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Syndicate
I just thought it was interesting, not really sure why? Never expected people in the medical profession to be identified as major offenders.
When you googled it what top 3 did you find Remind?
Listening to rap music and/or playing video games only takes up a small percentage of our lives. Being in the military is a full time occupation "we are working hard to chip away all individuality and humanity". Big difference.
did anyone else watch the press conference yesterday on the cbc with the guy's commander? He was asked outright if the accused had every had a psych evaluation and he said that it was not common and that he had not been tested.
Not that psych evaulations are perfect and infalliable, but doesn't this ring an alarm bell for anyone else? I mean really? Not only are these men (used men purposely here as they are the main leaders) in positions of tremendous power, but they are also engaged in what has been described in this thread as macho culture... shouldn't someone be paying attention to attitudes. If not, does that mean the military simply doesn't give a shit about what these men (and some women too i think) are actually getting out of the experience and how it plays a role in their own lives?
On the issue of past or possible other crimes, I don't think we'd hear about the ones committed anywhere outside of Canada, rape, murder and general mistreatment of women is too common a theme on the part of the military outside of our gloriously benevolent state...
I think that the militaries Bomb Villages on the Other Side of the World video game is the worst of all worlds. The bad news is that the military understands that making their weapons systems similar to video games gives them a large pool of people to draw on who are already acclimatized to murdering on screen. Sitting in Arizona and bombing a wedding party in Pakistan is just like playing Grand Theft Auto. I wonder what new version they will be playing next week. Many people are betting on Iran as the next edition but Yemen is clearly in the running.
Thanks for post #55 Slumberjack.
There's really not enough facts for all this, yet.
The Toronto Star had an article today, from some FBI "profiler". While it all seems to be logical, it's really just speculation. And it's handy to remember that an FBI "profiler" had a lot to do with starting the OPP down the wrong path in the Guy Paul Morin wrongfull conviction.
Which is not to say I'm building a point of view one way or another. There's just a vaccum of facts right now, and we're all eager to understand, to whatever degree we can understand, what happened so we can reconstruct the crystal latice illusion of control in our lives.
When I was in basic training we had a female Master Corporal who'd gleefully ask us recruits, "What's the spirit of the bayonet?" to which we were supposed to holler, "To kill!"
I felt like saying, "I dunno, I'm still working on the spirit of the ironing board," but I didn't bother. I received enough heat for constantly being an individual as it was.
Ha! That would've been hilarious. Probably worth whatever punishment you got.
Well, now it would be, anyhow. Perhaps not at the time. And I guess it makes a good story either way. Although I'm not sure why it matters whether the Master Corporal was male or female.
In general, the women were way more gung ho than the males, especially among the instructors.
It's a solitary quest for the most part, where understanding its subtle essence is further hindered when inquiries about what one is doing when ironing generally elicits the same response..as in..'you don't want to know.'
Not surprising, al-Q. They probably had a lot more to prove, and it was probably a lot harder for them than the male instructors to get respect in such a macho environment. Also, considering how many women get raped by their comrades in the military (at least in the US - do they track it in Canada?), it's not surprising that they would protect themselves with a "don't fuck with me, asshole" kind of attitude.
Al'Q doubt they were more "gung ho" (interesting choice of words on several fronts), but they were perhaps reacting as they were/are taught, that they had to be me more unsensitive than the men in order to prove themselves in said man's world.
And perhaps the male instructors said the same things or simalr, except it did not seem to be abnormal, and thus sticks out memory wise.
War video games make good military recruits, eh!
Female soldiers died of dehydration rather than risk sexual assault
The situation in Canada one short decade ago
Some of the quotes in the article were interesting - instead of being dismayed at all the stories of sexual assault they were dealing with, the men were instead feeling "resentful" that "suspicion was being cast on every man in a Canadian Forces uniform." It was still all about them and their feelings.
From the same article:
I think that's often the case in a lot of situations where you have a group of men who are prepared to all give each other permission to behave badly - it doesn't just happen in the military.
I guess what is special about the military is the special training in extreme violence coupled with a methodical desensitization to violence.
Of course it doesn't just happen in the military. I don't think there's a feminist on the planet who thinks the military is the sole source of sexism in society. :)
My dad was in the military until he was injured in maneuvers in the UK during WWII, then he became a military archivist and author. Eventually he returned to Canada, and in the 1950s raised a family, and my mother also took a full time job as a statistican for the Dominion Bureau of Statistics. Dad's close friends, all military men, would try to get away with all kinds of shitty comments in the early days, until me mudder made it clear they had to behave themselves or get the hell out of her house. They got the message.
(Jack Granatstein was a close personal friend of my dad's, worked together on a few books, along with Courtney C. J. Bond, another Ottawa author. Some Ottawa bigwigs also filled our living room, and they were well-behaved or they didn't get served drinks). None of that military macho crap was tolerated at our place.
My father was a veteran of WWII, serving with the 1st RCR. And, he was active with the ANAF, both recreationally and as President of a couple of branches, and various other offices over the years. My mother, served similarly.
So, I was exposed to former military people all my formative years and into my twenties. Of course, those people were not on the leading edge of second wave feminism at the time. But by the same token, disrespect to women in the club room wasn't tollerated, nor did I hear from my father or his friends stupid macho sexist remarks concerning specific women or women in general. Having said that, I don't believe every joke or every comment was an enlightened one for that or this age, either. And, I don't doubt that in those marriages there wasn't incidences of spousal abuse and all the stuff that goes on society wide.
I guess what I mean to say is I never got the sense that there was something systemic coming from the military or association with it that seems indemic in today's military, judging from Michelle's links.
I don't think it is just the military either. I get the impression the feminist gains that have been made are in jeopardy over the place. Overall I don't think that much progress has been made since the seventies.
I'm not saying it isn't the military. Maybe there's been a change over time; surely women joining the forces has created backlash from the knuckle dragging caucus in the military. And, the other difference is that military policy is made by lifers and the people I knew were volunteers, veterans of WWII and Korea.
My memories of my father and his squadron mates correspond to those of Boom Boom and Tommy Paine. While they weren't cutting-edge social theorists, they were respectful and even a little awkward around women. Perhaps the difference was that as veterans of WWII, they were part of a mass enlistment, rather than the cherry-picked volunteer army we have today. In those days the armed forces were perhaps more reflective of general social trends, where today many recruits will be at the edges of those trends.
If you want armed forces that truly reflect society's values, some form of draft may be necessary. Of course, professional soldiers hate the draft and all the rebelliousness, indiscipline and fragging that creates.
Some form of just cause to fight for, reflecting society's values, would also help.
Yes, there is an egalitarian democratic quality to a draft.
Guys, just a reminder that this is in the feminism forum and about a very decorated military guy that did some heinous shit and the last female post was about coverups of rape in the military. Perhaps, one of you could open a thread somewhere else. Just sayin'.
I hear tell the Taliban had a rather swift way of dealing with people like the Colonel.
My experience, brief though it was, was that we gave each other excuses to behave correctly. I found that regular societal sexism was pretty foreign in my group. We were all colleagues.
No, that isn't the case.
Well, there has been a quite extensive discussion of military culture in very general terms, so it seems fair to me for a few of us who are old enough to have known a structurally different one to make that point.
Both my parents and most of my aunts and uncles served in WWII. Some of the most interesting independent women I've ever known, a few of them still alive in their nineties, joined the RCAF in 1939, tasted independence during their years stationed in the UK, came home to take up offers of university education, and became trail-blazers for other women in a variety of careers.Just about everyone I've described in this paragraph was originally a farm kid who'd come of age during the Depression and known pretty tough times before the war.
The wider culture was different in many ways, as others have said, although the war years definitely helped to disrupt class and gender and race barriers in some progressive ways for some people. I knew these people. I suppose many of them (not all) were trained to kill, were at least willing to kill or willing to approve the killing. But once they were home, they just didn't fit the cultural profile that I've seen described above, and I wonder how true that is even now, with a very different kind of armed forces.
If anything, our armed forces might have regressed in class terms, the gap between an elite officer corps and working-class kids who join up for an education and a living much greater than it was in wartime. Williams certainly sounds like a guy with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement, and then beyond that he could just be psychopathic. Analysing him and analysing, say, a Clayton Matchee seem to me to require two quite different kinds of analysis.