Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Meanwhile, with our crack Gomer Pyle Unit


.... we are reminded the war on IM is being lost on all fronts.

Hey, you can teach Pashto to smart young troopers. No harder than learning German. crikey.

9 comments:

Tecumseh said...

Cloaca maxima. Do you think this is just rank stupidity, or also the same PC gone mad, as at Ft Hood?

Arelcao Akleos said...

The second, Tecumseh. Russian and Chinese language translators were drawn from enlisted ranks just fine when I was in, and the military had some really fine language programs for their training, and absolutely no need to drawn upon russian or chinese emigres for roles where the loyalty of the soldier was important. As a group we were no smarter then tha now. But then we were not made puppets of PCdom.

Mr roT said...

AA, that's about the most fatuous comment you've written on this blog, and that's saying something.

1) Of course we're stupider now than then. Compare the school you went to with the ones our kids are at. Compare modern sodomy center MIT with the nerds in glasses that put guys on the moon (further back than us).

2) We had many more citizens of Chinese descent in California then than we have citizens of Pashto or Arabic descent now, all over the country, and the Chinese had been in the US for longer. Remember the coolies?

Russian has been a commonly spoken language in parts of NYC for 150 years.

In addition, Russian has for a long time attracted many students in the US, and for reasons that had nothing to do with sympathy or reaction to the communists.

I wanted to read Dostoyevsky in the original as soon as I read it in translation and I am sure my impulse was not a rare one.

3) Pashto and Arabic are a shitload of a lot harder to learn than German, for an English-speaker.

Ever hear the expression "Anglo-Saxon"?

Of course it isn't all PC shit. There's a lot of intellectual laziness aside from the determined and concerted intellectual effort to equalize all societies.

The real shit of it is that if people really bought the PC crap, they'd be interested in learning the difficult and interesting part of other cultures (the languages) rather than just saying "genius" at the sight of some unsightly primitive art and saying that a pair of African maracas are the equivalent of the Sistine Chapel.

Jesus, what planet do you live on?

Tecumseh said...

You're being too harsh on AA, Mr Rot. His reaction is not unusual. You merely have two different takes on reality. Hard to tell who's right, but then again, we're not talking black-and-white here, or how to solve linear ODEs. Use nuance and understanding, willya?

I still remember those days when you were acting (and more-or-less thinking) like an Alan Alda look-alike. Do you?

Mr roT said...

Ah, Tecs, you're either pulling my leg:

You merely have two different takes on reality. Hard to tell who's right, but then again, we're not talking black-and-white here, or how to solve linear ODEs. Use nuance and understanding, willya?

or hunkering down waiting for AA to reply and then you judge a winner and say you were on the winner's side, at least on points.

Gimme a break, willya?

AA's a big boy and he knows how to dish it and take it. "No red on red" is not going to get at the truth and debating the meaning of the word ``is'' isn't either.

Arelcao Akleos said...

Part II:

[3] Pashto is a Indo-European language [similar to Persian]. It ain't a Semitic language at all. And if you've studied some Iranian, or try to, you'll find that the language ain't no harder, at worst, than German. Certainly these country rubes found it no great shakes [Persian was a growing language, for the military, by then. Except for one Bahai, none of the folks were Iranian. None were Muslim. Yet, lo and behold, they could learnd the stupid lingo.

Arabic? Yeah, Arabic ain't Indo European. You think it's harder than Vietnamese or Chinese or Japanese or Korean? Those enlisted kids, assigned to this training, found these not so hard. Very few of the Army's translators, in the Army, in Vietnam, for example, had been of vietnamese background. They were cornfed yokels of the most depsised by Pepe sort. Yet they had the talent, and they could read and speak the shit like FCP does loose cannon.[Honestly, I find Vietnamese easy to read. It's the bloody speaking that leaves me dumbfound]. There was no need then to rely on the goodwill of folks educated by Hanoi or Beijing or Pyongyang or Communist sympathizing fellow ethnic academies--in Yankdom-- to find men who could handle all the tasks of communication involving those languages. And there being no objective need, and because we were not so damn PC then, we bloody well made a point of it NOT to rely on those folks. It's called rational self-interest, dude.
If today the military is rife with a "only a meccan can capisce meccanese" job assignments, it is PC all the fucking way down.
In the military, this current "multiculti" basis for these jobs is precisely PC. It ain't laziness, it's PC. It takes less effort to train our own to learn these languages than it does to find one of 'em we can trust.
Muhammad, what planet do you live on? Oh, yeah, nearer to Pepe art thou than me.

Mr roT said...

AA, is all that wordsalad you put there in an Indo-European language?

The only thing I caught was that German and Persian are equally difficult for an American to learn.

Still laughing my ass off!

Thanks at least for that.

Arelcao Akleos said...

In other words, Rott, you have no good answer for your inanities being blown to pieces; and so you go Mann up.
Thanks, Chuckles.

Mr roT said...

You win.