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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34590 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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It is absolutely true. Racism is virtually nonexistent in the military. Especially compared to academia and the kinds of NIMBY upper class blue communities who believe immigration is a good thing, so long as it doesn’t impact them.

Sexism is a different story.

Racism is virtually nonexistent in the military.

Depends on what you mean by that. If you mean there is very little actual race-hate, absolutely. But soldiers are some of the most inveterate users of racial slurs in a ball-busting way. So if your metric is "used a racial slur", then the military is hilariously racist. If we mean some deep-seated bigotry against other races, it's a rounding error.

One outlier I've observed is the attitudes of service members towards the populations of hostile nations they are occupying. The only person that I've heard IRL unironically discussing the merits of genocide, was an active duty service member pondering whether it might be morally correct to glass the middle east, due to the pervasiveness of human rights abuses he had witnessed while stationed there.

I suppose this is technically Jingoism rather than racism, but it definitely bled into his domestic views eg. immigration from Arabic countries.

That's not bigotry, that's just reality. It's one thing to hear stories, it's another to watch what goes on with your own eyes. I'd put it to you that anyone who had to do that job would come out hating whoever he thought were the people responsible. Part of this is just the dynamics of war, we have to dehumanize the opposition a bit to do our jobs. But the other is just that the middle east is so incredibly fucked up. And it's not one or two people, it's everyone. That's why some of us are a bit leery of bringing over people who have been socialized to beat women and rape anything that can be held down.

Well, it was virtually nonexistent in the military. The DEI crowd are doing their level best to pump those numbers up as high and fast as possible. The recent controversy over the recommended reading list for officers is one example that made it out of the filter bubble.

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