I know a lot of Americans are reflexively obsequious toward the military
...I come at it with deep suspicion and often contempt toward their leaders and the way they are led, but great respect and care for the people who serve under them.
As a citizen, I feel great personal responsibility for their mission and preparation that I think every American should feel some care for, and are, nonetheless, obligated to because of our shared commitment to our nation's and it's inhabitants' general defense.
When I hear Trump and Hegseth, and the rest of the goons in the White House talk about their diversity like it's some disease, I have to ask myself - do they intend for the military forces to only serve the people they elevate and prioritize in their removal of incentives, protections, and accommodations of the needs of women in the military with "sex-neutral, age-normed" physical requirements that "follow the male standard."
Is this to be a military which outright insists without any credibility that the way women serve is inferior to men or detrimental to some mission; or that women in the military should be made to subjugate whatever this new command regards of their womanhood as weak, ineffective, or 'warrior ethos" to a "male standard" that comes with it's own inherent fault and flaw, and can't possibly respond effectively to a diverse world with just one testosterone-based notion of excellence or competence that only exists in the imaginations of culture warriors who very likely couldn't perform many of the jobs women are doing right now with excellence?
"There has always been one standard for those jobs," Elisa Cardnell, who served in the US Navy for eleven years said. "There was never a man's standard or a woman's standard for flying a jet."
Combat standards are set differently depending on the unit a person is serving in, whether they are in special operations, infantry, armour or pararescue, she said. But all personnel in those roles have to pass the same test.
"These standards have always been gender neutral, and they have always been set at a high standard," she said. "Of course, not all women are going to make those, but not all men do either."
There's no actual evidence that the U.S.military is “less capable and less lethal,” as Hegseth claimed in his speech before the generals.
None of the military's readiness, capability, or effectiveness is hindered in any way by his targets of “identity months ir DEI offices; no harm whatsoever.
Hegseth's ranting about "no more division, distraction or gender delusions" are projections of his own antipathies, and perhaps the shared bias of some of the troops he holds up as superior to the others he's denigrating to the point of threatening their service.
"No more debris," he declared about the women he reviles, making clear what he thinks of our diverse society that supports his civilian agency and pays for all of the slick weaponry that he and his boss have decided should be bandied about and wielded against Americans like a personal enhanced phallus.
The men and women armed to the hilt who Trump is arraying against his political rivals at the same time he's making domestic terrorism declarations for dubious labels he's invented to describe Democrats are to be a defense of ALL Americans.
Their duty isn't the creation or possession of the party in power; it's Americans' collective defense force which is proscribed in the Constitution, and less in the zealous and narrow intention and concern of a pair of insecure white males hiding their small feelings behind the force of our collective military.
We didn't provide them weapons so that they could turn them against us.
We didn't provide their institutions for them to make those public assets exclusive clubs for the party in power, or the white male-standard that Hegseth is so obviously projecting out of his own insecurity with an increasingly diverse world that is even more apparent in the ranks of our armed forces than in most other institutions and enterprises in America.
Trump and Hegseth have come into a world so foreign and hostile to their own personal shortcomings that their only instinct and action is to try and bring women DOWN to their low, one-dimensional level and pretend that's the only standard of excellence or competence; despite failure and fecklessness having no particular gender attached; witnessed by their own impotence and ineptitude at their level of incompetency.
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Who are actually pretty darn smart. Maybe more like, lions being led by a couple of worms. Worms hang out underground and eat dirt.
I like these quotes though.
I couldn't stand to hear more than little pieces from those two clowns, but it looked and sounded like they were both on drugs. The military mostly looked stunned at what they were hearing.
