Shrike
1d ago
Broken Arrow
Huh, I haven't played in a while, but I like to think I'll bump into you if/when I pick it up again.
Unless you're a Russian cruise missile main, of course... ;)
(Also, great idea for a test.)
Shrike
1d ago
This is a very interesting question, and I think my answer would depend on the specifics (my apologies - I know this is not a satisfying answer). I think sometimes people reframe natural divisions as "disfavored groups" - for instance someone complaining about how "disfavored groups" have a social norm of having to work to sustain themselves - wherein the disfavored group is "adults." But I think a lot of times a social norm of disparate treatment breeds resentment that is itself a bad thing.
Still, if we imagine that only women aren't allowed to play loud music in the library...I might bite the bullet and hope that doing so reduces my odds of hearing loud music at all.
Shrike
1d ago
The Church of Mike Huckabee likely won't exist in any recognizable way in 100 years
To my point, Huckabee's tradition, like the Catholic one, is distinctly and recognizably Christian. His views on the Jews and/or eschatology is not meaningfully more unusual or anti-Christian than the views of many historical Catholic religious leaders. In fact, it's unclear to me that the Christian Zionism at issue here isn't shared by many American Catholics, who are about as likely as Jews to say that Israel was given to the Jewish people by God. (Perhaps this dovetails into what I've posted before about the dangers of Catholic triumphalism, although note that I am rather optimistic about the future of Catholicism in the states.)
Anyway, if it matters, I Googled one of the churches Huckabee preached at (Beech Street First Baptist Church) and found that it was founded in 1904. Pretty okay odds it makes it to 2126. Likewise, I'd be surprised if the Southern Baptist Convention (founded 1845) had disappeared in 100 years, barring eschatological events or the like. The idea of Christian Zionism, of course, goes back much further than either institution.
Now, from my perspective, what's shared by the diverse Christian groups is more important than what divides them. The vast majority of Christians are, well, Christian. It's in that sense that I suggest that Huckabee is your ally, your meaningful disagreements aside.
Shrike
1d ago
No disagreement from me on that. If anything those seem higher priority to me.
Also - in case it's not clear - I'm not trying to pick on you. Merely suggest what I think is a pretty defensible explanation for the norm. I think it's helpful for understanding society to be able to separate out "morally wrong" from "norm" while also leaving room for norms to exist.
Shrike
1d ago
Yes, from my perspective (a Catholic) Huckabee is in an insane, anti-christian cult with absolutely insane beliefs. My (somewhat unrelated) point is that this is why you need The Church.
I would like to gently propose that history suggests that merely having The Church doesn't prevent people in power from developing ideas about Palestine that might be considered by many unusual or harmful, and that despite your understandably vehement theological disagreements with Huckabee he's probably more your ally (theologically and otherwise!) than most.
Shrike
1d ago
This seems plausible, but it doesn't really account for societal disapproval of a relationship between someone who is 70 and someone who is 24.
It's really not ideal (from a childbearing perspective) for a woman who is in her peak fertile years to be with a guy who is pretty far past his most fertile years (the persistence of male fertility notwithstanding). This might not be the explanation for the actual negative reactions of people, but it is probably good to keep in mind, although obviously it applies mostly to really big gaps like the one mentioned above.
A lot of people have spoken (correctly, I think) about the female jealousy angle, but I think it's also correct that guys don't want people their dad's age elbowing in on their mating pool. And it's bad for romance and male-female relations for men (and women) to start to think of romantic or sexual relationships as one where a woman tries to get as much money/status-adjacency out of a man. (Obviously this does not describe all age-gap relationships.)
The way I tend to think about this is that although it's not really morally wrong for age-gap relationships to exist (presuming no age of consent or other issues) but it's probably good for society to put a few cultural norms that hedge against it, to keep it from being normalized. If older men and younger women were typical, you'd see reduced fertility and a lot of angry young men. All things being equal, it's best if the norm if most people get married relatively young.
Shrike
2d ago
I'm suggesting that in this new world, SCOTUS could hand down a decision, and by the next week various state legislatures could be passing bills that are competently written specifically to thwart/loophole those decisions.
Are you sure this hasn't already happened? Trigger laws already exist, which accomplish the same thing in substance.
Either way, it seems to me that the bottleneck now is mostly the legislative schedule and the court's hearing schedule. If legislatures and courts use LLMs to speed things up (far-out now but not impossible), I could see real gains being made to the speed there the entire cycle.
I guess the logical end-point of this is multi-agent negotiation between the LLM representatives of the state, the legislature, the courts, and various interest groups, all negotiating, passing, and striking down new laws millions of times a year. Humans might not notice this, of course, since at this point the laws might mostly bind the LLMs...
(Hope this isn't a repost, looks like my first comment got eaten by the cyber gremlins!)
Shrike
4d ago
President Trump could try to get his tariff agenda passed in Congress.
Even if unnecessary legally, this would be preferable because it would curb the enthusiasm of other governments to try to wait it out for a few years.
Shrike
4d ago
It will be interesting to see if people view the LLM as more authoritative, though. Lawyers will take losing cases if they are going to be paid for them.
Shrike
4d ago
I suspect now its as easy as "read this Appellate decision and find me six possible loopholes or procedural methods to delay its implementation to achieve my client's goals, make sure to check the entire corpus of Law Journal Articles for creative arguments or possible alternative interpretations of existing law. Make no mistakes."
I don't know that this is a big improvement over Westlaw, at the societal level. At the level of an individual lawyer, maybe, but bigshot appellate firms have a lot of legal hours to noodle on these problems and clients who will pay for those hours.
And my impression is litigants react to changes in caselaw very quickly. If SCOTUS makes a major decision, interested litigators will move very rapidly to bring cases under that new decision. Look at how many shots gun rights groups have taken at SCOTUS recently.
Shrike
6d ago
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.
Shrike
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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
7d 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
7d 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
7d 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
7d 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
7d 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
7d 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
7d 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
7d 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
7d 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
7d 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.
This is interesting to contrast with American conduct during the Revolutionary War, where marksmen at Cowpens and Saratoga took particular aim at enemy officers.
Although I don't recall off the top of my head if I've ever read if the stigma trickled down to more junior officers. At Saratoga General Fraser was legendarily targeted, but the legend is of dubious provenance, and perhaps he was killed by a stray shot.
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