2020 Democratic presidential primary

I still don't understand the lamb/goat thing?

"No matter what your path in life you will be held accountable in the end"

it's not like. not that weird of an idiom

gonna guess it translates a bit wonky

gonna tentatively translate it as "I'm going straight to hell but I'm not going to sink my political future by saying outright it may have been wrong of me to be a soldier"

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-one3.htm

As for the ethics of soldiering: as the Afghans say, "a lamb will be hung up by its own legs, and a goat by its own."

VS.

One might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.

These do seem to convey pretty similar ideas, using very similar imagery, but the Afghan one seems more cynical and brutal. The English saying refers to differing degrees of guilt resulting in uniformity of punishment, so if you commit a crime, you may as well make it a big one. The Afghan saying refers to both the innocent and the guilty getting butchered, so in the end there's no difference between them.

well, that's one possible campaign message.

I did not carry an assault weapon around a foreign country so I could come home and see them used to massacre my countrymen.
— Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) October 2, 2017

this is one of those "so close, but..." things. i don't understand how someone as sharp as buttigieg could have decided it was a good idea to be an ambassador for US imperialism. unless it's as cynical as "this will help my political ambitions." i mean, i would buy that he just "wanted to serve my country" as they all say if his dad wasn't a gramsci scholar and didn't, by pete's own admission, inculcate him in a kind of radical political skepticism. and it's not like, as with so many people who enlist, he desperately needed the money or college loans. maybe he just wanted the adventure; he wouldn't be the first.

maybe i'm just a cynical jerk.

well it's blithely accepting of US military adventurism but come on the tweet is about gun control and in dialogue with NRA fuckos who were like "we fought for our freedom to carry guns at home", I don't think he was trying to burnish a hawkish profile. If we're being hermeneutical about it.

According to his wiki he was a commissioned officer. He's still in the naval reserve too.

I have mixed feelings about the US military as a whole but silby is otm about the tweet.

He's not shy about calling attention to his military service. Apparently this is now a thing among up and coming Democratic politicians.

That's been a thing among up and coming Democrats forever, but especially since 2006.

No one ever lost a race because they did time in the military. It might not win in the end (hello John Kerry) but it doesn't hurt.

Like, he's a big believer in putting time in public service. I don't want it to be mandatory military service but at a certain point when so many grown ass adults are incapable of functioning in society or doing simple tasks to care for themselves, maybe that's what is needed. I could see that working in obtaining universal healthcare and ubi too.

Apparently this is now a thing

It has always been a thing among politicians. If you can claim military service, you do. It's as automatic as "I've met a payroll" from every politician who ever ran a business with an employee.

right. you just have to wonder about the motivations of guy raised in a left-wing household for enlisting. i don't mean that to cast asperions, i just genuinely wonder what his attitude about it was.

i can't help thinking of the Laurence Harvey character in Manchurian Candidate, who is being groomed to hold political office and whose military service in Korea is simply a stepping stone to that, as it probably was in the case of JFK. (which doesn't say anything about how such real and fictional folks actually got on once they were in the military.) not that Mayor Pete's parents put him up to it... just wondering if there's an element of him burnishing his credentials from the start. or if he was just genuinely curious to have a military-sponsored adventure and only later realized it would come in handy.

i know the Manchurian Candidate analogy is bizarre and off base, it's just something that popped into my mind as a pop-cultural instance of someone joining the military to help jumpstart a military career. although obviously in that particular scenario there's a little more to it. ;)

he was commissioned which is different, than just , like high schooler enlisting.

disregard that. I kind of don't even want to get into whatever is this tangent.

i'm just wondering why buttigieg (a guy steeped in left-wing critiques of american foreign policy) joined the military is all.

maybe he was just rebelling.

my communist friend's communist partner was in the Army, and they're now both communist PhD students

you never know!

my communist friend's communist partner was in the Army, and they're now both communist PhD students

good belle and sebastian song!

The Russian revolution was full of soldiers and ex-soldiers and would have failed without the rapid creation of the Red Army. There is nothing inherent in leftism that requires pacifism, and revolutionary leftism especially tends to embrace militarism.

i can only think of one person here that was in the us military but there has to be others?

There is nothing inherent in leftism that requires pacifism

of course not, but i'm not talking about pacificism, i'm talking about contributing to an imperialist ameriKKKA's military adventurism in the middle east. i mean, it's one thing for a leftist to have joined the abraham lincoln brigade, quite another to, say, buddy up with the contras.

(think of "AmeriKKKa" in light scare quotes)

When did you decide to join the military?

I joined the Reserves and started drilling in late 2009.

And why did you decide to join the military at that point? You had already graduated from Harvard.

I mean I would say, like a lot of people, it probably first entered my mind around the time of 9/11, but it always felt like there was something else going on that I needed to focus on, whether it was school or work.

And things really started to shift for me when I visited Iowa. I was a campaign volunteer and knocking on doors in a low-income area of South Central Iowa. I was with a couple of old friends from Harvard. It was just really striking how many teenagers from these rural towns were headed straight to the military as soon as they were old enough.

And it prompted some soul searching for us. I got to thinking about how many of my Harvard classmates had served and there weren't many. Of course, I was raised on some of the legends of the Kennedys and other figures from previous generations, when actually going to a place like Harvard meant it was almost assumed that you would serve. And by the time I was there, the reverse was true.

And so it prompted me to ask myself, "If teenagers in rural communities are routinely stepping up and serving, why have I not been wearing my country's uniform?" And I saw the Reserve as an opportunity to continue to have my career in the private sector. I was in management consulting at the time, but also be doing some kind of public service.

I don't find his joining that surprising? He's not a leftist firebrand by any stretch of the imagination. If Obama was 20 years younger, he would have given the same response.

https://pics.me.me/not-only-will-america-go-to-y-country-and-kill-43216114.png

decent movies more often than not tbf

woof

Great to meet today in my office with California AIPAC leaders to discuss the need for a strong U.S.-Israel alliance, the right of Israel to defend itself, and my commitment to combat anti-Semitism in our country and around the world. pic.twitter.com/83Yrrbw4Q8

— Kamala Harris (@SenKamalaHarris) March 25, 2019

😎

yeah, wdn't vote for Mayor Pete in a million years just off that fucking tripe

xxp

Kamala, you're supposed to say "to defend HERself"

btw fuck you, copper

I feel like ex-soldiers are ideally placed to critique imperialism.

that's true!

mammals are creatures who make decisions based on feelings

my bff was so disillusioned with america after serving in the marines that he left the country.

also the most irl left-wing person ive ever worked with was ex-AF.

it be like that sometimes

but bootage-edge is not a hardcore lefty and he's still not better than LIZ

it just occurred to me that Buttguy's reasoning is almost identical to the disgraced Missouri governor's story about becoming a SEAL. Both played up a "despite my humanitarian efforts/privilege, I just didn't think I was doing enough vs the salt of the earth who were joining up."

Which is to say I'd place a bet on ambition and resume-building

i actually find it plausible and identifiable that someone's not-particularly-sound reaction to the first puncturing of their class bubble might be "oh shit i have to subject myself to what the Others are subjected to, immediately", whether or not you understood yet that what they're subjected to is the job of subjecting the other others. it's also possible-- indeed easy-- indeed inevitable-- to be startled by the puncturing of yr class bubble even if yr dad is a gramsci scholar. but yeah he is obv an ambitious guy and it is funny that he's willing to admit this revelation came to him in iowa.

and yeah i have known plenty of leftie ex-military, tho that is slightly different.

the most irl left-wing person ive ever worked with was ex-AF.

read this as "ex as fuck" and was like, same

just look at the state of this, smdh

Beto's new campaign manager, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, comes from Precision Strategies, a corporate strategy firm that has repped GE, Bank of America, Humana, Pfizer and Facebook, among others.

— Lee Fang (@lhfang) March 25, 2019

but Frederik has told us that Lee Fang is a Russian spy

tbf kind of burying the lede there (she was obama's deputy campaign manager in 2012)

idk how much I care about that. PR strategy is PR strategy.

yeah me neither. but fang knows "she did the exact job o'rourke hired her to do for the previous democrat to win the presidency" doesn't have quite the same rhetorical effect.

well obv Beto is the New Obama... does he have a clergyman to disown, though?

maybe he'll own his campaign director for working at jobs.