We gotta downgrade how important politics are when it comes to interpersonal interactions. I think polarizing the populace is a good technique for gaining power, since you stop people from talking to each other. I talk daily about politics with folks that disagree with me on a lot of things, but we still really like each other, and always learn something when we talk.
I watch this show, Love is Blind, where people date without seeing each other. Somewhere in the middle of season 7, this guy Ramses has all this trouble with the girl he loves, because she served in the military. He places politics above his love of the woman, and his excuse is: "It's a moral thing for me, your politics is tied to your ethics."
So, he's young, and he's wrong. Politics is, 90% of the time, a disagreement about *how* to obtain a goal, rather than what that goal is. Politics is also a grift, where candidates sell one thing (making our country great) and instead do another thing (gain wealth and power by any means necessary). So when Ramses does this, he comes across as hopelessly naive. And to judge a woman, a Surface Warefare Officer in the United States Navy, with Strike Officer credentials and release authority for a tomahawk launch on a DDG, of being *immoral* is a simply wild claim. The military is a tool, and how it is wielded varys widely. In my time in the Navy, I did about as many humanitarian missions in southeast asia as I did combat missions in the gulf. And some of the "combat" missions were actually recovering US prisoners of war (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Lynch was recovered to my ship, USS Boxer, while I was on watch. I didn't know at the time.)
To his credit, he works for Impact Justice, which has noble goals:
> Impact Justice advances safety, justice, and opportunity through boundary-breaking work that honors and empowers people and is changing expectations about what we can accomplish together.
> Sometimes you have to reinvent the wheel.
> We spend billions of dollars annually on systems of law enforcement and punishment that fail to provide the safety and justice everyone deserves—systems that perpetuate racism and cycles of harm and that dehumanize and divide rather than unite us. It’s time to get creative, change the script and rules of engagement, believe in one another, and expand what’s possible.
So, reading critically, there's nothing there. The goal is superb, but the means? Not so much. Let's browse the site.
Oh! I see they have a whole page dedicated to "Our Impact". Let me paste *the whole thing* here:
> We leverage research and other knowledge to connect the desire for change with informed action and work to shift the narrative so that decision-makers and the public understand what’s at stake and what’s possible.
What the actual fuck does this mean? It's completely untethered from anything meaningful.
> We engage in three interrelated areas of work:
> Reducing the number of people caught up in harmful legal systems.
That's an outcome, not what you do. What do you do?
> Improving living conditions and life outcomes and safeguarding fundamental human rights for the millions of people still subject to mass incarceration.
OK, sure. How?
> Expanding opportunities for formerly incarcerated and other system-involved people to heal, fully participate in community life, and reach their potential.
This isn't impact, it's a goal. What metric did you move?
> In all our work, we aim to both create positive outcomes for people who are directly served by our programs, and for those outcomes to ripple out more broadly to communities and make us all safer.
Glad to hear your goals. Why should I give you money?
Sorry to digress there, but this kind of political virtue signaling is nauseating. He enjoys his ability to have these opinions because of the dominance of the US military and economic engine. Bite the hand that feeds you, and all that.
But Ramses might still be a great guy. Just because he disagrees on stuff like whether the military is ethical, is almost orthogonal to whether he's a good person. Yes, sometimes judgment failures are part of a larger pattern of cluelessness, but often they are narrow weaknesses that you can learn to work around, and otherwise have an amazing relationship. That's why I think politics should play less of role in our interpersonal conflict, and instead inspire discussion and thought. We're all in this together.
