Dorothea commented:

In that case, the correct criterion isn’t “male only.” It’s “capable of hauling 150 lbs X distance in Y time, REGARDLESS OF GENDER.”

Does the difference there make sense? And does it make sense that I don’t like to see the former criterion when what’s meant is the latter one?

——————

‘Course it does. My original characterization “that tends to rule out most women” was only meant to show that my desire to be cool with gays in the military has nothing to do with the political popularity of the idea.

The military is still working the kinks out of including women in the military. We profess to want to keep them out of combat, but this doesn’t stop them from dying. And we take great pains to protect women from their male associates…which ideally wouldn’t happen, if we were all honestly ready to put hormones and brain-stem decision making aside.

But like any other differently-treated minority, female soldiers divide into Overcompensation, Assimilation, and Exploitation camps. Very rarely, the men in a unit are cool enough to let females just be soldiers; most units require a female to be better than her comrades just to get by; some units (and leaders) allow female soldiers to skate by as flirtatious dirtbags. (Indeed, a unit often gets the soldier it deserves.)

I would point out that my father had to deal with similar bullshit when he tried to be a warrant officer and black simultaneously.  And I think this points directly to the source of my coarseness.

In a war, nobody wants to kill anyone else at first.  This is probably the greatest misconception a lot of the public has about soldiers – the idea that bloodthirst is something we bring to the fight in the first place.  But war pulls it out of all of us, I think.  Even the toughest, most macho-bullshit-bag-me-a-deer guy isn’t going to haul off and kill a man that first time and think it’s a fabulous thing.

At some point, especially when faced with great injustice, the choices reduce to:  fight back, or go cry about it.

I’ve watched a man beat and murder a woman on a video, then talked to him later…only to see the man display not a shred of remorse.  There may be a REASON that this man got to be as f**ked up as he is…but there isn’t an excuse.  So I have a very limited set of choices, if I think the conversation with said scumbag is necessary:  confront him with my version of the world, and try to make him see it, or quit.  (I’m leaving out the more emotionally satisfying third option, as it would have been illegal in that example, and quite possibly might have turned me into a Sith.)

Trying to find a way to state my opinion without angering him might be an option at first, but it will never produce the required result on its own.  Eventually, somewhere down the line, I need to tell him he’s wrong.  I need to make him see that, and that’s going to get ugly.  He’s going to call me a dog of the Jewish conspiracy, and I’m going to probably have to cuss at him a bit.  Or at least tell him his thinking, if not he, is broken and in need of rewrite.

And maybe this is why I try to be considerate as much as possible, but I make a distinction between being considerate and being polite.  Some fights are worth having in the open.  Sometimes, it’s worth it to piss people off, if only because that makes them more likely to punch back, and challenge us when we’re wrong.

Dorothea, we’ve had our words.  But you’ve always made me a better person for it.

Now that you’ve had my coarse, initial-reaction take on the repealing of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell…see how a real journalist does it.  He also covers what I glossed over yesterday – that integration begins as a recruiting necessity, and only goes mainstream after a lot of struggle.

Which is, in a way, my point.  When people who don’t like each other are forbidden to avoid one another, but are given leeway to speak their minds…the pain is immediate and sometimes intense, but it’s my experience that the pain takes less time to pass.

Allow me to further elaborate on the women-in-the-military angle, as well:  I’m in favor, and there are plenty of women (plenty enough) who have died in combat.  The kinds of combat position I’m referring to in the previous post are light infantry, walk-around-the-mountains-with-150-pounds-of-gear jobs.  The sort of jobs I wouldn’t be physically able to do, either.  Women are definitely tough enough…but the 240B squad machine gun is really danged heavy.

It’s about damned time that we started talking seriously and out loud about allowing gays and lesbians to serve in the military.  The military has survived including atheists, women, latinos and black folks.  Hell, some people in the Army even admit to being Democrats.  So there’s plenty of room for gay people too, I say.

Southern white culture will still remain dominant – at least in the Army.  I personally support maintaining physical standards for combat positions that, by and large, would exclude women by default (though if a female is 6′3″ and weighs 250 pounds…hey, whatever).  But the threat of Gay Pollution of our nation’s military readiness is just plain dumb.

If you think some men would be threatened to serve next to an openly gay comrade…you’d be right, but not in the way you think.  There’s a crap-ton of homophobes in the Army, yeah.  But sexual harassment is already illegal.  Openly gay service members would likely be careful with how they made passes at others.

If you’re worried about gay people being flamers in uniform, you shouldn’t be.  Military discipline already covers things like wearing a uniform properly, carrying oneself like a soldier, and so on.  As a sergeant, I’d have just as much cause to correct a slouch as I would an exaggerated lisp.

But one thing you’re never going to fix, not entirely?  Defamation.  Everything in the military that’s bad is either “gay,” “retarded”, or both.  ”MPH” does not mean Miles Per Hour.  The fight over who was right in the Civil War will never end, and joking about someone’s ethnic background is, by and large, considered a sign of affection.

If PFLAG has a problem with the way we talk…well, F*** them.  We may be assholes, but I’ll point this out: the military will stop giving a shit about the gays in its ranks long before the national public agrees to let them get married.

So it starts with a housing bubble.  This time.

Bubble drives property values up.  Values drive property taxes up.  Government has no incentive to save surplus money, so it starts spending more money.  (I am being bipartisan, here – the only difference between parties is what the money gets spent on.)

Bubble bursts.  Property values go down.  People get wiped out.  Government temporarily spends MORE money to fix this.  (Again, I’m not going to assume this is right or wrong; only inevitable.)  Then, property tax revenues start to dip below spending levels.  This is where we are now.

When you’ve got two parties at a state level, there is incentive to try and blame the budget overruns on your opponents.  This keeps you in office, and hopefully forces those opponents to cut their spending.  You protect your interests, damage the other players.

This scenario puts us into Arizona’s current scenario.  As of right now, the game of chicken is going right off the cliff – neither side is backing down.  This will probably lead to two things.

1.  A bunch of people will be fired at the state level.

2.  The people who replace them will have the same problems and incentives.  Once other options are exhausted, all that’s left is to beg the Feds for money.

And that last bit’s the kicker.  If unemployment stays where it is, income tax and sales tax will have the same problems as property tax.  If the money runs out at the Federal level, there are all sorts of weird things that may happen at that point.

I have to say, this is the OTHER thing I was willing to settle for when I backed Obama.  If the parties cannot be repaired, they must be destroyed.  Neither party is willing to pull the plank from their own eye.  I think I see where this leads.  I hope it doesn’t hurt us more than it has to.

If you’re looking for a clearer indicator that America is screwed, you won’t find one.  Giving a corporation a constitutional right to free speech is just about the stupidest thing anyone could possibly do.

Adam Smith – you know, the guy who invented capitalism? – he didn’t even think that corporations should be allowed to exist.  His idea was, a person is the ultimate holder of responsibility.  A piece of paper or an idea can get someone killed, but that inanimate object can’t do time in jail for murder. So why should a corporation get equal justice?

This may sound like I’m going all pinko-soft here, but I’m not.  A government can be overthrown. The guy who votes wrong in Congress can, at least in theory, be fired for doing so.

But Goldman Sachs can make trillions of dollars in bad bets, reach into MY pocket to pay them off, appoint its own lackeys to cabinet positions…and NOW it has the constitutional right to spend money I no longer have to tell me why I’m wrong, and that its political thunderwhores should keep giving them my money.  And because it’s a private organization, I apparently have no right to tell them to stop, or fire them.

Thanks for this, truly.  Makes me feel all warm.  Probably because an investment banker just pissed on me and told me it was rain.