Friday, March 16, 2007

Pace & the onion

7 comments:

My Frontier Thesis said...

Militaries have been responsible for social engineering since time immemorial, so that argument doesn't work. And anyone who has even given a superficial read-over of the history of Western Civilization can see that morality changes throughout time (be it incest amongst European nobility; Spartan butt-plugging; etc).

However, in the Darwinian sense, it's probably not a bad thing for one of America's biggest employers (the Pentagon) to endorse relationships between the opposite sex, at the very least to encourage reproduction. Not to mention that individual "free-thinkers" and an effective military don't work well together.

Pepe le Pew said...

mft, what argument doesn't work?

you mean spartan butt-plugging is out? i am sure jj is still doing it. where can i report him?

My Frontier Thesis said...

Two arguments don't work: 1) that militaries only social engineer one way or the other (they are always engineering society); and 2) that Morality is somehow fixed (thus the argument that the Marine General recently made about "morality" or "immorality").

The second paragraph, first sentence of my initial post is the argument that makes most sense (to me, anyhow).

Pepe said: "you mean spartan butt-plugging is out?"

Well, until you put it that way, yes, I thought so. Then again, maybe it's just more of a localized, regional New Orleans practice.

Pepe le Pew said...

formal proof that pace is wrong

My Frontier Thesis said...

Thank you, Pepe, that was very disturbing. At least for the ten seconds that I let it play.

Pepe le Pew said...

One of the best laughs i ever had was at the time that I was working for nrl, some captain asked me at a lunch what a frenchman was doing working for the navy in mississippi. this was shortly after i had decided to resign and i told him i'd watched the village people video and thought that's exactly what i wanted to do. there was a mix of sicentists and military types at the table: i'll let you guess who laughed and who didn't.

My Frontier Thesis said...

The military guys I know are pretty "dynamic" (aka, crude), and with certainty I can say they'd have laughed (depending, of course, on delivery). But I can imagine who did most the laughing on your end. Then again, pillow-biting and butt-pirateering is much more serious when you're as close as you are to it in the deep woods and trailor parks of the South.

Minor sidenote, somewhat related: Although a much different time, the French Navy was quite helpful (some would even argue pivotal) in the success of the American Revolution. Contemporary politics and zany ideology tends to tinge our perspective on the past, however. And historically, the French and British have always managed to figure out some way to wage war on one another.

...since it's St. Patrick's Day, I gotta go find some Irish today and tell them what drunken degenerates they are (this is my antidote to the sickening "Drunken Indian" stereotype I often encounter), but just after putting a couple Pogue's numbers on the jukebox.