misfitS pOLITICS
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Dateline: 4 August 2001, RAF Mildenhall, United Kingdom. I arrived in East Anglia with two teenagers and a wife. About five weeks later the world changed. You, dear reader, may recall the events of 11 September 2001. America was attacked by that existential enemy of all civilized people, (radical) Islam.
Beginning in early October, my unit deployed all over the theater (which then included Europe and (mainly) northern Africa) to support the efforts to defeat our enemy in Operation ENDURING FREEDOM (OEF). My flight (a company-sized unit in Army speak) consisted of about 23 intel people, six COMSEC troops, and a SERE expert. After we had sent most of our equipment (that means ‘airplanes’) and personnel down range, we were tasked further. So it was that the senior enlisted intel guy (me) and my senior enlisted COMSEC guy (Teresa) were the only people left to deploy to support the mission. So we deployed, leaving no enlisted leadership at our home base. This is a dangerous situation, as one never wants to leave officers on their own; they get up to all sorts of mischief. It’s what plants crave. Seriously, the reason we were the only ones left was that we were the leaders. At this point, we were the only fully qualified people who could be sent to support flight operations. The 100th Air Refueling Wing had no trained up and experienced intel people still at home apart from my boss, a senior captain who was our Flight Chief (and who was also brilliant - love ya Trish) who could be sent to kill people and break their things. So Teresa and I moved out to Rhein-Main Air Base in Frankfurt, Germany. I say all that to say this: Allowing transgender individuals to serve openly in the U.S. military is among the stupidest ideas that has ever been thought up. Imagine this: On that October day in 2001, me and Teresa leading our teams and being the last two qualified troops available… what if one of us (or some other troop who had already deployed) were unavailable because of some mental issue? Gender dysphoria is a mental deformity, kids. The APA can change terms all they like, but “dysphoria” means “confusion,” and that’s fucking crazy. Worse, what if a qualified troop was convalescing from an elective surgery (paid for by you, by the way) and was unable to deploy to support the mission (which you also pay for)? I suppose if you never served, you might think this is something that is easy to deal with. You’d be wrong as a wrong thing in Wrongland on wrong holiday. Authorized manning levels do not change. So if I am sent a deranged troop (a ‘transgender’ or serial killer or clown or otherwise mentally deficient), and it goes into elective surgery (which the DoD does not pay for in any other cases), I do not get another body to replace it while it is doing all the bullshit we are paying for to support its mental illness. Tell me, Mr. Civilian (or specifically, SJW retard): How do we overcome this? A military force has one job: Destroy the enemy and protect the country from external threats. Transexuals (people with the mental illness now called ‘gender dysphoria’) have built-in mental issues and are not suited to military life. Do you know transsexuals have a 40 percent suicide attempt rate? I served 23 years, and I can tell you that suicide rates are far higher in the military than they are in the civilian world. It’s a stressful way to make a living. Now add to that the madness of not being able to see your sex organs and understand this basic core of mammalian existence (or whatever the fuck happens in these psychos’ heads). Yeah, glad I don’t have to lead a platoon of psychotic people into a fight. It is often said that the military isn’t the place for social experimentation. I don’t necessarily agree completely with that. The military was the first institution that tried racial integration, and met with great success doing that. It took a while, and there were fits and starts, but we got it done. It was also the military where females first gained equal footing with males in the context of pay and career opportunity. I know some will argue we haven’t fully achieved that integration, but I don’t believe women should be front-line ground troops. That is a debate for another time. We do have female combat pilots and women serve on ships. There are also many homosexuals serving in the armed forces. I was retired by the time Obama canceled DADT, so I don’t know if my concerns about that have panned out. But DADT worked well. And I knew quite a few gay people. I knew it, they knew it; I didn’t ask and they didn’t tell. To my mind, allowing people with gender dysphoria to serve at all will generally cause problems. I understand there are a few currently serving and keeping quiet about the problem they have. That’s bad, but there is no perfect way for a recruiter or DI to diagnose many mental afflictions. Gender dysphoria definitely fits this category. Readiness. Unit cohesion. Esprit de corps. These are terms which might not mean much to a politician or to a silly kid who believes in equality of outcome over equality of opportunity. But to the United States armed forces, they mean everything. Our missions are global, and we have to be prepared to go anywhere, at any time, with little or no notice. This is the very nature of our business. Some people might read this and call me a bigot for my way of thinking. Nothing could be further from the truth. I do not ‘hate’ people based on generalities, and I certainly do not hold any resentment or anger because a person has a mental disorder. That would be cruel. I genuinely hope every single transexual person in America gets the help they need to deal with their disorder. I also will not celebrate or try to normalize any sort of ‘dysphoria.’ That might even be crueler. Some of my words here might seem ‘mean’ or worse. I don’t mean it ‘mean,’ but our military has to be ready at all times. Allowing people who have a known mental disorder to serve makes no sense. It’s a dangerous idea which should be discarded post haste. Thanks for reading and #AimHigh! Rex, MSgt, USAF (ret)
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An unsecured border is an open pathway for human trafficking, and this could be the strongest but most neglected argument to convince skeptics of the need for regulated immigration. When we turn a blind eye to those crossing the borders, we are ignoring the criminal activity of human trafficking. Individuals who were promised freedom get exploited and abused, sold into labor and prostitution. Often proponents of tough immigration laws are accused of lacking compassion, but there is no compassion in ignoring the smuggling and trading of human beings, nor in protecting traffickers or inhibiting investigations with sanctuary cities. If the left cares about human trafficking, they need to recognize that illegal immigrants are especially vulnerable and unenforced law does not help them.
The promises and policies of the Obama administration made easy targets for human traffickers, and the lack of immigration enforcement was an enabler. Human trafficking is profitable and with lessened border enforcement, it was easier. The influx of unaccompanied minors across the southern border between 2011 and 2016 was met with no resistance under the Obama Administration. The Washington Post reported on the difficulty in tracking these children. One official conceded that “identity requirements” for those claiming to be family members of the children were “relaxed” to place the children more quickly. The children were released to individuals who were not assuredly verified as relatives, and with limited follow-up, if any. Such an acknowledgment would seem to indicate complicity in trafficking, or at the least, pure negligence. Legal advocates for the minors said the children faced abuse, and sometimes vanished. This is how Guatemalan teens ended up being held captive as forced labor on an egg farm. That discovery is what prompted Senator Rob Portman to launch an investigation. The Washington Post highlighted the findings of the report by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (part of the DHHS) which stated the minors were placed with shady caretakers. The DHHS failed to properly vet the sponsors and allowed them to avoid oversight by caseworkers. 
Why wasn't this a core focus of those trying secure the border? It seems that the mainstream media interest in human trafficking as a result of Obama policy was largely absent. In the midst of pro-illegal immigrant reporting, such a story fell to the wayside. However, it's the lack of consistent discourse on illegal immigration and human trafficking on the right that is notable and concerning. It's not that it doesn't exist, only that often it is drowned out by other concerns in the immigration debate. Advocates for tightening immigration appeared to favor cultural and economic arguments, but setting aside the human trafficking situation gave Obama and the Democrats a huge pass in accountability. More so, it permitted a horrible consequence to go uncovered.
The Trump Administration has vowed to combat human trafficking. Let's hope it is sincere, and policy toward immigration does not ignore it. Additional Reading: The Heritage Foundation “The Human Tragedy of Illegal Immigration: Greater Efforts Needed to Combat Smuggling and Violence”
As Charlie Gard enters the last stages of his tragic life, debate over his (lack of) care continues in the UK and abroad. In the US, that debate has been driven by a multitude of agendas, from those who blame socialized medicine to those who praise socialized medicine for caring for him this far, to those who see this as a right-to-life issue more than anything else.
I don’t wholly agree with any of those, although they are not all that far off. I can’t rightly credit the public health system for “keeping him alive this long” if that same system is refusing a medically viable chance to treat him further (and, before the armchair doctors start in on the child’s prognosis: the doctor offering further treatment isn’t some quack snake-oil salesman, he is a professor of neurology at Columbia University Medical Center). And while the attitudes of the “quality of life” crowd sound pretty familiar, I don’t think that this is strictly a right to life issue: Charlie’s parents should have every right to eschew low-hope treatments if they think that Charlie’s fight is over now. More than anything, this is about the right of an individual and family to self-determination. Socialized medicine isn’t the cause of this tragedy; it is just another symptom of the root problem: a willingness to abdicate frightening power to the state under the historically debunked theory that the state knows what’s best for its citizens. Charlie Gard’s parents sought to do something – seek the best care for their child – that is so fundamentally natural that most Americans would never even stop to think that it required any sort of permission. At a very basic level, law in the UK has now evolved to the unmistakable conclusion that children are, first and foremost, the property of the state. Parents are given quite a bit of leeway in how they foster and raise those state assets, but when the rubber meets the road, the state is the ultimate owner of every child. Under British law, un-elected and unaccountable bureaucrats are the ultimate arbiters of what is in every child’s best interest. There is a whole spate of potential iterations of this line of thinking, and none of them are anything less than terrifying. As the state is the official arbiter of which lives are worth living and not worth living, it stands to reason that the state also holds the power to order a pregnancy terminated if the Council of Wise Doctor Folk determine that the fetus has some sort of affliction that would make the life not worth living. And, of course, they decide what is and isn’t worth living. There are already countries where babies with Down syndrome are near-universally aborted, and the British government has just ventured into territory where, with just the tiniest extension of existing law, having a baby with Down syndrome could be deemed illegal. {I’m old enough to remember when my right to have an abortion was based on an implied Constitutional right to privacy between my doctor and me. In the UK, that now includes me, my doctor and the entire 1.4 million employees of the National Health Service.} Clearly, NHS’s right to block treatment of a patient under “quality of life” criteria extends to more than just the rare mitochondrial DNA disease that Charlie Gard has. What would we make of a healthy adult paralyzed in some kind of accident? Is that a life worth living? Or, as a better parallel, a healthy adult who suffered brain damage such that he or she could not advocate for themselves. Or some kind of neurological deterioration like ALS (sorry, circa-1961 Stephen Hawking, you have two years, at best, and that is just not worth treating you for). What does this mean for the 850,000 British people who currently have Alzheimer’s? I would love for the Bureau of Life Quality Assessors to reconcile the decision to refuse care to Charlie Gard with their ongoing treatment of patients with late-stage Alzheimer’s. Surely, the dignified, humane thing to do is simply to refuse to treat them at all and allow for a quicker death. Nay, to block and pro-actively obstruct anyone’s attempts to treat them. We don’t want to be dragging out anyone’s un-worthwhile life, after all. We can also alleviate ourselves of the undue burden of signing living wills and healthcare proxies as well: after all, once a person can no longer make their own decisions, the Council on Lives Worth Living takes over. Beyond the issues surrounding medical treatments for patients who cannot speak for themselves, this line of thinking has some other frightening logical outcomes that may currently seem far-fetched, but maybe aren’t as distant as you think. If the state owns your children and has the authority to overrule parents’ wishes in the pursuit of things it deems to be in the child’s interest, what do we do with kids who have special talents? Do extraordinary British children still have the right to pursue those activities that they enjoy regardless of what the state thinks is best? Can the state take gifted students and force them into specialized academies of science or math because, well, that’s what’s “in their best interest”? Do we start taking extraordinary athletes from their parents at a young age in order to send them to a special training facility to win eventual glory for the nation? If that sounds particularly Soviet, it is because that is probably where you've heard of that before. Once you have established that the state owns every child as its ultimate parent, you’ve allowed for that level of control over your life. It’s not a coincidence they called it “The Mother Land”. Finally, how much do you trust the state to nurture and care for children deemed “different?” Maybe a child has fallen behind in school, or suffers from some kind of learning disability. Maybe he is just kinda weird and socially awkward. Maybe he is gay or transgender. Whatever the “problem” (as defined, of course, by the bureaucracy), the state now has the right to “fix”, or not, your children, through whatever means it determines is appropriate. Obviously, that usually isn’t going to result in killing the child, but Charlie Gard has taught us that sometimes, that’s what is in the child’s best interest… I’m not trying to imply that the government of the UK is about to round up promising rowers to go to Henley Regatta Prep school or re-educating every four-year old boy who puts on a dress at day care. I get that the facts in the Charlie Gard case are particularly tragic and his diagnosis especially grave. But the theory put forth by the government, and affirmed by the courts, is extraordinarily far reaching and utterly terrifying. This isn’t a case of the state refusing costly or difficult medical care, this is about a state asserting its authority to do as it pleases with the children of its citizens, even if that means going to court to physically detain an infant against its parents’ wishes for the explicit purpose of denying the child legitimate medical care. This case has raised emotions on both sides of the Atlantic, and Charlie’s death will answer none of the questions the case raises. Charlie’s parents are not only losing their only child, they are being tormented by a bureaucracy that seems to be intent on allowing their son to die as it sees fit mostly just to prove to everyone in the UK that it has the authority to do it. The British, along with much of the rest of Europe, have chosen to turn to the state to solve their problems. They have elected to surrender enormous swaths of freedom to government bureaucracy, and this is the inevitable outcome. May we be fortunate enough that our fellow Americans don’t make the same mistakes. |
MisfitsJust a gaggle of people from all over who have similar interests and loud opinions mixed with a dose of humor. We met on Twitter. Archives
January 2024
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