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As I keep telling @aardvark2, I'm not dodging the question, I'm questioning the entire framework upon which the question rests. Is dingblat freater than fnord? Yes or no?
I feel like "Macnamara's Folly" is something that has been litigated and relitigated to hell and back, but upon review it hasn't really been touched since we move to the new site. So you know what @ArmedTooHeavily, you're a fair cop.
To rehash the arguments that I used to get into with TPO, Gwern, and others back in the day; I don't think the facts as presented are either A) complete, or B) particularly supportive of the sweeping conclusions that bay area rationalists in general and certain "dark enlightenment" thinkers in particular want to draw from them.
Robert MacNamara is an interesting and controversial character in that with the exception of some Civil War Confederate Generals he's probably one of, if not the, US historical figure with the largest split in emotional valence between tribes. The blue-tribe professional and academic classes seem to regard him as this brilliant visionary who used his education and intelligence to optimize all the things, bring balance to
the Forceforeign policy, and rationality to the military industrial complex. Meanwhile on the other side, the name of the man who lost Vietnam is a by-word for why technocratic rule by experts is a bad idea. While less so today there was a time not all that long ago where the surest way to start a fight in a VFW or American Legion bar was to praise Robert MacNamara.Going off on a tangent, the US military has always been a bit unusual in that even when it was a largely conscript force it remained oddly picky (compared to other nations) about who it brought in, heavily favoring the quality of its troops over the quantity. While less obvious today we can see evidence of this this in media of the 1910s 20s 30s and 40s where ostensibly fit characters are labeled "4F" and in modern echoes of the same such as Captain America. Point being that despite the popular conception of the ranks of "dumb grunts" being filled by little more than dumb grunts with few or no alternatives, this has not historically been case.
Coming back to MacNamara, McNamara was/is practically the posterchild for rational technocratic decision making, it's a big part of why he's so popular amongst a certain set, but it also made him kind of an idiot and an all-around terrible person. MacNamara being the very rational liberal and high IQ person that he was felt that the US military was leaving a lot of money on the table by not lowering it's recruitment standards. After all dumb grunts are just dumb grunts and what good are infantry really except as cannon fodder? Why shouldn't we as rational technocratic authoritarians lower the acceptance standards, skimp on the training, and throw bodies at the problem until it goes away?
The reasons not to just throw bodies at the problem are probably an effort post on their own this is the basic argument being made, and I don't see how Macnamara displaying a callous disregard for both military tradition and human life is supposed to prove that "niggers r dum" unless the specific tradition being disregarded is the one about equality before God.
As @Botond173 observes up thread I think that a user must be particularly stupid and/or naive to believe that "the experiment" was anything of the sort and that getting a bunch of non rationalist technocrat individuals killed wasn't the goal from the start
In the mean time @somedude is by thier own admission an account created for the specific purpose of picking a fight with me and @aardvark2 seems to be in the same boat in the sense that I don't think I've ever seen him engage in a discussion that wasn't about HBD.
This is not remotely true. He’s largely associated with expanding the Vietnam War, which did not go well, and Taylorism, which has long been out of fashion.
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