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A Progressive Asks a Clarifying Question
Friday’s adventures in Twitterland was consumed with President Trump’s decision to reverse the Obama Administration’s inclusion of transgender individuals serving in the military. One woman from California asked me the following:
Valid question and clarifying. Exactly what am I afraid of? Mostly my son dying. It’s as simple as that. And while I have but one Marine related to me by blood, all of them, no matter what branch of the service they may be in, all are his brothers and sisters. For any of them to perish diminishes me and diminishes our country.
One of the talking points latched onto by her fellow progressives follows this line: “If someone wants to volunteer and is willing to die for our country, who are any of us to say ‘no?'” This very question is at fundamental odds with the purpose and intent of the United States military. To paraphrase Gen. George S. Patton, their objective is not to die for our country, but rather make the other poor bastard die for his country. We honor those that make that sacrifice, but we never seek to place them in a situation that guarantees it. Every minute of training is devoted to giving every recruit every chance of coming home.
Part and parcel of that is evaluating fitness for combat. While not every job in the military is designated as a combat position, war can be a funny thing. Just because you are not seeking combat doesn’t mean that combat won’t find you. That is why, for the Corps, every Marine is first a rifleman.
Which brings us to the most disturbing of statistics concerning transgender individuals: According to the Williams Institute at UCLA, at some time or another 40 percent to 50 percent of them will attempt suicide. Why the desire then to give them a weapon and put them into a situation where lives depend on emotional and mental stability under stress?
So asks J.R. Salzman. Salzman is a champion athlete who won eight world titles at the Lumberjack World Championships between 1998 and 2010. He joined the Minnesota National Guard on the 2nd anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and was sent to Iraq in 2006. In December of that year he was injured in a blast that caused traumatic brain injury and the loss of his right arm below the elbow.
He writes about being stuck in the 105° heat, being both bored and frightened at the same time, and the toll it takes:
Any tiny little personal issue (with the youngest among his team) had suddenly became a mountain. And that [expletive] came out on that fire base. And they snapped mentally. After stepping on each other’s nuts living in the same can for five months, guys were at each other’s throats. The stress made it worse. Guys would literally snap over a Dear John letter. Their personal issues came out and they were instantly combat ineffective.
Now take someone confused about whether they are a man or woman. Take those psychological and emotional issues and put them in that environment. Take someone who is right off the bat not uniform or part of the same team. Give them special treatment because of their identity. Take that person, put them in that stressful war environment and watch what happens. It’s a [expletive] ticking time bomb.
You have to be incredibly tough mentally, physically and emotionally. War is not a [expletive] video game. It tests every ounce of your being. You can’t teach someone to be a fearless warrior in a [expletive] PowerPoint. You either have it or you don’t. You can hack it or you can’t.
The worst thing about the transgender advocates is that they have neither the experience or nor the family ties to the military. For them these are purely political exercises paid for by the blood of others and the anguish of families that they will never have to meet. If you believe your side of the argument is personal and about people, don’t treat the other side as a mere statistic.
Unfortunately, when I answered this woman’s question the conversation stopped. Evidently my answer was either unexpected or not included in her list of preconceived answers to everything.
Published in Military
I don’t know of any good executive who would operate in this fashion, namely, by announcing major policy decisions publicly before telling the people who will be tasked with implementing them. Who does that? And why?
Ok, now we can all agree, it was a butthead thing to do to not at least tell the Joint Chiefs of Staff before the tweet. He didn’t need to tell everyone in Washington, but yeah, those guys.
I’m afraid of losing wars.
And I’m afraid this will happen to our troops.
Fire all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who thought tranny soldiers was a good idea. Why are we even entertaining this as a reasonable idea?
Stars on your shoulders do strange things. You don’t get that deep in brass without nodding in agreement to the civilian authorities no matter which party is in power. It’s schizophrenic in its own way.
It really did take this man as commander-in-chief to make this decision.
As I said during the campaigns, he’s willing to be a (redacted) so I don’t have to be.
Here’s my answer. I had a crazy great-aunt who said that if you hang around people long enough, you’ll eventually figure out what you think of them. I worked on a couple long-term, large-scale projects over the years and I met two egregious examples of LW’ers. I worked with them and was around them long enough. They shared some characteristics, among them, a belief that they were intellectually gifted, a complete lack of self-awareness, and a belief that there are no absolutes.
Now an implication of the last is that, in their view, one can’t believe in a moral value because it is an objective truth perceptible to anyone willing to exercise the necessary intellectual discipline. One can’t make a decision about transgenders in the military on a rational basis. To them it has to be emotionally based, and those who disagree with them are emotionally immature, insecure, hate-filled, fearful, and so on. Believe me; it goes no deeper than that. They simply cannot believe anyone could hold a view contrary to theirs for any other reasons. It is the main reason for their annoying sense of superiority.
Once again I find myself in agreement with a policy the president supports but I can’t believe how stupidly he goes about presenting it. Comments 5 and 28 are absolutely correct.
I don’t understand why so many of you celebrate the idiocy coming from the White House. Many of you proudly support the amateur hour tweets “because he’s saying what needs to be said”. Apparently you don’t understand that he can say what needs to be said without sounding like a moron and undermining his position- thus preventing his agenda to pass. The people who cheer this nonsense are the problem, as much as the democrats. There are times when I begin to fall for trump because I support many of his policies, and then I log onto this site and see how his sycophants defend everything he does and it reminds me that they are just as bad as the left. I can’t wait for this one term wonder to be gone so real conservatives can take their party back and the RINOS that worship trump can go back to trolling online, voting for democrats, or not voting at all.
Trump will never be a successful president as long as he uses twitter. He should be trying to pass repeal instead of spending his time trying to get sessions to quit and getting into twitter spats. I’m gonna be ready for impeachment if this nonsense keeps up. I can’t take 3 more years of this failure.
What if he mentioned in his tweet that the high rate of suicide among transgender people makes it unethical to have them serve? Then at least the left would have to deal with some small part of reality.
Exactly. And nothing he tweeted matters until he goes back and takes care of all this, because until he does, the policy doesn’t change anyway. I’ll be fascinated to see how long it takes, and how closely the final policy matches what he said in the tweets.
What if he didn’t Tweet at all until he had a comprehensive policy in place that was being implemented? The Left doesn’t have to deal with any part of reality when the president doesn’t act like he’s working in the real world.
Furthermore, I haven’t seen any posts on this website that have argued that having transgendered soldiers is especially beneficial for the military. Even though I have seen some defense of the rights of the trans people currently in uniform–or sympathy for those people–because there has been no fleshed out directive about how they are handled no matter where they are serving at the current point in time, it seems there is a consensus view that opening the door for entry was little more than social engineering by the previous guy to make his own base cheer.
This is a center right website, after all.
It seems we’re all on the same page that the military should not be a place where readiness is shunted to one side for politics, which is a basic principle the Left has forgotten.
I forget who said it, but people in the broader American public understand little about military culture, which is one of the problems there. (Less than 1/2 percent of our population is in uniform.) They don’t even understand that it’s not that easy to join. I’ve taught high school students who have been turned away for various reasons that have nothing to do with their sex. I’ve seen kids in ROTC not get active duty even though they’ve been on scholarship. And getting into the infantry??? It’s hard.
So reversing this policy on allowing transgender people in uniform–which is not the same thing as LGB people at all—should be easy, yet @tyrionlannister is right.
The process that the president has initiated–which is no process at all since all he did was type something into Twitter–made that more difficult because he acts like he doesn’t have to participate in the actual procedures in place to change policy, even policies that can be controlled more by directive.
Furthermore, he undermines his credibility when he talks about “his generals” and none of them seem to have a clue about what he’s doing.
That’s–at best–incompetence.
I agree with this entirely. You are a good and thoughtful person, E.J., to take the time to answer such a tendentious question.
The problem, as I see it, is that, most of us on the right take these things seriously. Most of those on the left just want to try to make their points. They are so sanctimonious that they consider whatever they think is the truth, and those who disagree with them are doing so out of bad motives. Therefore, when they are taken seriously, they are unable to respond in a series manner, and retreat into their cocoon-like existence.
Conversation with a Leftist typically stops the moment one starts using facts and logic to counter their feelings.
I have a few buddies in the military, EJ, and your summary is exactly what they describe to me. If you left the transgender thing out of it, would the military accept someone who’s so mentally unstable – for any reason – that there’s something close to a 50% suicide attempt rate?
All that’s going to do is get more people killed or wounded than would happen otherwise. Not to mention the morale impact, the fact that many transgendered are on multiple medications that now need to be overseen, in the field, else someone might become so upset by their situation so they decide to inhale every pill in their possession.
It simply doesn’t work. I have crappy eyesight. Do I get to pilot an Apache? Or an X-wing?
No.
“Why do RW’s constantly seek to exclude those that are different from them” ? Tell her she has it backwards – it is the liberals that exclude. Your answer, and I am sure Trump’s decision, was about effectiveness, and based on facts and statistics, not a decision made to exclude someone “different”.
On that note, those that call themselves “progressive” shut down free speech on campuses, praise groups like BLM, who push for “black only” proms, work days, campus days, where gay couples seeking to marry can’t find a damn cake, but choose to destroy a baker who based on religious convictions, opted out of providing one.
There seems to be a culture of shaming within liberals, shame on you if you are a man, and look and act like one, or white, or Christian, or a mother, or feminine, or anything that doesn’t fit with their worldview. They require safe spaces, safe speech, where in their world both are currently unsafe unless those around them change. They seem to exhibit extreme vindictiveness and hostility, while calling themselves “progressives”. The message of tolerance, love and acceptance is distorted.
If you have enough of the force you can pilot an X-wing with bad eyesight.
In general, force sensitive people should be encouraged to join the military.
I don’t. It’s a course correction. If military people can’t handle the fact that the terrain has changed with no warning, they should not be leading.
Trump made policy, good or bad. Now go execute it. Assuming there were no discussions beforehand is almost irrelevant, but just assumptions. Because he chose to implement the policy immediately without extensive hand-holding and hiring change management consultants to do a stakeholder impact analysis doesn’t mean it’s amateur hour.
In fact, if I had a significant change to an organization, military or no, I’d announce it in a similar way, with a very short notice, and details available broken down at a lower level to the impacted organizations. It’s already done. This is what we’re doing. Move on.
This president is his own worst enemy. I’m going going to look back on 2016 as the greatest what-if election in history. While I’m eternally grateful for trump slaying Hillary, I can’t help but imagine how things would be going under a president Cruz. Cruz was so close to the nomination- it’s disheartening. There would have been no idiotic twitter use, no off topic statements. We’d have had a president who understood the dangers of Obamacare (I doubt trump can articulate why Obamacare is bad and Trumpcare is better), we wouldn’t be having the Russia scandal dogging a president the last 6 months, and we would have had a focus on the issues and getting conservative legislation passed by using the bully pulpit with an understanding of the actual issues to push an agenda through a conservative congress. The biggest shame is that with narrow majorities we can’t do anything because there is no leadership at the top.
The president needs to be having meetings all day and making speeches to rally support for good legislation. He should quit twitter. He should fire tillerson, kushner, scaramucci, and bannon. He should order sessions to stop assets forfeiture, he should be working with congress to repeal Obamacare and talking about nothing else. He should help primary every republican who voted against straight repeal. He should stop calling into news shows. He should stop watching tv all together. Nothing good happens when he’s tweeting about a show at 2am.
We don’t actually know if the Joint Chiefs of Staff thought “tranny soldiers” were a good idea or not. Because they follow the direction of their leader. They can voice their opinion, whatever it is. And they probably have. To this leader, and to the last one. But as I understand it, the Pentagon was explicitly told, by Ashton Carter and Joe Biden (following a study by the Rand Corporation) to figure out a way to facilitate open service of transgenders. It was a question of leadership, you see. And the United States military is led by a civilian.
Right now, those same Joint Chiefs of Staff are doing nothing different from what they were doing under the orders of their last leader, pending the proper direction, and orders from their current one. Because a Tweet is not an order.
When they get an order, I’m sure they’ll follow it. Just like last time. And we still won’t know whether they think it’s a good idea or not.
While I do not question that many of the people who support Trump think that anything that he does is good and right, their judgments are very much to be questioned. It is not just his tweets, it is his behavior in front of boy scouts; it is the reasoning behind his treatment of Sessions; and it is so many other traits of his.
No man can know what is in another man’s heart, and we should not try. We do know his actions, though. And Trump’s actions are that of a very limited person: Limited in intellect; limited in imagination; and limited in kindness.
His own Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said he will not stand behind a tweet. Policies must go through the proper channels.
I do not think the president will ever give up Twitter, or any of the other aspects of his strange behavior. We will just have to ride this difficult period out, and hope that there are good enough people in Congress and the Military who can reasonably stand up to his antics.
It’s never good for the officials in an administration finding out about policy through the media. He could easily have ordered it during a closed door meeting and had the policy reviewed with senior staff and reported to proper channels. Once again- I’m actually 100% in favor of the policy. But we aren’t talking about whether the policy is good or bad, we’re discussing how poorly it was implemented, which makes it easier to undermine by the left. That doesn’t help the cause.
The offending (3) tweets read as follows:
I fail to see the idiocy or moronicity in this statement. It’s pretty direct and professional. It’s not like he made fun of transexuals.
He’s the commander-in-chief. He doesn’t have to ask his underlings’ permission before he announces policy. Maybe he was afraid it would be leaked and spun before it got reviewed.
He shouldn’t have tweeted it at all. He should have worked out the policy with his staff and the military, and issued the policy and held press conferences on the subject at the same time with everyone on the same page. The statement you added about the mental illness should have been included in the reasons they give the press on day one to defend the policy. He should quit twitter.
So you’re not worried about this being leaked by staff?
I, for one, will be very interested to see what the final, and actual, “policy” looks like. When there actually is one.
It’s so interesting that the unilateral “I have a pen and a
phoneTwitter account” style of leadership is now lauded as exemplary and necessary simply because it scratches our itch, whereas just a few short months ago it was reviled as arbitrary and unconstitutional. (have to note that it regularly got the job done, though, without a whole lot of drama. And that much of it is, and will prove, considerably harder to undo than it was to do).Still, no point in letting the “hobgoblin of little minds,” foolish or otherwise, rule our own, I suppose.
I agree about the leaks but policy shouldn’t be announced via twitter with everyone playing catchup. If you want him to shoot from the hip why not have him just inform top staff in a meeting and have them implement it through proper channels? Why use twitter for it? Delegation is fine, but by announcing it on twitter he’s made it harder to establish the policy not easier. I want good policy like this to go forward, not get strangled in the crib by negative publicity before it’s established. Can’t you see how this undermines his position?
1. Recruit people with obvious mental problems
2. ??????
3. Profit
I read on the site the government officials found out about the policy change through the media. If that’s incorrect then I was wrong. The tweet itself was respectful- I do not object to the tone. I object to the president tweeting at all. Policy should not come from the top through tweets.
Sorry for the butchered quotes it’s hard to quickly utilize the phone version of the site. I’m normally on a desktop.
I agree about the leaks. Fire the leakers when you catch them I don’t know what else to do. Twitter isn’t the answer.