I never seen to be able to get them on board. It's not like I do it often, but the few times I've tried recently they just don't get it
The right way is to make them as morally uncomfortable as possible. They like pretending they are good people.
You know half my :LIB: family. What a, luxury it must be to choose one's political education based on vibes instead of, you know, brutal exposure to the material realities of capitalism and imperialism.
"She would have been a good person if she had a gun to her head every single day of her life."
Oh man I love playing the heel to get the point across. I just love being as obviously wrong as possible so that they are the ones telling me what the right thing is. Doesn't always work though, sometimes they agree with me and in those cases all you can say is "And you don't see a problem with that?" :dont-laugh:
The best part about this system is that even if you misread them, and they never had the wrong idea, it's the exact same conclusion as if they were wrong: They conclude feeling like a hero.
Very true - ask a lib if they recognize the term "homeless vet", then if that is a respectable legacy for a military with a budget larger than the next 10 militaries combined.
Trying to convince liberals that that the Iraqi victims of the invasion of Iraq are real, fully human people with lives and families and dreams and pet cats that were ruthlessly extinguished in service of Halliburton's bottom line is next to impossible.
Furthermore I think stressing the lack of real accountability within the military might pull some of the emotional liberal strings they love to care about might help. There are so many war crimes that go unpunished at every level of the military. How can a society claim to spread freedom and democracy while not practicing what they preach, reigning in the military isn't a common or easy task, the citizens have virtually no say in the people representing them the most in foreign countries
i think it can be done with appropriate application of blunt trauma
Madeline Albright saying that 500,000 dead children were a price that was worth it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYagQuqK31s Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: "We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?"
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it."
Ask the libs if 500,000 dead children was "worth it", particularly since we know now the whole WMD excuse was a lie from the beginning.
"The US Military is the single greatest exporter of human misery in the world."
Anything less than this and you're a :LIB:
A guy I work with was in the Marines and his job was literally drafting up plans all day for how to best tactically breach or drone strike homes in Afghanistan. It's insane how mundane some of this shit is. Like literally just clocking in, booting up Google Earth and AutoCAD to do breach and clear plans on a house where the Google street view shows a kid playing with a dog.
Just dump all of the sources for war crimes of whatever military they stan then ask them to justify why they even exist. Then if they continue to defend the military say they then support those war crimes.
This wont work but it would be funny to piss off libs into going full mask off.
I mention that Thucydides believed that the stronger a nations military was, the weaker its democracy is and then talk about how "even a Republican like Eisenhower" made the same point when he warned us about the military-industrial-complex.
This primes them, it pitches their liberal values against the military and primes them to hear whatever Noam Chomsky argument I'm about to bring up.
Plus it's fun watching them pretend to know who Thucydides was, since being the smartest dude in the room is as central to the liberal worldview as any actual values are.
liberals as in ignorant maroons like most of us used to be or liberals that reap the benefits of liberal institutions?
first category: just teach history from a non-US perspective
second category: the bourgeoisie aren't human (impossible)
I always open up with how it fucked up my friends and their families. When I was a boy I worked for a woman pulling weeds and clearing her garden bed and digging irrigation ditches. Her father was a veteran of WWII, "the good war" as people like to think of it. She told me once that nobody could wake her father up by touching him. If you were within striking distance he would wake up throwing punches and trying to kill you. Even if you were his 10 year old daughter.
They would wake him up by grabbing a toe and leaving the room.
This was also a man who, if the stories are true, was among a couple dozen soldiers who blockaded some trucks at gunpoint so they could offload food supplies to the concentration camp they had just liberated. If all of that is true imagine the lives he saved. Imagine how much "good" he did with his time at war. And it still fucked him up until the day he died.
Once you get them onboard with the horror of war you can start to dismantle their ideas about the need for a military. It is disgusting that it takes PTSD riddled soldiers to get people to understand how bad war is and not the victims who died nameless under their guns. It really is awful that it takes soldiers coming home as broken humans for people to understand "war is bad." But, if that's the only angle you can work with you should use it. These are libs, afterall.
That personal experience is a lib cheat code, they must be scared to interrupt
It plays upon the "respect the troops" narrative and it can be effective. If even "the good wars" send broken men home it challenges a lot of their assumptions.
Also toss in how combat troops are generally 17-24 year old men. Idk if the US skews much higher, but they're generally quite young and getting permanently fucked up over what's usually almost nothing (not to mention the "other side")
Right? The frontal lobe doesn't really finish developing in the human brain until your mid 20s.
"Young, dumb, and full of cum" isn't an enduring line about the state of enlistees for no reason.
Start with "the military complex is a government handout to Lockheed and Boeing" and then segue into the purposeful failures in Afghanistan/Iraq and move right into our sanctioning of a genocide in Yemen.
You should have no problem having a captive audience if you don't blame "our veteran heroes." And really any conversation about our dipshit foreign policy is a conversation most Americans would never think to have. So in that way, it's almost always a win.
Mainly because our foreign policy is indefensible.
Also throw in some Smedley Butler in there, teach them how war is a racket and how at least one highly decorated marine had all this shit sussed out decades before Eisenhower spoke about the MIC.
I dunno, he had some wacky conspiracy theories like the real reason America entered WWI was to ensure that France would pay back its bank loans it had taken out during the war. Not gonna fly with libs, it's more Alex Jones material.
Well for this lib, it's been the first I've heard of this theory. How many libs are going to dig this deep on Smedley Butler, or care so long as it doesn't point to the illuminati/elders of zion?
I'm just saying the man was into weird conspiracy theories. He did this thing where supposedly the (((bankers))) tried to overthrow America in a fascist plot and he was the lone American hero who exposed it all. The more you look into him the more off he gets.
hmm, idk the best strategy. It would be difficult if they don't care about the lives of non-Americans. If they do, you could mention: the Pentagon refusing to share instructions on how to defuse landmines with Southeast Asia. CIA mining three Nicaraguan harbors in 1984, which even the Hague said was fucked. (Actually, recite any of the horrors by the Contras). The Collateral Murder video that put WikiLeaks on the map (US helicopter pilots casually riffing while shooting civilians). 200,000 Iraqi civilian deaths. The "double-tap drone strike," which involves "bombing a target, waiting a period of five to twenty minutes, often during which first responders arrive, and then bombing the target a second or even third time" (S. Alexander, 2017). If they care about spending: mention how the US military budget is more than the next 9 or 10 countries combined; how the Pentagon "lost" 2.3 trillion dollars by 2001; how it costs $89,000 an hour to fly a V-22 Osprey. Those are just some things that jump out at me.
depends on how much of a lib they are. If they're vaguely lib but not dedicated, discussing war crimes and how much money goes into the military usually works. If they're dedicated libs who fully believe in the American Dream, good luck. Those types are usually long gone and will always rebuttal with China or Russia when push comes to shove.
