Programming is a tool. Systems understanding is what has value. Pick a system you want to learn and actively build and fail consistently.

Repeated exposure to reality is the way to learn fast and gain confidence.

You’re not tied to ollama. You can choose other options like llama.cpp, vLLM, etc.

He was there the whole time

You are trying to exit the moral argument after making one.

“Class traitor,” “deserves no sympathy,” and “selling out fellow workers” are moral culpability claims. If culpability analysis is useless idealism, stop making culpability claims. If culpability matters, then agency, hierarchy, coercion, role, and decision-making power matter.

And yes, a serious class analysis would require concrete data about different segments of the military: class background, recruitment pathway, role, incentives, command authority, and organizing potential. That supports my point. It means distinguishing segments inside the institution, not collapsing recruit, commander, contractor, policymaker, and profiteer into one condemned category.

That is the difference between analysis and category assignment.

“I’m not interested in examining distinctions” is not a rebuttal to being accused of flattening distinctions. It is a confession.

My argument is not that enlistment is innocent. It is that a material analysis should distinguish recruitment pressure, command hierarchy, profit extraction, and policy-making power. If your framework treats those as irrelevant because everyone falls under the same condemned category, then yes, that is moral flattening with theoretical vocabulary.

You’re not avoiding moral culpability. You’re making a moral claim and then refusing any distinctions inside it.

Calling every participant a class traitor who deserves no sympathy is not material analysis. It is a culpability claim. My point is not that material incentives make enlistment innocent. My point is that agency, hierarchy, coercion, information access, and decision-making power change the kind and degree of responsibility.

“Everyone has reasons” is not a rebuttal. Some reasons are structurally produced, some roles are coerced, some roles command, some profit, some design policy, and some are recruited into executing it. If your framework cannot distinguish those positions, it is not more radical. It is just less precise.

Even if you accept a Settlers-style critique of the U.S. working class, it still does not follow that all participants in an imperial institution have identical agency, power, or culpability.

While anti-fascist extremism is not fascism, social-media extremism can accelerate fascist dynamics by normalizing the psychological and rhetorical habits fascist movements depend on: dehumanization, purity logic, collective guilt, and contempt for procedural restraint.

Projecting.

This still dodges the distinction.

If we’re talking moral culpability, then role, power, age, coercion, hierarchy, and decision-making authority matter. Treating a senator, a general, a defense executive, and a 19-year-old recruit as morally interchangeable is not materialism. It is flattening.

If we’re talking material analysis, then the recruitment bargain matters. The military offers healthcare, housing, education, income, status, and structure in a society where those are insecure for many people. That does not make enlistment innocent. It does mean the institution is reproducing itself through material dependency, not simply through millions of individually evil fascist choices.

“Implicated” does not mean “equally responsible.” That distinction is not liberal sentimentality. It is basic analytical precision.

Ad hominem is logical fallacy

This is not materialism. It is moral flattening with Marxist language.

Yes, the U.S. military is an imperial institution, and service members are implicated in what it does. But treating an enlisted 19-year-old, a general, a defense contractor, and a senator as morally identical erases class pressure, hierarchy, coercion, and actual decision-making power.

People can be responsible without being equally responsible. Recruitment works because healthcare, education, housing, and stable work are inaccessible to many people. That does not make enlistment innocent, but it does make “they’re all just selfish class traitors” a lazy analysis.

The machine matters. So do the conditions that feed people into it.

The draft does exist. Marketing/Advertising is the preferred tool. Military families are only one feed into the system, it’s absolutist to think otherwise.

Joining it doesn’t make you a fascist, especially if your baseline needs aren’t being met it gives you choice. Systems this large have to be taken down from the inside.

Joining military gives them baseline needs so they gain choice. Most soldiers never get deployed, and if they do they can use the gained choice to employ Simple Sabotage Field Manual.

Describe your experience and why you think considering nuance in a situation means agreeing or disagreeing to a “side” rather than analyzing the gray of every situation.

Look up Simple Sabotage Field Manual. Joining Military for free education and not being homeless doesn’t mean you agree with or help the US. Most people leech resources intentionally and leave.

Most service members never even enter combat. You’re making assumptions based on media.

You’ve obviously never been poor. Choice is a luxury.

Don’t confuse hatred of the institution with hatred of the people fed into it.

The U.S. military sells education, healthcare, housing, income, status, and stability in a country where those things are not guaranteed. That is not an accident; it is part of the recruiting bargain. A lot of people join because it is one of the few paths that looks structured and secure.

That does not make every service member personally responsible for U.S. foreign policy, defense contractors, or the political decisions that send people into wars. Criticize the machine. Don’t pretend every person inside it built the machine.

Don’t Nod Entertainment has some great games. Tell Me Why was another interesting story too.