lol back when i worked at a restaurant i "accidentally" charged cops more, when they noticed i just played dumb but most of the time they didn't you just have to pull the "thanks for your service" card. i called it the pig tax.
this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2025
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chapotraphouse
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Trans people can't help serving, it'd be like asking a gay man in the '10s not to slay
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.
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?
This is my line too. It’s more morally acceptable imo to turn to straight up robbing people’s houses to escape poverty than to join the military.
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.
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.
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)
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
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.
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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.
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.
Do you think there might be some historical background that coloured chinese civil war socialists thoughts on drug dealers?
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somehow i grew up poor without even once being tempted to sign up as a mercenary for corporations to kill random brown people
Hmm sounds like you’re a superhuman with obscene standards we can’t possibly use to judge the poor widdle imperialism facilitators
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still a very prevalent myth for some reason. Most US military recruits actually come from the middle class: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/demographics-us-military
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.
Never discuss "the middle class". It's not materialist and whatever discussion centers upon it will lead nowhere useful.
Its literally propaganda used to destroy working class consciousness. It turns doctors into class traitors and is based on vibes. A very unmarxist concept.
Scabs also cross the picket line to "escape poverty."
Hopefully trans people who were trained in the military don't use that knowledge against their government.
They certainly shouldn't use their training to seek out and train trans civilians! That would be terrible.
This has been and will continue to be my line on this issue. Are trans people who served in the US military criminals and morally reprehensible? Absolutely. Do they exist at a unique intersection of having important skills for the revolutionary struggle, and having a marginalized identity that orients their energy in the right direction? Also yes, at least if the left can capitalize on them instead of liberal opportunists. The tricky thing is drawing the connection between their oppression and the historical process of imperialism which they have contributed to but could help destroy.
how much does the left current capitalize on gathering resources for the militant overthrow of the government? if people were talking like this is another context it would be disregarded as larp, but with soldiers, it's suddenly considered serious to imagine what benefits they could bring to a guerilla warfare campaign. mfw the Special Forces commando that the Mutual aid collective was able to recruit suggests allocating $9 billion to pay local partner's salaries, spend $500 million on catering for the contractors, and then fire a $2 million dollar missile at a truck seen transporting water near known police affiliated bases.
Military knowledge isnt just for offensive actions. Say it would be very important to know how to deal if fascist irregulars stage an ambush on a safe community for trans people for example?
I've been in the room while people from an org design their security strategies, and drilling to "Turn and Burn" through a near ambush, or anything resembling that is never discussed. if anything, the strategy is to not have coordinated guidance to absolve the org of liability if a member is in a self-defense shooting. members in security roles exercise their own discretion when they carry concealed weapons, and generally don't communicate if they are carrying or not.
All the US military knows how to do is blow their money in the most inefficient way imaginable and lose to insurgents. People here grossly underestimate how:
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Most people in the military work in logistics and lack real combat experience, in which case they functionally bring nothing to the table that a generic worker couldn't bring as well. I met so many vets whose entire years of service boils down to "I moved boxes from point A to point B" or "I drove and repaired trucks" or "I sat on a desk and read emails." You know, like any other generic job.
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The people who actually have combat experience are either serial killers who get off on the warcrimes they've committed, complete drones who do as they're told, or people with horrible PTSD who need our help more than we need theirs. In the way, this makes sense. If you're send out to commit warcrimes, the serial killers and drones will leave relatively unscathed and sleep like a baby while normal people will be haunted by what they've witnessed and committed for the rest of their days.
Obviously not top brass (although people with knowledge of military history and tactics are always useful). But knowing how to organize a division, understand military logistics, that type of concern has historically been very useful in any armed struggle.
Were most of the forces of the Russian civil war all former imperial soldiers?
Conscripts vs volunteers. Self-selects for ideology making it less of a base for proletarian revolution
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I really really want to teach trans people how to do BJJ, judo, and muay thai for self defense. If they like Melee they'll LOVE BJJ. 3 new guards will be developed by the end of the first month.
I don’t think any martial arts is helping me.
You're going to encounter sparingly few situations where martial arts are the difference maker, especially compared to apologizing when it's not your fault or removing yourself from the situation. Your problems don't go away. But it's an insurance policy - if shit hits the fan I cling to my BJJ[1]. If you encounter someone who has a personal problem with you and you're fortunate enough sweep them from bop to toddom because they have no balance (nobody ever does) you can run away. You go from hopeless where you cannot conceive of getting them to fuck off to a little hope in knowing what it would look like to assert your will. The next day and every day for the next month you'd never skip a class. In my opinion in minecraft in a not legal advice sort of way - but it is financial advice.
[1] I have a fun story where punches weren't working in a dream so I went for a wrestling take down and started grappling which worked
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100% correct
Hot take: Banning trans people from the imperial military is a good thing that protects my trans comrades from becoming war criminals and also has a chance of radicalizing trans people who are already in the military to not be evil.
I want as many groups banned from serving in the evil empire’s military as possible. Bring back don’t ask don’t tell and go stricter. Hell, ban black people from the military, I’m sure that won’t cause any issues for capabilities.
It’s a double win, it’s protects the people who I care about being protected from the abuse of being a US soldier, and makes the imperial military less competent.
That would be so, so funny if Trump and the GOP banned everyone except cishet, WASP men from joining the military.
Banning trans people from the military is good strategically, and will cause misery. Proletarianization of scientists is good strategically, and will cause misery. I mean, that's just contradiction for you unfortunately.
Will it cause misery? Acutely in some places obviously, but I think overall banning any group of people from serving in the US military directly decreases the overall amount of misery in the world.
It protects the people who were banned from the trauma of being in the military, it protects the victims of the empire from being killed by those people, who is becoming more miserable? Some trans higher ups in the military? I don’t really care about people losing their jobs as managers at the Murder and Torture Factory
You haven’t considered the misery of trans people who won’t be able to work at the murder and torture factory! Some of them could have been Guantanamo guards :((((
I love turning down people that try to claim military discounts at my job. They always try to get me to double-check/give them a discount anyway (I couldn't even if I wanted to). Not one has said "oh ok nevermind"
Claim their proof is fake and they're stealing valor
I'd respect the stolen valor guys more tbh, if some dude came in with a medal stack covering his whole chest claiming to be the first SEAL-Ranger-DELTAforce-Spaceforce Commando I'd give him anything he wanted.
let me check in the back for those military discounts
bathroom break time 
"oh darn, looks like we're fresh out, best I can do is spit in your food while you can't see"
FTM (Fuck The Military)
I'll serve c-nt before I serve in the military
Every day bitch
agreed, but pretty funny though that trans people were disproportionately higher level officers, so now in addition to the recruitment crisis at the grunt level there's also a bunch of holes riddling more important positions. very "it hurt itself in confusion" moment
Probably a case of people at the lower levels not having the resources, education, and surroundings to realize they're trans and come out.
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any time someone has said this to me i just point out that it doesnt make it right because every broke ass person could do the exact same thing but choose to bust their ass doing the work nobody wants to do for an amount of pay nobody should be subjected to instead of taking the easy road out and just joining the military
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