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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.
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.
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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