#Draft Dodger

[cainvstheworld]

Draft Dodger by Cain Birch

Thank you for all the love on my last poem btw <3

[Text ID: Draft Dodger by Cain Birch. I am a man by most means, mediums, measures. But the law leaves me out; it doesn’t want my boots on the ground, doesn’t recognize my manhood. I’m grateful: that there is no slim chance, no open window or cracked door, that I’ll be shipped off to murder, boxed up to butcher. I skirted the tragedies of boyhood, the relentless teasing and awkward boners, the fistfights and choked-back-down tears. The guilt rains down heavy, like endless rounds of gunfire, that I got off easy, that my knuckles never bruised. I huddled in wait for my moment, patient sniper on the battlefield, my weapon my needle, my ammo my medicine. My target was camouflaged in a sea of crew cuts. The boy bestowed me his boots and haircut; I blessed him with an exit wound the moment I came of age. The guilt dies with the memories that rush thick and fast: phantom knives ripping through my abdomen, rape whistles for Christmas, a self-defense class that taught me how to bring a man to his knees when he palms your breast. Girlhood was a battlefield, and there was no draft. /End ID]

[hale-nathan]

Trump Weird News - Trump Bites The Apple

Grandfather, Frederick Trump (born Frederich Trump), owned "the Dairy Restaurant [which] was in the middle of Seattle's Pioneer Square… Biographer Gwenda Blair called it 'a hotbed of sex, booze, and money, [it] was the indisputable center of the action in Seattle.' The restaurant served food and liquor and was advertised to include 'Rooms for Ladies', a common euphemism for prostitution." He had immigrated to the U.S. to escape mandatory conscription in the Prussian Army and was banished from Prussia for so doing.

[vintageseawitch]

veterans & active duty currently serving & consider the Constitution something that must be protected:

if you still want to vote for this traitor, you might as well take a dump on the Constitution next to the one he & his gang will be adding. anything that is sacred in the United States isn't to this felon. he was the first president to not only attempt to not peacefully transfer his power he also incited an attempted insurrection. do you care about cops? one died on January 6th.

this should be career-ending. it's illegal. it's a federal offense. but somehow this rich, spoiled narcissistic asshole spits on what we hold dearly & revere & yet he continues to be celebrated. are you angry? offended? upset? i should hope so if you actually respect our fallen.

if you still stand up with this piece of shit you're just as much of a traitor. do you look forward to shooting your fellow countrymen if they make the misfortune of having a problem with going through hell because of this man? you're fucking awful. do better. to anyone else who has served or are currently serving & you changed your mind or have always been here, welcome.

i was active duty & have since been honorably discharged. the Constitution is still very important to me. if this isn't sacred then neither are our rights. we need to fight to protect them. this evil man who avoided the draft with his fake bone spurs will never understand this.

please check your registration status often. vote early if you can. don't stop talking about Project 2025/Agenda 47 & this psychotic weirdo's connection to it. you want to know why he never talks about policy? it's because Project 2025 IS his policy. we can do this 💙

[critical-skeptic]

When Will Enough Be Enough?

It would be so damn easy to stop this madness. We have the mechanisms—Congressional and military oaths, the UCMJ, constitutional authority—all of it designed for precisely this kind of moment: when a clear and present danger to the Republic emerges. And yet, what do we get? Nothing. Spineless platitudes, endless hearings that amount to nothing, and a collective shrug from those in power who have sworn an oath to protect this country. They have the ability—no, the duty—to act, but instead, they tiptoe around the edges, pretending the fire consuming our democracy is just another bad season of political theater.

The military, the politicians, the courts—they all cling to this farce of procedural propriety as if following the rules matters when the rulebook itself is being set ablaze. These are the same people who proudly invoke the Founding Fathers while utterly ignoring the revolutionary spirit of those men who risked their lives to create a system that wouldn’t be beholden to tyrants. They act like the mere suggestion of extreme measures is taboo, as if waiting for a magic moment of unanimous consent will suddenly fix everything. Newsflash: that moment isn’t coming. We’re already past it. The water is boiling, and instead of leaping out, we’re sitting here like morons, seasoning ourselves with denial and cowardice.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t just about one man or one movement. It’s about the absolute abdication of responsibility by everyone—the lawmakers who sit in chambers and bicker about decorum while the Constitution they claim to revere gets shredded; the judges who hide behind technicalities instead of delivering justice; the military brass who have forgotten that their oath isn’t just to follow orders but to defend the nation against all enemies, foreign and domestic. They know the stakes. They’ve seen the lines crossed, the norms obliterated. And still, they wait. For what? Permission? Consensus? A fucking parade?

Meanwhile, the citizenry is fed this endless, suffocating narrative that we must “avoid conflict” at all costs, as if conflict isn’t already here. It’s here in the erosion of our institutions, in the normalization of corruption, in the relentless assault on truth itself. This country was built on conflict when it was necessary to preserve freedom. Now, we cower in the face of it, deluding ourselves into thinking that restraint is virtue while the very fabric of our democracy frays to the point of no return.

At what point do we stop pretending this is business as usual? How much more blatant does it have to get? Do we need it in neon lights? Do we need a literal dictator standing on the Capitol steps declaring martial law before we acknowledge what’s happening? The fact that so many in positions of authority, with the power and the mandate to act, are choosing inaction isn’t just cowardice—it’s complicity. They are complicit in this decay, complicit in the destruction of the ideals they swore to defend. Their inaction is a betrayal—not just of their oaths, but of the people they serve and the generations yet to come.

There comes a point where the fear of doing something becomes far more dangerous than the act itself. We’re long past that point. Waiting only ensures the fall. So, to those with the power to act but who choose to sit on their hands instead: understand this. History will not remember your neutrality as wisdom. It will remember it as cowardice. And you will deserve every ounce of condemnation that comes with it.

[gramarobin]

[sjerzgirl]

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"When the F.B.I. agents finally came for me, it was my day off and I was alone in my room working on a long poem having to do, as I recall it, with everything and anything that I happened to be thinking about at the time. I wrote in an indecipherable longhand in a ruled notebook. One of the F.B.I. agents picked it up and studied it for a time and then asked what it was.

“Poetry,” I said. He looked blank. “Contemporary.” I added. This seemed to satisfy him and he dropped it back on the table. I was vaguely disappointed. I’d briefly held visions of its cryptic contents creating all kinds of uneasiness high up in the councils of the powerful.

I was a little put off—put down—by the casual, offhand manner in which the agents handled my arrest, as if they found the entire business strictly a bore. In my room they wondered aloud, amused, if it would be necessary to manacle one so obviously bent on breaking into prison—they decided it wasn’t—and their search of the room itself was accomplished indifferently and in silence, with first the one and then the other agent picking up my books, leafing through them, and setting them back down without comment.

Clean underclothes were found in one dresser drawer, dirty underclothes in the other, a discovery the agents seemed to find vaguely significant, of what I can’t imagine, but worth a grunt and a head shake anyhow.

...

At the F.B.I. office, I suspected humor when the youngest of the two agents, preparing his report, requested the address of Henry David Thoreau, whose name I had given when asked about persons who might have influenced my thinking. When my answer, Walden Pond, was dutifully written down and the agent looked up, waiting for the rest of it, I could only explain, chagrined, that the man in question was a writer of books I much admired and a man now many years dead.

With some annoyance, the offending material was struck, and it was explained to me that the crime of conspiracy, a charge to which people like myself might become liable if our numbers ever became really significant, was a hell of a lot more serious than whatever it was I thought I was doing now.

(Just for a minute there the state had flexed its muscle. And—correctly, I believe—a man who had never heard of Henry David Thoreau or of Walden was the man to make me know it.)

But in general, except for that one little, “Watch it there, bub,” I was treated by the F.B.I. as not much of a fish—I am reminded of the old coffin maker’s disdain in Chekhov’s Rothchild’s Fiddle when called upon to make a coffin for a child—but rather as a waste of their true, esoteric talents.

Yet I stuck with my own private notion of the enormity of my act, the deliberate violation of a law which, since our own civil war, no modern nation had been without—the law that said men may be conscripted into armies, made military instruments, impersonal as guns—if it, the state, wished to abrogate all strictures against fratricide in the name of its national best interests; if war, that is, was to continue to be seen and employed as a viable instrument of national policy."

- Donald Wetzel, Pacifist: Or, My War And Louis Lepke. New York: Permanent Press, 1986/2016. p. 38-39

[beatsforbrothels]

Koncept Jack$on & Sadhugold - Lacienigga Boulevard

[portobello1042]

Okay, y’all how’s this plan to avoid the conflict happening in the US.

•Step one: liquidise all your assets.

•Step 2: using your new cash, buy so much weed, like way too much.

•Step three: move to New Zealand.

It’s the perfect plan, right?

[isaacsapphire]

"oh just go to college, get married, or fake up a medical excuse. Or flee the country. Nothing too hard."

Buddy, they didn't used to give every idiot a state u admission and a student loan. No fault divorce is pretty new. The bullshit medical excuse, like today's medical excuses, COST MONEY and required having a cooperative doctor.

Like, is everyone here so young they don't recall the multiple election scuffles about how exactly some wealthy scion of Vietnam draft age avoided serving? It was by getting the family doctor to say you had flat feet or something. But that wasn't available to people who had no family doctor, or who had hangups about lying.

Engraved Zippo lighters from the Vietnam War.

~ Cowan’s Auctions

[hale-nathan]

Trump Weird News - Generations Of Draft Dodgers

[ernestbruce]

perfectly compatible with Putin's asshole

ass kissing is GOP (Trump cult) mantra

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Prison, in my experience, is every rotten thing that all the books written by prisoners say it is. However, it is not my purpose here seriously to attempt any real contribution to the literature of this genre. By and large—and I don’t mean the observation to be perjorative—I find books by prisoners to contain much the same general message as do books by infantrymen, which is, “Consider now this deadly folly, which I have managed to survive.”

Certainly such books are worth the writing; but I would rather my purpose be understood as being simply anti-war; the writing of a tract, if it must be, but an anti-war tract, and one dealing with prison only as I for a time was prisoner through being pacifist.

This much having been said by way of disclaimer, a few personal observations then about pacifists in prison and myself, once, as one of them, and since.

And since …

To this day I can hear a sound of metal on metal—a certain pitched and timbered hollow-sounding clang—that will turn my blood cold. I am, also now, always a little uncomfortable in the halls of any government building, while the silence, the air of captivity peculiar to schools, can make me downright uneasy. In my youth I was in no way claustrophobic, but I can not now enter an elevator or ride in a compact car without severe disquiet. It has become impossible for me to sleep in a pup tent, no matter that its walls are of canvas.

Small scars; but scars.

Imprisonment is a physical thing; it is being caged. I think that one necessarily must have been caged for a time fully to understand it, what it feels like, what it is. Nothing in our common experience anticipates it, or lets us easily imagine it; as, for instance, we can imagine quite accurately, I believe, drowning or suffocating or being beaten; but not so, I think, imprisonment.

It is the force—and for its duration it is merciless and unyielding—which society exercises upon its individual transgressors; to have felt it is, indeed, to fear the law.

Today, only with the greatest reluctance and possibly not at all would I seek recourse through the law if cheated, robbed or assaulted. It is not yet in my experience or inclination to perceive the law and its power as other chiefly than the tool of the privileged, an instrument equally for the suppression of the dissident and the oppression of the poor.

Surely the law must be more than this; but I have known, and I know it to be, at least this.

It seems to me obvious that there are similarities between armies and prisons, in the way each is operated and in their functions generally; certainly these rigid and authoritarian institutions have more in common than that their members find the wearing of uniforms obligatory.

I suggest, for instance, that they also have this in common. That they are the two most prevalent institutions in modern society that are everywhere, and hugely, failures; that each not only fails to serve the purpose for which ostensibly it exists, but in fact serves a purpose quite the opposite; prisons being, more than anything else, training schools for criminals; and armies— as the targets of other armies—being the occasion, if not precisely the cause, of the destruction of large segments of those populations which they are supposed to protect.

With the exception of the United States—spared by a happenstance of distance, a happenstance no longer in effect—the various nations involved in World War Two took non-combatant, civilian casualties, of both sexes and all ages, in the thousands and hundreds of thousands; and in America it is a young criminal today—the barest child—who does not have a prison record.

Prisons and armies, as with insect societies, are run by fiat, unquestioned decree. (With insect societies, of course, the decree is biological and quite beyond appeal; which can appear to be the case, at times, with human societies as well.) But what works for a bug would not seem to work too well for a man. The car thieves, bootleggers and bank robbers that I came to know in Chillicothe and Ashland prisons left these institutions—to my firsthand knowledge—not better citizens but better car thieves, bootleggers and bank robbers, a decree and imprisonment to the contrary notwithstanding; as I, in fact, left Ashland a more iconoclastic, if not a better, pacifist.

Having lived in prison for a time with a group of pacifists, I am of the opinion that most of us would have made lousy soldiers under any conditions. It was in our natures, in any authoritarian, conformist environment, to be trouble makers. Simply put, we wouldn’t march well.

Strangely, I am not certain if it was at Ashland or at Chillicothe—I believe it was at Ashland—when for a brief time we were required to march in lock step. It is one of my more vivid, if isolated, prison memories. Beyond the obvious imposition upon us of a demeaning and excessive ritual conformity, it was the ridiculous intimacy of the lock step march to which I objected. I recall thinking at the time that even circus elephants are not so forcibly ass-to-groin paraded, but circle the arena trunk-to-tail, having room at least decently to breathe or pass wind.

(Interestingly enough, the official justification of the use of lock step was that it enabled the authorities immediately to detect any troublesome behavior on the part of an inmate, any ‘stepping out of line.’)

I remember especially how at first we were tightly lined up … and then made endlessly to wait. Then, at the blowing of a whistle, row upon row, as mechanically as men can be made to function, we moved about as though on conveyor belts; we were as lines of robots, blind-shuffling through the halls, twisting the same along the outside walks, no matter that it rained or snowed, or that a wind blew.

I remember moving in lock step across a prison yard through a crashing, sky-splitting electrical storm. I was amazed that we were spared. Any decent God would have wiped us out in contempt, flattened us all in a row, like dominoes."

- Donald Wetzel, Pacifist: Or, My War And Louis Lepke. New York: Permanent Press, 1986/2016. p. 103-105.

[sunthroughdarkclouds]

Donald Trump goes to war

[rodgermalcolmmitchell]

What is the appeal of Donald Trump?

People may ask, “Why is Donald Trump worshipped by so many people, given all his terrible traits? Every time he is indicted for a crime, his followers seem to love him more. Why is that? The answer is right in front of our noses. First, the source of their bewilderment is the man himself. He is a psychopath — or, more correctly, a person with antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). He meets all…

[panspanther]

How anyone can support such a mean, stupid, lying fascist coward and call themselves a "patriot" is sickening.