USMC Scandal, Continued

American Military News has interviews with some female Marines, at least one of whom appears in the database of nude female Marines. At least the ones they spoke to all agree that this is a problem with male Marines, period. At no point do any of them appear to entertain any idea that there's any additional discipline that might be imposed on the exercise of sexuality in general.

Maxmilian, the creator of Terminal Lance, agrees. The idea that discipline should be imposed on sexuality is right out:

To the first point, everyone sends nudes in 2017. There are so many photos of my modestly large penis out there that you could fill a 7-ton if you printed them out. The argument that women are asking for it is rapey as hell and straight up victim-blaming. Nude photos sent or received, unless otherwise specified, have a pretty clear implication of privacy involved in it.

That's a pretty big generational shift. Even 20 years ago, the mere existence of nude photos -- physical ones, which couldn't be instantly transmitted around the globe -- was pretty racy stuff.

This is an area where the law is really not very helpful. In general, if I take a photograph that photograph is my intellectual property and I can share it if I want to do. If I share it with you and you, without my consent, publish it widely I can sue you for copyright infringement. But if you took the photo -- even if it's a photo of me taken without my consent, if I was in a public place at the time -- you can do whatever you want with it. It's your intellectual property.

One woman in another context tried to copyright the image of her own breasts as a method of using copyright infringement law to get her images taken down from 'revenge porn' sites. The method seems clumsy and impossible to extend to a broader set of cases, and may only have worked because she herself took the photos. If her boyfriend had taken them, it's not clear to me that she would have had a claim to copyright his photos (taken with her consent) even though they were images of her.

It may also be the case that copyright law, which is how we usually control images, really misses the point of what's going on here. We have stalker laws that punish what is otherwise perfectly legal behavior, for example, taking photos of someone in a public place. Perhaps the nature of the offense here is such that the ordinary laws shouldn't apply.

Maximilian speaks to this issue:

There’s an underlying reality that needs to be addressed, and that male Marines need to really internalize here.

Female Marines are female.

We can talk about one team, one fight and all of that, but at the end of the day they are still women.

He goes on to note that women are only 7% of the Marine Corps, and thus can't effect changes in the culture on their own. Male Marines will have to help them, if it is to be done.

Nevertheless, I still think that the coed combat arms are going to present a very real readiness concern that earlier integration did not. The Marine Corps' leadership was prescient about it, but they were told to shut up and stop thinking by Secretary Ray Mabus. Here are the first fruits.

UPDATE: The DB takes another swing.

A Little Revival

Big Stories, Small Time

There are two huge stories today: Paul Ryan's Obamacare-lite bill, which will surely die as it is opposed by CATO, the Club for Growth, Paul's libertarian faction, Cruz's conservative faction, all Democrats, but not Susan Collins. It deserves more attention, but won't get it because...

...of the second big story, Wikileaks' huge CIA dump. This purports to come from a leaker within the intelligence community itself, and to give away the store on the CIA's hacking techniques. Allegedly they can take over your car (or a big truck near your car) for assassination purposes, and listen in to your conversations through your iWhatever or smart television. This, likewise, is huge news if true and needs to be carefully studied, but we won't get to do that because...

...of yesterday's big story, the new EO on immigration and refugees. It is supposed to be a significant improvement over the first one, and Trump's legal team is in place to fight challenges as they arise. Opponents are swearing to combat it, but most of us won't have time to pay attention because...

...of the weekend's big story, on 'wiretapping' accusations, which threatens to turn into an all-engulfing war between the two leading political factions in America. This is likewise an intricate story that needs very careful parsing, but we won't get to do that because...

...of all the other stories, and the ones that will come starting tomorrow.

Nakbah

Gun sales down by double digits every month since Trump elected.

Privileges Abound

A couple of experiments that both involve switching the sex of a person to see how it impacts how people receive them. It turns out that, liberal though the professors and their audience both were, switching the sex in the second Trump/Clinton debate only proved why Clinton lost.



Clinton's mode of trying to smile off serious charges, backed with carefully-worded responses that are technically true but completely misleading, turns out to look even worse on a man. The audience described him as “really punchable.” The kind of smarmy 'I think I'm smarter than you so I'm going to give you an answer you know is false but can't prove is false' mode is completely unacceptable from a man, so much so that it provokes the impulse to give him a sock in the chops for trying it.

I wonder if it isn't only our society's very strong mores forbidding violence against women that allows someone like Clinton -- or Pelosi, or DWS -- to get away with this mode. Maybe Obama could do it, protected by a similar set of mores among educated Americans against similar lashing out at African-Americans. The protections extended to them, out of a kind of respect for the vulnerability of their position, can turn out to enable bad behavior. Not voting for one of them, though, isn't violence against them -- and it isn't sexist or racist, not if you'd reject the same mode in a white man (and indeed, even more strongly reject it).

The female Trump stand in, meanwhile, was not rejected (as the organizers expected her to be) for being too 'pushy' or outspoken. Instead, people were suddenly able to see in her answers what they had been unable to see in the same answers given by Trump himself.

We heard a lot of “now I understand how this happened”—meaning how Trump won the election. People got upset. There was a guy two rows in front of me who was literally holding his head in his hands, and the person with him was rubbing his back. The simplicity of Trump’s message became easier for people to hear when it was coming from a woman—that was a theme. One person said, “I’m just so struck by how precise Trump’s technique is.” Another—a musical theater composer, actually—said that Trump created “hummable lyrics”...

I was surprised by how critical I was seeing [Clinton] on a man’s body, and also by the fact that I didn’t find Trump’s behavior on a woman to be off-putting. I remember turning to Maria at one point in the rehearsals and saying, "I kind of want to have a beer with her!"

The second one is about a lesbian feminist who undertook the experiment without telling people she met she wasn't the man she was pretending to be. You've probably seen this one before, but it compares and contrasts nicely with the NYU experiment around Trump/Clinton.

Clarance Thomas on Civil Asset Forfeiture

“This system — where police can seize property with limited judicial oversight and retain it for their own use — has led to egregious and well-chronicled abuses,” wrote Thomas. “I am skeptical that this historical practice is capable of sustaining, as a constitutional matter, the contours of modern practice.”

Thomas went on to outline his concerns, noting that legal precedent ― most recently in the Supreme Court’s 1996 Bennis v. Michigan decision ― has been based largely on “early statutes” involving property related primarily to piracy and customs.

That's a good originalist objection: that the original justification for the practice no longer applies to the way the practice is currently being used. Piracy and customs involve things moving into the jurisdiction of the United States that, for example, you might have reason to believe were stolen goods. "Prove that these goods were not stolen if you want to bring them here" is much more reasonable than "prove that this money in your pocket was not stolen" when you and your money were always here. The burden of proof much more obviously falls on the government when the whole affair has happened within the jurisdiction of its courts and law enforcement officers.

Not your circus, not your monkeys

Or as Ace says, don't buy tickets on the crazy train.  He likens the psychic dislocations of 9/11 to those of 11/9.

Raising babies

Here's a theory that has a superficial appeal, especially to someone like myself with such ingrained anxiety about (and hostility to) dependence:

The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development has found:

Children in full-time day care were close to three times more likely to show behavior problems than those cared for by their mothers at home.

…

The more time in child care of any kind or quality, the more aggressive the child.

The result is young people who, a decade and a half after daycare, scream at the parent/State for not protecting them sufficiently. It is no coincidence that “safe spaces” resemble daycare centers.

Granted, I recognize the behavior, but I can't reconcile it with my own experience of motherlessness. Maybe you have to combine daycare with the other silly trends in child development, which my full-time working father and stepmother were, to put in mildly, not into.

I'm much more drawn to the approach of this sensible lady, Brene Brown, who has my number when it comes to the fear of vulnerability.

Irish Unification

Sinn Fein did very well in the recent Ulster elections, and is now the second-largest party in the North -- second by only one seat. But that's not enough. It's time to re-unify, says Martina Devlin.

A united Ireland, a free Scotland, a newly-liberated England and an end to EU international socialism. All thanks to Brexit.

UPDATE: Coincidentally, there's a new documentary on women of the Irish revolution.

Swords at Dawn

"As for me, I was in a place by myself; in a time by myself. I remember the water sparkling around our ankles as we fought. One part of my mind could not help admiring how so very picturesque it was. I remember my opponents eyes especially. They were yellow, like he was on drugs."

"Then I sensed, more than reasoned that I would die unless I ended this," he said. "So I stepped in and struck his arm. I didn't even feel the hit on my knee."

An actual knife fight, as metaphor for the current political feud. Wretchard, of course.

Media Moves to Make "Wiretapping" Purely About Phones

CBS: " Former president Barack Obama has denied President Trump's claims that the Obama administration wiretapped phones..."

Independent: "The FBI disputing Donald Trump's claim Barack Obama had his telephones tapped..."

AP: "President Donald Trump on Saturday accused former President Barack Obama of tapping his telephones..."

The FISA warrant apparently targeted a server, so it would be surprising if they tapped a telephone to find out what the server was saying to another server. I'm going to guess that the Obama team's careful denials, parroted by all these media outlets, mean that no actual telephones were "tapped." So we're only talking about internet traffic, servers being penetrated and covertly examined, maybe reading emails... but no, absolutely no "telephones."

The right thing to do would be to come clean on what spying was done, but of course they can't: all the information is surely classified at a high level. Still, some sunlight and honesty -- and not these carefully construed denials -- is the only way to restore any sort of trust.

That's How I Want Government to Work All The Time

Charles M. Blow at the NYT:

The American people must immediately demand a cessation of all consequential actions by this “president”.... no action to put this presidency on pause is extreme. Rather, it is exceedingly prudent.

Some things must be done and some positions filled simply to keep the government operational. Absolute abrogation of administrative authority is infeasible and ill advised. But a bare minimum standard must be applied until we know more about what the current raft of investigations yield.

Don't stop there! Let's adopt this as the model going forward: the Federal government should do only the bare minimum of things that absolutely have to be done. I'd suggest that we draw the line at "anything for which there is not explicit constitutional warrant." But if that's not good enough, I'll consider constitutional amendments designed to make the "bare minimum standard" for Federal action even tighter.

How Sauron Conquered Middle Earth

A short comic.

Of Course the Ambassador is a Spymaster

That is one of the principal functions of ambassadors.

“I don’t think they’d make the ambassador to the United States a KGB guy. It’s not really their style.”

That said, the job of any Russian ambassador is to oversee the rezidentura, or mission-bound spy station, putting Kislyak at the top of the pyramid of Russia’s security services in Washington. He would, therefore, likely have intimate knowledge of everything Russia's foreign and military intelligence operatives were up to in Washington and wouldn’t necessarily need to hail from the SVR or GRU or any of the other “power ministries" to cultivate assets and informants on foreign soil.

That is also how our own system works: the ambassador, in his role as Chief of Mission, leads and directs the Country Team. That team includes the CIA's Chief of Station. Though the COS reports back to Langley as well, the COM has the overall responsibility for directing US government operations in the country concerned.

That said, American ambassadors are often political donors -- especially ambassadors to countries without much need for aggressive intelligence collection. Still, this is a major part of their role, as everyone knows who has to deal with ambassadors in any official capacity.

UPDATE: Right on cue, Wikileaks sets out to prove the point.

Like Jesse James

Black Rifle Coffee

Another Mat Best & Company operation, they've recently posted their "hold music" online.



I'd post some of their videos, but... well, go see for yourselves if you dare. No warranty express or implied.

I mean, there's no excuse for this stuff.

Well, OK: maybe one excuse. If you're a Medal of Honor recipient, you can wink at this stuff if you want.

Orin Kerr, Troll Lord

I know Cass just said she hates this concept, but you have to give the man credit where credit is due.

Going To Have To Work On This

The USMC is having a bit of a scandal right now, over the existence of a Facebook group made up of Marines and former Marines that shared nude pictures of female Marines.

Oddly enough, it's the less-revealing images that are the greater concern.

In one instance, a woman corporal in uniform was followed at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina by a fellow Marine, who surreptitiously photographed her as she picked up her gear. Those photographs were posted online in the Facebook group “Marines United,” which has nearly 30,000 followers, drawing dozens of obscene comments.

That woman, in her full dress, was victimized by being stalked -- and perhaps, again, by the commentary on her desirability. (I say 'perhaps' because it's unclear. Would she have been victimized if the comments had not been made public? Her identity is not public, so perhaps she doesn't even know herself what was said about her. Is she a victim of 'harassment' if she's suffered no mental harm? Maybe -- perhaps she could be victimized by being in a culture that was hostile to her even if she was completely unaware that it was hostile to her. On the other hand, a group of anonymous posters on Facebook is not her chain of command, so perhaps this group doesn't rise to the level of 'a hostile work environment.' I leave all that to others to sort out.)

The stalking is genuinely improper. On the other hand, what about this?

Many images appear to have originated from the consensual, but private, exchange of racy images, some clearly taken by the women themselves.

Here, the women consented to being photographed -- photographed themselves, even -- but not to having the images shared in a creeper database of which they knew nothing.

So... what exactly do you do about that? Presumably the woman has a right to take a photo of herself naked if she wants to, even though she's a Marine. She has a right to share it, arguably, even though she's a Marine (indeed, she's certainly not in uniform). So what do we say about the unauthorized sharing? Is it a copyright violation?

If you're sharing nude photos of yourself with other members of the Marine Corps -- not your spouse, I presume -- aren't you partially responsible for the collapse of good order that this represents? If you allow yourself to be videoed having sex by other members of your unit, aren't you partially responsible for the collapse of good order?

No, of course not. These are all "victims," and the PAO has put out a 10 page document in part devoted to explaining their rights under the law.

Meanwhile, the news stories about this are taking pains to paint this as a USMC failure, claiming that the Corps' hostility to the idea of integrating women into the combat arms is responsible for this whole incident. A gentle suggestion: is it worth considering that the leadership's hostility to the idea was built around the understanding that a collapse of good order and discipline such as this was highly likely? Doesn't this scandal prove the leadership's concerns about what this would do to their organization to have been fairly sound?

No, of course not. No one should ever think that.

UPDATE: Related.

The evacuation of pregnant women is costly for the Navy. Jude Eden, a nationally known author about women in the military who served in 2004 as a Marine deployed to Iraq, said a single transfer can cost the Navy up to $30,000 for each woman trained for a specific task, then evacuated from an active duty ship and sent to land. That figure translates into $115 million in expenses for 2016 alone.... [B]y August 2016 that number reached nearly 16 percent, an all-time high. The Navy reported that 3,840 of the 24,259 women sailors who were aboard Navy ships were pregnant.

The article goes on to note that the Navy has declared a policy of making sure that 25% of personnel on ships are women. That shifts this issue from a relatively easy to address situation to a front-and-center problem for the readiness of our warships. The Navy also grants a year of maternity leave (forced by former SECDEF Ash Carter to back down from 18 months, and vice 10 days of paternity leave), so it's a lengthy problem when it happens.

Like the nude photos that female Marines consented to having taken, or took themselves, female sailors have a right to get pregnant if they want to do so. If you want to solve this problem, though, you have to question the degree to which what we used to call 'liberated sexuality' is compatible with coed military service. You'll have to do more than crack down on predatory male behavior, though of course you should do that. You'll also have to reconsider what we currently believe are inalienable rights -- more inalienable to these female servicemembers than their right to free speech, for example, as that right is constrained quite a bit while in the service.

UPDATE: The DuffelBlog checks in.

A "Broader Point" About Truth

It's the last paragraph that marks out an interesting claim, but I'll give you enough of the setup to judge its worth in this context.

Obama and his surrogates–notably the slug (or is he a cockroach?) Ben Rhodes–harrumph that Obama could not unilaterally order electronic surveillance. Well, yes, it is the case that Obama did not personally issue the order: the FISA court did so. But even if that is literally correct, it is also true that the FISA court would not unilaterally issue such an order: it would only do so in response to a request from the executive branch. Thus, Obama is clearly implicated even if he did not issue the order. He could have ordered his subordinates to make the request to the court, or could have approved a subordinate’s request to seek an order. Maybe he merely hinted, a la Henry II–“will no one rid me of this turbulent candidate?” (And “turbulent” is a good adjective to apply to Trump.) But regardless, there is no way that such a request to the court in such a fraught and weighty matter would have proceeded without Obama’s acquiescence.

I therefore consider that the substance of Trump’s charge–that he was surveilled at behest of Obama has been admitted by the principals.

This episode illustrates a broader point that is definitely useful to keep in mind. What Obama and his minions (and the Democrats and many in the media) say is likely to be correct, strictly speaking, but fundamentally misleading. In contrast, what Trump says is often incorrect, strictly speaking, but captures the fundamental truth.

With apologies to the lawyers among us, whom I am sure are careful never to do this, this 'strictly speaking correct, but fundamentally misleading' bit is what people hate about lawyers. Sometimes also journalists.

Resistance

From a comment at Maggie's Farm, referring to a link identified by the website as "Rebellion: Trump Takes on The Blob - Washington’s foreign policy elites are used to battling America’s adversaries. Now they have a new common enemy: the president."

The people rebel. The bureaucracy mutinies.