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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24259 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 24, 2025

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According to an anonymously leaked preliminary memo the US military will be cutting ties with Scouting America (formerly the Boy Scouts of America). This will reportedly amount to ending logistical and medical support for the annual Jamboree, ending the use of military installations as meeting locations for Scout troops, and possibly ending the practice of conferring rank/pay benefits on Eagle Scouts.

The reasoning given is that "the group once known as the Boy Scouts is no longer a meritocracy and has become an organization designed to "attack boy-friendly spaces"", "for being "genderless" and for promoting diversity, equity and inclusion.", and because "the Scouts have strayed from their mission to "cultivate masculine values."".

"Scouting America has undergone a significant transformation," the memo states. "It is no longer a meritocracy which holds its members accountable to meet high standards."

I've spoken out before as a defender of the organization, especially against the slimy, "damn you for doing better than anyone else and still feeling bad about your failures" child abuse bullshit. I've pitched it to other adults, specifically citing the fact that the astronaut program used to use Eagle as a tie breaker. I was a Scout myself (I made Life; my troop fell apart over interpersonal conflicts before I even began the push the Eagle, and I never bothered finding a new one). And I was an adult volunteer as a Den Leader.

Key word there: was.

And a large part of that is because the criticisms alluded to in that memo are not wrong... though I don't think it's necessarily the result of "feminizing leftist attacks". I think the problem is much older, much more structural, and more fundamental to the gender war in general.

Let's roll back thirty-odd years. I was one of those kids who loved asking extremely awkward questions. I was smart enough to notice certain things, and too socially stupid to realize why without just blurting it out. On one occasion, I ended up sitting next to my Den Leader in his basement while we did some crafting project.

And, with the innocence of a child, I asked: "Hey, Mr. Den Leader. You're the Den Leader, right?"

He looked down at me with his usual surly, dour mien. "Yeah."

"So, why does your wife do all the work?"

Suffice to say, this did not endear me to him, nor improve his demeanor. Later in life I better understood the elements in play, like "construction worker with chronic back pain". But the point stands that in an organization theoretically inclined towards "cultivating masculine virtues", the first five years were mostly run by women and involved an awful lot of arts and crafts projects.

This dynamic stood out even more as an adult. In the Cub Scout Pack I volunteered for, I was the only male Den Leader. We had a dad serve as Quartermaster, and another who was a nebulous Committee Member. But every other Den Leader, the Treasurer, the Secretary and the Cub Master were all moms.

I don't want this to seem like I'm attacking those women. I was quite grateful to the Cub Master (who was also a Den Leader) in particular. She was a no-nonsense, hard-headed woman... by the standards of morbidly obese women who work in HR. The problem is not that the moms stepped up.

The glaring problem is that the dads didn't.

How the hell is Scouts supposed to foster masculine virtues when there's no men to serve as examples? It's the exact same problem as all the elementary teachers being women.

The second, compounding and reinforcing, problem is the program itself. Here is the actual Cub Scout program, running from Lion to Arrow of Light, roughly K-5th grade. Each of those activities awards a belt loop, and they call them "adventures", which is honestly kind of insulting to adventure. Take a few minutes and peruse a few, if you're unfamiliar. See anything that deserves to be called an adventure?

The overwhelming majority of the program is designed to be (I'm going to be blunt here) bonus social studies classes for the biggest pussies in the grade, with a side dish of "technically counts as a gym class, if we're being generous to the huge pussies".

Oh, and I guess once or twice a year, starting in the back half, they get to shoot the simplest, safest bows or BB guns at targets 10 feet away for 10-15 minutes.

Gosh golly, that sure sounds like something that should be worth a bonus rank in the military, right?

It felt like most of the fun, exciting, interesting, vigorous or masculine things we did were things I brought to the table. Like I had to fight the program to do anything cool. The official program doesn't even call for a single one mile hike until Bear - third grade. I had those boys out and loose on every park and wild area in a 45 minute radius every month. That was the part they enjoyed and cared about. The social studies lessons in between? Boring as fuck. I'm the one who took the initiative to teach them about tracking and dangerous animals and poisonous plants. For an organization that was always styled as teaching literary Native American style woodscraft, the entire program is designed to be completed at a school playground.

The very first meeting that I hosted as a Den Leader, I cut up dozens of slips of paper with the virtues of the Scout Law printed on them, then put them in balloons I blew up. I scattered them all around the meeting room, and handed the boys a 3' wooden dowel with a pin duct taped to it, and told them to "hunt for virtue". And with each one they picked up, we had a quick discussion about what "obedient" or "thrifty" meant. The boys had a blast, and obviously escalated to practicing throwing the "spear", and one boy got a minor scratch on his leg.

None of the parents actually complained, but there were a few comments along the lines of "Huh. Are we allowed to do that?" And the answer is... prooooooobably not? If you read any of those "adventures" above, notice the massive safety disclaimer on each one?

Like @FiveHourMarathon said last week, you have to serve a master. But you can't serve two. If your highest priority is safety, you have to sacrifice fun. If your highest priority is inclusion, you have to sacrifice excellence. And if you insist on making Scouts a place where the weakest, most coddled boy in his cohort feels safe and protected, with his mom as Den Leader to ensure everything is maximally Safe and Supervised, then you're going to drive off most boys who might grow up to be special forces, or an astronaut, or a bronze age king.

AIUI, actual Boy Scouts (grades 6-12) are less coddled, even now. They're more independent, they plan their activities themselves and can choose to focus on actual adventures and range time and such. But I don't know for sure, because my own son begged me to stop with the pussified social studies bullshit before then (there were other, personal reasons involved as well, but when I bring scouts up now, a few years later, all he remembers is the boring bullshit and the too-rare hikes). And it's a moot point, because the Boy Scout Troop that his Cub Scout Pack fed into collapsed, because there was no new kids joining.

The military used to value Scouting because a boy who'd spent 12 years LARPing as special forces in the Boer War presumably had a certain independent-mindedness and a bevy of practical skills that might come in handy in a tight spot. NASA used to value Eagle for the same reason, that it showed a certain level of initiative and decision-making that might serve well when all alone with a small team in the cold depths of space.

These days, as I hear it, the Eagle program has been Goodhearted to hell and back. An Eagle rank is desirable, it helps with college, employment, the military - shit I knew a guy who kept his Eagle cert in his wallet to hand over with his license to get favorable treatment from cops. It's desirable, it's known to be desirable, so of course it's gamed to hell and back. Eagle is supposed to involve an independent project that the scout conceives and executes entirely on their own, with no adult help. But of course there are troops that are functionally "Eagle Mills", where the people signing off on the promotion are themselves coaching the kid into doing the bare minimum to technically qualify. I hear the Mormon troops were particularly bad about this, before they spun off into their own thing.

That ties into other safetyist crap. There's a nearby park that has a bunch of small wooden bridges that were built as Eagle projects. Bridges. Uninspected, built by an unlicensed 17 year old. Can you imagine? It's like something out of an irresponsible comedy show. What if something happened and someone fell three feet into knee-deep water? Who would get sued?! Forget that they've stayed up for 30+ years, and served countless thousands of people, you can't do that stuff anymore. The closest Eagle project that I'm aware of from the last 10 years was a couple of public benches.

I hope they at least talked a municipal building inspector into double-checking the work.

The problem with Scouting is that you definitely can get a great experience out of it, with a ton of valuable learning and practical skills... with the right dads, using common sense to flout the technical rules when needed. And then you get the same rank as the useless pussy who was hand-held through a badge mill.

Don't even get me started on fucking popcorn.

I honestly think, for the money you'd spend, you'd get a better experience just organizing a hiking group out of the youth members at the local gun/archery range. You just have to be willing to tolerate a bit of risk and tell the most timid moms to STFU and deal.

In conclusion, while I think totally cutting ties is kind of petty and stupid, well, so is modern Scouting America.

The gender framing is catnip hereabouts, but I don't think it's the correct one in this case, because girls don't like this shit any more than boys do (though they may be conscientious enough to tolerate it for longer). In fact, several girls of my acquaintance quit Girl Scouts for approximately the same reasons: the old-skool exciting activities with real-world skills, actual exertion, exploration, challenge and risk were almost wholly replaced by boring social-studies modules with posters, web research, scrapbooking and worksheets. Girl Scouts were never that big on spearing things with straight pins (!), but they used to do lots of wilderness survival stuff, practical making, etc. that's now gone.

I'd argue all that dull safetyism is more about the general totalitarian vibes/ expansion of bureaucratic culture (you can't deny that those poster and worksheet skills are better training for a sweet nonprofit or middle-management job than spearfishing would be). Plus, frankly, most of the adults also being indolent deskilled couch-dwellers whose idea of exploration is a good long gaming session, some Twitter or Insta, and a pornhub chaser. If a bunch of men were out joyfully hunting squirrels and building racers from scrap parts, then we could rant about the feminization of scouting all you want, but from what I can see the guys are mostly just as boring, limp and abstracted as the women.

There are rednecks who would happily take the youths hunting, there's even special seasons for this. If you, as a middle or high school boy, go to a deep mechanic shop and ask if you can help so you can learn a thing or too they'll let you. Etc, etc.

Scouting used to be good at facilitating this stuff- it decided to pivot away from it.

Anyone who stepped up to offer those things would get nothing but criticism for only being willing to volunteer for the fun things but not the hard things.

Probably, yes.

And I think someone elsewhere mentioned the child abuse stuff. Anyone who attempts to step up is going to be told "Well, you'll need to take this online course about child abuse, then you'll need to get fingerprinted at the police station, and sign this form to allow a criminal background check." At which point said redneck is going to say "You want me to WHAT now?"

Well, freedom of association was never in the Constitution to begin with.

(Not that it helps nations that have it in theirs; their problem is more that they put a "we're not obeying this fuck you lolol" in the header instead.)

Then "society" has made its choice. You can make people jump through flaming hoops to be considered moral enough to associate with children (Padme: Other than your own, right? Anakin: ... Padme: Other than your own, right?), or you can have an ample supply of volunteers. You can have neither but you can't have both, and counterarguments involving the word "should" (as in men "should" be willing to go through these simple and vital procedures) are not really arguments but just social pressure to avoid this point being made.

You can have neither but you can't have both

Sure you can- clearly, all you need to do is to become a public schoolteacher. After that, you may sexually interfere with kids all you like (generally with the regime's blessing; so all you have to do is align yourself with the regime).

Sure, you will still generally get arrested if you actually get physical with them- but for molesters, that interference is the end goal (they're getting off on it), so that doesn't actually hinder them any.

are not really arguments but just social pressure to avoid this point being made

Internalized misandry hurts men and lying flat under these conditions is the correct "negotiating tactic". What is sabotage (including inaction) if not bargaining -> negotiating -> politics -> warfare by other means?

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...Rednecks do that shit all the time.

Get fingerprinted at the police station? Maybe, but not VOLUNTARILY.

I see you got a downvote for that. I feel like the Motte needs a bit more sense of humor.

Maybe that was the case a generation ago, but in case you haven't noticed, there's been a massive drop in interest/ skill in physical handicraft of any kind, including outdoorsmanship, among the middle classes. Even on the Motte, where a lot of folks are in theory very big on masculinity, I've never seen a single person mention any physical project in the Tinker Tuesday thread, or anywhere else on the site, for that matter.

I know a lot of those grizzled old-timer hunters, mechanics, etc. that you mention, and they are mostly entering the frail part of old age, some still holding gatherings and events that would welcome interest from younger men and teens, but with zero attendance from anyone Gen X or younger. Your average Millennial fortysomething PMC dad could go hunting or visit the classic cars meetup or whatever, but he mostly doesn't. (For that matter, do you?)

Some working-class folks do seem to keep up interest in fishing/working on cars/etc., particularly in the Hispanic community, but working-class families in general have less opportunity to encourage their kids to do organized activities, so I doubt there's much intersection with the Boy Scout clientele. You can trace pretty clear lines from Charles Murray Coming Apart- type trends.

This has got to be related to increasing urbanism, right? If I wanted to go and ‘play in the outdoors’ I could travel five minutes to a park packed with people where I’m not allowed to do anything, or more than an hour to the countryside.

If I wanted to do woodworking, the first step would be to get a new job so I could afford to move to a new house with the room to do it.

WhiningCoil's had multiple woodworking projects, dr_analog's project was focused on hardware but to support biking, and we've had a couple DIY car repairs (or people like me complaining about car repairs: I'm actually fighting with door power window repairs again myself). My rant about FIRST and STEM outreach is the geekier side of physical handicraft, but it's still more about assembling and greasing gearboxes or running CNC machines than it is about the comparatively entry-level code side of things. As, more prosaically, was the war on dandelions.

There's some genuine drop in interest and development along those lines, especially post-COVID, but it's also hard to talk at length about it, especially here.

I had missed WhiningCoil's woodworking posts, will have to check those out. Thanks!

Absolutely no shade on dr_analog, whose work sounds very cool - but on some level, I wonder how hydroacetylene's redneck hunters and mechanics would rate the manliness of a hardware-focused tech project to support leisure biking.

That's fair, but I'd caution about stereotypes. I work with a different sort of mechanic than, say, hydroacetylene, but there's a lot more overlap between the techie side of things and the automotive maintenance bro these days, just because tech stuff is much harder to avoid these days. I've helped hunters make a psuedo-shot-spotter tool for their range, traded some car advice for tips on hooking neopixels up to an offroad atv, and maybe half of the mechanics have or have access to a 3d printer.

((That said, they'd probably have at-best-mixed feelings about helmets on adults for leisure biking.))

Even on the Motte, where a lot of folks are in theory very big on masculinity, I've never seen a single person mention any physical project in the Tinker Tuesday thread, or anywhere else on the site, for that matter.

I fly model helicopters. Like real helicopters, they require more time spent repairing than flying. And it's a ridiculously male hobby. I also do my own bicycle maintenance and general fixing of stuff (e.g. I restrung my blinds and fixed my humidifier recently), though that's instrumental rather than for its own sake.

There's no real shortage of hunters, at least once you get out of New Jersey (Pennsylvania: America Starts Here).

I post deer processing on the tinker tuesday thread most years. We've had several bike modification projects posted and woodworking features occasionally too. Obviously the motte is not 'average'.

Life getting safer makes men and women believe that delegation and training is riskier and may be delayed, preferably (and observably) indefinitely.

So it becomes less important, thus the need to accommodate for it is less, thus the concept that it should even occur passes away.

The "Eagle mills" are definitely real. I was part of several troops, and every single Eagle was essentially carried by an overzealous parent, usually his mom. There were a lot of "social studies homework" merit badges I had to do, and those all sucked. I remember being horribly embarrassed by the "sexual abuse awareness" training section of the handbook I had to read with my parents.

The most fun troop I belonged to was run by redneck dads who took us on 7-10 mile hikes on coastal islands or through hill country. The dads mostly just followed to make sure nobody died, and the SPL ran the show. We'd pick a place to camp, then the SPL would tell us to go get firewood. Me and my buds would go fuck off in the woods for an hour, whittle little spears and wooden daggers, set interesting looking plants on fire, hurl rocks and playful taunts at other patrols we encountered. Headed back to camp, cooked and ate dinner, cleaned up, made a fire, play some cards while cracking the raunchiest jokes and using the worst profanity we knew while the dads snickered and pretended not to hear. Then it was lights out, to our tents and sleeping bags where we talked about girls (90% bullshit, we knew nothing) and busted each other's balls for this or that. The dads cracked a bottle of whiskey and shot the breeze; if you were quiet enough you could eavesdrop and learn a thing or two.

Good times. Sad my sons probably won't get to experience the same thing. I'm thinking about trying to get some of my extended family together to do something like it, though.

Me and my buds would go fuck off in the woods for an hour, whittle little spears and wooden daggers, set interesting looking plants on fire, hurl rocks and playful taunts at other patrols we encountered. Headed back to camp, cooked and ate dinner, cleaned up, made a fire, play some cards while cracking the raunchiest jokes and using the worst profanity we knew while the dads snickered and pretended not to hear. Then it was lights out, to our tents and sleeping bags where we talked about girls (90% bullshit, we knew nothing) and busted each other's balls for this or that. The dads cracked a bottle of whiskey and shot the breeze;

Doesn't seem Courteous, Kind, Clean, or Reverent....

Definitely seems like boys though.

My own dad was a Scoutmaster in the 60s. Although my older brother he shepherded at least through the Cub Scouts, he never once even suggested I join scouting. I think--and I am to some degree making this up but I feel like I heard him talk about this, if not with me--that he had come to feel scouting had changed to such a degree that it was no longer what he valued, and this was in the mid 70s.

The one time I went with my brother to a Cub Scout meeting, all the guys did was take an old hubcap and tie it to a thin cord and throw it in the street when cars would pass so the driver would think he or she had lost a hub cap. They'd then pull it by the cord back into the woods. This seemed incredibly stupid and pointless to me even then, and I am not sure if we ever told my dad about it, but suffice to say this was not the Scouts he had grown up with and had been an active part of.

I write this to say that my dad was obsessive about Courteous, Kind, Clean and Reverent. He was a great role model in very many ways--for me, anyway, I feel that he was--which gives me pause when I realize that we were never close the way I would have wanted. I expect I was in some ways a giant disappoint for him, although he certainly made an impression on me.

\End needless personal tangent.

And if you burn poison ivy, that's a mistake you won't forget.

I joined a robotics competition when I was a kid, and they were in the process of converting it into the exact same boring social studies busywork you describe. In the time I was there, the robotics part of the robotics competition was reduced from 50% of your score to a piddling 25% of your score, with the other parts being 25% for "sportsmanship" and 50% for writing a stupid essay about environmentalism.

Even as a little kid it was obvious to me that the judges didn't like that whoever had the best robot would just win on the merit of their skills, leaving the judges with no power. Better to have a system where 75% of your score is decided by judge fiat. That way they can decide who wins based on who they like the most without the vulgarity of mere skill getting in the way.

I don't think this is a scouting thing, I think this is an everything thing. It mirrors the general trend of abolishing any scale that cannot have a thumb put on it. These are the same people who want to abolish standardized testing and replace it with personal essays and diversity statements. The point is to abolish everything objective and replace it with subjectivity, thereby concentrating more power in the hands of authority.

I'm an Eagle Scout, I worked for the Boy Scouts for a period of time as High Adventure Director for my local council, and I've regularly volunteered since at the council level, though my involvement over the past decade has waned and been more at the direction of others rather than of my own initiative, though I did agree to attend a meeting this Saturday evening to discuss certain things. Complaining about a program compared to what it used to be is only valid if you actually knew what it used to be like. So when you say something like:

It felt like most of the fun, exciting, interesting, vigorous or masculine things we did were things I brought to the table. Like I had to fight the program to do anything cool. The official program doesn't even call for a single one mile hike until Bear - third grade. I had those boys out and loose on every park and wild area in a 45 minute radius every month. That was the part they enjoyed and cared about. The social studies lessons in between? Boring as fuck. I'm the one who took the initiative to teach them about tracking and dangerous animals and poisonous plants. For an organization that was always styled as teaching literary Native American style woodscraft, the entire program is designed to be completed at a school playground.

For full disclosure I was a Cub Scout and Den Chief as a kid but other than that I had little involvement with Cub Scouts. As a professional, I helped out with program during special winter weekends we hosted but I never did anything beyond that, and I never served on the Cub Committee as a volunteer. But I had a lot of colleagues and friends who were involved heavily in the Cub program, some of whom continue to be involved to this day. This program was completely overhauled in the early 2010s, with changes taking effect in 2015. It is now significantly more masculine, or whatever, than the program it replaced, which was basically a continually tweaked version of what they had been doing since at least the 1950s. I checked the requirements, and yes, Bears need to do a 1-mile hike, and a 3-mile hike is part of the Webelos program. Before that it was zero.

Cub Scouts was deliberately separate from Boy Scouts, intended to be a more family-oriented program. Your parent signs off on the requirements, not someone with the Troop/Pack. The program was thus designed around things you could do at home with your family. Except different families do things differently. Some families just aren't going to go camping, or hiking, or whatever, and while there was always that opportunity at the Den or Pack level, they weren't going to make it part of the requirements. Cub Scout leadership is also more transitory than in Boy Scouts. Parents usually only participate while their kids are there, then cross over to Boy Scouts with them. It's not like with Boy Scouts where you have old Scoutmasters who can't give it up and college kids who hang around as adult leaders. Therefore, the program has to be doable by the kind of person who isn't as dedicated as a typical Boy Scout leader.

The reason for the changes was similar to the reason for the admission of girls, and the same reason that underlies the lion's share of decisions the BSA has made over the past 15 years: Numbers. The problem we had was that there was a lot of interest in the Cub program but crossover rates were in sharp decline. The idea was that if we modeled the Cub requirements as junior versions of the Boy Scout requirements it could ease with the transition. Girls were admitted because, when you're looking to increase numbers, it doesn't help to exclude 50% of the youth population. Even in my program things were liberalized a lot more than I would have expected. National Standards had a list of activities that were prohibited in all circumstances. Some of them were inherently dangerous (exploring abandoned mines) and would never be approved under any circumstances, but others were normal recreational activities that the conservative brass in Iriving thought weren't in the Scout Spirit. Then they not only removed ATV riding from the prohibited list but made it part of the camp program. I don't think I'm terribly conservative when it comes to this, but this kind of thing irritates me more than anything they do with politics. I'd rather see it it turned into a woke DEI paradise than have it degenerate into a third-rate tourist trap where our camp offers paddle boats and miniature golf. Part of the reason I left was that I saw things trending in this direction, and my own program was expected to do things that I wasn't comfortable with and knew I couldn't sell to leaders. But that's another story.

Therefore, the program has to be doable by the kind of person who isn't as dedicated as a typical Boy Scout leader.

I think this expectations mismatch might be the heart of the problem. I wanted something more rigorous and active and, well, manly. Even as a child I wanted grueling endurance challenges, not a gentle stroll that meets a PBS Kids definition of "being active". My favorite memories are things like winning a fire-building contest, teeth chattering in the wet snow, at the Klondike Derby. Or later on, after some Troop drama left me siding with a small break-away faction we did a "summer camp" that in retrospect was not actually an authorized Scouting event beyond the fact that the dad who took us was our new Scoutmaster. He just had a friend who owned a large expanse of wild property, and we spent two weeks loose and barely supervised on an Appalachian mountainside.

The things I remember fondly and want to recreate for my own kids are the things that were hard. If we're setting the standard to "easily accomplished by basically any family that cares to show up"... what is even the point? Is that sort of lowering of standards actually expanding numbers? Or is that why they're still dropping?

As a note, I don't have any problem with opening the program to girls. My own daughter did it for a while. In any county, there's going to be at least a troop's worthy of hardy, outdoorsy girls, and they deserve something more intensive than selling cookies.

This program was completely overhauled in the early 2010s, with changes taking effect in 2015. It is now significantly more masculine, or whatever, than the program it replaced, which was basically a continually tweaked version of what they had been doing since at least the 1950s. I checked the requirements, and yes, Bears need to do a 1-mile hike, and a 3-mile hike is part of the Webelos program. Before that it was zero.

I can find older lists of Boy Scout requirements, but not anything for Cubs. I have to wonder though - is this actually an increase in standards and manliness? That goes against the grain of the BSA changes. Or is this something that was being made a requirement because it used to be an assumed default baseline that didn't even need to be mentioned? If the revamp happened in 2015, that's just a few years after Obama ended the Presidential Physical Fitness Test.

Part of the reason I left was that I saw things trending in this direction, and my own program was expected to do things that I wasn't comfortable with and knew I couldn't sell to leaders. But that's another story.

I would like the story, if you don't mind, even if it needs to wait until after the holiday. You seem to have been more involved in this stuff than I was, and I'd appreciate reading your take.

If we're setting the standard to "easily accomplished by basically any family that cares to show up"... what is even the point? Is that sort of lowering of standards actually expanding numbers? Or is that why they're still dropping?

I had a fairly outdoorsy upbringing through the 90s. I built my first fire when I was 5, shot a .22 when I was 8, did archery somewhere in between, and spent a lot of time outside sleeping in a tent. There was no point (in my mind) to joining the Cub Scouts. "Oh those nerds making macaroni pictures for their moms? Pass." So at least for me, that is definitely why I never got involved in scouting.

I think of my childhood as a triptych. In school, I was a nerd and then I came home and reread Redwall books on loop. Then, after a few hours of reading, I went to sports practice for my jock third, where I did football, hockey, basketball, baseball, crew, and year round swim teams. And then, on the weekends, I went to the farm a few towns over where my best friend lived to spend 48 hours as a feral redneck, loose on quads in a few hundred acres of woods with BB guns and slingshots and M80s until we stumbled back at dusk, exhausted and filthy.

That best friend tolerated Scouts for a grand total of 36 hours before he was sick of it, and demanded his parents pick him up from the summer camp. And while that might sound weaksauce, he also bagged his first buck a month after he turned 10, alone with a shotgun in a tree stand on his family property.

AIUI, actual Boy Scouts (grades 6-12) are less coddled, even now. They're more independent, they plan their activities themselves and can choose to focus on actual adventures and range time and such. But I don't know for sure, because my own son begged me to stop with the pussified social studies bullshit before then (there were other, personal reasons involved as well, but when I bring scouts up now, a few years later, all he remembers is the boring bullshit and the too-rare hikes). And it's a moot point, because the Boy Scout Troop that his Cub Scout Pack fed into collapsed, because there was no new kids joining.

That was pretty much what happened to me. I remember going to cub scout meetings and mostly just being bored, doing a lot of cheesy arts and crafts project. All the den leaders were women. I looked forward to doing the cool outdoorsy stuff that I saw my older brother doing in the boy scouts, but then it collapsed before I was old enough to join because the Boy Scouts still insisted on having a male scout leader for that, and none of the men in my area wanted to do the job.

I will also say... Looking back, yeah, I can see how being an Eagle might have benefited my life in a lot of ways (like looking good on college applications). But as an 11 yr old kid I had absolutely no concept of any of that, I just wanted to have fun with my friends. So it's not surprising to me that a lot of the kids grinding Eagle Scout are just getting pushed by their parents to munchkin the merit badges.

edit- Probably a big factor in why no men wanted to do it, is that it was an after school program. That meant they had to be available from 3-5 PM on weekdays, and most of the men were busy working at that time. Also they probably wouldn't allow some random unemployed dude to do it, and it's not a paid position so... I don't know how they expected it to work.

It's not just "not paid", it costs money to register as a volunteer every year.

My husband was an Eagle Scout, and we take the kids out dispersed camping, though it's kind of stressful with kids who are too young to use a sleeping bag correctly, and keep crawling onto my head all night and pulling the blankets off of each other. I think husband just plans to keep doing this individually and teaching the kids, especially the son, things himself, because we're both the kind of introvert who reads disagreeable message boards and complains about them together, and organizing anything with another family feels like too much work. This is too bad, maybe we'll join some weird little Orthodox neighborhood or something, where none of the kids are allowed to have screens and have to crochet and harvest maple sap instead.

Ahh that's a shame. I would love to join you all once we (God willing) have kids. Sounds just like I want to do with my own.

Little known fact, the Scouts were a thing in India, a leftover from British colonial rule. I was a member, and I got fuck-all out of it. I think I joined because someone vaguely promised me that I'd get to shoot a gun at some point, but that never came about.

I found it immensely boring, but the Indian version had very little of the "scouting" that Americans enjoy (or did). Going for a week long hike in the woods? What woods? It was urban living and farms for several hundred miles till you ended up in a national park or a mangrove swamp. I think it was wise not to make a bunch of kids into (big) cat food.

We didn't do girly arts and crafts as far as I remember, they taught us a few knots (which I was never good at and have entirely forgotten), lit fires in the middle of a field, marching and so on. The only highlight was the one time an excursion had a lunch, and I got extra servings for helping prep food.

Masculinity? We had the fruitiest troop master known to man, who was our kindergarten teacher at some point. He became a she at some point, which I suppose is something.

Ah... Good times, it beat being in class, but not enjoying my summer vacation in front of a TV.

Boy Scouts(before it got ruined(And, if I'm being extremely charitable, still is today)) is alot like martial arts.

When it's good, it's really, really good.

When it's not, it's the metaphorical equivalent of a mcdojo.

Sadly, there's no uniform way you're going to be able to enforce that level of discipline other than getting the weird and interesting people whom are passionate about Odd Things into joining.

Recalling my own scouting days, come to think, all the weird and wonderful things that we got up to where specifically because of the guys running stuff were all Weird and Interesting in thier own unique ways. From Baptist Preachers to Ex-military to old-school Ham operators to... Well, you get the idea.

So. While the announcement that the military is basically backing away from scouting... well, I wish I could say I'm surprised. But I'm really, really not. Still a shame, though - I can remember many a time when scouting activities were being held on miltiary bases and whatnot, and getting to visit them were actually really cool.

Enshittification continues apace, I suppose.

Enshittification continues apace, I suppose.

Lol. I’d actually like to see Cory Doctorow make a statement on this now.

But the point stands that in an organization theoretically inclined towards "cultivating masculine virtues", the first five years were mostly run by women

RAND just published: The Limited Presence of Male Mentors in the Lives of Boys and Young Men

The Brookings Institution noticed this problem quite awhile back. I pointed it out in a discussion once to someone who was in denial. Conversation came to a close after that.

I was a scout in the middle of the transition to 'general early step on the cursus honorum for highborn youths'. Eagle scout rates, across all of the BSA, had just reached 6%. We had orienteering, ten mile hikes, backpacking trips were optional. I didn't get my eagle but eagle projects were invariably minor construction projects for sympathetic sounding but not hard case institutions- think 'put in a new flowerbed at the nursing home'. There were dads at the campouts, but they were in their own section, watching from afar. We had our own campfire, cooked our own food, were basically unsupervised. The older boys(teens) ran the program for the tweens. I liked that part, but the advanced ranks seemed like BS paperwork to burnish a resume.

Now don't get me wrong, I did learn some cool stuff, like orienteering, firebuilding, whittling safety, etc. We had .22 rifles for marksmanship, no archery. They ran some cool merit badge programs- pioneering and horsemanship in particular were some things I probably wouldn't have otherwise learned. But you're basically right.

Why is it petty and stupid? The Military is not a general charity or some kind of all-around governmental funding/hosting agency. It has a very specific (though complex) goals and needs certain means and instruments to achieve these goals. If the army would suddenly declare it is founding a set of scholarships for people to learn play Ukulele while walking a tightrope, I'd be surprised - it doesn't seem to be aligned with the Military's mission at all. That doesn't mean I think playing ukuleles or walking tightropes is evil - it may be wonderful, but it's not what the Military is supposed to concern itself with. It used to be that Scouts embody all those qualities that the Military does concern itself with, so it made a lot of sense for them to cooperate. But Scouts are a separate organization, and they may decide they want to do some other thing now. Maybe concentrate on ukulele playing and tightrope walking, maybe on learning all the pronouns, maybe evaluating all the ways to be maximally safe and inclusive and writing them down in the notebook. The organization does what it wants to do. If that happened, and the goals of Scouts and Military are no longer aligned, why is it stupid to recognize this fact and part ways?

Because some of the things they'd be taking way are very low cost, and probably even a net boon. Like letting Scouts meet on bases, or take tours. It functionally costs nothing, and it's tacitly encouraging Scouts in a direction you want to see them move.

Or cutting support to the Jamboree. It's probably justifiable just as a training exercise and a chance to show off. Citing the exemption that you can pull out for national security reasons because you're stretched too thin to handle the Boy Scouts just sounds weak.

The removal of rank/pay benefits, OTOH, are plausibly reasonable and appropriate.

I think it's clearly signalled as a slap in the face to encourage the Boy Scouts to change course. The administration wants to make it extremely obvious that they're not happy and are trying to demonstrate to BSA that it's not just the Left they need to worry about appeasing anymore.

Of course, it does not cost a lot for the military to give access to their facilities and conduct tours and so on on any particular case - maybe some personnel/organization costs but compared to trillion-wide budget, it's not even a rounding error. However, the military is not providing those services to every comer, and can not do so - because then the cost will eventually become noticeable, and again, it's not the military's business. They are and have to be selective in this. And once they are selective in this, it only makes sense for them to select to cooperate with groups that share their values and goals. There's no reason why the Army can't give free use of their facilities to the local ukulele club, it indeed would cost them nothing. But it's not their business to do so, so if they choose not to do so, it's completely appropriate choice.

I saw a study offsite about the lack of male role models and there was a lot of anxious whining about how men are afraid of being seen as creeps/pedophiles but I think any attempt to explain the problem without accounting for the general reasons why men are under-included in communities in general is going to fall prey to occam's law. It seems obvious to me that a satisfyingly complete explanation for why men don't join the scouts will also explain...

  • Why men volunteer less
  • Why men commit suicide more often
  • Why men so often abandon their children
  • Why men are more politically inactive

... And so on, and so forth.

But agreeing on that explanation is near-impossible because nearly without exception, people work backwards from their preffered solution to determine what the cause of the problem is. Anti-safetyist mottizens want to make scouting dangerous again, anxious redditors want counter-propaganda to convince women to not be afraid of men, women want to pressure single fathers into taking responsibility, and I even saw one dude that thinks the solution is masculine bonding via class warfare. If any of these groups is right, I suspect it's mostly by accident.

Maybe men shouldn’t be shamed every time they stick their head up to get involved. There are all kinds of stories about men being assumed to be a pedophile for the crime of taking his own child to the park. Men don’t dare to volunteer to work with kids because again, the meme of “any male showing interest in kids is dangerous” means that the male who gets involved in scouting is assumed to be grooming.

Men don’t dare to volunteer to work with kids because again, the meme of “any male showing interest in kids is dangerous” means that the male who gets involved in scouting is assumed to be grooming.

I agree that this is an issue. Another problem is that any child you've worked with can accuse you of wrong doing and cause you a world of problems. The accusation can be made years later. In some jurisdictions, the statute of limitations for such a claim is 30 or 40 years.

Given that (1) 1-5% of the population is batsh*t crazy; (2) there are a lot of activists, lawyers, etc. out there with an incentive to urge people to pursue these sorts of claims; and (3) our society has very little concern for the rights of men qua men, it doesn't seem like such a great idea for a man to do any activity which puts him in contact with large numbers of children.

I see why they're careful about unattached men who want to work with children.

I agree, but I think there needs to be some balance. As one person suggested, one solution could be to focus on recruiting married couples to be den leaders.

I have definitely heard the rules the scouts maintain for youth protection --- no one-on-one contact, two adults at all times, for example --- described as protecting both the kids and the adults.

Yes, that's what they say about the Pence Rule as well, which exists for the exact same reasons.

Any group that is well-known to need supervisors for children is going to attract paedophiles, because paedophiles have two brain cells and follow incentives like the rest of us. So some fraction of each intake - what fraction I have no idea - genuinely are going to be paedophiles unless you use a criteria like marriage that is pretty good for excluding that.

I'm usually in team 'Let's shame men less' but in this case I see why they're careful about unattached men who want to work with children.

There’s a question I’d never considered until now: is marriage actually a pretty good criterion for excluding pedophiles? Logically, it would make sense, but anecdotally, I seem to hear more stories of married men sexually abusing children (often their stepchildren) than single men. I assume some of that is simply due to ease of access to children, but I don’t know if that’s the only factor. That said, most of the married guys seem to abuse girls, not boys, which would be less of an issue in an all-male Boy Scout troop.

Aren't most cases of child sex abuse carried out by the mother's non-married partner?

I assume some of that is simply due to ease of access to children, but I don’t know if that’s the only factor. That said, most of the married guys seem to abuse girls, not boys, which would be less of an issue in an all-male Boy Scout troop.

There's also a disturbing number of moms pimping out their daughters to their partners to "sweeten the deal".

This... New Jersey man... that @ToaKraka posted about a few months ago is likely on the Mount Rushmore of capitalizing on such a thing:

  • March 2019: A mother notices something strange about her two daughters, 12-year-old "Kelly" and 13-year-old "Taylor". She brings them to the hospital, and is surprised to learn that they are both pregnant. Taylor gives birth a few days later. In police interviews, the daughters do not provide any leads, and deny that the mother's romantic partner is the culprit.

  • June 2019: Kelly gives birth. The police obtain a DNA sample from the romantic partner.

  • September 2019: The DNA test shows that the romantic partner is the father of both babies. The father is arrested and is charged with fifteen felonies, and then is released on his own recognizance (zero bail; this isn't mentioned in the opinion, but is indicated on the docket).

  • March 2021: Taylor gives birth again. Presumably the father made the most of being out on bail.

  • August 2022: The father pleads guilty to three felonies—impregnating Taylor at age 12, impregnating Kelly at age 11, and impregnating Taylor again at age 13. He is sentenced to 25 years in prison (without the possibility of parole).

I could only imagine the seethe toward you (the general "you") that would be triggered if you posted this story on /r/Stepdadreflexes.

However, in this case the mother claims innocence. Although, what else is she supposed to claim:

[T]he girls' mother testified during a hearing in January 2021. “Today I’m here to protect them. You don’t understand what they went through. People thinking I’m this type of woman who didn’t protect my kids."

She said she didn’t know he was abusing her daughters. “My (first) granddaughter was born three month, two months early,” the girls’ mother testified. “I thought (the father) was her boyfriend.”

Getting cucked by your girlfriend's stepfather or stepfather-figure has got to be one hell of a villain origin story.

Getting cucked by your girlfriend's stepfather or stepfather-figure has got to be one hell of a villain origin story.

Only course open to you at that point is to sleep with her mother and assert dominance.

Also, good old-fashioned eugenic sterilization would fix this. As you mentioned in that thread, it makes zero sense for capable, civilized attorneys to be out-reproduced by these lowlifes. Only progressive taxation and the welfare state can achieve such an unnatural outcome.

Maybe capable civilized attorneys should have more babies then.

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FWIW, the only people in my time in scouting who gave me "pedo-ick" were a married couple who were volunteering on behalf of their nephew, and who claimed to want to stay involved even after he left the program. It wasn't anything in particular, just physiognomy/vibe plus the oddity of being so into volunteering while having such a personal remove. I was very glad when they did not follow through and I never saw them again.

"Men are afraid of being called pedophiles" seems like an insufficiently powerful explanation. While it may explain some fraction of why men volunteer less for boyscouts, it's almost certainty downstream of why men volunteer less in general, which in turn is downstream of whatever combination of factors leads to less male involvement in communities/pro-social activities/the male loneliness epidemic in general. I have a hard time believing that pedophile-accusation-risk is the reason why men commit suicide and abandon their children more often, but conversely I can imagine a satisfying explanation for suicides and absent fathers also being applicable to the problem of why men don't lead boy scout troops anymore. "Men are afraid of being called pedophiles" isn't false, but my gut instinct is that it's noncentral. Actually, the link I posted seems to hint at the real causes by looking into the crosstabs-- men with children and/or bachelor's degrees volunteer at much greater rates than single and/or uneducated men. Given that men are facing rising rates of singlehood and falling rates of education, I'd look in that direction for the true causation. Just don't make the mistake of fingering whatever most flatters your beliefs as the problem... you might not be wrong to blame misandry, or anti-intellectualism, or whatever your personal bugbear is... but a lazy epistemology isn't going to convince anyone of your point, and won't do anything to get the issue fixed.

why men volunteer less in general,

A three percentage point gap may be statistically significant, but I don't think it's very interesting or notable. There's an eight-point gap in labor force participation rate, and one full-time-volunteer wife with a working husband can get a lot of volunteer hours. Heck, with a gap that small it could be something as banal as different responses to the same activities as men and women have different standards.

communities/pro-social activities/the male loneliness epidemic in general.

Male spaces get disrupted and socially attacked. Even if whatever comes out the other side is just as good (very doubtful), the transition still causes people to leave. Also, women have the opportunity to join both women's-only and gender-neutral groups, while men only have the second set.

"Men are afraid of being called pedophiles" isn't false, but my gut instinct is that it's noncentral.

That is the most visible part of the issue, but it's not the only one. You have to go through the anti-pedophile screening, take the anti-pedophile training, follow the anti-pedophile procedures, be conscious of pedophile-adjacent actions...and finally work at the organization with a reputation for pedophilia. It just doesn't seem that attractive.

A three percentage point gap may be statistically significant, but I don't think it's very interesting or notable. There's an eight-point gap in labor force participation rate, and one full-time-volunteer wife with a working husband can get a lot of volunteer hours. Heck, with a gap that small it could be something as banal as different responses to the same activities as men and women have different standards.

Sorry I posted the wrong link. I mean to link this: https://aibm.org/research/men-and-volunteering-gender-gaps-and-trends/

Admittedly, a 5% gap still doesn't seem like as much of a difference, but you need to compare the proportions of the people volunteering. 27% vs 35% already means that the base ratio of volunteers is 84 men for 100 women. Then add in the fact that the genders choose different types of volunteering-- men are much more likely to be coaches, for example, while women are much more likely to be anything else. Finally, volunteers are going to spend different amounts of time volunteering. It all multiplies together into a crisis of male volunteers for specifically mentorship roles.

Male spaces get disrupted and socially attacked.

I occasionally hateread crystal.cafe and they complain pretty often about unwelcome males (successfully) inserting themselves into female spaces and disrupting them. My priors are telling me to that their complaints are still less relevant than yours, and I'm confident in those priors because if I wasn't I would have them, but I'm not meta-confident in those priors because I'm fully aware that my incentives as a man are to seek out information that supports pro-man priors. Generalizing, I find myself in this situation pretty often when it comes to gender-war stuff-- I'm confident enough in my object-level beliefs to argue for them, but I'm not confident enough in my confidence to accept any totalizing theories because even small changes to my priors should force me to completely rethink the specifics of a broad philosophy.

For example, I was talking to my little brother about the lack of male mentorship recently and he said he thought about doing big brothers big sisters/boys and girls club, but decided against it because he figured if he was going to be doing that sort of thing anyways, he might as well be paid for it-- like he got paid for working as a substitute teacher. If you let your eyes go out-of-focus this generally melds into the "particular gender roles are unfairly imposed on me" supertheory, but in-focus it's completely at odds with the, "men don't want to be mentors because they're afraid of being called pedophiles" theory.

I think there are two related reasons: one, motivation dies quickly after becoming mired in bureaucracy. Someone who is highly motivated to provide a mentoring opportunity for a group of boys might not be able to find the drive to complete more than a single form, let alone typing up paragraphs of baloney. Same thing hampering science IMO.

Second is legitimate fear of liability. Even if you jump through all the paperwork hoops, even a minor accident can easily result in years of expensive legal wrangling, even if you ultimately win. Insurance against this is expensive and yet scourge bureaucratic hurdle to doing anything.

As usual, if you want to make the world a better place, first kill all the lawyers.

Again, this sounds like noncentral, reasoning-backwards stuff. Women don't like bureaucracy either. Men tolerate liability when it comes to other pursuits. Other countries and organizations have varying levels of both but still face a surplus of male suicides and lack of male mentors. Without rejecting your premise that bureaucracy and liability are onerous, I find myself unconvinced by the argument that they must therefore be the principal causes of our crisis of masculinity.

Women don't like bureaucracy either.

The fact they're the only class with the power to deal with it (because the moral hazard is in their favor) but are doing fuck-all about it is the fundamental root of the problem here.

Men gave up their power to unilaterally dictate terms to women in relatively peaceful ways. Until women figure out they have to do the same- until they fully embrace the fact equality is a solved problem, as men did so many years ago- this will continue, but the fact they're on the high side of those gibs makes this unlikely.

Liability being financially ruinous because reasons (that are tangentially related to the above core) doesn't help things either.

Men tolerate liability when it comes to other pursuits.

Nobody tolerates liability unless they can insure it away, and that means accepting the constraints the insurance companies put in to prevent actually having to pay a claim.

I find myself unconvinced by the argument that they must therefore be the principal causes of our crisis of masculinity.

Yes, because you have a reason in mind (in general terms, that men, in some way, suck), which is wrong, but is the only reason within the Overton window.

Don't put words in my mouth, buddy. I'm not part of some sort of anti-man conspiracy; my position is that basically no one (including myself) should have the epistemic confidence to have a position.

Speaking very broadly, I suspect the problem is less about actual costs and more about opportunity costs-- basically, I think that most men just have better things to do than volunteer given their goals and incentives. I think I would enjoy volunteering for boy scouts, liability and bureaucracy (and the risk of false accusations) be damned. But I'm trying to get myself in position to secure a wife and kids, and to that extent the best uses of my time are earning money, getting fit, and seeking legible status. Optimizing for the intersection of those things and also enjoying my life generally leaves me focused on working, working out, and trying (so far, futiley) to get published. And I'll have to keep focusing on those things indefinitely because suddenly letting myself go wouldn't be a great recipe for keeping a wife and kids.

But to the extent that all the things I said are true, and generalizeable, I know I'm still not reaching the bottom of the issue-- I'm not getting to why these opportunity costs exist. And even discovering that wouldn't necessarily suggest which actions could or should be taken to mitigate them. I could make suggestions, but no matter how hard I tried for apolitical neutrality they would probably flatter my interests and goals in particular. So the problem remains intractable, and everyone who says otherwise without addressing the full complexities just makes more convinced that no one really knows what's going on.

Don't put words in my mouth, buddy. I'm not part of some sort of anti-man conspiracy; my position is that basically no one (including myself) should have the epistemic confidence to have a position.

If you insist on using your own state of mind as if it were evidence, prepare to have the contents of your mind interrogated.

As for the position that no one should have epistemic confidence to have a position, if that were to be universally adopted it would mean either throwing up ones hands or trying things at random. But in practice, that position is only deployed against certain positions -- usually but not always positions that imply a change should be made -- and so it is not the neutral agosticism it would appear.

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There must be other reasons. I sincerely doubt the average man is that paranoid about false accusations. Most people assume that tragedies always happen to other people, not themselves and I don't see why this should be different for accusations of pedophilia.

Internet commenters tend to be a lot more anxious than ordinary people and thus you see the false accusation points a lot online. But "internet commenters" is not exactly the group I would imagine as volunteering to quite literally touch grass regardless. So the answer should probably be found elsewhere.

Doubt isn't an argument. It's part of American culture, and has been for a long time now, that a man interested in interacting with kids other than his own (and sometimes his own too) is probably up to no good.

There must be other reasons.

Do microplastics and hormonal inversions count? Lol. I’m slowly beginning to think there just ‘might’ be something to that…

Why men are more politically inactive

??? Politics has always been a principally male thing? Roosevelt, Reagan, Trump, Mitterand, Blair, Putin, Xi... In political theory, there's Rawls, Hayek, Schmitt, Sartre, Foucault... Some women emerge: Thatcher, Merkel, Rand, Hilary Clinton but not as many as men.

Women are more likely to sign petitions for social movements but its men who actually implement politics in so far as they riot and overthrow governments. Jan 6th was overwhelmingly male as were basically all of the revolutions in history.

Men are the agentic sex, they're more likely to do good or evil, killing themselves, killing others, creating new things, implementing large-scale plans or reforms (Deng Xiaoping, Gorbachev, Ataturk, Rao in India's market reforms, Keating in Australia). Again Thatcher is the only woman I can think of who made big changes...

The most politically active individuals remain men, but as a cohort men are less politically active

Feels cringe to post twice, but something stood out to me on a quick reread: the original post doesn't actually describe 2020s-era boys' interest in or aptitude for helping other people, for doing one's duty to God and country, or keeping morally straight-- much less in, per Baden-Powell's original oath, "doing my best to help others, whatever it may cost me." Instead, it sounds as though they empirically enjoyed (a) casual unfocused play-violence/chaos (pin spearing) and (b) short bouts of running around in parks and fields, i.e. two of the highest-reward, lowest-discipline, lowest-skill-demand activities possible, already familiar from videogames.

The OP presumes that since safety is coded feminine to him, reintroducing risk, competition and violence will naturally lead boys to develop masculine virtues. I have no problem with risk and violence per se, but the old stories from when men actually engaged in these things make it quite clear that adventure and excitement are just occasional bright spots rolled in with a lot of discomfort, self-denial, patience and ego mortification in developing assorted masculine virtues. The miles gloriosus and similar tropes actually ridicule the sorts of people who get too immediately enthusiastic about themselves as adventure heroes bound for a life of fun and excellence. Presumably, that consistent ridicule is drawing on long cultural experience that vainglorious people don't go the distance in the end.

I'd be interested to follow the further adventures of this troop, especially since it doesn't sound as though there was meaningful resistance to OP's initial experiments. I do wonder whether it's true that with danger and violence in place, today's boys would eagerly line up for the less fun parts of the Baden-Powell program. Would those kids ever have had the interest or self-command to hang out around a shop for weeks just handing tools and watching the competent guys, like the builder of those Eagle Scout bridges presumably did thirty years ago? To sit quietly in the cold for hours on a hunting or fishing trip, then gamely return if the first day or seven weren't successful like the first 10 mintues of a game? I wish somebody would try working them up to these challenges and report back.

it's been a long, long time since my family had anything to do with Scouts, but re: Cub Scouts and women - yes? Den Mothers? though I see you refer to the women as Den Leaders so presumably that went by the wayside in the name of equality or something. Cub Scouts, so far as I can remember, are meant to be a bunch of six year olds so you have the female Den Mother keeping them from poking their eyes out with scissors until they're old enough to graduate on to the Boy Scouts (and then go on to Venturer or whatever if they stick around into their teens).

There seems to be a lot of conflation of cub scouts with boy scouts in this thread. The appropriate leadership and activities for six year olds and for seventeen year olds is an unbridgeable gap.

It's possible there is some mix-up between regional terminology and technical rankings. But as I have always used them, the "den leader" term is for the actual, on-the-paperwork adult in charge of a den. A "den mother" would be another parent, probably a mom, nowadays always an on-the-paperwork volunteer (but maybe not in the Olden Days of 1990), who would focus on more nurturing aspects. Stuff like making sure no kid skipped breakfast on a camping trip, that a dad might be more likely to just ignore or shrug off.

There's a similar dynamic on my son's middle school football team. There is a group of coaches, mostly dads, all men. And there is another group of "team mom's" who do things like self-organize rotations to make sure the players are provided with Gatorade and snacks at halftime and after the game. The "team mom" role is so female-coded that they don't even bother to reach out to me (single dad) for my turn in the rotation. Instead, they contact my mother (who, in fairness, was a longtime and committed volunteer when I was little and is more than happy to keep going for the grandkids).

I remember 'den mom' was just the word for a female den leader, and that one did not become a den leader unless your son was in that den(but moms and dads had equal opportunity to volunteer). Again, I was under eleven, so maybe there's dynamics I'm missing.

The military used to value Scouting because a boy who'd spent 12 years LARPing as special forces in the Boer War presumably had a certain independent-mindedness and a bevy of practical skills that might come in handy in a tight spot.

Of course, this is double edged weapon. Someone with outdoors survival and evasion training who does not want to be in the army, has much better chance of getting out of tight spot than usual hapless conscript dragged from the streets. If you are not 100% certain about patriotic spirit and dedication of your population, better not disseminate widely these skills among them.

If you are not 100% certain about patriotic spirit and dedication of your population, better not disseminate widely these skills among them.

This is why patriotic spirit and dedication oriented propaganda tends to be a large part of the organization when Scouting was adapted/modified/mutilated into things like Young Pioneers or Hitler Youth.

I wonder to what extent there is room for RETVRN scouts in the world. There appears to be a mostly moribund Baden-Powell Traditional Scouts thing independent of the BSA. But why not integrate it into the BSA organization as an alternative?

Scouting has long had sub-programs alongside the flagship Boy Scouts. Venture Crews and Sea Scouts have long operated under different rulesets. My mother was in the Venture program in the 1970s.

If there is demand for a return to Scouting's frankly paramilitary roots, then Scouting could develop a troop concept built around a more intensive and classically masculine program. One with real requirements rather than a focus on inclusivity. In areas with numerous troops, like mine, it wouldn't hamstring the mainline Boy Scouts troop to have a Hard Scouts program fifteen minutes away.

Boy scouts have long varied with the troop anyway. Why not formalize it?

What would such a program look like in your mind?

What would such a program look like in your mind?

One of the ideas that I had in mind, that I never got the opportunity to do because orienteering wasn't on the curriculum until Webelos was to bury caches of water balloons and water guns in our main wooded park, and then divide the scouts into teams. Give each team a map, and then let them loose to secure weapons and munitions and then wage war against each other.

It took me about $50 to build an ax-throwing range in the back yard. The local gun range charges $10 a head for an hour of archery, and would absolutely give discounts for a Scouts or Hard Scouts type regular event, and would almost certainly involve a subject-matter expert helping out. Bullets are expensive, but I'm sure something could be arranged, and the rentable 50 cal sniper rifle they offer would be a hell of an incentive to reward 12 year olds.

Beyond that, hard hiking and roughing it. Physically intensive activities, especially involving mud and filth. Mud Runs would be a good fit and fuck it, I'm signing up for the Philly one tonight. Manhunt in the woods at night. Paintball. Airsoft. Reach out to local law enforcement, military, and academic institutions for specific trainings. See where you can overlap with ROTC, (there's a term for junior police academy, but I've had a bunch of wine at dinner and can't think of it). Reach out to local universities and zoos for help with teaching about local wilderness hazards and wildlife.

Seriously physical conditioning. What are the optimal amounts for pre-teens? My son talks like he's terrified of "Coach Tyler sprints" at football... but he also complains when they get skipped. What does an optimal 2-3 times per month workout for young boys look like?

And let's go even more intensive. Movie nights with films like Tremors 1-2 and Red Dawn. Monthly book clubs featuring Gary Paulsen and Jack London and Rudyard Kipling.

The hard part would be maintaining standards, but I think with 15-20 hours per month between meetings and training and assigned readings, you could get some impressive results out of a program like that.

One of the ideas that I had in mind, that I never got the opportunity to do because orienteering wasn't on the curriculum until Webelos was to bury caches of water balloons and water guns in our main wooded park, and then divide the scouts into teams. Give each team a map, and then let them loose to secure weapons and munitions and then wage war against each other.

I remember, I must have been seventeen or so because all the young Indian kids had joined our troop already, we did a civil war reenactment weekend. Every troop was assigned "randomly" to either the Union or the Confederacy with appropriately colored T shirts (someone had the brains to make sure the majority black troops were mostly like us in the Confederacy), and the end of the day was a water balloon fight between the two sides. As I recall, we won the battle by giving everyone only two water balloons and holding the rest in reserve along with a couple troops, so we were able to draw them in and then finish them off, while the Union wasted all their ammo early driving off our initial attack. Our final charge yelling "FOR SLAVERY" was a ton of fun.

I wonder if they still do things like that.

One problem with traditional scouting is it emphasizes conformity with society and obedience to authority. But traditional scout activities today are forbidden or fenced around with so many rules and regulations to be essentially so. So an organization doing them today would have to be transgressive, and that's exactly the opposite of Scouting.

The Chinese finger trap of post-modernity: when rebellion is the teaching of the mainstream authorities, submission is the radical act of rebellion. But submission to whom?

The obvious answer is religion and a more ethereal concept of the Nation.

Though England isn't exactly doing all that hot these days anyway, I see the wisdom in the philosophical conceit of Hart

The ideal king would rather be like the king in chess: the most useless piece on the board, which occupies its square simply to prevent any other piece from doing so, but which is somehow still the most important piece.

Powell said specifically that a Scout was loyal to his King. This captures the concept of submission and nationalism, without making explicit religious or political commitments to actual controversies. A Scout isn't a Tory or a Whig or a Liberal, necessarily, a Scout is Loyal to his King and Country, a more ephemeral concept of the nation.

The mainstream does not teach rebellion; it teaches conformism (as always) with some of the outward trappings of rebellion. It's what it is teaching conformism TO that no longer fits Scouting.

There's approximately seven zillion scouting knockoff organizations running around, ranging from the scouts of europe to the adventure guides. None of them have reached the popularity of the BSA, or even seriously competed- American Heritage Girls are at least noticeable next to girl scouts of America. None of the others are. I've heard parents prefer the scouts of Europe to the troops of St. George because at least the former has a program, but it's still tiny next to the BSA.

Which is why I'm saying that it would behoove BSA to create a harder core program within the umbrella.

When I came out of cub scouts, I could have joined any of about four or five equidistant troops in my area. We actually visited them all as part of our Arrow of Light process. The BSA could have a specific program or designation for troops that are less inclusive and more intensive. I don't think it will help the boy scouts program in general to try to become more exclusive, but I think there's room within the program to have a more aggressive program under their aegis.

Don't make it a knockoff, make it a program within the same org. Join troop 80 over at the Lutheran Church and you have the current Boy Scouts experience with one meeting per week and one camping trip or 8-10 mile hike every month; join troop 88 over at the Unitarian Church and you get one meeting per week, one physical training session per week, and a 15-20 mile backpacking trip every month, but you have to pass a fitness test to join. That kind of thing. Similar to how local baseball leagues have both the regular anybody who wants to join league, and the tryout travel league.

What you're talking about already exists. They're just called Venture Crews, and they don't have any fitness tests and are variable in how active they are. Realistically, 11 is too young for them to make that kind of choice. Even if the kid can pass some kind of test, they aren't going to keep up. My program was geared toward Venture crews and older scouts and while there were a few 12 and 13 year olds who slipped through for various reasons and invariably did fine, there's generally a pretty clear skill progression with age, and when I worked with younger kids on the side there's no way I'd want them anywhere near my program as a matter of course. If you were to try to separate these kids out right after crossing over all but a few would go to normal troops and the pipeline would dry up pretty quickly because no one wants to join a troop without their friends. Aside from the fitness test, nothing is preventing anyone from starting a troop like this as it is, but saying you want to be more active runs up against the reality that it requires active adult leaders and kids who are also willing to put in the work as far as planning is concerned. Last year I had to tag along with my old troop because a few kids wanted to get the cycling merit badge and needed a second adult to go on the 50-miler. The first adult was a 22-year-old who hung around after aging out. I hadn't been involved with the troop in 20 years. None of the dads were willing to ride 50 miles, even if the scouts were. And by the end of the ride, the kids, who were all fit and reasonably active, looked like they never wanted to sit on a bike again. I think it's easy to sit here as adults and think of what we would have like d in retrospect, forgetting that we weren't always stronger than we are now and didn't have as much tolerance for pain as we do now.

Aside from the fitness test, nothing is preventing anyone from starting a troop like this as it is,

The fitness test is more or less the point here. In current rules you can't exclude anyone, which is pretty much the whole point of this hypothetical. Ordinary boy scout troops have to admit weak, fat, uninterested, special needs kids. This obviously limits the outer boundaries of what can be done.

I think it's easy to sit here as adults and think of what we would have like d in retrospect, forgetting that we weren't always stronger than we are now and didn't have as much tolerance for pain as we do now.

Absolutely, I'm musing here to push the conversation in a new direction, is it something that would be practical to create or not? And if it won't work, then why are we complaining about the direction the boy scouts have gone in?

Alternatively, the more intense scouting path could be a badge track within the boy scouts. If Eagle has been Goodhart'd, the Department of War could collaborate on designing a new set of qualifications that would deliver those results for the military?

I think it's easy to sit here as adults and think of what we would have like d in retrospect, forgetting that we weren't always stronger than we are now and didn't have as much tolerance for pain as we do now.

I'll note in the way of reminiscence that I'm not entirely speaking out of turn here, I wanted my scout troop to do more outdoor events, so I started going on hikes and camping trips with the other troops my friends were in. There were other scouts who similarly wanted more activities, and the paths for achieving that goal within the scouts were limited. So I do think there exists some subset of boys who are interested in more activities. And the world is full of men who want to mentor younger boys in physically intense activity! Guys love to coach baseball and basketball and jiu jitsu etc.

So I'm questioning if part of the problem is the lack of exclusion. Without exclusionary principles, there's no real urge to progression.

Let me try to restate my argument, because I think we're talking past each other. What kind of test are you going to have and what is it going to entail? What I'm getting at is: What percentage of 11-year-olds crossing over is it going to exclude? 80%? 90% 50%? It honestly doesn't matter what number you pick, because unless you're only selecting for the top 1% you're using a test that any 14-year-old is going to be able to pass easily unless he's fat, special needs, etc. IF you're talking about a troop, where you do the full complement of scout activities and advance towards Eagle, you need a steady pipeline from Cubs, or the troop withers and dies. I've seen power struggles before where the Cubmaster loses faith in the local troop and sends the kids elsewhere, and it takes a long time for the troop to recover, if it can at all. So any troop that decides to exclude is at a disadvantage initially, even if their reputation enables them to draw from a wider geographic area.

But all you've really done is exclude for an 11-year-old with the fitness of a below average 14-year-old. And any 14-year-old who is that out of shape doesn't want to do the more difficult activities anyway. The goal of Venturing is to move away from advancement and focus on high-adventure group activities. Selecting for motivated 14-year-olds does a better job than selecting for fit 11-year-olds, and since advancement is an afterthought the group can focus on activities. I haven't seen any Venture crews who participated in my programs that included people who shouldn't have been there. I saw more 14-year-olds who could pass a fitness test but were some combination of lazy, unskilled, or petulant, while these kids never seemed to show up in Venturing. In any organization that relies on people acting locally (rather than the council-level program), some groups are going to be more active than others. I don't think creating a new kind of class is going to do anything, and in the years I spent heavily involved in Scouting and Venturing, nothing led me to believe that something like this would have any benefit.

How did you get into Venturing? I wasn't even aware it was a thing when I was young. And when I was an adult volunteer, everything made it sound like a thing for older kids who couldn't let go, a way to hang onto scouting after Eagle until you could drink.

If it's more of a parallel to existing BSA program, maybe that's the a good chunk of the answer I was looking for... just poorly advertised.

Looks like there are none in my county, but 25 miles isn't too far. My 14 year old might be more into that than the social studies stuff.

Yeah, I remember venture scouting was a thing for older boys- they made it sound like you got your eagle and then pivoted to venture scouts if you didn't want to hang around helping mentor eleven year olds in the troop.

Whatever they do, can they make it less boomer-cringe (that's the only way I can describe it). I read the 12 Scout Oath and Scout Law thing some one linked earlier and would have died of second hand embarasment if I had heard some one recite these with a straight face IRL.

Hi. I was a Scout, and I did indeed recite them every time with a straight face. Same with the Pledge of Allegiance when I recited that. We need a society that's able to recite things like that without cringe.

The Scout Oath is from 1908. The oldest of the WWII generation was still too young to join at the time (Cub Scouts not yet existing). The author, Baden-Powell, was two generations before that. If you want trad you're stuck with cringe, but the boomers had nothing to do with it.

I guess the past ain't what it used to be. Conceptually I am for something like the scouts, but if it should exist it should be ran less like my grandma and a saturday morning cartoon sidekick had a brainstorm together.

Ironic detachment is strictly a postmodernist invention.

Diogenes laughs in Ancient Greek.

Diogenes did it in bad faith.

Yeah I think if worrying about being earnest and lame is a problem, Scouts (or the military for that matter) are just not going to be for you. It predates boomer cringe by multiple generation, it's Boer War cringe.

You're supposed to read it with an old-timey radio mid-Atlantic accent.

Since the younger generations seem to have a weird fascination with Nazis, maybe they could bring it back as the Hitler Youth instead. I think that was basically the "scouts" for 1930s German kids.

I believe the Hitler Youth attended several international scouting events at the time.

But obviously, we should be bringing back Reagan Youth.

'Nazi' is a youth subculture now, like Emo or Goth. When was the last time you heard of one of them running a scouting org?

sigh I suppose it's up to us middle-aged men to lead the way. who wants to help me start a Hitler Youth scouting organization? (kidding obviously, I don't really want to do that)

The reasoning given is that "the group once known as the Boy Scouts is no longer a meritocracy and has become an organization designed to "attack boy-friendly spaces"", "for being "genderless" and for promoting diversity, equity and inclusion.", and because "the Scouts have strayed from their mission to "cultivate masculine values."".

Other criticisms of Scouts aside, "LARPing at being a Park Ranger" and "masculine values" is a false equivalency (And I say that, having totally wanted to LARP as a Park Ranger and grow up to be Indiana Jones, when I was a kid, and being sad that my parents didn't go for it!) and I'd be more convinced Scouts was failing to teach Park Ranger LARPing, if not for Hegseth's "masculine values" BS.

Indiana Jones

Seemingly canonically Indiana Jones was born July 1, 1899. He would have been amoungst the first cohort of scouts, the BSA having been founded in 1910.

I haven’t been following any of this in detail but what’s wrong with Hegseth’s statement? I’m pretty sure the left thinks the Boy Scouts are practically the Hitler Youth under Trump anyway, so they shouldn’t object to it’s closure.

I don't want to judge a description of a draft memo, but if the actual memo doesn't include evidence that the Scouts are failing to train valuable skills, the statement isn't good for much - competency isn't masculine or feminine, is it?

Competency is competency regardless. In that sense I’m wholly meritocratic. If it stops being about that, I’ve got to start asking questions.

I want to briefly talk about the massive Somali fraud network in Minnesota. UPDATE adding a more reputable source. Apparently Somalis have committed welfare fraud at least half a billion, maybe more, over the last couple decades. Much of it going home to Somalia to fund terrorist groups.

The surprising thing, looking into it, is that this seems to have been a bit of an open secret? Independent journalists were reporting on it for a while, and nobody seemed to care.

I think this story represents an overall change in the cultural climate, where this sort of information is finally becoming more popular to discuss. I'm reminded of the Rotherham scandal in the U.K. as well. Where there has been a major scandal involving mostly minority/immigrant groups that was covered up or just not really discussed, due to the Problematic nature.

I'm curious if this trend will continue moving forward, and we can perhaps have a more honest conversation about immigration and assimilation? We'll see...

From my personal perspective, the fact that every bit of meaningful news coming out of Minnesota is related to migrants behaving badly or the Politicians doing insanely self-destructive stuff has been ridiculously radicalizing on the immigration question.

Before, the literal only thing I 'knew' about Minnesota was the Movie FARGO and the accents. Never been there, but the people I meet from that area are unfailingly polite and stable if a little weird to my southern sensibilities.

I viewed it as a quaint little slice of Midwestern rural charm. A bit of cultural crossover between the U.S. and Canada, maybe.

I've since learned that for NGOs and the Obama and Biden administration, it was viewed as "Free Real Estate."

And if you asked me to define the precise polar opposite of the Minnesotan cultural archetype, I'd probably say "Somalia".

So naturally a whole bunch of Somalians with zero cultural connection and from an area with a completely incongruous environment got shoved into Minnesotan towns and given every single piece of governmental assistance possible to try to ease their transition... and now the full implications of that are unavoidable. The existence of Ihlan Omar alone is enough for me to balk.

All the more so because as far as I can tell the Minnesotans were never asked, nor do they currently have much of a say. That is what really makes the situation feel 'unfair' if you ask me. The FedGov, through cooperation with NGOs (funded by FedGov) can instantly and irretrievably change the entire character of a given town without technically violating anyone's rights or needing their direct approval.

We've seen how well off communities react to this (Remember Desantis' Martha's Vineyard stunt), but these towns probably have little political clout and not much wealth to speak of.

All the more so because as far as I can tell the Minnesotans were never asked, nor do they currently have much of a say.

Unfortunaltely, Minnesota, for some reason or another, is incredibly liberal relative to its demographics. The non-africans voted for billions of africans, and they continue to vote for billions of africans for the forseeable future.

I don't think they voted for them all to be slammed down into the same jurisdictions granting them instant majorities and almost zero demand to truly assimilate.

Hell, if they had been spread around the country rather than specifically creating ethnic enclaves with outsized political power, I would find it less objectionable.

Yet the minnesotan whites who just had a million somalians dropped in their small town will still vote blue no matter who

It’s not actually incredibly liberal relative to demographics, it’s full of secular urban northern euros.

Biden and Obama
got shoved into Minnesotans were never asked

Wait, how do you think they got there?

The current refugee regime dates back to Carter’s presidency. It integrated the efforts of existing VOLAGs, which are probably the NGOs you have in mind. Not exactly a new invention.

Minnesota has a bunch of NGOs, including some of the VOLAGs. Global Refuge is Lutheran and USCCB Catholic; both denominations are well-represented in the state. Historically, they’ve literally volunteered to take refugees. I believe they’re ending up in the Twin Cities more than individual towns, but I don’t have a source for that.

Somalis specifically started fleeing their civil war in the early 90s. Omar got here in ‘95. There was definitely a surge around 2012 coinciding with a new push in the war; that accounts for about 6,000 Minnesotans. More stats here.

Point is, the Somali population mostly pre-dates Obama and definitely pre-dates Biden. There’s been plenty of support from native Minnesota institutions, largely downstream of a strong Christian presence. The national involvement was hashed out before there was even a Somalian civil war, and continued for decades without today’s wailing and gnashing of teeth. I don’t think you can write it off as nonconsensual Federal airdrops to random towns.

I'm not saying they were hiding it.

The process was definitely transparent in that they will straight up tell you how many they brought in.

I just note that somehow, the Sub-Saharan Immigrant population was about 1.3 million in 2010, and is listed at 2.5 million in 2024, so almost doubling.

Do I have to point out who the sitting Presidents were during the majority of that time period?

And the included map shows that a huge number of them were indeed dropped off in Minnesota, to the point they're around 3% of the population in the Minneapolis area.

The part that hasn't become so transparent until lately is exactly how much aid these folks were receiving, and, likewise, how much fraud and crime many were involved in.

If the Minnesotans start to disapprove of this situation, what's their recourse, precisely?

I'm curious if this trend will continue moving forward, and we can perhaps have a more honest conversation about immigration and assimilation? We'll see...

No.

I mean, once again, look at the rape gangs in the UK. Despite there being "more open conversation", all that's really happened is the UK is arresting people for having that "more open conversation". Turns out after decades of the UK pleading that they simply lack the state capacity to stop immigration, or the rape of their children on an industrial scale, they somehow found the state capacity to start locking people up for twitter posts. And they'll even let the rapist out of prison to make room for it!

I expect much the same will happen in the US. Congress will do nothing, Judges will stop all executive enforcement, the state and local government is already captured racially/ideologically. In 10 years people will behave like this was always the case. Like if you live in Minnesota, you just should have known better. You know, back when your parents birthed and raised you back in the 1990's and the notion that Minnesota would get conquered by Somalia was nothing but a Buchananite fever dream.

Welfare fraud is rampant in the US. Given the scope of IRS's surveillance, welfare fraud looks like an intended loophole rather than a egregious crime.

How does welfare fraud work ? My understanding is:

  1. Minor fraud - Household composition misreporting. IMO, this is called smart accounting when done by billionaires. A person would have to be making just slightly over the limit for welfare, to massage their house hold composition to fit into welfare limits. That's okay.
  2. Major fraud - Not reporting income. This has been a major issue even outside welfare fraud. If the IRS truly cared, then tips, employment and gig-economy work would be more strictly surveilled. It would be trivial to implement from a technical perspective. Definitely an intended loophole, similar to illegal workers employed by farms and hospitality businesses around America, much to my chagrin.

I followed links in the article, and the sources are weird.

The first link points to a Pandemic relief fund scandal.

$250 million in pandemic relief funds. Aimee Bock, the 44-year-old founder of Feeding our Future, was found guilty on federal charges of wire fraud, bribery and conspiracy for recruiting a network of people and organizations to operate as many as 250 fraudulent meal assistance sites throughout the state

The primary culprit is a white lady who used pandemic relief funds to fraudulently route money to for-profit restaurants and live a lavish lifestyle.

Abdullahe Nur Jesow had become the 56th defendant to plead guilty in the $250 million Feeding Our Future fraud scheme.

Based on another link (which I had to chase down separately), there are many Somali secondary defendants, but the primary perpetrator was a white woman.

The 2nd link points to election integrity concerns. Nothing to do with fraud.

Republican Minn. gov candidate blasts Tim Walz on election integrity: ‘fraud capital of the country’

Finally, the 3rd link gives us something useful

The HSS program paid $104 million in 2024. On August 1, Minnesota’s Department of Human Services moved to scrap the HSS program, noting that payment to 77 housing-stabilization providers had been terminated this year due to “credible allegations of fraud.” Joe Thompson, then the Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota, went even further, stating that the “vast majority” of the HSS program was fraudulent.

On September 18, Thompson announced criminal indictments for six members of Minnesota’s Somali community.

Ok, finally, we're onto something.

Somalis have committed welfare fraud at least half a billion, maybe more, over the last couple decades. Much of it going home to Somalia to fund terrorist groups.

I believe your claim has validity, but all the linked articles take many leaps of logic and rounding of numbers to reach this specific conclusions.

Yes, on the balance, around half a billion in funds were used in programs that had fraud. It is not clear than 100% of those funds were fraudulently used. It is not clear that 100% of the fraudulently used funds were used by Somalis. It is not clear that 100% of the Somalian fraud had to do with sending money back to Somalia. It is not clear that 100% of the money sent back to Somalia was sent to terrorists.

If you 50% at each step, it is still many millions being sent to Somalian terrorists. I also agree with your wider point, that integration of ghettoized tribal societies should not be taken for granted. But, the eventual sum sent to Somali terrorists is likely less than $100 million.

In cases like this, I'd prefer if we shared the more reputed sources (City Journal) instead of rage-baiting sources like NY Post which add nothing to the original [City Journal] sources.

Thanks for the thoughts and the link, updated the OP.

I'm curious if this trend will continue moving forward, and we can perhaps have a more honest conversation about immigration and assimilation? We'll see...

I don't see why it would. We haven't had a national conversation about fraud in the Orthodox Jewish community and there are still hebrew signs in the Hudson valley; or any conversation at all about fraud among Baptist churches.

Here's a bonus case with a pastor who stole someone's identity, defrauded the military through fake education funds, and then abused a minor girl at the church.

The problem is really that any high trust group can defraud the government pretty easily.

In general, trusting your family is a pretty major hack against the American legal system. The entire system is built around not trusting your family. Being high trust enough to put income, properties, or businesses in the name of your family members can get you out of taxes, into subsidies, and boy does it make for a fun divorce to untangle. Immigrants of all kinds are notorious for this, as are small family businesses. Combine the two and there goes your week.

A Russian with a small business is a nightmare in a divorce case. The house is half in his name and half in his mother's, but the down payment was supposedly lent to him by his brother, but no one has any documentation of that money ever being transferred. The business is a partnership with an uncle, and no one knows where the money came from or where it goes.

A local family, our local feudal lords around here, when one of the sons got divorced, his wife was surprised to find out that while she was under the impression they'd been living a normal upper middle class life with a house and two cars, actually they had almost no assets, that the house and the cars belonged to his father and they had effectively no equity in anything.

Another local family filed tax returns for family members who never worked for the business, for income that the family members in question never actually received, in order to distribute income taxes around in some way or other.

Anyone who looks around will have similar stories. If you can trust each other enough to count on getting what's yours later, then the government has a lot of trouble pinning you down.

It's hard not to be horrified of all that goes on. The government tax incentives and welfare schemes that slosh around are insane.

Counterpoint: trusting your family also creates some of the most unhinged legal drama.

One branch of my family has a bit of a “trailer park slum lord” thing going in the Southeast. Buy foreclosed lots, rent them back to the former owners, clean out the ones who can’t or won’t pay.

That branch includes one brother who is very much not welcome in the family business. He’s a scammer who’s known to show up and claim property when anyone near the community dies. Sometimes he even waves a convenient will. He’d happily file a few lawsuits if he thought there was any chance of getting a payout.

There is zero chance that the family business can pull those kind of accounting tricks, because they know their brother would come ruin it. And that’s for quite literally clannish behavior!

Trusting each other works until it doesn’t. There’s a reason that bigger institutions accrue more and more guardrails.

The real lesson, as always, is 'coordination problems are hard'. The son of the local feudal lord, in that case, was kept in line by economic dependence on the family patriarch(he didn't own anything), who just had to pick a stool pigeon smart enough not to bite the hand that feeds(that is, to never disobey, ever, for personal gain) and treat them well. The Orthodox Jews believe they have a divine commandment to obey their rebbe. Albanians stab each other in the back all the time, but they keep the drama in-community- informing on their shady dealings is the one sin that gets you cut off. The mafia enforces their no-defection policy lethally.

I suspect your slumlord kinfolk lack the ruthlessness of the albanians and mafiosi, and the central coordination point of the feudal lord, and the genuine belief of the Jews.

The son of the local feudal lord, in that case, was kept in line by economic dependence on the family patriarch(he didn't own anything), who just had to pick a stool pigeon smart enough not to bite the hand that feeds(that is, to never disobey, ever, for personal gain) and treat them well.

Weirdly, it might have been done precisely to keep assets in the family in case of divorce. "Oh, sorry honey, you thought you were going to get 50% of everything? In fact I don't personally own anything, it's all family trust/business assets, so good luck with that!"

(I'd been binging a lot of dumb Youtube 'revenge stories' and a couple of these have that exact set-up: wronged wife gets wind that hubby intends to leave her without a penny, steal her assets, and set up with new snookums so she lawyers up in secret and transfers everything into a trust/years back before they got married put everything into the business name so the house, cars, etc. are all technically business assets that they have the use of).

Local feudal lord arranges it so blood kin have the use of houses, cars, bank accounts and so forth, but if greedy spouses try to despoil them in a divorce, they end up with nothing since technically the married kids own nothing. Kids know that when Father kicks the bucket, they'll inherit, so they have no incentive to go against this arrangement. If they do end up getting divorced, they know they'll lose nothing.

wronged wife gets wind that hubby intends to leave her without a penny, steal her assets, and set up with new snookums so she lawyers up in secret and transfers everything ...

For some odd reason, I suspect that a husband wouldn't have as much success with that strategy. I've heard of a few alimony/child support cases where the court is less "pay to the extent of your ability" and more "die broke in a gutter".

Yeah but they've still fundamentally got to come for the property of the divorced. They can't easily reach out to third parties

They can't easily reach out to third parties

Not the court's problem in those stories: Pay up or get punished for failing to pay.

If you already own nothing and work for your (shady) dad, the available punishments are quite limited though.

More comments

The problem here would be that alimony is based on the income of the partners, not any expected inheritance. Assume for this hypothetical that I am "Worth" $200k/yr after taxes.

Scenario A) I work for a law firm where I am payed $200k/yr after taxes, I live on $100k and save the rest.

Scenario B) I work for the family business, I receive a salary of $100k/yr after taxes, I save nothing, the rest remains within the family and either benefits me indirectly or will come to me as inheritance eventually.

If Mrs. FiveHour left me, alimony and property settlement would be calculated based on my income and assets. Under Scenario A, that would be based on $200k/yr in income plus splitting the savings. Under Scenario B, it would be based on $100k/yr and there are no savings to split. A divorcing spouse can't reach speculative inheritance.

The "trick" is in trusting my folks to manage the money for me for decades before I see it.

Child support is a little different, as it ought to be.

It serves numerous purposes, and the divorce one is probably low on the list.

The primary justification given to family is vague "tax advantages;" which I'm not sure ultimately pay off in every case. Maneuvering who makes what money and who or what has title to which asset can be useful, but when it always comes up "daddy controls everything and you get what little he wants to give you;" well then I doubt that it's all about the tax advantages.

Knowing the family dynamics, the biggest reason was that the patriarch wanted to keep everyone enslaved to himself, totally dependent on him for their livelihoods. This extended through other family dynamics: he had numerous children, and none of them went to college, and he managed their work lives such that none of them ever built easily transferable experience. You worked for the family business until he died or you died, and as long as you worked for the family business you lived in luxury, but if you left you were out in the cold with no assets and no easy transition to another job that would pay anything like the same total compensation. He underpaid his kids for the work they did, but made up the difference by paying for their housing and cars, their vacations to family properties, company employees doing domestic labor at their homes, etc. But this in turn means being a 40 year old man with kids, and living where daddy tells you and driving the car your daddy agrees on and never going against his will.

The break up daddy was worried about was between him and his kids, not his kids and their spouses. That's just a side benefit of the arrangement.

That's clear, then.

Sure, I'm not saying the execution is perfect every time or that it's an unbeatable cheat code. But I am saying it's a wildly common situation, and it often allows a high-trust grouping to evade taxes and other legal issues by using informal agreements.

Yep, I remember a high profile case of Moroccan soccer player who got out of divorce settlement worth $70 million, as apparently everything was owned by his mother.

It appears the senders aren't deliberately funding the terrorist groups, but rather the terrorist groups are getting a cut.

I think this story represents an overall change in the cultural climate, where this sort of information is finally becoming more popular to discuss.

It's just political, with a Republican administration willing and even eager to offend a local Democratic power center.

Indeed, this welfare fraud scheme is funding both sides of the Somali civil war in question.

but rather the terrorist groups are getting a cut.

Through osmosis or? Surely somebody has to send them said cut.

They aren't exactly a terrorist group like you're probably thinking, hidden with cells.

Somalia is in a civil war. Al-Shabaab is an Islamist faction in that war that commits terrorist attacks and is affiliated with al-Qaeda.

A lot of the Somalis in the west were refugees because they were supporters of Siad Barre before his government fell in 1990. Somali naming conventions are somewhat opaque to outsiders, so it was easy for colonels to just say they were teachers. The Barre government is hard to pin down ideologically, it was allied with the Soviet Bloc and also Islamist groups that opposed westernization.

So a lot of American-Somalis have family aligned with al-Shabaab due to tribal loyalties, support for Islam, local family strategies, etc.

Okay. I'm fairly intimately familiar with 'the men behind the wire' and whatnot.

You're essentially saying that they're sending remittances to Somali-residing family, who are then aligned with the terrorist groups and then possibly funded by those family members, but not direct transfer?

Yes. They probably couldn't do direct transfers even if they wanted to, it'd be too easy for the US Government to shut down. They probably do know that some of the money is ending up with al-Shabaab.

Say what you will about the people of Boston, at least most of the money they were funneling to terrorists came out of their own pockets and not the taxpayer’s.

The surprising thing, looking into it, is that this seems to have been a bit of an open secret?

This article doesn't bring it up specifically, but it's been speculated the incredible increase in autism centers, and support costs is also related to Somali-organized fraud.

The Somali-associated government fraud is bad. To steel man, set aside the Feeding Our Future and housing stabilization fraud schemes, and focus just on the autism assistance scheme. Compliant doctors were found to diagnose Somali-American children at a rate three times that of other Minnesotan children, multiple fake LLCs were set up to assist lower income parents with their supposedly-autistic children, and these LLCs paid kickbacks to the parents out of the state and federal funds they were getting and pocketing. In what is much more of an indictment of the Somali-American community in Minnesota than particular fraudsters who are Somali-American behind the other schemes, in the autism assistance fraud, numerous families where shopping among the LLC fronts based on how large of a kickback they were offered by each, and switching between them. This in particular is widespread corruption within the community.

But also to steel man, the original report cited by the NY Post doesn’t fully make the case in the way Rufo frames it for maximum offense. It didn’t actually track any specific funds. And cites only retired feds. It just notes there was massive fraud, and remittances going on at the same time. And as /u/DradisPing points out below, Somali is so fucked up, and its civil war run through family/clan ties, that Al-Shabaab is going to get a taste of pretty much any money than reaches those clans sympathetic their half of the civil war. And as /u/hydroacetylene added, the other half of the civil war is probably, also.

Wouldn’t be the only thing coming out of Minnesota. Sigh. Reactions are as one would expect.

The political class will continue to do nothing until the problem lands on their doorstep. Western countries have no idea how to integrate people. Nor do they have a desire to.

This country needs a radical transformation of the immigration system with a simplified (albeit still strict) pathway to citizenship. I actually have a friend of sorts who works in tech and previously used to work doing malware analysis for the NSA. At one point in his life he lived in Mongolia and did work there.

One thing he told me was that the very hard and industrious working Mongolians frequently emigrate out of the country leaving the more complacent and indolent workers who are content to sit around and do whatever their thing is from within the country. He never told me where the ones who moved often went to, but a preferential policy of selecting for and seeking the best and brightest who are willing to work should at the very least be given priority in that regard.

That article immediately veering from introducing the identity borrower into 'wah wah wah red tribe making it harder for immigrants' is kinda hilarious tonally. Then the guy kills somebody in a traffic accident after being deported 3 times.

Also the deliberate brain drain thing does come up a lot, especially now in 2025 that diffusion of technology and the messiness of a lot of spots in the West means that the QOL gap between 'nice part of developing world' and developed world is pretty damned close. I moved from Australia to SEA a year ago and whilst I do miss a few things from Australia there really isn't some massive development chasm between where I'm at and where I was. Plus everybody with half a pulse/brain from the developing world immediately fleeing to the West to attempt to commandeer random laptop jobs and do-nothing middle class neutral-sum bureaucracies doesn't really do anything useful for anybody.

The worst is that I actually can feel for the ID thief. It sucks that he probably does have his ducks in a row now and that he has dependants yet can't get a stable, legal status to support them.

The problem is that the solution was decades ago, when he should have been prevented from moving in, prevented to work and prevented from coming back when deported. Or even earlier, by Reagan not making that amnesty deal, not giving illegals hope that their situation will eventually be regularized. He would be working and taking care of his dependants in Guatemala, and if he's as good a guy as the journalist tries to make him out to be, would be making Guatemala a slightly better place by his presence. But now, unless you're giving up any pretention to controlling immigration, the damage from regularizing this guy's situation now would be felt 10-20-30 years from now by the people enboldened into sticking their heads into the same trap by his outcome.

The worst is that I actually can feel for the ID thief. It sucks that he probably does have his ducks in a row now and that he has dependants yet can't get a stable, legal status to support them.

I do feel for him on some level but his presence in the USA also directly led to an innocent bystander dying (and even if he wasn't at direct fault I'd be quite surprised if his car were at the absolute pinnacle of maintenance standards). He's trying his hardest to have a 'better life', though it's not like Guatemala is an active warzone at present

That article immediately veering from introducing the identity borrower into 'wah wah wah red tribe making it harder for immigrants' is kinda hilarious tonally. Then the guy kills somebody in a traffic accident after being deported 3 times.

Reading that article Sunday, I thought it was pretty solid "vibe shift" evidence that the Sunday Times was willing to make its front page about an illegal immigrant doing actual, understandable harm to a very sympathetic American citizen. The article was largely about the harm done, the bureaucratic nightmare committed against the citizen, with comparatively less effort put into the alien.

One thing he told me was that the very hard and industrious working Mongolians frequently emigrate out of the country leaving the more complacent and indolent workers who are content to sit around and do whatever their thing is from within the country. He never told me where they ones who moved often went to, but a preferential policy of selecting for and seeking the best and brightest who are willing to work should at the very least be given priority in that regard.

This is absolutely not a significant numerical draw, but for a while Mongolians have been absolutely killing it in Japanese Sumo.

With Russians and the ‘stans bringing up third place, interestingly enough.

Positions for non-Japanese are very strictly controlled and the Mongolians have got most of them (entirely through interest and merit AFAIK), and are killing it as you say.

I would note that the fraud at issue here isn't welfare fraud in the popular sense of people lying on application forms to get an extra $367/month from the government or whatever, but a more sophisticated form of white collar crime that is both more damaging in terms of total dollar amount and harder to detect. A lot of public services aren't provided by the government itself but are in essence contracted out to private companies and nonprofits, who are reimbursed for their services at fixed rates. The fraud comes in when these providers submit reimbursement claims for fictitious services.

At one extreme, this scam doesn't involve the provision of services at all. One can simply rent an office, buy a bunch of personal information for the demographic you're targeting, and start submitting reimbursements for services you never provided for clients who may be entirely fictitious. This is cheap and easy to do, but is necessarily limited, as one can only keep it up for so long before someone starts asking questions, at which point the entire operation falls apart because you can't credibly claim the charges were legitimate. At the other end of the spectrum, the fraud can exist as part of a legitimate organization that actually is providing most of the services it claims it's providing. The upside to this is that if anyone investigates your operation looks perfectly normal, with offices full of clients and invoices for relevant expenses. The downside is that you actually need to go through the process of providing services, which involves incurring expenditures that you may not be compensated for, including employees who may be inclined to blow the whistle when they start wondering why they're seeing reimbursement bills for services they know weren't provided. One upside, though, is that in the event that an investigator does find something untoward, it can be explained away as an administrative error or the consequence of a legitimate dispute.

Which end of the spectrum the fraud falls on usually depends on whether the fraudster intended on the whole thing being a sham from the beginning or if he realized he could pad his income by committing a little fraud on the side. The frauds in question here lean more towards the former, though they weren't quite as blatant as the first example I gave. They created enough of a front that the fraud wouldn't be obvious through a casual inquiry, but would be easily uncovered by a dedicated investigation. I would note that one thing that's misleading in both the Post article and the post itself is that these weren't "open secrets" that were only covered by independent journalists but actual scandals. The biggest fraud, the Feeding Our Future fraud, broke in 2022 and was covered in local media, including both major newspapers in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, local television news, and the local NPR affiliate. And even that scandal, in which Feeding Our Future bilked $250 million from taxpayers, wasn't exactly due to incompetence on the part of the government.

Feeding Our Future was founded in 2016 but was denied government grant money due to concerns over the group's administrative practices. In 2020, with a ton of COVID money available, they decided to sue the Minnesota Department of Education over these denials. The nonprofit was allegedly applying for grant money that would be used to feed hungry children (MDE was administering the grants as part of the school lunch program). In the face of the suit, MDE approved the grants in November, but slow-walked the disbursements and demanded additional documentation. The matter went before a judge in April 2021, who effectively ruled that MDE's suspicious were not enough on their own to justify a denial of payment or the imposition of conditions that wouldn't apply to other organizations. The matter was complicated by the fact that MDE had by this time referred the matter to the USDA for a Federal investigation. The judge didn't order them to make payments exactly, but ruled that the withholding of payments had been in proper and that Feed Our Future was owed $20 million in back payments. MDE felt they had no choice but to resume payments. The whole thing came to a crashing halt in January 2022, when the FBI raided Feed Our Future's offices and MDE stopped making payments. To date, over 70 people have been convicted in the fraud.

In the aftermath of the FBI raid and the revelation that $250 million had been stolen, there was a lot of finger pointing over who was responsible (aside from the scammers, of course). Republicans blamed the Democratic state government for being incompetent, Democrats claimed their hand was forced by the judge, Tim Walz called for the judge to resign, the judge claimed he never technically ordered MDE to make payments and they were made voluntarily because they didn't appeal, MDE claimed that realistically they had no choice and the matter was out of their hands due to the Federal investigation, etc. In the end, though, it's hard to blame anyone in particular for what happened, and the idea that Democrats were covering up massive fraud to protect Somali immigrants doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. MDE smelled a rat from the beginning and tried to withhold payments, but were prevented from doing so by a judge. The judge may have not had a choice in the matter, since it's unclear what evidence MDE had at the time, and what they were able to actually argue in court in light of the ongoing Federal investigation. The Feds, for their part, had to contend with the fact that frauds like this are hard to prove, and even in a relatively straightforward fraud such as this it still took them a year to gather enough evidence to be confident in obtaining convictions.

I don't know much about the other scams, but what's concerning about them isn't so much that they say anything about the character of the Somali people as it does how much more money could have been stolen if they had been either a little more sophisticated or a little less brazen; the only thing really that surprising about these is that they were able to steal so much money while being under an investigative microscope. When scams at the other end of the spectrum happen, where the scammers are using fraud to pad the income of legitimate businesses, the totals can be truly staggering. Historically, the most prevalent frauds of this category have been for Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement. While there are some cases of these frauds existing with sham patients, it's unusually easy for a legitimate healthcare provider to slip in bills for reimbursement for services that weren't provided. This is especially true in the case of older patients, who go to the doctor so much they can't remember every test they have, or hospitals, that charge for so many things it's unlikely an individual patient can say whether something is legitimate or not. Hospital Corporation of America operates numerous real hospitals and paid nearly 2 billion in settlements stemming from such fraud that occurred in the 1990s, though the total amount of fraud remains unknown. This wasn't incidental fraud, either; there was an entirely separate set of books documenting the real profits the company was making (and not paying taxes on) as opposed to the public books that showed reimbursements for services that presumably cost them money to provide. It was, at the time, the largest Medicare/Medicaid fraud case in US history, though such fraud still costs the American taxpayer tens of billions annually.

I can't take the Post or any other conservative publication or individual conservative seriously when they talk about this kind of crime, because the only time they seem to care about it is when they can use it as ammo against a group they don't like. In the eyes of a Republican, the only crime the Somalis involved really committed here is that their scheme wasn't sophisticated enough to succeed long-term and that they didn't properly insulate themselves from criminal repercussions. The CEO of HCA and the founder of the parent company was forced to resign when the fraud was discovered, but he never faced any criminal charges personally, or had to pay back any of the money himself. After all, it was the company that committed the crimes, not him, and by stepping down he was "accepting responsibility" for what happened on his watch. This acceptance of responsibility came with a $5.1 million cash payment ,$300 million in stock and options, and a $950k/year consulting position. He would later run several other healthcare companies before becoming governor of Florida and United States Senator, a position he holds today. But I have not yet heard anyone in the Republican party or conservative media criticize Rick Scott for being responsible for one of the biggest scams in US history. Instead they give full-throated defenses of how he was somehow a victim of circumstance and how, contrary to what witnesses said, he was totally unaware that providers were upcharging almost every expense. And I somehow doubt that a few Somalis bringing this kind of issue to national attention will lead to any kind of reckoning and calls for Scott to resign. So please, if you're going to look for a reason to denigrate Somali immigrants, don't cry crocodile tears about how bad fraud is, at least unless you're willing to have an equal amount of concern when rich white people do it.

crocodile tears

I was aware this term existed but I've seen it several times the last couple days. Frequency illusion or did a software update go out about how to discuss these things?

at least unless you're willing to have an equal amount of concern when rich white people do it.

Okay, I'll bite that bullet and say all fraud is bad, and everyone involved should have the book thrown at them.

Maybe Baader-Meinhof phenomenon?

The actual psychological l term for that is Frequency Illusion, the term used here.

I'm going to channel my inner Peggy Hill and say this is you agreeing with me.

There was an article in last week's Reader's Digest called "Increase Your Word Power" that included a bunch of vocabulary words and underused expressions, and that was among them. /s

In the end, though, it's hard to blame anyone in particular for what happened

I feel like the part that is missing here is that groups can be entitled to government payments at all; unless I'm misunderstanding, the whole premise of this case is that Feed Our Future was able to (successfully) sue because they felt like they were owed government money, and a judge agreed with them.

Like, correct me if I don't have this right, but the sequence of events you laid out appears to be:

  1. Government is giving grants for (charity related purposes).
  2. NGO feels that they can apply to the grant, so does so.
  3. Government says "no".
  4. NGO sues, and judge says "they're owed the grant money".

Why can't the answer just be "the government doesn't owe grant money to anyone?" (And before you tell me its an anti-discrimination effort; like, duh, but I don't doubt that if it had been an obviously right wing group applying, the judge would've found that they were not eligible).

On a related tangent - has anyone else been getting the feeling that a lot of the complaints that are being attributed to the swamp, or the ruling governmental party, or really just anything political are actually problems with the judiciary? I hear a lot of leftists talk about how the supreme court is corrupt and in Trump's pocket; by the same token, a lot of right-wingers mention the ninth(?) circuit court as being unusually corrupt and blocking the right-wing government from accomplishing its goals (sorry, Canadian, I don't actually know the US court system super well). Up here in Canada, we have judges that rule that immigration status modifies a party's guilt (specifically, if you are sentenced to 6 months, it will affect your immigration claim; hence, a lot of judges rule that even severe crimes like assault warrant 6 months less a day).

I'm beginning to get the feeling that having a group of individuals, who are appointed for life, paid generously, and who are basically impossible to remove may have been something of a mistake.

Great question. I think the main source of your misunderstanding is that your conception of the kind of grants involved are different from those that are at issue here. Most people's idea of a grant is some fixed sum of money that's available for a specific purpose that the government awards to a specific group, and that's true of a lot of grants relating to things like the arts, scientific research, local government, etc. These each have their own criteria that vary, and I'm not going to get into that here because it's not really the point. The grants at issue here aren't for specific sums of money but are reimbursement for services that the government is paying for. Think of something like Medicaid—a qualifying individual who seeks medical treatment will have the cost of qualifying care covered by the program. It doesn't really work, though, if you just ask doctors to apply for $500,000 grants that they can use to provide free care. There are a lot of people who are going to need a lot of services and we can't really identify the particular amount each person is going to need from a particular provider, and we want as many providers as possible to participate in the system so that there won't be as much friction.

So the way it works is that every provider who wants to participate gets qualified and once the permission is granted they submit bills from qualifying patients to Medicaid for reimbursement, which they're paid based on a fixed schedule. To be clear, not all providers participate, but most do, and when you're aiming for coverage to be as wide as possible you make it so any provider who meets the criteria is eligible. What you can't do then, legally, is deny the ability for a provider who meets the criteria to participate based on you're own prejudices. You need a concrete reason.

Feed Our Future was a group that was purportedly providing a similar service, which would provide meals to children who qualified. Since they couldn't say in advance how many kids would show up each day, they would keep records and submit them for reimbursement. So say if one location served 100 meals per day on average, and the government reimbursed at $10/meal, they'd send a bill at the end of the month for $30,000. The state had denied them grant money for years based on their perception that they were shady, which was probably based on legitimate reasons. The problem was that in 2020 they were applying to participate in a COVID-era Federal program that was being administered by the state, and the Feds set the eligibility requirements. So while they may not have met the requirements the state had set in the past, the state couldn't use that as a justification to deny them Federal money distributed under a different program. So it was ultimately the Federal government who prosecuted them, not the state, as they had stolen Federal money.

Okay, that makes a lot of sense - thank you!

I would say I do have a huge concern with fraud in general. Problem is many rich white people, for cultural reasons, feel morally justified in setting up this sort of fraud scandal at large for poor immigrant groups.

I'm definitely outraged with this sort of welfare fraud, period.

The NY Post links to A Somali-American former investigator: why you’re hearing about fraud in my community, which may have been a better starting point for discussion.

How is a Rufo-coauthored article better than a Rufo-sourced article?

Members of my community must cease the leveraging of race and religion to avoid accountability,

I have some doubts about this part of his proposed solution.

"Must" != "I have confidence they will"

I wasn’t impressed last time people were suddenly interested in minnesota, so my expectations are pretty low. Just flipping through the Post article intermingles a number of claims. It’s relying on the City Journal report, anyway, so let’s go there.

  • Minnesota has been investigating >$300M in welfare fraud, mostly by Somalis.
  • One Terrorism Task Force detective says that al-Shabab gets “a cut” of any money making it back to Somalia.
  • A separate contractor, investigating the 58 Americans who joined ISIS, insists that “the largest funder of al-Shabab is the Minnesota taxpayer”.

So numbers basically evaporate as we move from fraudulent charities to overall remittances to al-Shabab’s cut. Not surprising. But anything related to terrorism still operates on homeopathic principles: diluting it makes people take it more seriously.

(Man, peeling back the calendar, reveals the year: 2001)

I don’t know why you would expect a “more honest conversation”. You’re going to put off anybody who has the cultural antibodies to deal with this flavor of criticism. You might as well accuse Somalia of hiding WMDs. It’s not going to convince anybody new.

I don’t know why you would expect a “more honest conversation”. You’re going to put off anybody who has the cultural antibodies to deal with this flavor of criticism. You might as well accuse Somalia of hiding WMDs. It’s not going to convince anybody new.

Hmm I mean this is much less an argument for war or anything, more an argument that immigrant groups on the whole likely commit a lot of fraud / have more problems than is immediately apparent?

I agree about the source and updated it.

I’d differentiate between different types of immigrant groups. Minnesota, IIRC, has the nation’s largest Hmong and Karen (not Karens, but the Karen) populations and doesn’t see the same kinds of issues that it has with the Somalian expat community.

The Somalis are far more insular. You have clan loyalties solidified by cousin marriages. And also, Islam. Thinking aloud, the Hmong also have clans, but aren’t insular and have integrated fairly well. It helps many of them love fishing and Minnesota is the Land of 10,000 Lakes.

Okay, I guess I fumbled that metaphor.

There was a period after 9/11 when mentioning terrorism basically won any number of debates. American politics adapted, and now the risk of a terrorist link is kind of priced in. Very few of the people who weren’t already moved by the outrageous fraud are going to be moved by this addendum.

It might be a different story if Somali Minnesotans directly funded a known terrorist attack, but up until that point, it’s largely academic.

deal with this flavor of criticism

Would that flavor be "doesn't trust the NY Post" (fair, ish) or "thinks all immigrants are fully above reproach" (the Tim Walz special)?

More “assumes it’s the undead hand of Dick Cheney.”

Though there’s also a subset who would endorse “can’t free Palestine without breaking a few eggs.”

Two National Guardsman shot in DC.

Situation is still developing... conflicting reports about deaths. Trump has already requested 500 more guardsmen to be deployed in the capital. I'm afraid that any commentary on my part will be pure speculation: I'll edit this OP as more information comes to light. Apologies for the shortness of this initial post.

I would expect ICE to be shot at, especially during active operations: but the National Guard? They're literally doing nothing but stand around. They're dads and uncles pulling overtime shifts away from their real jobs, not stormtroopers. I'm highly suspecting some sort of mental illness or dumb radicalization, but I'll refrain on coming to conclusions for now.

Edit 1: Suspect has been identified as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a Afghan national evacuated back in 2021.

Edit 2: Speculatively, a linkedin profile of the same name seems to point him as being connected to a bunch of American NGOs. I'm always skeptical of these - the world is big enough for strangers to have the same names - but the face on the profile seems to match the suspect.

Or perhaps I don't have an eye for Afghans, and they all look the same to me.

I am quite enjoying the responses to the effect of - "This is Trump's fault for putting those guardsmen into harm's way"

Um, excuse me? Can you please give me a reason why sending someone to Washington, DC constitutes "putting them into harm's way," and why this reasoning doesn't justify deploying the national guard?

Doesn't matter. As was similarly true for Kyle Rittenhouse, "They shouldn't have been there, and Trump sent them there" will resonate just fine with the large portion of the public attuned with the mainstream media.

Well, why are they deployed? Why is there a ton of tension and pressure around their deployment the a crazy ideologue can hook into?

Well, why are they deployed?

Because some American cities are more dangerous than Ukraine.

Why is there a ton of tension and pressure around their deployment the a crazy ideologue can hook into?

Because Democrats are ideologically wedded to the idea that crime isn't real and that policing causes crime and the worst thing that could happen is for an increase in military-style crime deterrence to actually deter crime. Doubly so if that results in a win for Cheeto Hitler.

Very much agree about democrat delusion re: crime and enforcement, but my autism does not allow me to let this go.

Because some American cities are more dangerous than Ukraine.

This is statistical torture, the numbers are screaming as they are twisted into this narrative. Also kind of a rhetorical one as when you say "Ukraine" people read "front line of the Russo-Ukrainian war" but I imagine whatever stat underlies this is the mortality rate in the country overall, most of which is not a warzone. On the other side, if you are not a poor American involved in, or adjacent to, the drug trade, I imagine your odds of being shot in Chicago et al. are extremely, extremely low.

Also from the politics angle, the way and "vibe" in which these troops were deployed was intentionally maximally inflammatory, so I am not surprised that in a country with the most guns, a crazy person was baited into doing something dumb.

This past July, Chicago had ~45 murders against a population of 2.72 million. Ukraine had 286 civilians killed, against a population that seems a bit up in the air, but 35 million looks like a decent estimate, somewhat rounded down.

So in that month, Chicago had 16.67 murders per million people, and Ukraine had 8.17 civilians killed per million people.

Sure this is a bit cherry picked - though I chose July simply because that was the first search result with a tangible number of deaths for Ukraine. That article notes that the 286 dead civilians was "the highest since May 2022", and July is also usually a bumper month for urban crime. I don't think the comparison is completely off base, or unfair. If we restricted it to just active war zones or active gang wars, do the ratios really change that much?

It's unfair because you're only including civilian deaths.

If you're going to claim a city is more dangerous than a war zone, you have to include the people actually killed in the war - including the combatants. This isn't just cherry-picking, it's lying with statistics.

"Being a civilian in Chicago is more dangerous than being a civilian in Ukraine". Does that phrasing sound acceptable?

You're still not comparing like things. The vast majority of civilian.deaths in Chicago are criminals engaged in violent activity. Do you think the average citizen of Chicago would agree "I'd feel safer in Ukraine"?

You can make a point about high crime rates without juicing numbers dishonestly. In this case, "civilian" and "combatant" is exploiting a gap where you are comparing gang activity and warfare. Is it more dangerous to be a gangbanger in Chicago or a soldier in Ukraine? Is it more dangerous to be a non-combatant (not involved in drugs or warfare) in Chicago or in Ukraine?

Because some American cities are more dangerous than Ukraine.

By what metric?

Murder rate versus dead civilian rate.

Is Trump, strictly speaking, in the chain of causality which caused the national guards to be shot? Without a doubt.

Does this mean that he is legally or morally responsible? Hell no.

Personally, I am of the opinion that his deployment of the national guard is a waste of taxpayer money. But I do not generally want politicians to make decisions based on how some crazies might react, because that would yield a lot of power to the crazies.

Some crazies see gay night clubs as a provocation which drives them to murder. Others are similarly enraged by national guard deployments. Luckily, the crazies are few and far between, so the optimal strategy is to bury the dead and not yield an inch policy-wise.

Now, if he had ordered the national guard to parachute over Kabul, or if a troop of national guardsmen had opened fire on civilians in DC, then I would lay the dead at Trump's feet, because causalities in battle deployments and excessive force are both outcomes which I want politicians to consider (which does not mean that their risk is never worth it, obviously).

I would expect ICE to be shot at, especially during active operations: but the National Guard? They're literally doing nothing but stand around. They're dads and uncles pulling overtime shifts away from their real jobs, not stormtroopers. I'm highly suspecting some sort of mental illness or dumb radicalization, but I'll refrain on coming to conclusions for now.

You know how anti-Muslim radicals attack Sikhs sometimes? Same thing; the kinds of people willing to engage in violent #resistance are probably not especially discerning about their targets.

If those Afghans were so evil as to collaborate with foreign occupiers and their puppet regime based around raping boys (bacha bazi) and growing opium what else are they capable of? Absolutely reckless to let them live in America.

Vindicated.

I got banned for that comment.

This place frequently operates on the same principles as most, I don't even know what to call them, "authority worshiping" spaces? Which is to say, it's against the rules to be correct about things before the authorities have updated the correct opinions first.

There was an instance on my local subreddit where after our sloppy pullout from Afghanistan, Biden was recklessly spraying Afghan "refugees" all over local schools. People had concerns over this, and they were widely dismissed as racist. You weren't supposed to recollect how for decades stories had trickled out, even in the papers of record which you are allowed to remember (NYTimes, WaPo, etc), about how our armed forces were revolted at orders from above to turn a blind eye towards their boy love, or "bacha bazi" custom. It was widely reported that our ostensible allies were deeply committed pedarast. I brought this up, another person brought up that boys in another school in Maryland adjacent to the "refugees" had already been raped. Then the whole thread was locked and deleted.

We are still descended from Reddit. You can be correct here at your own peril.

I feel like we’re reading different Mottes. I don’t think it’s accurate to compare the rules here to any subreddit the admins have continued to tolerate, given that the limits of their tolerance are why we’re here and not there.

I have observed that posters are willing to do more consensus building and boundary policing on issues to do with literal wars than with culture wars, and the mods tend to tolerate it more, which is unfortunate. But even that fades after a while, and discussion opens up again as it never seems to do on reddit.

Why did Lakanwal drive all the way to DC to shoot two National Guardsman? There were many other National Guard deployments between his home and DC. Edit: I'm not questioning his motive to kill members of the NG. I'm questioning why he drove 40 hours from Washington State to Washington D.C.

Guess 1: It's symbolic. DC is more "America" than Portland and the attack was against America. But if so, why not wait one more day and do it on Thanksgiving proper? Even more symbolic that way.

Guess 2: It's a probing attack for a bigger event later on. Probably shouldn't have let himself get taken alive if that's the case...

Guess 3: He had a personal beef against one of the Guardsmen? Was one of them deployed in Afghanistan, he saw them on the TV once, and made it his mission to take revenge for something?

Guess 4: He is actually a Trump agent. After the "Sedition" video, Trump activated him to attack a couple national guards to show his opponents just how dangerous it is to call the military the enemies of the American people. No one was supposed to get really hurt...

Guess 5: He's actually the most patriotic of Americans and took it upon himself to lead the uprising of the American people against the Tyrannical Trump regime, as prompted by the "Sedition" video.

If you can't tell, my guesses are getting wilder and wilder, because I haven't settled on anything I find very plausible. Anyone else feel the same?

I think Guess 5 is actually a subset of Guess 1. I'd be surprised if an Afghan were a full-on anti-Trump #resistance supporter, but stranger things have happened. And I don't know any other reason a Muslim in general or an Afghan specifically would attack National Guard members, but add in a little crazy and who knows? Whatever the reason, I'd bet on Guess 1.

Why do I get as worked up or more worked up about stuff in America than in my hometown? Well, for one thing, it's a lot more interesting.

Media and other kinds of second-hand experience forms a huge part of our personal lives and our 'experience'. In a way, we all live in CA/NY/WA now.

Alternatively: he's a traumatized nutcase and because he's brown the killing is or becomes or must be political.

If he were white we'd just shrug and ultimately say he was nuts.

He's nuts, for sure, but even crazy people have some kind of internal logic . I'm not asking, "Why did he attack the National Guards?" I'm asking, "Why did he attack the National Guard in DC instead of the ones in Portland, California, Chicago, Tennessee, etc." Or is DC the only place they are actually deployed, in which case what is with the Liberal histrionics?

If he were white we'd just shrug and ultimately say he was nuts.

The NG in DC under Trump's orders is sufficiently right-coded that everyone except the left and the MSM would be assuming it was left-wing political violence until proven otherwise. Some of those people would claim that shooting a right-coded target is per se left-wing political violence regardless of the shooter's actual motives - there are still people on the Motte saying this about Thomas Crooks.

Sure, his being a nut found expression through shooting the National Guard, but the difference is that because he's brown it's assumed to be a trait of his racial identity and/or part of an organized plot.

Compare the Cybertruck bombing, which was similar in involving a US Special Forces soldier who served overseas who drove a long distance to launch a nutty but (in that case explicitly) politically motivated protest attack, involved a white guy so nobody said "THIS IS A NATIONAL CRISIS WE NEED TO INVESTIGATE EVERY SPECIAL FORCES VETERAN." There's some mumbling about overheated political rhetoric and stochastic terrorism, which nobody really takes seriously. Or, for that matter, much speculation about intelligence connections.

An Afghan is assumed to be some mix of congenitally terroristic, part of some organized group, both necessarily related to his origin.

Compare the Cybertruck bombing, which was similar in involving a US Special Forces soldier who served overseas who drove a long distance to launch a nutty but (in that case explicitly) politically motivated protest attack, involved a white guy so nobody said "THIS IS A NATIONAL CRISIS WE NEED TO INVESTIGATE EVERY SPECIAL FORCES VETERAN."

The idea that veterans are dangerous has been around for a very long time. Here's a 2012 article decrying it, and it's obviously much older than that; First Blood is based on the idea. And in fact the idea of some sort of plot by a group of veterans was involved in the cybertruck bombing WAS investigated.

Afghan national

We now have a new addition to the list embarrassingly wrong Scott Alexander quotes:

Many Afghans had collaborated with the Americans, eg as translators, in exchange for a promise of US citizenship. As the Taliban advanced, they called in the promise, begging to be allowed to flee to America before they got punished as traitors. The article focused on a heroic effort by certain immigration bureaucrats, who worked around the clock with minimal sleep for the last few weeks before Kabul fell, trying to get the citizenship forms filled in and approved for as many translators as possible. It made an impression on me because nobody was opposed to the translators getting citizenship, and the bureaucrats were themselves the people in charge of approving citizenship applications, so what exactly was forcing them to go to such desperate lengths?

The relative proportion of translators in the Afghan population is challenged only by the proportion of journalists in the Gazan population.

And hospitals/hospital personnel

Anybody casting aspersions on the 80% of Palestine's children who are simultaneously journalists and doctors should be chided

As somebody who's always been skeptical of the journalist numbers. I do assume if you're simply marking anybody who's ever taken footage or had an interview for journalistic purposes you could somehow explain Palestine's insane per Capita population.

...Or Israel could be targeting journalists.

These guys were our friends in a war zone so they must make for great neighbors.

Whilst I understand the fuzzy feels of helping those who help you, one would have preferred a sort of quarantine zone or special village for the empires mercenaries.

That being said, I think it's harsh to call Scott embarrassingly wrong based on these events in specific and that quote in particular. For starters, I'm not sure it's fair to assume any hardline position on small scale Afghani immigration based on the quote. He's talking about something else, no?.

But assuming he is, the awful performance of Afghani immigrants in Europe is a fact. So one could perhaps call him naïve on the topic of Afghani 'assimilation' if he can't imagine a reason to be against importing a fair number of them.

Afghan immigrants in Europe are mostly refugees who used the people-trafficker network to arrive overland. It is conventional wisdom in Frontex that various hostile countries, including Russia and Belarus, are intentionally facilitating refugee transit in order to destabilise the EU.

That is a differently selected group than people flown out of Afghanistan because they convinced US authorities that they were collaborators at risk of Taliban reprisal, and expecting different outcomes as a result isn't foolish. I don't know enough about the behaviour of Afghan immigrants in the US to know to what extent you are getting better results than us. One guy turning out to be a disorganised Islamist killer is weak Bayesian evidence that you are not, of course.

I mean Afghanis who speak english well enough to pose as translators are a very selected group.

They only have to speak Pashto better than Americans and to speak English better than other locals. That's two bars that are not very hard to clear.

They could very well turn out to be useful. I have a couple friends who are Middle Eastern (Iraqi-) Americans that I’ve known since childhood. They once told me they laughed pretty hard when they watched Zero Dark Thirty and asked why the scenes had Pakistanis speaking Arabic (they speak Urdu). It’s one of the ways Americans don’t understand other cultures.

If the 'translators' shoot at police / guardsman does it matter if they're doing it for Islamic reasons and / or mental health reasons?

There was bodcam footage of the one from earlier im the year. https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/northern-virginia/fairfax-police-release-body-cam-video-of-police-shooting-in-greenbriar/3921110/

If the 'translators' shoot at police / guardsman does it matter if they're doing it for Islamic reasons and / or mental health reasons?

No - of course it doesn't. I don't even think it is always a distinction with a difference - given the total ineffectiveness of disorganised political violence I assume anyone engaging in it is batshit until proven otherwise.

I was wondering if your Afghan refugees (who are weakly selected) behave better than European Afghan refugees (who are not selected at all) - the point I was making is that you really need statistics to settle this question rather than dualling anecdotes.

Yeah, maybe we could run the experiment in other people's countries first.

Refugees are also selected. They are the most privileged in that they have the money to afford the trip, and also the most cynical and selfish, in that they are willing to break laws across half the planet in order to make a quick buck.

How is that wrong?

Edit: I have no qualms saying my comments aged poorly.

The Afghan 'collaborators' were often drug-ridden, totally undisciplined, shamelessly corrupt, traitors and/or child rapists. These are the guys who gave us green-on-blue attacks. That's why the combined power of the US bloc lost to semi-literate goat-herders, the people we were allied with were in many respects worse than the Taliban and commanded less legitimacy among the population.

Plus the average Afghan refugee in the West is one of the most rapey and ill-mannered refugees.

That's why the combined power of the US bloc lost to semi-literate goat-herders, the people we were allied with were in many respects worse than the Taliban and commanded less legitimacy among the population.

This sounds like a cope. I am certain that allying with child-fucking warlords did not help win the hearts and minds of the Afghan population, but I also think that the eventual outcome was overdetermined the minute W invaded. Even if the US had made a point of murdering every alleged boy-fucker on the spot, the fact remains that few Afghans preferred freedom and democracy to the point where they were willing to die for it, while plenty were willing to die for the Taliban cause.

We could've installed a more effective puppet government and that would've worked. The Soviet puppet govt outlived the Soviet Union! Really not that hard to administer basic justice and secure a power base.

Realistically the US and co weren't going to do that or win because of these political factors you've identified - because freedom and liberal democracy was the goal. Would've been far easier to install a friendly govt that doesn't shelter Islamist terrorists. The bulk of the people we allied with were either feeble or corruptible, they were willing to give lip service to democracy or whatever they thought we would pay for. That's the problem.

Also I think the political value of murdering child rapists is underrated. That was the Taliban's original source of legitimacy, that was their starting mythology, hanging paedophiles from a tank barrel.

And it's worth noting that when we went in, the US still had the geniuses behind operation condor. Say what you will, but Pinochet was not soft on crime. It wasn't lack of ability.

Not with US public opinion we couldn't.

"Administering justice and securing a power base" are, to the media and the US public, genocide and war crimes. We have to send our diplomats to hawk sex change surgeries to hillside goatherders and offer to "learn from Women of Color" who have an explosive belt locked around their waist by the warlord their family sold them to.

Are we talking about the translators who were embeded with and beloved by US military units or the local warlords who got the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" treatment?

The program was not limited to translators, and Scott acknowledges that with "eg as translators". Anyone who worked for the American or coalition forces for at least 12 months can get a special immigrant visa.

Even steelmanning your argument though, why would we grant citizenship to someone willing to sell out their country to an invading power for a paycheck? When they swear their oath of citizenship to the United States, promising to bear arms on behalf of the US when required by law, and support and defend the Constitution, why would we believe them?

Even steelmanning your argument though, why would we grant citizenship to someone willing to sell out their country to an invading power for a paycheck?

As an incentive to future collaborators? "Help us out, and you can earn your citizenship. Also, if everything does go to hell, we won't leave you in the lurch to be executed by the government you turned against".

The incentives seem misaligned when we reward our collaborators for failure. We spent decades and tens of billions of dollars training the ANA only for them to surrender practically without a fight. Giving them the prospect of an escape route to the US likely weakened their resolve rather than strengthening it. It also doesn't seem like the sort of behavior you'd expect from people who genuinely believe they will be executed or harshly persecuted by the new government.

I can see making an exception for rare cases that demonstrate remarkable courage or character as a PR strategy, but extending it to just about any collaborator is completely misguided.

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Even steelmanning your argument though, why would we grant citizenship to someone willing to sell out their country to an invading power for a paycheck?

Because the Taliban isn't "their country", it is just a group of thugs even if it is located in their country. You wouldn't ask why someone in a place run by the Mafia, or a Jew in Nazi Germany, would sell out "their country".

If they are doing it only for the money, sure, but if they are doing it for other reasons, they still need to eat.

I’m not at all convinced a large majority of Afghans view the Taliban that way. Either now or when they first came to power. In the case of the latter, they were originally greeted as liberators because they were at least bringing some kind of order to the place. Believe it or not, that’s how ISIS initially gained a large swath of supporters in Syria because they stemmed a great deal of corruption among the local population.

I also think the American “PR campaign” if you want to call it that for the Taliban is kind of funny.

There is a line in the sand for collaborating with a foreign invader to depose your government and occupy your country, which comes with unavoidable mass murder and atrocities. For Afghanistan, the death toll is estimated at around 200,000, along with the displacement of millions. The government actively trying to genocide you certainly crosses that line. The government enforcing a strict interpretation of Islamic law? That's a lot more questionable. Even a shitty government is often better than a foreign occupation and a low-intensity insurgency. Collaborating means obtaining a personal benefit from and enabling a process that imposes mass suffering on one's countrymen. I think the willingness to do so should be considered an anti-signal when it comes to citizenship, and certainly not an automatic qualification.

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Even steelmanning your argument though, why would we grant citizenship to someone willing to sell out their country to an invading power for a paycheck?

So your claim is that the Taliban regime ca. 2004 was the obvious Schelling point for Afghans interested in the long-term thriving of their country, and those who did not support the Taliban were clearly defecting from the common good of the country?

Personally, I think the loyalty of a population is earned, not given. Citizens of the US or modern Germany should display some loyalty to their government because it represents an equilibrium which has a higher utility than any other equilibrium they are likely to establish working against the government.

By contrast, less optimal regimes do not deserve loyalty. In 1945, Hitler was just the mobster in power, Stauffenberg blowing him up would not have let to a lower utility equilibrium, hence it was not treason to try to do so. Nor were the exile Germans who aided the Allies betraying Germany, because even with the Soviets, Ally-occupied Germany was a far better place for the Germans to thrive than Nazi Germany.

The real world is not Civilization where governments change but annexation is forever.

So your claim is that the Taliban regime ca. 2004 was the obvious Schelling point for Afghans interested in the long-term thriving of their country, and those who did not support the Taliban were clearly defecting from the common good of the country?

No. I just don't think they are demonstrating qualities that would make them uniquely valuable citizens, worthy of being fast-tracked through a special process. We have plenty of carrots and sticks for dealing with collaborators: money, status, security... And if we want our local collaborators to be effective, they should be invested in the success of our effort for the long haul. If their plan is to be on an evacuation flight out, why not staff the army with soldiers who only exist on paper, and rob the treasury blind?

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By contrast, less optimal regimes do not deserve loyalty. In 1945, Hitler was just the mobster in power, Stauffenberg blowing him up would not have let to a lower utility equilibrium, hence it was not treason to try to do so.

The Allies did polling in West Germany a year after the war ended in 45’. Hitler was still remarkably popular even then. Different societies have different attitudes about what they believe their relationship to their governments should be.

For you to have been a patriot back then you’d had to have actively opposed your own government, essentially knowing you were going to be rounded up and executed as these people undoubtedly knew. And they are certainly heroes for what they did.

Ally-occupied Germany was a far better place for the Germans to thrive than Nazi Germany.

It always boggles my mind how so many revisionist types can think otherwise. At heart I think a lot of people have this suppressed desire that they wish to have seen the Nazis win out and to have gotten their racial utopia. If you look at Nazi society it didn’t work very well for the people who were in it. And it certainly didn’t end very well for the people who were in it. Some people definitely benefitted but it wasn’t a government of its citizens, but of a particular category of citizens who the Nazis saw populating Germany’s future.

It’s also why the Allies took very careful steps in their postwar planning of Germany to crush Prussia and its influence over Germany. It historically was a massive fountainhead for its supremely militaristic attitude over all aspects of society. There’s a reason why it was called the “Iron Kingdom” and the “Sparta of Europe.” States like that tend to have a short half life. The ancient Assyrian Empire ended the same way, eventually declaring war on almost everyone within its neighborhood and having a religious ideology that demands you bring order and stability to the world outside by conquering the chaotic neighbors among the fringes of your borderlands.

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why would we grant citizenship to someone willing to sell out their country to an invading power for a paycheck?

I don't really get omni-nationalism. Americans believing that the US is the greatest and deserves extra status/power/deference/etc? Sure. Ditto for the French, Brazilians, Chinese, or even Afghans. I don't see anything strange about different people having different values and opinions, even if they can't see the obvious truth that Canada is better than any of them (despite its current troubles).

Putting every country at the top of the list (but only when projecting your opinions onto other people) is a different matter. If you think your homeland is the greatest, then why do you want every foreigner to express incorrect opinions? If you're a cosmopolitan moral relativist who thinks there is no true "greatest" place and it's all opinions and tradeoffs, then why not let other people believe that too?

Saying that people should oppose you makes me feel like nationalism is a debate-club-style issue that's fun to talk about, instead of an honestly expressed and important core belief. Heck, I rarely see sports team omni-supremacy anywhere ("cheer for your home team, whichever one that is"). It's all either neutrality or people cheering for their specific favored team.

YMMV, but "embedded with" =/= "beloved by"

Terps are like officers. Maybe someone somewhere had a good one, but for all the rest of us, they're the people most likely to get us killed.

I'm talking about the Afghan military and well-connected associates of the old regime, which would presumably make up the bulk of those who got away. There may well be many decent people, translators amongst them. Generally, the population of Afghan refugees as a whole is badly behaved.

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/ive-worked-refugees-decades-europes-afghan-crime-wave-mind-21506

So, not the translators Scott was referring to?

Many Afghans had collaborated with the Americans, eg as translators,

That is what he said. Translators are included as part of this pool but do not make up the not the bulk of refugees.

https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2021/09/22/two-fort-mccoy-afghan-refugees-charged-child-sex-spousal-abuse/5820807001/

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But the collaborator in Guy Ritchie's "The Covenant" seemed really nice

nobody was opposed to the translators getting citizenship

I can guarantee you that there were people who were opposed to giving Afghan refugees citizenship.

a heroic effort by certain immigration bureaucrats

I guess this one is an opinion, but I would not classify the people who rushed immigration forms for nationals of a terror-stricken country as “heroic”. Over the course of the war, there was a constant stream of Afghans who we thought were on our side becoming terrorists. The people administering this program should have known that.

And how do you verify that they are who the claim to be and harbor no jihadist sympathy?

Arnaud Amalric has some thoughts.

Motive?

Supposedly he shouted “Allahu Akbar” while opening fire so apparently Islamic lone wolf terrorism.

Edit: Please disregard the fact that the shooter was employed by the CIA in Afghanistan. Please disregard the fact that this shooting has spurred a comprehensive review of all Green Card holders in the United States. :^)

This genuinely could be a real false flag.

No idea, but I imagine that I might get pretty angry if I helped US forces in a war zone but was then not immediately given US citizenship in return and instead had to spend years navigating asylum and visa application processes. This, even if I had never been promised citizenship, as this man of course was not, since I would feel slighted.

Or perhaps I don't have an eye for Afghans, and they all look the same to me.

To a weasel, another weasel is weaselly weckognised.

But a stoat? That's stoatally different!

Brian Jacques approves of this post.

Mission: You are undercover behind enemy lines. Eliminate as many uniformed enemy personnel as you can. Your life is expendable, your mission is not.

Starting equipment: One handgun and 15 rounds. Anything else you have to acquire on your own.

The good news is that perpetrator's level of human capital was, as usual, not very high. Not to overtly fed post (or @KulakRevolt post), but given such task, average mottizen even with no military training would be able to rack considerably higher score.

Of course, in current annals of ineffective terrorism/resistance nothing beats this episode.

Officials describe a coordinated plot in which about 12 individuals in black clothing and body armor allegedly used fireworks and vandalism to draw out officers and ambush them with rifles. One Alvarado police officer was shot in the neck and released from the hospital a short time later.

Local reporting and court documents identify ten individuals arrested shortly after; an alleged shooter was arrested on July 15 after a manhunt, and several alleged associates were also arrested.

I am near certain that feds inside this group provided them with blank ammo, the alternative is just too ghastly to contemplate.

I suspect they simply hadn't trained, aside perhaps from target shooting. They only fired 11 rounds, and only one hit.

Or just shit themselves on exposure to live fire. Not to disparage the average mental health of the trans diaspora but the vast majority of people aren't gonna do anything in an actual firefight much less a bunch of first timers with no real training who probably assumed they'd easily takedown the police in the first salvo

This, it smacks of a group that did a lot of reading but had minimal actual field experience.

Mission: You are undercover behind enemy lines. Eliminate as many uniformed enemy personnel as you can. Your life is expendable, your mission is not.

Mission... Given by whom? Known how?

What do mottizens mean, when they reference "fed posting?"

I am near certain that feds inside this group provided them with blank ammo, the alternative is just too ghastly to contemplate.

Inside the Alvarado group? What does that have to do with this? If so, was it proven that there were "feds inside" that group?

Fed posting means posting like a federal agent, which means posting to entrap others. You are encouraging violence, action, imminent action, etc.

It's basically edgy posting, but it rings true in that you find examples of feds definitely entrapping people, and ginning up plots out of nowhere.

What do mottizens mean, when they reference "fed posting?"

Fedposting is an Internet term in general, not a Motte thing. It means that someone is posting pretty openly about doing very illegal stuff (generally violence but could be drug dealing or something of that nature I guess). The etymology is that federal agents have been known to stir people up to do illegal things, then arrest them for it. Thus, if one were to say "we should go shoot a bunch of people" or whatever, they are posting like one might expect one of those federal agents to. Thus, fedposting.

average mottizen even with no military training would be able to rack considerably higher score.

I seriously doubt it. You're seriously outnumbered and outgunned, so the only thing you have going for you is the element of surprise. After your first few kills things will get exponentially harder.

The best way to get more kills is probably to go the serial killer route, and get them while they are off duty, but I don't think this really accomplishes the spirit of the mission.

Probably better ways to deploy a truck and/or suicide bombing for an immediate highscore.

...

More than 300 West Virginia National Guard members were deployed to Washington in August. Last week, about 160 of them volunteered to extend their deployment until the end of the year while the others returned to West Virginia just over a week ago.

https://apnews.com/article/national-guard-shooting-dc-c5785dd8920d2d1ac7d71fab769faf5f

How does volunteering to extend a deployment work?

I'm curious about the motive of the shooter (it'd be very American if this was attempted suicide-by-cop gone horribly wrong) - I don't think America is on the verge of a second civil war... but I would expect an American Civil War II in the current era to consist of Troubles-esque terrorism and small-scale paramilitary skirmishes.

My impression is that barring some sort of state of emergency or legislation regarding the matter, the federal government can't nationalize state national guardsmen over extended periods of time. But if the relevant individuals wish to volunteer to remain the feds can keep on paying them, so as long as the state consents to it. It was a sweet gig for one hundred and sixty people who got OT pay and expenses reimbursed in DC - right up until now.


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