As everyone reading this blog no doubt already knows, feminists have hailed the Pentagon’s decision to open combat jobs to women, which will allow women the same opportunities to serve as men. The decision is also a backhanded acknowledgement that, for all intents and purposes, women are serving in combat today already. (Congresswoman Tammy Duckworth lost both of her legs in combat in Iraq – but officially, what she was engaged in wasn’t combat.)
It seems inevitable that, as a result of this decision, young women will be required to sign up for selective service alongside men. While virtually all feminists I know oppose the draft, most agree that as long as registration is going to be required, it should be required for both men and women. Indeed, when selective service was reinstated in 1981, the National Organization for Women brought a lawsuit demanding this sort of equality.
Reaction amongst Men’s Rightsers to the Pentagon’s announcement has been mixed. Some have welcomed the change, as a “what’s good for the goose” acknowledgement of equal rights and responsibilities. Others, like most of the regulars on The Spearhead, predict catastrophe, as inherently unqualified women are sent to the front lines. Regular Spearhead commenter Uncle Elmer joked:
After this experiment runs its course, how many men will have died while bringing tampon supplies up to the front?
Can anyone tell me the additional garbage load from tampon-related issues on all-women submarines? Could a mission fail if some gal flushed her tampon down the toilet instead of following the proper mil-spec procedure?
But the most telling reaction has come from A Voice for Men, which in an editorial suggested that it would only support the move if women were required to die as often as men.
No, really. Here’s what the editorialist, presumably site founder Paul Elam, wrote:
AVFM supports the spirit of the new Pentagon Directive … However, any blanket approval of the new measure thus far would be premature. …
[T]he only way this new policy will have any meaning will be if it is mandatory that women face combat on the front lines. With 20% of the military being comprised of women, that means roughly 20% of combat related fatalities should be female. 1 in 5 of body bags being filled overseas should contain the bodies of mothers, sisters, daughters, wives and girlfriends.
AVFM isn’t alone in hoping that one result of the Pentagon’s new policy will be increased injury and death for women. On his blog the self-designated “counter-feminist agent of change” Fidelbogen quoted – with a weird sort of semi-approval – one comment from an unknown person he says he found online:
I know this isn’t a laughing matter but this is pretty fucking sweet. Now those very same women who complain about how hard childbirth is get to experience real pain and misery by getting their arms blown off by enemy fire or their legs blown off by mines. Or getting infections when they have to stay at their post for days at a time without taking a bath. Those same women who say all men are rapists can now see what real rape is when they are taken as POW’s and gang-raped by foreign men at gun point and passed around like a piece of meat and then their heads blown off when they are done. This is real war ladies, are you ready for your cup of true equality?
In the comments on AVFM, meanwhile one Rick Westlake helped to make clearer the vindictive subtext of the AVFM’s editorial, suggesting that the Pentagon’s decision could be good for men if it served to
rub … some high-ratcheted, ‘entitled/empowered’ noses in the misandric, disposable-male double standard of the Selective Service system.
Our current society, including our military, makes mock of ‘equality’ by divorcing ‘opportunity’ from ‘consequences,’ ‘choices’ from ‘costs,’ and ‘benefits’ from ‘responsibility.’ Princesses are awarded all of the opportunities, choices and benefits and are excused from all the responsibility, costs and consequences. ‘Draft-pigs,’ meaning men, are made to shoulder all those dirty, nasty, dangerous and demeaning responsibilities, consequences and costs on behalf of the Entitled Empowered Princesses.
Putting women on the combat line would be disastrous for the military … But the fact remains, enough Princesses have clamored for the ‘opportunities and benefits’ of serving in the front line, heedless of the consequences and the costs.
By requiring Princesses to register for Selective Service, before they can claim the benefits that ‘draft-pigs’ can only receive if they’ve registered – and by declaring them liable for the same fines and penalties as the draft-pigs, if they don’t – we at least remind them that freedom isn’t free, that choices have costs, and that true equality includes responsibility and consequences.
I can already hear the thin, reedy screeches from the Princesses. Fine. Let them learn what it is to hump 35-pound fifty-cal ammo cans to feed Ma Deuce in a firefight. Or let them scuttle back to the home and the hearth, and give thanks for (and to) the Brave Men who will defend them.
Elam himself echoed this vindictive “let them eat equality” stance in a sneering comment posted under his own name suggesting that in the wake of the Pentagon’s new policy plenty of women won’t find the “aroma” of equality to
be so sweet … This is what feminism was always about, and now, after three waves, the chickens are going to come home to roost. Because feminism never was about anything but creating tax paying, laboring, consuming, bleeding and dying servants to the masters of corporatocracy.
They lured women in with visions of corner offices and autonomy, and now that they have fully taken the bait, the doors are going to be slammed behind them and locked. They will be left to languish in their “freedom” as corporate wage slaves, and when needed they will be forced to contribute to the rivers of blood required to keep it going.
NOW and others will likely succeed in keeping the last part “optional” for while, but it won’t last.
The grand daughters of today’s college woman is as fucked as any man in history.
To which every feminist I know would say: bring it on. Feminists are well aware that equality, along with its many benefits, brings certain costs. Putting more women into combat roles means, inevitably, that more women will be injured or killed. The feminists supporting the Pentagon’s decision are aware of this. Unlike many MRAs, though, they look at combat injuries and deaths as one of the sad but inevitable consequences of war — not as something to rub anyone’s face into.
Here’s a hint to any MRAs who think that either AVFM or the more blatantly sadistic commenter quoted by Fidelbogen has a point: Civil Rights activism is about uplifting everyone, not making others “pay.”
When the American civil rights movement took up the issue of voting rights, civil rights activists demanded that black people be allowed to vote without harassment or other obstacles like “literacy tests” standing in their way.
Civil rights activists didn’t demand that whites be kept from voting.
The Civil Rights movement called for historically all-white colleges to be opened up to blacks. It didn’t call for white people to be banned from these colleges too.
This is how you can tell that the Men’s Rights movement, as it stands today, is not a true civil rights movement. Because insofar as it is about anything other than complaining about (and sometimes harassing) feminists and women in general, it’s about tearing down rather than building up.
Instead of trying to build domestic violence shelters and other services for men, for example, the MRM is more interested in defunding shelters for women – even when their efforts in this area directly harm male victims.
It’s telling that when Father’s Rights activist Glenn Sacks had an issue with the advertisements being run by one DV shelter, he encouraged his followers to bombard the shelter’s donors with phone calls in order to cripple the shelter’s fundraising efforts – even though the shelter in question also provides services for men. It’s telling as well that MRAs rail endlessly against the Violence Against Women Act, and have celebrated Republican opposition to it – even though the act is officially gender neutral in everything but its name, and would provide funding for men’s shelters if MRAs got off their asses to build any.
Instead of fighting for the rights of male victims of rape, the Men’s Rights movement is more interested in downplaying the rape of women, wildly exaggerating the number of “false rape accusations,” and in endless discussions about whether or not having sex with women incapacitated with drinks or drugs is really rape. All of these things contribute to a “rape culture” that harms male victims of rape as well as female.
Not that most MRAs actually care about male victims of rape except as a debating point — perhaps because that would require acknowledging that the overwhelming majority of their rapists are other men. (MRAs do get outraged in the rare cases in which women are the culprits.) The group that does more than any other to fight for male rape victims is the anti-prison rape group Just Detention. Try to find even a mention of this group on any of the leading Men’s Rights sites. (The only mention of the group on AVFM is a comment in a post attacking a feminist writer noting that it isn’t part of the Men’s Rights movement.)
There are endless other examples, because this is in essence the way that the so-called “Men’s Rights” movement does business.
When you take a certain pleasure in the notion of women being “made to pay” or otherwise harmed when they seek equality, you’re about as much of a civil rights movement as the Klan.
Random – I found a YouTube kitty who looks like my kitty! Just take the fluffy one and add tuxedo markings.
Some notes/general responses (it’s a long thread and, I am pretty sure I am going to see a lot of stupid).
I am likely to use the adjectives male/female. It’s a term the Army uses, because we have things which get segregated by gender and that’s the way our military language evolved (things like sleeping quarters/showers/urinalysis)
The US Army already has a female participation rate in the 12-15 percent range.
Kiwi girl asked about modern combat. By and large there hasn’t been much in the way of “force on force” engagements (though Desert Storm, and the initial weeks of OIF, were fairly “traditoinal” in that regard as was the overthrow of Qadaffi in Lybia). So long as what one sees are operations against nations/people who have neither the political standing to possess an army (say Somalia) or which are completely outmatched (e.g. anyone outside of Western Europe against the US; and western europe is in a bind if the US engages only one of them, not all of them) you will see non-“battle area” combat.
That means mixed lines, resistance/partisan fighting, sabotage, random attacks by angry people against targets of opportunity, etc..
As to hospitals. Troops in hospitals have always been armed. What they haven’t been is offensive combatants. Among other things it means all they have is small arms (i.e. rifles and pistols, and couple of machine guns).
The patients, who aren’t incapacitated, keep their weapons with them.
Despite the professionalism of Marines, it would be distracting and potentially traumatizing to be forced to be naked in front of the opposite sex, particularly when your body has been ravaged by lack of hygiene. In the reverse, it would be painful to witness a member of the opposite sex in such an uncomfortable and awkward position.
What rubbish. Been there, done that. Not bothered at all. We had other shit on our minds. As to the, “lack of hygiene… nope. We washed. We washed regularly. We got good at it (3 liters and I could be clean from head to toe, including my hair).
Idiot.
Combat effectiveness is based in large part on unit cohesion. The relationships among members of a unit can be irreparably harmed by forcing them to violate societal norms.
Because it’ so normal to cop a squat over a hole and cover your shit with a shovel.
Cohesion comes of shared norms all right; but the military in question (as a function of the polity it comes from/lives in) sets those norms. Cohesion breaks down when the military norms (service/unit) are violated. The rest of society is usually small potatoes to the unit/fire team when in a combat zone.
Idiot.
Any individual person who does not want to be in a combat position has several options for avoiding ending up there. Plus I’ve seen estimates that 80-90% of the military is not made up of combat positions, it’s all support and logistics.
To a point. Only 10-20 percent of an army are front line combat jobs. Another 10-20 percent are “Close Combat Support Roles” and spend time in harm’s way on a moderately regular basis. (e.g. the clerks and cooks in an Infantry Battalion: they don’t have a special place to hang out, where there isn’t any shooting, but they aren’t, “Combat Troops).
Other jobs (in logistics) may have to go back and forth to the “battle area” to do their job (one of the things we were pissed at KBR about was their unwillingness to deliver our mail, because they didn’t like to get so near the shooting).
Re tampons: I had several in my ruck. They make great plugs for a non through and through (i.e. a bullet wound in which the bullet stops in the body of the casualty). A lot of the troops I knew did the same. None of the women in my area ever asked to, “borrow” one. Seems they managed to keep themselves in supply.
Cassie: Do you argue now that instead of increasing pay for women to achieve pay equity that we should decrease pay for men? It is the exact same argument and it is the argument a MRA would make.
What?
The only way I can parse that is if you are talking about the penalties for non-registration. But, since the penalties for registration are nil, this is bogus.
Is there a draft? No. If there was no active system of registration would a gov’t be unable to institute a draft?
No.
Ergo registration isn’t actively harming men; or any women who might be required to register.
Now, if there were a draft, this might hold water, but since there isn’t, it’s daft.
My problems with registration are, 1: Non-registration is punished in ways which have lifetime harms, and those harms fall disproportionately on those who are not well to do.
2: It relegates women to a second class status; allowing asshats to say, “they don’t face the draft”.
As for why it is a violation of human rights, perhaps it isn’t, I didn’t say it was. If you could provide me with why you guys think it shouldn’t exist at all I could respond to that. Is it because you think it is unethical? Unnecessary? A violation of human rights? What is it?
This is bullshit. You made the claim. You defend it. What you are now asking us to do us replace the strawman you already burnt up, so you can declare a second victory.
Can you clarify this please. It seems to be contradictory. I think the less people who suffer human rights violations, or unethical laws, or whatever is you want to call this situation, the better! Extending it only hurts more people, one should campaign for it to be abolished if one disagrees with it, not extended.
Whut? So if the gov’t needs 1 million soldiers to fight a war, and the pool of available soldiers is increased, they will draft more people?
Does Not Compute.
It’s going to be funny watching new people come online and react to Cassie’s Wall of Stupid (it’s like the Wall of Sound, but less fun to listen to) throughout the day.
Cassie: Did you just say you aren’t a feminist, but rather a socialist?
Interesting point, I don’t necessarily accept the bounds of this scenario though. Why is it necessarily that the same amount of people will be sent to fight and die? If women could have been drafted during Vietnam do you not think it is possible if not likely there would have been more people over there?
No. The economy of it, if nothing else. If you want to actually know what you are saying, rather than posing, “do you not think” leading questions to try and garner a smidgeon of agree to something which is patently absurd, you might want to read, “Working Man’s War”, which is a social history of how the draft was applied.
One of the things things which hindered the ability of the US to draft more troops, was just how many troops they were drafting and the class inequities of who was drafted. combined with how those draftees were used.
This is really a different argument altogether. I have not argued against asserting this as a position for political reasons, only argued with the position itself.
Really? So the slam at people who, “compromise their political opinions to appeal to the masses” wasn’t something you believed, but rather some cheap rhetoric to win debate points with a touch of ad hominem.
Good to know.
Quite possibly yes, but this is just speculation. For me to accept the position that it wouldn’t mean an increase in body count I need a little more than that.
No. For you to convince us it would requires you to show why (when there was an available pool far larger than the apparent requirement) they didn’t draft more poeople.
In a given year there are 365 draft numbers. In 1969 (the peak year for the draft in Vietnam) they called 195 of them. So they had 170 more they didn’t call. Why didn’t they call them?
Because they didn’t need them. If the draft were expanded the only, structural change, is that each number would have more people in it. But in 1969 they only called 56 percent of the eligible men. They also didn’t reduce the number of deferments and exceptions (which would have increased the pool of draftees).
So, if you want to convince us (your mind being made up, there isn’t really any point to us trying to convince you. I am playing this game as an exercise in critical thinking, not one in which I expect any actual suasion), you need to explain the mechanism by which adding women to the mix will cause more numbers to be pulled.
And you need to do that when your example has failed your argument.
This may be the case, but I don’t think so in this particular instance, most men don’t take the registration seriously probably most women would not either.
Moreso than you think (because there are real penalties for not doing so). But, insofar as they don’t care, it’s because there is no draft.
Dinner? HRmn… I had some very nice soft cheese which had creme fraiche in the milk when it was formed, along with some Ollia Salumeria speck. I ate those with some sweetish semolina bread. Then I had some pasta; boiled with smoked salt, pan-fried coho, and a salad; other people got brussel sprouts with rice vinegar and sesame oil in their salad, but I don’t like sprouts and left them off.
I totally called it!
Still catching up, but Cassie, this is why I think you’re a disingenuous motherfucker. When people were talking about feminism earlier, you chimed in to tell everyone you were a socialist in a way that implied you were therefore not a feminist. When I pointed out that there wasn’t necessarily a contradiction, you pretended you hadn’t meant that at all – yet here you are all over this page announcing that you think feminism has the wrong focus and you think class is more important than “identity politics”. Thanks for the gaslighting, now fuck off.
@Cassandra
I don’t disagree with you, but I feel like “sweetie” is pretty gendered and I’m uncomfortable with the way you used it here.
I call men who I’m talking down to “sweetie” too. To me it implies adult talking to child, not gender. That may be cultural, though.
Cassie: It is a problem that people tend to form into cliques and ostracise outsiders and their views yes
Ooh… self-valorisation. I’m impressed (oh wait, no, that would mean I was forced into the British Navy, and that would be wrong… I’m not impressed, but I can’t be arsed to be offended. I’ll just sit here and be amused instead).
You assume that I have not done “any sort of basic groundwork” because I disagree with you. This is a shallow and untrue analysis.
I think it because when you are pressed for facts you say shit like, “I don’t know, but I can see how it might be; why don’t you find the evidence and disprove my nonsensical, non-fact-based, assertion”.
I never stated it was a human rights abuse
No, the specific thing you called it was a human rights violation.
We have the ability to go back and check your statements against the record.
However there are other factors at play here. You could hypothetically have a country where there are not enough men to fight the wars, so drafting women will indeed mean more people get sent to war. This is a situation where competency is not the issue causing this.
Which isn’t what you argued (see Shifting the goalposts, if you want to play, “Spot that fallacy”).
You argued a larger pool would lead to larger drafts because, unlike juries, gov’t gets to make it up as it goes along.
This argument, of yours, is however a different sort of folly. In short it’s “might makes right” and any nation which doesn’t have the manpower to defend itself from a larger agressor needs to just give up.
People use hypotheticals all the time to clarify their opinions.
But you’ve presented hypotheticals as proof of your claims. There is a difference.
viz: “How the fuck does the body count increase if women were drafted? It’s the bears, isn’t it?”
I never said it did. I just asked for evidence that it won’t from someone who made this assertion
But you started that with a hypothetical, and then you asked us to disprove your hypothetical, pretending the response in the middle was a new affirmative claim.
The fact you don’t think it is an important issue is not a good argument against having a position on this issue and expressing it,
That you think it is important doesn’t make it so. You have a philosophical objection to the US non-draft. We get it. We don’t have the same objection (not, mind you, we have no objection, just that we find yours unpersuasive).
To which you say, “disprove my philosophical objection”.
Since your mind is, foolishly* made up, that not possible. Since you are demanding we argue your points (you made the positive assertion that registering women for the draft is the same as demanding men be paid less, because women are; when the analogy is nonsense. 1: there is no draft, 2: registration doesn’t impose; as you admit, any real harm, just a philosophical one), and we aren’t, you are whining that we just don’t brook disagreement.
Never mind that your “arguments” have been met with facts, which you have ignored. It’s not the disagreement, it’s the assdata, the ad hominem, the ignorance and the arrogance.
*I say it is foolishly made up, not because you are convinced, perhaps even sincere, in your belief, but because you seem unable to argue your way out of a paper bag with a flame-thrower, and won’t stick to a single argument, going instead, it seems, on the theory that if you throw enough at the wall to make something stick, you can claim to be right on all.
Why, why can’t I abandon an argument that didn’t work and present a new one? Or in this case an example. Seems like honest arguing to me. I don’t think it is shifting the goalposts so much as discussing things.
You think wrong.
What you did wasn’t change the argument you were making. You were making a new argument, as if it were a continuation of the old.
That is simply not true, the amount of troops in afghanistan and iraq has changed often and without the foresight back at the start of the campaign that this was going to occur.
Wrong. The separate goals which were set, were tasked. In some cases (see Shinseki and estimates of boots needed on the ground to occupy/pacify) the gov’t understaffed the mission. But combat isn’t making widgets. Shit changes. It’s not that a decrease in people who want your widgets happens, it’s that what’s going on has lots of actors, and some of those actors aren’t in play at the start of the campaign.
“Except you’re blathering about something that doesn’t exist and hence doesn’t cause suffering.”
I still don’t understand why you continue to insist that men being required to register for the draft is something that doesn’t exist. Clearly it does.
You keep conflating Registration with The Draft. Show me the suffering. You made the claim that adding women to the draft pool would cause more people to suffer.
Support your claim.
“Citation needed, twit.”
Sorry it isn’t my place to educate you, Use google.
This was your positive fact claim (see above, where I quoted you). As someone recently said, “you don’t get to shift the burden of proof.
Agreed, they don’t have to, but if they don’t I am not going to just accept what they say is factual. Also you may want to tell HellKell that since she demanded citations from me.
Sauce, goose, gander. You keep telling people to back things up (often in error, because what they are doing is responding to a postive claim you are pretending you didn’t make [well, I suppose it’s possible you don’t remember making them, nor that the quotations cited are yours. I can’t decide which of those options is the least flattering]), which means they get to tell you to do the same.
When you then whine about it, it makes people think you need a binky and a nap.
3) making a wrong thing fair can be damaging. As it spreads the wrong thing to more people.
This is where your, “more casualties” comes from, because there is a logical error here.
If we posit registration is wrong, yes you are correct, but then you moved the goalposts to casualties.§
Widening the pool doesn’t make more people suffer the harms of being drafted. It means more people are at risk of that harm (and some of them would now be women).
Unless, for some reason, having a larger pool = more people being drafted* then the relevant suffering (i.e. being drafted/sent to war: which aren’t the same) then there are not “more people” suffering. In fact, for those at risk the odds of being one of those who suffers decreases. So the only way for this to be true is for there to be more people drafted.
Show your work.
6) (conclusion) It is better to target the wrong thing than unfair thing.
Not proven. People, at large, tend to have a more developed sense of fair then they do of, “right”. As such, from a purely tactical POV, attacking the unfair is often more effective. At which point the moral thing is to attack both, and to focus more strongly on making the unfair obvious, so the wrong is more likely to be seen.
This is what you call, “compromising principles to appeal to the masses”. It’s what I call a long-term plan for victory.
*which has been shown to not be a very supportable argument; as times when there was a large need didn’t see the available reserves completely tapped, nor the pool widened. Among the things I left out of the previous comment on Vietnam was that post 1969 the draft pool was decreased, and draftees were the last category sent to Vietnam. This didn’t, actually, change some of the more egregious disparities in those who went to Vietnam, because that policy wasn’t widely known, and so people who thought they could improve their odds by volunteering ended up in combat units; it’s arguable this hastened the end of the war, because it meant white kids who volunteered ended up getting shot more, and so stiffened the resistance to the war which had been growing in the middle-american working class, which had been more supportive when it was more black/inner city men being killed: and “dirty hippies” protesting, but I digress.
§ I have a hard time with the idea that registration is a human rights violation which causes suffering, on it’s face. Since there is no draft. Since instituting a draft isn’t functionally changed by the existence of registration, and since the act of registering isn’t onerous, life-threatening, nor in any way a subject of public awareness, I don’t see the harm.
I do see a moral question to it, and I can argue for some secondary harms which come of not registering; but those harms are predicate on the question of the morality of an actual draft; since they are punishments meted out administratively (in theory one could be jailed), and based on the idea the draft is moral. They are part and parcel, and so don’t seem to affect your basic claim.
But since those questions hinge not on the question of, suffering, but on the validity of a draft, they are irrelevant to your argument, no matter how relevant they are to the question of fairness.
Did I miss some stupid overnight?
YOU HAD DOCTOR REID FANGIRLING AND DIDn’T TELL ME HOW COULD YOU ARGENTI WHYYYYYY?!?! D:
You may not intend to do so, but that’s exactly what you’re doing. By regarding male supremacy as something that merely stems from the ruling class, you ignore the realities that we trans* people face. The misogyny that affects us all is not solely a product of the ruling class’ influence on society. It’s also an enduring aspect of our culture that is not institutionalized at all. While we also do face institutionalized misogyny, it is not the only kind of oppression we deal with. Our cultural norms are extremely oppressive. They are what made me be ashamed of my femininity and femaleness. They are what made me stuck in the closet for so many years. And none of it had anything to do with the ruling class.
Anarcha-feminists don’t focus enough on class politics? What world do you live in?
I have to go to work, so I need to get dressed (I forgot I own flannel lined pants, why? Why did I forget this wonderful fact?), but there is a little I want to say.
You are the ones calling me dumb, immature, a box of hair, a teenager, an adolescent, a parrot and whatever else. I think it is you making it about me. I just wanted to discuss the issues.
Bullshit.
Since I’ve not had any chance to see a direct response from you, I don’t have a (personal) dog in this fight.
The “issue” here is that some MRM types are slavering at the idea of women being hurt in combat. They are leering at the idea of what will happen to them when they get captured (which they are sure will happen because they are 1: Incapable, or 2: will make all the men lose their shit, see Michael Coren is a clueless, dickless, worthless fuck ), and how this will cause them to realise they only thrive when they are ruled by men.
You flat out ignored that, to accuse Dave, and any number of feminists of being; at root, no better than Elam, et al, because they don’t devote all their efforts to fighting draft registration in the US.
To further the insulting nature of that idea, you bobbed, weaved, lied and misdirected. You posted hypotheticals as if they were evidentiary response and don’t actually have more than a (weak) philosophical dog in the fight; because you are an Australian, and a socialist of the type who thinks women need to wait in the back of the bus, because when all the class issues facing men are solved the socialist paradise will magically make it all better.
Until then all the other, more deserving, groups will get your attention, because (as the MRM keeps telling us) the patriarchy is a myth.
That’s why you are getting the response you are getting, not because you “wanted to talk about the issues, but because you ignored the real issue, and then told us women don’t rate.
Argenti: 1) women already volunteer, and get treated as if they aren’t combat soldiers — this is more than a pedantic technical thing, has to do with pay and benefits, but I’ll leave that for Pecunium.
Nope. Pay and benefits are the same. In a “Hostile Fire Zone” you get extra pay, etc. What your specialty is makes no difference.
It’s for the enlisted, a culture issue. Women aren’t allowed to have some jobs which are, “real soldiering”. Not all men can, and the Infantry (in particular) can be real dicks about everyone else. But no one looks at a dude and says, “you can’t every be a grunt”, they give then grief because they didn’t chooes to be.
For officer’s it’s different. Even peacetime the path to promotion is strongly skewed to those who have a combat arms (ideally in the infantry) command/assignment.
Everyone: I’ll be back after work, and see if there is any real discussion to be had.
@pecunium-
*nods* That’s what I was assuming. Also as you said, the current way the US engages in warfare puts any American in the invaded country in danger from various sources, so the entire delineation of combat vs non-combat is becoming moot at this point.
The whole “if you make women eligible the government will draft more people overall” thing is still making my head hurt. I’m glad I left last night when I did.
Today I’m making a pot roast with tons of gravy, asparaguse and roasted potatoes for dinner. Cause in our family, gravy is a beverage. 🙂
@WeeBoy popped in to say I’m really sorry for your loss and internet hugs and coffee/chai tea if you would like. Be especially kind to yourself while you’re grieving.
asparaguse = asparagus
Clearly I’m way too excited about the gravy. *facepalm*
I’d be excited too if I was coming, since gravy is one of the few things that neither Mr C or I know how to make.
I’m confused about how a gravy is made with a pot roast. I’m only aware of (1) instant gravy and (2) making it with flour from the meat juices/fats in the bottom of the roasting pan. But I assume there is no roasting pan with a pot roast – I’ve never made one so I don’t know.
Actually we do roast pork a lot but he wants to attempt roast beef, so any recipes that are good for a beginner and easy to scale down for only 2 people would be appreciated. I’d like it even more if they leaned towards British-style roast beef, since that’s what I grew up with.
Oooo does that mean you’ll be doing Yorkshire Pudding as well? It’s not proper roast beef unless it’s with Yorkshire Pudding as well. My Cornish grandparents always did it that way, because … Yorkshire is part of Cornwall????