Move Fast, Break Things, Be Gay, Do Crime

When I turned 17, we ordered a cake at the grocery store for my party, as we’d done many times before. If you wanted something written on the cake you’d write it into a section of the order form. We requested, very simply, “Happy Birthday Courtney”. When we went to pick it up the day of the party, this is what we got.

The bakery employees had absolutely no explanation for this. The order form, attached to the box, very clearly did not contain any of those extra names. Whomever had done the writing was no longer in, so there was no one to ask how this had happened. The fact that the name ‘Juan’ is misspelled bewilders me to this day. (I’ve never seen ‘Miley’ without the E, either, but it’s believable that someone might spell it that way.) Did this cake slip in from an alternate universe where I’m one quarter of a set of Hispanic quadruplets? Dyslexic Hispanic quadruplets, maybe?

This cake became the focal point of my party. At least two of my friends regularly called me ‘Courtney Mily Jaun Pablo’ for years to come. My siblings and I still reference it sometimes, eleven years later. It is probably the funniest thing ever to occur at any birthday celebration of my life, and may well remain so for the rest of my days.

No One Like You

now, it took us a while to realise it meant "(there is) no one like you". at first, we all parsed it as a botched "no one like(s) you"

Percury

Enus

Mirth

Dars

Apter

If someone says something that you know to be wrong, say something. Push back on it. Iran didn't start this war. They haven't been at war with the US for forty seven years. The US didn't have to support Israel's strikes with this kind of escalation (we haven't in the past, in fact Trump hasn't in the past). The Iranian people are not looking to the US as liberators. The Strait of Hormuz was always going to be used tactically in this way, it is absurd to suggest that the Iran would open it because it is the single best method of leverage they have to resist annihilation from a superpower. Bombing civilian infrastructure is a war crime. Saying that an entire culture will be destroyed is genocidal.

There is no moral reason for the US to do this, the reasons that the US is doing this are oil and to destabilize the region. Hubris, cruelty, and a vile old man who wants to give himself a hero's legacy play a part as well.

You should be saying out loud to the people around you "This war is unjust, unnecessary, and cruel, and every reason our leaders are giving us to tell us why we're doing it is a lie."

There is no justification for bombing water and power infrastructure for ninety million people; that will kill thousands of civilians and is a war crime.

Iran was bombed while they were negotiating with the countries that bombed them; they were willing to make the agreements requested by the US and Israel before they were bombed.

The Strait was open in February. If the US and Israel hadn't attacked Iran there would have been no reason for Iran to close it.

We also don't currently have boots on the ground, and to my knowledge, Israel is the one dropping shit rn.

I understand your hatred for the military industrial complex, and I understand your hatred for the government, but the average soldier is not the problem here, and not to blame.

Despite what most people think, you can protest in the military as a soldier. However! You have to have damn good reasons to back up that protest. You cannot just "refuse" or "desert". You can always tell when opinions come from people who have never served or been around soldiers because they so clearly don't understand how things work.

Also, the whole argument of "you got yourself into this" is bullshit. The US military is full of marginalized communities. People of color, people coming from impoverished communities, abusive homes, etc. For many soldiers, their choice was join the military, or starve. Join the military, or get beaten at home again.

If you vet targets for drones, you are responsible for the targets those drones hit.

If you are a secretary who makes sure that logistics works out, you are culpable for the people whose infrastructure was destroyed by the supply chain you facilitated.

I am much more sympathetic to soldiers than many leftists, and much more understanding of why people join up - which is why I've done a lot of posting about why you shouldn't enlist, how recruiters lie to you, and how you have to be enlisted for three years before you're making more money in the military than you would making minimum wage in california so if you are escaping an abusive situation you would do better to get a bus ticket to the coast and aim for a job at costco with roommates than you would to put yourself in a position where you are going to be responsible for other people dying.

The president said that he wants to eradicate a civilization this week. He has said that he wants to do war crimes that could kill millions of people. If you are currently in the US military, you are following the orders of a genocidal regime.

If the things that Trump has been calling for this week happen, our government and military will be facing our own Nuremberg trials in a few years. And they will absolutely deserve it, and it will be the responsibility of every person of conscience to make sure that people who participated in this war face consequences for their support of genocide.

You are literally saying that if US soldiers bomb bridges and power plants and desalination plants they are just following orders. You are justifying participation atrocities against ninety million people because some American teenagers needed to get out of a bad situation or wanted to pay for college.

I'm not saying that there are no consequences for refusing orders or deserting, I am saying that the morally correct position is to go to military prison rather than taking any actions that will result in the destruction of drinking water treatment for a country that was "preemtively" bombed by a superpower and already had a water crisis.

I'm aware that the US military recruits and propagandizes children, but I'm not interested in infantalizing soldiers. They did make the choices that got them where they are, in the same way that people who sell drugs made that choice and the people who rob banks made that choice - I understand that there are terrible situations that motivate those choices, but if the choice you made hurts other people you have to take responsibility for making that choice.

The bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh school was very likely done by US pilots. That bombing killed 100 little girls, in addition to at least 75 other civilians.

The pilots who dropped those bombs likely didn't know what they were dropping bombs on. The specialists who chose the targets may not have known the school was going to be hit during strikes on a nearby base (but they did know that Iran had not struck the US or Israel - those targets were selected when Iran was negotiating to stay out of a war). The Navy loadmasters who transported the bombs didn't know that the bombs were going to spatter schoolbooks with children's blood, or that they were going to be used in a triple-tap strike that would have targeted those children's parents and emergency workers.

But the bombs got there. They were loaded into the planes and they were aimed at targets that had been chosen and approved of. They were flown over a country that the US was not at war with, and a person in that plane had to be the one to make the decision to release the bombs.

If you were part of that chain, yes. You made a horrible decision. You might have been trying to keep yourself safe, you might have been trying to pay for healthcare for your child, you might have needed to get an education to have a better shot at a comfortable life.

And you decided that was worth more than the lives of a hundred little girls who had stickers on their notebooks and inside jokes with their friends and loved their parents and hugged their siblings before they went to school that morning and were buried under the rubble of your choices.

I don't hate soldiers. I pity soldiers.

That's not the kind of thing that I could live with. I don't know how anybody could live with knowing that they were the one who dropped that bomb or delivered it to the gulf or requisitioned its parts or chose where it was going to fall.

So I think they shouldn't live with that. Desert. Refuse orders. Go to jail, get dishonorably discharged, don't sign up in the first place.