Bing West

Traditional Views, Consequences, And Who’s Going To Drive The Car? Some Links

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Tyler Cowen and Eric Weinstein have a discussion.  Recommended.

Cowen mentions something I’ve often thought:  Changing institutions to include female representation will have costs and benefits, and change the character of many institutions themselves, and many parts of our civilization (marriage, incentives, parenthood, politics etc).  Pretty unremarkable, but a highly charged and consequential topic nonetheless.

Via Youtube: ‘Are We Really Coming Apart?’ Charles Murray and Robert Putnam Discuss

Robert Putnam, author of ‘Bowling Alone‘, seems to agree with Charles Murray about what much of what the data highlights: Working-class whites are behaving more like working-class non-whites, and college-educated non-whites are behaving more like college-educated whites.

You don’t have to agree with all of the ideas, but traditional views have their merits:

Bing West on women in ground combat from the previous administration:

‘In sum, the Joint Chiefs have taken a clear long-term risk for an unclear near-term political gain, perhaps hoping to diminish budgetary cuts. The question is whether increasing the individual rights of the female soldier decreases the combined combat effectiveness of the killing pack. We won’t know the answer until we fight a hard ground war sometime in the future.’

Something many Boomers probably still take for granted: If you have a sexual, moral and political liberation movement sweep parts of your civilization (generation of ’68), there are gonna be some consequences, good and bad.  Some radicals and social revolutionaries (professing to not believe in the legitimacy of any institution) will join and co-opt many parts of the institutions themselves; enjoying the sudden stability, influence and money gained.

The institutions, however, may arguably become less stable, so a previous stability might have been taken for granted by those Boomers.

I usually prize stability, moral decency, slow change, and rule of law (political/economic freedom) more than any one cause.

It’s probably a matter of time until you get a counter-revolution, and what worries me is a less stable system overall.

It can still be pretty funny, however.

How much are we like Britain anyways?  

Subject: ‘Is England Still Influencing America?’ on Hitchens’ book ‘Blood, Class, & Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies‘ when Hitchens’ was pushing the idea that ’empire’ was the primary transmission, apparently due to his ideological commitments at the time. America must have seemed a classless paradise with institutions well-functioning and ripe to achieve justice and equality for the whole world…for some folks in the Generation of ’68.

Obamacare, The Islamic State & Vietnam-Three Friday Links

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Avik Roy is working towards Obamacare alternatives, but has always supported some form of universal coverage, about which this blog harbors doubts. Perhaps much in the same way that human rights and human rights institutions have become part of the foreign policy institutional landscape, so too could universal coverage become part of the furniture.  Big, heavy furniture.

A healthy skepticism might recognize that such a delivery system could likely create too tantalizing a prize for Leftward ideological interests and perhaps too immovable an institutional object to remain nimble and responsive to We The People over time.

Nevertheless, Roy is really working on rising health-care cost problems, and it addresses many of the flawed incentives and ridiculous complexity and overreach of the ACA:

‘One of the fundamental flaws in the conservative approach to health care policy is that few—if any—Republican leaders have articulated a vision of what a market-oriented health care system would look like. Hence, Republican proposals on health reform have often been tactical and political—in opposition to whatever Democrats were pitching—instead of strategic and serious.

Those days must come to an end. The problems with our health care system are too great. Health care is too expensive for the government, and too expensive for average Americans.’

Bing West at The National Review on the Islamic State, and possible options:

‘As war author Karl Marlantes has written, don’t treat a human life as a bargaining chip, unless you are willing to be that chip. Too many policymakers and generals think of violence, if they think of it at all, as a negotiating tool.’

If we go in with guns blazing, aren’t we aligning ourselves with Iran and their proxy war in Iraq and Syria and goals for nuclear domination?  I mean, as far as nuclear negotiations, we’re already out on a limb with an increasingly desperate American President and a repressive authoritarian regime in which the Ayatollah has final say over a very real divide between Iranian and American interests.

Perhaps we have interests to let both sides fight it out. This could weaken both Tehran and IS.  We could help arm the Kurds and see if the branches of the Peshmerga are up to the task of battling IS, try and have Maliki’s departure not devolve into a bloody mess, keep channels open with the Turks, Jordan, Lebanon and…develop something vaguely representing leadership and protection and advancement of our interests and alliances.

Lead!

But how aggressively?

Meanwhile, given the extreme lunacy and violence of IS against the Yazidis, Iraqi Christians, and others in their path, and the clear security threat they post to Western interests, even the humanitarian interventionists and the American public are beginning to see the tatters of current foreign policy and the fires raging throughout the Middle-East.

On that note, it’s nice to relax and read about another part of the world, even if it has an old Communist structure in place.  Michael Totten visited Vietnam:

‘Some parts of Hanoi are a bit messy, but aside from the outdated rat’s nest of electrical wires, its messes are the kind you make in your house when you’re in the middle of a remodeling project. Parts of the Old Quarter still look a little decayed, but even there the decay is like a holdover from the past that’s being blotted out with one high-end boutique store after another.’

Bing West At The American Interest-‘Women In Ground Combat’

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Full piece here.

‘In sum, the Joint Chiefs have taken a clear long-term risk for an unclear near-term political gain, perhaps hoping to diminish budgetary cuts. The question is whether increasing the individual rights of the female soldier decreases the combined combat effectiveness of the killing pack. We won’t know the answer until we fight a hard ground war sometime in the future.’

Our politics is extremely polarized and there’s rarely middle ground.

Does allowing women into combat situations make us more combat ready?  As someone who’s non-military, I’ve heard these arguments made, which I find persuasive, but they’re up for debate:

–Allowing women into combat necessarily invites sexual tension into the close-knit, cohesive, adrenalin-fueled environment of combat units and infantrymen.  There’s nothing like shooting and being shot at, killing up close, and the brutal conditions that occur in combat operations.  It’s animalistic.  You truly don’t know unless you’ve been there, I’ve been told.  Men and women are both changed by the presence of women, and they get up to what nature intended with all sorts of repercussions.

–Only a very few women may even physically qualify to serve in combat, often at great physical cost, including later infertility in some cases.  Many men fail to qualify, for various reasons, and failure out in the field can mean death, or the death of your brothers.  This can cost us an operation, a battle, or a war.  Inevitably this will lead to two different standards, and lowered standards all around.  As West points out, some people pushing this change want equal access, but not equal obligation (no draft for women).  It’s Title IX writ large, one more boys’ club to equalize, one more situation in which to extend the gender equity logic, often with some ideological hostility for the very organizations they want to alter, often wanting to simply extend their own political and institutional influence without always having the best reasons to do so.

–Our enemies, after capturing female infantry, will not only be torture and brutalize them, hold them as hostages and POW’s as they’ve done our men, but they could also rape them, and use our obvious attachment to a young woman service member to leverage their aims and which could lead to altered outcomes.  Fewer young women serving may be willing to accept such scenarios.

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Here’s General Robert Barrow, 27th Commandant Of The Marines testifying back in 1991 (Clinton administration), whose testimony was referred to in West’s piece:

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Here’s a quote by Samuel Huntington (wikipedia).  The quote is from The Clash Of Civilizations and is fairly well known.

“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.”

Do we get to extend the values of gender equality, humanism, and human rights without our military superiority?  Do we ignore violence at our peril, either organizing it or being consumed by it?  Are we inevitably drifting Europeward, accelerated under this administration?

Related On This Site:   Can you see limited government, life, liberty and property from here?:  From The Atlantic: Samuel Huntington’s Death And Life’s Work…From The American Interest Online: Francis Fukuyama On Samuel Huntington…From Foreign Affairs Via The A & L Daily: ‘Conflict Or Cooperation: Three Visions Revisited’

Do we try and invest in global institutions as flawed as they are…upon a Kantian raft?:  Daniel Deudney On YouTube Responding to Robert Kagan: Liberal Democracy Vs. Autocracy

Repost-Revisting Larry Summers: What Did He Say Again?

Democracy as we envision it requires people to constrain themselves within laws and institutions that maintain democracy…through Mill’s utilitarianism?: Thursday Quotation: Jeane Kirkpatrick – J.S. Mill  Is Bernhard Henri-Levy actually influencing U.S. policy decisions..? From New York Magazine: ‘European Superhero Quashes Libyan Dictator’…Bernhard Henri-Levy At The Daily Beast: ‘A Moral Tipping Point’