Shrike
23hr ago
Just as a preliminary matter, I got that from the US Census Bureau's State of residence by Place of Birth data for 2019.
Very interesting, thank you!
With that out of the way, it's certainly and odd argument to make that if that were the case, and there were lingering resentment among Southerners, that they would respond by disproportionately participating in the military of the country that conquered them, unless your argument were that they intended to use their positions to launch some kind of military coup, which I think we both can agree is ridiculous. If you want to make an argument that the overrepresentation is due to cultural factors I can get on board with that argument, I just don't think it has anything to do with the Confederacy, and I don't think modern Confederate symbology has anything to do with it either.
Yes, the suggestion I made was that the Southern martial culture, plus postwar poverty, might have created (or sustained) a culture that was conducive to military service. (I mentioned elsewhere anecdotal data that, at least for a time - IIRC as late as WW1 - that there was actually social pressure for Southern men to stay out of the military for precisely the reasons you suggest.) In this suggestion the operative fact wasn't the trauma of defeat so much as "being poor" and the cultural narratives the war generated - perhaps I should have pushed back more clearly when you mentioned "generational trauma" since I think I'm suggesting something a bit more grounded. To the extent that the Civil War itself played a role, I think it has less to do with Confederate ideology per se and more to do with creating material conditions, plus war heroes like Lee and Jackson to idolize. The South for some time didn't have a lot else to idolize, so I don't think it's surprising that they would become something of a cultural nucleus of the postwar South.
For example, New York as the third-highest share of black 18–24 year-olds, with 6.6% of the national total. Yet it only produces 66% of the black recruits one would expect based on its population. The story is the same in Illinois and Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, Florida produces 147% of the expected black recruits.
I agree with your position that it's easy to construct any number of just-so stories. But doesn't this match my theory that material conditions + culture are driving the over-representation? Without tracking down specific numbers my assumption would be that during, say, the 1960s the military was a comparatively more attractive career for blacks in the South than in the North, even if you don't think Southern martial culture would bleed over horizontally from whites to blacks (I suspect that it would, at least some, but just for the sake of argument).
The upshot is that I wouldn't put too much stock in this theory.
The generational military theory? It's definitely a factor, but if I'm understanding what you aren't putting stock in, it's "kids born at military bases muddying the waters." Which is interesting!
In other words, people from the second-highest quintile were most likely to enlist, and military enlistment is generally a middle-class phenomenon.
Yes, and as discussed, (much of) the South is no longer poor. I don't think this really speaks to whether or not the times when the South was poorer helped create the culture that continues to be overrepresented in the military. I'd be happy of course to pin it all on culture and remove the poverty angle from my calculus if we could do so, however.
Also it's worth noting that the absolute poorest of the poor are often basically disqualified from military service (they're insane or mentally ill, they are imprisoned, etc.) So the recruitment pool for the military is going to be less poor than a nationally representative sample.
The first is that it isn't so much that individuals are more likely to enlist in certain areas as it is that the practices of recruiters are different, and recruiters in the South simply have lower standards, leading to higher numbers. I don't think that this is particularly likely, but it's interesting to think that the differences may have more to do with the culture of recruiters than the culture of the local population.
Was this including officers? I'm not sure if they still use this system, but I've had recruitment described to me as a points-based system (the holy grail: a female nuclear engineer) and so if there are a lot of willing recruits in the South, it might sense that recruiters in the South wouldn't be as choosy as they can easily get all the recruits they need, whereas recruiters in really lean environments might concentrate hard on bagging top-tier recruits. It's also possible (particularly if this includes officers) that recruiters are getting recruits from very specific pipelines. (Back to the nuclear engineers: US News and World Report lists 18 schools with nuclear engineering programs, so we might expect, e.g., US Navy top-tier recruits to come disproportionately from those states - but that would be officers.)
What's the other explanation?
Shrike
1d ago
I think divorcing "institutional effectiveness" from "morality" is a wrong choice. While it's true that part of institutional effectiveness is just the process of learning to do hard things, an institution with poor moral values will be a less effective one. Look at China - or for that matter look at the procurement/sustainment scandals in Western countries. Men without virtue are not the only thing that makes a military weak. But they do make it weaker.
Your monograph here acts as if for a theory to be correct, it has to be the only explanation for something. So if someone says "decadence is bad for military readiness and societal cohesion" you say "no, look at This Example!" Now, if someone is claiming that a lack of decadence is the only factor in military defeat, then it's fair to raise that objection (and that person is being silly). But the operative question, at least for people who understand that not everything is monocausal is really "would This Example perform better or worse if they were decadent/lacked certain virtues/were soft men/etc.
state the decadence model in a form that could be falsified, then tell me what evidence would make them update.
Sure. I proposed a sort of modification of the Hard Times Cycle suggesting it made more sense if you conceived of the cycle as telling a story about virtue rather than strength (or, if you prefer, suggesting a different, more nuanced understanding of strength), and using Kipling as a brief example of how we might conceive of the traits that virtue requires.
My theory is that virtue is better for a society, including a military. Militaries will perform worse if their ranks are full of the corrupt; so will societies. What evidence would make me update would be evidence that organizations and societies full of cowardly, lazy, lying people performed just as well or better as societies full of brave, hard-working, honest people.
I think anti-D wants a warning that normies can act on: "good times make weak men" is memorable, it is emotionally resonant, it gives people something they can picture and a villain they can name (the soft, comfort-seeking elite who has lost the warrior spirit). I understand the appeal.
My objection is that this appeal is precisely why it is dangerous. It compresses messy institutional failure into a story about moral character, and moral character stories are the enemy of structural diagnosis. Bad takes on history inform bad takes on the present. You can't fix a training pipeline by convincing people that softness is sinful. You cannot fix a logistics system by shaming elites for enjoying hot baths. The story feels true but does not help. Sometimes, it harms outright, if people feel inspired to advocate for shock therapy.
"Decadence" is not a cause. It is a post-hoc aesthetic wrapper we apply to certain kinds of state failure, selected specifically because it flatters the person applying it and lets them feel they saw it coming. If you must, break it down into components like the level of corruption, birth rates, enlistment, political turmoil etc etc. Decadence as a blanket term only muddles the picture.
On the one hand, I concede that there's a risk of using the Hard Times Cycle to "fix the wrong problem." On the other hand, fingering "decadence" is a problem is good in part because it is so actionable. Behaving in decadent ways is bad for you and while most people have little to no control over what their military apparatus is doing, they do have some control over what they are doing. And I would argue that advantage of fingering virtue as something that elevates a society and makes it more fit is that not only is it true, but it's actionable at all levels, both the institutional and the individual.
And, as @FiveHourMarathon points out, the historical method of creating virtue is intentionally creating a sort of limited Hard Times even amongst a society living in Good Times. That's also how the military creates institutional effectiveness: boot camp is supposed to be hard. Which, if you look at it from that lens makes your concerns (you specifically mention a lack of training!) and the concerns of the anti-decadence people the same thing - although I should hasten to clarify that I do not think that hard times in and of themselves create effective training - here I would diverge from the simplistic version of the meme. But I do think that effective training often requires hard times.
Shrike
1d ago
I think Derbyshire's point is less about individual softness and more about "we can't demographically sustain big wars as a society anymore."
I don't exactly agree with Derbyshire but it's enough of a problem that it's impacting the war in Ukraine.
Shrike
1d ago
Yeah this is fair.
It's also okay to be a skinny nerd iff the situation isn't so bad as to justify the deployment of force at scale and the entire point of the meme is that the proliferation of such men will make it necessary.
I guess what grinds my gears is that (as many people in the pro-Devereaux camp have pointed out) the military isn't just comprised of "bearded SOF soldiers" even though the bearded SOF soldiers are an important part of winning the war. I think the correct response (if you're a skinny nerd facing Hard Times) isn't to tear down the bearded SOF guys, it's to go "hey how can I chip in?" That might look like becoming a bearded SOF dude, but it might look very different, and that's okay.
Not everyone can be a 6-foot-2 god of war, but in truly desperate times pretty much everyone can do something. During World War Two they even put teens and seniors in Civil Air Patrol aircraft to spot submarines. This might not be as glamorous as being a fighter pilot, but it is fundamentally an honorable thing to do.
Granted, Devereaux doesn't live in Hard Times. At least not yet. (Admittedly, I am interacting with the Devereaux in Gog's imagination, who might be different from the real deal.) But just because you're a comparatively soft guy living in comparatively easy times doesn't mean you must inevitably tear down hard guys. In fact, if anything, you ought to want them to be harder and tougher to protect your comfort. Which is in fact the way that prosperous nations often go, shifting away from citizen-soldiers to professionalized armed forces, which I think has a lot of practical benefits but potentially also some drawbacks.
Shrike
1d ago
I dunno if this is true, but if it is, it's a bad motivation.
While I do think that at its core masculinity implies a responsibility to be willing to use force to defend the good if necessary - and thus all men have a certain responsibility to embrace the capacity for violence - it's a big world and it's okay if some guys are skinny nerds who read a lot.
Perhaps due to cultural fragmentation fights over these sorts of things will increase or at least run relatively high until there's a decisive cultural break or one side "wins."
Shrike
1d ago
Perhaps because of the long range capabilities you describe, governments have ended up fighting insurgents an awful lot. (Obviously insurgencies go back centuries, I am not claiming they are a new innovation caused by the invention of missiles.) Even in Ukraine (a very artillery-heavy war between one of the top #3 military powers and probably one of the top #10 military powers) point-blank combat with firearms is still very relevant. I can't vouch for it, but I was just reading the other day that (despite all the drones, bombs, and shells) about 5% of casualties in Ukraine were caused by small arms fire. That 5% isn't insignificant, it's the last-mile violence that's achieving the political ends of the states in question.
In either context, elan is going to be extremely helpful. The US just got a big geopolitical W in Venezuela because, basically, a bunch of dudes were willing to fly at night in helicopters to seize the leader of a country who knew they were coming in his own army base. Russia might have gotten a massive W at Hostomel due to the elan of the VDV - they were foiled in part by fancy technology (the US SIGINT apparatus, as I understand it) but, at the last mile, the guts of the Ukrainian defenders who were willing to attempt to push them out of the airport, which may have scrapped plans to establish an airbridge, and the failure of the Russian ground troops to link up with the VDV at the airport (which might reflect poorly on their "warrior ethos" or what have you, I am not sure of the details there.)
Either way, troop quality makes a big difference. You could describe that troop quality by referencing the "warrior ethos," I think, but I am not convinced that is the best way to describe it. I think there's a lot of very good and valid criticism of the "cult of special forces" in the United States, but at the end of the day having a bunch of guys who are acculturated to violence is pretty helpful. Whether or not "warrior" is the correct way to describe them, I suppose, is a semantics question - the word doesn't give me the vibe you describe, but I will cop to being leery of the idea of professionalized soldiery.
Shrike
2d ago
The average age of enlisted personnel is 27.
This is fair enough! You're correct that World War One is very far from us today, and World War Two is much further than the time I was a boy. But I think that cultural habits persist long after people are dead. The average age in the US is 39, and you can very quickly find Southerners much younger than 39 expressing sympathy for the Confederacy, less out of any neoconfederate ideological alignment and more out of nativist sentiment. One gentleman I spoke with once told me that he would have fought for Virginia even though he thought it was in the wrong. And so given those attitudes I am liable to give credence to the idea that other cultural attitudes might have hung on for just as long.
your thesis doesn't hold when you look at things at a more granular level.
This is a respectable argument, but I don't think your more granular analysis tells the whole story.
- Firstly, a lot of migration is state to state, so native-born population doesn't actually speak as much to "former CSA status" as we would like: many of the immigrants to these states are probably from other Southern states. (You say that only 43% of Floridians were born in the former CSA - very interested as to where you go that stat specifically.)
- Secondly, there's no particular reason to think that military recruitment from a state is representative of the population there as a whole. In fact, we should expect recruits to disproportionately be born in the state they are from, because a lot of new recruits are starting their career in the military, whereas a lot of people living in a state moved there as part of a (different) career. So, for instance, it's possible that people born in South Carolina provide 75% of the state's recruits despite being only about half of the population, because we should expect most people who have recently moved to South Carolina (unless they are in the military) to be there for reasons that make them unlikely candidates to enlist.
- This is muddied quite a bit in both directions by the fact that military families often produce more military recruits, and military families move around: possibly someone born in Hawaii because their father, born in Texas, is forward deployed there is more in touch with the Southern martial culture than someone born in Texas because his father, born in the Philippines, moved there as part of his deployment. So a lot of "native born" Southerners had fathers from places like Illinois; they were born in the South because their father was stationed there.
- Fifthly, culture doesn't just transmit vertically - Southern martial culture can influence people in, e.g. Florida, whose ancestors were from elsewhere. (And vice versa!)
- Finally, it's true I cited to enlistment numbers, but I also mentioned the raid trigger-pullers. It's quite possible for Southern martial culture to have a disproportionate influence on the American war machine regardless of their raw numbers.
How would we measure a cultural angle? It's hard, but I don't think impossible to probe the idea. We could look at whose tactics and strategy was emulated and studied by the US military. (Realistically, I think the answer here is disproportionately German.)
Or we can look at current people in elite positions. For instance, we can look at the Joint Chiefs of Staff right now. But illustrating my point above, some of it's fuzzy. For one thing, Lunday is from South Carolina, but he's from the Coast Guard and so merely an attendee of the JCOS. I'm not sure where Wilsbach was born, but it seems likely he grew up in Florida. And Smith is from Plano (Texas), but was born in Missouri. So generously, 4/9 JSOC members are Southern - SOUTHERN BIAS CONFIRMED! - but conservatively, only 1/8 (Caudle, from North Carolina).
Or, we can look at historical commanders of JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) and SOCOM (Special Operations Command). JSOC has had 18 commanders, and we should expect those commanders to have a lot of influence in the modern US war machine. By my count, 5 of those came from the former Confederacy (including 2 from Texas, 3 if you count McRaven who moved there in elementary school). If JSOC perfectly represented current population trends, we would likely expect it to have 6 from the South, but on the flip side, 5 probably is a slight overrepresentation of the population in 1980 (when JSOC was stood up, and the South was closer to 25% of the population). Things get funny if you look at SOCOM: 6/14! Nearly half! Wild overrepresentation! But this is only if I exclude Raymond Smith since he was only in office for 41 days as acting commander - which I think is fair enough - and INCLUDE Holland, born in WEST VIRGINIA. I'll leave it to you to decide if that counts as a former Confederate state.
Or you can look at the Blue Angels, if we assume that they are likely to represent the best America has to offer - the South puts up 2/6 pilots (about right statistically), 7/17 officers on the team, (a bit more than we would expect, particularly if you drop the two not born in US states; one is Puerto Rican and one is from the Philippines); and, finally, 51 or 52/134 enlisted, depending on if you count West Virginia, and if you remove people born in Puerto Rico or otherwise overseas you lose about 10 people - that number is about what we would expect based on current demographics.
I don't think these are slam-dunk arguments - they suggest to me that the South might be slightly overrepresented in elite US military institutions if we control for birth year, but while I don't particularly find them hugely persuasive I at least find them to be entertainingly granular. The military is an institution, and when you're looking at how a culture impacts the military, analyzing it like intellectual history is, I think, a valid approach.
Anyway, I can't find good numbers on this
I was going off of the good old USA.gov (that's also why I specified enlisted; officers matter too, of course): https://usafacts.org/articles/is-military-enlistment-down/
It (in turn) is pulling yearly enlistment data from 2022. This makes it a good snapshot of the current sorts of people who are entering the military (but not necessarily of who is in the military as a whole). So this might be better at grabbing trends, while your dataset might be better at grabbing the long view.
Florida, Georgia, Texas, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Mississippi are above the national average (for enlistments ages 18 - 24, anyway) in that order, although Mississippi and Louisiana are not notably so. Arkansas and West Virginia are below.
California is above, but less than even Mississippi and Louisiana - practically average. New York is notably below. Other items of note:
- Hawaii is massively overrepresented.
- Nevada is extremely overrepresented, behind Georgia, Florida but before South Carolina. Alaska is tied with Texas, and Wyoming is slightly ahead of it.
Top ten US states by enlistment per capita, by my eyeball:
- Hawaii
- Florida
- Georgia
- Nevada
- Wyoming
- South Carolina
- Texas
- Alaska
- North Carolina
- Virginia
So the former CSA takes 6/10.
Now, to be clear, I think this is an oversimplification if you present this entirely as an artifact of Southern martial culture - for instance, I am sure that a lot of the recruits in Texas are Hispanics with no particular direct attachment to the martial culture of the antebellum South (although I do believe culture transmits horizontally as well as vertically). As [your least favorite politician] said (probably), the world is a complicated place, with a lot of things going on. But I do think that there's something going on, rooted in the attitudes and traditions of the peoples there, and at least some of that is causally downstream of the Civil War, and much of it is downstream of events far beyond it in time.
Shrike
2d ago
Yes, I think this is exactly the right sort of way to be thinking. It can be a cold comfort to merely be able to accurately describe a thing.
Shrike
2d ago
Just like with the dictatorships, that the most successful examples are drastically different from the archetype is not a coincidence.
Isn't this also true of democracies?
Not that I am a fan of dictatorships or monarchies. But there is a lot of bad governance out there to go around, and the fact that democracies eclipsed monarchies once doesn't, in my mind, assume that the question is settled forever for all time (my own sense is that democracies and monarchies decay in different ways and thus can feed into each other.) The fact that a lot of those democracies are still functioning monarchies in at least a nominal sense can definitely be interpreted as a L for monarchies...but I think it could also be taken as a W.
Shrike
2d ago
Yeah I've been noodling on that a bit - I don't have a ranking of all countries best to worst, but it seems to me you could argue that constitutional monarchies outperform the average democracy, at least in certain respects, which would be interesting.
Shrike
2d ago
Does that make them not a monarchy? (Does a democracy that is not liberal become not a democracy?)
If the first goal of a state is to perpetuate itself, then perhaps monarchies are more successful than commonly believed.
Shrike
2d ago
I feel like you need to be in your 50s(?) for that to be true.
I am not yet 35 and one of my grandparents was born before 1930 and I think they were all born before 1940...but perhaps this is unusual!
Shrike
2d ago
the South already had a strong martial culture.
Yes - I think the strong martial culture => strong martial culture is a better predictor than hard times => strong martial culture (in this case); however, in the specific context of the United States, I suspect the combination of strong martial culture + hard times cooperated (since military service is a reliable route out of poverty, though of course not just for Southern Americans.)
Is there evidence that they became more likely to sign up for military service on a per-capita basis?
I've heard anecdotes that the opposite was actually true for some time, as signing up in the services was viewed as going over to the enemy. I haven't seen that addressed statistically one way or the other, though.
Israel. Their special forces punch way above their weight class, but then again the entire country does too.
Yeah, agree with this for sure.
Intelligence and education negatively correlate with religiosity.
Not true, at least in the United States, where graduate education is correlated with religiosity (although people with graduate degrees are slightly more likely to be atheists as well).
I agree that Europe stagnated because of poor economic choices, including excessive redistribution and deindustrialization.
Perhaps you would even say they are less reasonable than Americans?
One would assume that going through WW2 would put them in prime position to become stronger men, while the Americans, having had it easy for centuries, would be the ones in decline.
You're wandering back around again to the version of the meme you described instead of what I am suggesting has some descriptive power: that a lack of virtue (for a certain value of virtue) creates (let's say) bad times.
It seems to me that you agree with me and Kipling that robbing the collective Peter to pay the collective Paul has put them in danger of being sold and delivered bound to their foe. You're going to object here that the insight is trivial: doing dumb stuff leads to bad results. Well, Kipling called them the Gods of the Copybook Headings for a reason - they seem like pretty basic stuff, and people fumble them anyway.
Shrike
2d ago
it is more common to stay in the class you were born in, and to my knowledge, this has always been the case.
If there was an iron law of history that every four generations like clockwork the meritorious in the lower classes would rise up and take the place of the decrepit in the upper classes, this would still be true. It's quite possible for there to be both a cycle of uprisings from the lower class that overtake the complacent upper class folks and for most people to stay in the same social class as their parents.
Shrike
2d ago
The empires flunked the exam.
Perhaps it's a little bit more complicated than this, given how many of the successful Western European states are literal monarchies?
Shrike
2d ago
The poor stay poor, the rich get richer. Money flows towards wealth, and power creates more power.
This definitely is not an inevitable historical constant, otherwise we would be ruled by Sumerian priest-kings or something.
Which tbf is a pretty fun conspiracy theory.
Shrike
2d ago
If Hard Times produce the strongest military culture, and the South has been steeped in both literal defeat and the mythology of that defeat for 160 years, shouldn't we expect that culture to translate into superior military outcomes, not just higher enlistment rates?
My suggestion is precisely that Hard Times (the South's defeat) led to Strong Men (the US military prowess you mention). I don't think there's a straight line there - I agree with you that the US' technology and such is also very important - but...yes, the South's contributions to the US military have been associated with US military victory. If I had to guess, I suspect this has more to do with Southern martial culture than the economic situation, but if I had to guess, those are at least somewhat intertwined.
Sure, they put up a good fight, but their martial culture didn't beat raw industrial output.
It is true that South was the better combatant, but all the stuff you've said about how the South lost its war suggests to me that you didn't really read my comment - their loss is precisely what you would expect to create Strong Men (in the Strong Man cycle theory) and thus them losing the war is evidence for the theory, not against it, as you seem to think.
Now, let me be the first person to say that I think the true picture of what is going on is much more complicated and that I don't exactly believe in the Strong Man cycle theory, at least not unless you interpret it as I suggest, in which case I would not consider it to be the only factor at play.
After all, plenty of other countries have top-notch special forces without relying on beef-fed Scots-Irish borderers.
Really? Which ones do you have in mind? I think the Russians were impressive at Hostomel. I actually suspect this is an area where the Chinese severely lag. The UK and France, I think, have good trigger-pullers but not a lot of mass...who else?
The thing is that having the top-notch tech by itself actually isn't enough to have a top-notch SOF apparatus - the US SOF apparatus is as good as it is because of the combination of the beef-fed borderers, the top-tier tech, relentless training, and years of actual implementation. The hardest part of those sorts of ops is operating "jointly" as a bureaucratic apparatus and that's where I think the Chinese, specifically, are likely the lag. One might even posit that the US SOF guys are as good as they are specifically because of what one might term Hard Times.
Anyway, a rabbit trail, but my point here is that, yes, the fat tail and the tech matter, a lot, but the difference between the US and everyone else is practice. I think it's fine to argue, as you suggest, that wealth plays a role in enabling this.
In other words, what elevates this from being just another just-so story, if it's my turn to bring Kipling into the court?
Kipling identifies a few things in his poem that are connected with what he would term a lack of virtue (or a mistaken idea about reality), I think:
- Pacifism and naivety about human nature
- Sexually libertine behavior (you might style as "the decline of the traditional family," I suppose) that disrupts childrearing
- Attempting to redistribute wealth to create collective abundance
- Loss of faith (probably religious but possibly also in a shared national project)
- Loss of reliance on reason
We can see how Europe and the US of A compare, with the massive caveat that we're doing a horribly broad generalization, particularly given how diverse Europe is. We can throw in Russia as a bonus.
- Say what you will about Russia, but they are not pacifistic or naive. Neither is the United States. Europe is moreso. This is admittedly a bit subjective but I don't think it's controversial.
- I suspect attitudes about sexually libertine behavior are probably quite variable in both the US and Europe but that the US has more cultural pockets that have strongly traditional sexual mores. Russia has been making noise about maybe cracking down on certain types of what one might refer to as "sexual deviancy" but I have the impression that they aren't actually doing too hot here, either. Their TFR is worse than Europe's, while American TFR is higher.
- The US does a ton of wealth redistribution but I am told that the European social democracies do this "better" and they seem to have a more comprehensive mindset about it. Russia...I assume is too poor to do too much of this.
- The US is much more religious and much more serious about religion than Europe. Russia pretends to be but my understanding is that on the ground they are very poorly off, maybe worse off than Europe. The US and Russia are more patriotic than the EU, IIRC (measuring by "would you fight for your country" type questions) although I should note that some European countries, like Finland, score MUCH higher on this question, as I understand it.
- Loss of reliance on reason...seems like its own argument. Let's call it a draw?
I'd say on balance, with N=3, Kipling's little poem - which is very far from being a complete theory of Kipling's politics, to say nothing of mine - is doing pretty good. I wouldn't say it's a freestanding argument for how the world works. But I wouldn't say it has no descriptive power, either.
Now, the counter-argument here is to find some place where everything is terrible and religious belief or TFR or landmine manufacturing is really high and hold it up and say "why aren't they like the United States?" To which I say - the best way to find out if a theory has predictive power is to test it where other things are close to equal. Let's say for the sake of argument that Ethiopia decided to dedicate itself to Kipling's principles AND that Kipling's principles were the entire secret sauce for a society - that's still not going to make them a world-class power overnight, nor will it magically protect them from, e.g., nuclear weapons. But the US and Europe are interesting comparison points because despite their many differences they also have a great many similarities.
Shrike
2d ago
The Civil War was 160 years ago.
Another way of putting this is "your grandparents probably grew up around people who remembered the Civil War."
Are you seriously trying to make the argument that "generational trauma" or whatever is a thing?
You could call it that if you wanted, I guess. I just think culture is very powerful. As you say, the South is no longer a cultural and economic backwater, but during the time that it was I think it formed a lot of habits that endured. However, I don't think the "hard times" are the ONLY reason for those habits - Southern marital culture, for instance, predated the Civil War. I do wonder if they helped preserve them.
I guess that would also explain why blacks have disproportionately high enlistment rates.
IIRC Native Americans are the MOST over-represented group in the Armed Forces. Not to start up the oppression Olympics, but they have seen a lot of hard times. I suspect that "poor => military opportunity" is probably more relevant here than "tough => warrior spirit" but I imagine there's room for both, along with a hearty helping of family warrior tradition.
Shrike
2d ago
Your post repeatedly lauds the US military (and American strength more broadly) without stepping back and asking, e.g., where all of the trigger-pullers in the Maduro raid came from. It's sort of glossed over but the US has a region that has both a history of Hard Times (from losing a war) and of Strong Men (from a long military tradition). I'm speaking, of course, of the former Confederate states, most of which are more likely to enlist their men in US wars than wealthy American states such as California or New York. Hawaii - which (contrary to its public image) is very much a Hard Times state - is the most over-represented, although some of that might be military kids joining the military.
I think that the the Strong Men Good Times cycle makes more sense historically if you take a Victorian understanding of Strong Men as being men who are virtuous. I don't take it as inevitable that a society facing hard times will create virtuous men, or that a society flourishing from the effects of virtue will create weak and bad men (at least - not in any given timeframe). But I do think there's some truth to a more nuanced version of the theory, as demonstrated precisely by the United States.
You take it for granted that the US of A is living in Good Times due to its power and material wealth. But if we understand Good Times to be in a sense derisive, we can quickly understand that that it's not power and wealth themselves that are Good Times; rather it's (for example)
robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul
You'll see that the Gods of the Copybook Headings have been much more respected (although unevenly) in the United States than in Europe - and often precisely due to the influence of the Hard Times states.
Russia is in many ways a shadow of what could have been, I think, far further down the civilizational decline speedrun than the US is, but they at least understood Kipling's admonition that disarmament would result in being sold and delivered bound to your foe. Similarly the US never believed this (just look at the Ottawa Treaty and the Convention on Cluster Munitions) and various attempts to introduce Americans to the Fuller Life have kicked off massive internal resistance in the form of the culture wars.
Perhaps it's not coincidence, but rather virtue, that has seen the US pull ahead of the European economy while maintaining a truly ludicrous edge in military prowess and birth rates despite a much smaller population. After the Hard Times (the Cold War) ended, Europe decided to embrace the Hopes that our World is built on and now they are paying the price.
Shrike
3d ago
The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. Getting pretty close to finishing, and quite enjoy it so far.
Stephenson's very interesting to me, because many of his novels seem as if they were written yesterday despite being written decades ago...and also because he strikes me as a sort of Grey Tribe forerunner who clearly has a lot of scathing commentary for liberal political correctness but also isn't quite at home in Team Red. (This is, admittedly, mostly due to reverse-engineering his thinking from reading his novels, a pretty risky methodology for figuring out someone's politics.)
Shrike
3d ago
Shrike
3d ago
To me, "west" would mean that the helicopter turns 90 degrees to the left.
If the helicopter makes 90 degree turns at each turn, it will return to the Empire State building, making a square with 300 miles to a side, right? Helicopters fly, so they don't need to respect the Earth's curvature - they can fly in a plane, at least until they exceed their operating altitude. So the 2D map view would be basically correct (if we don't worry about the Earth's rotation). This is the mental model I had in my head that told me we would return to New York (which now I feel a bit dumb about.)
But when after turning West, we turn back South, if we flew to the South pole from our location, we would collide with (intersect) with an aircraft flying due South from the Empire State Building (at the South pole). The lines aren't parallel; they intersect. So when we made our turn South, we will fly a different course if we turn "South" as in "South by compass" or if we turn "South" as in "parallel to a line extending due South from the Empire State Building." And if we fly South by compass, we won't be making a 90 degree turn, for the same reason that squares of latitude and longitude aren't perfect squares.
...I think that's all correct, but it's been a long time since I've thought about this, so thanks (it's good for me).
Shrike
3d ago
Doesn't this only hold if you're measuring the direction at each juncture rather than working from the NSEW coordinates of the Empire State Building?
Maybe that doesn't sound like the most intuitive way to think about it, but in my defense it's kinda similar to how bullseye navigation works.
(Also, since we're in an aircraft, pedantically we would need in theory need to account for the rotation of the Earth, which we can't do without knowing the airspeed.)
Lockheed is juicing their numbers when they say that 20% of their workforce "has a direct connection to the military" but you should assume that former DoD personnel are overrepresented there. If I had to guess, they're probably more and more overrepresented there the further up you go, simply because getting a security clearance is a hassle and DoD personnel often have one already, even if you don't account for the 4-star-to-defense-industry pipeline. And relevant to this discussion, those security screenings will weed out people who are decadent (people with drug or alcohol habits, a lot of personal debt, even things like overseas travel can be a red flag.) There are LOTS of nerds in the defense industry (and in the armed forces) but I think the ones working on classified programs are much more likely to present as someone who is traditionally masculine - in the sense of "married weekly churchgoer with kids" - than the, uh, nerd population at large.
Now, I'm on the record saying that it's okay for skinny nerds to exist and, as someone who's been to an army boot camp graduation ceremony in the past decade or so, I'll be the first to tell you that the actual army itself has a lot fewer six-foot-two bodybuilder bros and a lot more short women than you might expect. But I don't think the idea that a bunch of nerds in the basement of Raytheon build all the weapons for the knuckle-draggers in the DoD and two are kept as separate as the peas and mashed potatoes on the plate of your toddler is really accurate.
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