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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.
No. I’ve essentially thought the same thing forever.
I think it was Mike Huckabee who said when he was on the debate stage years ago, “… the military isn’t a social experiment. The military’s job is to kill people and break things…”
When you’re a society as affluent as the US is, you can afford to have your head deep in your own ass and believe all kinds of absurd nonsense like this when you have no real problems to deal with. People in third world countries don’t have time for this shit, so they get real logical and strait laced about the correct attitudes much easier when their daily bread and way of life is under threat.
I used to sometimes teeter around a bit in how I should view this. On the one hand they should be kept out of combat roles. On the other hand, if you’re stupid enough to sign up for the front lines, natural selection will fix the problem for you by eliminating people who think this way and it’ll strengthen future generations with less of those people anyway. So long-term it’s a win/win. Nature will beat you over the head with the correct answer whether you like it or not.
Militarily women have no business being a front line soldier. That’s a suicidal death sentence.
Third world countries tend to be third world countries because the people there have absolutely retarded attitudes about the world and society. There's a happy medium between following the examples of western progressivism and those of societies where people live in caves and use goats as a medium of exchange.
On the other hand, goats have actual uses beyond 'Alice will give me useful stuff in exchange for this because Bob will give her useful stuff in exchange for it because Carol will give him useful stuff in exchange for it because Dave will give her useful stuff in exchange for it because....'; they'll clear out overgrown vegetation, fuel themselves in doing so, and are delicious!
(I still don't get how people can be like 'USD is only valuable because people think it is, but gold has real value.'; they both derive their value from that same endless loop.)
Perhaps the solution is dollars backed by a goat standard?
But somebody's going to have to clean up a lot of poop in Fort Knox.
New jobs created in the wake of AI displacement, as we're being assured! Employment options in the world of finance-cum-custodianship-cum environmental initiatives: goat poop cleaner-upper!
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The drawbacks outweigh the benefits. Goats are not fungible (no two goats are exactly alike), goats are not durable (they die after a decade or two), goats are cumbersome to move and transfer, etc. Money is simply a tool to make exchange easy; it is the goods and services of an economy that are valuable.
Apart from being a Schelling point (gold has been used around the world for thousands of years while the fiat dollar has only been around since 1971, 54 years ago) the big difference is that you can't fuck with the supply of gold the way you can with USD. Gold exists in limited quantities and more gold can only be mined from the Earth with great effort (equivalent to crypto's proof of work).
To some people this is gold's great advantage, the only way to enforce a modicum of discipline on governments, and all economies since we departed from the gold standard are a house of cards. To other people, this is gold's great weakness, and you cannot have a modern economy without fiat currency. I don't have the economic chops to have a firm opinion one way or the other. But I do recommend Extra History's excellent "History of Paper Money" (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, & 6).
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Context: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-sick-societies-by-robert-b/
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Do those people believe that men and women are "spiritually and morally equal before God in dignity and respect"? (Quote from the pre-edit version of the above comment)
Practitioners of the faith obviously do.
(Edit was due to my remark not being relevant to the OP’s comment.)
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I really think the barrier to people accepting this (obviously correct) perspective is that while there are many, many, many important things that men can generally do better than women, there's almost nothing that women can do better than men except that it has to do with bearing and raising children. In which case they do shine!
But people notice this and fundamentally flinch away from the idea, because our entire generation has been raised to hate it and find it low-status.
I would dispute this; I would actually go for this qualifier:
There's almost nothing that women can do better than men that society values. If society valued these things, I don't think the issues between the genders would be anywhere near as clownish as it is today.
The other thing is that on a graph, men are the extreme outliers at both ends of the graph; in a world that tries to reduce everything to binary ones and zeroes, you'd end up self-selecting the extreme outliers at either ends of the scale.
That was G. K. Chesterton's issue with feminism.
-- What's Wrong with the World (1910)
And you think this is the strongest or most representative ask from women wanting to participate in politics: drinking at the pub with the boys? Not voting or participating in discussion that is separate from hanging out at the pub?
Apparently, it was. Even after women obtained the right to vote in the US and participate in political discussions, it was still necessary to smash any male-only spaces with rules against admitting women.
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Aren't even low IQ women better at reading faces and emotions than high IQ men?
I guess that feels nebulous compared to Science^(tm) and hand-eye coordination but it matters a fuckton in the real world.
There are also obviously other things (e.g. leveraging sexuality) but this doesn't play well with old or new moral codes and it has a shelf life
Also, it's women who build and maintain the entire social world, which is also sort of important.
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If I was a woman I would also object to the tone of this statement too. I recognize what you’re trying to say and still would dispute a lot of it, but it lends support to a number of prejudicial ideas that do, in fact demean women.
If you’re a woman for instance who violates the “nice” and “nurturant” stereotype, you can often find yourself being penalized in hiring and evaluations. In a man’s world, that’s part of who we are. A woman does it and she’s a bitch. In my own experience of 1 personally, the best bosses I’ve ever had have been women. I’ve had good and bad of both, but the best female boss I had vastly outstripped the best male boss I had. The worst boss I ever had was a 40+ year old spinster who acted like a Stalinist and was an idiot.
Who is more prudent? Who is more happy-go-lucky? Who is more practical? Who is more imaginative? Who are better educators? Men or women? I really don’t know. And there’s a thousand questions you could subject this analysis to. The one categorical area men unambiguously tower over women in is raw physical strength and force. The average man could wreck the shit out of the average woman in a physical fight. Okay, fine. One can win that argument.
I think acknowledging sex differences can be harmful at times, insofar as it can play into the hands of others who want to serve some bad ideas. I think the harm of ignoring sex differences is far worse. Biologically men and women are different enough that you don’t have to agonizingly compare individuals for every trait, you can aggregate experiences.
I’m a pretty far right leaning guy but there is a basic point to be made that women do face significant social deprivation in traditional societies. And that downward pressure can in turn suppress inborn personality traits. And if you always have to modify your expressions to meet the tendencies of your culture’s social norms, it’s going to warp how you view the other gender. Yes, the same thing can also be said about men. But one interesting feature about egalitarian societies is that they’re simpler in one respect. Both sexes are freer to do what comes naturally. And that’s for better and worse.
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If we flinch away from the idea, it is because we realize that such norms are incompatible with dignity of womanhood. If woman's sole appropriate domain is the bearing and raising of children, then Schopenhauer and Thales are substantially correct:
- Arthur Schopenhauer, On Women
- Thales
I am reminded of AntiDem's advice to Nick Fuentes:
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I know nothing about ole Artie there, but this is sounding very strongly gay. Have to go run off and look up "Schopenhauer sexuality" which is not a Google search I thought I'd be doing today:
Huh. So maybe more sour grapes than gayness there: "that bitch turned me down, well I don't care, women are all ugly in fact and stupid and dumb and don't care about important things like me and my guy friends do and they're smelly poopy-heads, why won't the girls give me a chance, I'm a nice guy! why can't I get a hot upper-class girlfriend instead of having to pay for sex?"
I get the distinct impression he would approve of the phrase "riding the cock carousel".
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Quite the opposite, insisting that we're equal is what is incompatible with the dignity of womanhood. If we're the same, but women fail to reach the same heights as men, that has far harsher implications than if we're different, and have different strengths. This is why we end up with "systemic sexism" and other epicycles to keep the theory alive, and to drive men and women even more at each other's throats (which really is the whole point of the equality meme to begin with).
Oh no, not a barely-out-of-the-bronze-age pagan!
If womanhood is synonymous with femaleness (that is, performing the biological role of the female sex), then woman has no more claim to dignity (that is, the natural sense which leads us to value man over animal and noble over savage) than any other mammal.
If you would prefer an abrahamic source:
- fragment of a prayer, Cairo Geniza
Sure it does. Any value that humanity has above other animals is completely dependent on motherhood, and is therefore subordinate to it.
Also, you haven't addressed anything I said in the previous comment.
I think you'll need to be a bit more specific than that to move me.
This, of course, is why garbage men and truck drivers are among the most admired and desirable professions.
The point is that, from a bioessentialist framework, the female role requires little to no particular strength of character. Pregnancy is a completely automatic process, caring for babies may be arduous but is not particularly skilled work, and if you believe the hereditarians, the actual raising of children has little effect on how they turn out. Additionally, none of the above tasks is particularly suited to cooperative effort, stunting the potential for camaraderie; as the saying goes, nine women can't make a baby in one month. Thus, if woman's sole or primary duty is to fulfill the female biological role, she will be naturally baser and ignobler than the men she pairs with, who must cultivate virtue in themselves to become capable protectors and providers.
The question, then, is how much impact has this lack of incentive for virtue had on the evolutionary development (or lack thereof) of the female mind. While I personally believe that ingrained differences in potential for virtue between men and women are relatively minimal, what differences exist are surely exaggerated by restrictive norms surrounding women's options for societal contribution.
Not everything is a market, and so not all value is derived from supply and demand. Otherwise jokes like this or this would not land.
I'd say in a pure bioessentialist framework there is no such thing as a "female role". You either are a man or a woman, which may have implication as to your strengths and weaknesses, but what you do with that is up to you.
But in any case, I reject the claim. The biological function of conceiving and giving birth might not require any particular strength of character, but motherhood absolutely does. Patience, wisdom, or love, are all strengths of character.
That's... a bizarre way to look at it. There's plenty of room for camaraderie with the father of the children, and with the extended family, and I don't see how the inability to ship off the production of babies to China, to be done at scale, would be a detriment to that.
You're using some strange definition of virtue, because I don't think men's physical strength, ability to rotate shapes in their mind, hand-eye coordination, or what have you, are virtues, so I don't really see a reason to disagree with the statement that the difference in men's and women's potential for virtue are minimal. But if you do associate virtue with these traits than I think you're pretty obviously wrong, social constructivists have been trying for decades force equality, but sex-differences keep reasserting themselves. The idea that there currently are any restrictive norms on women is absurd on it's face.
Finally, you're still not really addressing my point, you're just elaborating on yours. I said that if according to you men and women are the same, and should be judged by the same criteria as men, any failure to perform at the same level as men is proof that they're inferior. It is therefore your framework that robs them of their dignity.
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