Lot of people on here seem to assume that the US military is basically as bad as US police when it comes to “being totally dominated by frothing MAGA freaks.”
This is absolutely NOT the case.
people forget that the military specifically targets poor kids for recruitment, using benefits/stability as a big draw, and therefore you have a lot of people in the military who would not otherwise choose to be there
and of course there are people who will moralize that decision by saying that folks don’t have a right to live comfortably through that route, but I just also don’t believe that folks born into situations they cannot control should be forced to suffer to ensure their morality remains pure
yeah there’s quite a bit of “leftism” that doesn’t seem to be built on the idea of community, and I don’t like that at all! and I think that’s why fuck ups are deemed “unacceptable” by some
as a Catholic this is my main criticism of whatever exactly you want to call secular culture right now. No one is repentant and it wouldn't mean anything if they were because there is no absolution.
Evangelicals are more like as long as you believe in jesus - their version of jesus - you can be as shitty and evil as you want and still be saved. There are some strains of leftism like this as well
I think a lot of it is Calvinism: the world, including all of humanity, is inherently fallen/irredeemable (total depravity) AND only the elect can be saved - and any good works you do don’t matter at all.
Honestly Catholicism has a fairly robust model for freedom and culpability—a person coerced to do evil hasn't committed a mortal sin in Catholicism.
Leftism is its own thing.
This is interesting - can you expand? My initial sense is that everyone is supposed to suffer in various ways to be validated/accepted. But I haven't really thought about this before.
one of my favorite colleagues was raised by social justice catholics and apart from a few years in our little consulting operation has dedicated her career to abortion activism
i will always beat the drum that leftists should the bible even if they're not at all religious, just simply as a morals guide and/or to see how badly propagandized conservatives have made it
a somewhat cursed but true statement is that the us armed forces, especially in peacetime, are one of the greatest elevators to the middle class for the poor and minorities
i've had a very charming conversation with a neighbor about how much he enjoyed living in Germany and seeing the world. his father was a sharecropper and he owns his own home
My time in the military exposed me to a ton of people from different backgrounds, ethnicities, races, etc. My 80 man bootcamp platoon had more people of color than my entire high school. That experience played a fundamental part of my politics today.
There is a nonzero number of kids in every single basic training cycle who have simply NEVER SPOKEN to a Black, Latino/a, white, non-Christian, etc. person. It's insane. Like, every rotation you get someone saying "Huh, I thought Those People were all [insert horrible, often hilarious, stereotype]."
some of the most thoughtful people I’ve met are veterans from those areas who had to confront that upbringing in the military and ended up very left wing as a result
When I was in basic training, most of the other kids with me were not politically aware at all. The few that were swung to the left. Once I was done, there was a lot of heavy recruitment of the same kids by religious orgs like the Mormons, and those people virtually always ended up on the right.
My dad -- who first served in the segregated Amy Air Force -- made that point to me many times when I was growing up
"When the air crew keeping your plane from falling apart at 30000 feet is Black you quickly find that racism is a luxury you can;t afford," or words to that effect
sometimes! sometimes white people go rancid and come out of the Army about half a degree of separation from the Aryan Nation! DEFINITELY NOT SPEAKING FROM EXPERIENCE HERE
it’s absolutely true! while my mom sucks for other reasons, joining the military allowed her to leave a creepy older husband when she was 19 (her parents had gone back to Okinawa right after she graduated high school and she had no other support, financial or otherwise)
honestly I’d want to see some recent and decent polling data on this. personally, the only vets I know are liberal to left; but most of my friends are liberal to left so I’m selecting on the dependent variable here
the plural of anecdote isn’t data, etc.
Yeah I’m generally not a fan of attacking individual choices made in the face of systemic problems (in general! This is not a pass for people who know better and have options to do bad things, ENTIRE TECH SECTOR)
Like people absolutely join the military to pay for school. This isn’t a new thing or controversial to point out? And maybe if you don’t want that to happen, advocating for free college would be a better use of your time than shaming those people. Leftists can be so annoying (I am not exempt)
