Probably the same way I did. Long line of respected men in the family gave their service without ever reflecting on the atrocities they committed and the plunder they oversaw for colonial masters; I was groomed into it from one direction by my father, and groomed into it by another direction because a recruiter got me to sign a Delayed Enlistment paper when I was 15. With my father's not only cosign, but direction to have me signing that young, no less.
Conservatives shriek about "groomer this, groomer that", when the Department of Defense is the single most prolific groomer in the country next to the Catholic Church.
Fuuuuccking hell. Signing kids up to die at 15. I had no idea that was a thing. Jesus
That's a lot of why I hold grace for some fellow veterans. These recruiters prowl high schools on some predator shit(and I know I've seen headlines about recruiters getting pinched for statutory); so if a comradely veteran tells me they were DEP too, I hold space for them that I wouldn't hold for a graduate careerist or an actually proud veteran.
I had recruiters at my high school.
They would keep trying to get me to join and I'd tell them to fuck off, I was going to university. One time they called home when I wasn't there and my grandma answered and they told her that I was interested in joining and they were just calling to follow up and gather more information about me for my application or whatever. My grandma saw right through that and told them to fuck off and that I wasn't interested in joining and hung up on them and then told me when I got home. I was just a kid.
Those recruiter fucks are scum.
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
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.
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.
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.
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"
The twitch channel it was streamed on makes their politics clear as day.
Show
Nothing, cause you can't have a party if you're dead. Frankly I want to go back in time and slap this person
WHY WHAT DID MY TRANS TUMBLR MARXIST LENINIST QUEEN DO
Economics, pure and simple I'd bet, unless he was like some I recall that went in for the sake of training for some mutual self-defense thing. Anyway, many rural places your only employment choices are the US military, service, or agriculture and then they all bunch bench press the young to join by offering wages and opportunities they otherwise wouldn't have access to any other way.
Also wtf, you can’t stop a fire with fucking bullets.
The majority of my extended family are current or former service members specifically because we're all from poorer backgrounds with few options. Some of them eventually drank the Kool aid and others only see their time as a means to leverage themselves out of poverty. Less than half will encourage their kids to join.
Class conscious would imply he's aware of his own alienation as well, I think. He seemed like he was at a stage before class consciousness but after the dissonance, and did not survive it.
I don't recommend the video to anyone, but it is gruesome and comical. One of the first thing a police officer does in response is point a gun and tell the guy to get on the floor, literally while he's burning. He keeps the gun trained on him as a medic tells him they need fire extinguishers, not guns. The cop does not listen, like he's desperate to shoot the guy for daring to self-immolate in front of him.
like he's desperate to shoot the guy for daring to self-immolate in front of him
I think it's more that he has no other response to the situation. Pulling a gun is his 1st-10th options and any sort of rational action (putting the fire out) is far down the list.
So one night when I was about 16 I was going to eat with my mom and sister but we swung by Kmart so I could pick up my check beforehand. As we pulled up to the front doors so I could pop in real quick I spotted what looked like fire and a bunch of smoke coming from the back of a jeep about 1/2 way down the parking lot, along with a bunch of people just kinda standing around it in a panic.
I immediately ran inside, pointed at the customer service clerk and told her to call 911 for a car fire in the parking lot, ran over to the fire extinguisher on the post over by the cash registers, grabbed it, read the tag real quick and pulled the pin, and ran back out to the parking lot. The back of the enclosed jeep was fully engulfed in flames by this time and everyone had taken several steps back except for the guy who owned it who was pacing back and forth not sure what to do. I tried to hand him the fire extinguisher and he just stared at me like I asked him to solve the theory of everything. So after a second or two I just opened the jeep door and sprayed the extinguisher and got covered from head to foot in the worst smelling soot that took several washings to come out of my winter coat, but the flames went out immediately.
I walked back into work, gave the fire extinguisher to the customer service clerk, and asked her for my check, and then we left. As we were leaving a couple fire trucks pulled in, but there really wasn't anything left for them to do.
I say all that because I was not trained to handle any emergency situations whatsoever. I just did what I thought needed to be done especially because no one else seemed to be doing anything. If I had a gun, it would never have entered my mind to point it at the Jeep. Even less so if the Jeep had been a person.
When your only tool is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail. For cops they start to look like tools. Congrats on being part of the 30% of humans that aren't useless in an emergency. Another 50% can be directed (such as being told to call 911, but you have to be specific). The final 20% suffers from normalcy bias so badly that they will impede the rest in an emergency.
I witnessed a similar thing happen at a house party when I was a kid. Once the fire started most people kinda froze and a couple people (including the house owner) panicked. My mom was the only one who seemed to "snap out of it" and grabbed the fire extinguisher from the kitchen to put the fire out.
Later in life I've been trained to point at specific people and give them specific tasks in an emergency. "YOU call 911! YOU get a first aid kit!" etc since that's supposed to be how you break the spell. But I'll never forget when i was twelve seeing about ten adults just freeze and all watch a fire creep its way up a curtain for twenty seconds.
