deadken posted:

its not useful agitprop

its a babby step toward more meaningful anti imperialism, like posting in lf

Goethestein posted:

something about bein a ganster

what if he doesn't recognise that he's a gangster. what if he's privately morally conflicted about killing people but honestly believes in Defending America and Fighting For The Nation. yeah its a dumb ideal but plenty of people would say the same about killing for socialism or w/e. thing is i agree that us soldiers are enemy combatants but by calling them all sociopaths you're not carrying out anything close to analysis, you're going on what looks like a deeply personal rant

e: nice edit bro

deadken posted:

if people have false consciousness it's because leftists aren't broadcasting their ideas loudly and comprehensively enough. soldiers have been an essential class element in every revolution. we should be propagandising to them, not sneering at them for being psychopaths in a forum read by twenty people

right-wing reactionary racist white heterosexual sociopath males from middle-class backgrounds in the first world are not a revolutionary class. the military itself as a structure bends towards fascism. you note that soldiers have been an essential element in every revolution, you fail to mention that most of these have been right-wing juntas.

Goethestein posted:

i said soldiers as a whole are uniquely sociopathic. you are bringing it down to one (fantasy) individual as though this disproved the rule. whos guilty of the ideological crime of Individualism now

your whole op was about a fantasy individual, even if you used the plural pronoun

Israeli and American films dealing with war in the Oliver-Stone style often forge an image of the soldier not as a righteous superhero, but rather as a sensi- tive individual who acquiesces to his own moral weaknesses. In a dialectic way, because he reveals his moral failure, the soldier then receives moral sympathy from the audience. Not only is a liberal audience ready to forgive him for his war crimes, but the fact that these crimes make him so human is the very impetus for us to embrace him as an errant child. Take, for example, the pro- tagonist (who also happens to be the director) of the recently released Israeli film Waltz with Bashir. The director took part in the massacre of Sabra and Shatila only to, years later, make a documentary about his post-traumatic state journey, the end of which includes a scene where he is redeemed by his shrink, who, in so many words, tells him: “You are good person. It’s true you made a mistake, but don’t ever forget: You are not a killer.” In Forgiveness, on the other hand, the soldier arrives, at the end of his journey, to the terrible understanding that he’s part of a perpetual killing. The crime he commits is not an individual failure within a healthy ethical structure, but an ethical failure built within the ideological structure itself.

the problem with american soldiers isn't that they are sociopaths. they are probably, in general, well-attuned to social norms and what's expected of them. the problem isn't individual moral failing so much as the imperatives of social structure that produce that sort of person. and it's the same basically for the response: you can understand as an individual but you have to respond at the level of systemic change. and the only way systemic change happens is by articulating a movement that can impose changes to the structure of society. and that can only happen if people see it's in their best interests to join such movements, which means focusing on the oppressed, and linking oppressions into a political fight. but even then, the level of coordination you need across huge numbers of people is so difficult that it happens in grand waves across decades.

so part of the issue, why i get so angry, is that i want to be able to arrange society in a nice way, but obviously i don't have the power to do that. and there are so many different injustices every day but i can't do much about them. any attempt to engage in a sort of visceral direct participation against the system would just be suicidal or close to it. like alcoholics you have to admit that you're basically powerless to "fix" society by yourself and you have to trust that there's a possibility we'll figure things out together. and i think once i can really wrap my head around that then i'll be better at just living day to day instead of feeling like i have some sort of personal quest to fix everything. so i want to be able to get angry, be angry, and just sort of live with that while i pursue personal projects i care about.

ilmdge posted:

deadken posted:

i remember i was doing the troop hate argue in wddp and someone said that they hated the army because the troops she'd met were all really rude and mean and transphobic and i pointed out that you dont need to go to the army to find transphobia and that as reasons for opposing us imperialism go thats pretty weak and everyone got mad at me for Transphobia Denial or whatever. weird place. anyway basically thats u goatstein

that was goatstein. seriously.

no seriously guys im 99% sure that was a goatstein alt. he had a valerie solanas av i think and his name was some feminist pun or something and he made the trans case against the military and then went on to make a broader case and then got banned for being goatstein. am i wrong goatstein, come clean

ilmdge posted:

ilmdge posted:

deadken posted:

i remember i was doing the troop hate argue in wddp and someone said that they hated the army because the troops she'd met were all really rude and mean and transphobic and i pointed out that you dont need to go to the army to find transphobia and that as reasons for opposing us imperialism go thats pretty weak and everyone got mad at me for Transphobia Denial or whatever. weird place. anyway basically thats u goatstein

that was goatstein. seriously.

no seriously guys im 99% sure that was a goatstein alt. he had a valerie solanas av i think and his name was some feminist pun or something and he made the trans case against the military and then went on to make a broader case and then got banned for being goatstein. am i wrong goatstein, come clean

that sounds more like something iwc would do

deadken posted:

goatstein thinks people who join the army are somehow uniquely sociopathic. basically he's blind to ideology because he is ideology. nobody makes decisions based on objective moral calculus, that's liberal nonsense. he blames those under the influence of false consciousness for having false consciousness because his analysis is not built on any solid theoretical base. troop hate is a function of liberalism

there's no such thing as false consciousness: everything is damned in the scope of infinity.