Women in combat is just another front in his multifront campaign to be “transformational,” which is to say to change America by removing all traditional institutions: the rights of Catholic employers, traditional marriage, meritocracy in school and work, limited government, the right to bear arms, and the masculine ethos of the military.
The arguments against women in combat and in having too big a role in the military are familiar. They are physically weaker, will create liabilities for those around them, because so many military personnel are young and single they will often create more sexual dynamics and tension, and men tend not to be willing to be as hard-headed in sending women to their deaths and will take excessive risk to avoid that. Finally, women in combat will create an oddly distorted society, where men enjoy video games and luxury while young women get blown to pieces overseas.
The one thing missing from the last 15 or so year’s experiment with expanding military roles for women is the utter lack of a definitive study by the DoD on its impact. Has it worked? Increased efficiency? Created any problems? Of course, the biggest problem is that women in the military and the push for gender equality will degrade standards across the board. Since the median woman cannot run as fast, lift as much, or march as far as the average man, the standards will be reduced across the board, which will also hurt men indirectly by allowing physically weaker men to advance when they would otherwise be limited. The failure to actually look at this issue and its dimensions allows propaganda and wishful thinking to be substituted for facts. Undoubtedly, it would be hard to point to a single woman in a single job and say the mission failed on account of that. It’s more a question of whether we have the best military we possibly can, and high physical, mental, and moral standards are part of that. We have the luxury of a smallish military and can easily fill almost every slot with a man if we chose. But we have pushed women hither and yon, and never once, so far as I can tell, has a neutral study been conducted that said how this has been working out.
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I dated a girl in the Air Force a long time ago, and I can tell you that the increase of women in even non-combat roles has been a disaster for all concerned; the Services who are forced to lower standards to accomodate weaker smaller women, the male members of the services, who often have to do the work and shoulder the burdens sloughed off by incompetent women, and who are routinely “dinged” if they notice this (it’s called “not supporting equal opportunity”), and the women themselves, who are often abused, raped, and tormented, and who very frequently break down physically and mentally under the sheer stresses of military service. And now, we hear that this has all been so successful, we’re going to send women into combat. God help us come our next war, and I’m not kidding…
This is a long read, but Colonel David Hackworth wrote a piece a dozen years ago about women and men training together at Ft. Jackson, where non combat arms personnel undergo their initial training. The article is called ‘The March of the Porcelain Soldiers’ and probably should have been read beforehand by Panetta and those pushing this ridiculous policy of putting women into the combat arms.
Standards and reality don’t matter. Only ideology does.
If it hastens the end of the Empire, I’m all for it. ZOG must fall.
http://www.fredoneverything.net/MilMed.shtml
Some good stats here.
“If it hastens the end of the Empire, I’m all for it. ZOG must fall.”
this tribal “only concerned with what hurts/helps Israel” mindset that dominates large swaths of paleo thinking is so damn lame
this tribal “only concerned with what hurts/helps Israel” mindset that dominates large swaths of paleo thinking is so damn lame
The tribal “only concerned with what hurts/helps Israel” mindset that dominates large swaths of neocon thinking is damn lame too.
You’re both right.
i don’t see how neocons are really relevant to this? i was responding to a commenter who expressed support for a bad policy in irrelevant anti-Israeli terms. it’s representative of the central focus against Israel in a good amount of modern paleo commentary, to the point that something that hurts the American military is OK since the U.S. government is “Zionist-occupied.” anti-Israeli sentiment that morphs into anti-American sentiment, in other words.
i don’t include this blog in that critique since it doesn’t appear to share that nihilistic worldview.
Here’s a new blog: Occam’s Razor
http://occamsrazormag.wordpress.com/
It has multiple bloggers and will include topics: HBD, politics, history and economics, immigration, etc.
We are still working on blogroll. If we do not have you added, please add us, leave comment or email, and we’ll add you.
Thanks.
For what’s it’s worth, JDP, I agree with you. This doesn’t have damn-all to do with Israel.
thanks. was responding to the other guy to be clear.
“this tribal “only concerned with what hurts/helps Israel” mindset that dominates large swaths of paleo thinking is so damn lame”
Yeah, kinda like the HBDite ideology of boiling everything down to biology. But you’d never see much criticism of that on certain sites…
All of thee single issue explanations are attempts at short cutting real understanding with the complexity and uncertainty real life entails. It’s what Burke has in mind when he puts down calculators sophists and economists.
I think that the fact that some (not most) HBDers focus too much on biology is a result of the fact that all too many people over the last fifty years have denied that biology plays any role at all, and there’s naturally a tendency to over-emphasize that which you believe has been under-emphasized in the past. But when it gets right down to it, I don’t know too many HBDers who think that environment doesn’t account for about 40 – 50% of intelligence. Somehow, I never meet those “100% biology” people that the enviros are always talking about, and are so keen to refute.
my issue with HBD is when people like Steve Sailer reduce ideological views to “status competition.” now obviously there’s an element of truth to this, in that people feel good about holding certain positions because it makes them feel superior to others. but it sort of avoids the issue that, smugness or no, people generally take stances because they’re convinced they’re right.
it can also get into some nasty places when combined with conspiratorial anti-Semitism, something you see in his commenter base. and i believe there was some commenter here fairly recently who got smacked down for suggesting that lower-IQ individuals are incapable of leading any kind of solid middle-class existence.
Obviously, monistic “theory of everything” theories are generally wrong, and it’s a good idea to steer clear of them. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t some truth in them, that can be winnowed out. As for lower IQ individuals, certainly some may not be able to live solid, middle class lives, but we could do better by them than we do now. The developments of the last fifty years have been terrible for the left half of the bell curve, and they are our fellow citizens, too.