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The current War of Northern Aggression "discourse" has brought to mind the top 100 first place greatest mistake in US state craft: not letting Burnen' Sherman just march back and forth for a couple years or finishing hardcore full reconstruction.
Every degenerate tendency in US Con. politics has originated directly from the South's special position as a rebellious territory that was allowed to maintain it's cultural legitimacy, or second order effect from it. Imagine the conservatives we could have in this country if the wellspring of the tendency was John Adams and the federalists; rather than Rutherford and the lost causers.
Wrapping up the entire holographic southern cultural package with opposition to Washington eg. the North, eg the technocratic, rich part of the country has led to a situation where Technocratic Tech-billionaire Technologists are shackled to the cultural traditions of south, either Cavalier hedonistic indulgence papered over with cheap aristocratic pretension lacking any of the actual cultural roots that european aristocrats have; or hill people proud ignorance and shiftless rebellion against anyone who might have gotten any of that big city 'lernin.
You can watch these tendencies poison Republican politics live all the time; it's why even though the Democratic party is jam packed full of passionless ossified corporate aphorism chat bots, when republicans have all three wings of the government they STILL can't get anything done. There is a deep state problem, but it's not the 'unelected bureaucrats' in washington, it's the decaying corpses of Jefferson Davis and Johnny Reb clinging on to conservatism's ankles and dragging it down into the mud.
Why are so many Americans committed to sneering at and impugning the traditions of their warrior class? We all know that the South provides a disproportionate number of soldiers. Washington DC has the lowest enlistment ratio proportionate to population (this reveals a lot about how the US works), South Carolinas has the highest. Furthermore whites take up a larger proportion of the combat arms, diversity is more prevalent in rear areas and admin. I conclude that Southern whites are integral to the US war machine.
Nearly all of the people here are white-collar, I assume. A few have military experience but not very many. It's not our place to belittle those who march off to fight and die at our direction, at the will of the white-collar class. We can give orders, we can enjoy a privileged position at the top of a hierarchy, we can enjoy the fruits of war without sharing in the costs (should there be any fruits) - the bare minimum we should do is give some respect to those who do the fighting.
In Australia we had this case where some of our special forces were a bit overenthusiastic, they shot a couple of prisoners because there was no room on the helicopter, according to legend they stole one guy's artificial leg for use as a drinking trophy. There was a huge media storm about it, a Royal Commission, a massive defamation trial trial that our special forces guy Roberts-Smith lost. He was uncouth, the whole thing was a bit of a shambles. You could tell that the legal class were disgusted and repulsed by this guy and he despised them back.
OK, so Australian special forces killed a few dozen people they shouldn't have. That's a drop in the ocean compared to the West extending the war 10 years past the point we'd clearly lost, allying with the child molesters and drug exporters against the Taliban. The vast majority of the moral harms were committed by careless policymakers and senior officers who committed troops to achieving the unachievable. A huge part of it must have been embarrassment over losing to a small band of semi-literate goatherders with no advanced weapons, foreign backers or money.
And yet nobody dragged Bush, Obama, Petraeus or Trump over the coals - no Royal Commissions (or whatever American equivalent) for them, not for disastrous wars at least. If our leaders get zero accountability for huge crimes, those who follow their commands and deal with the farcical conditions should enjoy immunity for small crimes, let alone not being sufficiently classy.
Who wants to join special forces, do intense training, go off to fight a meaningless, futile war and be hauled over the coals for any excesses?
Who wants to join the US army if the war memorials and bases for their subculture are going to be defaced and renamed, if they're going to be sneered at for being uncouth hill people? Perhaps this is why the US military is so understrength in a time of global crisis. You don't tend to get classy, sophisticated people joining as infantry (who are still vital) - we should appreciate this and not demand this from them.
Do you want to go and risk getting turned to meat paste by Chinese hypersonics? Do you want to risk getting your guts ripped out by HE, get burned to the point everyone is repulsed by the sight of you? No. I don't either. Those who take that risk are making a special social contract and deserve support from the top of the pyramid, not contempt.
7.3 percent of all living Americans have served in the military at some point in their lives.
According to fiscal year 2017 data, the most recent available, the South's share of the U.S. young adult population was 33 percent, but it provided 41 percent of new military enlistees nationwide. As a result, the region's representation ratio is 1.2, which means it provided 20 percent more military recruits than might be expected given its young adult population.
This is a factor of ten smaller of a difference than would justify the above comment. 90% southerners never serve in the military, and those that do serve only 20% more often than northerners. Calling them the 'warrior class' is absurd.
Or, you know, maybe the first numbers on Google are wrong. That's possible. (I skimmed the articles, they seem reasonable). But if you're going to make fiery moral pronouncements, maybe bring a number or two with it, so we can check if the claim is justified?
I'm curious if people who downvoted can explain why? I just don't think there's a significant material link between the South and America's modern "warrior class". Or was it tone? The third paragraph was intended to be self-deprecating and indicate my uncertainty.
I didn't downvote, don't know either.
I'm still fairly confident that Southern White men are integral to the strength of the US military. Total numbers are one thing, boots on the ground are another. The primary sacrifices in war (and the key to victory) comes from those who are doing the fighting. Military enlistees includes maintenance, catering, admin and so on which are all important but secondary to the primary combat function.
See an article complaining that there aren't enough Blacks in combat arms, meaning they can't be officers, meaning they can't get high-ranking command positions: https://mwi.usma.edu/strategic-problem-army-doesnt-seem-care-african-americans-arent-branching-combat-arms/
This article says that US casualties in Iraq were predominantly White Southern men from working class backgrounds: https://www.baltimoresun.com/2005/10/30/iraq-war-casualties-mostly-white-working-class/
I think I'd maybe slightly disagree with that because occupations are fungible, but not really that strongly and I don't know much.
My much bigger disagreement is I don't understand why that undermines DBDr's original post. He's insulting the South for bad reasons, but (see math below) the south is like 9% "warrior" while the non-south is 6% "warrior", so it doesn't feel like the insults are motivated by, or really related to, that 'warrior class' aspect. And I think it's quite plausible (not true though) for the South to have significant negative cultural features while also providing 41% more of the military than you'd expect, and it'd reasonable to criticize those. If, hypothetically, the black community provided much more than its share of America's soldiers, I'd still support far-right statements about black culture because they're true!
Are they though? Are you ready to march off to war, not merely to some IT/intel-analysis job that befits our class but actual boots on the ground? I'm not.
What I'm trying to say is that the people he sneers at provide a useful service to the 'rich technocratic part of the country', who also have many serious flaws. They do things we don't want to, it's division of labour. A country is at its best when united, not divided.
Furthermore, OP didn't provide reasonable criticism. He's not saying 'and some, I suppose are good people'. He's saying that the South consists of unreconstructed (literally) traitors and some combination of proudly stupid hill people and pretentious faux-aristocratic hedonists. He's saying everything's really simple, that there's a broadly good North with some bad elements and a totally worthless South that needed/needs Forceful Correction. That's a gross and aggressive simplification. Imagine if I just valorised our special forces or the working class and demonized the elites like that, it would be a distortion. He even got modded, it was an egregious post.
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I didn't downvote you but here is my guess:
41 to 33 is closer to 1.24. This also means the non-South's share is lower, so the South is 41% more likely to serve, not 20%. (I just plugged (41/33)/((100-41)/(100-33)) into a calculator, I may have calculated incorrectly so someone correct me if I'm wrong). The disparity between north/south may be greater or lower since this is specifically non-south states, not north states. There is a chart in this article here that shows by state breakdown using 2018 data: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/demographics-us-military. You can see the ratios go from 0.3 (Washington DC) to 1.5 (South Carolina).
Regarding what constitutes a "warrior class" that's a semantics argument, so people are in disagreement with you that you need a 200% difference to qualify the existence of a warrior class. You could cherry-pick specific states (e.g. Washington DC to South Carolina) and get a 400% difference in the ratio, though, but the 41% is probably close to the actual number.
It's also important to consider the culture and attitude surrounding the military, and not just who serves in the military. The military is more red-tribe-aligned than blue-tribe-aligned. I don't think it's unreasonable to see how people from a state like New York think about the military (disinterest to disdain) to people from Texas (generally supportive). Your average Southerner may not have been in the military, but they sure as hell are more likely to support it than your average Northerner. If there ever was a draft for a conflict I believe it's reasonable to assume Southerners will be more likely to support their country while the Northern people are likely to protest it. For example, if we look at protests during the Vietnam War, a disproportionate amount of protests came from northeastern states relative to their population, enrollment rates, and deaths from war. There are some other things to consider, such as why people join the military (is it pride for the country? Or because the military provides an opportunity for the economically disadvantaged?), or how long people serve, or how many people choose to stay in the reserve forces after active duty.
Essentially, I think the data point you brought up was simply inadequate to convince people that the South does not constitute more of the "warrior class" compared to the North. Furthermore, even if you were able to provide more facts/statistics, whether or not the South constitutes a "warrior class" is not relevant to the core argument of @RandomRanger's comment, which is regarding people's attitudes toward the military.
That being said, I personally would not downvote your post, as I think it adds an interesting point of discussion to consider, but people will vote however they want. I have seen similar sentiment recently regarding voting patterns here. I can't remember who but I saw someone with a flair that essentially said to comment if downvoting and nobody else put a reason why. It would be nice to get a response from someone who actually downvoted but the most likely explanation is they just didn't agree with what you said, and I suspect my points above would not be that different for why they didn't agree with what you said.
I think your 41% number is correct. And if half of the US population served in the military, then I'd be comfortable calling the South the warrior class informally. But since only 7% ever serve, I don't think that makes sense.
In particular, OP's inference was that people who insult the south are "sneering at our warrior class". To whatever extent the South has distinct cultural attributes from the rest of the US, I don't think it's reasonable to call criticism of that culture 'sneering at the warrior class'. Things like "Cavalier hedonistic indulgence papered over with cheap aristocratic pretension" aren't really true IMO, but they could be, and if they were I don't see what criticizing that has to do with sneering at a warrior class. The people he's criticizing are mostly not warriors! 9% of them are warriors, as opposed to 6% of the people he's not criticizing.
Like, Ranger's post just feels like a non-sequitur to me.
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I'd say it's right there in your first sentence: a warrior class.
Americans are allergic to the concept. Or at least to talking about it openly. When something implies the existence of a class divide, we tend to get real uncomfortable real fast, and start casting about for alternate explanations. You can have military families just like you can have legacy admissions, so long as they're framed as pure personal preference.
"Warrior class" isn't the right word, anyway. We're not talking about kshatriyas or samurai or knights. Those classes are no longer economically viable. Back in the days of subsistence farming, feudal dues were one of the more effective ways to support specialization of labor. Peasants farmed, lords taxed, and when it came time for violence, the necessary logistics and command structures were already in place. As food production improved, and state capacity generally expanded, this relationship was no longer the only game in town. The standing armies of Renaissance Europe were already decoupled from retinue-of-retinues feudal structures.
Simultaneously, the proliferation of firearms and fire artillery was closing the technological gap between the aristocracy and the plebes. By the modern era, the warrior aristocracy was no longer load-bearing. Officers got down in the mud and choked on mustard gas just like their lowborn brethren. The most successful militaries coming out of the World Wars adapted to this reality by treating military expertise like any other economic niche. Career soldiers are no longer a class. They're a commodity.
So there is a class of Americans which makes up the tip of the spear. But they're not a warrior class. They're just another one of the socioeconomic strata which form our vast, Byzantine economy. As with doctors, lawyers, police officers and chronic welfare recipients, membership in this class is to some extent inherited. Members hail from certain regions and tend to hold particular political beliefs. Their parents were likely in the class, and their children may find themselves making suspiciously similar choices.
On the flip side, we don't allocate greater rights to our doctors and lawyers and other extreme specialists. At least not explicitly. The privileges of rank, and of choosing to commit oneself to a particular niche, are supposed to be folded into pure economics. If, on noticing your material wealth and stable retirement prospects, others choose to treat you better...well, that's their prerogative, isn't it? Once again, any implication of class barriers is swept under the rug.
I cannot stress how important this is to our national mythos! As such, I can't endorse giving the military class some sort of immunity or credibility. Just look at how much damage the perception of such immunity has done to American politics. The cult of personal responsibility may be one of our greatest pretensions, but it's also one of our most effective. I think we should be trying to repair it rather than work around it.
Perception of immunity only happens when there's actual immunity. If there was a true system of personal responsibility, that would be great, near-ideal. But since there isn't, immunity and special privileges should be distributed outside the elite.
Even if we don't call it a class, class is still there. In the US, there are the Harvard and Stanford people, people with connections.
And isn't there this whole cult of veteranhood in the US, how soldiers get discounts on certain goods? Don't they get cheaper education and preferences in employment, in some places? Isn't there Veteran's Day, (like we have ANZAC day)? It seems like they're a class with positive privileges. I simply propose the negative privilege of not having the predominant, load-bearing echelon be harassed or insulted by their leaders.
Napoleon is right IMO. Soldiers aren't just an economic product, they need some kind of ideal to fight for. If there's one lesson from the Middle East, it's that money is secondary to will. The hatred, fanaticism and self-confidence of the Taliban overcame our firepower and funding.
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The people who will stop Chinese hypersonic missiles will be, and I am only slightly being hyperbolic, are trans furry military members in some bunker in Nevada piloting drones or other military gear, not some guy who signed up for reasonable reasons like access to college or career training or the darker reasons.
We already saw this in Ukraine - lots of hype over the true non-woke military, and it's regularly getting shredded by missiles that are largely being guided by a they/them army.
The actual thing that'll probably stop Chinese hypersonic missiles is a combination of they probably don't really exist in the way that anti-woke people hype them up online in the obsessive way they tend too, a corrupt Chinese procurement process that makes the US process look clean and normal, and the fact we've probably got stuff we're working on that we don't have to hype up the way the Chinese do to look strong.
The people who will stop Chinese hypersonic missiles do not exist in America and are unlikely to for the near future.
Good thing Chinese hypersonic missiles can't hit targets, then.
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This is untrue. Military does not produce or design weapons. Yes, furries can operate weapon system, but they won't have them because the US military and industry contracting system is broken.
The 'war' with China is already lost, if we go by statements of a former foreign minister of Singapore, who says both militaries understand US cannot win a conventional war, which is why the Chinese are now building a more robust nuclear force that'd deter the US from escalating in case of a conventional war.
Which is why Ukraine army is advancing, their offensive has succeeded and Russians do not have fire or aerial superiority over the front line. Because 'they/them' army has destroyed their ability to make things go boom. Yes, very true.
Of course a land war over Taiwan is unwinnable for the US. Taiwan is directly next to China’s 1.4 billion people and 2m soldiers, with easy resupply and colossal domestic manufacturing capacity next door. The US is thousands of miles away, has a vastly longer supply chain even to nearby bases in Japan and South Korea, has much less casualty tolerance, and is honest that the main strategic value of Taiwan is chip factories that thoroughly destroying would defeat the point of the defense, preventing any easy repulsion of an attack once large numbers of Chinese forces had landed.
But this doesn’t mean the US is weak, any more than a weak man beating a strong one on home territory while his opponent is only allowed to use his pinky finger serves as a good way to judge their respective actual fighting capacity.
As for Ukraine, Western intelligence predicted a full and successful invasion and Ukrainian surrender in a matter of days, which is why everyone was pulled out and all embassies closed. Two years later Russia has suffered 300,000 casualties, many of its best units have been destroyed by death and injury, and not a single American soldier has died for it. The only price has been a tiny fraction of GDP that’s less dear than many individual federal programs which accomplish much less.
I meant that the naval war is unwinnable.
Seeing as China is catching up, destruction of these chip factories would probably hurt the US and the 'free world' more than losing access to their products would hurt China.
It's not ? Why then can't it even keep it's ships manned? Why is the Navy shrinking ? Why can't it supply Ukraine with enough artillery shells, anti-air missiles, drone defences ? Is that strength ?
It's estimated that they lost 50-70k. IIRc direct count of deaths online and in FB got to 35k. They weren't very good, and unless their army structure is completely dysfunctional, this war is going to strenghten, not weaken their army and air forces. They figured out what works, they got practice in, they saw which commanders are competent and which aren't.
You believe that ? Russian MOD says it's killed 300+ Americans. Special forces are reputed to be in there, odds are, some got killed.
Let me name some other consequences:
deindustrialization of US 'allies'. IIRC, a significant fraction (20%) of EU chemical industry went titsup, as in, ceased production.
loss of prestige because US kept loudly talking about defeating Putler for 1.5 years, shipped what fifty billion in hardware to Ukraine. It's likely going to end up with Ukraine losing a lot, possibly even sea access. Russians are in no mood to negotiate, Ukraine has no one to send to the front, and arms shipments are down.
revelation that the 'mighty' US war machine is hollow, unprepared for wars against anyone but mud hut dwellers. E.g. US can't even source blackpowder domestically, because the single factory blew up 2 years ago. How things would work out in an actual big war, with sabotage groups using drones to blow up critical industries would be even more interesting. I strongly doubt US internal security would be on par with e.g. China's, or even as good as in WW2. US doesn't really have solid reserves of anti-air missiles, artillery shells. It doesn't have production capacity for same. Satellites it relies on heavily would probably all get shot down within a week. Is there a stockpile of ready-to-launch replacements? No. You had funny stories such as Raytheon searching for retirees from Stinger manufacture to restart the mfg process, because somehow the 'free world' with its vast GDP doesn't have a live MANPADS production ability to supply a fairly sedate war with ~200k frontline troops.
wasn't there also marked decline in the willingness of foreign countries to hold USD ?
For years the idea that Western governments could actually lock a billion Westerners used to protesting for "muh rights" at every opportunity up for a year with almost zero major dissent also seemed absurd, until it happened and was 'always possible' of course.
The reality is that Western state capacity, in particular American state capacity, hasn't been tested since WW2 and the current sclerotic, inefficient functioning of the government, including defense, is a malaise both enabled and tolerated by American hegemony and prosperity. To paraphrase the apocryphal Churchill quote, Americans do the right thing only after exhausting every other option. The war in Ukraine is not important enough to create the fear of god that drives Americans to exert their state capacity in a meaningful way, it simply isn't a good indicator of what the country is capable of.
By casualties I meant KIA and WIA. KIA I think 70-120k is a common estimate for KIA.
Zero dissent? Up to a year ? It was some months, and it created a vast amount of radicalised people and extreme unwillingness to repeat it. To the point that if quarantine was now actually needed because of yet another lab leak of this time interestingly lethal disease, it'd probably not happen.
US had an entire industrial base and was entirely self sufficient in basically everything. Ball bearings, steel production, building materials, electronics chemicals, etc. Anything you can name, around 1950s US was making it, usually in world class quality. That's not true anymore.
That industrial base was hollowed out and largely outsourced since 1980. US industry now largely depends on imports from rival powers. So, in the event of a crisis involving said hostile powers, you'd be half a decade away from merely being self-sufficient.
And let's not even go into something such as level of trust in state institutions, the government, political polarization and so on. Incomparably worse now, especially since the USG seems to regard it's core sustaining population-whites with deep suspicion and paranoia.
Yes, Ukraine war isn't a big enough crisis, but a big enough crisis might just result in a collapse of yet another WW2 victor.
Can confirm. Sample size of one. Next "vaccine" they come up with for as of yet unnamed global pandemic they are gonna have to shove it up their own behinds. And if they make it mandatory they're are going to literally get home grown terrorism, not that fake glow in the dark shit FBI tricking special needs students to do a terrorism.
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More than a year in some places. And as far as I can tell the Overton window on the subject runs from "Of course it was worth it" to "We should have gone full China".
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Western intelligence agencies predicted this because they, like Russian intelligence agencies, expected Ukraine not to fight, not because Russia was unstoppable- it was known at the time that the army Russia had on the borders wasn’t big enough to take on a Ukraine which fought, and it shocked everyone when Ukraine fought.
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Which is why it's a damn good thing Taiwan is an island. Deny China the strait, and everything changes.
I meant a war with boots-on-the-ground, probably the wrong term.
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Do Americans have it in them to setup a durable blockade that can escalate to a nuclear war for long enough to make it meaningful? Do they have it in them to completely wreck their (and the world's) economy and to scramble to get local industrial capacity back online?
Every time I read about a sustained conflict between modern great powers, the first two moves sound reasonable and after that it's basically reading like the end of the world as we know it, even in the scenarios that are explicitly not nuclear.
If neither side fully escalates it is a matter of who is willing to escalate further. If both sides are willing to escalate, but stop short of nuclear weapons, there is no existent navel force, or combination of navel forces, which can sustain a Taiwanese blockade in the face of Chinese opposition.
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If China's asking, the answer is "fuck around and find out". A "blockade" is not the limit of what the US can do, anyway -- the US could also sink every Chinese ship capable of taking troops to Taiwan.
Not doing so is not a choice. The alternative to defending Taiwan by force is not just letting China take over and then business as usual. It's the usual dumbass sanctions regime that hurts the US just as much as a Chinese embargo would, without actually helping anyone.
Yes, a sustained conflict between modern great powers is not a reasonable thing. Why would you expect it to be?
I suppose all previous ones were also completely unreasonable. Fuck.
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Russia is putting all its abilities into winning, the US considers the Ukraine war an afterthought. And yet, despite being an afterthought they/them are able to check the entire might of the great "masculine" Russian bear.
No, the military and government and people of Ukraine did that. It was the fact that none of those 3 crumpled that stopped Ukraine being overrun in weeks like Russia expected, not that the U.S. had sent them some Javelins/small-arms/intelligence. The more substantial supply of equipment came later, and has made it more difficult for Russia to grind down Ukraine with the sheer size difference, but even then it is nonsense to pretend that donating some spare equipment (without even dramatically ramping up production) means Ukrainian performance can be attributed to the U.S. military. If you want to see how "afterthought" support from the U.S. military does when it is backing a people without a sense of patriotism for their country and a military that isn't already competent, look at post-withdrawal Afghanistan.
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This is pure ideology trying to analyze pure ideology.
Join me in the real world, where Russia has successfully attained its stated military goals at decent but significant costs and NATO has made it difficult for them but not difficult enough that they failed or destroyed their economy.
Russia is poised to successfully prevent a NATO Ukraine with any significant fighting power at the price of becoming a junior partner to China. And traded a limited amount of manpower for a now booming arms industry.
Nobody but NATO's proxy is fighting with all they got, sexual minorities are so insignificant in their population as to have no influence except as fodder for online flamewars and regular plain old white men of all ages are catching shrapnel in the mud the same way they have for centuries.
So at the end Ukraine has lost, Russia has won a meager victory that, at best - and at extraordinary cost - gets them back to the level of influence over (half) of Ukraine that they had in the halcyon days of...2013 (truly an extraordinary, Catherine-the-Great esque imperial victory), and the US bled one of its two main geopolitical opponents at negligible cost for several years. What's the problem?
Ironically, pro-Russian activists appear to value hypothetical Ukrainian lives more than Ukrainians. From what I can tell, they wanted to fight, and now they are. They may suffer for it, but it was not forced upon them by the Americans, who did after all expect them to surrender.
Military action is not judged in the absolute but relative to the available alternatives. Orderly retreat is a success.
Russia is certainly not doing great, but they've successfully avoided having a knife to their throat. Which was their stated goal. And it didn't cost them total war.
I think they're correctly allocating their ressources. The biggest risk was that the Western economic sanctions would actually have some bite, and they did not.
It's sad, but indeed nobody actually seems to care about Ukrainians lives. Not even Ukrainians.
I won't pretend I do. I hate this senseless waste, but ultimately the fate of some far away people is not my problem.
From America's point of view? I think this whole endeavor was a long term blunder. Antagonizing Russia, which was never really a threat, as should be all too evident now, does not serve long term American interests. It just pushes them and China closer together, when the opposite is desirable and would likely have been achievable were the State department not made up of moralist morons and cold war relics.
If there is a large scale China-US conflict, the full extent of the mistake of further aligning China with a country that has large amounts of natural ressources, loads of nuclear weapons and engineers that know how to make aircraft engines will be felt pretty hard.
Don't get me wrong, this whole affair is still a great coup for the US, but it has nothing to do with undermining Russia and everything to do with kneecapping Europe.
Still, spending 75B to make sure your allies never get uppity just seems petty. And that's yet more people that won't come to your help in any significance if there is a big war. Hell, they're already declining to help put down a handful of Iran backed irregulars.
And there lies russia’s error. On the strength of their stalingrad cred, all the old american cold war warriors bought the myth of the unbeatable red army, russia could have stolen pots indefinitely. Their assumed strength was way higher than their actual strength, so they never should have let it come to a showdown. They’re never getting the baltic russians now that everybody knows they could never in a million years get past the bug and the vistula.
I was never fooled – gdp is destiny – but the suckers at the table, americans who never updated their fulda gap division calculations, and german pacifists, would have let putin bluff them indefinitely.
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They traded the distant possibility that a future Ukrainian state might join NATO for the certainty that Sweden and Finland did, I suppose.
I don’t think we’re likely to see the Russians allying with the US in a US-China conflict. They’ve had their differences but unless it seemed overwhelmingly likely the Chinese would completely wipeout US global hegemony forever (unlikely I’d say) Russia would have nothing to gain by helping the US.
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If you're referring to the Ukrainian people valuing their lives less, that seems to be contradicted by the ban on fighting-age men leaving the country, and forced conscription.
If you're referring to the Ukrainian government, that seems to be contradicted by the reports on them wanting to negotiate with the Russians and being pushed to war by the West.
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I do not know of any polls about how many Ukrainians believe people born with a "non-binary gender identity" exist, or that people should avoid "misgendering" them, but I doubt it is a significant number. I do not even know if anyone has invented "non-binary pronouns" in Ukrainian, I assume a few Ukrainians on Tumblr have done so but I do not know of them successfully convincing major Ukrainian institutions that their adoption is a civil rights issue. Searching finds an article about a soldier who identifies as "non-binary" and says that "some even used my she pronoun", with no mention of "non-binary pronouns" as a concept. Ukrainians are of course not using singular they as a pronoun to indicate "non-binary" people, since less than 30% speak even "some English".
By comparison, in a 2023 poll 44% of Ukrainians supported common-law same-sex marriage and 30% believed same-sex couples should be allowed to adopt children. I do not think it is useful to base your understanding of major world events on bizarre gotchas against conservatives from /r/politicalhumor.
I think it’s the US army that provides the intel that’s being referred to as the they/them army.
Right, I saw that part of the sentence but skipped past that part of the argument, I should have explicitly said why I was talking about the military of Ukraine. I think it is deeply silly to attribute Ukrainian military performance to the politics of the U.S. army because of U.S. intelligence passing them some information. Also, even if we were talking about the U.S. military, soldiers are more right-wing than the general public and belief in "non-binary gender identity" is far from consensus in the U.S. even outside the right.
To the extent talking about "the they/them army beating Russia!" is a real argument at all, it is a response to those who have said it weakens the U.S. army when it adopts policies such as lowering standards to let in more women and pandering to divisive left-wing political groups who are not particularly patriotic/nationalistic or likely to join the military. Those criticisms have essentially no relevance to the U.S. keeping a spy drone over international waters and passing some of its data to Ukraine. Meanwhile the actual Ukrainian army is not particularly left-wing, owes much of its success to the Ukrainian people being more patriotic/nationalistic than Russia expected, and by the way a surprisingly successful force in pushing that sense of anti-Russian patriotism was a militia of literal neo-Nazis who were subsequently successfully integrated into the mainstream army and political system. (Meanwhile the U.S. military brags about campaigns to root out supposed "right-wing extremism".)
I agree. The Ukraine government is oddly successful at sending men to their death. You'd expect from all these street press gang videos that at least a few low-level officers would get shot by desperate soldiers, but they must be really good at compartimentalizing.
Perhaps the new recruits only get ammunition 5min before going to clear the minefield with their legs, or maybe they really get fired up by the patriotic speech at the camp?
I really wonder what I would do in such a situation, probably not much. It'd only take a couple guys to carry me into a van and after that it's probably game over?
And then there's all these men. Imagine being the guy shoving Ukrainian men into a van to send them to the trench. You didn't manage to escape and you have to keep doing it, and the more you do it, the longer the war lasts, the more likely you are to get sent as well. Then you end up in the minefield and all you can think about is 'if only I killed that commanding officer on day 1, how many men could I have saved?'.
I talked to a guy who was doing business importing sunflower oil from Ukraine, but he ran into personnel issues. He'd hire a Ukrainian man to pick up and deliver across the border but then they'd abandon the truck after crossing.
...or that the street press gang videos being spread by pro-Russians as a form of propaganda are really not reflective of the situation at large.
Perhaps the videos were not reflective of the situation up to this point. Perhaps the Ukrainians who did not flee immediately as soon as orders were given by whoever is in charge of the West were really willing to die. Then they got their wishes and we have a lot more videos as impressment becomes more urgent. I suppose this is more recent development, here's an article from a month ago.
The more striking act of resistance so far, a couple weeks old. A village councillor in western Ukraine has thrown grenades on to the floor of a council meeting, wounding 26 people, police say.
How did he get those grenades, and why is he the only one doing it?
My prediction for 2024: there will be few male Ukrainians ready to die for the Ukraine government, and the ones that do will be quite old.
It really is a marvel of media bubble. I wonder how many Ukrainians who died on the battlefield ever read a quote from the Americans who 'support' them.
This is what some of the Americans who in practice support TUD seem to believe:
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Even the New York Times is busting out the high-grade copium: 'Ukraine doesn't need all its territory to beat Putin'. The tone is that of a rear-guard action, trying to salvage credibility for the next phase of this disaster. Full text here: https://old.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/18sb5l0/ua_pov_ukraine_doesnt_need_all_its_territory_to/
Whatever issues China has with procurement, they're light-years ahead of the US. China's navy is growing while the US fleet shrinks. They also have 232x times more shipbuilding capacity than the US, per US estimates. I'd be wary before fighting a naval war (as an industrial dwarf) against the world's leading shipbuilder.
I'll take failures out in the open over a secret, unknown, hypothetical success. If the US fleet is so powerful, why can't US allies get their shipping through Suez? If it's so easy to shoot down these missiles, hypersonic or otherwise, why are Ukrainian cities constantly being bombed? Patriots were provided after all.
Can you imagine how insane the current situation would have seemed in February 2022 in Ukraine? “Oh, Ukraine is losing an ongoing war of attrition in December 2023 while still controlling the vast majority of the country, while Russia has thrown 300,000 lives and unfathomable amounts of its best hardware at the conflict, what?”. The official intelligence assessment on the eve of the war by the West was so dire that they evacuated every major embassy in Kiev (likely after the usual kind of warning from Russia) to avoid any risky diplomatic incidents during the Russian invasion, which they presumed would certainly be successful at capturing Kiev.
The US won in Ukraine by the first week of the war. Everything since then is bleeding Russia for free without risking a single American serviceman’s life. The cost is minuscule - food stamps cost vastly more, as do countless other bullshit federal programs - and much of Russia’s most elite fighting capacity has been slaughtered and replaced with 80 IQ Central Asian peasant conscripts using WW1 trench tactics. Sure, Ukraine is destroyed, but they wanted to fight and, to paraphrase the immortal words of Lord Farquad, that’s a price we’re willing to pay.
The reason the US is reluctant to attack the Houthis on land is that a big goal of US foreign policy under Biden was to support the Saudi peace deal with the Houthis. Biden personally promised that the US would cut support for Saudi Arabia in the Yemen war, essentially pressuring them into peace. It would be an embarrassing move for the Democrats to reverse course now and to fight the Saudis’ war against the Houthis for them. If the neocons had been listened to (Trump listened to them, which is why he vetoed a plan to stop US support for anti-Houthi forces) the Houthis might well no longer be an issue.
Coincidentally, just today I saw a video of Ukrainian soldiers mocking a mentally retarded conscript sent to their trench. https://twitter.com/Alex_Oloyede2/status/1740797508400632195#m
The West is not bleeding Russia for 'free'. It's expensive in terms of munitions, wealth and prestige. Europe is suffering considerable energy costs (in the trillions) as a result of their sanctions program, part of the economic war against Russia. Much of our media went around saying 'oh Ukraine must win to preserve the rules-based order and deter Xi in Taiwan', yet Ukraine is losing. This sets an unhelpful precedent for Xi in China - if there are setbacks at the start of the war, just double down and power on through to ultimate victory.
Once Ukraine is beaten, we'll face a powerful, angry Russia in Europe, closely aligned with China. China is the real winner, they get cheaper gas, a useful ally and a weaker West distracted from Asia.
The much vaunted gas crisis never materialized; European gas prices largely returned to pre-2019 levels in 2023; I said 300,000 casualties, including WIA - KIA is likely in the 70-120k bracket; I don’t think fever dreams of Ed Krassenstein Twitter types mean that the Pentagon “expected” Ukraine to win (if anything quite the opposite).
This means exactly the opposite of what you think it does. If even an interminably corrupt, poor, kleptocratic, bureaucratic shithole like Russia can get its act together this much in a crisis, it means the US and other Western could likely jump to serious war footing much faster than naysayers predict. They merely do not yet care, because bleeding Russia in Ukraine for as long as possible is so minor in terms of both blood and treasure for the United States.
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No? It seems like this is exactly what you'd expect through mere triangulation of extreme takes being made at the time.
Man, Ukrainians must love reading stuff like this...
Didn't they want to negotiate, and got pressured out of it by the UK?
People disagreed about whether the invasion would happen and how ambitious Russian objectives would be, there was some disagreement about whether there would be much guerilla/resistance fighting, but I don't recall anyone here suggesting Ukraine would largely successfully repel a full-scale invasion in a matter of weeks.
I remember prediction of the entire Russian economy collapsing within weeks, part of the disagreement over whether Russian will invade stemming from the prediction that Ukrainians will be able to defend itself, and I definitely do not recall the pro-Ukraine side predicting an immediate collapse of the defense (that was the pro-Russia side).
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The people who will stop Chinese hypersonic missiles will be the nerds who design and the blue collars who build the high tech military gear. Especially with something as fast as hypersonics, a trans furry, or well any other human, would just be too slow to really matter. If we want successful products from nerds/builders, we probably ought let them be meritocratic in their own domains rather than force them to include a bunch of trans furries or other diversity hires.
There might be some trans furries designing and building the gear, though they'll be working for contractors rather than military members (I knew one trans person when I was in that field. No furries as far as I know, but they tended to keep it (that is, their tail) in their pants back then).
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I gather that trans/furries/trans furries are greatly overrepresented among the relevant nerds.
Myths are powerful things. Anyone can just tell a story, and whether it's believed tells you more about the culture that believes the myth than it does about the subject of the story.
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Steve Hsu estimated Chinese engineering pipeline produces 10-15x more graduates per year than the US one.
Chinese government as of late has tried to lower investment into IT bullshit and promote investment into industry and actual tangible technologies, not just apps.
Graduate quality depends. Per capita that's only 2-3x more than the US, on a quality adjusted per capita basis it's probably roughly the same. And once you add in the US's allies (including India, they'll definitely choose US over China) the total "quality" available to the US probably equals that available to China, and if you include the fact that the US poaches the best Chinese while the reverse doesn't happen the US (and its allies) come out ahead compared to China.
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Every now and then it leaks that some German military group has a private chat where they post nationalist memes and comments. The sorts of people proactively seeking to join German defense forces are commonly German nationalists. Not really a profound point.
But, this is always characterized as far right, Nazi adjacent groups have infiltrated German police and military. I suspect a more level-headed reframing would be "nationalists who generally lean right of course compose a disproportionate amount of the door-kickers and spec ops". They're not a bunch of tender progressive PMC types and that's not a coincidence. Their manners and interests are largely opposed to the PMC, and that doesn't mean the PMC is better or somehow in the right here.
So it seems denigrating the attitudes and norms of the warrior class is popular in America and other Western countries.
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It's because they're not viewed as a warrior class, they're viewed as backwards, stupid, dangerous, bigoted toxic males who probably signed up because they were too stupid to do anything else and/or they wanted to kill brown people.
There used to be a tiny grudging admission that at the end of the day these people actually did have some merit since they were putting life and limb on the line, but even that has evaporated as evidenced by the queering/feminization of the military (and recent ham-fisted attempts to walk some of it back).
Soldiers have very rarely been viewed highly. Voluntary enlistments throughout history have usually not been motivated by patriotism, but been petty criminals or roustabouts with no other options.
The Duke of Wellington’s description of his troops is the mainstream historical attitude.
Plus ça change...
Although at least back then the army whipped you into shape, the quote from Wellington continues:
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White Southerners are not the American warrior class. Enlisting at a somewhat higher rate doesn't overcome the weight of demographics.
That rate isn't just somewhat higher. White Southerner men are markedly overrepresented in the combat arms. Again, I'm aware that this is an important qualifier.
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I looked for metrics on this and found that whites are 52% of infantry: https://www.zippia.com/11b-infantryman-jobs/demographics/
That’s just slightly more than the demographics for the population. Census says whites are 50.5% of 18-24 year olds.
Though that doesn’t seem to jibe with documentaries like Restrepo. I wonder how much checking the Hispanic box changes the infantry number.
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Do Southern whites enlist more than Northern whites because they’re culturally warriors, or because they’re poorer and come from places with less opportunity? One sees similar patterns in most wealthy Western nations.
Higher southern unemployment rates are surely a factor, but cultural reasons are definitely big; Texas provides 25% of the combat branches despite being dramatically wealthier than the rest of the south and southern Whites dominate the combat arms much more so than the comparably safe, easy logistical and support roles(which is where you see a disproportionate amount of recruits from the black ghettos- and that one probably is mostly about potential soldiers coming from poor families and not having great jobs available). I think they're also just as overrepresented in the officer class, which is not what you'd expect if it was mostly because of poverty and lack of opportunity.
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They sign up to potentially kill complete strangers on government orders, because they believe in the cause and/or for money. They willingly turn themselves into tools of the government. Hence I will belittle and mock them just as surely as I belittle and mock the government itself. If you are fine with belittling and mocking the government, then there is no reason not to belittle and mock the people who willingly make themselves into that government's agents.
100% of the actual harms were committed by the soldiers, not the politicians. If the soldiers did not follow the orders, the harms would not have happened.
Nobody has to risk that to begin with. The US is more than well-enough protected by its nuclear arsenal and, on top of that, by the oceans. If some American decides that going to fight for Taiwan or South Korea or whatever is really important to him - either because he cares about those countries or because he cares about maintaining US global military dominance and economic might - then alright, fine, but I'm not going to pretend that it has anything to do with defending the US itself from a threat of being militarily attacked.
Every truly great Western nation in history has aspired to imperial dominion. The isolationist position is so pathetic precisely because it runs contrary to that great impulse to conquer, to lead, to rule, to expand that drove the settlement of the Americas in the first place.
Isolationist conservatives ironically reject this core aspect of traditional European civilization.
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Given that the aus SF execution happened in afganistan - what would be your response to 9/11 if we had no govenment agents? Nuke them? How does the US deal with houthis attacking shipping? Nuke them too?
An isolationist US wouldn’t take responsibility for freedom of the seas; that would probably be France or Britain(after all, the suez is their canal).
My argument is that we need a military. Every state needs a military. Or an alliance with a state that has one. What other state has ever existed without a military? If you can think of an example - how tenable is it for the US to emulate that example in a 21st century globalized economy? I contend that no such state exists, and if it did exist it would be completely untenable for the US to emulate it. I contend so because even in @Goodguy's response he acknowledges the need for a military - who else would be doing the physical act of nuclear deterrence but the military? I contend so because he offers no serious resolution to acts of hostility by state or sub state actors that clearly do not merit a nuclear response.
You yourself reference other states taking responsibility for stopping piracy or freedom the seas - do you see any value in this? What happens when you generalize @Goodguy's argument - should the UK or France also mock their armed forces? I would also like to point out that you yourself have made a foreign policy critique here.
So the question is: If we need a military and cannot exist as a state without then why hold them in contempt? Why blame those that serve for the failure of our foreign policy? It is misguided and misdirected ire, we need a military regardless of the competence of the state department.
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If I had been in charge of US foreign policy for the last 60 years or so, 9/11 would not have happened and the Houthis would not be attacking any US shipping because I would not have intervened militarily in the Middle East or supported Israel, so Middle Eastern military and paramilitary groups would not have had any reason to resort to such drastic measures against the US.
Would Somali pirates have happened on your watch? Please explain without retreating to the counterfactual. Do you honestly take yourself to be such an adroit statesman that the US could just... not have a navy? You hold those who serve in such contempt. But even in your own response you aren't actually taking issue with the soldiers and sailors themselves, you are pointing to US foreign policy as the problem.
I'd still have a navy to fight pirates. Because while I'm not in favor of supporting Israel, I still think it's reasonable to spend a bit of effort to keep innocent merchant ships from getting stolen.
And no, I am absolutely taking issue with the soldiers and sailors themselves. They carry out the policy and as such, are the ones most to blame. At the end of the day, they are the ones who pull the triggers.
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Why were people living in a cave in Afghanistan allowed to enter the US? Why had the US pissed off so much of the middle east?
As for the war it caused a surge in heroin production and pushed waves of migrants into the west.
I don't think Afghans should be let into the US. I also think the US has had poor foreign policy on the mid east. But these are policy critiques, the people that serve in the armed forces do not decide these. Why hold the armed forces in such contempt for decisions they didn't make? What is the alternative to having them? If there is no alternative then why mock them instead of those who make the decisions that you actually disagree with in your response?
A lot of them knew what they signed up for. They signed up for the war. I am sure there were some unlucky soldiers who signed up in 2000 who were forced to deploy.
They haven't really done anything that helps the average person in the west.
Again - I agree with you regarding US policy in the ME, I also think that is and has been poor. Again I will point out that this is a decision that was not made by those individuals who enlisted.
The US imports $3 trillion in goods every year, the majority of which is by sea. Does that benefit the average westerner? The US exports $2 trillion of goods a year, the majority of which is by sea. Does that benefit the average westerner? The US Navy ensures freedom of trade on the oceans which enables this trade to exist. Until England and later the US ensured this fact the reality has been widespread piracy. Within the timeframe you describe the US Navy has dealt with piracy from Somalia in one of the busiest shipping lanes used by the west. Does that benefit the average westerner? Even if I were to concede that 99% of what the US military does is misguided that last 1% is materially vital enough to justify its existence. We absolutely need people doing this job, there is no alternative to having a military. It is makes no sense to hold them to account for foreign policy decisions that they have not made. Blame the state department.
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There's a distinction between despising someone for being tools of the government and despising them for being
OP isn't anti-US government. He's calling for more aggressive use of state force against Southerners - Sherman.
Their whole job is to follow orders! The division of labour is that the elite decides who is the enemy, then the soldiers destroy them as directed. When a bridge fails, the engineer can't just throw up his hands and say 'if the builders didn't follow my retarded schematics then we wouldn't have wasted all those trillions of dollars and thousands of lives'. It's the engineer who is to blame.
The US has global interests and it's straightforward that protecting them incurs risks. Taiwan and South Korea are really important to the US. He who controls East Asia and semiconductors rules the world. Plus a good part of America's living standards relies on being the strongest great power, if that mantle is lost then the US is in for a very tough time. Instant depression IMO as the US dollar stops being a safe haven, equities dumped, interest payments on bonds soar, terms of trade get markedly worse, plus a massive political crisis.
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