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Notes -
I will preface this by saying my voting pattern went Obama, Obama, Biden, Trump. It’s been a real philosophical adventure.
DEI has been in the military from Day 1 of my career. There was a female servicemember who won the “Female Servicemember of the Quarter” award the same quarter she won the “Servicemember of the Quarter” award at my first duty station. Obviously, that’s one more award than I could have won each quarter, and awards matter in the military. I’m not saying I would have won, I didn’t know that gal and she might have been Queen of the Amazons. She just had more opportunity than I did.
In boot camp, women received the same degree of PT God recognition as the men did, despite the female standards being 20 fewer pushups and a minute slower run than I was already accomplishing, and I was just at the low end of the good male PTers, something like 10 pushups and 30 seconds off the top guys. But the women got praised and rewarded for being objectively worse, and I just carried on with life. It was the water in which I swam and I saw nothing wrong with it.
Obama just made it clear to the upper echelons in the military that they were going to stop saying things like “Women aren’t as strong as men,” and “Young women in a platoon of young men are going to cause order and discipline problems, and their chance to girlboss around is not worth the sacrifice.”
That was the point at which Skynet began learning at a geometric rate. He shuffled out the old guard and replaced them with people more aligned with him. From then on, the Pentagon just kept sending up more and more prog general promotion recommendations. At the time, this was of course a right-wing conspiracy theory, as I smugly told many people.
Since then, I would say that the military stopped being an inherently conservative (slow progressive) organization, and has switched to being progressive at the top echelons. It’s also much more prog at the lower echelons than it was when I came in. But we’ll see how Hegseth’s purges shake out and if people are willing to stay if a culture shift actually happens. Hegseth needs to get his own Pentagon Skynet learning at a hyperbolic rate if he wants to succeed.
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