Unsurprisingly, our old friend “The Thinking Housewife” is aghast at the notion of women serving in combat. What is a little surprising is why. In one of her many recent posts on the subject she offers this unique take on the subject:
There are so many unexamined consequences of the full integration of women into the military that one barely knows where to start, but one of the obvious places is with the fact that the Armed Forces will be increasingly in the business of population control.
Yes, that’s right: women in combat means women using birth control. The horror!
You see, women who are nine momths pregnant can’t exactly serve on the front lines. So that means the military is going to have to get in the business of helping its women soldiers avoid becoming pregnant.
In addition to providing rations and equipment, troops in combat will need ample supplies of contraceptives — and under this mentality, it will be the military’s responsibility to prevent pregnancy. Given that pregnancies can be, even in the best of circumstances, “unintended,” a woman who becomes pregnant on tour after her unit runs out of birth control pills or condoms will now have cause to blame the military for her offspring’s existence. We will almost certainly see women suing the Army for damages after “unintended” pregnancy. And as a consequence, the military will need to become more and more involved in the effective sterilization of their female troops.
Um, what? Sterilization? When women stop using birth control, they can become pregnant. Heck, they can become pregnant while still using birth control. Calling female birth control “sterilization” is a bit like calling a condom a vasectomy.
She ends her piece with this doozy:
As I said before, women don’t join the military as equals of men in order to defend their country. They join it to destroy their country. An egalitarian military must embrace socially destructive ideals. What can be more emblematic of our times than a military unit equipped with guns to destroy the enemy and contraceptives to destroy future soldiers? We have lost both the will to fight and the will to live.
Time to pull out the Don Draper “what?” gif again.
Actually, I don’t think that will be adequate to convey the sheer WTFery of that conclusion. I’m pulling out the big guns this time.
Pretty much anywhere on the internet is going to have judgmental folks. At least if there is the ability to comment on things.
I feel bad for the husband. I hope she got herself checked afterwards. It would really suck if she brought an STD home with her.
I imagine all the tombstones in the fort to read “Happy At Last” with appropriate adornment.
Hell, one of my craftspeople made a stone cup called, and I shit you not… “Clenchedplays, the Cavity of Recreation” which featured an image of a satyr in iron. I swear it was a legendary fleshlight. 🙁
Magma pipe fire imps + immigrants + dry climate + Trade depot full of elves with their flammable, flammable goods = FUN!
I honestly wish I knew the secret. I’m usually boned by the time the first siege arrives. Wealth and self-sufficieny I can manage, functioning military, defences and medical system.. not so much.
^drawbridges. Nothing gets past them. Just raise the drawbridge and block access to the surface until the siege leaves, and you’re golden. If you want to actually kill the invaders, a long tunnel full of traps works wonders.
You people are making me curious about DF.
Nobody has yet mentioned the thermonuclear catsplosion.
Pecunium: It’s about as easy to learn and hard to master as go but the war stories are way more interesting.
Also there’s a whole lot of dead baby comedy in the community, in part because of the aforesaid tendency of nursing dwarf mothers in the militia to carry their tots into battle, but also because the dwarfs are stupid and the world is stupid dangerous.
@katz: The thermonuclear catsplosion was a result of hacking the temperature files. I do think the conventional catsplosion (i.e., cats breed to such numbers that your FPS crashes) got mentioned.
I should learn not to designate huge excavation projects and then get frustrated when my minerdwarfs take forever because I’ve overloaded them and their task-seeking programming seems to have a random element, or they look for the closest job.
Also, creating a militia seems like a job for a Pentagon-sized staff. I far prefer the Warcraft/StarCraft model (Minerals go in! Marines come out! Can’t explain that!)
The learning curve seems a bit steep. I may persevere. I may spin instead.
Here’s what you gotta do to get a military up and running. And the game throws stronger and stronger enemies at you, culminating in megabeasts. You play to your last dwarf, or until your framerate gets so low the game is unplayable.
Spinning gets you things you can give to other people! DF has recreational value, but the only thing I’ve ever gotten from it that I have been able to give other people is a grumpy.
There is a wiki, though, to help people learn the game. It’s kind of necessary, I’ve never seen any manual or similar doc.
(I should learn to say everything in one comment so’s I don’t dominate the “Recent Posts” widget with trivia.)
Coming real late to the party! But ALL the women in my family(direct bloodline) are left handed with the exception of my daughter. Most of the men are left handed as well.
Come to think of it, we get right handers in my family as uncommonly as most other families get lefties.
Bloody convenient at the family gatherings though!
My sister is left handed and I am right handed, and since early childhood I have always sat to the left of her at the dinner table. Because apparently my family hates rationality. :p
@Bagelsan Or they enjoyed slapstick comedy with their meals …
Dwarf Fortress entertains me greatly. Though I much prefer it with invaders turned off – then I get to play around building magma rivers and underground egg farms without interruption.
I already found the wiki. It does what all such wikis do… fails some basics from the sense that “it’s so obvious what this means in practice”.
Now to make some supper.
Oh man, Dwarf Fortress would be too intense for me. Hack103 is about the heaviest learning curve I’m willing to take on, and it’s cake compared to Dwarf Fortress. (Though for 1985, I believe it did have some of the most creative ways to die. The family used to have war stories on the theme of The Most Humiliating Way I Died. Mine was biologically contaminated orange juice.)
As per handedness, the ma was left-handed. Here in our system, we’re all left-handed except for Mac, who’s a dogmatic rightie. When he found out the body wouldn’t cooperate with him, he just knuckled down and trained our right hand, and so now we’re ambidextrous. Writing is still easier left-handed, but if we break an arm, we’ll do okay. (Though cutting food would be an ass.)
Okay, what’s Hack103? Wikipedia doesn’t recognize it (so it must not be notable :P).
One of the precursors to NetHack, I believe. At least the biologically contaminated juice line sounds very familiar…