Contruct??…that’s not a contruct!

Now this… is a contruct!!!

http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/current/artgallery/lesbianrangers/index.shtml

Moira

you’ve clearly mistaken me for a left-liberal, who believes that men and women are identical, or that gender is a construct. They’re not, it isn’t. I believe in essential, biologically grounded differences between men and women which structure the fundamental cultural categories through which our lives have meaning. So don’t go telling me what I know or don;t know. Gender probably is the most important category by which we live IMHO.

Pamela Bone abandoned every conception of ‘just war’ that philosophers have put in place to give some framework for assessing whether a war is moral, she bought into the obviously dodged-up arguments about WMDs, and then admitted that this was a cover for a war against Saddam Hussein on human rights grounds, she treated the anti-war arguments with sarcasm and contempt when she should have paused to listen and think, she was ludicrously uninformed about the state of women in Iraq, which was considerably better than that of many other arab countries, and her primary concern when the occupation started to become a bloody quagmire was that the anti-war movement was being ‘smug’.

Finally, after years and several hundred thousand deaths, a society with re-imposed Sharia law, she said that the war wasn’t worth it. Given the moral weight she’d lent to a right wing cause from the left-liberal side, that wasn’t good enough - she leant her shoulder to the war effort and pushed mightily. Nobody compelled her to spend the last five years of her life supporting mass killing, but that’s what she did

Imperial feminism is exactly what it was - it takes gender equality and strips away every other principle that guided second-wave feminism - insights about patriachal violence, about western imperialism - and wound up endorsing the bombing of civilians to extend the gains of the western feminist social revolution by force of arms. It’s the same process that’s been used to defend these sort of lethal wars all through the twentieth century - with the same apologies and mea culpas coming after. I’m not really interested in Bone’s remorse after the fact., or whether she was sincere. I’m interested in identifying the wilful obtuseness that led her to ignore basic moral principles in forming a position.

You opened up a pandoras box of a 1000 isues.

(((one of its justifications then becomes that process of gender neutrality. Bravo! )))

Side note: A few years back did anyone notice some rather stange and mysterious NAB advertisments on the back of buses and various bill-boards around town?

They depicted 2 people close-ups, standing together and assumingly they were male & female…but the gender lines were blurred, you could n’t tell if they were male or female…hmmm.

So Guy, you stop worrying about female soldiers, I’ll stop worrying about male soldiers, and together we can worry about the fate of humanity. And in doing so, we’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that whatever our views, they include and don’t exclude people like that unfortunate South African runner who has external female organs and internal testes where her ovaries should be (if we can believe the leaked reports).

Gender is not the most important marker of humanity. No more than ‘race’ or ‘colour’ is. YOU Guy know that those are furfies.

M

If something is worth fighting for (eg recovery of a community after a natural disaster) would you rather have untaught amateurs mucking in, or a trained disciplined troupe such as the army is famed for producing?

Your (self-confessed) irrational comment about children losing their mothers in war tells us something about you, just as my equally irrational comment that I’d rather have lost my mother than my father at an early age tells anyone reading this something about me. Children losing parents is awful, so is children losing whichever adult brought them up be it grandma, auntie or big sister. That’s NOT the point in this debate. We can all weep, and in the end it doesn’t matter who we weep for, just that we lost them when we needed them, and can’t get them back again.

Finally, however: if sending women to a useless war is a [useless] expression of equality, then maybe we shouldn’t be sending anyone at all? (I think this was your original point.) But shouldn’t we be non-gender specific about the people we’re not sending to this useless war?

I really enjoy your writing by the way. I haven’t bought your book yet because I believe Crikey should offer subscribers (especially me) a discount and they don’t seem to want to … just a little discount would persuade me …

So war is just a job now. And the ground has been prepared for egalitarianism as just the next logical step.

personally, i find the prospect of women with young children dying in war far worse than men - and it’s the very irrationality of that that tells you something important.

sob story? can you think of an occasion where sobbing would be more appropriate? if you think it’s outlandish there are plenty of americans you can talk to….

Sean Bedlam: “Wiping out our own ability to have babies never goes over well.” The population of the world has more than doubled in my lifetime and stands at a figure never before seen in geological history: the human race’s ability to reproduce is one thing we don’t need to worry about (despite AIDS, various types of flu, resistant TB, etc). Also, men’s activities in war (pillage, rape, murder etc) can wipe out women’s ability to have babies just as effectively as if said women had been serving in the front line.

The other thing I recall was that some of the women doing foot-rotter (infantry) training were very fit and effective, at least under training conditions which was all I ever saw.

In your heart of hearts, that place deep inside you. …does it seem right that women fight and die as mercenaries? Does it make sense that the very human beings responsible for bringing life into the world, spend their reproductive years killing others and possibly being killed? Australian soldiers are no more than mercenaries in Afghanistan - mercenaries for business interests. We are not defending our country against an attacker. Nor are we defending Afghanistan against an external foe. Nine months prior to the bombing of Afghanistan, the Taliban were in power and the West was dealing with them. NATO and the UN made little if any comment on the way they ran their country. Of course all of that changed after the Taliban decided they didn’t want to do business with the West. It surprises me that none in the cowardly mainstream media will even raise the issue of how Afghanistan impacts Australia. If we are so hell bent on freeing the oppressed, how about invading Zimbabwe, Burma, Sudan or any of a thousand other places? Why Afghanistan? Why Pakistan? You will find the answer in a book by Zbigniew Brzezinski called the Global Chess Board.

According to the former head of the FBI in Los Angeles turned whistleblower, Mike Ruppert, the only real cash in the entire credit based system under which we operate is drug money together with the returns from a host of other illegal activities, which is why according to Ruppert, Afghanistan is so important.

After six months of Obama rhetoric, inaction in Iraq and escalation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, maybe the Left is starting to question whether there really is Left and Right or whether they are really just part of the Hegelian deception. You know, Hegel’s false choice. The State endures no matter what and the State decides what happens; not the politicians. Today, a leading official in the Cuban government said that although Obama talks the talk, there is not going to be any material change in the US relationship with Cuba in the foreseeable future. Even the Obama health care program is being recognised by many left leaning commentators as a fillip for the medical industrial complex and unlikely to make any real difference to the quality of life of the poor.

Until we recognise that the people we elect do not represent us but those who finance their election, there will be no change because those people do not want any change.
Former Goldman Sachs banker, John Talbott, in Australia to promote his new book “The 86 Biggest Lies on Wall Street”, said
“A total of 98.4% of the members of congress are re-elected every term because they can each raise $US20 million from the lobbyists to spend on television advertising at election time, Talbott said. The American populace understands this, leading to Congress’ current approval rating of 11%, compared with George W Bush’s final approval rating of 18%”. And he ought to know; Goldman Sachs in one way or another is one the biggest contributors to the re-election campaigns of US Congressmen.

Why are we not discussing the many amazing free energy technologies that have been suppressed over the last fifty years and are now close to development? Why instead do we talk ETS, cap in trade and whatever the latest rip-off concept happens to be? Why is the debate not about pollution and property rights. No one is entitled to pollute another individual’s personal space and the law should protect us accordingly.

The real issues are about our abilities to make choices as free citizens and they are disappearing daily under threat of terrorist attack apparently emanating out of Hellman province. According to the Hegelian social model, progress comes through contrived conflict. Hegelianism glorifies the State, the vehicle for dissemination of statist and materialist ideas and policies in education, science, politics and economics. It is in direct opposition to classic liberalism which is the basis of the 19th century British and American thinking. In classical liberalism, the State is always subordinate to the individual. In Hegelian statism such as Nazism and Marxism, the State is supreme and the individual exists only to serve the State. In the Hegelian state, the child exists to be trained to serve the state. You have probably heard children described these days by the statists, not as human beings but as “human capital”. The two party politics of the Anglo American Empire exists to enable a very small number of powerful individuals to control society for their own purpose. Don’t take my word for it!

“We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the world… no longer a government of free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men.” - Pres. Woodrow Wilson, 1921. (These statements were made after his realization that the signing of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 was the worst decision he ever made)

However, the main motivation that anyone has when fighting in a war is to protect their team. You’re trained to work as a team and to help and protect the rest of your team. I’m sure men would try to protect the other men in their team as much as they would other women. Especially if they were used to having more women around.

In my experience, women can be just as warry as men, sometimes more so. Wars are stupid, and mostly pointless, but if we’re still having them now, we’re likely to still be having them in several hundred years time, and we might as well move with the times and start letting women fight on the front line if they want to. Why is it better for children to lose their fathers than their mothers?

Personally, I think, too many innocent women and their children have been slaughtered by male population of this planet. Do we need mothers killing mothers???

Hmm if conscription was ever re-enacted, does this mean men and women alike would be called up? Wow.