Post #1376980

2026-04-07 17:00 UTC

@Fishercat With respect, I've been beating this drum for most of my adult life. People chose not to listen because they thought their country was always going to have the moral high ground. There was definitely a tone of smugness in their voices when they expounded on that, too. "If we don't have an army, how can we stop rogue states?" and never "If we have an army, what happens when we become a rogue state?" And now that people are listening and have learned a measure of humility, it's too late for this war, but I don't find it acceptable to blame me for that. I believe in you. I believe you can be smarter than this. Be against the next war ahead of time.

Replies (2)

@johnzajac@dice.camp 2026-04-07 17:05

@passenger @Fishercat But it's not really "being against war" that's effective. It's being against *the auspices and institutions that make war possible*. Around the time your country got rid of its nukes, the US relegated the draft and instituted a (constantly metastasizing) standing volunteer professional army. This allowed them to insulate the US public from their profit-motivated warmaking by turning the military into an economic and ideological destination for a certain kind of person.

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@Fishercat@kolektiva.social 2026-04-07 18:10

@passenger I appreciate both your commitment to a laudable tenet, and how utterly frustrating and irritating it must be listening to people smugly asserting moral superiority as justification for immoral policies. I'm not blaming you for it now being too late for your unchanged advice to be useful. Or even for feeling "I *told* you so!!"-ness. I can't imagine not feeling the same way in your position. Just, expressing that feeling along with advice that you know is useless for the problem at hand is unkind to the folks who are asking. That's all I'm taking issue with.

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