I upvoted because being nice to the imperialist war machine is cringe
Which matters more: AOC telling some troops they can have snacks, or AOC saying she's against interventions on principle and against intervention in Venezuela specifically?
spoiler
You're correct! Neither really matters, and AOC has about as much real power over U.S. foreign policy as you or me.
Don't criticize the parasocial kween, it's not her fault she's a captured asset for the DNC
copjacketing is cool and good and the left needs more of it, great stuff
No, just focus on substantive criticism instead of silly retail politics shit like this. Focus on stuff they have actual power over instead of stuff they don't.
What if we just made posts about those serious bad takes and discussed them there, and didn't bother with the silly bullshit at all?
Especially that I can totally see Ilhan or Bernie who gave anti-imperlialist credentials get upset over this. It's edgy to hate the troops, but come on.
come on the one funny bit on the american constitution is that if the soldiers can't find places they have to stay like that give us that at least
15 days before, these soldiers gunned down a woman for daring to criticize the election.
Your stupid ass is defending that QAnon Chud? I have never cared less about a police shooting victim in my life. And that wasn’t the National guard idiot
Doesn’t make the cops (not the troops, I was wrong about that part) who shot her in cold blood just.
And it also does not mean they shot her for critizing the election.
Im not going to lose sleep over this when they far worse to far less deserving poeple
In this situation theres an easy excuse, people in the protest had guns and they could easily assume she had one too and was trying to get in to hurt people.
Like yeah thats a bog standard excuse but its realistic enough that hammering on this point isnt doing what you think its doing.
There's even a video of this shooting. A bunch of chuds are trying to break through a closed door/window barrier in a hallway, and when they start making some progress you see someone on the other side point a gun and turn her into a good fascist.
Why would capitol police fire on people breaking through a barricade when they're protecting the vice president and congress people in the office behind them? I mean come on dude. I'm not saying they're in the right, but it wasn't the "criticism" that got her shot.
I feel like everyone is rushing to celebrate a woman’s murder by the pigs when it’s a bad thign
no they didn't. that was capitol police and that crowd killed one of theirs too. what is even the point of this post?
She was trying to kill congressmen and women you fucking far right sleeper agent. Go back to stupidpol or some other fashy space.
Of course you don’t you fucking loon. You think I’m gonna cheer fascists killing AOC, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tliab? Fuck you.
AOC supported the fascist Bolivian regime. Stop running defense for congress holy shit
When I first saw the comment, it was at 15 upbears, and now it's at 8.
So, nearly half of those upbearing it, realized what he was actually referencing, then went back and unbeared it.
LAWLZ
From now on, I'm gonna use "criticize" as the new "parody" so thank you for that.
If the military lib takes continue, someone is gonna have to post the comic about the soldier killing a kids parents and him telling the kid it wasnt his fault
I did something similar a few months ago and the takes were off the charts. Any essential worker is braver than the shitty troops in my eyes
Honestly, you are just as bad as a lib. You want to lazily blame a target to make yourself feel better.
Who, exactly, is excusing such behavior?
Go talk about the "clean" Wehrmacht to someone who cares westerner
Who the fuck is even saying that?
All I'm seeing is cowardly class traitors consumed by impotent hatred.
You arent even part of the international proletariat, you are labor aristocracy that currently defending the class traitors know as the US military
I nearly died, unemployed, because of the American healthcare system. My lifespan is limited because I was born working class.
I earn my living now, by selling my labor. And definitely not in the military. I own no capital.
Fuck you. I stand with my brothers and sisters in the working class they sell their labor in the military or not.
“All troops are forever irredeemable” is a bad take, as is "troops are basically the same as cops." Troops aren't good, and we should be automatically skeptical of them, but there are real differences.
For troops, the most powerful military on earth uses the most powerful propaganda machine on earth to target kids who are barely shaving for recruitment. That kid has zero firsthand experience with the reality of the imperial war machine, and if they try to quit once they’re in they can get a black mark next to their name that will impede their ability to get housing, education, and employment for the rest of their life. We can’t hold a kid 100% responsible – with no possibility of forgiveness at any point – for their decision under these conditions. That’s totally inconsistent with how leftists should think about culpability and rehabilitation in any other scenario.
Compare this to cops, who generally sign up for pig school in their 20s, who live under the realities of American policing every day, and who can quit at any time with no real repercussions.
“All troops are forever irredeemable” is a bad take,
Pretty sure only we privileged westerners who have to opportunity to have this "debate" may think this and not the Afghan child that saw their family get blown up by a drone, they certainly wouldn't give a fuck if that US soldier is a doctor, some bureaucratic pencil pusher down the chain of command or the war criminal that piloted the drone.
Read the rest of the comment, though. In no other context would leftists find it acceptable to write someone off for the rest of their life, especially if there are significant mitigating circumstances, and even if they were only tangentially linked to direct harm (e.g., some pencil pusher who's spent his entire career at a base in Kansas).
Imagine some 17-year-old was pressured into joining a gang. He just sells drugs, but other members of his gang kill people. If he thinks he's in over his head and tries to leave the gang, they're going to make life pretty hard for him. Should our 17-year-old drug dealer be put to death? Should he be imprisoned for life? Or should we consider the circumstances of how he got in the gang in the first place, and how easy it would have been for him to leave, and what he personally did, and have some avenue for him to redeem himself?
I will have you know that I only bend over backwards to yell a single thing at a time.
And right now (bends backwards) it's that it is January 27, 2021, and Joe Biden is still a rapist.
Now, allow me to bend backwards a second, distinctly separate time: directing your blame and hatred towards individual cops or service members for crimes committed by other individuals, and due to systemic issues caused by capitalism, is stupid, counterproductive, and fractures solidarity of the working class.
This literally excuses nothing.
Thank you for your patience as I bent over two, distinctly separate times.
War criminals
National Guardsmen
Fellas I don't think OP knows what the fuck he's talking about. (also the National Guard is arguable the least chud of the all the military jobs, fuck the OP for being a joyless communist who thinks AOC must always be the offensive because that's good politics apparently.)
-7DeadlyFetishes
The national guard was firing tear gas and canister at protestors during the summer, bud.
Guard and Reserve units made up about 45 percent of the total force sent to Iraq and Afghanistan, and received about 18.4 percent of the casualties.
Jesus Christ that's even worse than I thought. 45% of the total force? That's almost half.
It's because the actual army is so small. In that situation the guard can be called to act as a support arm of army which happens because everyone knows the army sucks ass and won't join it. This was routine in the 19th century (though national guard were only called such in NY, it became the national name for state militia in 1903 and officially became mixed state and federal reserve forces in 1933) when the professional US army was small. They basically get called in by the army to be infantry fodder and logistics.
When the infantry units from the Florida National Guard arrived at the Assad airbase north-west of Baghdad in early May last year, they discovered they were to run a makeshift prison camp where detainees were confined in a vast aircraft hangar, with cells marked off with concertina wire.
Prisoners wore hoods made out of sacking used for sandbags. The Guard units were ordered to keep those suspected of being combatants awake for future interrogation, and instructed in techniques of sleep deprivation by three interrogators.
The interrogators were not in regular army uniform, and the soldiers never learned their real names.
"We had a sledgehammer that we would bang against the wall, and that would create an echo that sounds like an explosion that scared the hell out of them," said Camilo Mejia, a member of the Florida National Guard who has applied to the Pentagon for status as a conscientious objector.
"If that didn't work we would load a 9mm pistol, and pretend to be charging it near their head, and make them think we were going to shoot them. Once you did that, they did whatever you wanted them to do basically."
In a statement, written to support his conscientious objector application, Sgt Mejia writes that a platoon leader objected to their new duties, only to be told that his stand could end his military career.
next look up "ramadi madness"
This is a fucking stupid. They’re the national guard...what war crimes? Most of their job is sitting around. This is what’s known as...being a nice person. You all sound like that dipshit Jimmy Dore
Read Generation Kill; guardsmen are very dumb, but also very much war criminals.
Also they probably spent last summer beating and tear gassing BLM protesters.
Bad take, they can go fuck themselves with a rusty trowel just the same as the rest of the troops
That said I do feel for folks who fell for the lies and are now trapped in the NG, with the only ways out being destroy your life with dishonorable discharge or finish your service
https://twitter.com/herosnvrdie69/status/1319687366571950081?s=19
Do you mean Jimmy Dore, fan and apologist for the imperialist-approved Lava Jato sham that resulted in the false imprisonment of Lula?
:yes-chad:
how do you determine when its performative? do I need a specific form or permit to be valid? what if I left it in my other jacket?
i started using performatively for my internship that forced me too, and now I say folks and yall without realizing it
Is it okay to say y’all because it’s shorter and easier to say and also because I like saying it instead of you all?
They're is something dysfunctional about an empire who can't even accommodate is own troops in its own capital protecting its own elite.
as someone else has suggested...
let aocPosts = getAocPosts()if (isEven(aocPosts.length)) {chapoBanner = 'aoc bad'} else {chapoBanner = 'aoc good'}let's call communism communism instead
I do not think populism is a useful term for understanding a political position, as it seems more to describe aesthetic presentation rather than what kind of policy is actually being advocated for
that you switched so effortlessly between applying it to Trump's most fervent supporters and applying it to communism demonstrates this lack of meaning
Trump is populist, Maduro is populist, Modi is populist, Mao was populist, Julius Caesar was populist, so many totally different things are labeled as populist that attacking or defending something on the grounds that it is populist is weak as hell
I'm not saying "populism bad" or "populism good", and that's because I don't see the point in taking either side of that argument
Military service members are an exploited part of the proletariat, fuck you and everyone else in this thread that wants to sow even more division amongst the working class.
The military isn't part of the proletariat unless a draft is instituted, this is basic shit, like come on
It is basic shit. Their relationship to the means of production is the same as a factory worker's or an office clerk: they sell their time, their labor for compensation. They work for the interests of the capitalist class.
WTF are you talking about, they have no relations to the means of production, they're completely insulated by the state, physically, psychologically and financially, they're sole purpose is to enforce the capitalist state's monopoly of violence, that is not the function of the working class
Subjugating the global working class is not a fuckin form of labor
They absolutely do. Their labor fuels the military industrial complex.
Psychologically and financially insulated? Tell that to homeless vets. That's a joke.
THEY DO NOT PERFORM ECONOMIC LABOR, do you think solders are the ones building the tanks, the planes, the guns? They are a drain, literal weapons of the state, they're function is to kill and enforce, there is no relation here with the working class other than thru cultural affectation or like I said a mass draft which isn't the case in the United States
Psychologically and financially insulated? Tell that to homeless vets
We're not talking about homeless vets
If soldiers are so insulated, how do homeless vets exist, exactly? We absolutely are talking about vets, there is no decoupling of the subject.
Whether it's manning a ship, defending a border, or taking an oilfield, it has a huge, tangible economic impact. It is a form of labor, the labor that the military industrial complex fundamentally subsists off of. Without that labor, there can be no military industrial complex.
Just because some of the labor is mind bogglingly awful, does not make it not labor.
If soldiers are so insulated, how do homeless vets exist, exactly?
Because they're no longer insulated once they're cut loose, this isn't rocket science
there is no decoupling of the subject.
lol there absolutely is because the state does it for us
Whether it’s manning a ship, defending a border, or taking an oilfield, it has a huge, tangible economic impact
Economic IMPACT is not the same thing as economic output or maintenance, you're confusing concepts and terms, whether soldiers perform a FORM of labor is irreverent, with no relations to the means of production they cannot be working class, by your universal definition of labor every human on the planet is a member of the "working class", you're talking nonsense
And the military industrial complex doesn't subsist on the labor of soldiers, it subsists on our tax dollars
I mean you can easily say the same thing about cops. They get a paycheck too
Alright you've played your hand at this point. Calling the bluff, this is a bit
Haha I'm afraid it totally isn't!
I do non-ironically appreciate the indignant responses because they have me thinking more deeply about what "class" is.
Don't get me wrong, I believe in an ideal world there would be no military, no police.
I support "defunding" the police, and withdrawing our troops from abroad.
But I don't believe in demonizing the individuals. Nor do I think having a military or a police force is intrinsically wrong.
And yeah, I'm sympathetic towards the ACAB sentiment since I've never once had a positive experience with cops. Mostly scared of getting murdered.
But again, I think it's really important to direct our hatred and anger towards the right places.
It's one thing to dislike the military, it's another to be a class traitor and useful idiot to the capitalist class by shunning others in the proletariat.
You become a defacto class traitor. And that is certainly worth dunking on.
A person joining the military in an attempt to better their life or do what they think is right is no worse than someone joining a corporation to better their lot.
Blaming the soldiers is cowardly and shortsighted. The blame rests on leadership, and more importantly, the system.
All you end up doing is destroying solidarity, unnecessarily blaming the victims without understanding or empathy.
The millions of innocents slaughtered by American imperialism are absolutely victims.
And so is the American father who gets blown up in Iraq the day before his child is born, all for the sake of America's lust for oil.
Saying "they had a choice" ignores materialism and the influences the system has upon all of us.
Active soldiers, vets, and people that do not yet have class consciousness. When they see there's these stupid hysterics, this blame for American policy on the individual soldiers, they're going to think you're an unreasonable dingbat. And they'd have a point. It absolutely fractures solidarity.
Tell me, are soldiers called into action due to a proto fascist insurrection, sleeping a night in a parking garage, the same as a group of the Whermacht burning down a village?
probably like half of them would want to kill her so uh maybe not a good idea lol
