really cannot be emphasized enough that libs winning control over the military is actually very cool and good from a "survival of the republic" perspective
again it cannot actually be taken for granted that the military is going to side with the liberals and the constitution; traditionally in other countries the military is one of the most dangerous and powerful forces for reaction. in america the chairman of the joint chiefs writes stuff like this:
people talk endless shit about pinkwashing capitalism and like okay
would you prefer the situation where raytheon was flying thin blue line flags all over the place? appeal to heaven flags? no? then shut the fuck up
it's cool and good actually when all the people with the guns and the people who make the guns and the people who make the machines that make the guns believe in law and rights and justice, because the alternative is that they don't
Don’t forget Based USMC Commandant David Berger, who banned conf*dearer battle flag imagery, and when he took office went on a long Twitter thread about how Marines must respect the women in our ranks as our equals and siblings-in-arms
Updating to add: four years ago today.
Yes I know “coopted” isn’t right, that’s what it really means in the first place, but he’s just being diplomatic — the demand is 100% on the money.
My Corps! Your Corps! Our Corps! MARINE CORPS!
I mean, I understand the argument that they don’t actually believe in it at all, they’re just doing another moneygrab…but that’s all they do anyway, might as well be rainbow.
I say this ALL THE TIME. You're complaining about **what victory looks like** and it can go away tomorrow, if you don't protect it.
NOTHING corporations do is sincere; if they're pandering to you in a shitty and representational way, THAT MEANS YOU'VE ARRIVED.
I consider this to be as stark a generational divide as they come among us. Those of us who remember the Before Times are largely all *okay* with this because we lived through the alternative, and those who didn't largely seem to think that it should go away.
got lectured by some twentysomething nonbinary person about how claiming the lgbtq movement has made progress since 1990 invisibilizes "non homonormative forms of queerness" and i worked very hard not to reply with something extremely nasty
I remember when I was 18, a freshman in college, looking for my first part time job, and one of the things that I had to do was go ask my older gay friends where it was safe to apply. Not "safe" as in where they would hire me, but safe as in *physically safe* for a young gay man applying for work.
In 2021, I got into an argument about Target's pride collection. I said that it was actually a good thing that a major corporation thought being openly pro-LGBT was good for profits, that it was a good cultural sign. The other person insisted it was all stupid and meaningless.
I left the argument feeling like maybe I was just a dumb corporate shill. Now, I look at the cultural changes that have resulted in Target running away from their support, and I've decided I was right.
I just don't see the problem, literally at all. There is literally no individual, organization, or sector of society that I think should be LGBT-exclusionary. The more I think about "pinkwashing" the more it just seems like a leftish justification for reactionary homophobia.
Less homophobia is always better. There is no situation where I think homophobia would be better than the absence of homophobia. I'm running out of ways to state the obvious here
Is pinkwashing a problem? Yes.
Is pinkwashing as big of a problem as "the military-industrial complex does not respect the democratic rule of law"? nooooooooooooooooo
One thing in this - maybe mostly a language thing - is that the rise of the far right really abolished the concept of "conservatism" as has largely existed for the 20th c. Like, it's just not a force any more
There are groups of people who are maybe broadly conservative, but I think they get described as "centrists" or for whatever reason, "liberals," but their political strength rarely comes from actual support for conservatism.
Maybe the most basic element of conservatism is support for stability and continuation of the status quo, even at the expense of substantive injustices.
That probably describes the New York Times, but no Republicans any more.
the gop has moved so far to the right and the dems have kept chasing after them so far that *biden* is the classical right-of-center conservative now, while the gop is openly a segregationist party again
almost every american voter is significantly to the left of their party now, it's wild
The Pentagon, like the three letter agencies, cares way too much about US power and credibility in the world to ever back Trump--they understand what a mortal threat he is to it
And you know what?
I welcome their support--it's no longer 2003 and the question of the day is no longer the Iraq War
Different eras have different issues which make for different political coalitions
genuinely has changed a lot of my undertanding when it became clear that the neocons were, as a group, far and away the most principled and sincere members of the republican party
Other right wing groups to acquitted themselves *fairly* well under Trump are politically conservative Jews (has overlap with the Neocons obv but not entirely) and Mormons (eg Mitt Romney, Jeff Flake, Rusty Bowers)
That they've done a better job of living up to the values of their faith than Evangelical Christians have since Trump came on the scene ought to make the latter utterly ashamed of themselves
if you had told me in 2012 that there was going to be one principled republican in the senate and it would be mitt fucking romney i would have spat out my coffee
--he's still compromised his principles in pursuit of power pretty relentlessly imo, but it seems like he actually has principles, as opposed to the rest of those spineless fucks
Weren't they ideologically and intellectually rooted in, like, neo-Trotskyism or something? Never read too much into that at the time of their peak influence, but seemed like some real weird shit
A few degrees of separation off. Trotskyism-> Max Schactman -> Cold War Social Democrats -> Rep. Scoop Jackson.
Neocons' priority was hawkish foreign policy, and they went along with the GOP domestic platform to get the FP they wanted. Never had much popular base tho
It deeply pains my dovish early aughts-era inner child to say it but the Democratic party absolutely needs to make room for a neocon wing, to the absolute exclusion of an antisemitic "anti war" "left" wing. The neocons are ultimately just very hawkish liberals, that's why they're called neocons
