"I regret that I have but one life to give for political incorrectness ..."
2012-01-14
Redefining words to suit special interests
2015-05-01
I am getting very, very tired of special interests
redefining words in a manner favoring their interests.
Here is the most recent example of that phenomenon.
Consider the word "thug".
In my almost exclusively white education in the 1950s,
I learned the meaning of that word.
It meant, essentially, a person who used force to get what he
(I cannot recall an instance when it was used to describe a woman) wanted.
Likewise, "thuggish" referred to obtaining things by force.
The word had absolutely nothing to do with race.
Now, in 2015, come members of the black community asserting that the word has a racial connotation:
In recent years,
members of the black community have said thug is
simply a politically correct replacement for racial slurs.
In January 2014, for example,
Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman said during a press conference,
“It seems like it’s the accepted way of calling somebody the N word nowadays.”
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Let me say it again: A thug is someone who gets his way by force.
Just because someone is black
doesn't make him (or her) immune from being, potentially, labeled a thug.
What is determinative about whether the word is appropriate
is the behavior of the individual, not their race.
Remember when the homos and their media and political supporters
(including prominently such names as Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Carl Levin)
were assuring us (lying to us is more accurate)
that letting the homos serve openly in the military would have no negative effect on the military's effectiveness?
[P]olice, prosecutors and sex crime experts say that
Sandusky’s alleged abuse
is illustrative of sex predation across the country.
It is an extremely high-profile version
of what police departments and social services offices see regularly:
A man in a position of trust is accused of
abusing those who are most vulnerable.
Capt. Bill Carson of the Maryland Heights, Mo., police department,
a 32-year veteran who has studied imprisoned sex offenders,
noticed similarities between his cases and the Penn State case right away.
“I interviewed a lot of charismatic people
that would appear to be really nice people
if you didn’t know what they were in prison for,” he said.
“They came across as being very pleasant.
A lot of them had been in a position of trust.
They were youth pastors or school teachers or YMCA volunteers,
Boy Scout leaders, Little League coaches.
“They were well respected and well thought of in their career,”
Carson said.
“And when the charges came down, everyone was shocked.”
...
[T]he experts and law enforcement officials say the vast majority of predators share many of the same traits as Sandusky.
They are teachers, counselors, clergymen and coaches
who might be close to kids anyway,
so the amount of time they spend with children
and the close relationships they build
don’t raise too many questions.
...
“Just the fact that it’s a person in power elevates the situation.
From the victim’s point of view,
they’re put in the position of being a nobody,
and if they accuse the person of abusing them,
they’re going up against a powerful and well-liked person.
Who’s going to believe them?”
It is that concern that experts say keeps victims quiet, sometimes for decades.
Attorneys for accusers in Sandusky’s case said
the boys felt silenced in part because
they didn’t want to play a role in hurting Penn State,
which holds enormous community influence.
...
“But for this Penn State thing, we probably wouldn’t have known about this,”
said Prince William County Commonwealth’s Attorney Paul B. Ebert.
“All these guys use their position of authority
to try to target vulnerable people.”
[
End of article.
What should be obvious to any knowledgeable, honest, intellectually capable person
is the relevance of all this to the military.
The most basic characteristics of the military social structure are
authority and trust.
The higher ranks are given great authority over the lower ranks,
who in turn must be able to trust that their superiors are giving orders
not in the interest of personal gain
but for the good of the unit and the mission.
I am not trying stigmatize all homosexuals.
But I am trying to make a point
that the "elite" has systematically denied or ignored:
“That putting homosexuals in charge of troops of the same sex
is like putting a chocolate-o-holic in charge of a candy store.”
No matter how well-intentioned the homo may be,
the temptation will be there
(which it would not for a heterosexual supervising same-sex troops),
and some will succumb to the temptation
to use their power and authority for personal gain,
with a corrosive effect on unit effectiveness.
And the factors mentioned in the article
that made some victims reluctant to call out a revered leader
will apply in spades in the military.
It’s going to be a real mess, one the “elite” has ignored or denied.
And who is to blame for this?
What group has been most supportive of homosexual rights,
including their service in the military?
It’s not hard to accurately identify that group,
although to do so brings furious responses from the members of that group,
who cannot bear any criticism of their group,
no matter how justified.
I am not going to name it.
In any case, I think the homosexual lobby should be absolutely ashamed
for not recognizing the problem their selfish desires have created
for the military.]
The rate of sexual assaults on American women serving in the military
remains intolerably high.
While an estimated 17 percent of women in the general population become victims at some point in their lives, a 2006 study of female veterans financed by the Department of Veterans Affairs estimated that between 23 percent and 33 percent of uniformed women had been assaulted. Those estimates are borne out in other surveys, and a recent Pentagon report on sexual assaults at the service academies found that in the 2010-11 academic year, cadets and midshipmen were involved in 65 reported assaults.
Too often victims are afraid to come forward.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta estimated that
the number of attacks in 2011 by service members on other service members —
both women and men —
was close to 19,000,
more than six times the number of reported attacks.
...
[Remember when the New York Times editorial board
was calling, nay, demanding,
that the military open its doors to open homosexuals?
Remember when they claimed that the only reasons to oppose such
was bigotry?
Now recall something else,
that the gay lobby asserted that homosexuals were just like heterosexuals?
Well, if so,
then we can expect that homosexuals
will commit acts of sexual violence and coercion
at the same rate as heterosexuals.
In other words, adding open homosexuals to the military
will only increase the rate of sexual violence
which the Times deplores in the above editorial.
Does it not seem like an act of total intellectual dishonesty
that the Times editorial board,
along with practically all of the rest of the MSM,
failed to point that out?
Surely it is not that hard an observation to make
for such "elite" people as have been chosen to be America's opinion leaders.]
The Air Force is investigating a growing sexual-misconduct scandal
in its basic-training operations,
with a dozen male boot-camp instructors under suspicion of
assaulting, harassing or having sex with female recruits.
...
[The conclusion of the article:]
“For every instructor that assaults a recruit,
there are usually dozens of others who have known about the problem,”
said Anu Bhagwati, a former Marine officer
and executive director of the Service Women’s Action Network.
About 22 percent of the Air Force’s recruits are women,
but only about 11 percent of its training instructors are female.
Bhagwati called boot camp “a target-rich environment” for sexual abuse
because instructors wield total authority over raw recruits.
“It’s the kind of environment where you’re being yelled at 24-7,
where you’re terrified of everybody around you,” she said.
“How are you supposed to ask for help
if you’re the victim of sexual assault?”
[The scandal uncovered here involved
the abuse of female cadets by male instructors.
But what about when the boot-camp instructors are homosexuals?
If, as the homo lobby and their many supporters and allies repeatedly told us,
the only difference between homosexuals and heterosexuals is
that a homosexual is attracted to people of the same gender,
then this same problem will arise.
For women, the feminist movement and women in general
have created a strong support network,
with rich and wide access to the media,
to publicize and try to prevent the abuse of female service members by men.
But when homos pray upon people under their control of the same gender,
who will call out this problem?
And when the service itself tries to prevent the problem,
will not the homo lobby then accuse the service of being, you guessed it,
“homophobic”?]
Your bending of their words intended target to suit your own agenda is likely motivated by some deep seated angst and self loathing.
The above was the initial response to a column by Jim Lobe. The point is by attacking Lobe’s motivations, without giving the slightest reason, the attacker avoids the need to address the substantive point Lobe had made. (The “self loathing” charge, by the way, is because Lobe is Jewish.)
Note: This, together with the post on “Homosexuals in the Military”,
was buried down among the other posts.
However it is my understanding that Congress could, by rapid action,
block the placement of women in submarines,
and of course has the option to repeal or not repeal “DADT”.
Because of the current relevance,
I have (temporarily) moved these two posts to the top position in this blog.
(Technically, the “deadline” for Congress to veto women on subs has passed.
But as the first women will not actually go on the subs until sometime in 2012,
I am quite sure that,
if Congress would tell the Navy to drop that idea,
there is still plenty of time for the Navy to abort (how’s that for the right word?!)
that plan.)
I have no doubt that some people
rabidly oppose the point of view expressed herein.
But the arguments for this point of view are not often expressed in detail.
I hope my attempts at making those argument are not too feeble.
Homosexuals in the U.S. Military
A considerable amount of material on this subject
was moved on 2010-03-29 to a dedicated post:
“Homosexuals in the Military.”
The Department of Defense released an annual report on Tuesday showing
an 11 percent increase
in reports of sexual assault in the military over the past year,
including a 16 percent increase
in reported assaults occurring in combat areas, principally Iraq and Afghanistan.
The report said there were
3,230 reports of sexual assault filed
involving service members as either victims or assailants
in the fiscal year that ended in September.
...
“One sexual assault is too many,” Kaye Whitley,
the director of the Pentagon’s sexual assault prevention and response office,
said in a telephone interview.
The 2009 report, like previous reports, included sexual assaults
by civilians on service members and
by service members on civilians.
But Ms. Whitley said a majority, 53 percent,
were assaults by service members on other service members.
Of all the assaults, Ms. Whitley said,
a vast majority, 87 percent, were male on female,
while 7 percent were male on male.
The typical case, she said, was
an assault by an 18- to 25-year-old junior enlisted male service member
on a woman, with alcohol involved.
In the report, sexual assault was defined as
rape, sodomy and other unwanted sexual contact,
including touching of private body parts.
It did not include sexual harassment,
which is handled by another office in the military.
Ms. Whitley said that most sexual assault in the military went unreported,
as it did in the general population,
and that she did not believe that there was
more sexual assault in the military than in the population at large.
“We are recruiting from the society we serve,” she said.
The report said that
sexual assault was devastating to individual service members
because it “destroys the human spirit,”
but that it also took a serious toll on the military.
“Sexual assault reverberates throughout a unit and beyond,” it said.
[1]
The lifting of the military’s policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell,”
the ban on “out” gays serving, is now all but certain.
All but certain, too, is that the military will make
the same morale-busting mistakes
with the integration of openly gay service members
that it has made with the integration of women.
This will make an already difficult situation far worse.
[2]
The military is staffed by “alpha” types
who think more force means greater success.
That means it frequently over-reaches and has to be called back.
The military also tends to go into a counterproductive “enforcer” mode
with its own people,
even when what is being crammed down their throats
is a policy the military itself resolutely opposed —
until the day it didn’t.
The integration of “out” gays into the military is such a policy.
[3]
The integration of women into the armed forces
is an earlier — and still current — example of
this sort of destructive “do it or else” change of policies within ranks.
The recent firing of Capt. Holly Graf of the USS Cowpens
for incidences of what were alleged to be abusive behavior
was explained by a source quoted in the Navy Times:
“The Navy has a vested interest in pushing women up. …
We will do anything to please these senior women.
Effectively, they can hold the Navy hostage.”
[I have no Navy experience, nor do I know anyone who does.
None the less, I have thought a little about the submarine service
and what it would be like to be part of a submarine crew on multi-month deployments,
away from any contact with the world outside your small, crowded vessel
and the close contact you must have with your fellow crew.
First, I think all should be somewhat in awe of
how successful the “Silent Service” has been
at conducting their missions without accidents or losses.
They have been operating nuclear submarines since the Nautilus went to sea in 1954.
That’s over half a century!
Nuclear submarines are a high-tech marvel,
packed not only with a nuclear reactor
but also a wide variety of munitions, ranging from torpedoes
to all sorts of missiles (cruise, ballistic, you name it)
armed with a wide variety of very deadly warheads
and fueled by highly explosive propellants just waiting to be ignited.
They operate underwater,
where an accident can easily lead to the entire boat being lost.
Yet, so far as I know, in that half-century only two boats have been lost:
the Thresher and the Scorpion, both in the 1960s.
I, for one, salute those men of the Silent Service
who have carried out those operations so successfully.
Now, there’s an old expression “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
The Silent Service “ain’t broke.”
There is absolutely no need for it to introduce women and homosexuals.
The only drive for that is from the politicians,
who in turn are pushed by feminists and the homosexual lobby
and the feminists and homosexuals who influence the politicians,
through their votes, their money, and their advocacy in the media and elsewhere.
What can go wrong by introducing women and homosexuals?
Well, here’s what I would worry about:
The effect that will have on the ability of the sailors
to maintain the concentration that is so necessary.
To better understand the problem,
let’s take a closer look at the operational and technical environment
that the PC class intends to perturb.
The backbone of the U.S. submarine force consists of
about fifty Los Angeles class fast attack submarines
each about 350 feet long, carrying a crew of 130,
with a unit cost of about $1.5G in 2010 dollars.
Its successor, the Virginia class, has unit cost of about $2G in 2010 dollars.
The high expense is largely due to
the sophistication of the systems packed in each boat, especially
the propulsion, sensor, offensive-weapons, and life-support systems.
Each of these systems must be monitored, operated, and maintained scrupulously.
A problem with any one of them can easily lead to the loss of the entire vessel:
a leak or explosion from the reactor or the high-pressure steam used for propulsion,
an accidental weapons explosion (Iowa),
problems with the propulsion systems for those torpedoes and missiles,
(Scorpion, Kursk)
a problem with the oxygen system or hull integrity (Thresher).
Situational awareness reports need to be collected, collated, analyzed,
compared to procedures and plans;
decisions need to be made and communicated to the relevant crew.
In some cases, time will indeed be of the essence.
In some cases, there will no margin for error,
and there will not be time for cross-checking or review of decisions made.
There is no opportunity for a mulligan, “do-over”, or next-day editorial correction.
The first decision must be the right one, or else.
Now let us suppose we do as the PC class,
Obama,
all those Democratic politicians,
the homosexuals who are so critical to their electoral success,
the Jew-heavy Ivy League universities
(you know, those places that have banned ROTC for the past forty years),
and those bastions of political correctness, the media
want us to do,
and force the sub crews to include women and homosexuals.
Take a look at the recent New York Times article
“When Cupid Strikes at the Cubicle”,
which informs us that
[W]orking together can itself be a kind of aphrodisiac.
In a phenomenon known as the “mere exposure effect,”
people who see each other continuously tend to like each other more,
said Terri L. Orbuch, a psychologist, relationship therapist and research professor
at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.
Workplace romances are exciting
because they usually start in secrecy,
Dr. Orbuch said. “The secretiveness is actually arousal-producing,” she said,
[I’m sure Navy spouses are going to love this.]
“so it is important to make sure you are attracted to the person
and not just the secrecy.”
Great.
So now we can look forward to “When Cupid Strikes in the Torpedo Room, Sonar Room, Engine Room,
Missile Storage Area, Wardroom, Fire Control Center or Intel Center
(the facilities where intelligence information
is gathered, processed, analyzed, and reported)” ?
I can just see this (and I’m serious):
“Gee, sorry, captain,
I know we should have been processing that intel data
and putting out a CRITIC on it,
but we were too busy having a personal conversation and lost track of time.”
And if Admiral Mullen doesn’t think that those situations are going to happen,
regs or no regs, training or no training, he is a big fat idiot.
But at least Maureen Dowd writes him up favorably.
There will be those who say these fears are overblown,
that men and women in the military are far too professional and well-trained
to let mere personal relations distract them.
Those people are out of their minds (but what else is new among the PC crowd?).
For instance, see the above articles 2009-12-28-NYT-sexual-abuse-in-combat-zones 2010-03-17-NYT-sexual-assaults.
For those who want a specific example, I have just two words: “Lisa Nowak.”
Note also how the media keeps well-separated
their articles on sexual harassment and sexual assaults
in the military and by Catholic priests
from their articles on how wonderful it would be
to introduce homosexuals in the military (and women on submarines).
Mustn’t connect those dots!]
Because there are no good mixed gender comparisons
when considering all of the unique mission and environmental conditions
of a submarine,
there is great uncertainty about
the effect that gender mixing will have on group dynamics
during normal submarine operations and combat conditions. In no other institutions, including
schools, prisons, Antarctica, the space shuttle,
and other military operational units
are men and women forced to live isolated from the outside world,
in such unrelenting close contact with minimal privacy,
and in less than satisfactory accomodations,
for extended periods of time.
“The key variable in the effectiveness of a submarine
is not just technical abilities,
though a certain level of technical competence is necessary,
but the ability of the crew to maintain cohesiveness
under all possible conditions,
including ship casualties and combat situations.
Thus it is essential that every effort be made
to identify any factors that can adversely affect
unit cohesiveness and morale.”
[Comments, in this color, by the author of this blog have been added.]
NORFOLK, Va (NNS) --
The Department of the Navy has announced a policy change that
will allow women to serve on submarines.
The change was considered by Congress
after Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
formally presented a letter to congressional leaders Feb. 19, 2010
notifying them of the Department of Navy's desire
to reverse current policy of
prohibiting submarine service to women.
"There are extremely capable women in the Navy
who have the talent and desire to succeed in the submarine force,"
said the Honorable Ray Mabus, Secretary of the Navy.
"Enabling them to serve in the submarine community
is best for the submarine force and our Navy.
We literally could not run the Navy without women today." [What does that last have to do with women in subs? Nothing.]
On July 28, 1994, Congress was notified of policy changes
to expand the number of assignments available to women in the Navy.
At that time, opening assignments aboard submarines to women
was deemed cost prohibitive and assignments on submarines remained closed.
Currently, women make up 15 percent of the active duty Navy –
52,446 of 330,700.
Integrating women into the submarine force
increases the talent pool for officer accessions
and subsequently the force's overall readiness,
ensuring that the U.S. Submarine Force will remain the world's most capable
for ensuing decades.
"The young women that have come up to me
since we announced our intention to change the policy
have such great enthusiasm,"
said Adm. Gary Roughead, Chief of Naval Operations.
"Knowing the great young women we have serving in the Navy,
as a former commanding officer of a ship that had a mixed gender crew,
to me it would be foolish to not take
the great talent, the great confidence and intellect
of the young women who serve in our Navy today
and bring that into our submarine force."
"Today,
women earn about half of all science and engineering bachelor's degrees,"
said Vice Adm. John J. Donnelly, Commander, Naval Submarine Forces. [Heavily weighted in the biological sciences.
It is frequently observed (evidently not by the Navy, though)
that women are vastly underrepresented in physics and electrical engineering.]
"There are capable women who have the interest, talent, and desire
to succeed in the submarine force.
Maintaining the best submarine force in the world
requires us to recruit from the largest possible talent pool."
Implementing the policy change will begin by
assigning three female officers in eight different crews
of guided-missile attack (SSGNs) and ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs).
The assignments involve
two submarines on the East Coast and two on the West Coast,
each of which is supported by a Blue and Gold crew.
More living space is available aboard these platforms
which will require no modification,
permitting the Navy to move quickly on integrating female officers in submarines.
"We need to open up the aperture for submarine officer selection
to maintain our current selectivity,"
said Rear Adm. Barry L. Bruner, Commander, Submarine Group Ten
and leader of the Women in Submarines Task Force.
"The key to making this significant change happen successfully
will be correctly carrying out the plan
and also ensuring that we educate the force and their families." [Right out of the PC playbook.
It’s all about education.
Education can solve everything.
Sure.]
SSGNs provide the Navy with
an unprecedented combination of strike and special operation mission capability
within a stealthy, clandestine platform,
while SSBNs are specifically designed for extended strategic deterrent patrols.
There are currently 14 SSBNs and four SSGNs in the Navy's inventory,
each with two crews assigned.
The female officers would be assigned
after completing the 15-month submarine officer training pipeline,
which consists of nuclear power school, prototype training,
and the Submarine Officer Basic Course.
The SSBNs are billeted for 15 officers and 140 enlisted,
while the SSGNs have a crew allotment of 15 officers and 144 enlisted.
"We have created a well-thought-out plan
to phase in the female officers
to the selected SSGN and SSBN submarine crews,"
added Donnelly.
"Enabling these bright and talented female officers to serve
will be a great asset to
our submarine force, our Navy, and the strength of our military."
[Comments, in this color, by the author of this blog have been added.]
KINGS BAY, Ga. (NNS) --
Rear Adm. Barry Bruner, Commander, Submarine Group Ten,
announced the Department of the Navy's plan
to allow women to serve on submarines,
during a press conference at Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay, Ga., April 29.
...
The commanding officer of USS Alaska, Cmdr. Kevin Byrne said
implementing the policy change will not pose a major challenge.
"Integrating women on board is nothing new to us.
Women have been getting underway on submarines
for overnight embarks and qualifications, familiarization,
and sea trials embarks for weeklong periods.
So having women permanently established on board
is not a major adjustment for the crew."
[Really?
I have zero Navy experience,
but I will take exception to the commander and state that
I find that hard to believe.
The Navy management, both civilian and military,
persists in claiming that, essentially,
“nothing significant will be changed
by replacing some male crewmembers by women.”
Well, some reasons why that surely is an invalid assumption
were given above, but now let me add this:
With an all heterosexual male crew,
the possibility of intra-crew sexual attraction is, by definition, zero.
Introduce women and homosexuals and you, again by definition,
introduce, not the possibility, but the certainty of
within-crew sexual attraction.
With that come the inevitable accompaniments of
lust, envy, jealousy, and passion.
These will come due to unchangeable, iron-clad laws of human nature.
Training and conditioning may, in the short-term, totally repeal those laws,
and in the long-term, reduce the effect of those laws.
But they will not eliminate all the effects of those laws.
And in the zero-tolerance-for-error situation
of a sub on a long-duration underwater cruise,
with human passions, no doubt,
building up as the time spent away from home and loved ones grows,
it is only a matter of time before
some human-passion-generated mishap causes the loss of a sub.
Does the Navy deny that?
Will some military reporter have the concern for the crews of those subs
to ask Admiral Roughead his answer to that question?]
[Come on.
How many men, looking at that photo,
will be thinking about
what Midshipman Wilcox’s
professional qualifications are?
Admiral Roughead,
what example do you set for your men
if you deny that?
Shame on you for not making sure
the public is well informed about
the distractions women on submarines will cause.]
Making Navy Capt. Owen P. Honors a scapegoat is ridiculous
and terribly damaging to the morale of U.S. military forces.
For those who have been on a float or in combat,
this kind of locker-room humor is the only safety valve we have.
It is all-encompassing and an equal-opportunity offender.
That kind of universal razzing promotes camaraderie.
To punish the then-executive officer of the USS Enterprise
for creating a climate of humor for men and women far from home,
performing dangerous and frequently repetitive duty
with no other outlet for entertainment,
is wrong.
To relieve the captain of his command over this
is sending the message to U.S. troops
that the swagger and insouciance
that make them the best fighting force in the world
now has to be hidden.
This is a poorly thought-out pandering to political elements
at the expense of a fine officer,
and it has already affected troop morale out here on the ground,
especially among elite units.
S.A. Lackey, Baghdad
The writer is a civilian contractor with the U.S. Army.
There are serious problems in today’s military that it did not create
but must address to the satisfaction of its civilian masters.
Human beings are created with a sex drive,
and the civilian world has demanded that first women, and now openly gay people,
be integrated into largely closed-quarters situations
that have historically operated by the rules of straight males.
It’s not Neanderthal to note that men and women socialize differently -
men by aggressing one another and
women by supporting one another
(see the work of Georgetown linguist Deborah Tannen).
It’s not homophobic to point out that most people
are more comfortable being naked around strangers
whom they think (perhaps wrongly) have no sexual interest in them.
That’s why we have single-sex bathrooms in public places.
It’s the tenor of our times to go ballistic
on anyone who notes these elemental facts.
But noting them is just what we should be doing,
as a way of defusing tensions and persuading people
to accept difficult situations.
I think Honors realized that
problems everybody talks about privately become worse
if the command structure pretends they don’t exist.
He’s like a parent who decided to make clear to his kids
that he knew they were thinking about sex and drugs,
and to take control of the topic. He should get a medal for being proactive.
Among those problems:
the fact that on a tight-quarters ship,
masturbation (frowned upon in the 19th century but now generally accepted)
becomes difficult. [It’s hard for me to imagine how that situation could work satisfactorily
when heteros and homos are bunking together.]
The fact that plenty of straight servicemen and women
fear showering with people of the same sex
but a different sexual orientation.
The fact that profanity is overused.
The executive officer frankly referenced those facts
with his insider videos on the ship’s closed-circuit TV.
They were meant for one audience; now they’re being seen by another.
During a town hall-style event in Northern Virginia on Monday morning, a combat veteran asked Donald Trump what he would do about the "social engineering" that he says is happening in the military to allow women and transgender individuals to serve. The Republican presidential nominee agreed that the military has become too "politically correct" and said he would follow the recommendations of top military leaders.
Army Col. Don Bartholomew, who asked the question, accused the Obama administration of attacking the "warrior ethos" that has long been at the heart of the Army's success.
"The military has become an institution for social experiments
and, as a result,
the military has undergone a number of changes to regulations with regard to
women in combat, transgender rights and other issues,"
Bartholomew said.
"None of these P.C. actions were combat-effective or readiness-driven.
In fact, the opposite is happening.
Deployability, readiness and morale are all adversely affected.
So my question to you is:
What will you do about the social engineering and political correctness
that has been imposed upon our military?"
"Well, we're going to get away from political correctness, and we are going to have to do that,"
Trump told the audience at a Retired American Warriors event in Herndon.
He then compared political correctness in the military
to the outcry he faced when he praised profiling as a police and security tactic.
"You're right," Trump said.
"We have a politically correct military,
and it's getting more and more politically correct every day.
And a lot of the great people in this room
don't even understand how it's possible to do that.
And that's through intelligence, not through ignorance -- believe me --
because some of the things that they're asking you to do
and be politically correct about are ridiculous."
When it came to the examples Bartholomew provided, Trump said that he would leave such decisions to top military leaders.
"We'd get our military people to come back and make recommendations to me,
and I will follow those recommendations," Trump said. "I will follow them very strongly."
The military has made a number of policy changes in the last few years that have not always been popular with the rank-and-file. [You notice the "Support the troops" crowd is AWOL on this issue.
To them, "supporting the troops" means fighting endless, fruitless, pointless wars designed to support Israel, not America nor its troops.]
In 2011, the Obama administration repealed the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which prohibited gay service members from serving openly.
Last December, the Pentagon announced it would open all jobs and units to women, as long as they could meet the rigorous requirements that go with them. Although a full integration is now underway, no woman has yet to become a Navy SEAL or a Marine Corps infantry officer.
And on July 1, the Department of Defense dropped its long-held ban on transgender people serving in the military and began to pay for medical treatment for those diagnosed with gender dysphoria. That decision was made after a long, belabored process during which the Pentagon missed a self-imposed deadline because of internal resistance.
When the debate was waged over whether it was merely bias
that caused many members of the military (both current and former)
to state their opposition to admitting open homosexuals into the military,
the media would frequently quote civilians as asking the question:
“Why should the military operate under different ground rules
than, say, the university or the newsroom?”
The media would then leave that question unanswered,
as if there were no good answer.
(That way of framing the issue, by the way,
itself indicates the bias of the media.)
There are, in fact, good answers to that question,
answers which the media did not choose to offer.
Let me make a, probably feeble, attempt to supply some of those answers.
In the first place:
Professors do not ask their students or their colleagues to put their lives at risk.
Neither do publishers or editors
(at least not in general;
those covering emergency and war situations
obviously do place their lives at some risk,
although, I think, not normally as much as happens to, say,
combat infantry or attack fighter pilots in the days when U.S. planes were often being lost).
Second,
while most civilians live in their home communities,
with access for romance and, yes, sex, with their spouses or significant others
or, nowadays,
whomever they choose to hook up with,
the military, when they are deployed,
have no such ready access to romantic and sexual support.
Third,
Army military forces, at least, when in field operations,
live in exceptionally close quarters.
They live and work together twenty-four hours a day.
They even sleep, if not together, at least in a common area.
The idea of privacy is, in the field, nonexistent.
Separate toilet facilities for men and women?
What a reduction in flexibility that would be for the unit.
You literally live with your fellow soldiers.
So, if you are a man, you are literally living with and rubbing bodies with,
potentially very sexually desirable women.
And if you are homosexual, the same applies to those of the same sex in your unit.
And when you are ready for sex, you cannot, at day’s end,
go back home to your honey or
go visit some recreation facility to find a partner for hooking up.
Your potential sex partners are limited to
the people in your unit.
And this situation may persist for months at a time.
It really seems insane to me to expect anything other than that,
after months of living in those conditions,
that a significant number of men will do
exactly what the women in the military have been complaining about,
take advantage of the situation.
But beyond the issue of sexual assaults,
there is another problem that must be considered.
The women in the unit will, unavoidably,
be a constant distraction for the men.
Looking ahead to the now threatened entry of women into combat units,
suppose you are a male member of an infantry squad,
with some hot female working next to you.
What are you going to be thinking about?
What your squad leader wants, or what the woman wants?
Indeed, from the viewpoint of overall military effectiveness in combat,
it is possible they will be attractive nuisances.
Civilian women work constantly to get men to do what they want,
using their female wiles when necessary to manipulate men.
No doubt some female service members will not resort to such tactics,
but who can doubt that some female service members
will go right ahead and use their wiles?
This will affect even senior officers,
who will make special accommodations for sexually desirable people.
What if Ms. Broadwell had been, not a civilian General Petraeus met at Harvard,
but LTC Broadwell, assigned to his G-2 or J-2 (Intelligence) staff?
(She was apparently an MI officer.)
Would she, as a staff officer, have made the same or similar efforts to make friends with the CINC
that she in fact did as a civilian?
And in that remote situation, in Kabul or wherever the Afghan force was headquartered,
would Petraeus have given her special treatment?
If he had, surely that would have been noticed by his other staff officers,
and caused resentment.
Back in the civilian world,
I remember once hearing a Georgetown University coed say of her boy friend
“He worships the ground I walk on.”
Will some military women not also develop boy friends, who are equally smitten?
Of course they will.
And that will cause grave problems for the need to keep troops focused on
the needs of their commander, presumably expressing the needs of the mission,
rather than the needs of whomever the service member is trying to woo.
If I might be pardoned for an example from the comic strips,
consider Miss Buxley in the strip “Beetle Bailey”.
Two issues arise here.
First, on the issue of sexual assault.
Consider the attraction she holds for various troops, say, “Killer.”
As long as she is the general’s secretary,
she is safe from harassment or assault.
All she has to do is tell her boss, the general, about what happened,
and he will take care of the malefactor.
But what is she were not the general’s secretary,
but a fellow soldier living in a common situation with Beetle and Killer.
The opportunities for trouble are numerous,
ranging from harassment or assault coming from Killer
to jealousy and a triangle based on competition between Killer and Beetle
for her favors, whether just companionship or actual sex.
Second, while Beetle and Killer are preoccupied with
trying to woo now Private Buxley,
how much will they listen to the orders of Sgt. Snorkle?
Consider this situation.
Here Beetle is willing to perform favors for her, but in an off-duty situation.
If he extended his special treatment of her into duty situations,
that could pose problems for his relations with his fellow soldiers,
as he does more for her than for them,
possibly putting them in greater physical danger.
Now clearly this is, for now,
just a figment of the comic strip writer’s imagination,
but I have no doubt that, when and if women serve in combat units,
they will occur in real life,
to the great detriment of the unit’s cohesion and combat effectiveness.
So, the factors mentioned above affect the military significantly in several ways.
First, based on the hazardous duty required by superiors of subordinates,
there is the need for absolute trust between subordinates and superiors.
...
Excessive fraternization can be the enemy of unit coherence.
This is not so much the case in the civilian world.
If, for example, a university dean has a sexual relation with a student,
that would certainly set off alarms,
but harming the “coherence” of the university
or the performance of the other students
would not be one of them.
It is quite different in areas where unit or team coherence
is vital to performance of the unit or team.
Perhaps the military is too far removed
from the experience of many of those who have been pushing so avidly
for the military to open its combat ranks to both women and homosexuals,
which inevitably broadens both the potential scope of and desire for
fraternization between members of the unit,
whether they are of equal or unequal rank, or in a command relation.
It may be helpful to note how a case of what amounts to fraternization
has adversely affected something which is well-known to almost all Washingtonians,
namely the Washington Redskins.
To illustrate,
here are excerpts from several 2013 Washington Post articles reporting that
the social relation between the team owner, Daniel Snyder,
and the team’s much-hyped quarterback, Robert Griffin III,
has been noticed by other team members and has, according to the reports,
adversely affected their morale and, it is implied, their performance.
It does not seem a stretch to describe this as
harming the team’s “coherence.”
We thought Snyder might have learned that an owner’s leadership
is compromised when he attempts to befriend his star players, confusing employees for friends —
from Bruce Smith to LaVar Arrington and Clinton Portis.
But then we hear about
Robert Griffin III’s car being parked in the bowels of FedEx Field during the game
for a painless exit afterward
and a longtime employee calling another to say,
“The kid’s got a parking space during the game? No one got that.”
...
Double standards don’t just cripple team chemistry;
they destroy chains of command, circumvent authority.
The guess here is that Shanahan was finished as Redskins coach long ago —
a dead man walking maybe as early as last spring, when radioactively over-empowered rookie quarterback Robert Griffin III
began to openly campaign against the coach to the owner,
and the owner didn’t stop it.
The result was that nobody knew who they were playing for.
“You could find guys who played exceptionally hard last year,
and they didn’t [play hard] this year,”
observed former tight end Chris Cooley.
“Something was wrong with their situation.
It’s so strange to me.
You see the same group of guys who won that many last year,
lose that many this year.”
Shanahan was too intolerant,
not cut out for the kind of adroit situational massage
that the Redskins’ annual dysfunction calls for.
Possibly,
the fates of his predecessors over-sensitized Shanahan to issues of control.
Or maybe he just thought he was the guy who could finally handle this owner.
This makes Shanahan no different from the six coaches who came before him.
They all think they’re the guy who can handle Snyder, who can cure his hapless forays into locker room affairs,
and his tendency to wield his cigar like a billy-club,
and open fissures in his own organization.
...
[Jenkins explicitly raises the issue that
the Snyder/Griffin III relation circumvented the chain of command,
which would seem to run
from the team owner, Snyder
to the boss of football operations, Shanahan,
and then down to the players, of whom Griffin III was one.
While she, in this article, does not explicitly raise the issue of fraternization,
it seems inevitable that
intra-service sexual attraction will exponentially increase
the desire for, and likelihood of, fraternization,
in particular, these outside-of-chain-of-command relations.
What will happen when virile people, of either sex,
are in the same unit as people they are sexually attracted to?
You can write regulations to your heart's content,
and demand that anyone caught in a non-consensual sexual relation
be punished to suit the desire of the most ardent feminist Senator,
but that will not stop
the spark of desire from lighting in the loins of service members.
Relations of sexual desire will form,
fraternization of various types will occur,
and it will be impossible to regulate all of those,
because the criteria for what is fraternization are so hard to specify.
But the fraternization will be noticed by members of the unit,
just as the members of General David Petraeus' staff noticed
the way he was favoring and fraternizing with
his civilian biographer, Paula Broadwell.
One can imagine analogies to their fraternization
in a strictly military context.
Suppose an O-5 Lieutenant Colonel battalion commander
spends a lot of time going on runs, stictly for conditioning of course,
with an exceptionally attractive person in the O-5's unit.
Will the lower-ranking person's peers believe
that gives that person an inside edge with the C.O.,
one based not on effectiveness of performance but on sexual attraction?
Very likely.
I hope that you can see the analogy with how the Snyder/Griffin relation corroded,
according the media reports, the attitude of the other Redskins players.]
But does not one’s religious upbringing and training
have a greater effect on one’s propensity to commit crimes
than one’s military training?
I think the answer to that question is certainly “Yes.”
So why is the past military training of those Congolese troops
relevant to their crimes,
while the religious upbringing of Bernard Madoff, Ivan Boesky and Hillel Nahmad
is not relevant to theirs?
Is the argument that
military training is a better character builder than religion?
Again, that argument seems totally specious to me.
So why does the Post go with this headline and not the others?
My answer:
The Post is currently running a campaign to smear the U.S. military,
just as they smeared the U.S. Secret Service,
with either directly committing or being somehow responsible for sexual misconduct,
with the ultimate goal of,
just as as happened at Harvard, the IMF, and the Secret Service,
bringing those crucial institutions under female control.]
A Congolese army battalion that received its formative training from the U.S. military went on to commit mass rapes and other atrocities last year, a U.N. investigation has found.
Members of the 391st Commando Battalion, a unit created in 2010 with extensive support from the U.S. government, joined with other Congolese soldiers to rape 97 women and 33 girls as they fled a rebel advance in eastern Congo in November, according to the United Nations.
U.S. Special Operations forces had spent eight months training the 750-member battalion in a bid to professionalize Congo’s ragtag military, which has a long history of rights abuses, including raping and killing civilians. The training program, dubbed Operation Olympic Chase, was led by the State Department and the U.S. Africa Command, which oversees military operations on the continent.
Two years later, members of the battalion joined other Congolese soldiers to rape and rob scores of civilians in Minova, a town in eastern Congo, according to an investigative report released last week by the U.N. Joint Human Rights Office. The attacks occurred as Congolese forces were chased out of Goma, a key provincial capital, by a rebel group known as M23.
On Monday, the State Department acknowledged that some U.S.-trained soldiers “may be implicated in these rapes,” according to an e-mailed statement from a spokeswoman, Hilary Renner. “We condemn these crimes unequivocally and call for a full and credible investigation” by the Congolese government, she added.
Officials with the Africa Command, which is headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany, declined to comment.
The U.N. findings represent another setback in the U.S. military’s efforts to train and equip troops in Third World countries, many of which have poor human rights records.
In March 2012, a Malian army captain who had received extensive training in the United States led a coup that toppled his country’s democratically elected president. In the aftermath, France and neighboring African countries intervened militarily — with U.S. aid — to prevent Islamist fighters from taking over much of the country.
The Pentagon is ramping up its training in irregular warfare and counterterrorism with friendly countries as part of a broader strategy to combat extremist groups and stabilize war-torn regions. At any given time, U.S. Special Operations forces are deployed on training or liaison missions to as many as 80 countries.
U.S. law requires that individual foreign troops be vetted for human rights abuses before they can receive training. But some U.S. military leaders have said that those rules can be too restrictive and prevent Special Operations forces from training units that need the most help.
The U.N. report accused the Congolese military of “gross human rights violations” and documented 135 cases of sexual assault by Congolese soldiers in Minova. The report also accused M23 rebels of sexually assaulting 59 civilians in Minova.
The leadership of the Congolese armed forces is investigating the allegations. The commander and deputy commander of the 391st Battalion are among 12 officers who have been suspended, according to the United Nations.
While Operation Olympic Chase was underway in 2010, State Department and U.S. military officials said they were fully aware of the Congolese military’s troubled history. The training program, they said, emphasized respect for human rights and the need to protect civilians, particularly from sexual violence.
“You have enhanced your moral understanding of how a professional military operates effectively within a democratic society to provide security, to protect the civilian population and to contribute to greater stability,” Samuel Laeuchli, the ranking U.S. diplomat in the Congo at the time, said in a speech at the 391st Battalion’s graduation.
Thierry Vircoulon, Central Africa project director for the International Crisis Group, said the U.S. government underestimated what it would take to reform the Congolese armed forces.
“The state of the army in itself is a disaster, so you train people and you send them back to a dysfunctional army,” he said. “You are trained, but you still have a very low wage, no logistics, a very poor command system and no sense of belonging and cohesion because the Congolese army is still a patchwork of very different groups. Even if you’re trained, at the end of the day, you’re still an hungry and unpaid soldier.”
A senior U.S. official familiar with the training program said the Obama administration was aware of the risks but faced “tremendous political pressure to do something for Congo.”
“There were a lot of criticisms at the time that this would just make them [the troops] better able to oppress their own people,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media. “It’s one of those political judgment calls. . . . We bent over backwards to make this investment and to avoid the pitfalls and to really do it right.”
[Compare the following (but published in 2009) article.
NAIROBI -- The U.N. peacekeeping mission in Congo is collaborating with known human rights abusers as it backs a brutal Congolese military operation that has led to the deliberate killing of at least 1,400 civilians and a massive surge in rapes, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.
The 183-page report, the fullest accounting so far of the operation, is a chronicle of horrors. It describes gang rapes, massacres, village burnings and civilians being tied together before their throats are slit -- many incidents carried out by a Congolese army being fed, transported and otherwise supported by the United Nations.
The report calls for the U.N. peacekeeping mission to “immediately cease all support” to the Congolese army until the army removes commanders with known records of human rights abuses and otherwise ensures the operation complies with international humanitarian laws.
“Continued killing and rape by all sides in eastern Congo shows that the U.N. Security Council needs a new approach to protect civilians,” said Anneke Van Woudenberg, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch.
The Security Council is scheduled to meet this week to discuss the Congolese peacekeeping mission’s mandate, which is the United Nations’ largest and most expensive. A mission spokesman said officials are studying the report and declined to comment. The United States also has a small military team in Congo assisting the Congolese army.
The Congolese military operations, which began in January, were intended to root out abusive Rwandan rebels who have lived mostly by force among eastern Congolese villagers for years, fueling a long-running conflict that has become the deadliest since World War II.
The rebels -- known as the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, or FDLR -- include some leaders accused of participating in the 1994 genocide in neighboring Rwanda. The initial phase of the military operations were backed by Rwandan troops.
But as the Rwandans departed in February, U.N. peacekeepers stepped in, supplying attack helicopters, trucks, food and other logistical support to a Congolese army known as one of the most abusive militaries in the world. At the time, the head of the U.N. mission, Alan Doss, said that the operations were necessary and that some civilian casualties were inevitable.
But the Human Rights Watch report does not document the story of civilians accidentally caught in the crossfire. Instead, it details a chilling pattern of deliberate civilian killings by Congolese and Rwandan soldiers and the rebels they are fighting. Both sides, the report says, have carried out a strategy of “punishing” villagers they accuse of supporting the wrong side.
And, of course, all three served under and were appointed by
Barack Obama, America's first non-white president,
who surely also played a large role in setting the priorities of the OPM.
Wikipedia also observes that:
Mr. Barry was and is a male homosexual,
Ms. Kaplan was and is a lesbian,
and Ms. Archuleta was the first Latina director.
A commonly used phrase by minorities to denigrate the will of the majority.
A fundamentally anti-democratic expression.
Note the selectivity with which it is used.
The phrase is only applied to selected majoritarian policy preferences.
In fact, it is fairly safe to observe that
it is only used against majorities which are heavily white and/or Christian.
In practice, it is used heavily by the usual practitioners of PC
to attack the policy desires of the non-PC.
Finally, consider a variant:
When have you ever heard the phrase
“The Tyranny of the Minority”?
Is it only possible for majorities to be tyrannical?
Of course not,
but who would want to admit the possibility of a tyranny of the PC?
Might sound too much like what we really have.
An excellent discussion of the origins and history of political correctness
is given in a roughly half hour video by William Lind a YouTube playlist for the William Lind talk
The playlist embedded:
But the economy is not all;
the GOP’s last best hope remains identity politics.
In a year when the Democrats have an African American presidential nominee, the Republicans now more than ever are the white folks’ party,
the party that delays the advent of our multicultural future,
the party of the American past.
[Some of us, but evidently not Mr. Meyerson, still admire and respect that past
and abhor the notion of a multicultural future.]
Republican conventions have long been
bastions of de facto Caucasian exclusivity,
[The word “exclusivity” is perhaps misleading here.
If the Republican Party is heavily white,
that is not because Republicans keep blacks out,
but because blacks choose, out of their own free will, not to join.
Also, when black Republicans run for office in majority-black districts,
they are usually defeated by black Democrats.
And note how such black Republicans as Clarence Thomas
are shunned and reviled by the bulk of the black community.]
but coming right after the diversity of Denver,
this year’s GOP convention is almost shockingly -- un-Americanly -- white.
[Evidently in the eyes of Mr. Meyerson
the founders of the American republic,
and the signers of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution,
were “un-American.”]
Long term, this whiteness is a huge problem.
This year, however, whiteness is the only way Republicans cling to power.
If the election is about the economy, they’re cooked --
and their silence this week on nearly all things economic
means that they know it.
[“Anti-Semites” have traditionally said that a main objective of Jews was
to undermine the power of the white Christian majority.
Is telling the truth “anti-Semitic”?]
In response to the killing of 13 American soldiers at Ft. Hood by an Islamic U. S. Army major, a number of senior officials have expressed their fear, not of Islam, but of a possible threat to “diversity.” “Diversity” is one of the many false gods of “Political Correctness.” But what exactly is Political Correctness?
Political Correctness is cultural Marxism, Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. Its history goes back not to the 1960s but to World War I. Before 1914, Marxist theory said that if a major war broke out in Europe, the workers of every country would join together in a revolution to overthrow capitalism and replace it with international socialism. But when war came, that did not happen. What had gone wrong?
Two Marxist theorists, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary, independently came up with the same answer. They said that Western culture and the Christian religion had so “blinded” the working class to its true (Marxist) class interests that Communism was impossible in the West until traditional culture and Christianity were destroyed. When Lukacs became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Bela Kun Bolshevik government in Hungary in 1919, one of his first acts was introducing sex education into the Hungarian schools. He knew that destroying traditional sexual morals would be a major step toward destroying Western culture itself.
Lukacs became a major influence on a Marxist think tank established in 1923 at Frankfurt University in Germany, the Institute for Social Research, commonly known as the Frankfurt School. When Max Horkheimer took over as director of the Frankfurt School in 1930, he set about in earnest to do Lukacs’ bidding by translating Marxism from economic into cultural terms. Other Frankfurt School members devoted to this intellectually difficult task were Theodor Adorno, Eric Fromm, Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse. Theirs was not the Marxism of the Soviet Union – Moscow considered them heretics – but it was Marxism nonetheless.
The Frankfurt School’s key to success was crossing Marx with Freud. They argued that just as under capitalism everyone lived in a state of economic oppression, so under Western culture people lived under psychological repression. From psychology they also drew the technique of psychological conditioning. Want to “normalize” homosexuality? Just show television program after television program where the only normal-seeming white male is homosexual.
In 1933 the Frankfurt School moved from Germany to New York City. There, its products included “critical theory,” which demands constant, destructive criticism of every traditional social institution, starting with the family. It also created a series of “studies in prejudice,” culminating in Adorno’s immensely influential book, The Authoritarian Personality, which argued that anyone who defends traditional culture is a “fascist” and also mentally ill. That is why anyone who now dares defy “PC” gets sent to “sensitivity training,” which is psychological conditioning designed to produce submission.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Herbert Marcuse translated the abstruse work of the other Frankfurt School thinkers into books college students could understand, such as Eros and Civilization, which became the Bible of the New Left in the 1960s. Marcuse injected the Frankfurt School’s cultural Marxism into the baby boom generation, to the point where it is now that generation’s ideology. We know it as “multiculturalism,” “diversity” or just Political Correctness.
That is the dirty little secret of Political Correctness, folks: it is a form of Marxism. If the average American knew that, I suspect Political Correctness would be in serious trouble.
The Ft. Hood killings raise an interesting question: why would Marxists of any variety come to the support of Islam? After all, if the Islamics took over, they would cut Marxists’ throats even before they cut the throats of Christians and Jews. The answer is that cultural Marxism will ally with any force that helps it to achieve its goals, destroying Western culture and Christianity.
Obviously, there is far more to the history of the Frankfurt School and its creation of Political Correctness than I can cover in a short column. This is just a bare-bones outline. For those who want to learn more (and I hope you do), you can find a short book on the subject, which I edited, on the website of the Free Congress Foundation (www.freecongress.org). Free Congress also produced a short video documentary history of the Frankfurt School, which I’m told is available on Youtube (look under Frankfurt School or under my name). The video is especially valuable because we interviewed the principal American expert on the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay, who was then the chairman of the History Department at Berkeley (and obviously no conservative). He spills the beans.
Most people in the U. S. military hate Political Correctness, but they don’t know how to fight it. The way to fight it is to find out what it really is, and make sure all your friends find out too. Political Correctness is cultural Marxism, which is to say intellectual Soylent Green. Here more than in anything else, knowledge is a weapon!
A Valentine’s Day editorial in the official newspaper of the American College of Surgeons has set off a firestorm of controversy that has divided the largest professional organization of surgeons in the country and raised questions about the current leadership and its attitudes toward women and gay and lesbian members.
The editorial, written by Dr. Lazar J. Greenfield, an emeritus professor of surgery at the University of Michigan School of Medicine and president-elect of the American College of Surgeons, extols the mood-enhancing effects of semen on women.
It begins with a reference to the mating behaviors of fruit flies,
then goes on to discuss studies on
the menstrual cycles of heterosexual and lesbian women who live together.
Citing the research of
evolutionary psychologists at the State University of New York,
it describes how female college students who had been exposed to semen
were less depressed than their peers who had not,
concluding:
“So there’s a deeper bond between men and women
than St. Valentine would have suspected,
and now we know there’s a better gift for that day than chocolates.”
This month, in response to complaints, the editorial was retracted and pulled from the group’s Web site, and Dr. Greenfield was asked to step down from his position as editor in chief of the surgeon’s newspaper. But criticisms continue to mount.
“I was aghast,” said Dr. Colleen Brophy, a professor of surgery at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, and a member of the organization for over 20 years. Dr. Brophy, who served as chairwoman of its surgical research committee, publicly resigned from the College on Thursday. “I’ve gone back and reviewed the science, and it’s erroneous,” she said. “But I’m resigning from the college not so much because of the editorial but because of the leadership’s response to it.”
The organization has more than 75,000 members (I am one). Roughly 10 percent are women. There are five women on the organization’s 22-member governing board; this month, they issued a letter requesting that Dr. Greenfield step down as president-elect. The entire board is set to vote on the issue on Sunday.
Dr. Greenfield has not issued a formal statement and could not be reached for comment, but in an e-mail to his colleagues in response to the criticism, he wrote that his editorial “was considered by the Women in Surgery Committee and the Association of Women Surgeons as demeaning to women.
Despite my apologies, they brought the issue to the Board of Regents.”
[“Demeaning to women”?
What baloney.
The feminists just can’t stand to think that men might provide something women lack.
What bitches they are.
In fact, to call them bitches probably demeans dogs.
If the science is erroneous, that is a legitimate criticism.
The science deserves to be scrutinized.
But the word "demeaning" has no scientific standing.
Rather, it is a political judgment.
But feminists subordinate science and truth to their political values.
So do some (male) psychologists, by the way, as I discovered in the early 1980s.]
Dr. L. D. Britt, the current president of the organization and chairman of surgery at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, also did not respond to requests for comment. But at a surgical meeting this month, he invoked the experience of “oppressed” South Africans who chose “reconciliation,” adding, “If someone is truly apologetic, we have to consider that.”
While women now make up almost half of all entering medical school classes in the United States, fewer than a third choose to go into surgery, in part because of a perceived male bias, negative attitudes of surgeons and a lack of female mentors. Once in practice, studies have shown, well over half of all women surgeons report feeling demeaned, and nearly a third say they have been the objects of inappropriate sexist remarks or advances.
Dr. Greenfield has had what many believe is an exemplary career not only as a surgeon but also as a longtime mentor and advocate of women in surgery. He is the editor of one of the major textbooks of surgery and the inventor of the Greenfield Filter, a device that has been used in hundreds of thousands of patients to prevent life-threatening blood clots from entering the lung. And Dr. Greenfield has been a mentor to countless surgeons, many of them women, while serving as chairman of surgery first at Virginia Commonwealth University and then at the University of Michigan.
“He has always been above reproach,” said Dr. Mary T. Hawn, an associate professor of surgery at the University of Alabama School of Medicine in Birmingham, who worked as a medical student, surgeon-in-training and faculty member under Dr. Greenfield. “Our understanding was that he went out of his way to recruit women on the trainee and faculty level.”
Dr. Diane M. Simeone, a professor of surgery at the University of Michigan who was a co-author of a recent article on barriers faced by women in academic surgery, agrees. “There still is a lot of gender bias in surgery, and I have seen it myself on multiple fronts,” she said. “That was never evident from Dr. Greenfield. I think it’s important to know that this is one event and to weigh it against a long career where he has always been completely above board and a role model for supporting women in surgery.”
It is less clear what attitudes Dr. Greenfield or other leaders of the organization have toward the college’s gay and lesbian members. “I think race and religion have made a lot more progress in the college than women, and particularly gay women or men,” Dr. Brophy said. “This is probably the first time I’ve ever seen the word ‘lesbian’ used in a piece or associated with the college. Ever.”
For some, the controversy is less a matter of Dr. Greenfield’s fate as president-elect and more a reflection of what some see as a deep disconnect between the old guard and its respect of hierarchy and professional omerta, and a newer generation of surgeons and leaders who embrace a culture of transparency in the age of the Internet.
Many surgeons chose not to comment on the matter, for fear of professional repercussions,
but one said,
“It’s frankly been heartbreaking for all of us.”
“There are all these men and women out there who are afraid to say something,”
said Dr. Barbara Lee Bass,
chairwoman of surgery at the Methodist Hospital in Houston,
who recently served on the college’s governing board. “It reveals that there is still this intimidation and fearfulness,
and that’s what troubles me most.”
[Yep, that’s our feminists.
Clamping down on anyone who says anything of which they disapprove.
Reminds me of my married days.]
“I’m not sure some of the old guard see this as the watershed moment it is,” she continued. Referring to the college’s role as a standard bearer for surgeons and an advocacy organization for patient care and patient safety, she added: “It’s not so much about Dr. Greenfield anymore. It’s about the spine of our organization and the principles by which the organization governs itself.”
[Further comments, largely repeating those above:
The feminists have shown both their desire and ability to suppress any communications which suggest that their views are wrong.
See, for example, their successful war against doctors who tried to publicize the fertility problems that the lifestyle favored by feminists impose on women who (eventually) desire to have their own children,
and also their claims that pornography is only for the benefit of men,
rather than having the potential to motivate and encourage both men and women
to engage in mutually beneficial sexual relations
(which it certainly can do)
(see, for example, their attack on Faith Kroll's demonstration of
how she achieves female pleasure).
They are disgusting examples of speech and thought police.]
[The above New York Times gives a very small part of the editorial.
I think the whole paragraph in which that part appears is significant,
so here it is:]
As far as humans are concerned,
you may think you know all about sexual signals,
but you’d be surprised by new findings.
It’s been known since the 1990s that heterosexual women living together
synchronize their menstrual cycles because of pheromones,
but when a study of lesbians showed that they do not synchronize,
the researchers suspected that semen played a role.
In fact, they found ingredients in semen that include mood enhancers
like estrone, cortisol, prolactin, oxytocin, and serotonin;
a sleep enhancer, melatonin;
and of course, sperm, which makes up only 1%-5%.
Delivering these compounds into the richly vascularized vagina
also turns out to have major salutary effects for the recipient. Female college students having unprotected sex
were significantly less depressed
than were those whose partners used condoms
(Arch. Sex. Behav. 2002;31:289-93).
Their better moods were not just a feature of promiscuity,
because women using condoms were just as depressed
as those practicing total abstinence.
The benefits of semen contact also were seen in fewer suicide attempts
and better performance on cognition tests.
[T]o imagine p.c. as simply a thing college kids do
relieves us of taking it seriously as a coherent set of beliefs, which it very much is. Political correctness is a system of thought
that denies the legitimacy of political pluralism on issues of race and gender.
It manifests itself most prominently in campus settings not because it’s a passing phase, like acne,
but because the academy is one of the few bastions of American life
where the p.c. left can muster the strength to impose its political hegemony upon others.
The phenomenon also exists in other nonacademic left-wing communities,
many of them virtual ones centered on social media,
and its defenders include professional left-wing intellectuals.
The upsurge of political correctness is not just greasy-kid stuff,
and it’s not just a bunch of weird, unfortunate events that somehow keep happening over and over.
It’s the expression of a political culture with consistent norms,
and philosophical premises that happen to be incompatible with liberalism.
The reason every Marxist government in the history of the world turned massively repressive
is not because they all had the misfortune of being hijacked by murderous thugs.
It’s that the ideology itself prioritizes class justice over individual rights
and makes no allowance for legitimate disagreement.
(For those inclined to defend p.c. on the grounds that racism and sexism are important,
bear in mind that the forms of repression Marxist government set out to eradicate were hardly imaginary.)
American political correctness has obviously never perpetrated the brutality of a communist government,
but it has also never acquired the powers that come with full control of the machinery of the state.
The continuous stream of small-scale outrages it generates
is a testament to an illiberalism that runs deep down to its core
(a character I tried to explain in my January essay).
The scene in Columbia and the recent scene in New Haven share a similar structure:
jeering student mobs expressing incredulity at the idea of political democracy.
As far as the students are concerned, they represent the cause of anti-racism,
a fact that renders the need for debate irrelevant.
Defenses of p.c. tactics simply sweep aside objections to the tactics as self-interested whining.
“It’s not about creating an intellectual space,” shouts one Yalie.
Notably, the events at Yale have redounded in New Haven to the benefit of the protesters,
who have renewed their demands,
and Nicholas Christakis, the Yale administrator seen pleading futilely for reason, issuing apologies for his behavior.
Likewise, at Wesleyan, the student newspaper that sparked outrage
by publishing the op-ed of a student (cautiously) questioning elements of the Black Lives Matter movement has been harshly sanctioned.
That these activists have been able to prevail,
even in the face of frequently harsh national publicity highlighting the blunt illiberalism of their methods,
confirms that these incidents reflect something deeper than a series of one-off episodes.
They are carrying out the ideals of a movement that regards the delegitimization of dissent
as a first-order goal.
People on the left need to stop evading the question of political correctness —
by laughing it off as college goofs, or interrogating the motives of p.c. critics, or ignoring it —
and make a decision on whether they agree with it.
[It seems to me the designation of dissenting groups as "hate groups"
is rather similar.
One cannot advocate, for example, for the interests of white people
without being designated "a hater".
On the other hand, those advocating for the interests of black people
get a free pass.
The resonance this strikes with me is with a view I first met at Brandeis University c. 1970.
It seemed to be a given in the general campus culture
that something called "the establishment" or "the system"
was something to be opposed, for keeping (presumed deserving) people down.
(This whole anti-establishment attitude was definitely something I had never encountered before.)
An underlying assumption seems to be that the people then "on top" of the system
did not deserve to be there....]
Last week, the president of Virginia Tech, Tim Sands, published an “open letter to the Virginia Tech community” defending lectures delivered by deplorable people like me (I’m speaking on the themes of Coming Apart on March 25). Bravo for President Sands’s defense of intellectual freedom. But I confess that I was not entirely satisfied with his characterization of my work. So I’m writing an open letter of my own.
Dear Virginia Tech community,
Since President Sands has just published an open letter making a serious allegation against me, it seems appropriate to respond. The allegation: “Dr. Murray is well known for his controversial and largely discredited work linking measures of intelligence to heredity, and specifically to race and ethnicity — a flawed socioeconomic theory that has been used by some to justify fascism, racism and eugenics.”
Let me make an allegation of my own. President Sands is unfamiliar either with the actual content of The Bell Curve — the book I wrote with Richard J. Herrnstein to which he alludes — or with the state of knowledge in psychometrics.
