I'm picking up on an old thread here...this is RTK commenting on the 28 articles...

Quote Originally Posted by RTK View Post
Iraq, despite the men's perspective, is a matriarichal society. Getting into the women's networks influences the family network and gets 14 year old Joe Jiahist grounded and beaten with a wooden stick by his mom. Aside from the pure comedic value of these types of events, the women's circles are often the untapped venues of success in this type of society.
Has anybody had a good look at the effect sending our young men into the field, who will do the sorts of things that young men do while dressed up in and driving soldier kit using the kinds of power that soldiers have, has on the ongoing negotiations about whose on top and what kinds of power are more important in the societies where we are deployed?

I'm starting from the assumption here that there are ongoing fights in every society about what kinds of power are important and who gets to wield those sorts of power. The folks and capabilities we field are a partial subset of the range internal to our society. I'm worried that the specifics of that partiality may induce changes on the other side that we might not like that much if we thought about it.

The intro line comes from a deeply essentialist read of Canadian history. Apologies in advance...and here it is.

When Europeans showed up in Tlingit areas the matriarchs told their proxies (old men) to send their disposables (young men) out to talk with our disposables (again, young men). The short version is that our young men played with their young men and the proxies that looked like their chiefs in ways that totally screwed up their norms and governance structures.

We're still eating the consequences of this 300 years later.

-peter