That's the Spirit
A journalist in England redeems his profession's reputation somewhat in the face of a fifty-thousand pound bounty on his head.
Oathless
What happens when justices don't trust the oath of the President?
Yet normally courts presume campaign rhetoric is a sort of nonsense that has no bearing on how one actually governs -- and that seems to be a presumption justified by the facts to some degree. If anything justifies presuming Trump's oath is less reliable than usual, it must be that he is unusually likely to pursue his campaign statements. He did, after all, pull us out of the Paris accords. He did, after all, appoint a hardliner to run the CIA's operations against Iran (and, by the way, we need to have a talk with our 'paper of record' about the propriety of publishing the names of such officers). He did, after all, prefer a serious textualist to the Supreme Court. He hasn't kept all his promises (e.g., moving the embassy to Jerusalem), but he has apparently taken a number of them seriously.
Compare and contrast with President Obama, "I'll close GitMo," "if you like your plan you can keep your plan," "if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor," "the Iran deal is not a treaty," "the Paris climate accord is not a treaty," etc. I should be more suspicious of the oaths of, say, Supreme Court justices who feel that the Constitution is a living document they are free to modify at will. That is plainly not in keeping with an oath to protect and preserve the Constitution; it is making it one's own playtoy, and arrogating powers never intended by the Constitution to one's self and one's own office. It is their oaths I doubt.
It seems strange to doubt Trump's oath more than one would doubt the oaths of other politicians on the precise ground that he seems unusually likely to keep his promises. I don't take his word seriously because he often seems to say things he doesn't mean, but that approach undermines the 4th and 9th circuit opinions: why bother worrying about what he said on the campaign trail if you don't worry about what he says in general?
Their argument is just the opposite: 'We doubt his oath because we believe he will keep his word.'
[I]f the courts are going to write a new jurisprudence for an oathless presidency into the law, Mandel and Din actually make for a very natural place to start. Both literally concern the question of “bad faith,” the same question raised by whether the courts can trust Trump’s fidelity to his oath. To put it another way, the cases are an expression of the “presumption of regularity,” the idea that we can usually trust public officials to do their duty. And as the Trump administration is discovering, that presumption of regularity is only a presumption, which courts can waive in extraordinary circumstances.What justifies this "presumption of regularity" even as a presumption? The oath of office is to the Constitution; many acts by Presidents, Senators, and Congressional representatives are facially unconstitutional. Any sort of "campaign finance reform" appears to violate the First Amendment, which plainly states that Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech. The vast majority of Congressional and Executive acts violate any reasonable reading of the 10th Amendment. Many campaign promises also plainly violate the 10th Amendment, as candidates pledge to pursue powers that the Constitution never delegates to the Federal government.
Yet normally courts presume campaign rhetoric is a sort of nonsense that has no bearing on how one actually governs -- and that seems to be a presumption justified by the facts to some degree. If anything justifies presuming Trump's oath is less reliable than usual, it must be that he is unusually likely to pursue his campaign statements. He did, after all, pull us out of the Paris accords. He did, after all, appoint a hardliner to run the CIA's operations against Iran (and, by the way, we need to have a talk with our 'paper of record' about the propriety of publishing the names of such officers). He did, after all, prefer a serious textualist to the Supreme Court. He hasn't kept all his promises (e.g., moving the embassy to Jerusalem), but he has apparently taken a number of them seriously.
Compare and contrast with President Obama, "I'll close GitMo," "if you like your plan you can keep your plan," "if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor," "the Iran deal is not a treaty," "the Paris climate accord is not a treaty," etc. I should be more suspicious of the oaths of, say, Supreme Court justices who feel that the Constitution is a living document they are free to modify at will. That is plainly not in keeping with an oath to protect and preserve the Constitution; it is making it one's own playtoy, and arrogating powers never intended by the Constitution to one's self and one's own office. It is their oaths I doubt.
It seems strange to doubt Trump's oath more than one would doubt the oaths of other politicians on the precise ground that he seems unusually likely to keep his promises. I don't take his word seriously because he often seems to say things he doesn't mean, but that approach undermines the 4th and 9th circuit opinions: why bother worrying about what he said on the campaign trail if you don't worry about what he says in general?
Their argument is just the opposite: 'We doubt his oath because we believe he will keep his word.'
Three Men, Eight Minutes in London
Eight minutes is a pretty solid response time for a terrorist attack, given that you will want to stage up some sort of response rather than sending individual officers in without backup. You'll want to send people in linked up with at least one other officer, and given that aspect of this, eight minutes from report to "terrorists shot dead" has got to be close to as good as it gets. The London police deserve real credit here.
The British people also deserve credit for fighting back. At the "Black and Blue" -- alternatively described as a "pub" and a "steakhouse" in the press -- a disarmed populace fought back as well as it could by hurling glasses, chairs, whatever came to hand. Slowing the attackers any amount is not to be disparaged as a response given that the police inside London are capable of a fairly quick response time. Every second is a second off the eight-minute clock.
So you might call this the "new normal" for London. You could adapt to this the way London adapted to the Blitz. Once in a while, these bloody attacks come up. It's part of life given the existence of a real enemy that wants to kill you and destroy your civilization. Everyone knows his duty: the disarmed citizen to resist however possible to buy time for the armed agents of the state to arrive and stop the attack. Mentally, one could accept this and learn to live with it.
Why, though, should one do so? The Blitz was accepted because, in 1940, the British had no way to strike back against continental German targets. The alternative was to surrender, but that was unacceptable. It was endured because there was no alternative but to endure it until things changed.
It was also endured because the British superiority in naval forces, and its homeland defense, prevented the Nazis from carrying out any other sort of attacks. There is a parallel here. The Islamists who are murdering British citizens on a regular basis are very much like the Luftwaffe, in that they have hit upon a reliable way to cause death and disruption within London that nevertheless cannot possibly win them the war they want to fight. The Nazis at least could hope for a collapse in civilian morale that would cause a demand that the British government surrender. These Islamists cannot hope even for that, as there is no one to whom the British could surrender if they would.
My own prescription is by now well-known: I think the population should be armed and trained in how to fight back. A civil defense option here would leverage the goodwill of most ordinary people such that any group of fifty random folks at the pub would be able to form a common defense, a kind of impromptu shield wall. If the British government really rejects arming them with firearms, it can train them to fight with knives or sticks. Properly, of course, a free people has the right to self-defense -- and therefore, the right to the tools of self-defense. Properly, a free people has the duty to defend the common peace and lawful order -- and therefore a duty, stronger than a right, to be prepared with the tools to do so.
So far this resort to the citizen militia has not been appealing to the elites, who fear -- I suppose -- the citizen's militia more than they fear the radicals and terrorists. One might wonder why that would be so in a society that claims to be a democracy.
Still, in the light of this attack, it should be obvious why such a militia is an important component of civil defense. There's a clock that starts ticking at the onset of an attack like this, and it stops when the terrorists are dead. The police probably can't do much better than they did in terms of response time here. What can help are citizens who are trained to defend themselves, both in terms of how to avoid harm to themselves and how to link up for a common defense against the foe.
Do that, and the eight minute response time doesn't look so bad. Indeed, even at eight minutes, the police might begin to find that they are arriving largely too late to save the attackers.
The British people also deserve credit for fighting back. At the "Black and Blue" -- alternatively described as a "pub" and a "steakhouse" in the press -- a disarmed populace fought back as well as it could by hurling glasses, chairs, whatever came to hand. Slowing the attackers any amount is not to be disparaged as a response given that the police inside London are capable of a fairly quick response time. Every second is a second off the eight-minute clock.
So you might call this the "new normal" for London. You could adapt to this the way London adapted to the Blitz. Once in a while, these bloody attacks come up. It's part of life given the existence of a real enemy that wants to kill you and destroy your civilization. Everyone knows his duty: the disarmed citizen to resist however possible to buy time for the armed agents of the state to arrive and stop the attack. Mentally, one could accept this and learn to live with it.
Why, though, should one do so? The Blitz was accepted because, in 1940, the British had no way to strike back against continental German targets. The alternative was to surrender, but that was unacceptable. It was endured because there was no alternative but to endure it until things changed.
It was also endured because the British superiority in naval forces, and its homeland defense, prevented the Nazis from carrying out any other sort of attacks. There is a parallel here. The Islamists who are murdering British citizens on a regular basis are very much like the Luftwaffe, in that they have hit upon a reliable way to cause death and disruption within London that nevertheless cannot possibly win them the war they want to fight. The Nazis at least could hope for a collapse in civilian morale that would cause a demand that the British government surrender. These Islamists cannot hope even for that, as there is no one to whom the British could surrender if they would.
My own prescription is by now well-known: I think the population should be armed and trained in how to fight back. A civil defense option here would leverage the goodwill of most ordinary people such that any group of fifty random folks at the pub would be able to form a common defense, a kind of impromptu shield wall. If the British government really rejects arming them with firearms, it can train them to fight with knives or sticks. Properly, of course, a free people has the right to self-defense -- and therefore, the right to the tools of self-defense. Properly, a free people has the duty to defend the common peace and lawful order -- and therefore a duty, stronger than a right, to be prepared with the tools to do so.
So far this resort to the citizen militia has not been appealing to the elites, who fear -- I suppose -- the citizen's militia more than they fear the radicals and terrorists. One might wonder why that would be so in a society that claims to be a democracy.
Still, in the light of this attack, it should be obvious why such a militia is an important component of civil defense. There's a clock that starts ticking at the onset of an attack like this, and it stops when the terrorists are dead. The police probably can't do much better than they did in terms of response time here. What can help are citizens who are trained to defend themselves, both in terms of how to avoid harm to themselves and how to link up for a common defense against the foe.
Do that, and the eight minute response time doesn't look so bad. Indeed, even at eight minutes, the police might begin to find that they are arriving largely too late to save the attackers.
An Alternative Reading List for Incoming Freshmen
The National Association of Scholars, rebels, radicals, and revolutionaries all, have put out a reading list for incoming college freshmen. While it includes such classics as Augustine's Confessions, The Book of Ecclesiastes, Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, and William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways,
I've never heard of quite a few of the 115 recommendations. Each is
given with a justification for its inclusion, such as the following
examples.
Chinua Achebe – THINGS FALL APART (1958)
Among the first African novels written in English, Things Fall Apart depicts the Igbo of southern Nigeria during the period of initial Western colonization. The protagonist is an ambitious young man in a traditional village who gains fame through a feat of wrestling and goes on to become a powerful leader, only to see his world collapse. We picked it because it is a classic indictment of colonialism but comes with the complicating twist that it is written in a colonial language by an author who has thoroughly absorbed a Western aesthetic sensibility, and because it puts the real questions of cultural relativism on the table.
KINGSLEY AMIS – LUCKY JIM (1954)
Jim Dixon is a medieval history lecturer (and first-generation college student) who does not like academia, does not like academics, and is faced with the horrible prospect of spending the rest of his life in the pompous, affected world of the university. The funniest campus novel ever written, Lucky Jim will inoculate students against the self-importance of college life
M. F. K. FISHER – HOW TO COOK A WOLF (1942)
One of the first great American evocations of the love of food—written during World War II food rationing, when the absence of food increased the love for it. We select this book as an alternate to the growing number of contemporary books on food selected for common readings, for 1) its literary quality; 2) its evocation of the American home front during World War II; 3) its important role in the birth of the food writing genre; 4) because Fisher turns love of food into something more than the hedonism of the well-fed; and 5) because her chapter “How to Keep Alive” gives very practical advice to a college student trying to feed himself on a tight budget.
A Clearing of the Tabs
He got a bad grade. So, he got the Constitution amended.
At Imprimis, Hillsdale College's monthly "speech digest", Kimberly Strassel, author of the book The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech, gives a three-page overview of that topic that is full of specific examples.
Why college graduates still can't think, by Rob Jenkins over at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.
Over at USA Today, Glenn Reynolds does the job American journalists don't seem to want to do by asking if Obama's illegal spying was worse than Watergate. Although I don't think there will be anything really new to readers at the Hall, it gives a good summary of events in one place.
Mexico's drug war death toll in 2016 reportedly exceeded that of many countries having real wars.
A very even-handed assessment of Obamacare over at the Federalist by Mary Katherine Ham. She discusses how it has helped some of her friends and how it has hurt her family. Her argument is that we shouldn't ignore either side.
The rise of obesity in the U.S. tracks closely with the expansion of America's primary food assistance program.
Babalu Blog covers a report arguing that Cuba's treatment of medical professionals amounts to human trafficking.
Brett and Kate McKay over at the Art of Manliness have an article I should read, you know, after I check this next website: How to Quite Mindlessly Surfing the Internet and Actually Get Stuff Done.
Graph Paper Diaries offers a 12-post course on spotting and refuting BS called, appropriately, Calling BS Readalong. The link is to the series index.
The Best Browser Extensions that Protect Your Privacy
FIRE's Greg Lukianoff and Heterodox Academy's Jonathan Haidt offer The Coddling of the American Mind.
Junicode -- a Unicode font for medievalists
A page on using Old English in the digital world (font, browser, etc., recommendations)
A guide to giving your cats their annual performance review
At Imprimis, Hillsdale College's monthly "speech digest", Kimberly Strassel, author of the book The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech, gives a three-page overview of that topic that is full of specific examples.
Why college graduates still can't think, by Rob Jenkins over at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.
Over at USA Today, Glenn Reynolds does the job American journalists don't seem to want to do by asking if Obama's illegal spying was worse than Watergate. Although I don't think there will be anything really new to readers at the Hall, it gives a good summary of events in one place.
Mexico's drug war death toll in 2016 reportedly exceeded that of many countries having real wars.
A very even-handed assessment of Obamacare over at the Federalist by Mary Katherine Ham. She discusses how it has helped some of her friends and how it has hurt her family. Her argument is that we shouldn't ignore either side.
The rise of obesity in the U.S. tracks closely with the expansion of America's primary food assistance program.
Babalu Blog covers a report arguing that Cuba's treatment of medical professionals amounts to human trafficking.
Brett and Kate McKay over at the Art of Manliness have an article I should read, you know, after I check this next website: How to Quite Mindlessly Surfing the Internet and Actually Get Stuff Done.
Graph Paper Diaries offers a 12-post course on spotting and refuting BS called, appropriately, Calling BS Readalong. The link is to the series index.
The Best Browser Extensions that Protect Your Privacy
FIRE's Greg Lukianoff and Heterodox Academy's Jonathan Haidt offer The Coddling of the American Mind.
Junicode -- a Unicode font for medievalists
A page on using Old English in the digital world (font, browser, etc., recommendations)
A guide to giving your cats their annual performance review
Honor and Progressives
Interesting to see the word come up in a progressive piece, and even employed correctly to describe this particular problem.
Two changes are required for Democrats to diminish the 39-point margin by which whites without college degrees voted for Mr. Trump over Hillary Clinton.I sometimes get the sense that progressives think that step two is sufficient: that if they come up with a good enough set of government-based gifts, they'll win (and deserve to win) the working class without needing to treat the honor of working class members as important. This guy clearly sees both that this is not sufficient, and also understands just why.
This first concerns social honor. Too often in otherwise polite society, elites (progressives emphatically included) unselfconsciously belittle working-class whites. We hear talk of “trailer trash” in “flyover states” afflicted by “plumber’s butt” — open class insults that pass for wit. This condescension affects political campaigns, as in Hillary Clinton’s comment about “deplorables” and Barack Obama’s about people who “cling to guns or religion.”
“My biggest boneheaded move,” Mr. Obama mused.
He was right. Democrats should stop insulting people. The high cost of doing so is dramatized by “I’m deplorable” T-shirts and Inaugural DeploraBalls. There’s no need to accept racism, sexism or homophobia from working-class whites or anyone else. Just live up to our progressive ideals by acknowledging social disadvantage more consistently....
That’s the first step. The second is for Democrats to advocate an agenda attractive to low-income and working-class Americans of all races: creating good jobs for high school graduates.
Education theory
I'm proofing a sweet little juvenile story on Project Gutenberg, called "Squib and his friends," by Evelyn Everett Green (1900). Our young hero is befriended by a wise man during a family trip to Switzerland, and is regretting having to go home, where he will be
". . . just having stupid, tiresome lessons to do. It will be so dull!"
"Dull!" said Herr Adler, in a voice which brought a sudden wave of red into Squib's cheeks; "dull to learn all sorts of wonderful and interesting things about the great wonderful world we live in! Why, what did you say to me the other day about finding everything so interesting? And now you call your lessons dull. Why, that is nonsense!"
"Oh, if you taught me my lessons they would all be interesting," answered the little boy quickly; "but some people can't make anything interesting; and then--and then--"
Herr Adler nodded his head several times, with one of his grave smiles.
"Yes, you may well say, 'and then--and then--' and stick fast. Can't you make things interesting for yourself? How is it your games are all so interesting?--your collections and your carving? Why, because you are interested; because you want to learn and to know and to do more and more, and better and better. And your lessons will be just as interesting--no matter who teaches you--if you just make up your mind that you want to know.
A promise we can all get behind
In a nice counterpoint to the hyperventilating about Trump's withdrawal from the Paris "accords," Commentary Magazine gives us an example of the pitiful tissue of nothingness in which the participating countries are expressing their continued staunch support. Pakistan, for instance, has agreed to "reduce its emissions after reaching peak levels to the extent possible.” As the author points out, that is a definition of the word "peak," not a commitment.
Anarchy and McMaster
David Benson makes a reasonable point: "McMaster/Cohn simply accept the world as anarchic. If Putin does, too, that just means they're all right together. Putin may also believe water is wet."
DB: ISIS Condemns Kathy Griffin
“This is just another example of a privileged white woman culturally appropriating the proud custom of a marginalized people. Beheadings are our thing, not your thing,” said the statement, which was released on Telegram.
It's Not Bias -Exactly-....
Opinion, CNN: "Everyone should have a shot at paid family leave." (4 April 2017)
Headline, CNN: "Trump's Budget to Include Paid Family Leave..." (22 May 2017)
Opinion, CNN: "How Paid Family Leave Hurts Women." (Yesterday)
I mean, different people wrote the opinion pieces. The timing is plausibly a coincidence. And yet...
Headline, CNN: "Trump's Budget to Include Paid Family Leave..." (22 May 2017)
Opinion, CNN: "How Paid Family Leave Hurts Women." (Yesterday)
I mean, different people wrote the opinion pieces. The timing is plausibly a coincidence. And yet...
Warning Order: Wolf Time Discussion
I think we'll do the Wolf Time discussion starting next Monday, unless people need more time. Sound off in the comments if that's too soon for you, but you'd like to join in.
Beheading the President in Absentia
There were a few occasions during the Obama administration that the President was hung in effigy, and Bush, and Hillary Clinton. So it's not new.
Holding up the severed head instead of hanging him, though, has interesting symbolism in the age of ISIS. But the same sort of thing was said about the tricky symbolism of hanging Obama, as opposed to hanging Bush.
The only thing that's maybe new is that this is not some fringe dude putting up a gallows in his cornfield somewhere, but a celebrity recognizable to most Americans.
UPDATE: Scott Adams has a good account.
Holding up the severed head instead of hanging him, though, has interesting symbolism in the age of ISIS. But the same sort of thing was said about the tricky symbolism of hanging Obama, as opposed to hanging Bush.
The only thing that's maybe new is that this is not some fringe dude putting up a gallows in his cornfield somewhere, but a celebrity recognizable to most Americans.
UPDATE: Scott Adams has a good account.
I have been telling you since before the inauguration that the country was going to split into two movies on one screen. Some of us are watching a new president do his best to make America great. But half the country is watching a disaster movie in which we unknowingly elected a Hitler-monster to destroy civilization. The Kathy Griffin situation illustrates the two-movie idea perfectly. For Kathy and her associates at the photoshoot, this photo was intentionally provocative, but in a silly way. In their movie, beheading the Hitler-monster is a widely-approved fantasy. Perfectly acceptable. Nothing to see here.
Then they published the photo.
And learned there was another movie on the same screen....
Obviously I support Griffin’s right to produce provocative and sometimes offensive art. That is part of her job. And I also respect her rapid and thorough apology. To feel otherwise about Kathy would make me one of the overly-sensitive folks I have been mocking for years. You don’t get to turn me into that person. But you can go full-snowflake on this topic if you like.
The takeaway here should not be so much about Griffin. The takeaway is that a room full of people involved in the photoshoot did not see this as a huge problem from the start. They were living a different movie. If you judge this situation to be an error of taste, judgement, intelligence, or morality, you are missing the bigger picture. The bigger picture is that the country is living two movies at the same time, and Griffin was acting “normal” in one of them.
In the Company of the Dead
I grew up in a rather Spartan Protestant denomination where we believed when people were dead, they were dead and gone. We could remember them, but that was all we could do. There was a permanent severing that, for me, always seemed to magnify the loss.
In the last decade I've been reading more and more about some of the liturgical churches: Anglican, Catholic, Orthodox. Visiting an Orthodox church was interesting, the walls and even ceiling covered in icons, hundreds of images of Christ and dead Christians that, according to the liturgical churches, are not gone. They are still "here" in a sense: we can talk with them, ask them to intercede for us, be inspired by them. To a point, I guess, we can get to know these strangers who are our brothers and sisters in Christ.
However, according to the priests and scholars, it is not just canonized saints we can talk to. We can speak with our own dead, too. Reading and hearing and coming to accept this tore down the wall between the living and dead that my old denomination had erected in my heart, and it was a great comfort when my aunt passed away recently. There are things I'd wished I told her, and in mourning I took the time to say them. But it doesn't end there; she is still with us; all of our dead are. Death does not need to tear a hole in our community.
Some say this is just a way to deal with grief, but it isn't. I believe it is a way to keep the fabric of community whole and strong, and it is more about building and maintaining the courage to fight the good fight than comforting us in loss.
There should be tears as we look out on those fields of crosses, row on row, and gaze upon those stones that mark our own personal dead. Death is a tragedy. But we should also feel our courage renewed in such company, and we should eat and drink and sing and talk with them.
Memorial Day seems a good time to speak of this. Maybe our fallen warriors are all around us, cheering us on, interceding with the Commander for us. Maybe we already live in Valhalla, in a way. Whether we are victorious in our current struggles or not, if we live courageously, then when we die they are here to welcome us home, and we can join them in their mission.
In the last decade I've been reading more and more about some of the liturgical churches: Anglican, Catholic, Orthodox. Visiting an Orthodox church was interesting, the walls and even ceiling covered in icons, hundreds of images of Christ and dead Christians that, according to the liturgical churches, are not gone. They are still "here" in a sense: we can talk with them, ask them to intercede for us, be inspired by them. To a point, I guess, we can get to know these strangers who are our brothers and sisters in Christ.
However, according to the priests and scholars, it is not just canonized saints we can talk to. We can speak with our own dead, too. Reading and hearing and coming to accept this tore down the wall between the living and dead that my old denomination had erected in my heart, and it was a great comfort when my aunt passed away recently. There are things I'd wished I told her, and in mourning I took the time to say them. But it doesn't end there; she is still with us; all of our dead are. Death does not need to tear a hole in our community.
Some say this is just a way to deal with grief, but it isn't. I believe it is a way to keep the fabric of community whole and strong, and it is more about building and maintaining the courage to fight the good fight than comforting us in loss.
There should be tears as we look out on those fields of crosses, row on row, and gaze upon those stones that mark our own personal dead. Death is a tragedy. But we should also feel our courage renewed in such company, and we should eat and drink and sing and talk with them.
Memorial Day seems a good time to speak of this. Maybe our fallen warriors are all around us, cheering us on, interceding with the Commander for us. Maybe we already live in Valhalla, in a way. Whether we are victorious in our current struggles or not, if we live courageously, then when we die they are here to welcome us home, and we can join them in their mission.
Talking About the Queen Again? On Independence Day?
Vox apparently decided that Memorial Day was the right day to run an article titled, "The Marine Corps has a 'toxic masculinity' problem."
The Marines’ reaction was to be expected, though. The corps acts like a fraternity, according to Emerald Archer, an expert on women’s advancement at Mount St. Mary’s University in California. Many Marines, she said, believe that integrating women would ruin that brotherhood.Like a fraternity, right. With graveyards.
Those who work with Marines agree. There’s a “toxic masculinity culture” in the Marine Corps, James Joyner, a professor at the Marine Command and Staff College, told me.
That may be what is at the core of the women-in-infantry debate among Marine ranks: the identity crisis of a historically macho club now being forced to let in women.
Now that the Marine Corps must allow women to serve in combat roles — and is putting out recruiting commercials highlighting that fact — it tears at the social fabric of the service.
Meanwhile, long-time commenter and former milblogger "Daniel, USMC" dropped by the comments to our recent discussion on the USMC's falling infantry standards. The recent sharp drop in standards to accommodate female Marines comes at the end of a long decline in standards for the School of Infantry, he notes.
I spoke to a friend of mine who did SOI a decade after I did; they've lowered the standards for SOI even before women in the infantry was an issue.(SOI: School of Infantry; MCCRES: Marine Corps Combat Readiness Evaluation; FMF: Fleet Marine Force, i.e., the post-training Corps that deploys on missions worldwide.)
When I went through Alpha-traz in the early 90's, the benchmark forced hump was based on MCCRES standards: 40K in at least 8 hours. Troop handlers made sure we made it under par. Benchmark hump when he went through was 20K, half of MCCRES. We aren't even training Infantry to FMF standards.
We're told by Vox that "the Marine Corps needs to change," and that this marks a "fight for the soul of the Marine Corps." An institution doesn't have a soul, but it can have an essence. The real question ought to be: what is essential to an institution like the Marine Corps? That it be able to win the wars it is sent to fight, or something else?
UPDATE:
Task & Purpose has some interviews with Army female infantrymen from the recent class, plus trainers and some men involved.
Much of the controversy surrounding the integration of women has involved the maintenance of standards. In a statement, Command Sgt. Maj. Tyrus Taylor affirmed that “the standards remained the same from previous classes” and that “male and female trainees all had to pass the same significant requirements to graduate.”So, lower standards for all! That should fix everything.
Asked if he agreed, the male infantryman wasn’t so sure. “A lot of them were pushed through because they were females,” he said, explaining that he thinks the female soldiers were given more chances to stay in the course than their male counterparts were afforded. The instructor took issue with that assertion though. “Everyone did the same thing, and that’s why not all 34 that started, graduated,” he said. “If anything, the standards were upheld even more because there were females in the unit.”
There was one notable exception though: The standard Army Physical Fitness Test. “They [the Army] still grade them on the female scale,” the instructor admitted, “however, they are also part of a pilot program to do away with separate gender grading. This will in turn lower the standards for males, yet make the playing field pretty even when it comes to physical fitness test.”
As it stands now, female infantryman have to complete 23 fewer push-ups than their male counterparts, and they have more than three additional minutes to complete their two-mile run.
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