JTarrou
11B2O/IDPAM/USPSAA/BJJB
User ID: 196
JTarrou
1yr ago
Was it assigned? That's way over the heads of the vast majority of high schoolers. Hell, it's over the heads of most university professors, but that's not saying much.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Yet here we are, the defenestrated refugees of three previous platforms. All our standards of behavior and strict rules availed us nothing when it came to being "deplatformed". If there were no Kiwi Farms, and no other sites more heretical, they'd be knocking even this small outpost into the ground. The powers that be cannot allow discussion or debate, because they rule by lies.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Hi, you're posting on a site for people who got thrown out of at least three previous communities, one private, two on Reddit. Obviously someone cared.
JTarrou
1yr ago
You don't flaunt libertarian values as a progressive.
You do countersignal. When someone barges into a room shouting that they are not gay, do you update your priors toward or against them being gay?
Cloudflare did this previously, they just countersignaled afterward.
Ok, definitely not a SEAL here, but as one of the few in the forum with any pointy-end experience, here's my take:
1: I'm weakly against the ban on PEDs in the military. During my time in, steroids were by far the most popular illegal drug, people pissed hot for that shit constantly. Every unit is different, but we were hard up for bodies and infantry NCOs tend to be a practical bunch. I never wrote a soldier up for steroids unless he was also a shitbird. My opinion at the time and today is that if you're taking stuff to get better at your job, I'm not going to stand in the way.
2: When we talk about very specialized schools, we're talking about a very perverse set of conditions. Any special forces unit gets a lot more applicants than they have slots for, so they set up "weedout" programs. For Green Berets, it's Selection, for SEALS it's BUD/S. This is key, these are not training. These are shitshows intended to get gung-ho soldiers to quit. Exhaustion, sleep dep, pain, cold, heat, etc. The cadre will choose targets daily and focus their collective efforts on fucking with one soldier to see if they can get him to quit. The pressure is intense. What they're selecting for is the mental and physical ability to continue suffering indefinitely.
3: For those who are worried about rules not being followed, allow me to set your mind at ease. Rules are never followed, war is a free-for-all. You can do anything your balls and guns are big enough to handle. The idea that soldiers in combat give the tiniest of fucks about back-home moralizing about drugs is ridiculous on its face, and clearly denotes someone who has never met a real soldier.
4: Going out for special forces is a bit like going out for a pro sports team. There's a brutal and brutally efficient weeding-out portion, the vast majority of people do not make it. The collective pass rate for all the schools, training and selections required to become an actual special forces operator is a very small fraction of one percent. Maybe three to five out of every thousand who start will make it to the teams, and even fewer will be able to serve out a career there. We cannot think of these jobs as something that most people could or should be able to do.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Steroids have unpredictable and dangerous longterm consequences not just on testosterone but on mood stability and risk-taking.
Perhaps, but how could you tell? Military life has the same consequences.
If you’re a SEAL you’re not going to have “gear” in your gear on deployment.
Why not? Regular infantrymen manage it, and SEALs get a lot more discretionary baggage.
just as they have an internet in ensuring applicants are not using amphetamines, eyeglasses, or pain relievers.
Oh boy. Your whole thing is just one wrong assumption. Everyone in the military is on painkillers. ADD meds are super popular, widely prescribed and even more widely used off-label. Plus virtually everyone is a raging alcoholic. The eyeglass thing is real, but easy to get exceptions to, and the military pays for LASIK anyway.
I think there are good reasons not to use PEDs, but none of the issues you raise are real.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Won't the standards get even higher to match the better performance they get from steroids?
For the specific case of selective schools like BUD/S, most likely yes. Thirty years ago, weightlifting wasn't really a thing in special forces, but they've raised their standards quite a bit as everyone has gotten buff.
JTarrou
1yr ago
This misses the point of BUD/S, which is to weed out the (relatively) weak. You have to push people to the physical breaking point, so if they're all juiced, you have to move the standards.
A BUD/S class with an 85% pass rate isn't doing its job. The whole point is to cull the herd. If the herd gets stronger, you have to cull harder, or on different metrics.
My two cents, you're probably right that there's more to it than that, but there also might not be. Thing about SEALs is, the Navy doesn't have a pile of land warfare units they can send washouts back down to. There is no navy "infantry". In the Army, people who wash out of special forces training just go back to their line units. They might not be Green Berets, but they can still be king shit of 2/502 or whatever. My uncle washed in Selection and wound up in the 82nd Airborne. Prospective SEALs are betting it all on making it into the teams, because there is no other job waiting for them. And that's a structural problem that stems from letting the Navy play on land with the real boys. The SEAL teams IMO should fall under the Marines, and then washouts could be sent down to Marine units. But politically, they had to give the Navy a special forces unit since no one makes movies about battleships anymore. Ultimately, whatever their usefulness, the SEALS are a PR ploy to butch up the Navy's public image. Hence all the movies, the book deals, the podcasts etc.
JTarrou
1yr ago
This is true, and yet PEDs are mostly legal (or have legal versions). Specific sports ban them for competitive reasons, but surely that runs exactly counter to the point of a military, which is to be as overpowered and uncompetitive* as possible. We allow civilians to take these for fun. Is there a good reason to ban soldiers from using them? We might find that "roid rage" is too dangerous when combined with grenade launchers, but I can't think of many other good ones.
*"If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck" - Vegetius (probably)
JTarrou
1yr ago
Temporarily, but the "left" has a funny way of turning "right" once they control something. Such are the tides of politics. It's almost as if there is a natural shift in ideology depending on whether one has power or not. If leftism is about "fighting the power/man", then how can they possibly hold power, thus being The Man? Mostly by shifting their politics to the positions preferred by powerful people, with some leftover left-ish terminology sprinkled on top. Old Google: "Don't be Evil". New Google: "We make killbots for the military".
If you are correct, and I am also correct, then the pattern should play out like this: The left pioneers AI technology, and so become a disproportionate part of the new aristocracy formed from those who got in on the ground floor and got big. Within a decade, they move to consolidate control of their sector, begin lobbying for corporate protections, monopolies and lower taxation/regulation (unless that regulation hurts new companies more) within their industry. This will all be done in terminology palatable to the left. They won't want the power to censor nudity, they'll want it to ban Nazis (to use a contemporary example).
JTarrou
1yr ago
TBH, I stayed well clear of all that stuff, so I don't know much about where guys got it. I presume just had it mailed in, lots of guys were on creatine, supplements etc., so that sort of thing wouldn't automatically look suspect. I know a lot of other contraband got in that way, or in care packages from your people back home. I think the Army cared more about pornography than they did drugs, at least back in '05.
JTarrou
1yr ago
you say there's no "Navy infantry"; what about like the people who man battleships
One the level of staffing, yes of course. That's the sort of jobs enlisted men do in the Navy, mechanics, cooks, gun crewmen etc. But those jobs are not the sort of fallback position someone who was trying out for the SEALs is likely to be all that happy with. Might be gunners mate, but might also be snack bar at the on post gym. My point was that the people who go out for these units want to fight. For whatever reason, they're trying to get as close as possible to being the guys who are actually kicking the doors and shooting the faces. Even in the military, this is a distinct minority of people. But, because the Navy doesn't really do that sort of fighting as part of its normal job, they don't have a junior varsity squad to send these prospective SEALs to if they wash out. In the Army or the Marines, you just drop down a level, there's a whole pyramid scheme of "hardercore" units from basic line grunts to airborne to rangers to green berets to whatever the fuck they're calling Delta these days. Wash out of Airborne? No problem, go to a line unit. Made airborne but washed in Selection? Why not try out for the Rangers?
So it would make sense from my point of view that the best of the best in the Navy would be attached to... the best of the best battleships.
There is a prestige thing with serving on certain ships, I think. The Navy gives it's best new toys to its top officers etc. But as I said above, being the top plumber's mate on the Navy's best ship isn't really the plan B guys going out for the SEALs are likely to be all that happy about.
JTarrou
1yr ago
It is my belief that utopian dreaming about a human life without conflict and struggle itself ceases to be human. Humans are built to struggle, and if there's nothing there to struggle against, they'll find something to be "traumatized" about and struggle with that. I don't think humans will ever stop fighting each other, scrabbling for status and scarce resources. We can change the resources that are scarce, but we can't change people.
We are generational beings projecting our DNA forward through time one fuck, one war, one long damned waste at a time.
We will never be without trouble, without hardship, without want and need.
We are inexhaustible and insatiable.
We are built this way.
JTarrou
1yr ago
I very much doubt it. In fact, I don't think we can change ourselves at all. At least not reliably, in aggregate and in the direction we intended.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Alternatively, people are herd animals and follow fashionable trends. The vast majority of reddit users don't comment at all, so a small increase in the number of comments from a particular sector (say, their candidate just won a primary) might look a lot like an entire site turning 180 degrees.
Just to reiterate what I posted on the subreddit prior to Exodus 3:
1: There are two allegations here, one that someone in the student section shouted racial slurs, and one that Richardson was accosted by a white man who told her to "watch her back".
2: The second allegation was the UVU student, but it's unclear what exactly he said. Reports seem to indicate some sort of mental impairment, though apparently not enough to bar him from college. My read is that a weird kid said something weird and this got connected in Richardson's head to the (possibly imaginary) racism of BYU fans.
3: I had to watch women's volleyball for this, so I'm riding it as far as I can. The slur allegation was that someone (or multiple someones) in the freshman section was shouting the slur "every time she [richardson] served". She served once in the second set and twice in the fourth, so "every time" was three instances, specifically. Doesn't really impact whether the allegation is true, but some of the reporting made it sound like the crowd just chanted it for two whole sets. Which would, of course, be difficult to hide on footage.
4: I must say, I am heartened by BYU's second response. Their first was exactly as craven and shitty as we've come to expect, but apparently cooler heads prevailed.
5: Public service reminder that fake "hate incidents" are real hate incidents, just with the valence reversed. Jussie Smollett concocted a hateful and racialized plot to play the victim and thereby victimize white people, Republicans, and Trump fans specifically. To the degree that we believe a racial accusation to be false, I think it is a mistake to classify it as a "hoax". It isn't, it's a false flag intended to harm people. This isn't about sympathy or clout, it's about hurting a race of people based on their race, by making false accusations. In other words, it's the same shitty mob behavior that lead to lynchings in the past. We would not describe a false rape accusation of a black man in the Jim Crow South as a "hoax", but as an act of racism and incitement to violence.
JTarrou
1yr ago
how ultra-orthodox Jews in NYC are funneling billions in public money for use in their yeshivas. Students are barely taught how to read and write in English
There may be something here, but let's frame this in comparative terms. How is this different from regular public schools? And do the educational outcomes at the end of this produce bad societal results? For instance, is there a lot of welfare usage, violent crime etc. in ultra-orthodox circles?
JTarrou
1yr ago
If the laws are poorly written enough that they can be so easily gamed, I don't see how you can blame the minority of a minority of a minority that learned to exploit the system. It's not as if the ultra-orthodox wrote this stuff.
JTarrou
1yr ago
A note on the "Jack Ryan" thing, I thought the first season was very solid and went into the second hoping for more, but it was a dumpster fire. I don't know or care what they changed, but it ruined the show for me. Season 2 was just shit.
JTarrou
1yr ago
I don't see a functional difference that society should care about. Either we're ok with public money going to private enterprises because we don't want poor kids going hungry, or we are so enraged by a pack of religious nutters who figured out how to game the system that we are not.
Personally I don't really care which, but I find the sudden surge of interest when the religious scammers are jewish to be depressingly predictable. This article could have been written about any charter school in the country. The NYT is publishing it, and we're arguing about it because the position of jewish people in the progressive stack is in question.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Yes, how dare they be free to practice their dumb religion? This is America.
JTarrou
1yr ago
the laws are written with a general assumption of people not being hyper ingroup focused.
1: Are they?
2: If they are, isn't that really stupid?
3: How is it a minority's fault that majority politicians are so naive to the world they would assume for the purposes of a law that people don't have ingroups?
Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek - Annie Dillard's masterful contemplation of nature and man's place in it.
The Fall - Camus turns on Sarte, heralding the turn of europe against communism. A veritable nesting doll of allegory.
The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber - Hemmingway does battle of the sexes in short-story form!
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