You say there’s always a choice, but where do you draw the line? Is it just the military, or is it other things?

Maybe I don’t understand the question but the line is drawn wherever the question is asked. “Is this a morally thing to do or not?” is the question. Yes you can ask that question of other things.

I knew a guy who joined the National Guard because his son, they couldn’t afford the insulin for his son.

That’s a different case, this person could argue coercion. The example from above is someone joining for greater luxury. But to take this case, how about we frame it as, “Is it okay to kill an innocent to save the life of your own child?”. Granted this person’s culpability in the crimes of the US army is watered down, since there are so many people involved. But no one droplet thinks it’s responsible for the flood. Where you draw the line is up to you.

Prison guard? Sure there’s levels here, and we’re all in some way connected to horrors that are done in our names. Everyone needs to make their own choices.

Dakotas… it seems you’re just painting an increasingly more benign scenario from the original in order to slide its justification down a slippery slope. The Simpsons did a bit on this when the mafia guy was justifying his organised crime to Bart:

Is it wrong to steal a loaf of bread to feed your starving family?

And suppose you have a large starving family. Is it wrong to steal a truckload of bread to feed them? And, what if your family don’t like bread? They like cigarettes?

Now, what if instead of giving them away, you sold them at a price that was practically giving them away. Would that be a crime?

The question was about a woman joining the military in order to improve her life. The claim was that this was always justified because mumble mumble material conditions. There is no real argument made as to why he thinks it’s justified.

Now you’re shifting the goalposts and bringing up new scenarios that I need to argue against, and if I fail, then for some reason the original is also justified.

It seems to me that “there’s always a choice” thing. It’s just anti-materialist. It’s moralizing. It doesn’t win people over to your movement.

Now we’re trying to win people over to… sorry what? It was about a woman joining the army for dental and free college, no?

Fundamentally, I don’t give a shit about impressing other communists in the party with how moral, and how holier-than-thou I am. I care about organizing the working class, and in this country the working class sometimes has to make some real shitty fucking choices.

Okay? Spreading communism by justifying joining the US army. It’s a novel approach.