At this point in my life, I’m not in the game in the same capacity as I used to be. Now I seek something permanent in this life and something eternal in the next one.
It’s been just over 12 years since I discovered the manosphere when the likes of Roosh, Rollo, and Roissy (the three R’s) were just becoming household names after taking over the reigns (figuratively speaking) from David DeAngelo, Mystery, and others. At that time it was even called the Roissysphere for a while.
Since then I’ve seen so many names come and go, both big and small. From the aggregators like the Spearhead, In Mala Fide, Return of Kings, and Viva La Manosphere to heavy hitters like Delusion Damage, Whiskey & Ashes, Solomon, and LaidNYC. Precious few remain* and others have left their blogs up long after they stopped posting.
Though my opinions have changed a lot over the years, in some cases almost a 180 degree turn, I don’t regret my time in and around the ‘sphere. It gave me Father figures, Brothers, and friends during a time when I was very much alone. That by itself, was and is worth its weight in gold. There are people I talk to regularly as a result of my goings on in and around the ‘sphere. Talking about its subject matter helped me become acquainted with my now best friend.
All this is to say –
Thank you.
From the bottom of my heart.
Yours in fraternitas,
Wald
*When I started reading sometime around March 2010. I started writing January 2012.
I read Jim Bonner’s Interbellum for a second time the 2nd and 3rd week of this past March. Initially, I got his book (play) for free as PDF in a PM sometime last year when he offered the PDF for anyone who was hard done. Things recovered for me this year so I bought his book and wanted to offer thoughts, out of my gratitude towards Jim.Thoughts:I have to say – I was surprised I liked Bonner’s work as much as I did, given I’m not exactly among its intended audience. I normally not much one for plays and even less reading them. My distaste for them stems from AP English Class in high school. Despite the relatively unfertile ground of my preconceptionstowards reading plays, Bonner’s work struck a chord with me.I’d like to expand on three things mainly: Aphrodite’s curse, Kalyferes’ youthful folly and fury, and Aeneas as leader.
1) Aphrodite’s Curse:
A frequent theme I encounter in today’s literature including modern newspapers is the idea that we moderns are superior to our ancestors. We point to our advanced technology, war-making abilities, CGI in movies as proof that things are better. We fancy ourselves wiser than our ancestors, labeling many historical figures as small minded, bigoted, sexist, racist, et cetera. We see our ancestors and the idols they worshiped and laugh at their attempts to explain the workings of the natural world. We denigrate their (sometimes) blind faith and superstition as uneducated and insist that our Science ™ has all the facts. The hubris is so thick it makes one choke.
I see Aphrodite’s Curse as very similar to the propaganda force fed to the world through Zog-Controlled mediums (modern day Oracles, should I say?). The difference between now and then is that it was recognized that a people could be afflicted by a universal malaise, per an outside agenda. This is not to say that these people would know it or that many people would know it. Only that, intelligent men could recognize when a widely held sentiment didn’t get through normal means and therefore normal means could not easily dispel it. They intuitively understood that accursed people were often unaware of their malady and would resist attempts to dislodge it.This understanding seems to be lost to the sands of time today. Propaganda rebranded itself as ‘public relations’ after WW2 and seemingly paid off all the right people. For example, it boggles my mind how many people still think vaccines or masks are effective against coronavirus, two years plus after “14 days to flatten the curve”, and more still how many people think the government did the right thing and has ourinterests in mind. Perhaps Aphrodite or some other God has not yet lost the taste for interfering in the affairs of man after all.
2) Kalyferes’ youthful folly and fury:
I sympathize with Kalyferes’ mad determination to end Diomedes’ life even though I was yelling at him in my head as he nearly ruined everything at the end of the play. I sympathize because I’ve had many moments in life where my own body was screaming for me to act and the best course of action was to do nothing. When directed towards appropriate ends, there’s nothing wrong with this natural impulse. In fact, it may very well be among the reasons our race endures to this day. I realized at the end of the story that the reason why I didn’t like Kalyferes’ was because he was a mirror. I was looking at a younger version of myself, less able to control my own emotions. I was looking at a younger version of myself who was the author of many self-inflicted wounds because I insisted on learning things the hard way. I’vecome so far in the last 10 years that the sight of who I used to be can make me shudder. That said – there’s a time and place for everything. Perhaps the world as we know it today, exists in part because too many Kalyfereses were denied the ability to right very real wrongs?
3) Aeneas as a Leader:
I am jealous of the Greeks under Aeneas’ leadership. He had the balls to stand up to the crowd, as it bayed for blood, and insist that they hold true to Greek values and practices. He insisted that Diomedes beproperly tried through court when he would have won much favor with his own people if they had been allowed to string the unfortunate man up on the spot. He believed he owed it to his people to do the right thing despite having an obvious pass to trample over Greek customs to please the men and women under him. When Diomedes had his knife at Kalyferes’ throat and Silvius had an arrow at the ready, it was only because of Aeneas’ stature as a leader and Father that lowered Silvius’ bow and saved Kalyferes’ life. This stature and the respect it commanded was foreshadowed in the first half of the play in Aeneas’ treatment of Diomedes. See, Aeneas not only mastered the compulsions of his own emotions, but the emotions of his people. It’s very difficult to do both, but I think an unspoken lesson of the book is that if one can’t do the former one can never do the latter.
Final Thoughts:
I have to say, reading this play made me feel uneducated. I looked up a lot of the words and the way each character spoke seemed a foreign language even though everything was in English. I’d probably understand things more if I saw the actual play. Despite all this, it was an enjoyable read in the end and absolutely worth the price of a paltry $6.
Wald
P.S. You can get his book on Amazon here. I do not make any affiliate money off of this.
For a lot of people, 2020 has been the worst year of thier lives. For me, 2018 was that year. I didn’t quite hit rock bottom, but I got pretty close. The next year saw me leave the army with $14k in savings, which were promptly wiped out through drinking, eating, and additional bad financial decisions. I began 2020 dead broke, with around $9-12k in debt, shuffling credit cards and bills around. Sometime in the Spring I walked away from an eleven month relationship with a good woman because I just couldn’t see myself marrying her and I didn’t want to waste her time.
But in that Spring, I got a new job that paid well. I decided to not drink for a year. And given the lack of open businesses or things to do in the initial corona panic, I was able to service about $2-3k of debt a month until I eliminated it completely. On top of all that, I met another good woman, made her my girlfriend, and may or may not be buying a house.
All in all, 2020 has actually been very good to me.
But I didn’t claw my way up out of this hole all on my own.
I owe thanks to a lot of people who helped me get here.
I’m thankful for my Father who, since 2015 has performed triple duty, between his day job, preventing hospitals from accidentally murdering my post-stroke Mother, and supporting me with wise, patient counsel at crucial moments in my life. Without him, I may never have escaped 2018 relatively unscathed. Without him, I might have taken an extra 10 years to realize the folly of the path I was on in regards to women. Conversations with him and seeing his relationship with and love for my Mother, have been my North Star. They’ve been an unseen guiding hand in the last ten years of my sojourn in this sphere of the internet.
I’m thankful for Whiskey & Ashes (aka Ace) for his friendship and mentorship. He helped keep me on an even kilter through my lowest points in 2018 and helped keep me sober-minded during my high[er] points in 2019 and 2020. Without him, my lowest point two years ago may have gotten the best of me.
I’m thankful for my best friend, without whom I would have gone crazy. He’s someone else in my daily life able to see the same things I do and tell me I’m not the only one. I’ve got the absolute confidence that he’s there for me if I need him and I believe he’s got the same in me. Should he need a body buried, a sympathetic ear, or good company – I’m happy to be of whatever assistance I can. He’s longest, continous friendship I’ve had in my traveling life and I hope we remain friends until I pass. I’m extremely grateful for his parents who a supportive, fun to hang out with, and overall good people who restore my faith in humanity.
I’m thankful for my girlfriend and her family. A surprising bright light this year. Last year, the gap between confessions was 15 years.Then, with her, the gap became a year, and then a month. Tomorrow, the gap will be a week. She and her cousins and siblings who live close by have made me feel as if I’ve got a large family close by, despite my actual family being widespread, small, and difficult to see because of [2020/rona]. I know not what the future holds beyond my hopes, but I know that I’m better with her.
I’m thankful for all the friends and frens along the way who’ve been kindred spirits, who’ve made me laugh and smile at different times.
I’m thankful for all the mistakes I’ve made and the lessons I’ve learned from them. I’m a better man because of them. This is especially true of the last two years. My head is screwed on so much tighter that I wonder if I had been sleepwalking up till this point.
Finally, I’m thankful for God and his love for me, a sinner. Because of him, I know I need not despair at my lot in life, because I can improve it. In this life and the next.
Political-ideological discourse in the English-speaking world is visibly debased. A few reactionary thinkers have speculated that this is a function of mass literacy. They are not far from the truth. But the problem is not mass literacy as such, rather it is the illusion, thereof hiding the reality of our endemic subliteracy. Great swathes of the apparently universally literate population are just literate enough to be able to process and generate text only at a surface level – but not literate enough to be able to perceive the emergent metatext lying beyond the words on the page. Endemic subliteracy is why we see such great numbers of people confuse slogans for substance and fall for manipulative marketing tactics.
Subliteracy is exploited by secretive cadres pursuing private agendas using disingenuous rhetorical tricks to justify and legitimize themselves to the public. Examples abound, you encounter them all throughout the social medias.
Example 1. “Antifascism means opposing Fascism – if you are against Fascism you are Antifascist.” But it should be obvious that there is more to being Antifa than assaulting your local Hugo Boss and Mauser aficionado. Antifa is a complete century old political-ideological agenda with a well-documented history of succeeding in only one thing: popularizing fascism.
Example 2. “You either agree Black Lives Matter, or you think they don’t.” Here too, we know that Black Lives Matter does not merely express the sentiment that the lives of black people are meaningful and valuable. Black Lives Matter too is a political-ideological position whose name belies its true agenda.
These tricks only genuinely work on subliterate people. But they are adopted by the literate too. The support of naive subliterates is necessary in furtherance of their desired agenda. Subliterates have money and love to purchase products (who doesn’t?) as well — so literate agents take this as an opportunity to offer products catering to the subliterate. Marketing groups make a lot of money spreading these catch-phrases, buzzwords and talking points specifically to people without the requisite metatextual prowess to see why such are mere advert content empty of substance. Political-ideological junk food.
Example 3.“It’s human rights, not politics,” / “It’s human rights, not ideology.” This is the purest marketing of these examples in that it is tautologically empty of meaning.
Let’s break down why this is. “Politics” is the procedural means by which rights are distributed among humans within and between communities. “Ideology” is the normative standard which determines how rights ought to be distributed among humans within and between communities. Human-rights is a concept emergent from the intersection of ideology and politics. Politics + Ideology = Human Rights. The semantics of this slogan could be translated in both variants as – “It’s Ideology-politics, not politics” and “It’s Ideology-politics, not ideology,” The meaning and function is the same as in the commercial slogan “It’s not delivery – it’s Digiorno.” Instead of selling you a brand of frozen pizza, it sells you a brand of political organization in which you have no say in the interpretation of the phrase “human rights.”
Brand names very rarely signify what they appear to signify. A simple example: Puma is a sportswear brand and not a cougar. But Puma is its name and Puma is also another name for Cougar! By the logic of Antifa being antifascist, Puma must be a cougar – and if Puma is a cougar its agenda is to live in the deserts and mountains, hunt rodents and terrorize suburbs. But if you can understand that Puma is nothing like a cougar and its agenda bears no resemblance to that of a cougar, you can understand why Antifa does not necessarily represent the agenda of opposition to fascism, and Black Lives Matter does not necessarily represent the agenda of improving the quality of the lives of black people, and that “human rights is not politics/ideology” is an expression which means nothing. Brand names are empty signifiers – their purpose is for your recognition and your purchase, and nothing more. What does the word Nestle, Sprite or Adidas mean to you? They all mean “product.” So what’s the product being sold by the above trickery? Politics in the interpretation of which you play no role, supporting the agenda of its distributors.
All this is good marketing – marketing justifying the price paid for it many times over. It still is mere sale and spin. And if it’s being marketed, it means someone is directing the marketing strategy and paying the costs. Grassroots donors and activists are not in charge of that aspect of the operation. Which slogans filter into mass-media or are adopted and repeated by the rich and famous (those who retain PR firms and media agents with maximal influence) is determined by very small cadres of people. Grassroots actors participate in this process in the same way as one participates in the marketing of Puma by hanging up Puma posters, being an extra in a commercial, or rocking Puma gear telling all your friends how much you love Puma. But it is officers of the corporate entity which owns the Puma brand who determine how and why the marketing is conducted the way it is. The agenda of the Puma-Guy spreading the good word of Puma for free is in another universe from the agenda of the corporate entity manufacturing and distributing the product.
Studying the history of mass movements reveals that none of them were directed, organized or defined by the spontaneous actions of the masses. The driving forces have always been cadres of a political vanguard or a clique with shared commercial interest, and so on. Studying the history of mass movements reveals that there have never been any mass movements whatsoever, only multitudes of conspiracies where those in-the-know instrumentalized those out-of-the-know. In order to have assets to instrumentalize you want the cooperation and loyalty of people who will become those assets. To keep their loyalty, you want them out-of-the-know on any information which may jeopardize their usefulness as an asset. If your cadre’s true agenda is at odds with its public agenda, then all information jeopardizes the loyalty of the asset. In this event, it’s better to control how your assets process information, rather than what information is available. Control of how your asset understands information makes what information is available irrelevant. Indoctrination into a cult – religion, ideology, or any social arrangement prescribing an ego-justifying moral code rendering impossible any notion of an esoteric agenda at odds with the exoteric one. The controlling cadre enjoys total freedom, while its assets live happily under the illusion of moral certitude.
In Ancient Greece, ‘Idiot’ was the name of the class of person who did not participate in political affairs. Today, such a class does not and cannot exist. Industrialization, mass production, the increased rate of travel of both people and information saturated the atmosphere with politics-ideology, becoming an omnipresent smog which suffocated the apolitical idiot into extinction (around the same time the class known as the “peasant” disappeared, curiously). The surviving descendants of the apolitical idiot transmogfried into Useful Idiots, who are not apolitical at all but adapted to survive in a hyperpolitical atmosphere. The Useful idiot is hyperpolitical — but is as subliterate as his ancestor was illiterate.
So we return to that endemic subliteracy, the debasement of language and the degradation of discourse. If we ask why has the discourse become degraded, we can simply point to where it is learned. The simple and easy answer is at school. It is precisely there that children are enculturated into a political clown show. The failure of American political discourse, and everything that flows from that, is in school. School is where our ways of thought are shaped while our cognition is still pliable and powerless to resist suggestion. The discourse is not decaying due to lack of funding for education – the exact opposite! If we funnel more money toward education, we will only get more of that which we already have too much of: endemic hyperpolitical subliteracy. Schools are not failing to achieve their purpose as they graduate thousands upon thousands of subliterate and innumerate half-morons and mid-wits every year. They fulfill their purposes adequately, if not perfectly. Those purposes include redistribution of public money toward the agenda of the controlling cadres (and their pockets), containment and monitoring the youth population to expand the increasingly desperate adult labor pool, and enculturation of the youth into politics-ideology which is susceptible to marketing and social pressure. Education in math, science and literature is a tertiary goal at best, as only a tiny minority of the population is required to master them for the system to have a sufficient number of specialists and ability to maintain its function. Only a minority of people will get through their education and come out of it literate — these in fact, are the ones “slipping through the cracks” as the effectiveness of marketing and social pressure is significantly limited in directing their behavior. But the average person will graduate grade 12 with the reading ability of a 7th grader. The system does not require any better than that, it could maintain itself with even less.
Insidiously, subliteracy isn’t easy to measure, and such measurement not in the interest of those at the levers of power. The literacy rates in the developed world are standard at 98%. But what proportion is literate just enough to read and write and regurgitate, to those literate in the sense that they have mastery of written language? We cannot ever truly know who can read not just lines of text, but between and beyond them. We cannot know who merely parses text, and who parses metatext. When you couple surface level literacy with mass media marketing and the influence of social, professional and libidinal pressures, the result is the circumstances in which we live. Here, style mistaken for substance, marketing for product. Words lose their definitions as euphemisms, platitudes and slogans bloom, flourish, die and are replaced by others just like them except completely different. Schizophrenia becomes camouflaged as ideological clarity. Slowly but surely the social fabric rots along with the quality of life. Cadres of those in-the-know profit, their oligarchy is strengthened – the masses are sold endless brands of moral self-satisfaction, and battles with other brands of convenient false dialectics, punctuated occasionally with a half-assed satisfaction of minor complaints. This order is maintained so long as schools educate people just enough to be socialized, that is, desirous to fit in with assortment of temporary peers which seldom develop into permanent bonds, and able to read, write and repeat from a text, but never enough that a majority could interpret and synthesize metatext emergent therefrom.
With a limited amount of text, there can only be a limited amount of interpretations – education would not be the effective means of mass social control. Even a subliterate person would with time have understanding of his surrounding political metatext and become indistinguishable from a fully literate person in terms of political-ideological autonomy. For a historical example see how translating the Bible into local languages sparked so many political-ideological conflicts between those whose scriptural interpretation differed from that prescribed by the Catholic Church. With a potentially infinite amount of text, top-down marketing directs the social pressures toward which texts and which interpretations predominate within society. By analogy, imagine if the Catholic Bible had an infinity of books rather than 73, with an infinity of pages and the Catholic Church was the only entity which could access that infinity of content. The social unrest from translating scripture into common languages wouldn’t emerge at all! The Church could determine which verses, pages and books would be available for translation and which would remain untranslated or unknown. This would allow the Church to control interpretation regardless of who can read or understand the text by simply distributing only those pages that convenience its power and not those which do not.
For us, it’s not the Catholic Church, but another sort of cathedral that influences and directs the interpretation of infinite information, by means of mass-propaganda and social pressures. The mass-propaganda funneling us toward specific texts, the social pressures of our enculturation pulling us away from coloring outside of the orthodox lines with heterodox colors. If we stray from the path we are expected to follow, if we become truly literate but do not buy in, not only must we suffer alienation, but the infinite quantities of data coupled with our finite time and resources lead us to the paralysis of ambivalence, as well as the self-sabotage of misdirected action. The metatext of the controlling interests and of ultimate truths – potentially accessible- is obscured by infinities of word salad and disinformation, thus rendered practically all but forbidden. So many are left to admit defeat – too literate for their own good – their choice to either drown in content, or to return to the cathedral’s prescribed context.
The simple goal of improving the quality of public discourse and the reconstruction of sensible semantics requires from us the formation of yet another conspiratorial cadre with yet another totalizing agenda. All this just to teach a metatextual literacy. It turns out that in order to build a school house, we must first build a grand cathedral. Perhaps we’re better off focusing on abolishing school instead.
A friend of mine sent me an article that he wanted my opinion on. As I was typing up a response on my phone’s keyboard I realized I had more thoughts than would fit comfortably inside of one to two paragraphs. So here I offer some unprofessional commentary.
The entire article reads like someone who’s leading the witness because they can take advantage of the reader’s likely lack of familiarity with or exposure to military life. It speaks with assumptions about the military and jumps to conclusions as if you, the reader, share those assumptions and have also jumped to those conclusions.There’s a disconnect between what the article says and what actually is, that one who was not prior service would not necessarily be able to pick out.
I intend to go through the entire article with commentary on each major piece.
Many U.S. military members publicly disavowed President Trump’s decision to pardon Edward Gallagher, the former SEAL commando convicted of killing a teenage detainee in Iraq in 2017.
Gallagher’s alleged war crimes were nearly universally condemned up the chain of command, from enlisted men to Navy Secretary Richard Spencer. Indeed, it was Gallagher’s SEAL colleagues who reported the former commando’s actions.
This insistence on holding fellow service members accountable for bad behavior sharply differentiates the military from the police.
The article starts off talking about current events to build context around its central premise it wishes to push on the reader. Given my lack of familiarity with Gallagher’s case, I won’t comment on the specifics such as whether or not his actions were universally condemned beyond surmising that anyone who thought differently kept quiet in fear of being cancelled and pushed out of a job. The military had cancel culture since before it was cool and still has it.
However, the writer starts off playing a game of two truths and lie as he all but says off the bat that willingness to “hold fellow ‘members accountable’ is what differentiates the military from the police. It’s the central theme of the article, but any cursory familiarity with armed forces shows this to not necessarily be the case. For example, most of the officers, ncos, and enlisted who were involved in deliberately sweeping the investigation in Pat Tillman’s death continued to served after tragedy and often kept getting promotions. Already, we’re off to a shaky start.
U.S. military culture stresses organizational, rather than personal, loyalty. When Gallagher’s SEAL colleagues reported him, they were doing what Navy SEALs are taught to do: They put the good of the institution before the individual.
And the pride Marines famously feel, for instance, comes from being part of this well-respected corps. Personal relationships with other Marines are of secondary importance.
Accountability for individual misdeeds is written into U.S. military law. Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, culpability for criminal conduct is not avoided simply because a superior ordered a criminal act to be committed. Only lawful orders are to be followed.
After his preamble, the author, Dwight Stirling, starts the body of words that will give credence to his central premise with an appeal to authority, “As a military lawyer and scholar”. Credentials such as those impress no one in the military because officers in the Judge Advocate General (Corps) are often little more than lawyers who happen to wear a uniform.
As for his point about organizational loyalty, that’s bullshit. On the line, you fight for the man the left and right of you, not for nebulous concepts like “organizational loyalty”. Soldiers are loyal to their team, squad, platoon, company, battalion, brigade, division, and the Army in that order. It sounds plausible enough to be true and the ‘scholar’ who wrote this tripe is counting on that.
He tries to do this again talking about the Marine Corps but is again dead-wrong. “Once a Marine, Always a Marine” hardly has anything to do with a willingness to turn one’s fellow marines in for wrong-doing, big or small. In the military snitches, ne’er do wells, malingerers et al are all called ‘Blue Falcons” which is slang for ‘Buddy Fucker’.
He ignores the fact that soldiers act a lot more similar to cops behind the wire. In Vietnam, for example, fragging, whereby soldiers would shoot an officer who they felt risked their lives unnecessarily and too often. And in the fog of war, the military found it difficult prove foul play given the fact that soldiers and ncos alike would close ranks and the fact that getting shot in a warzone is in the range of normal outcomes in an officer’s or soldier’s time in the field.
His fluff-piece level paragraph about accountability being written into U.S. military law and unlawful orders aren’t supposed to be followed is on the level of complex premises like, “water is wet”, “the sky is blue”, and “soldiers shoot guns”.
“A soldier is reasoning agent,” a military court explained in the 1991 case U.S. v. Kinder, in which a soldier who killed a civilian was convicted of murder on the grounds that his superior’s order to do so was obviously illegal and should have been reported.
“It is a fallacy of widespread consumption that a soldier is required to do everything a superior officers tells him to do,” the ruling concluded, referencing the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals after World War II.
Like a college student he references some now obscure court case with just a single line about it that tells you just enough that you can see it supports the point he just made. Nevermind the actual details about the case. I can’t find the specifics with a cursory Google search but I can say that if a civilian in a warzone pointed a gun at you, the situation would not be so black and white like Stirling would have you believe it would be.
And just in case you forgot what year it is, Stirling invokes Godwin’s Law and brings in the Nazis because the concept that illegal orders should not be obeyed is so foreign to the average civilian that he whips out the holocaust to force the point across. Because following illegal orders is bad, m’kay?
Not every soldier follows the rules, of course. The U.S. military has covered up atrocities.
“If you snitch, your career is done,” he was told, according to a 2011 lawsuit Crystal filed against the department for failing to protect him from retaliation.
Police reluctance to report a fellow officer stems from the politicization of police brutality incidents and the widespread perception among police that nobody outside law enforcement understands their dangerous jobs, research shows. Frustrated at being judged by civilians and public officials who don’t face the life-and-death decisions they do, cops tend to close ranks when things go wrong, police monitors find.
He attempts to address counter-arguments in advance by pointing out the military does, in fact, also have rule breakers. He takes Frank Seprico’s story and points out that “if you snitch your career is done” as if that is unique to cops. It’s quite telling that he brings up My Lai and Abu Ghraib. Had those whistleblowers not pushed those issues, the Army would have been quite content to brush those incidents under the rug, like it did with Pat Tillman.
The last sentence about officers being frustrated that they’re Monday-morning quarterbacked on the particulars of their job by people who’ve often never been anywhere near a life or death situation is interesting. Stirling almost touches on a point of conversation that if explored might help give one a sober understanding of ‘police misconduct’. Unfortunately, he realized his mistake and did a prompt about face and marched in the other direction as he introduces the military ‘fear of political interference’ into the discussion.
The military is also wary of political interference in military matters. That’s why it takes internal justice seriously.
The Department of Defense is the only governmental organization allowed to operate its own internal criminal justice system – a privilege as remarkable as it is fragile.
The civilian judiciary has long been skeptical of the military’s judicial system. The courts used to worry about due process, particularly the ability of military commanders to improperly influence the outcome of trials. In 1969, the Supreme Court severely restricted the jurisdiction of military courts.
“Courts-martial as an institution are singularly inept in dealing with the subtleties of constitutional law,” the court wrote in O’Callahan v. Parker.
That ruling limited the military justice system to handling purely military offenses, such as abandoning their post or behaving insubordinately. Serious allegations like murder and rape had to be tried in civilian courts.
Today, military judicial proceedings are supposed to be free from political interference, even by the commander-in-chief.
Where do I begin?
First of all – he talks about the military being wary about political interference as if it hasn’t already happened and isn’t still happening. Ranging from oscillating official policy on transgender soldiers to pushing females into combat arms to SHARP briefs that tell you you’re a bad person if you possess a penis to Suicide Prevention Briefs that make you want to kill yourself, political interference in military life is already here. The myriad examples are legion.
Having its own justice system is not a privilege but a necessity, given the unique challenges and requirements of service, especially in war time. Like it or not, when one enlists or commissions into the Army, one loses several constitutional rights. You become a GI; government issue. For example, you could get disciplinary action for getting a sunburn, for doing damage to “government property”. And even so, the military discplinary system is not immune to outside influence given how whistleblowers forced it to investigate and do something about the aforementioned My Lai Massacre and Abu Ghraib among other similar events. Public opinion, ever since the Vietnam War, continues to hold considerable sway over the military for good and ill. Every soldier knows, eventually, that when it comes to a list of priorities, it is funding and public image that jockey for first place, followed by accomplishing the mission, followed by about 69 others things, followed by the ‘health & welfare’ of its soldiers.
When …
When I was the chief of military justice for the California National Guard, I tried dozens of courts-martials, convicting soldiers for larceny, battery and rape.
I could usually get soldiers to level with me, even when telling the truth meant revealing the malfeasance of friends or superiors. They had confidence in the integrity of the military’s legal system, I felt – an understanding that they would be safe if they did the right thing.
In the post-Gallagher era, is that still true? Or will a “camouflage wall of silence” rise?
I don’t know what cases he tried or what the circumstances were but I do want to address two central points he makes – that is the idea that what distinguishes the military from the police is a soldier’s willingness to disobey illegal orders and to turn his fellow soldiers in and that this is a good thing. Stirling talks about this pride the armed forces have in themselves as if the litigious nature of society being reflected in the army is a foregone conclusion and a good thing. This conveniently omits the costs and gripes associated with it.
The thing is – the military like society, is a litigious organization. It’s an amorphous, bloated organization that has its own interests and rarely do they coincide with the interests of the average soldier. When it was soley focused on how to best kill the nation’s enemies they did line up often but that’s not its sole mission anymore. More and more, it’s focused on becoming diverse, tolerant, and more an organization that reflects the values of today’s current insane cultural Zeitgeist than its main job. Taxpayers and soldiers alike pay the price for this inexorable travesty. Increasingly, it’s clear that soldiers at home and abroad face two enemies – the proclaimed bad guys du jour and the military [beauracracy] itself.
How else can a soldier come home from a deployment to a home that would be empty but for the divorce papers and eviction notice? How else would it come to be that a soldier’s paycheck is garnished instantly if he is paid too much or owes the military money, but it takes weeks, sometimes months for them to pay him back if his paycheck gets bungled or withheld due to some accounting error, honest or not?
Why does it seem like the military is getting less effective and spending more money on each soldier and not necessarily seeing a corresponding increase in combat effectiveness? Why does its retention rates appear to be in dire straits?
If you asked Stirling, we may never find out. Just like haircutters like to cut, trigger pullers like to shoot, he likes to litigate. More often than not, he sees little wrong with more of it, missing the forest, for the trees.
Are you tired of repeating things to your children over, and over, and over, and over again? Are you scratching your head at the daunting task of being a good parent in an age of rapidly evolving technology? Do you wonder what you can do to leave behind not only financial but a wealth of knowledge to your children? Me too! And I don’t even have kids yet…or any that I know of!
Behold! Had A Dad* Youtube Channel!
The other night, Ace & I were chatting the wee morning hours away as I got off my shift as we sometimes do and the conversation drifted towards a vape that I had sent him. I bought it, discovered I didn’t like it and otherwise had no use for it, and sent it to Ace given he’s into vaping in his quest to quit smoking cigarettes.
He told me about how in the time it had spent in USPS limbo (I accidentally sent it to an old address of his), the vape solution leaked out in the box, got everywhere, and hardened. So, he had to clean his healthy gotten gain for hours before he could even enjoy it. He confessed he didn’t know how to use it and that the instruction booklet I’d included in the package wasn’t very helpful. He looked up it up on youtube but only really found product reviews that talked about its features, pros, and cons; and nary a video that actually described how to use it. I think he’s resigned to going to a vape shop to seek the arcane knowledge when it comes to the proper way to cast a spell by blowing vape rings…I mean, how to use the damn thing.
A light bulb appeared in my head and I mentioned that there was a youtube channel, Dad How do I? that was highlighted in the media about this guy who created a youtube channel that goes over basic house maintenance, things that people who grew up without a Dad probably wouldn’t know, given that the channel creator himself grew up without one.
Rob Kenney has been dubbed the “Internet’s Dad” after starting a Youtube channel called “Dad, How Do I?” this past April — and his how-to videos have since gone majorly viral. …
Kenney knows what it’s like not to have a dad to turn to growing up, and tells PEOPLE that his own father’s absence was part of what inspired him to start “Dad, How Do I?”
“My dad left me as a teenager, and after that, I determined I would never do that to my family,” he explains. “Now I am creating videos about things I wish I knew how to do when I was younger.”
Ace mentioned how he thought of the idea about three years back and I told him that while he might be late to the party, it’s not too late to do something like that. The market is probably not saturated and even if he set up a channel that sees few views and nary a cent from monetization, those videos can still be extremely useful. As far as I know, he doesn’t have any young ones though does desire them someday. Should he pursue Fatherhood at an advanced age, he can leave behind these, “Dad How do I?” type videos as a combination of passing on knowledge to his children, but also leaving them behind a way to see him as he was at a certain time. A way to see that he loved them very much and I wanted them to know it and not just because he was showing them how to tie a tie. But because in the mess of life in the West today, bleak as the future may be, his love for his children compelled him to leave something substantial behind for them. Proof that despite all the weight on his shoulders, his love for his own compelled him to take time and effort out of what limited amount he had left, to leave his progeny something they can appreciate for the rest of their lives.
I too wish to do the same for my own, though my solution is not as elegant as video clips that can show tone of voice, facial expressions, body language, among other cues. I got the idea of a continuity book, like the one that anyone in a position of authority is supposed to leave for their successor. A book that has lessons learned, problems solved and how they were solved, unsolved mysteries, current problems, etc. so the oncoming officer can get a running start on his first day. I’d like to do the same with my life and see if I can’t capture some of those from my Dad, because I am afraid my memory will betray me long before I remember I want to pass knowledge at the moments I naturally would for my children.
I must admit, that is a small part of why I write this blog. Because my children will be allowed to read it at some point. And at that point, it will have advanced far beyond the once nearly single-minded pursuit of skirts to Fatherhood, being a good, moral person in a fallen world while accidentally booking yourself a ticket up or down too early by accident.
So, should I have children in the future like I hope to, this is to you guys.
Know that I love you very much. No matter what happens between us or the rest of the family, ultimately, it’s us against the world, always.
Love,
Wald
*Future Youtube Channel That He Will Someday….Soon
It all started December 2012 with a dream I didn’t write down here until 2015.
Back then I wanted to buy an island off the coast of Brazil that was 1000+ acres and worth about $4 million. I realized after a while that it would be unlikely I’d have that kind of money anytime soon or enough friends with $40k plus to invest to secure such an island to get this acquisition done in my life time. I also had a nagging worry that should I even acquire the island, there wasn’t much to prevent any sovereign nation from treating the island as a training playground with their respective SOF.
So I changed my mind and set my heart on the same idea but on a more local scale. That is, I wish to buy land about 2-3 hrs drive from my parents in the Western part of my state, where I can get 200-1,000 acres for around $700,000 or under or less depending on where I look. I’ve got a VA loan that can go up to that amount or thereabouts, and some of these plots of land come with houses prebuilt.
Basically, I wish to buy a lot of land and build a neighborhood around my house, so that I have a small neighborhood of not crazy. I’ve given up on making a global or even regional impact because I think I have a real chance of making a local one, starting with myself and my own family.
Were I to put this in scale, I give you this picture that Wrath of Gnon was kind enough to post:
The Dutch city of Roermond, as it might have looked on the morning of May 1st 1700 A.D., by Mr. Wim Luinge. A perfectly defined human scaled medieval city (site occupied since prehistoric times) with a population of 6000 at 0.37 square miles (pop. density same as London 1990). pic.twitter.com/YuUKPXHu0a
That above is about 236 acres. I don’t need 6,000 people or all 236 acres. But I will say I can find 300 acres in the Western part of my state for about $300,000, sometimes including a house.
If I can, I’d like to incorporate my own city with my own police force, court, city hall, etc, and staff them with fellow non-crazy people. And there’d be no-modernist buildings at all.
In about three days, it will be the end of an era at the RVF. No longer will the game and travel forums be available for general perusal. Fornication and casual dating are no longer the focus off the forum, as they had been for nearly 12 years. That said. some users, keen to not throw out the baby with the bathwater have taken to archiving their favorite posts and threads. One of my favorite posters, who goes by the name of pseudonym of scorpion, has archived all his posts and put them in a handy PDF format for people to peruse at will.
And I’ll host here since it takes no effort for me to do so.
I actually didn’t like this song at first, but now it’s grown on me. I like the post as I see it as a very good basic building block of a relationship – settings expectations for better or worse. I believe I made my own version based on it and I think I’m going to make a second, revised version. Below is one of his best points.
18. If you have a problem with me, I expect you to tell me about it. I will continue to behave the way I do until I’m clearly told it is unacceptable. I may continue even afterwords but I’m willing to listen to reason.
This is another song that grew on me. I’m not normally a fan of Duran Duran, beyond a few recognized hits. As for the post, I like it because it references important posts in Ace’s inventory, which makes it easier for me to reference them later.
Besides a good song, I like this post because it’s a promise to get to 52 posts in a year. Which I greatly appreciate given that Ace’s blog is one of the few I still read.
This song rends my heart. It scares me. It reminds me that my Father is about to turn 70 this year, and though he looks around 10-20 years younger, depending on the day, when he started caring for my Mother after her stroke three years ago, it was the first time I’d seen him tired. The first time I’d seen him as an old man. The first time I’d seen him as normal. The first time I’d realized that he’d eventually fade out, just like my grandparents. I’m not ready for that at all.
I can appreciate the experience Ace talks about in this post as I’ve lived it a couple times. Even though I misinterpreted the homework assignment, I got out an email that contains a lot of what I should have said to someone some 3-8 years sooner than I did. The song’s an interesting variation, too.
This song is eeriely beautiful. And it came in my life a time so appropriate for it that I don’t think it was just happenstance.
It makes an extremely good point about how women tend to look for the meaning in what people don’t say or reveal. Which is an interesting way to look at things – it also makes more sense why some women are attracted to men who look like outright scumbags, besides the obvious talking points.
There’s so much negativity around that we often forget there’s a very good reason that men naturally want women in their lives. It’s just that their natural programming to be a helpmeet to the right man is subverted by propaganda and societal messages that invert natural drives and incentivize the worst in women rather than rewarding their best and discouraging otherwise.
I really like the central message of the song – too many men let a bad relationship or even worse, the end of a good one, torpedo their lives. I’m guilty of this to an extent as well, though I’m better than I used to be.
I like that Ace reminds the reader that he’s learned things the hard way and has suffered plenty himself, rather than just pretending he was either always an Alpha Male or that he just magically found the keys to the kingdom and you too, for the price of $69.99, can be ballsdeep in a tsunami of women like me!
This song has an eerie quality to it. Ace has said, a couple of times, that he hopes to be your dark secret that you read under the covers with a flashlight under the dark of night. This song is great background music for it.
I agree with the premise to this post; loss and how you deal with it, are more responsible for your success with women than many things. Hell, most men, including myself, were drawn to this corner of the web because an overwhelming sense of loss. Loss of a loved one, and perceived loss of future opportunities due to lack of knowledge.
