resources other countries want. The become puppets of the countries that have militaries. The exceptions are small countries that don’t have enough of anything anyone wants for others to bother taking it. They don’t tend to do so well usually.
It’s a race to the bottom.
ironically the countries with more natural resources typically have lower quality of life. this is known as the resource curse phenomenon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
Yeah i’m sure it’s a curse, and not centuries of colonialism, imperialism, uneven trade etc etc.
-Michael Parenti
The “resource curse” is just people trying to pretend imperialism isn’t responsible. Norway has plenty of oil and they have a high quality of life, because nobody invaded them.
Plenty of these countries had leaders who wanted to use their resources to help the people, but the powers that be, most often the US, didn’t want that. And so for example Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran, a peaceful, democratically elected progressive, was overthrown by the CIA, and he was replaced by a monarch who could be easily bribed and would use the oil to enrich himself. And when that monarch caved to domestic pressure and participated in an oil embargo, US support was withdrawn and he was overthrown and the current government came to power.
There’s no “mystery” or “curse.” It’s just imperialism. The story generally goes that these resources were stolen by force during colonialism and remained in foreign hands after independence and the country still functions as a neocolony, leading to poverty and exploitation, or war and instability if they challenge it.
Very much so. So ewhere there is a balance of having enough to be a stable country, but not so much to draw attention. But it’s a very small point to balance on.
So what you’re saying is… superpower nations shouldn’t exist
Correct. If there is one, then others have to exist to balance them out. Only with none can we all exist without militaries. And that really should be a goal.
but they do. And now it is just a game of brinksmanshit
Not true for the USN. They hand you a contract that you sign. You only have to do what is contained in that contract. To change your job they have to get you to sign a new contract. I was never close to combat, and neither would any other Navy Nuke, though they actually left the school for the fleet. I skipped that step. There are tons of non-combat jobs in the US military that will never be anywhere close to combat. Logistics is why our military works.
That being said, it’s worse than you are making it out to be. A lot of the people who signed up for combat roles were looking to kill people before they ever signed the contract.
You join the USN, you help with the logistics, someone you’ve helped in some way or another presses a button somewhere, a cruise missile is fired, obliterates a target and a few bad guys, some civilians die as collateral damage - to me, you’ve helped kill these civilians even though, admittedly, you’ve only played a very minor role. I very much doubt there are any contracts at the USN that 100% exclude that possibility and I’m not giving anyone a benefit of the doubt.
I have a good friend that is a cardiologist in the air force. Joined the military when he got into med school to cover his tuition and the get guaranteed residency. He’s never been deployed over seas, never been in a war area, and never designed a process or item that has led to an indirect killing. An exception could be if he saved someone that went back to kill someone, but that would be true for all doctors military or not, so that’s not a valid comparison.
There are many military jobs that are simple office jobs like accounting. Not everyone of them is linked to battle.
If you think these more mundane jobs indirectly lead to military related casualties, you better start hating on your local grocery store, because odds are they have given supplies to a soldier that eventually indirectly killed someone. Or probably any public service a soldier could use, because indirectly, that may help the soldier kill someone.
Holy reaching Batman. That’s quite a reach from serving in the military doesn’t ackchually serve the military in some cases to your grocery is probably serving the military.
No wonder yankistanis like getting dominated by your government. Keep kissing that boot though and wondering why the government turned fascist, it’s probably the local groceries fault.
Working for the military makes you a war enabler. Best case. You help making it possible for some government asshole to wage war. Worst case, you become a murderer.
So whether you’re in battle or not only decides if you’re a murderer or helping murderers.
None of these possibilities are acceptable. Period.
Paying your taxes makes you a much bigger war enabler than the non combat military. And with taxes, you not only enable your country to go to war. You enable other countries to do so too, as your gov pays for weapons to give them. The fact is, noone is innocent. And the people truely causing the wars for thier own interest just want us to blame each other instead of them. Clearly, you are giving them what they want.
This guy, apparently
If you read my first comment, I explicitly said “of their own free will”. I do not pay taxes out of my own free will, so your comparison is invalid.
Um… If they really had a choice, the vast majority would not join the military. There are exceptions of course. But most feel they have no other options. Just like technically you don’t have to pay your taxes (you can file a form to have nothing withheld from your paycheck). But it is the best choice if you want to make a living. So still, very much valid.
Feeling you have no other option (despite a lot of other jobs being on offer) and totally not having any other option (because they’ll put you in jail for not paying taxes) are two completely different things.
With all due respect, but there is no reason to join the army unless they force you to. Even when Germany still had mandatory military service and they wanted to draft me in 1997, I opted to wipe old peoples’ butts in an old people’s home instead because that was the only way out. Don’t you dare tell me there is no other option.
The grocery’s job doesn’t rely upon the imperial pillaging of other places to make economic sense. “Non combat roles” in the military do. The military doctor’s job is to get the boys back out doing more slaughter. That’s the point. If they didn’t do that they wouldn’t be doing their job. Other doctors, that’s not the point…it could be some distant effect, sure, but for a military doctor it’s direct. Other doctors see patients who are not involved in imperialist slaughter of innocents. Military doctors do not.
This is like Von Braun saying “I was only an SS officer developing military weapons for the science! I wasn’t like…info it, you know, you can’t hold it against me.” Accountants for the Nazis should have quit, and it’s okay to say they’re awful people and complicit in the holocost. Anyone who works for the US military is complicit in the imperialist crimes of that organization. I’m sorry if that’s you or people you love. If it is, you should do something about it.
Absolutely agree.
I happen to be German, by the way. My grandfather was forced into the Wehrmacht, he tried fleeing the battlefield, he got executed.
Anyone who works for the military enables politicians to wage war. And no soldier will ever be able to 100% prove their actions never led to anyone getting hurt.
Soldiers know and accept that and that’s why I despise them.
Your grandfather was very brave ❤️ It’s sad that ordinary people are sometimes forced to choose between bravery and monstrosity. But there it is.
And frankly, us military members are not forced. They can just…have a normal life instead.
Yeah. Why not just lead a normal life.
I wish society would frown upon people choosing to become soldiers like they do upon prostitutes. But instead, all this glorification and militarism makes them think being a soldier is a commendable thing.
In my view, prostitutes should get the medals. They literally make love, not war.
Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun,
A man whose allegiance
Is ruled by expedience.
Call him a Nazi, he won’t even frown.
“Ha, Nazi Schmazi,” says Wernher von Braun.
Don’t say that he’s hypocritical,
Say rather that he’s apolitical.
“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department,” says Wernher von Braun.
Some have harsh words for this man of renown,
But some think our attitude
Should be one of gratitude,
Like the widows and cripples in old London town
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.
There are tons of contracts in the USN that absolutely guarantee that you will never see anywhere close to combat. All Nukes only serve on Carriers and Subs. Corpsmen (Navy Doctors and nurses) tend the wounded. You KNOW what you are signing up to do before they ever even send you to MEPS for medical testing. The only people that might not have specifically signed up for firing a weapon is whoever launches the missiles that we shoot from our frigates. I don’t know if “Gunner” is still a job, but I would assume it is since the Navy has all the big guns.
I can’t speak to what happens in the fleet. I went to Navy Nuke school, learned to operate power plants, and they gave me a new extremely lucrative contract to stay there and teach other people to operate power plants.
I also cannot speak for The Army, Air Force, or Marines. Though with the first and third, it’s hard to imagine that one wouldn’t know that they are signing up to potentially kill people.