Last week Professor Jordan Peterson sat for a 30 minute live interview with journalist Cathy Newman on the BBC’s Chanel 4. The results were a stunning unmasking of the liberal narrative that dominates western culture today. It was the most important debate of my generation unmasking the hubris and fallacy of the left by a calm, collected, brilliant professor speaking substantive truth to privileged, dishonest power (hat tip to Paul Weston for the cleaver phrase).
If you are not one of the over 3 million people who have watched this interview on YouTube take the time to watch it now. It is remarkable.
Cathy Newman entered this debate without any idea on why Professor Peterson burst onto the YouTube scene just over a year ago. She expected to win this debate with the weak strengths of rhetoric and sophistry. That is how the left always wins but winning has made them soft so she was unprepared for a concentrated dose of reality.
She walked into a buzzsaw of undeniable truth laid out by a man who has spent years thinking deeply about human motivations and interactions. Every time she tried to reframe a comment with one of her straw-men talking points Professor Peterson would respond with an argument she could not refute and, due to her liberal bias, could not accept. It is a beautiful thing to watch.
Here’a the Kill Shot:
Newman: Is gender equality desirable?
Peterson: “If you mean equality of outcome than almost certainly it’s undesirable…Men and women won’t sort themselves out into the same categories if you leave them alone to do it on their own accord. We’ve seen that in Scandinavia, it’s 20 to 1 female nurses to male nurses…and approximately the same male engineers to female engineers and that’s the consequences of free choice by men and women in the societies that have gone farther than any other societies to make to make gender equality the purpose of the law. Those are ineradicable differences. You can eradicate them with tremendous social pressure and tyranny but if you leave men and women to make their own choices you will not get equal outcomes.”
This answers, once and for all, both the how and why behind forcing women onto the infantry.
It is not bias against or animus for women that drives my insistence that they are unsuited for the role of direct combatant. It is love for and the respect of the role of women in society that makes the insanity of placing them in the infantry unpalatable. It is also love of and respect for the PBI (Poor Bloody Infantry) combined with (for men like myself) an intimate understanding of the physical, emotional and psychological toll infantry combat exacts on humans that makes the idea of subjecting women to the role abhorrent.
Think back to the senate confirmations of Secretary Jim Mattis and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Joe Dunford. Do you remember the questioning from the distaff side of the chamber? Do you remember the concern of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand about the possibility of Secretary Mattis rolling back the recent policies forcing women onto the combat arms ? That was rhetoric and sophistry in action. It was the demand, by a clueless political class, for equal outcomes.
The Marine Corps, like all the branches of the armed forces, is helpless against the diktats of our ruling elites. They can’t sit down and spend 30 minutes dismantling liberal dogma on live TV. They fought back against Ash Carter and the idiot Ray Mabus the only way they could, by launching a detailed experiment on the performance of mixed gender infantry units. The results were unequivocal; mixed gender units performed poorly, women Marines were unable to meet the physical demands of infantry combat. Even if they could hack it the critical topic of how infantry Marines socialize to develop the cohesion required to sustain themselves in combat was ignored.
Yet our political elites, using the blunt tools of rhetoric and sophistry, ignored the Marines findings. They chose to use tyranny to force their preferences on the military because there have been no consequences (at least ones visible to us) from their contemptuous treatment of Marine leaders and ignorance of historical precedents. That has all changed now. Every day a million more people watch the video linked above. Every day dozens of YouTubers critique this remarkable debate and they are uniform in their admiration for the remarkable Jordan Peterson.
The media minders of the narrative reacted to this devastating defeat exactly as one would suspect. The rolled out the victim card claiming, without any evidence whatsoever, that Cathy Newman had been subjected to such ‘vicious misogynistic abuse and nastiness,’ that Channel 4 hired a “security specialist” to “review the threats”. A careful analysis of twitter comments by the blogger hequal showed the following:
Non-sexist violence aimed at Newman or her supporters: 2
Sexist violence aimed at Newman or her supporters: 0
Non-sexist violence aimed at Peterson or his supporters: 8
Sexist violence aimed at Peterson or his supporters: 55
As media critic Stephen Knight pointed out “these findings raise some inconvenient questions for those who like to play victimhood Olympics in order to detract from genuine criticism”.
Will this debate change the trajectory of the politically correct dogma which infuses our political class? It might but that could be little more than wishful thinking on my part. I can accurately predict what will put a nail in the ‘women in the infantry’ coffin. A real shooting war with a near peer adversary. And history tells us those kinds of events happen when you least expect them to.
This lady is truly clueless. I will name a couple examples but the entire interview is full of examples of her cluelessness. Give me one reason why men should exhibit feminine traits in order for women to succeed. She seemed offended that he advocated equal opportunity rather than equal outcome, while totally oblivious to the fact that equal outcome is one of the surest ways to destroy a society.
I presume what will happen is along the lines of Canada which has had female infantry for > 20 years.
Few will join. Very few will pass. Most will be employed as drivers, radio operators etc. Few will go near a battle. Most will ride in armored vehicles. Most will soon quit. The chance that a rifle platoon will meet disaster because it has a girl is near zero.
The real effect is what it does to the male portion of the army. In an attempt to get more girls in the Canadians have steadily dropped their fitness requirements until now the latest “operational fitness test” (all arms and all services) can be waived if the soldier can’t pass it. (The test itself is set at the “air force clerk” level).
In a perfect world the COs could be expected to run intensive training to prepare for combat (see Stephen Ambrose’s “Pegasus Bridge” for the example of what should happen).
The general effect is to lower the dismounted mobility of the infantry as a whole. Siphoning off very fit people to the ever expanding SOF doesn’t help. Combine this with the gargantuan loads we expect troops to lug around and it’s no wonder they could rarely close with the Taliban.
I was a member of the Bethesda Chevy Chase Rescue Squad (an all volunteer outfit) in the early 80’s when we were forced to accept women in the squad. The women who were applying couldn’t carry a slightly above average size man (180 pounds) in full kit from the second floor which was one of the tests you had to pass (after a full year on prohibition) but they were able to point that most of the long time members couldn’t either due to age or obvious lack of physical fitness. I was one their side back then because they had a point and I wanted to meet girls. On any large call we knew there would be enough firefighters on scene to do any heavy lifting and the standards for riding the heavy rescue units never carried because if your couldn’t handle a HURST tool you were worthless on the unit. Handing a HURST tool back then took a big dude and there were plenty of big gut types who were thick as bulls and had no problems cutting people out of cars with a HURST tool. But a volunteer Rescue Squad is in no way analogous to an infantry squad. When the shit hits the fan for an infantry squad one thing you can bet on is there are not going to be a ton of big dudes responding to the scene to lend a hand. Any attempt to introduce weak sisters into an infantry squad is a threat to that squad. There are no other ways to look at it.
Agreed but what kind of training is the company doing that would permit such people to continue in the rifle platoons? In a properly run rifle company they would get fit, quit, be invalided out or shuffled off to HQ Company.
WRT fitness it’s been clear that most infantry senior NCOs and officers (most of whom aren’t in active duty infantry battalions) have been fine with the effective ending of standards.
The unfit ones are happy not to have to go out on the annual route march and then shuffle around the office in runners because their feet hurt from blisters.
The ambitious ones certainly didn’t want to be painted as “against the girls” when they start the administrative processes that are suppose to kick in when people are unfit. They’d also prefer not be seen to be ignoring failure as was common.
Better to not have a joke of a test and just do what you can with the troops you have although I expect this is a bit too flexible for the normally very uniform US Army & USMC.
To J Harlan – It’s not a matter of women simply getting fit. Very extensive British Army infantry tests determined some relevant things:
1. The rate of incapacitating pelvic injuries for men was 1 in 1,000. For women it was 250 in 1,000. This is consistent with my experience as the First Sergeant of 2 mixed gender OCS programs.
2. Women have smaller bones which don’t support weight as well as men. [Yes, women carry babies around. But a baby isn’t an 80+ pound rucksack. Moreover the weight distribution is all different.]
3. Most seriously, women have smaller hearts which size and thus capacity perameters limit a female’s ability to do extended, endurance based heavy work.
There are of course individual exceptions to these test results – Rhonda Rousey comes to mind. But the military cannot deal with the exceptions. It must deal with and train groups of people to standard. We have neither the time nor the money to put large numbers of women through a program just to find the very, very few exceptions.
There are of course exceptions. Well yes and that’s why there is no chance a US Court would uphold blanket prohibitions. Your objections would all however result in most women invaliding out which brings up the question of how do they pass basic training or MOS training for other combat and CS arms?
Don’t worry. There is no way there will be large numbers of infantry women to cull. There are two reasons men join the modern infantry; 1) They are very gung-ho or 2) they couldn’t get in a trade but need a job. There will be few women in the first category and none in the second.
As I wrote the problem isn’t the handful of girls who actually want to be in the infantry, it’s the pols and bureaucrats (military & civil) who will try to get more in by lowering standards which will allow unfit males to skate.