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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30393 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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In the US women are more likely to register for voting and have a higher turnout:

https://cawp.rutgers.edu/facts/voters/gender-differences-voter-turnout

It has been so since the 60s. For Presidential elections, it amounts to roughly 10 million more votes coming from women than men.

Why do you think it is the case?

Maybe it is because men understand voting isn’t really individually useful?

I would suggest this preoccupation with what might be "individually useful" is symptomatic of the toxic femininity that has come to infect the whole of our intellectual class.

To quote George S. Patton...

An army is a team. It lives, eats, sleeps, and fights as a team. This individual hero stuff is bullshit. The bilious bastards who write that stuff for the Saturday Evening Post don't know any more about real battle than they do about fucking. And we have the best team—we have the finest food and equipment, the best spirit and the best men in the world. Why, by God, I actually pity these poor bastards we're going up against.

All the real heroes are not storybook combat fighters. Every single man in the army plays a vital role. So don't ever let up. Don't ever think that your job is unimportant. What if every truck driver decided that he didn't like the whine of the shells and turned yellow and jumped headlong into a ditch? That cowardly bastard could say to himself, 'Hell, they won't miss me, just one man in thousands.' What if every man said that? Where in the hell would we be then? No, thank God, Americans don't say that. Every man does his job. Every man is important. The ordnance men are needed to supply the guns, the quartermaster is needed to bring up the food and clothes for us because where we are going there isn't a hell of a lot to steal. Every last damn man in the mess hall, even the one who boils the water to keep us from getting the GI shits, has a job to do.

Agreed. In my earlier years I was interested in WW1 and especially WW2 eating all the autobiographies of fighter pilots and tankers from all sides. I made extra effort to watch every war movie that was on TV. And then my world was upended when I read Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe. His book was all about port capacity, supply line security and throughput and where to open fronts strategically or where to hamper German capacities all with tables and numbers. It really opened my eyes - no amount of heroism on any side could ever made the difference against such a well oiled machine. It did not matter if Germans had "better" tanks or jet fighters or even more experienced troops. They lost the moment US entered the war.

On a kind of related note, this is another thing I find funny about Paul Verhoeven's adaptation of Starship Troopers. Verhoeven famously didn't read the book and basically set out to to subvert what he saw as "some warmonger's manifesto" yet accidentally made a decent enough adaptation that Heinlein's core point about the importance of "doing one's part" even when it may be relatively insignificant in the grand scheme of things remains readily legible.

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