ComradeSharkfucker

  • 4 Posts
  • 446 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 7th, 2023

help-circle







  • This is gonna sound fucked up bc it absolutely was but I only learned that women are people when I was like 15 maybe 16. By that I mean complex and interesting in a way deserving of respect and patience. I was a shitty kid who grew up around a lot of misogyny. Learning this earlier would have saved women in my life a lot of trouble and grief they didn’t deserve. There are a lot of people I’ll never be able to make it up to and I think about them a lot tbh. I wish I could find 2 of them to atleast say sorry.

    On a less consequential note though, I wish I had learned how interesting history can be far earlier. I spend the majority of my undergrad on physics which I liked to think about but didn’t actually enjoy doing very often. I struggled heavily compared to my peers especially as I came to realize most of the uses for my degree would betray the morals I was developing at the time. My interest in the subject remained but my motivation to be good at it plummeted. I took an art history course as an elective in my 3rd year and fell in love. Not only was it beautiful and interesting in the mechanical sense but the evolution and variety of human expression was endlessly fascinating. I am a history major now and while some of the romance has faded at the hands of 200 pages of grain and transport statistics I am much happier. It’s a wonder I did not realize this sooner to be entirely honest. I am autistic and have always loved obsessing over fictional worlds, knowing everything about them until I ran out of things to know, digesting and regurgitating their lore to anyone who will listen. How I did not see the greatest story right in front of me I will never know. It also ended up being far more alligned with my morals which is a plus.



  • Consider who this mentality benefits most. Things are certainly going to get very awful, but as they get worse there will come a time when those most responsible are held accountable, one way or another. The sooner this occurs the more people are likely to survive. Yes, a vast many, maybe even most of us could perish, but retreating into doomerism, choosing to do nothing, means prolonging the worlds destitution by postponing change. Humans, as a collective, are not a species that likes to give up, the sooner we do something the more lives we save, even if it is just a few. I will not blame you for forsaking the collective in order to preserve the individual but pushing that mentality to others could do real harm. The only people who benefit from this choice are those responsible for our doom.




  • So you ran PR for the murder machine then? What difference does it make. I’m not calling you an awful person for joining the military, a lot of people join really young before they have a developed understanding of the world and honestly, nationalist indoctrination (cultural osmosis if you want to call it that) plays a huge role. Despite that, serving in the US military IS an awful thing to do no matter the capacity in which you served. It is worth contextualizing the military through how it serves empire (regardless of who is steering that empire) and, through that, internalizing your role. The purpose of the US military is not humanitarianism, it isn’t world peace, it isn’t protecting American citizens. It exists to protect the interests of the American ruling class through violence. You helped do that. I am not asking you to beat yourself up about it, I am not even asking you to atone through actual community service. I just want you not to pretend that there is a single benevolent role that someone can play in a machine made for murder.