As Long As We're Talking about Modern Shibboleths

Let's talk about men and women being equal in every way:

The Problems of Women in Combat – From a Female Combat Vet
:

Because most women wouldn’t even qualify to be in the military if they didn’t have separate standards. Men and women are different, but those pushing women into combat don’t want to admit that truth. They huff and puff about how women can do whatever men can do, but it just ain’t so. We’re built differently, and it doesn’t matter that one particular woman could best one particular man. The best woman is still no match for the best man, and most of the men she’d be fireman-carrying off the battlefield will be at least 100 lbs heavier than her with their gear on.

Read the whole thing.

(Via SoCon Or Bust.)

Drones and Morality

My uneasiness at the use of drones is amplified by this:

The Many Victims of Drones:

We’ve discussed drones on this blog before, generally agreeing that killing enemy combatants with unmanned drones can be morally legitimate but leery about their seemingly indiscriminate use.

Read the whole thing.

(Via First Thoughts.)

Logical Inconsistency

is a common human condition. We are apt to entertain two quite inconsistent ideas without ever realizing it. Do read the entire article below for an illuminating exploration of one such situation, involving a brilliant man. Intelligence is guarantor of consistency it seems:

The Delusions of Liberal Humanism:

The link between intelligence and correct interpretation of reality is unfortunately weak. That is one of the reason why someone like cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker can be very smart and yet be consistently wrong. Pinker champions his latest wrong idea in his new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: the Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes, which posits that humans are evolving to become less violent.

The fact that you can publish a book making a claim so easily debunked by both empirical evidence and common sense says a lot about the publishing industry. But the idea that Pinker believes it to to be true—and so many people are willing to entertain the notion—says even more about the delusions of liberal humanism. As philosopher John Grey says in his devastating review,

The idea that a new world can be constructed through the rational application of force is peculiarly modern, animating ideas of revolutionary war and pedagogic terror that feature in an influential tradition of radical Enlightenment thinking. Downplaying this tradition is extremely important for Pinker. Along with liberal humanists everywhere, he regards the core of the Enlightenment as a commitment to rationality. The fact that prominent Enlightenment figures have favoured violence as an instrument of social transformation is—to put it mildly—inconvenient.

There is a deeper difficulty. Like so many contemporary evangelists for humanism, Pinker takes for granted that science endorses an Enlightenment account of human reason. Since science is a human creation, how could humans not be rational? Surely science and humanism are one and the same. Actually it’s extremely curious—though entirely typical of current thinking—that science should be linked with humanism in this way. A method of inquiry rather than a settled view of the world, there can be no guarantee that science will vindicate Enlightenment ideals of human rationality. Science could just as well end up showing them to be unrealisable.

Read more . . .

Read the whole thing.

(Via First Thoughts.)

What He Said

(Well, isn't that what most of my posts say?)

Reaping the Whirlwind:

Zac Alstin on how Nazi thinking became our own.

In what sense did we win World War II?

(Via Catholic and Enjoying It!.)

Boys and War

What is it about the male of the species that makes us try to measure ourselves against those engaged in active combat? The war games, movies and toys continue to do a brisk business despite the feminization of the culture over the last, say, forty years. In any case, the author mentioned below is quite compelling, at least to the testosterone producing side of the equation:

Yon: The Kopp-Etchells Effect:

Another photo-filled essay from Afghanistan by Michael Yon, memorializing lost comrades as the fighting heats up: The Kopp-Etchells Effect.

(Via Little Green Footballs.)

Just War

Assuming that the title is not an oxymoron, it is worth investigating what the rights and wrongs, legally and ethically, are in the current Gaza conflict. Here is one thoughtful contribution. (I regret to say I can't figure out which blog pointed me to this--sorry!):

Commentary » Blog Archive » Gaza and the Law of Armed Conflict:

While much of the world engages in hand-wringing, placard-waving, teeth-gnashing, and rocket-launching over Israel’s “disproportionate” response to Hamas attacks from Gaza, it’s worth looking at what the doctrines of “proportionality” actually say.

Read the whole thing.

(Via .)