One of the problems for me is that the people I disagree with are the white supremacists who operate the empire.
I know them pretty well. It actually has been quite difficult to extricate my thinking from that culture which raised me and I still struggle to do that work.
I know they are incredibly violent.
Hoping that you could take their firearms manufacturing and get them to shoot flowers isn't just dumb, it's a dangerous misreading of the structure.
F35s aren't going to start dropping aid packages. Thinking they might is dangerously naive because it misses the structural forces that create them in the first place. And further, that kind of "the miliitary could be used for good if we just use the power of our minds to levitate the pentagon" style thinking is what leads folks to develop vicious technology without worrying how it may be used.
The folks with the guns and the empire often hold a belief that the technology that they produce has not underlying system or ethical structure that produced it, so it could be use for "good" just as easily as the violence to which it will enviably be put.
The US liberals and conservatives who hold these views generally think that if we just have more [trans/well-trained] bomber pilots or [black/class-transitioning] billionaires, all the violence in the world could be put in the bottle and chucked into the sea.
When I write that the person who is creating all this text is a fucking nut, this is the kind of thing that I am talking about:
"de-weaponization means, disconnecting the user from using technology in destructive ways".
You can't.
Thinking that you can is dangerous and just hides the problems.
Thinking that somehow the teleology of the technology can be reduced to a single person's motivations for using it is the exact same structure that the folks who are using it for violence think.
It destroys any hope of understanding the social structures that lead to folks using technology for violence.
It's what has led to the IMF, World Bank, and WTO doing so many crimes. It's lynch pin that allows folks in the US to think somehow their thoughts and prayers for how all the tech they produce just needs to be tweaked a bit and somehow that will stop the ecocide of the planet. "Sorry we destroyed your economy and caused massive instability, but you were holding it wrong".
I mean, I have in the past "expanded my mind" to understand that none of the terrible violence inflicted by this empire is necessary- you're right that it is not, but the problem is that anything I do after that is "all in my head".
The material reality, though, is that either we're not doing anything material at that point (which is certainly a kind of narcissism in its own right) or more typically we don't fully understand the deep violence maintained by something such as the US capitalist world order, which is (as far as I can tell) even more narcissistic and violent.
