Care of Proph of The Orthosphere:
The U.S. military has largely been an arm of the welfare state for at least the last 30 years, so this is hardly surprising. Objections to the effect that women in combat will harm military readiness are probably technically correct but miss the point. Promoting military readiness isn’t what the left is interested in here. What they want is to extend government benefits (e.g., hazard pay) to a segment of the population that doesn’t currently get them, at least not the same extent men do, and to provide employment for the otherwise-unemployable, which includes both low-IQ proletarians and second-sigma types with their government-subsidized bachelor’s degrees in diversity studies from Northwestern Nevada State Teachers’ College.
Remember, more people in the military = more people employed, so the leftist bureaucracy gets to claim it wins. More people in the military also = more pressure to justify the expense of military spending by invading increasingly insignificant nations posing increasingly illusory threats, so the left wins again. “Conservatives” get their hard-on from increased military spending, so they get to claim a win, too. Muslims and probably some day Russians (might) lose out, but who gives a crap about them, right?
By the way, while I do agree with the assessment that this harms military readiness (though not by much, at least not by much more than the already-existing sexualizaiton of the military, ludicrous and constantly shifting rules of engagement, etc., already have), objectively, that’s probably a good thing. Since America is the single most powerful force for evil in the world, and this evil is mediated in part by American military force, whatever weakens the American military will, ipso facto, lessen our capacity to aggressively export evil. Will someone like Putin be more afraid, less afraid, or equally as afraid of America now as before? We all know the answer.
I have to say, this comment of his struck me as merely bitter and tunnel-visioned, not to mention unnecessarily crude and nasty at the expense of conservatives. I note that there is _zero_ concern about what is going to happen to women in combat–so much for chivalry. There is _zero_ concern about the possibility that good, Christian young women of whom he should approve may be drafted against their will–so much for Christian solidarity. There is _zero_ patriotism. Yeah, I know, patriotism can be exaggerated, but since when does anyone with a single patriotic blood cell in his body actively wish that his country’s military might become pathetic and weak? Any concern there that we might, someday, have _actual_ enemies that we might need to respond to? Nope. America’s just the bad guy and the sooner she goes down the better. Unedifying. And the reflexive Russophilia is also annoying. Yeah, our biggest concern in the world ought to be not worrying Putin, that great and noble fellow who just sacrificed his country’s orphans to chest-thumping. One very nearly gets the impression that the author of this comment feels more loyalty to, of all people, Vladimir Putin than to a bunch of Christian home-schooled girls who now have to wonder about being drafted. Or, for that matter, to his own country.
There’s nothing like a bitter paleo at his most bitter (which is what this sounds exactly like) to give one the creeps. To my mind, that kind of narrow America-hatred that doesn’t even show any love for or concern for those who should be co-belligerents is…highly unpleasant.
Also, while I don’t think the women presently in the military should have joined up in the first place, it’s only fair to remember that they’ve been given something of a bait and switch, having joined up under the impression that women are not sent into combat. Maybe they should have known better, given the way that the line between combat and support roles has been blurred for several decades, but not everyone is as informed as those of us who follow these things, and the military does recruit fairly aggressively.
But, again, if one’s first response to this announcement is, “Oh, good, this will weaken the American military, which will be better for Russia and other countries who might otherwise have had cause to fear America,” then one has plenty of priority problems.
I believe I understand Lydia. I have 2 boys and 1 girl all under age 10 and the thought that someday they might be fed into this massive social-engineering machine with a possibility of death or maiming on one of America’s misadventures in defending democracy from tiny countries full of dusky-colored people horrifies me. My grandfather was a Pearl Harbor vet, and my father a promising Lt. Commander in the Navy during Vietnam. After Nam, they gutted the military and retired him which left him pretty sour on the military and so it was never encouraged that I follow in our family’s footsteps. Sometimes I wonder if I should have gone that route, but I quickly get over it when I consider what it has become.
Yeah, we non-mainstream conservatives are always in a strange in-between position. On the one hand, we don’t share the reflexive enthusiasm for the military that is seen in many of our fellow conservatives who are more mainstream. We know too much about the present-day military, and we don’t like to see nice young men, much less young women, going into it. We cringe when our fellow conservatives have no willingness to criticize any wars America happens to get into, and we cringe even more when some nice pastor prays for “all our men and women in the military.”
On the other hand, and it really is a big “other hand,” it’s important for us not to become *so* non-mainstream that, like Proph, we welcome the weakening of the military per se as a good in itself, we demonstrate no loyalty to our country, and our only response to this latest event (women being sent into combat) is a kind of bitter schadenfreude, accompanied by crude references to the (ahem) arousal of fellow conservatives at military spending. We should instead draw together and say, “What can we do about this? How can we help women of good will to avoid this?”
Being non-mainstream is a kind of balancing act. One might say that we’re “in conservatism but not of it.” But that shouldn’t allow us to indulge in the kind of unbridled hostility either toward America or toward what we regard as more naive conservatives, nor in the kind of reflexive liking for nasty foreign regimes like Russia’s, that I see in Proph’s comment.
The sad fact is that when one moves somewhat out of the mainstream of conservatism, especially now with the existence of the blogosphere bringing in every possible side-street of thought, one is always in a position to open oneself up to rather bizarre influences and alliances. It’s my opinion that it’s better to be darned lonely than to become part of a thought community full of people who react like Proph reacted here. Sorry to have to be that blunt, but there it is: There’s a new oeuvre I’m seeing and hearing on some of the trad-con blogs, and it has a darkness to it that I think we need to take warning about and steer clear of.
I admit there isn’t much concern about the prospect of women being drafted in that comment, but that’s because I don’t take such a prospect seriously. Why would I? It won’t happen, so I don’t feel the need to qualify my remarks with gratuitous fretting about scenarios that will never, ever be realized.