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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   28012 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024

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Was C.S. Lewis truly counter-cultural at the time? I think it’s only because the counter-culture and the mainstream flipped in recent years that C.S. Lewis’ views would be considered anything transgressive. His attitude towards women was fairly standard for a mid-20th century British man and his Christianity would have been shared by the majority in society.

Lewis and his society were simply closer to the reality of war.

Even to this day, this attitude is held when the rubber meets the road. Ukraine didn't put both men and women on the frontline and Ukraine did not stop women from leaving on the grounds that they had to fight and there was very little outrage about it.

People just don't want to be told they can't do X, even if they had no intention of actually doing that thing.

Uh, doesn't Ukraine put women in combat?

Frontline duty is 100% voluntary for women, while men are both drafted and assigned to the frontlines.

Even if you had complete equality in the draft, sending women to the frontline would be poor practice for the same reason that sending 50 year old men to the frontline in a total mobilization scenario would be poor practice, or for the same reason that you wouldn't train people with terrible eyesight to be pilots if you had the choice.

Not even as FPV drone pilots? I know my wife gets seasick when I show her J. Kenji Lopez-Alt's cooking videos, but surely not every woman's vestibular system is this underdeveloped.

Any skill requiring 3-demensional thinking and hand-eye coordination favors men. Video games and chess have proven this beyond all doubt.

I can't comment on the viability of women as drone pilots in the absence of men, but if you have men available you would obviously want them as a first option.

Beyond all doubt you say. What studies would you pull out if people demand evidence?

Studies are lower quality evidence, than the combned scoreboards of every competition involving those skills, in their entire recorded history.

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I saw propaganda around that recently, I didn't really take it that seriously - just thought it was part of the same desperation causing them to look for men. Because, if you're going to use women as combat troops, it seems deeply unwise to let half your manpower go.

What percent of Ukrainian front line troops are women?

Good luck finding a real answer to that question. BBC claims 5,000 but that's almost certainly an egregious lie. My guess is that the real answer rounds to zero.

I'm willing to change my estimate if you can find a single story of a woman killed while storming enemy lines.

The UKR army is like 800k strong which translates to roughly 225k troops on the front.

Given ukraines manpower problems having 2% of your frontliners be women might be reasonable. After all while a 23 year old man is probably better than almost any 23 year old women a 23 year old women might outperform a 45 year old man.

2% is fairly low. Frontline troops can mean Artillery gunners, FPV drone user ect, there are so many different combat roles in the military that they can find the least bad role for women to save more men for the infantrymen.

a 23 year old women might outperform a 45 year old man.

I take it you don't play co-ed sports. It might be worth an effort post, but there are lots of reasons why men are better than woman at combat that even this age gap wouldn't come close to erasing.

2% is fairly low. Frontline troops can mean Artillery gunners, FPV drone user ect, there are so many different combat roles in the military that they can find the least bad role for women to save more men for the infantrymen.

I suspect that this is where the 5,000 number comes from. But if women are being used on the "frontline" to save men for the actual frontline then "frontline" is a pretty meaningless term.

I play co-ed hobbyist sports but nothing professional. A women who lifts takes creatine and can do Frontflips can be more athletic than 20% of men aged >40. Obviously this doesn't describe many women but this maybe describes the top 1% of women which corrisponds to roughly 100% of women on the real front lines.

I suspect that this is where the 5,000 number comes from. But if women are being used on the "frontline" to save men for the actual frontline then "frontline" is a pretty meaningless term.

There's a big issue that's hard to mention which is that "frontline" can mean "any combat role where getting shot at is a real concern" (which is why I suspect it's 2% of the UKR army) and "guy in the trenches". What of these roles that I could find on /r/combatfootage would you describe as "the front lines"

  1. artillery gunner who is firing at russians 30km away
  2. driving a tank 1 kilometer away from the enemy?
  3. manning a pillbox shooting a shotgun at incoming drones?
  4. Somebody controlling drones dropping granades?
  5. Manning a helicopter firing rockets?

I suspect the 5k would call all 5 "front line". I would probably exclude 4.

What of these roles that I could find on /r/combatfootage would you describe as "the front lines"

I would define frontline in a similar way to you. Frontline = high risk of death + proximity to enemy forces. Whether a particular role is front line would depend on how many people died doing it, but many of those roles could definitely be considered front line.

In all the footage there is probably only one single clip of a Ukrainian woman storming a trench, three if you count the gender ambiguous blobs being shot at in Azovstal. Fair few of women in CASEVAC doing in-vehicle stabilization, and a few women working counterbattery were killed. These roles are still valued, but they aren't sitting in trenches waiting for the assault.

Doesn't change the fact that others raised, which is female soldiers are better used outside of directly employing violence of action. Keep men killing, thats what they do best. Women can get the teamkill assist.

C. S. Lewis quite explicitly believed that his Christianity was not shared by the majority in his society. He is very clear that he believes that Christians are a minority in Britain, even though it was the middle of the 20th century and the number of people writing 'Christian' on the census was an overwhelming majority.

See, for instance. Mere Christianity p. 62, where he writes, "My own view is that the Churches should frankly realise that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives." That book was published in 1952, and the passage I quoted was based on a radio talk he gave in the early 1940s. Lewis believed that as of 1952 most British people were not Christian.

For Lewis, being Christian in a meaningful sense is very much not just a matter of identification, nor of lip service. He understood himself to be counter-cultural.

I bumped into an earlier example when reading G. K. Chesterton's autobiography. Born in 1874, he writes that he was taught Christianity at a mainstream school by teachers who were not themselves Christians. This took me by surprise. We are talking about around 1890, and there is a Cathedral near where I live, built 1879, spires added 1913-1917. There is a contradiction between Chesterton's account of his post-Christian upbringing at a time when people are still building Cathedrals.

Chesterton doubles down, proposing that enthusiasm for Empire was a substitute for loss of Christian faith. People need to believe in something, and if Christianity has faded, they will latch on to something else.

My guess at the social history involves Darwin and the debates following his 1859 publication of The Origin Of Species. The London intellectuals of the generation before Chesterton respond by quietly giving up on Christianity. Meanwhile, others are participating in various Victorian Religious Revivals. Christianity looks healthy, but society's thought leaders have abandoned it. Christianity rots from the top down, and elites, such as C. S. Lewis experience a post-Christian country, while others are still happily attending Church.

Seems like Lewis was in retrospect correct.

Yes, quite probably. He was certainly a critic of merely cultural Christianity.

Hear, hear.

There’s a statement which I’ve heard semi-frequently in church and on Christian radio, and I know not its provenance: “God has no grandchildren.” It means that people may be culturally similar to their Christian parents and ancestors, but faith in Jesus as savior and God as father is an individual matter, not a familial/cultural one. For example, my father’s stories of his conversion have been vitally important to my own faith, but my faith has a different genesis (pun intended) and is inextricably mine.

Institutional churches, like the Church of England, tend to lose sight of this fact and settle for children inheriting the faith of their fathers, putting it on a shelf for safekeeping like the family china and bringing it out on holidays.

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