Originally Posted by The Batlord

I don't support troops, I support people not suffering. A Vietnam vet who thinks their war meant something is a fool, but if they got shot, watched a friend get shot, or experienced any of the things that can traumatize a human being in a war zone then I feel empathy for that, and that is one of the things that makes me not support war. Their presence in Vietnam may have been a crime to the people of that country engaged in a civil war that should never have involved any foreign nations, but that doesn't make an injured American's excruciating physical and emotional pain any less horrible.

Women who wear mini skirts for a night out and get raped don't deserve that suffering, and soldiers who go to war for idiotic patriotism and wake up screaming when they come home don't deserve that kind of visceral misery. Nothing can make you deserve that unless you were in the ****ing Waffen SS shooting Russian children in the head on your way to Stalingrad. There's simply no way to understand what any of that is until you're in it and to throw veterans under the bus simply because they were naive idiots undermines the very purpose of hating war because you just don't care about what happens to people.

Originally Posted by The Batlord

War is a political action perpetrated by politicians. The people who fight that war are almost inevitably ignorant poor people who don't appreciate what they are doing until it's too late.

Originally Posted by Frownland

If we coddle every mother****er who comes out of a war and drape the word hero over their soldiers, it only perpetuates the concept that murdering multiple people is somehow noble and churns out more bodies. Nobody deserves the pain or random death caused by war. Nobody deserves to inflict that pain and death.

Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien

There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.

Originally Posted by elphenor

gonna have to say there's not a clear cut moral answer to this from my eyes

can you blame individuals for falling victim to the powerful propaganda machines of world governments

Originally Posted by OccultHawk

The politicians being worse doesn’t negate my point.

Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien

There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.

Originally Posted by The Batlord

I'm not talking about coddling them or calling them heroes, but there's a way to recoil in horror at the suffering of a Vietnam vet without supporting what they did. It shouldn't be one or the other. Both extreme approaches (hero worship or hating them) are inhuman and miss the point of giving a **** about human life. Feel for the loss of American lives who died in a stupid war they shouldn't have been involved in, while being honest about the stupidity regardless of how it reflects on your soldiers, and feel for the loss of those they killed. There's really no other way without indulging in hate.

Originally Posted by Chiomara

Are sports like archery and martial arts plagued with awfulness too? I've heard that MMA in particular attracts obnoxious dudebro types (still want to do that and krav maga though; being thrown around while feebly trying to attack people is my #1 favorite activity). May just have to settle for magnet fishing.