Pete Buttigieg joined the military to seek career advancement. This is transparent and obvious. But he still joined. And he was still deployed. And swift boating that is bad and sharing the WSJs swift boating op ed is bad. /1
-
Show this thread
-
2) As an educator, I know a lot of veterans and I know a lot of their stories. There are reasons for listing are myriad, but it’s very rarely that they want to fight. Mostly, they want an education and a good job. Mostly they have not been deployed into combat.
5 replies 29 retweets 387 likesShow this thread -
3) but when you are enlisted, things happen, and it’s not under your control. And allowing the right wing to parse who does and doesn’t count as a real veteran is a mistake. If you think attacking Buttigieg requires diminishing his service, think again.
5 replies 57 retweets 558 likesShow this thread -
Replying to @Lollardfish
I served and Buttigieg's service and context behind serving is an embarrassment. My community of veterans sees him as a joke. And if I milked my own military history to the self-aggrandizing extent he did I'd deserve derision too.
1 reply 2 retweets 10 likes -
Replying to @Nymphomachy @Lollardfish
This is a bit of annoying insistent terminology but Buttigieg was never enlisted, he was commissioned And I think in this context it actually makes a big difference
1 reply 3 retweets 22 likes -
In broad terms, enlisting (or being conscripted) is signing away your right to make your own decisions to be told what to do by people who have a commission A commission is a magic piece of paper from the state telling you you can, on the state's behalf, tell people what to do
1 reply 4 retweets 12 likes -
It's not the same thing at all, it's an essential opposition, and half of military culture is about that opposition
2 replies 0 retweets 8 likes -
So, in the practical and legal sense, Pete never "gave up his freedom" the way an enlisted member of the armed forces did, as we can tell by the fact that he was a mayor and a naval intelligence officer simultaneously
1 reply 4 retweets 11 likes -
(Once you start learning about this it's really striking how shameless this implicit class system is It's in the Geneva Convention - if a hostile nation takes a commissioned officer prisoner you can't give them any orders, it's inhumane)
1 reply 0 retweets 10 likes
(You can make enlisted POWs work as long as you assign them work on an equitable basis to your own troops, and you can order NCO POWs to supervise them But commissioned officers don't take orders as POWs, it's part of respecting the sovereignty of the other nation)
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.