William S. Lind :collection (merged thread)

[AmericanPride]

"Superficial" != "wrong." Apologies if I came across as harsh yesterday, but the reason your point is not relevant is because you aren't going to fix it in your lifetime, and probably not in your grandkid's. What you are speaking of is the result of thousands of years of natural selection. You're not going to change the cumulative effect of that in a generation, unless you start playing God with people's DNA.

Any examples? No, remember I said this may have been long before the long time before. But I think if you look at all the accounts we have of preliterate fighting groups from the Commaches to the Mongols to the Zulus men have done the fighting. The women stayed home with the kids. I think the whole of human history militates against the belief that men fighting and women not is a "socio-political construction". Except for one or two exceptions the women stayed home and the men fought. It strains credulity, mine anyway, to think that way back when in the time before the time before people decided to create a "socio-political construction" that didn't have a pragmatic basis.

It's superficial because it is a reading of history without any factual basis. It has no more evidence than any modern day conspiracy theory.

I imagine that there are some women out there who can do it... but I doubt they meet USMC height/weight standards for females. I think the build necessitated by those standards is too slight to be able to make it. Lost in all of this is the simple fact that not a single female Marine I know would choose to go into a combat arms field if given the choice. Admittedly, I don't know all of them, but the fact that the ones I do aren't clamoring for this change to be made leads me to believe that the drive behind doing this isn't coming from what I'd consider a "pure" source.

And those are excellent examples of the normative barriers that I have been speaking about. Here is a good research paper addressing these normative obstacles. Some excerpts:

The Article examines four problems with the physical strength rationale: (1) stereotyping – the assumption that no woman can do the job without testing the abilities of the individual woman; (2) differential training – the failure to account for the potential for improvement for women who often have less prior physical activity; (3) trait selection – measuring only tasks that are perceived to be difficult for women, while ignoring equally mission critical tasks that women may be better at performing; and (4) task definition – not considering if there are other ways to get the job done. Each of these problems reveals a distortion based on an underlying normative belief that the military should be a male realm. It is this belief, not the reality of physical strength, that motivates the de jure exclusion, the very type of justification forbidden by law, and detrimental to women, men, and the military mission.

A pattern emerges from these four problems. What appears to be a biological truth is actually better understood as a normative belief that the military’s job is in some way peculiarly suited to men. It is not that
women’s bodies do not measure up against an objective standard, but
that the standard is defined so women do not fit it. This Part examines
the normative claims exposed as underlying the physical-strength arguments.

It goes beyond stereotyping, however, because in believing men are stronger, we both train them to be stronger, and we create a military designed around their abilities—in other words, we make the belief real. Epistemologist Sally Haslanger has termed this cognitive mechanism
“assumed objectivity.”207 Members of a powerful group ascribe characteristics to a weak group in a way that makes the differences real, and in a vicious cycle, the ascribed characteristics help make the weak group
weak.208 For example, slave owners might ascribe a lack of intelligence
to slaves, claim that this characteristic is innate, use this professed belief
to justify a lack of education, and in this way make real a difference that
keeps the slave owners in power.

I'll go with using the old noodle to solve military problems

Where did I suggest otherwise?