popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
popocatepetl
7d ago
To be honest, most times I contemplate making a top level post, I just contemplate getting modded for it and go do something else. We don't need to tolerate end to end bare links, but we'd benefit from somewhat reducing the minimum conversion activation energy.
Are people overestimating how much effort the mods require? I see OPs either posting 50 words (leading to them getting modded) or writing mini-essays. But usually a solid three paragraphs is enough for mods to leave a toplevel alone.
It seems disingenuous to talk negatively about women in the military without referencing these concrete examples and actually testing your thesis against data.
Well
The obvious example is the Soviets in WWII
Their society experienced complete collapse a generation later.
Chinese in (or 'around') WWII
Their society experienced complete collapse major problems (EDIT: To be fair) a generation later.
Israelis, and many other modern-ish armies
They haven't fought a high fatality war. I'll admit I haven't looked into the correlation between peacetime women military service and their fertility, but do you seriously doubt it will be negative?
I haven't crunched the numbers here, so calling me lazy might be fair.
popocatepetl
7d ago
The Motte’s Declining Audience
I don't think the problem is pageload time. Fewer people are posting high quality toplevel posts. Most people, myself included, just respond to toplevel conversations that strike our fancy. What's causing this, IMO:
- Motte's audience is now on average 5-10 years older than when they started. We have less testosterone, more responsibility, and less truth-seeking fire.
- "Discourse is dead", as my bae Dave Greene says every single stream. 2012-2022 was a very dynamic decade ideologically speaking. Now most of us have settled into one bunker or another. The culture war is still live, but in a All Quiet on the Western Front sense, not a Guns of August sense.
So what we have here is not a problem, but a predicament. Even if we invited new friends for fresh voices, our friends are also 30yo+ (#1) and they also live in a world where discourse is dead (#2). The Motte is on its nice, slow decline from here on out.
We can mitigate it by being less lazy and striving to post more middle-effort toplevel content. Responses per toplevel are still healthy. I tried this today, posting something on my mind that I usually wouldn't bother, wouldn't think was "good enough" back in the golden age of The Motte.
Women in the military
I'm watching Avatar: The Last Airbender: that kid show from 2005 featuring the bald boy with a Reddit downvote on his face. I'm sure you've seen the memes.
It's a mostly tolerable show from a culture war perspective, the early 00s being a more innocent time, except for extreme girlboss feminism. Every few episodes, the writers repeat the trope where a male warrior says it's inappropriate and against the precepts to train women to fight — always in the most sniveling, dismissive, chauvinistic way possible — then he proceeds to get his butt kicked by a girl. Said male warrior, embarrassed, learns his lesson that gender roles are bad, m'kay.
Am I the only one who finds this line of thinking incredibly dumb?
And no, I'm not talking about women strength or endurance or bone fragility or whatever. Let's ignore that. That's not the issue here.
Let's concede, for the purposes of argument, that women and men have equal potential for different tasks, such as soldiering. Or, to steelman progressives, that a meaningful fraction of women are equal to men, and so those ones should be trained. (This is probably more plausible in a universe where 1% of the population has magical combat powers, like Avatar-land, but whatever.) I don't think it's true even in the real world, with firearms, but let's concede it.
The main reason to direct men to become soldiers, not women, does not lie there.
Soldiers, like every other job, work for the health of society. Soldiering does not exist for the self-actualization of the soldier. Neither is soldiering an end in itself. We have armies for the security and continuation of the country.
But the career of a soldier coincides with the fertility window of a female. If she is getting married, becoming pregnant, and having kids — things that are necessary for both the health of society and the self-actualization of the woman — her soldiering and child-rearing will come into conflict, even in peacetime. In wartime, however, her dying in battle will prevent a new generation from being born, and leave her orphaned children psychologically crippled.
The reality is that men are fairly expendable. Society can afford for 30% of young men to die in the trenches and recover fairly quickly; their widows receive help from the community to raise children, and later they marry older widowers. Meanwhile, if 30% of young women die, the population pyramid of the next generation will crater, and society will be burdened by orphans with lifelong mental problems due to attachment disorders, triggered by loss of mothers during infancy.
The only reason, I think, our society doesn't see this is that we haven't had a war with existential stakes since women joined the military in any appreciable numbers. Even during the most rigorous war in recent memory, Vietnam, the US army was <1% female, and most of them nurses.
Then again, a lot of my arguments could also apply against training women to be medical doctors and other all-consuming vocations. We do that. So maybe our society really is insane enough to send millions of 20yo women to get mowed down by drones in WW3.
I think it was CovfefeAnon who stated "The most radical position you can hold in modern politics is believing people before the 1960s were sane and had rational motivations for doing what they did." Well, I think armies throughout history were perfectly sane for not sending women to combat, even in roles where women could have been effective.
This is the other side of the coin for the stupidity of training female soldiers. If they deploy and get killed, it's irrational for society. But if, on the other hand, when bugle sounds, female trainees all raise the W card to avoid getting deployed, training them turns out retroactively to have been a waste. It was just a handout for women, no more useful than fake email jobs at a tech company to make the gender ratio look good.
Although I must admit, your and @BahRamYou posts about military women getting pregnant to avoid service does give me a darkly amusing idea. With a universal draft and enough foreign wars, a hybrid woke/neocon managerial state could accidentally create breeders in the name of gender equality.
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