Chickenhawks

U.S. Marine on Iwo Jima. He's carrying a flame thrower and a M1911 pistol.  This battle was fought in February and March, 1945.  Combat as it really is, not how some social experimentalist imagine it to be, as they don't imagine it to be.

As anyone who followed this blog (darned few people) back during the election would be aware of, I'm not a Donald Trump fan.

I also don't have the massive visceral reaction to everything he does that the American left has either to where whatever it is must be bad, because he's the one doing it, although the degree to which he's been effective has been debatable to be sure.

One thing his supporters claimed he would do is to reverse what they perceived as a highly left oriented direction towards everything they claimed existed in the Obama Administration.  The extent to which that really existed can be debated, but a close look at the last two years of that administration does show that it engaged in a gigantic jump to the left on social issues in that time frame. And during that time frame it adopted the radically anti-nature stance of the extreme left so successfully that the views of that group have, in very short order, become the accepted norm that we cannot touch. Those views include the radically anti natural view that there's no difference at all between men and women, that a person decides their own gender, except for their own own gender "orientation", and that there's multiple "okays' in that area.

 US Army advisers and Vietnamese Special Forces, Vietnam War. All these men are men . . . for a reason.

All of that is deeply anti natural and will, long term (and short term) have massive negative consequences on the societies, which now include most of western society, and the individuals that adopt them.  Included in that group are what is now referred to as the "transgendered".

Transgenderism is not a well established phenomenon and indeed the better evidence is that people afflicted with leanings in that area, which are few in number, are victims of what often turns out to be a fleeting mental illness or, in some other cases, are expressing what was was a same gender attraction in a radical fashion.  Neither of these things is supposed to be said anymore, which doesn't mean they aren't true.

Indeed they are so true that in at least one "progressive" European country, if not the majority, surgeries designed to "assign", and by that we mean alter a natural, gender have been banned for children.  Statistically the majority of children that express, or have forced upon them, the concept that they are transgendered will actually revert to their natural orientation in relatively short order.  No matter, the radicals in the western world who hate nature and believe that a chemical and surgical utopia can be created that ratifies their own view is all for abusing, and it is abuse, children who express these leaning in the United States.

One of the really odd areas where the Obama Administrations  descent into the gender fantasy morass expressed itself was in the military, and in more than one fashion.  It was only as recently as the Clinton Administration when the military was forced to reverse its long held ban on homosexuals in the military. That change was not desired by the military, but rather forced upon it.  However, that change was a good change as, by that point in our history, things had changed enough to where the instinctive recoiling against homosexual behavior wasn't so pronounced that it would be disruptive in the service and therefore was truly unfair.  That's the point that is still missed in regards to this topic.  It is true that homosexuals were banned from the military as it was regarded as a character trait of depravity, but it was also banned because it was felt that it was so disruptive to military order that it was dangerous for a combat unit.  Throughout most of last couple of thousand years that in fact was true as it was only extremely recently that toleration (which is not the same of acceptance) of the trail became sufficiently widespread that this was no longer the case. That is, by the late 1980s the trait, no matter what a person thought of it, was unlikely to end up in brawls, disruption or even murder.

U.S. Marines, Peleliu, 1944.  We only imagine war not to be like this anymore as we came out so on top of things in 1945, and expanded on that over the next forty years, that we know imagine that all wars are push button remote affairs.  Our edge on the world, however, is rapidly declining.

A key aspect of that change, however, was the concept of normalization of the behavior that truly has no ends in where it might go. At the time there was no threat to the status of nature, that being that there is male and there is female, and the mammal norm is that they are attracted distinctly to the opposite other sexually but not to the same.  It's true that the opposite occurs, in very small percentages of the population, but whatever causes that is clearly a departure from the norm and in ways that defeat a lot of the normality of life for those who experience that.  In other words people had determined to tolerate same gender attraction, but that didn't equate to giving it fully equal status with the the normal orientation, let alone denying that there was a normal human natural orientation towards the opposite gender.

Following Justice Kennedy's extra judicial assault on nature in Obergefell the nation rapidly went from one that had determined to tolerate, in the Belloc sense, a deviation that didn't appear to be generally destructive to society at large to one that was, with the aid of Democratic Party, required to embrace any single sexual impulse going and declare it normal, or be accused of being bigoted. A lot of this has been at levels that would have been regarded as insane only recently.  Included in these, and particularly after Bruce Jenner started off in this odd direction, is that people assigning new genders to themselves is oh so normal and must be tolerated everywhere, including in the military.

Vietnam combat.  By post World War Two standards this was our largest war, although World War Two dwarfed it in scale.  Social planners can imagine women and even the "transgendered" in the modern military only because we haven't fought a war like this one since 1973, and we imagine, apparently that we will never have to again.

That the Obama Administration would go in this direction is not too surprising as the service has been under an assault for decades on the role of women in combat.  It's brutally clear that this is a silly idea and that the natural norm for ground combat is that its a male role, and has been since day one.  Only our overwhelming material superiority has kept this change, which was last forced on the Marine Corps over its objection, from being an absolute disaster.  Amazingly, we still somehow think that its natural to have an all male National Football League but not an all male ground combat military.   That's because we've become dense in this area.

And the densitude recently reached the point where the service had commenced issuing, in the case of the Army, instructions to women soldiers on not to overreacted if they saw fellow soldiers in the shower with the opposite gender bits.  Not to worry, the instructions held, the he/she may be just undergoing gender reassignment, not some creeper who just wanted to hang out in the shower with the girls and look at them.

Having said that, a male desire to hang out in the shower and look at the girls is actually a much more natural, indeed an immoral but fully natural, desire than to hack your privates off and take chemicals to alter your gender. This begs the question if the all the restrictions on guys hanging out and leering at girls whereevery they wish is deeply prejudicial. . . . it isn't, of course, as its normal and this is part of an assault on normalcy.

It's also, in the case of the military, extraordinarily dangerous and ill advised.  It's going to get people killed.

 North Korean Artillery piece, captured in Iraq.  The nation that produced this isn't going to be kind to women or people who have reassigned their genders and nature won't be kind to them in a combat environment either.

In combat, this isn't going to work for a plethora of reasons.  Amgosnt them, our collection of potential enemies would be inclined to find it an appalling abomination or crudely funny, either of which would end in death for those exhibiting it.  There's no question of this.  When a POW is taken and put in the slammer, and the gender begins to reassign itself to the human norm, the question will be raised, and then almost certainly ended, at the barrel of a gun.

Of course, for female prisoners, it would mean rape without question.  The Koran sanctions sexual slavery of female captives and we’ve seen that with ISIL.  When we won any war in which such unfortunates had been held captive, assuming we did, we’d have decades of sexual PTSD victims and quite a few unwanted children as a result of the same.

In later years our current era is almost certainly going to be looked  back on one during which the west truly began to decline or at least entered an episode of decline.  The vast wealth of modern society created sufficient leisure in which people were able to fully entertain their demons, and then demand that everyone else tolerate and accept them.  The results will not be good.

At any rate, the Trump Administration ordered the reversal of the Transgender acceptance in the military policy.

Good for them.

This is, frankly, good for everyone, including the people who express that leaning.  The military exists to kill people and break things, not to be a social experimentation camp. All sorts of things disqualify a person for military service, including physical ailments that are easily addressed in civilian society.  That's for a reason, and this policy change makes sense.

Frankly, I wish they'd also reverse the Obama decision requiring women be allowed in combat units. We'll see. Maybe there's some hope for that.

 Missile launchers of the People's Liberation Army (the Chinese Red Army).  The Chinese army has gone from a crude army based on mass attack to a technologically advanced modern one over the past twenty years, much like the Japanese military did the same in the late 19th Century.  Unfortunately for us, the Chinese also have a late 19th Century view of the world and a few policy pundits have flatly declared that a major war between the Untied States and China is likely.  If that occurs, it won't be like the Gulf Wars. . . or even like the Vietnam War.  It would be huge, bloody and more closely resemble a giant sized Korean War.

So what's with the title?

Well, our Congressional representation from this state has been quick to come out with an oatmeal like statement that backs away  from this, neither supporting it or rejecting it.  As the Casper Star Tribune reported:

"Political or social agendas shouldn’t drive such decisions, no matter which party is crafting them,” Enzi spokesman Max D’Onofrio wrote. “Senator Enzi believes all individuals should be treated with respect and ultimately these kinds of decisions should be left to the military leaders, as they are the ones in the best position to decide which policies will best benefit our armed service members and the military as a whole.”

That's pure baloney for a couple of reasons.

In the first place, if the military had been left to make its own decisions in this are women wouldn't have been put into combat units, which as noted still hasn't been addressed. That was forced on them by Presidential fiat.

Beyond that, a whole host of social agendas have been forced on the service in recent years.  Aiding that is that officers and senior NCOs who opposed these changes have departed the service in large numbers in recent years, a fact that was well noted at the time it was occurring.  Officers and senior NCOs who just couldn't see themselves ordering Suzy to die in combat left.  That sent the message to the remainders on what they would have to accept, and it also meant that a lot of the officer left after the last couple of years of the Obama Administration are more like corporate CEOs than military leaders.

In order to get the service back to what its supposed to focus on, which is nothing more than killing people and breaking things at the end of the day, the social experimentation has to end.  Social experimentation of a really radical anti natural level has always ended in disaster for militaries that engaged in it, the Imperial Russian and the early Soviet armies both provide examples, and this will pan out no differently for us.

It's also chicken for Enzi, Barasso and Cheney to take that position.  At least Barasso and Cheney were loud on the Trump bandwagon and Barasso was comfortable with drafting the GOP platform this past go around and even with including an anti public lands position that was deeply opposed by the residents of the state.  I find it difficult to believe that they just didn't fear being beaten up by the loud left social radicals in this area who have completely taken over the floor of the debate.  Enzi in fact was pretty roundly criticized recently when he made a statement about a hypothetical cross dresser, and he should have been as his comments were stupid, and they likely don't want to repeat that experience even on a completely different topic.

So, while I remain not a Trump fan, he was right on this one.