• 420blazeit69 [he/him]
    ·
    8 months ago

    We take a far too edgy stance on troops here. We're horrified at conservative takes on kids who commit serious crimes, we'll have all sorts of nuanced takes on brain development not fully finishing until your mid-20s, we'll post all day about how vast swaths of the country have no serious career opportunities, we'll quote class traitors and smedly-exhausted at each other, we'll go into fine detail discussing how militaries acted in historic revolutions or coups, then... we come up with the brilliant take that being a troop is some indelible sin deserving summary execution?

    There's simply no way to square leftist thinking on people who commit horrible crimes with this sort of approach towards troops. If you think Bob should get restorative justice after he puts someone in the hospital during a bar fight but Bill should be shot because he's a cook on an army base in Kansas, you have not thought this all the way through.

    • barrbaric [he/him]
      ·
      8 months ago

      I imagine most of us would say Bill should only be shot post-revolution if he's an unrepentant fascist who is a threat to the revolution.

      • 420blazeit69 [he/him]
        ·
        8 months ago

        I'd like to think that would be the consensus in a serious discussion, but that's not at all what comes through.

        The more immediate question is how to interact with current and former troops right now. A lot of leftists are hostile to the idea of a troop becoming a comrade in a way that's totally inconsistent with leftist thinking on people who have committed serious crimes. And that's to say nothing of the whole discussion around the value of bringing around people who were/are in the machine itself.

    • DyingOfDeBordom [none/use name]
      ·
      8 months ago

      Yeah I agree, it was really shitty yesterday watching people call this guy a loser or whatever on here. Another kkkracka down type shit. When he was clearly a comrade. That he did this at all makes it obvious there's more to him than "a troop"