re: #377 Obdicut

You don’t ‘rub me the wrong way’. You say things that are factually inaccurate all the time, you rarely make the effort to spend ten second on Google to actually achieve accuracy, and you get offended beyond belief when I point out that you repeatedly, over and over again, say things that are flat out wrong. It takes you goddamn forever to admit any mistake, as well.

And you say stupid, evil, unamerican shit like “Civil rights are a secondary question”.

It is not factually inaccurate that the military operates in ways that would be illegal with civilian employers. So when I’m saying civil rights are secondary, I’m making a factual point: the military does in fact do all these things that by the standards of civil society are violations of civil rights.

And when I say why they do it, it’s also why they’re allowed to do it. Because lives are on the line. And you can perfectly well measure military effectiveness by counting how many people must die to accomplish the mission.

The military did as it was told, some time back, and advanced a number of women pilots to carrier duty despite their not having met the allegedly “objective” standards that carrier pilots had to meet. It turned out that the standards were very real indicators of carrier proficiency. The women were in fact having a lot of trouble sticking their landings. Too many were getting killed in the process, and the carriers took damage as well. The policy HAD to be revoked.

If DADT is revoked and the new policy doesn’t work out, the results, by definition, will be either that the policy gets put back to how it is now, or that the new DoAskDoTell military suffers in its combat effectiveness, suffers unnecessary casualties, and sometimes loses fights it would have won.

As I was saying earlier, the reason we do experiments is because we do not actually know how a proposed policy will play out in the real world.
Maybe the change will work just fine. I think it more likely than not that it will. But since there are some in the military who think otherwise, and since I’m not the one who knows everything and they’re not the ones who know nothing, I’m inclined to take it one step at a time.