@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal to the civilians it serves.

My problem is that far too many who serve (This is my personal experience, so feel free to grain of salt it) are very much in the "Just follow orders" camp.

They have been trained for it their entire career, and have no example other than others who do the same thing. It is the rare individual who does the right thing, and they face years of censure and scorn for it. (See: Chelsea Manning)

IMHO, it is the duty of the military to maintain an absolute core of morality when it comes to the taking of life. There can be no "Shades of Grey" when it comes to killing people. The orders must be legal, approved by the people through their representatives (Which means CONGRESS declares war), and even then, the individual soldier must be the final check on pulling the trigger.

I of course, do not believe that just following orders is an excuse, no matter how many flag waving military fetishists claim otherwise.

#1.1.1 I know this sounds weird. But I don't blame the military, at least not the rank-and-file, and the lower ranks of officers, so much. Because in our system, the military was designed to be a subsidiary system of something larger, and subordinate to it. Once the civilian side of things has gone completely to hell, how is the military going to hold to something better?

That's a real question, btw, not rhetorical. And my position doesn't hold when you get up to the very top ranks--especially when you're talking about the people high up in the CIA, NSA, and all the other loathsome versions of secret police and assassins and liars. Which is not how military intelligence should be--even military intelligence shouldn't be completely without ethics, even given that it's probably the branch of activity that attracts the most dirt, and offers the most opportunity for doing terrible things. But you can have a less corrupt military intelligence--far less corrupt--than the one we've got, which has apparently pretty much entirely abandoned its original mission.

Unless one thinks that the Dulles brothers put it together in the first place to do exactly what it's doing, which is destroy the U.S. from the inside out and replace it with something worse.

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal would fire on vets? I suppose they've never heard of the Bonus Army.

#8.4.1 We're not getting what we need to live from the government. Yes, I'm glad the government still paves the roads and does some maintenance, if not enough, on the bridges, and I'm glad there's still schools of a sort, but that's a long way from "getting what we need to live." Which may be your point.

I think we may be on the same page, more or less, in re: "small actions;" the small actions I'm thinking of aren't violent. I do think they need to be done; actually there's massive amounts of work to be done, it's just that none of it has to do with bringing the government back under control. We've failed to do that. The failure is final; this particular arrangement of power will not respond to elections; it will not respond to peaceful temporary protests; it will only respond to peaceful persistent protests by bringing military levels of violence against the protesters (often with a Nazi flavor, I've noticed--they started writing numbers on the arms of the DAPL protesters) and by bringing corresponding economic pressure however they can (the blockade, the pressure on the tribe's economic interests).

That leaves revolution. The ideas certain people on the right have about picking up our father's gun, or the gun we bought at the local gun show, and somehow taking down the US government, seem totally bugnuts insane to me, and it baffles me that sometimes the people who talk like that are (at least supposedly, since online anybody could be anything) former military. I'd think anybody who spent time in the U.S. military would understand that even millions of Americans with rifles or shotguns or handguns or even the kind of military weaponry you can buy at the local gun show, would never be able to defeat the U.S. military (and that's assuming we'd all be willing to bear the terrible costs of trying to defeat them, both morally and materially). When I have these conversations, the person on the other end usually says "Yeah, but the military would come over to our side." They can't seem to conceive that American soldiers would actually fire on vets like them who would, in this imagined scenario, be attacking US Gov. All that sounds like a fever dream to me--not because I don't think some in the military would, sooner or later, refuse to fire on the people they're supposed to defend, but because the notion that all that would happen simply and without division and that it would result in an overthrow of the gov't just seems so unlikely, to the point of being nuts.

I also have often wondered why folks like that feel OK discussing it on the open Internet (!), if they really mean what they say.

I often get into these discussions, oddly enough, by being willing to discuss gun control/2nd amendment issues with people on the other side without feeling the need to shit all over them. When they get over the fact that a leftie isn't going to hurl abuse at them for their (often weird to me, I admit) attitudes toward their guns, the conversations often go in odd but interesting directions. Still, it just ends up making me feel sad, because it's like they don't know what they're saying.

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal
I've done it. So can others. If the masses do it too, the Oligarchy will fall.

#8.4.1 We're not getting what we need to live from the government. Yes, I'm glad the government still paves the roads and does some maintenance, if not enough, on the bridges, and I'm glad there's still schools of a sort, but that's a long way from "getting what we need to live." Which may be your point.

I think we may be on the same page, more or less, in re: "small actions;" the small actions I'm thinking of aren't violent. I do think they need to be done; actually there's massive amounts of work to be done, it's just that none of it has to do with bringing the government back under control. We've failed to do that. The failure is final; this particular arrangement of power will not respond to elections; it will not respond to peaceful temporary protests; it will only respond to peaceful persistent protests by bringing military levels of violence against the protesters (often with a Nazi flavor, I've noticed--they started writing numbers on the arms of the DAPL protesters) and by bringing corresponding economic pressure however they can (the blockade, the pressure on the tribe's economic interests).

That leaves revolution. The ideas certain people on the right have about picking up our father's gun, or the gun we bought at the local gun show, and somehow taking down the US government, seem totally bugnuts insane to me, and it baffles me that sometimes the people who talk like that are (at least supposedly, since online anybody could be anything) former military. I'd think anybody who spent time in the U.S. military would understand that even millions of Americans with rifles or shotguns or handguns or even the kind of military weaponry you can buy at the local gun show, would never be able to defeat the U.S. military (and that's assuming we'd all be willing to bear the terrible costs of trying to defeat them, both morally and materially). When I have these conversations, the person on the other end usually says "Yeah, but the military would come over to our side." They can't seem to conceive that American soldiers would actually fire on vets like them who would, in this imagined scenario, be attacking US Gov. All that sounds like a fever dream to me--not because I don't think some in the military would, sooner or later, refuse to fire on the people they're supposed to defend, but because the notion that all that would happen simply and without division and that it would result in an overthrow of the gov't just seems so unlikely, to the point of being nuts.

I also have often wondered why folks like that feel OK discussing it on the open Internet (!), if they really mean what they say.

I often get into these discussions, oddly enough, by being willing to discuss gun control/2nd amendment issues with people on the other side without feeling the need to shit all over them. When they get over the fact that a leftie isn't going to hurl abuse at them for their (often weird to me, I admit) attitudes toward their guns, the conversations often go in odd but interesting directions. Still, it just ends up making me feel sad, because it's like they don't know what they're saying.

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal 300,000,000 people over 4 million square miles.

The US military couldn't defeat 36 million Iraqis in a couple hundred thousand square miles. What makes you think they'd defeat 300,000,000 Americans?

We're soft? You might have a point, but shooting wars tend to make hard guerrillas out of the soft populace.

That said, the intelligence disparity is a HUGE problem. We're so jacked in that we can't escape the prying eyes of the bosses.

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

#8.4.1 We're not getting what we need to live from the government. Yes, I'm glad the government still paves the roads and does some maintenance, if not enough, on the bridges, and I'm glad there's still schools of a sort, but that's a long way from "getting what we need to live." Which may be your point.

I think we may be on the same page, more or less, in re: "small actions;" the small actions I'm thinking of aren't violent. I do think they need to be done; actually there's massive amounts of work to be done, it's just that none of it has to do with bringing the government back under control. We've failed to do that. The failure is final; this particular arrangement of power will not respond to elections; it will not respond to peaceful temporary protests; it will only respond to peaceful persistent protests by bringing military levels of violence against the protesters (often with a Nazi flavor, I've noticed--they started writing numbers on the arms of the DAPL protesters) and by bringing corresponding economic pressure however they can (the blockade, the pressure on the tribe's economic interests).

That leaves revolution. The ideas certain people on the right have about picking up our father's gun, or the gun we bought at the local gun show, and somehow taking down the US government, seem totally bugnuts insane to me, and it baffles me that sometimes the people who talk like that are (at least supposedly, since online anybody could be anything) former military. I'd think anybody who spent time in the U.S. military would understand that even millions of Americans with rifles or shotguns or handguns or even the kind of military weaponry you can buy at the local gun show, would never be able to defeat the U.S. military (and that's assuming we'd all be willing to bear the terrible costs of trying to defeat them, both morally and materially). When I have these conversations, the person on the other end usually says "Yeah, but the military would come over to our side." They can't seem to conceive that American soldiers would actually fire on vets like them who would, in this imagined scenario, be attacking US Gov. All that sounds like a fever dream to me--not because I don't think some in the military would, sooner or later, refuse to fire on the people they're supposed to defend, but because the notion that all that would happen simply and without division and that it would result in an overthrow of the gov't just seems so unlikely, to the point of being nuts.

I also have often wondered why folks like that feel OK discussing it on the open Internet (!), if they really mean what they say.

I often get into these discussions, oddly enough, by being willing to discuss gun control/2nd amendment issues with people on the other side without feeling the need to shit all over them. When they get over the fact that a leftie isn't going to hurl abuse at them for their (often weird to me, I admit) attitudes toward their guns, the conversations often go in odd but interesting directions. Still, it just ends up making me feel sad, because it's like they don't know what they're saying.

@thanatokephaloides Thing is, the Aztecs were kind of shitty pagans. I mean, they were the pagan answer to fundamentalist Christianity, or Wahabbism. They wiped out other tribes' traditions and religions and histories. I mean, they literally destroyed historical records and made it criminal to speak of or teach that history, and they replaced those erased histories with stories of amazing Aztec glory.

It wasn't really Montezuma, exactly, as I understand it; there was a brother or uncle or something who was a power behind the throne and a priest. Nasty guy; sort of like a religious version of Grover Norquist (except a Norquist who literally ripped out hearts).

#8.5.1

Aztecs made all their neighbors hate them so very much that the first outsiders to come along and say "Why don't you, and you, and you get together with us and go fight them?" got an enthusiastic reception.

And their descendants have spoken Spanish and attended Mass regularly ever since.

The Aztec people, once relieved of their Emperor and Priesthood, were quite willing to accept the idea of one blood sacrifice for all and for good. They were therefore fairly easy to convert to Catholic Christianity.