military members should be bullied. when one walks into your place of business and asks for a military discount say count dis dick

  • WhatDoYouMeanPodcast [comrade/them]
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    622 months ago

    My distaste for the military is so often immediately met with the argument that people join the torture factory with their torture degree to escape poverty.

    • bbnh69420 [she/her, they/them]
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      642 months ago

      I take the badempanada line on this: so what! We wouldn’t accept someone becoming a cop or a prison guard to escape poverty, why should we do the same for troops?

        • Belly_Beanis [he/him]
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          322 months ago

          Hell, it’s more moral to sell drugs like crack and heroin than it is to join an imperialist military. At least everyone involved is there because they want to be.

          Obviously, you shouldn’t sell drugs because you’re taking advantage of addiction. You’re also complicit in whatever activities your criminal organization takes part in, whether that’s contract killing or pimping. That’s how low the bar is in comparison to being a troop. But no one who’s in the mafia is under any illusions about what it is they do. Trying to convince Americans “Hey, maybe your friends deserved to get shot by the Vietcong,” is a fool’s errand.

          • Lemister [none/use name]
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            122 months ago

            Btw the socialists during the chinese civil war were more forgiving towards soldiers than drug dealers. Can not really have an revolution on twitter takes alone.

            • Outdoor_Catgirl [she/her, they/them]
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              242 months ago

              Think about the context: Opium was a tool of imperialist subjugation of China. Being a drug dealer was being part of that imperialism. America isn’t being imperially subjugated by means of drugs(unless you count the CIA crack thing)

              • Lemister [none/use name]
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                182 months ago

                The American government literally floods its own subaltern communities with drugs, it was part of the strategy to destroy black marxism and it is still used to this day. The comparison to Opium is actually quite adapt.

              • bbnh69420 [she/her, they/them]
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                2 months ago

                Didn’t the black panthers (and the IRA) have harsh policies towards drugs? The “cia crack thing” is exactly the same strategy as the British opium trade

                “And there, always there and ever willing, for a price of course, to meet the addict’s demand for dope is the cop-man, the dealer, purveyor of poison, distributor of death, merciless, murdering scum, of the planet, vile capitalists, salesmen of death on the installment plan, the dope pusher, the plague-man.”

                “We are the only ones capable of eradicating the plague from our communities. It will not be an easy task. It will require tremendous effort. It will have to be a revolutionary program, a people’s program. The Black Panther Party is presently in the process of formulating a program to combat the plague. It will be controlled totally by the people. We, the people, must stamp out the plague, and we will. Dope is a form of genocide in which the victim pays to be killed.”

                I could be wrong but this seems pretty clear

                https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/workers/black-panthers/1970/dope.htm

                • MidnightPocket [comrade/them]
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                  2 months ago

                  You’re both right.

                  Drug-dealing is a crime against the working class and the Chinese socialists along with the Black Panthers were so negatively impacted that they had no tolerance for it in their revolutionary praxis.

                  That doesn’t mean that a petty dealer deserves the same ire as US military members. If that were the case, every convenience store clerk is also an agent of reaction and death. Maybe you were specifically talking about opium? Even still, the other poster was also being bombastic rather than writing a thesis.

                  • bbnh69420 [she/her, they/them]
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                    2 months ago

                    I’m a little confused by this response, I never said a drug dealer deserves the same ire as the foot soldiers of imperialism, just that they can serve the same purpose to the imperialists in the domestic sphere. Not sure what the convience store clerk example has to do with this and I wasn’t specifically talking about opium, crack is an upper but served the same purpose as heroin or opium

            • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]
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              162 months ago

              In the context of China, the drug dealers were traitors who collaborated with imperialists (where did they get the opium from) while the soldiers (presumably you meant soldiers in the Nationalist army) were literally kidnapped from their villages and forced at gunpoint to put on a Nationalist uniform. Not remotely comparable.

            • 7bicycles [he/him]
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              152 months ago

              Do you think there might be some historical background that coloured chinese civil war socialists thoughts on drug dealers?

              • Lemister [none/use name]
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                52 months ago

                Yes? Your assumption that I just wrote out that statement without knowledge of the historical context, reflects quite negative on you.

                  • Lemister [none/use name]
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                    62 months ago

                    The twitter take is that we do not need ex-soldiers and that drug dealers deserve more “grace”. And I brought up the example of chinese socialists as an example to draw lessons from. People took issue because somehow the Brits flooding chinese markets with addictive substances to further their imperial ambitions is somehow alien to Americans flooding their own internal markets to secure their imperial ambitions.

            • bbnh69420 [she/her, they/them]
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              42 months ago

              Are the soldiers in the Chinese civil war comparable to the American army today? Totally agree on the drugs issue, it feels more like accepting Japanese defectors than Chinese nationalists

      • Z_Poster365 [none/use name]
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        142 months ago

        somehow i grew up poor without even once being tempted to sign up as a mercenary for corporations to kill random brown people

        • bbnh69420 [she/her, they/them]
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          112 months ago

          Hmm sounds like you’re a superhuman with obscene standards we can’t possibly use to judge the poor widdle imperialism facilitators

      • @ReadMoreBooks@lemmy.zip
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        2 months ago

        The data in that report shows that 83% of the military is from households that earn less than $87.9k. The median household income when this was published was $80.6k.

        You been deceived by a think tank full of literal government agents.

        • spectre [he/him]
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          292 months ago

          Never discuss “the middle class”. It’s not materialist and whatever discussion centers upon it will lead nowhere useful.

          • Lemister [none/use name]
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            242 months ago

            Its literally propaganda used to destroy working class consciousness. It turns doctors into class traitors and is based on vibes. A very unmarxist concept.