A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Bridging the wide gap between civilians and the armed forces is the best way to prevent future unwinnable wars.
Americans Venerate the Military but Don’t Really Understand What It Does
After two decades of war, the U.S. military is still the most trusted institution in the nation. But with the military’s involvement in Afghanistan drawing to its end and American troops still at risk in Iraq, the divide between the civilian and military worlds is wider than ever.
My father served in Iraq during the Gulf War, and I served in the same country during the war against ISIS 25 years later, an example of how military service is becoming more associated with familial ties, and ever more separate from the general population. An ever-smaller portion of the U.S. population, not to mention U.S. politicians, has any experience with military personnel. As the prospect of the end of our forever wars draws nearer, it’s time for the nation and its armed forces to reassess their relationships with each other. A stronger civil-military relationship may prevent our involvement in future unwinnable wars, and it may also help prevent needless deaths caused by an insular military culture during peacetime. In light of recent political events, strengthened ties can also prevent the horrifying prospect of our troops being used by political actors against our own citizens.
The Defense Department itself bears a large responsibility for its estrangement from the American public. While serving as a journalist in the Army, I often found that our own efforts at outreach were hindered by cultural norms and procedures that rewarded minimizing contact with the outside world. Media organizations were kept at arm’s length, and all news releases (including mine) were strenuously reviewed to ensure that they were on message. Concrete steps must be taken to engage in dialogue with citizens not just outside of military bases, but at college campuses, in areas that usually do not draw recruits, in places where the military may not be liked. Traditionally, when it comes to public affairs, military doctrine emphasizes persuasion, but the goal of this engagement with the public should be to provide information that allows citizens to civically engage with our government about the use of and policies relevant to armed service members.
There are many cultural issues in the military that need outside perspectives to change the status quo. Suicides among service members killed more personnel than our wars combined since 2001. Most personnel in the military never go to war, much less see combat, yet still commit suicide due to the stressors of military life.
While in Iraq, I was sometimes told that showing the conditions that personnel were living in or using their exact words would cause a public reaction that would not be beneficial to what we in the military were trying to accomplish. This line of thinking is responsible for the continuous rosy reports by military public affairs from Afghanistan and Iraq, even as the reality on the ground was much darker.
This campaign has included the utterly bizarre rewriting of history: In the most recent Call of Duty game, the Gulf War’s “Highway of Death” — where U.S. airpower conducted a wholesale slaughter of retreating Iraqis — was changed to a Russian operation.
More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/07/civil-military-divide-medi
a-forever-wars.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
After two decades of war, the U.S. military is still the most trusted institution in the nation.
Citation needed.
I think most people would put the Post Office and the Public Library above the military.
Sure, the PO loses a lot of shit and the libraries burn books. But c'mon man.
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And he who is not sufficiently courageous to defend his soul — don’t let him be proud of his ‘progressive’ views, and don’t let him boast that he is an academician or a people’s artist, a distinguished figure or a general. Let him say to himself: I am a part of the herd and a coward. It’s all the same to me as long as I’m fed and kept warm.
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Quote:https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspx
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
After two decades of war, the U.S. military is still the most trusted institution in the nation.
Citation needed.
If you want editorializing: https://www.google.com/search?q=U.S.+military+is+still+the+most+truste
d+institution+in+the+nation
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspx
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
After two decades of war, the U.S. military is still the most trusted institution in the nation.
Citation needed.
They didn't bother with the Post Office or Public Library, I see.
Looks like Small Businesses eeks out the win by 3 percentage points over the Military according to those graphs.
Still a pretty sad statistic how much trust Gallup came up with for the Military. I'm thinking once you take out Boomers and the Silent Generation that figure looks more like trust in Congress or the Media.
Quote:
If you want editorializing: https://www.google.com/search?q=U.S.+military+is+still+the+most+truste
d+institution+in+the+nation
I never, ever want editorializing.
Prime example right here being that whoever is printing those stories didn't actually look at the graphs and realize that the Military is the 2nd most trusted institution in the nation according to Gallup.
But that headline doesn't get clicks. And nobody actually looks at the data.
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And he who is not sufficiently courageous to defend his soul — don’t let him be proud of his ‘progressive’ views, and don’t let him boast that he is an academician or a people’s artist, a distinguished figure or a general. Let him say to himself: I am a part of the herd and a coward. It’s all the same to me as long as I’m fed and kept warm.
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https://web.archive.org/web/20210715095300/https://www.nytimes.com/202
1/07/15/opinion/climate-change-energy-infrastructure.html
It Seems Odd That We Would Just Let the World Burn
by Ezra Klein
I spent the weekend reading a book I wasn’t entirely comfortable being seen with in public. Andreas Malm’s “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” is only slightly inaptly named. You won’t find, anywhere inside, instructions on sabotaging energy infrastructure. A truer title would be “Why to Blow Up a Pipeline.” On this, Malm’s case is straightforward: Because nothing else has worked.
Free download of How to Blow Up a Pipeline at https://libgen.unblockit.uno/search.php?req=Andreas+Malm
Decades of climate activism have gotten millions of people into the streets but they haven’t turned the tide on emissions, or even investments. Citing a 2019 study in the journal Nature, Malm observes that, measuring by capacity, 49 percent of the fossil-fuel-burning energy infrastructure now in operation was installed after 2004. Add in the expected emissions from projects in some stage of the planning process and we are most of the way toward warming the world by 2 degrees Celsius — a prospect scientists consider terrifying and most world governments have repeatedly pledged to avoid. Some hoped that the pandemic would alter the world’s course, but it hasn’t. Oil consumption is hurtling back to pre-crisis levels, and demand for coal, the dirtiest of the fuels, is rising.
“Here is what this movement of millions should do, for a start,” Malm writes. “Announce and enforce the prohibition. Damage and destroy new CO2-emitting devices. Put them out of commission, pick them apart, demolish them, burn them, blow them up. Let the capitalists who keep on investing in the fire know that their properties will be trashed.”
The question at the heart of Malm’s book is why this isn’t happening already. “Were we governed by reason, we would be on the barricades today, dragging the drivers of Range Rovers and Nissan Patrols out of their seats, occupying and shutting down the coal-burning power stations, bursting in upon the Blairs’ retreat from reality in Barbados and demanding a reversal of economic life as dramatic as the one we bore when we went to war with Hitler,” he says.
Malm offers two answers for the resolute nonviolence of the climate movement. The first is “strategic pacificism,” the belief that nonviolent protest is more effective than violent resistance. Much of the book is occupied by Malm’s rebuttal to potted histories of past social movements, which is persuasive in parts. He’s surely right that we sanitize past uprisings, lionizing the peaceful and blackening or forgetting the names of the violent. There is at least an argument that it’s the interplay of forces that transforms societies. There was no peaceful American Revolution. There were riots and rifles woven into the civil rights movement. “Does this movement possess a radical flank?” asks Malm.
As to whether blowing up pipelines would work here, and now, Malm is less convincing. The likeliest outcome is that a few dozen climate activists would be jailed for years (as some already have been) and a wave of laws criminalizing even peaceful protest would sweep the nation. He has no answers for those who fear the probable political consequences: an immediate backlash that sweeps enemies of climate action into power, eliminating even the fragile hopes for policy progress.
“I do think we need to show society there’s something radical on the line, but can you imagine how thrilled Republican politicians would be if people began blowing up pipelines?” David Roberts, author of the invaluable climate newsletter Volts, told me. “They’ve been trying to make eco-terrorism a thing for years. Imagine the first time someone gets hurt.”
Elsewhere in the book, Malm is firmly opposed to tactics that could signal contempt or hostility for the working class. But the consequence of a wave of bombings to obliterate energy infrastructure would be to raise the price on energy immediately
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Got bored of our conversation, huh?
Yeah. Me too.
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And he who is not sufficiently courageous to defend his soul — don’t let him be proud of his ‘progressive’ views, and don’t let him boast that he is an academician or a people’s artist, a distinguished figure or a general. Let him say to himself: I am a part of the herd and a coward. It’s all the same to me as long as I’m fed and kept warm.
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Quote:Small Business was slightly more trusted than the military, but Small Business is NOT an Institution because it is millions of businesses, totally disconnected from each other, each with different tradition. You did not really have a valid point. You had an insignificant quibble.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Got bored of our conversation, huh?
Yeah. Me too.
If you really want a silly fight, declare the military is not one institution. There is the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, Space Force! (Trump's), United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, NOAA Commissioned Officer Corps. Which of those is the most trusted Institution? Coast Guard. I absolutely trust them to not to fire their ship mounted cannon at the wrong people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniformed_services_of_the_United_States
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspx
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
After two decades of war, the U.S. military is still the most trusted institution in the nation.
Citation needed.
They didn't bother with the Post Office or Public Library, I see.
Looks like Small Businesses eeks out the win by 3 percentage points over the Military according to those graphs.
Still a pretty sad statistic how much trust Gallup came up with for the Military. I'm thinking once you take out Boomers and the Silent Generation that figure looks more like trust in Congress or the Media.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Milley repeatedly met in private with the Joint Chiefs. He told them to make sure there were no unlawful orders from Trump and not to carry out any such orders without calling him first — almost a conscious echo of the final days of Richard Nixon, when Nixon’s Defense Secretary, James Schlesinger, reportedly warned the military not to act on any orders from the White House to launch a nuclear strike without first checking with him or with the national-security adviser, Henry Kissinger. At one meeting with the Joint Chiefs, in Milley’s Pentagon office, the chairman invoked Benjamin Franklin’s famous line, saying they should all hang together. To concerned members of Congress — including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — and also emissaries from the incoming Biden Administration, Milley also put out the word: Trump might attempt a coup, but he would fail because he would never succeed in co-opting the American military. “Our loyalty is to the U.S. Constitution,” Milley told them, and “we are not going to be involved in politics.”
This dangerous post-election period, Milley said, was all because of Trump’s “Hitler”-like embrace of the “Big Lie” that the election had been stolen from him; Milley feared it was Trump’s “Reichstag moment,” in which, like Adolf Hitler in 1933, he would manufacture a crisis in order to swoop in and rescue the nation from it.
On January 6th, a version of Milley’s nightmare scenario played out anyway: an attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob seeking to stop Congress from ratifying Biden’s victory. Milley had not envisioned it, not exactly — his fears had been largely about street violence, involving running battles between pro-Trump thugs and left-wing opponents that Trump might use as a pretext for demanding martial law. This was the analogy to Germany in the nineteen-thirties that Milley had in mind. When January 6th happened, it wasn’t quite like that, of course. But Milley told others on that awful day that what they had dreaded had come to pass: Trump had his “Reichstag moment” after all.
www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/youre-gonna-have-
a-fucking-war-mark-milleys-fight-to-stop-trump-from-striking-iran
January 6th Donald Trump: We will never give up, we will never concede
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Small Business was slightly more trusted than the military, but Small Business is NOT an Institution because it is millions of businesses, totally disconnected from each other, each with different tradition. You did not really have a valid point. You had an insignificant quibble.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Got bored of our conversation, huh?
Yeah. Me too.
If you really want a silly fight, declare the military is not one institution. There is the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, Space Force! (Trump's), United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, NOAA Commissioned Officer Corps. Which of those is the most trusted Institution? Coast Guard. I absolutely trust them to not to fire their ship mounted cannon at the wrong people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniformed_services_of_the_United_StatesQuote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspx
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
After two decades of war, the U.S. military is still the most trusted institution in the nation.
Citation needed.
They didn't bother with the Post Office or Public Library, I see.
Looks like Small Businesses eeks out the win by 3 percentage points over the Military according to those graphs.
Still a pretty sad statistic how much trust Gallup came up with for the Military. I'm thinking once you take out Boomers and the Silent Generation that figure looks more like trust in Congress or the Media.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Gallup put it on the list.
Your Media Gods chose to ignore it. You didn't even know it was there until I brought it up.
Meanwhile...
TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP
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And he who is not sufficiently courageous to defend his soul — don’t let him be proud of his ‘progressive’ views, and don’t let him boast that he is an academician or a people’s artist, a distinguished figure or a general. Let him say to himself: I am a part of the herd and a coward. It’s all the same to me as long as I’m fed and kept warm.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
On January 6th, a version of Milley’s nightmare scenario played out anyway: an attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob seeking to stop Congress from ratifying Biden’s victory. Milley had not envisioned it, not exactly — his fears had been largely about street violence, involving running battles between pro-Trump thugs and left-wing opponents that Trump might use as a pretext for demanding martial law. This was the analogy to Germany in the nineteen-thirties that Milley had in mind. When January 6th happened, it wasn’t quite like that, of course. But Milley told others on that awful day that what they had dreaded had come to pass: Trump had his “Reichstag moment” after all.
Milley didn't even notice CHAZ, or Antifa/BLM rioting in the streets all over the place last year. Or people being shot and robbed every day in every big Democrat ran city in the country.
Nobody takes you seriously because you and the people you follow are not serious people.
--------------------------------------------------
And he who is not sufficiently courageous to defend his soul — don’t let him be proud of his ‘progressive’ views, and don’t let him boast that he is an academician or a people’s artist, a distinguished figure or a general. Let him say to himself: I am a part of the herd and a coward. It’s all the same to me as long as I’m fed and kept warm.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME