JTarrou
14hr ago
1: Droning a drug boat isn't a war. Obama droned more weddings than Trump has boats.
2: "Trump's fixation with the spoils of war"? Did you just make that up? Or are we supposed to take that as a given?
My experience is that people who reason from their own ability to read the minds of people they hate are rarely anywhere near the mark.
JTarrou
14hr ago
Yet many do, and many more will do so temporarily on vacation or work trips. Given the difficulties and the pull of familiarity, family, culture etc., this is to my mind some evidence for the power of relative status.
JTarrou
2d ago
There is a point to be made about technology and the comforts, others have pointed out the obvious ability to hire people for that much money back then.
Another slight problem is the status differential. A hundred K back in 1959 puts you in a different social status for the day than that amount would today. Yes, you could buy more and better shit with it, but what people often want to buy with their cash is status. Whether luxury cars, penthouse apartments, living in a trendy neighborhood of a major city, etc. A hundred K today you could keep your head above water on a suburban mortgage outside a third-tier city and be respectably middle class. A hundred K in 1959 is enough to live like a country squire or the upper middle class of a major city. Send your kid to Harvard and shit.
I'm guessing there might be more than a few people who would choose 1959.
JTarrou
4d ago
Not with US public opinion we couldn't.
"Administering justice and securing a power base" are, to the media and the US public, genocide and war crimes. We have to send our diplomats to hawk sex change surgeries to hillside goatherders and offer to "learn from Women of Color" who have an explosive belt locked around their waist by the warlord their family sold them to.
JTarrou
5d ago
YMMV, but "embedded with" =/= "beloved by"
Terps are like officers. Maybe someone somewhere had a good one, but for all the rest of us, they're the people most likely to get us killed.
Don't get me started on why revolutions are always worse than the regime they replace. The most modern of Reformation schismatic sects is busy recreating the monastery system in academia, where holy men undergo sexual reassignment to become a privileged caste of eunuchs.
JTarrou
6d ago
The strength of christianity historically has been its willingness to empower women due to the ease of extracting the fruits of that empowerment from them. Women being able to inherit property was an early core tenet of the catholic church, which they forced on most of Europe, because then they could then transfer that property to the priests. How do you think the church became a major landowner? Bequests from widows, divorcees and other women were a key source of income for the early church.
Of course, there isn't shit in the Bible that mandates any of this, but surviving religions come to have a theology that funds their continued existence. Christianity is a "topping from the bottom" religion, and as such has always had its core support among women. This is also why more masculinist philosophers have always hated it, from Aurelian to Nietzsche.
Our modern childish individualism sees people as complete and perfect, needing no training or education at all. We are taught to resist and subvert legitimate authority, and submit to the opinions of strangers on the internet.
How much of our educational idiocy is downstream of the inability of teachers to command the respect and attention of their students?
How much of our criminal idiocy is downstream of the resistance of large sections of the public to basic enforcement of the laws?
How much of our political idiocy is downstream of the unwillingness of our ruling class to support the government they control?
Ultimately, we all spend our lives on what we find important. We follow the rules we must to get where we want to go. We all serve, we are all limited. Freedom is not the lack of restriction, it is the choice of restriction.
JTarrou
9d ago
Yes, women are perfectly capable of doing basic office jobs so long as no hardship is involved. Not sure that qualifies as "military", but we let the officers wear uniforms, so waddaya waddaya.
JTarrou
9d ago
1: The Navy is heavily, but not exclusively homosexual. Thousands of dudes on a ship, and it only takes one to knock up the girlboss.
2: If you've seen the level of attractiveness of military women, a gay man could be forgiven for making a mistake.
JTarrou
12d ago
Universal draft and holding all recruits to male fitness standards would do it, no need for war.
Trust me, they'd get pregnant to get out of a ten-mile road march.
JTarrou
12d ago
Women want to be in combat arms for that sweet combat pay,
I don't think this is it. The push for women in combat has come almost exclusively from female officers. There are to a rounding error zero women in the whole US trying to be enlisted infantry.
Officers want a combat billet for promotion purposes, and for the sweet sweet uniform garland. Bunch of awards you can only get in an infantry unit, and command of a combat unit is huge in officer promotions. There are essentially no women in the whole world who want to actually do the job of combat. Not for love, money or insanity. What there are is wanna-be girlbosses who need to stamp the Infantry page in their promotion journal.
Furthermore, women have an easy out of an actual deployment, because the Army doesn't deploy preggos. When the 11th deployed in '05, there was so many pregnancies in the support units that they had to transfer in eight hundred male soldiers to backfill all the women getting out of deployment. Only one female out of roughly a thousand deployed. And they weren't even combat arms!
Hear me now, believe me later, this is all bureaucratic manouver. There is no cadre of females who will actually fight in combat units. There are only two reasons women want to get into hardcore units, it's either promotion or pregnancy. They're looking for a star or a train.
What they really object to is Trump teaching the Republicans to do politics like Democrats. The Republican Party has its first tiny little riot in a hundred years, and the party of all-day-every-day rioting falls about hyperventilating about "insurrection".
Trump does normal, technically gray area stuff like have classified documents or pay off mistresses and it's a hundred felony counts. James gets grilled about mortgage fraud and it's the end of Democracy.
JTarrou
13d ago
It's a bad precedent, but it isn't Trump's precedent. Turnabout is fair play and so far nothing I've seen from Trump rises to the level of what his enemies have already done to him personally.
JTarrou
13d ago
Why are structurally advantaged people worried about the opinions of the structurally disadvantaged?
JTarrou
18d ago
As with many marginal religious groups, it was very successful under the original charismatic preacher, and fell to infighting starting immediately after his death (from a perfectly treatable medical issue).
At the least he had the conviction of his beliefs.
JTarrou
18d ago
Funny the behavior we punish in our heroes.
Tangentially, I have come to see hatred of religion as the first and largest red flag that someone has converted to a new one.
JTarrou
18d ago
No real denomination, independent evangelicals. Faith healing cult out of Indiana, google Hobart Freeman.
JTarrou
19d ago
My recollection is that it was very liberal-coded and "complementarian" grading on the curve of evangelical christianity. Very much a normie American christian thing, which my more strict upbringing recognized as "not real christianity".
I think it was, at least compared to western europe or east asia. I lived in Russia in the early '90s, and it was extremely low trust as a society. Everything is accomplished through bribery, nepotism and blackmail, nothing through official venues. The people don't trust the government or each other, the government doesn't trust the people or itself.
There are various Russian theories about this, but the most popular I recall was that Russian society evolved under extremely harsh foreign domination, the Mongols, Golden Horde, Polish-Lithuanians etc. and their own homegrown psychopaths. Russian elite society is incredibly low-trust and untrustworthy, moreso than the rest, hence the regular purges that have marked all of Russian political history.
Recall the tale of the murder of Rasputin, and if it sounds crazy, realize that the Russian nobility did shit like that constantly.
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