There’s vanishingly few places where the use of the word female is correct. The test is generally if the word male would also be correct and not weird there. If the speaker is talking about men and females then we have a problem.

There’s also a couple exceptions where the misogynist language got assimilated but it’s so normal that you can’t tell just by their use of the word. Like the military talking about female soldiers. For example there is a need to distinguish between male and female body armor. But also they talk about the needs of soldiers and female soldiers without a hint of disparagement. It’s just how they make it clear there needs to be a second latrine ditch and the camp shower needs to have at least canvas walls. The only fix most of us can see for this is persistently referring to men as male soldiers too because women soldiers sounds weird and doesn’t solve the problem of default soldier vs qualifier soldier.

We need to get this fun information to Northern California and Eastern Oregon. Neither state is in danger of voting for him but it should definitely cause some consternation in the conservative sphere.

My shoe lace broke the other day and it’s been a real pain to tie them up since. I was thinking about going to the store today but I have so many other errands to do.

And from a military perspective I’ve seen new commanders make incredibly stupid decisions just to make it look like they’re making a difference. I’ve also seen reporting channels get shut down or restricted to prevent inconvenient facts from going up the chain of command. I can’t really talk about specifics for the second one except to say they weren’t war crimes, they were just inconvenient to their next promotion. And at scale is probably why Biden, Trump, and Obama had an inflated sense of the ANA’s readiness.

But the first one, haha let’s go. In the Infantry drinking is a lifestyle, especially in the early-mid 2000’s when it seemed like you were just existing until the random number generator gave up your number. So the headquarters company gets a new CO. Of note, this guy isn’t the Battalion commander. He’s just the guy responsible for running the company that houses communications, scouts, mortars, etc. We’re not under his command, we’re one of the line companies. He decides his big splash is going to be tackling the alcohol problem. Looking back it really was a problem, but good luck telling us that when we knew we were going to be going back to Iraq at some point and for our sins were considered capable of taking on hard missions. No lazy patrols in a peaceful area for us. So yeah, we drank, and we partied, a lot, and we felt we were entitled to it. This living embodiment of the good idea fairy issues an order banning all alcohol from dorm rooms with headquarters company soldiers staying in them. The problem? The scouts and mortars were some of the hardest partiers and they were largely billeted with roommates from other companies. Reader, you can see where this is going right? But in order to see the entire depth of folly possible we need to keep going.

That Friday, their dear leader orders a surprise inspection of their rooms. This is actually against regulations. Health and welfare checks can be a surprise, but they are supposed to be conducted by neutral NCOs, typically Alpha will do Bravo and vice versa. Otherwise you can only do a surprise inspection with a warrant and MPs. (Believe or not there’s a union of enlisted soldiers that got this stuff written into regs.) Even better, this guy does it during the workday. So we’re not in our rooms. We come back from some training that afternoon to find trashcans all over the barracks filled with our alcohol. And of course they also wanted to write guys up for finding “contraband”. (There’s very little that’s actually contraband stateside in the military, it basically has to be illegal.) It turns out this guy was trying to enforce General Order Number 1, which is a deployed rule saying no porn, no sex, and no alcohol. Applying it to our barracks was not only unprecedented and outside his authority, it was seen as a declaration of war by the E4 mafia. To be fair, we didn’t abide by GO1 overseas either, and the idea of an officer who was going to make it his mission to enforce it, instead of using GO1 to go after guys who went too far was intolerable. He had broken the unspoken contract of ignoring small infractions and hammering the big ones.

So the first thing we did was we lodged a complaint, he had destroyed our personal property and invaded our privacy without authority. We were told it was unfortunate but it wouldn’t happen like that again, there would be a one time amnesty for anything illegal or contraband found, and we were to make sure we paid him his due respect still. Also, we should mark our alcohol clearly so that inspectors knew it was the property of someone in a different company, under different authority. Well you can guess how that went. The guys that didn’t share a room with someone from a line company got space in our fridges. The guys that did labeled an entire shelf as the one for beer from another company. Which I want to stress, was not an uncommon amount of beer for one person to keep on hand. On Monday they pulled a health and welfare check. And wouldn’t you know it there was nothing for them to find. The sergeants knew we were covering for them but as long as we told them it was ours and not owned by someone from headquarters there was nothing they could do. At this point only a few days have passed and the commander for headquarters is angry. He knows we’re working around him. He knows the E4 mafia has started making sure he doesn’t get anything done on time, headquarters company is the last to know about anything, the last to arrive to anything, the last to receive anything, and all of that goes doubly for anything he personally needs. They’ve begun making him look like he’s incompetent. So he ups the ante and orders a 100 percent piss test. Most of his barracks guys comes up dirty, they’ve been drinking and they can’t hide it. Now he’s got half of his company for disobeying GO1. This 900 IQ chad orders them all written up for administrative punishment. That means they could lose rank, pay, free time, or all three. Now this next part is a bit murky but one of two things happens. The Battalion Commander notices this shitfest and relieves him of command. That is the official version. The unofficial version is one of the E4’s with not much to lose signed for a courts martial. If you think your administrative punishment is unjust you can sign a line to turn it into a courts martial, where the punishment possibilities jump up to fun things like jail time. However an investigator from up the chain of command is assigned and everything comes out. More than one soldier has saved themselves punishment by signing that line.

So yeah, the moral of the story is the military has a special place in the annals of bad leadership, because of the complete control leadership exercises over their subordinates.

That sucks for him, but he could also have used that knowledge, and the warning that command wasn’t going to let him keep doing that, to engineer a defection. On the whole I hope Russian commanders keep being this stupid and corrupt.

Is that what it is though? Is there evidence that it’s incompetence and not enemy action? Because getting paid by the Russians and being at dinner with Michael Flynn and Putin is a pretty big leap in the direction of enemy action.

Yup. This country could use some good old fashioned environmentalism.

Normally I’d agree with you. But the Green party is rather transparently not actually trying to get elected. They have the same level of seriousness as RFK who publicly stated he’ll only keep his name on the ballot in states where it helps Trump.

If a third party did the leg work, spent a decade getting people elected to congress in every state, and then showed up in the presidential elections I’d be all for it. and before you whine about convenience, I’ve been saying the same thing to Libertarians and Greens for 2 decades now. They either aren’t serious, or they’re incompetent.

And some of these local places could use some good faith environmentalism. Co-opting the environmental cause to act purely as a spoiler is going to have consequences for hundreds of years in the US. Could you imagine if Ohio had had good faith green party elected officials raising a ruckus after the train de-railed? or the difference in Flint if there had been anyone there to say, hey wait a minute, that’s not how water works!

Instead we’re building more highway lanes, farming the deserts, and looking the other way as corporations make people homeless. (Humans are horrible at living with the land, it’s not just homeless people. Check out any tourist camping area by the end of September.) That’s what really pisses me off.

Something tells me these guys are more bark than bite. Either that or they’re really really good at shooting and they’re going to shoot the next person they see on their property before figuring out why they’re there.

The most hilarious part of that to me is that he put it all the way at the bottom, even below the references.

Hold on let me go check history, yup, yup, history says that it’s very possible. Which makes one wonder, why is Israel doing this?

There is a large difference between war and genocide. The last group to say you couldn’t have a war without genocide was the Serbians.

I continue to live in hope you will realize victim blaming the people you blow up isn’t an argument.

Nah.

It’s a summation, science isn’t into clickbait.

No. You’ve had two shots at this question and both answers will do here.

Sure the Nazis get 1st and 4th but BLM gets a police riot. If we didn’t have those rights, they don’t have those rights. There’s no double standard here.

Isn’t also a game at defcon to spread a harmless package to as many devices as possible?

Thankfully, we don’t have to.