This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Something I've seen today:
US Navy Used Drag Queen Influencer To Attract A ‘Wide Range’ Of New Troops As Recruitment Plummets
So, admittedly, I do not know much about the recruiting to the Navy (or any other military branch) and as a first generation immigrant, may misunderstand some larger things. But does it really make any sense to anybody else? I mean, sure, there are people that choose to lead this lifestyle, and I personally have no problem with that. But I always thought the intersection between them and the people that go to the military - and also the people that the military actually wants - is if not zero then small enough. And yet, this is what is happening, and I am struggling to make sense of any of it.
As I see it, the military is probably the last place that would be under pressure to go woke - the Left hates it unconditionally and passionately anyway, it is impossible to "cancel" it in any meaningful way, you can not really orchestrate an ideological boycott against the military (they have trillions of dollars, and most businesses would give an arm and a leg to be a military supplier, as I understand... maybe Google can afford to choose, but even they at the end are glad to be friends) and the advancement system does not really depend on the SJWs in any way up to the very top where only the very few get the chance to be anyway.
So, I see only these possible explanations:
Army recruiting is stunningly incompetent and literally has no idea what they are doing and why, they literally are desperate to try absolutely anything, on the tiny chance it may work, because they are completely out of ideas and can not think of anything that would attract the youth to join the military anymore, so they are just running through the options, however bizzarre, because it couldn't be any worse than it already is. Are things really this bad?
It is part of some kind of 4D chess complex strategy that I fail to understand because I am too dumb. Please ELI5 it to me then.
I am stunningly ignorant and there's actually a huge untapped reserve of drag queens that dream about joining the Navy (and the Army, and the Marines) as long as their penchant for womanface performances ceases to be a barrier. This is so significant audience that the need to address it absolutely overrides any negative effects that can be caused by such outreach effort to traditional macho-man audience which has been the traditional target of the military recruting efforts before. Is that the case? Any data I could see that supports it?
Any other explanations?
I think 1) military recruiting is stunningly incompetent is true, but that it’s also leaving out that military recruiting is a lot harder than it used to be for reasons that are not actually military recruiters’ fault, so they’ll try more left-field ideas.
More options
Context Copy link
The US Navy isn't about defence, the threat of invasion for the US is next to zero. The US Navy exists to ensure liberal hegemony. Their job is to ensure that the world has Netflix, Amazon and is run by black rock. Their job is to ensure the world's culture is super hero movies and McDonalds. Their enemies are de facto civilizational states such as China, Persian/Iran and Russia. Their job is essentially to replace them with radical individualism. The pride flag is the flag of the American empire. A pride parade is the ultimate sign of victory for the American empire and no two countries with official pride parades have ever fought a war against each other.
A transgender woman of colour makes more sense in the US military than a conservative white man, since her values align with the mission. The most important factor for a military is loyalty to the system and the values that the military fights for. A transgender soldier has fully committed to the American empire.
Chelsea Manning has joined the chat.
I was under the impression she only really transitioned after she was arrested and sentenced. Like, sure, that wouldn't rule out her wanting to transition when she was still in the military, but still.
I think the party line is that the transgender person has always been of the post-transitional gender since birth, and the transition is just "affirming" that fact. So Chelsea Manning is and has always been a female. Also, Wikipedia says:
And the last thing we want to do is to disbelieve a woman.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What are you talking about those states in the way they exist today are very recent creations. Iran wasn't even Shia until the Safavid Dynasty and wasn't ruled by Islamists until less than 50 years ago and the young people revolting now against the regime aren't CIA plants. China was a US ally until it was taken over by communists and the Republic of China in Taiwan remains a US ally. Russia was a monarchy until it became communist suddenly and was an ally of the USA in WW2.
These states were neutral or allied to the USA in living memory and the ideologies governing them were pushed on the population in living memory. These aren't 'civilizational' differences.
These civilizations weren't Shia or communist historically.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Don't forget that In the Navy was also commissioned by the USN. They are just continuing the tradition of embracing transgressive entertainment.
More options
Context Copy link
I believe there is fairly good evidence demonstrating T participation in the military is well above T population representation. Speculation for the cause was some combination of dysphoria causing some Ts to reach to the extremes of their current gender expression before about facing and turning to the extreme of another along with a jobs program that was viewed as relatively safe for an extreme minority. Now that dysphoria as a necessity for representation has fallen out of favor and the job protection extends to most white collar professions I would say neither currently apply but there's an established historical precedence similar to IBM's black jobs programs and Universities preparing for a post-Affirmative Action world where there is a small slice of pie available to be eaten for a motivated sect.
Of course, Ts and drag queens are not the same thing but in the current cultural moment they've been bundled together. The cause of this campaign is no different from any other T-catering cultural campaign of the past few years - they are exceptionally good at entryism and influence peddling with decision makers. Why did Bud Light hire Dylan Mulvaney? Because the people in charge of Bud Light's Marketing Department are the type of people who would hire Dylan Mulvaney. The military is no different
More options
Context Copy link
4 - After being on a boat for a couple months getting sucked off any way possible gets a lot more attractive, and the thought of a fellow sailor putting in the effort of doing their makeup and wearing a wig strongly appeals to you (and the women in the navy are famously below average).
Now I'm curious. Which branch of the service is reputed to have the hottest women? I honestly didn't know that there was thought to be a difference one way or the other.
Air Force, and it ain't close.
Well duh, if they're flying in a plane, you can't get that close.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This seems like misreading the reality of what the military answers to. The military is beholden to political wills and thus has plenty of political pressure to advance the agendas of the current political machine.
Here's one example. There's been a lot of drama about them not being so forward with the performance of female personnel. If women underperform or are under-recruited it's assumed to be an institutional problem, and they are scrutinized for it, so they relax the standards and aggressively try to attract more women while disregarding any negative consequences. It should not be a surprise they would try to appeal to current-day social trends. Look at how much women in the military are celebrated in every field you can find them. Female pilots in particular seem to have countless articles about them. They see it as great publicity, which tells a lot about who they mean to appeal to.
Since there's no war going on, there really isn't much demand for the military to operate at peak efficiency. There are fewer objective opportunities for people to distinguish themselves, but one good way to set yourself apart is by appealing to today's social trends. Hire the most women, be the most LGBT positive, and so on. It is purely a political game now, and so they look to where the winds are blowing politically.
As far as the military being a particularly unwoke organization, that really isn't true outside of combat arms units. You can find some real red tribe mindsets endemic within infantry battalions or special operations forces, but the further you get away from the grunt mindset, the more the people involved tend to have beliefs that reflect those of the general population. The Navy and Air Force have very little of that culture and, with the exception of their most austere units, are much closer to your average American corporate office environment than they are to badass hooah killing machines, so it should be no surprise one of them would run an ad like this.
I dread to think people in the army actually think this is a switch that can be turned on and off at will. Today we're at shit efficiency, tomorrow China invades Taiwan and - click! - we're at 100% efficiency. Hopefully the US will never get into a war with some real hungry and aggressive state anymore - because it would take a lot of losses to dig out of "shit efficiency" standards. I mean, losing to Taliban is shameful, but ultimately inconsequential by itself. The fact that China and Russia stop fearing the army of drag queens would be much worse. It very well could be the US army is so powerful it can beat China and Russia with one hand tied behind their back and while in drag and on high heels. But having to actually prove it would already be a huge loss - both politically and literally, in lives and economic consequences. And I am concerned operating at shit efficiency would lead to exactly that.
Every military is like this to some extent. Few enough major wars are fought that nobody really knows whether Taiwan, China, Korea etc. will hold up in a hot war. Just look at Russia's performance and how one of the most feared military machines turned out to be mostly hollow due to decades of rot.
People think of the Chinese government as being hyper-efficient and centralized. It's not. The central political committees have limited power to set policy for the rest of the government - because there is just too much of the latter to efficiently control. That's why China builds huge ghost cities or spaffs billions on totally unfeasible BRI initiatives. This is not to say that the PLA suffers from the same dysfunction. It might do, or it might not - just as in January of 2022, nobody knew, even in Russia, that the Russia military was so severely unready for war.
Anybody who has been in Russian army or knows somebody who has (which is about 100% of Russian-speaking or adjacent world) knows Russian army is a huge pile of dung, mostly dangerous by having tons of bodies to throw into the fire and gigatons of explosives accumulated over the Soviet years, which even with heroic efforts of all praporshiks combined could not be completely sold off or wasted. There's just too many of them. Well, this and also nukes. Organizationally, morally, technologically - Russian army is more a horde than a modern army. But it is a huge horde, controlling the huge pile of weaponry. And the huge pile of hydrocarbons, which the West is glad to buy, giving them the money to buy even more weaponry. It's not the efficiency of the horde that is feared, it is the size of it. And also its almost complete insensitivity to losses. Russians already lost almost 200k people - and there's next to zero unrest. In fact, as long as they have money, their recruiting ability is only limited by the organizational factors (which are complete shit) rather than the lack of human resources. Imagine the US losing comparable number of troops in a war - like half a million? That's like Civil War and WW2 combined. Vietnam losses were 1/10th of that, and is still seen as national trauma of generational proportions. For Russia, it's meh. That's what is so hard to deal with there.
More options
Context Copy link
Disagree, it was obvious the russian army wasn’t up to snuff, based on technology and budget alone . I said before the war: “ We should buy an exact replica of the russian army and store it in poland somewhere, just in case it’s as amazing as american cold warriors think it is.“
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That hypothetical was pretty much what happened in Korea. The US Army was pretty much written off at the end of the 1940's, since it was believed the Air Force would simply nuke any rival into submission, and ground forces were outdated for any offensive war (the Navy had to fight tooth and nail to stay relevant and keep its air branch). As a result, with the Army being such a low priority, they were vastly unprepared for a conventional ground war whose doctrine forbade the use of nuclear weapons in Korea, with many lessons learned in WWII having to be relearned, and most ground units being unequipped relative to what you'd expect of a superpower.
If we were to get into a war tomorrow we'd definitely be looking at a degree of unreadiness. We've been solving most of our problems with minimal commitment since the war on terror wound down, with the name of the game being "no boots on the ground," which really means "special operations and aviation assets only." (Although right now there's very little even of that going on.)
That error seems to come up again and again for the last 100 years. Strategic bombing proved to be useless, "just nuking the enemy" proved to be a fallacy, the ideas about "we don't need tanks and artillery, we will just destroy the enemy from afar" have been thoroughly debunked in Ukraine... And yet, somehow the galaxy brains of strategy still don't learn the lesson.
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think we've been in "off war mode" for long enough to be a significant degree of unreadiness. In the grand scheme of things we pretty much just wrapped up a 2-decade long war. It wasn't against a conventional army by any means but frankly, a lot of that looks easier than the desert fighting of Iraq and Afganistan.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The 'long peace' is still more or less intact. Over the past 70 years, military intervention has been to secure US political interests, not out of necessity like the Second World War. America has become complacent, because it can.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Recruitment numbers are falling, and much of combat is becoming automated or remote anyway. Unlike marines, top physical fitness is not needed.
More options
Context Copy link
I was thinking of trans the other day when someone I followed came out trans. Smart person. And passable so couldn’t tell.
It got me thinking a problem with trans is it feels a lot like stolen valor. Taking the benefits society gives to females without being female. The natural sympathies and support that females get in life. If men fail we are expected to deal with it. Your business fails at 50? Bye bye wife and go live an $800 a month apartment. Their is (and I believe deserved) societal support for females in society even in the wokest communities that a man would never receive.
I think some of the desire for m-f transitions is to escape the responsibilities that men naturally take on.
Yeah, the reaction to MTF transsexuals is reminiscent of "stolen valor" to me as well. I used to remark as such on the subreddit on time to time, but most recently:
>Hence why MTF transsexuals garner much more skepticism than FTM transsexuals, even from normies. The "trans" culture war for adults is almost entirely about MTF transsexuals. MTF transsexuals are potentially trying to coopt the Wonderfulness, privileges, and protections afforded to women, like stolen valor. Whereas FTM are subscribing to life on a more difficult setting.
It's like a reset button on life, hoping the slider gets dragged up on "wonderfulness" and down on "burden of performance" upon the re-roll.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Burgers?
…A bit off topic but this made me think that second-rate economists, utilitarians and other autistic behavioral scheme enjoyers who can't tell the map from the territory have poisoned the water supply somewhat.
Humans respond to incentives and pursue goals, but humans are not, by and large, maximizers (EY and SBF are I guess), they're behavior- and thought-executors. It may be the case that even generally useful AI agents are hard to build any other way, although some folks try. The rational economic agent is a spook, a simplified model; not in the sense that a real Rational Economic Agent is hairier, biased and makes mistakes when generating rational plans, but in that it's literally a sketch, fundamentally dissimilar from the real issue even if convenient for some analyses. Implicitly thinking that people maximize stuff is almost as boneheaded as imagining that a 130 IQ person has 130 grains of intelligence or something, it's a profound misunderstanding about the ontology on which the debate is premised, its terms are defined and measurements are done.
With that in mind, my answer is boring. People writing this army recruitment strategy (Stonetoss really is a genius) are not maximizing recruitment KPIs. They're not maximizing trans representation in the battlefield either. They're doing what they feel like they should be doing in their life, given their background and norms in their social circle. «It's called being a decent human being», you know? They're not grey-haired generals (but on this note, even Milley is mocked by tradcons, isn't he?) – they're part of the same HR/veryonline/Moldbuggian Cathedral mental blob that controls and molds the lion's share of labor pool for people-oriented jobs. They're what the military thinks is the safest bet in this dire situation of volunteer shortage; they're professionals. And professionals try not to fall behind the times. It's 2k23, so you've got to empower and platform trans women and women of color, what's the problem?
Now, certainly the recruitment may not go all that well (it may go well in the long run too: perhaps trans soldiers will prove much more useful in our transhuman augmented future). But anyway, who knows if an underwhelming harvest is due to aversion to the trans stuff (and even if it were, what are you suggesting they do – commit trans erasure over some KPI bullshit?! They'll walk out and cancel your family if you're unlucky) or just because those simple to a fault cisheteronormative Nebraskan boys already feel like they're doing their part of valor and sacrifice working and paying taxes – instead of flipping out and shooting up some symbol of their hopeless cultural subjugation by the smug coastal Elves who make those ads.
Well, @sodiummuffin said it better.
More options
Context Copy link
They’re drawing inspiration from A Confederacy of Dunces.
More options
Context Copy link
They are not trying to recruit drag queens. It is right there on the third bullet: "“An effort is, indeed, being made to connect recruiting to the interests and concerns of Gen-Z.” They are trying to show potential recruits that they aren't being asked to commit to years of hanging out with closed-minded Neanderthals, which is probably how a lot of potential recruits view military types. This article cites a military poll indicating that "dislike of military lifestyle" is one reason for reluctance to enlist.
Yeah, it's not entirely clear to me why we woould want to recruit people who dislike military lifestyle.
The point is to convince those people that the military lifestyle is not what they assume it is: If the military is Ok with soldiers doing drag shows, perhaps is it not so bad after all.
I’m pretty sure ‘dislike of military lifestyle’ is more ‘not wanting to do push-ups at 5 am and get shipped to wherever the hell Uncle Sam wants with no recourse while being subjected to random drug tests’, and not ‘concerned at the military’s embrace of gender roles’.
It might well be more that, but it is not exclusively that, and moreover being shipped wherever Uncle Sam wants is never going to change. In contrast, being tolerant of personal lifestyle choices which don't affect the ability to do the job apparently has changed, and the Navy apparently wants potential recruits to know that. Or do you really think that the point is to address a shortage of drag queens, as OP seems to think?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
"Dislike of military lifestyle" is incredibly broad though. It could be not liking having to stay sort of physically fit, the need to move halfway across the country (or world) every few years with no say in where you go, it could be the shitty pay compared to private sector, it could be the need to follow orders, ut could be the manual labor and sleep deprivation. Without more specifics on what respondents understood "lifestyle" to mean that's a pretty useless poll.
Plus a lot of people don't even know what the military lifestyle is, or have received a picture of it entirely from popular media. So you potentially have some people avoiding the military because they want to avoid something that doesn't even exist.
Right. Which is exactly the point of this campaign: to disabuse those people of those misperceptions (though of course they might be trying to create different, but less negative, misperceptions).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
Toxoplasma. The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. It's so crazy and out of left field that it might just win them a lot of free publicity.
More options
Context Copy link
I mean, that, plus the military tightened medical standards for recruits, plus a series of extremely unpopular wars.
More options
Context Copy link
Plus, also, the War On Terror is--hopefully--over for good, so recruitment is probably down because there is likely less incentive from the Government to push people into the military. (Granted, I don't know if the GI Bill is even still a thing, or if it even applies outside of branches like the Army and Marines.)
More options
Context Copy link
man, this just conjured a kindof funny thought. What if in the future the thai hookers warn the locals about american navy crew being lady-boys and not real women? could make a decent boomer facebook meme outta that.
I mean, SSBNs dont tend to make many port calls, so I'm not sure this'd really be a "Boomer" meme.
Sorry, couldn't resist. I'm still disappointed the future USS Oklahoma is going to be a Virginia class rather than Columbia, so there won't be any "OK boomer" jokes about it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Didn't the military study integrating units change and have lower standards for female applicants? That seems like the sort of thing born of woke pressure?
Perfectly adequate explanation. You can see a similar thing in churches that feel the need to go woke to appeal to their dwindling congregation (the Unitarians aren't the ones with great retention rates).
There might also be a ratchet effect. Maybe appealing to males' fascist impulses is the best way to sell the military. Is that as viable as going in the other direction?
More options
Context Copy link
Same as everywhere else, the people who made the decision are true believers who think this is a great idea for the Navy and/or for their moral/ideological goals.
There's a weird tendency to personify institutions and act like principal-agent problems don't exist, like how people will tie themselves in knots trying to come up with explanations about how corporations with SJW institutional capture are actually profit-maximizing. Why would someone with a Navy recruitment job care more about "doing the best job possible to slightly improve Navy recruitment numbers" than "making the world a safe place for LGBTQ+ people"? Even more importantly, why wouldn't someone with such an ideology sincerely believe that he can do both? People are biased about the merits of their ideology in other circumstances, they don't turn that off when they're making decisions on behalf of an institution. They can tell themselves something like "This will boost recruitment by showing the Navy is an inclusive place for young people, anyone bigoted enough to object is an asshole who would cause problems anyway." and believe it.
More options
Context Copy link
My guess: It’s 2
This isn’t about getting recruitment numbers up. It’s about getting recruitment demographics aligned with the other government industries. What’s the one thing that could overthrow the regime? The military. What if Jan 6 had explicit military support? Civilian military leadership is terrified that all the Pepe-loving edgelords will decide to join the military because it’s the only “based” profession left. This is their way of making the military “cringe” enough to prevent that.
Germany is an occupied country. If there was a reactionary military coup in Berlin we'd end up with Fort Sumter 2: Bavarian Boogaloo. If the US Military seized power in America who's going to stop them? Will there be a UN peacekeeping operation to land forces in New York and Los Angeles? Will China declare a special military operation? Will the UK launch a preemptive nuclear strike on military targets to safeguard Canadian sovereignty?
Canada and Mexico are literally the only countries on earth that could pose a serious military threat to the continental US. And even then, only if the US military was so caught up in other things (like a civil war) that they couldn't respond. Last I checked, China doesn't even have enough amphibious vehicles to transport a full battalion, let alone what they would need to invade across the Pacific.
Assessment of Chinese amphibious transport capacity has always been complex (since there's a bunch of dual-purpose civilian transports built to quasi-military standards that also participate in exercises but don't come under an order of battle). But a battalion? A single Type 75 landing ship can carry a battalion and they've got three.
By broader estimates, China has nearly as much sealift capacity as the US: https://warontherocks.com/2021/08/mind-the-gap-how-chinas-civilian-shipping-could-enable-a-taiwan-invasion/
More options
Context Copy link
… the specific what?
Well that's an embarrassing typo, fixed
More options
Context Copy link
Probably "Pacific" + autoincorrect to "specific."
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think that could ever happen. Things are not nearly bad enough for the rank-and-file to overcome all their indoctrination and defect. And of course top military would never support it - why erode the system of which they are part and one of the major (trillions of $$$) beneficiaries?
It won't happen because the military takes steps to prevent it. Suppose they really do care about what they claim to care about and did what would actually maximize recruitment. What if they went full Andrew Tate? Appeal to the huge demographic of lonely detached loser young men. Run commercials featuring beautiful young Ukrainian refugees finding a new life outside a NATO military base. Have a few "information warfare" agents post stories about "little brown fucking machines" on those creepy reddit threads. That would solve the recruitment problem real quick, but then you'd have other problems.
What is it you think the military "claims to care about"
lonely detached loser young men generally make terrible soldiers as Russia is currently learning the hard way. The US military has historically always made pretty extensive efforts to correct such deficiencies where found. Why do you think we pay 19 year-olds to get married and tie promotion prospects to physical fitness?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Principal-agent problem. For careerists, it might pay off to be seen as someone who advances elite ideology, whether that hurts the organisation or not.
More options
Context Copy link
/4. Someone in the Air Force or Army was involved, and wanted to make an incredibly mean joke at Navy expense.
Somewhat more steelmanned, there is actually a surprising number of MTF (until very recently, retired-)military personnel, just as there were a number of DADT-era gay military personnel. The Standard Narrative is that some number of internally-gender-nonconfirming people end compensating for it and looking for the Manliest Manly Man thing to do, and for a lot of folk at the lower income levels Joining The Military was one of those things. ((The non-standard version I favor is more than MTF people tend to be a lot more aware of the importance of benefits even before they 'crack the egg', and military benefits are pretty damned good if you can stand dealing with the paperwork.))
But the more plausible explanation for the Navy's recruitment isn't that they expect to (or even want to) get a bunch of trans employees; it's that they see younger generations as being extremely pro-LGBT even if the potential recruits are cis (or otherwise not-definitionally-trans), and they believe a stereotype of military environments as conservative on sexuality-stuff will discourage otherwise marginal potential recruits.
((The really cynical explanation is that this what they were ordered to do, by people who don't particularly care about military recruitment numbers but do care about recruiters that they can't kick off college campuses yet, and as bad as the modern military has gotten, it's still full of people who follow lawful orders even when stupid.))
Wasn't that traced to somewhat liberal usage of steroids and other nice thing in the military.
That's the first time I've heard of that theory, but I'm not really making proposals about what Is, but rather what a well-intentioned bureaucrat could reasonably be acting on.
I don't recall anything conclusive ever having been shown but steroid use was pretty rampant in the 90-era military and a combination of this and the theory that "certain folks were always kind of fucked/compensating for something" theory is pretty widespread on veterans' forums.
Does this theory apply to other environments where steroid usage is rampant, or differentiate the military from them?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think for a significant number of them being able to perform in drag (or being able to be entertained by drag performers) was a significant factor in deciding whether to join the military. Am I wrong?
I'm sure it's the case on Oberlin campus. Is that actually the case in places where the Navy recruits come from?
That said, benefits - like taxpayer-paid transition costs - may be one factor that I was not including. Something like "come work for the military, and your transition costs would be 100% covered" may be indeed attractive to some. It's probably a very bad deal, cost-wise, for the military, but the military is used to bad deals and runaway costs...
Probably not, but as costly signals go, this is a personally-inexpensive one that looks pricey.
((Which also applies to the military-broad costs. VA and MEPS and recruiting don't exactly share priorities, famously.))
That's a fun and complicated question! If your datum class is "younger people", it's easy to get one answer; if it's "poor people", another; if you try searching for self-identified patriots, a third.
I'm not claiming it's true, just that it's plausible and not so stunningly incompetent as to hit category 1.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think there's a distance between being willing to have sex with someone of the same sex, and being attracted to the military because there are drag queens there. Same-sex relations existed in the military as long as military existed, and never ceased, for obvious reasons. And I'd expect the number of gay people in the military be about the same as the rest of places, again for obvious reasons. But I think the message "it's ok to be in the military and be gay" and "come to us, because we have drag queens" are very different messages, aren't they?
More options
Context Copy link
Leadership positions increasingly filled with college educated, peace time service, career-oriented PMC types who are of and interface with DC political culture especially to advance beyond a certain level. Policies and initiatives are downstream from culture.
More options
Context Copy link
4) While the military is a hard target for the woke, it's not the last because it's also an incredibly valuable target, so they've gone after it.
5) The military is the last place that would be under pressure to go woke... and the last place has been reached.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link