The other night AL brought the musings of fake hillbilly JD Vance on education for the officer corps of America’s All Volunteer military (AVF for All Volunteer Force) to the blog’s attention. I’d already seen his “jenius” on display earlier in the day.
We should eliminate the university degree requirement from the officer corps. It’s dumb to make people get a BA before becoming officers anyway, and it may just make the military leadership less woke.
— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) March 13, 2021
Ordinarily I’d ignore Vance even as he’s receiving financial backing from Peter Thiel who seems to have a sweet tooth for Holocaust deniers, white supremacists, and neo-fascists and enjoys bankrolling them.
But in this case I just want to point out, as someone who has spent a lot of his career involved in professional military education, that the whole reason the Liberal Arts and the liberal arts education was created was to educate the young men who were destined to become the officer corps of their day. Take it away Professor DeLong (emphasis mine):
But originally the “liberal arts” had the most direct vocational objectives of all:
Wikipedia: The Liberal Arts: The liberal arts… are those subjects or skills that… were considered essential for a free person… participating in public debate, defending oneself in court, serving on juries, and most importantly, military service…. Grammar, rhetoric, and logic were the core liberal arts. During medieval times… these subjects (called the Trivium) were extended to include arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy…. Together the Trivium and Quadrivium constituted the seven liberal arts of the medieval university curriculum…
From which I deduce:
- The original “liberal arts” make up a vocational program–an education suitable for some landlord scion who is going to be a player in civic governance.
- Timothy Burke, Professor of History at Swarthmore, does not teach one of the seven “liberal arts”–and by calling what he teaches.
Ladies and gentlemen, please allow me to present JD Vance: fake hillbilly, funded by a neo-fascist, enlisted Marine Corps Public Affairs* veteran, and someone who apparently paid little to no attention to anything while attending THE Ohio State University and Yale Law School the producer, along with Harvard Law, of America’s worst elites and notables since the 1820s.
Open thread!
* Here is a simple pictorial explainer of Public Affairs.
raven
ugh
Adam L Silverman
@raven: This week has been a month too long…
West of the Cascades
I’m intrigued (in the same way I’m intrigued by watching a car wreck in slow motion) as to whether Vance will be able to maintain his schtick long enough to do real mischief or instead self-implode under the weight of accumulated awfulness like this.
cain
I keep thinking that cartoon would be about “forming voltron”. Heh. Good post and let’s not forget that the Samurai had a lot of liberal arts stuff too! It was an important part of being a soldier.
raven
@Adam L Silverman: I just do that to try to stop that silly shit on the initial post.
Yutsano
The temptation to steal that picture is real…
What party is Vance trying to win the nomination for? I honestly can’t tell.
Adam L Silverman
@Yutsano: Republican for the open Ohio senate seat.
jl
Fit for active service!
https://www.wikiart.org/en/george-grosz/fit-for-active-service-the-faith-healers-1917
Baud
Where is Ozarkhillbilly? He’s our expert on all things hillbilly.
Yutsano
@Adam L Silverman: Not Drumpy enough, not that Vance could read a room. Oi. He’ll never make it out of the primary but watching him getting torn to pieces by the wolves will be fun.
Adam L Silverman
@Yutsano: The oppo that will destroy his life is going to be choice.
Dorothy A. Winsor
I once heard a conference speaker talking about this and saying more or less the same thing. She said that for a lot of upper class men, their work was governing and recreating, and the liberal arts were job prep for that.
Benw
If you hate a university education you don’t love the troops
raven
@Baud: Rarely at night
Yutsano
Going OT: Alexandra Petri ladies, gentlemen, and others…
Adam L Silverman
@Baud: @raven: Also, Vance isn’t really a hillbilly.
Sister Golden Bear
@Adam L Silverman: Today has been the longest year of the month.
Adam L Silverman
@Sister Golden Bear: That too!
piratedan
I’m just a man, sitting in front of his monitor… hoping that his DOJ will finally start arresting traitorous GQP politicians…. is that too much to ask for?
debbie
His tweets are all over the place. I can’t imagine he’ll get past the primaries.
tom
No.
jl
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I think of modern liberal arts curriculum as history, creative and nonfiction writing, literature, geography and world culture, language, and some, you know… various arts. And some math for those not in STEM.
Many people have the same delusions as Vance, you can cut up knowledge into very narrow channels, and squeeze a person through one of them like through a meat grinder and have some useful product at the other end. And liberal arts is useless. I don’t think that is true for any kind of leadership position in STEM fields.
I have to deal with health sciences and engineering students who can whizz through formulas and understand all sorts of technical stuff. But you ask them to write a report, or even try to explain in plain English what they are doing, and they have a panic attack. Sometimes cannot write out anything decipherable, and stumble through their first presentations to a multidisciplinary audience.
There are many of us STEM people who hate the idea that only STEM courses are worth anything, and liberal arts is just ‘woke’ useless farting around and wasting time.
Omnes Omnibus
As a holder of a BA from a liberal arts college and a former army officer, I have strong opinions on this. Vance can go piss up a rope. Or take a running fuck at a rolling doughnut. His choice.
Bodacious
Sorry, but I cherish the thought that our officers would have some higher Ed history and general discipline to broaden their skills in dealing with world and military interactions. Biased – spouse ROTC, brother USMA. Also, important to have non college path to leadership as well, just saying
jl
Sad that the Union lost the Civil War because of US Grant’s indecipherable orders.
But, then, officers don’t write orders anymore. They just tell a junior flunky to tell a more junior flunky to push a button and the ZX43B does the first strike. Then press another button and the 24thandahalfC_320, laser facilitated neutrino guided flying wing precision hypersonic high explosive munitions do the mop up. Before and after recon is contracted out to MS AI, which also gets the contact info for civilian survivors for future ad placement. Warrior troops hang out and shoot any bad guys who skitter out of the Hot Zone.
War works that way now. It’s a thing of high precision beauty, as every corporate news actor says. Everyone knows this. Adam will confirm it for you in just a sec. (ha ha… a little joke…)
Throwi Stones
Vance and Thiel suck. Middletown is not Appalachia.
Very trumpy sociopath, Josh Mandel and former Ohio GOP chair, Jane Timken (another trumper), are in for Portman’s seat.
VOR
The US Military thought it was important enough to establish several colleges. West Point teaches a lot more than just military subjects.
jl
@Bodacious: “important to have non college path to leadership as well, just saying”
I thought all the branches already had programs to move from enlisted to officer.
Omnes Omnibus
The point of having officers with broad and liberal education is that one wants people making decisions to have a something more than the mere technical knowledge of how to do something like shell the living fuck out of a location. One wants someone who is capable of thinking about whether the location actually needs to have the living fuck shelled out of it.
Omnes Omnibus
@jl: They do require education.
Kelly
Officers don’t need university edumacation? My cousin, a retired command sergeant major, has a masters degree. His entire post high school education completed while serving, paid for by the Army.
Mike in NC
I retired from the USNR ten years ago, but back then there was a lot written about making promotion to E-7 and above based on having gotten an associate’s degree.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kelly: Was his masters in profanity?
jl
@Omnes Omnibus: We are moving backwards through history, and the past is future. WWI to pandemic, pandemic to WWI.
Vance is just preparing us to go back the he-man good old fashioned wars, when you really blew the crap out of stuff, over and over again.
I see a youtube channel named ‘The Best Uncle Rob Explosions Compilation’. Train em with that. Cheaper.
smith
Can’t have educated officers because they’d be too “woke.” Sounds like affirmative action for racists to me. (Also maybe a coded objection to efforts to de-nazify the armed services)
zhena gogolia
@piratedan:
Do you have floppy hair and a cute English accent?
jl
@Omnes Omnibus: ‘They do require education.’
But don’t the programs provide that, or enlisted who are interested can get the military to pay for a degree before they enroll?
zhena gogolia
@Omnes Omnibus:
Ahem. You mean THE liberal arts college. ?
Kelly
@Omnes Omnibus:I don’t know. Mrs command sergeant major told me although I have fun at family gatherings with the cousin I grew up with I’ve never met the command sergeant major ;-)
Peale
@smith: they are pissed that the generals turned down leveling Black neighborhoods this summer.
Omnes Omnibus
@zhena gogolia: Oxford on the Fox.
Have you seen any of the stuff about the new Pres? Currently at Shippensburg, 25 years at Juillard, and an African-American woman. Looks like a great pick to me.
jl
@Peale: OK, then there’s your trouble. Officers who can read the Constitution are getting too damn big for their britches. Won’t take out whole ZIP codes or do the coup when they’re told.
Barbara
Vance would probably come across as more authentic if he actually underwent a lobotomy instead of acting like it. It’s not just that what he says is dull and the opposite of witty, it’s that he is so obviously of the world he is crapping on. Hey J.D., you’re boring.
StringOnAStick
@smith: Bingo. Vance is using a somewhat subtle racist dog whistle, And his chosen marks hear it loud and clear. This is definitely about the move to weed out white supremacists from the military and his (and their) anger about it.
caphilldcne
Yep Vance can jump in a lake. Not loving the right wing undertones of the cartoon. Tinky winky is the gay one as Pat Roberts and Jerry Falwell let us all know.
Omnes Omnibus
@jl: When I went to OCS, it required a degree to apply from the outside. Currently serving soldiers needed 60 credit hours toward a degree. Those who didn’t have a completed degree would be sent complete their degrees after finishing their first tour as an LT and attending their branch advanced course – IOW as junior captains. Basically, every captain and above had a degree. The vast, vast majority of LTs did as well. Of course some had degrees from Texas A&M so I am not sure that counts.
debbie
@StringOnAStick:
Doubt his anger is genuine. He’s staking out ground to compete with other hopefuls for Portman’s seat. The worst of them, Josh Mandel, got a tweet banned the other day, so Vance is just playing catch up.
Here.
StringOnAStick
Considering the highly technical nature of modern profession of arms, it seems we should have an even more educated officer corps.
jl
@Omnes Omnibus: thanks
Chetan Murthy
I’m a STEM PhD, and took only “distribution” liberal arts classes in college. But over the years since, I’ve learned a healthy regard for them, especially learning about foreign cultures and languages. These last four years, I’ve learned not just a healthy regard, but the *incredible* importance of history in forming citizens. I’ve read with feverish intent the histories of the Nazis and the runup to WWII. I’ve read about the Civil War. I’ve read (over at Bret Devereaux’s site) about insurrection and internecine strife in ancient Greece and Rome. I’ve read about the end of the Roman Republic. All of this, in service of trying to understand our current travails as a nation.
Tom Ricks and Adam Tooze (among many others) have written about the importance of understanding military history and its relation to the rest of history, as critical education for general officers. Tooze has written about the critical importance of economic history to understanding the failures of Prussian militarism over a time-period of a century.
The idea that somehow none of this matters to military officers seems …… ridiculous. Hell, Thucydides is still in the list of books for officers, from what I understand.
Omnes Omnibus
@StringOnAStick: I think the reference to a BA and wokeness was intentional. It isn’t the technical knowledge that Vance is denigrating, it’s the humanities side.
Ken
@debbie: Well, at least he’s doing it early. I shudder to think what candidates who wait until next April to enter will do, to prove their bona fides. Burn a cross on the Ohio capitol steps, maybe.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
I love how all of the replies to the Vance tweet are dunking on him:
Vance himself attended Harvard OSU and got a liberal arts education! He’s the furthest thing from being “woke”
rp
Was Delong drunk when he wrote that?
Omnes Omnibus
I’ll also note for the record that Vance was a protege of the Tiger Mom while at Yale.
cain
Even better now, it starts with “Alexa…”
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Throwi Stones:
My HS World History and AP Government who is a Republican hated Josh Mandel, particularly because he had a passing resemblance to him ?
persistentillusion
@Omnes Omnibus: Well said. I actually know that jibe phonetically in I think Cantonese.
Omnes Omnibus
@zhena gogolia: FWIW I do have the floppy hair.
Steve in the ATL
@Omnes Omnibus: well played
Gvg
I think it also shows a disdain for the military.” They don’t need to be very smart, just obey orders and die on command of there betters.” I hate that attitude. This is the real reason the suggestion keeps coming up to make everyone serve some time, to keep the powerful from being too separate from the troops. Unfortunately I don’t see how to do that to the benefit of our modern military which needs specific training and skills.
I agree, he also doesn’t understand or respect education.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Omnes Omnibus:
Oh God, her! Amy Chua. I remember reading about her on RationalWiki:
That article speculates that Chua also may have exaggerated or made up a lot of that book to pander to white people with stereotypes of East Asians. I suppose Vance learned from her
Steeplejack
(Bumped up from downstairs.)
I’ve got a tech bleg here: What do you guys currently like for (Windows) disk-partitioning software? I haven’t had occasion to do it in quite a while, and I’m feeling rusty.
The particular problem is that my RWNJ brother has a Win10 computer with a small C drive (≈ 240 GB) and a huge D drive (≈ 1.8 TB) on one physical disk. He has limped along for quite a while, putting all his data on the D drive, but his C drive is still getting jammed. There’s no reason why he can’t have everything on one gigantic (2TB) C drive, and I’m trying to determine if it’s something I could talk him through on the phone or whether I should just tell him to take the box to some tech shop and have them do it.
J R in WV
@Baud:
Wait a cotton pickin’ minute — what about me? What about JOHN COLE!??!
ETA: With all due respect to Ozark — he’s on the wrong side of the Mississippi for this conversation!
Another Scott
@smith: He’s dog whistling, saying that universities shouldn’t educate officers, that the military service schools should do it. Because wokedness is a disease.
It’s stupid and dangerous, but he’s trying to get outrage points in the process and that’s the main goal.
Unfortunately, him getting free piss – off – the – pointy – headed – liberals points via discussion about it is getting him much more visibility than him posting a (stupid) position paper on a website somewhere.
It would be nice if there were a Twitter / CableTV / Web dungeon that people doing this stuff would have to go to for a week for every offense like this. Something like that is probably the only thing that will make them stop doing it.
Grr…
Cheers,
Scott.
Omnes Omnibus
@Steeplejack: First, copy everything to a cloud drive.
Kay
Our Ohio Renewal might be interesting. It’s a nonprofit he founded supposedly to come up with innovative approaches to drug addiction – advised by the American Enterprise Institute- but he’s weirdly evasive about it and what it actually did or does. It seems he’s lost interest in Ohio drug addicts and their struggles.
Vance’s wife clerked for Justice Roberts so I just find this “I don’t go for elite education” nonsense he’s adopted insufferable.
Chetan Murthy
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I knew of Chua, and the general story about her. But not these details. Geez, she sounds like my old man. There’s a reason none of his children showed up for his funeral. Gosh, I wonder what her children will do ….
Omnes Omnibus
@Kay: His JD is from Yale.
rikyrah
@StringOnAStick:
And a new Black Secretary of Defense
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Kay:
Vance was always a phony. Apparently the movie based on his book that released last year was pretty bad and got bad reviews. I’m surprised Ron Howard was involved in it
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Omnes Omnibus:
You sir win the internets tonight ?
Kay
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
The book didn’t hang together. I think it started as a normal “up from nothing book” and would have been okay as that although honestly I don’t think he can credibly claim his grandparents life as his own experience, which he does, but midway thru he decided it was bigger- a whole world view- and it’s really not. The “world view” part is just standard Right wing theory mixed in with some family anecdotes.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Chetan Murthy:
Seriously. Apparently one of the daughters has defended her from criticism, so I guess they bought into it. Can you imagine rejecting something your child made for you as a gift on the grounds that it’s “not good enough”? ?
Recipe for creating angry, resentful, anal adults. Or people like Chua who are self-righteous
mrmoshpotato
Surely a hoax that’ll go away with the weather, Mar-A-Kremlin.
Ken
Second, throw away your current computer.
Third, buy a new one with only one disk partition.
Fourth, copy everything back from the cloud.
sab
@Yutsano: Ohio GOP. Whoopee, when the choice is currently between him and Josh Mandel, the faux hillbilly from Lyndhurst, a suburb east of Cleveland.
Steeplejack
@Omnes Omnibus:
?? Smack in the puss for you, too.
Chetan Murthy
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): To expand on your “recipe for”: I once read an article about the “authoritarian personality”, and how it’s mostly a result of a certain kind of upbringing. Like, say, the kind I had. Or Chua’s children got. And that sort of personality is what you find in RWNJs.
Another Scott
@Steeplejack: I used to try to keep data and programs segregated on a different drive from the Windows boot drive, but so many installers put crap on C: even if they install on F: that it ended up being not worth the trouble. 1 partition per drive (+ reinstall partition, if necessary) is the way to go.
I haven’t tried to repartition Windows drives in a while. I used to use Partition Magic or GParted on a live CD. It generally worked fine, but was very picky about whether the partition was shut down cleanly. Convincing Windows to mark the partition as clean was sometimes frustrating.
If it were me, I’d just get a new HD of appropriate size, clone the C: partition to it, stretch it to fill the full drive [using the Windows partition tool], then manually copy over the stuff from the original D: to it and hope that not too much stuff needs to be reinstalled.
HTH a little. Good luck!
Cheers,
Scott.
Kay
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
The switch over to Right wing politics midway thru the book is remarkably CLUMSY too. You’re thinking “Jesus, really? You thought no one would notice they’re now reading your boring law school argument about how FDR killed ambition in the lower classes?”
mrmoshpotato
Just say the quiet part out loud on the Internet there, Jackass D Vance.
mrmoshpotato
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): “Your movie is bad, and you should feel bad!” Zoidberg, the film critic
Adam L Silverman
@jl: This made my head hurt and my eyes bleed.
Adam L Silverman
@jl: They do.
PJ
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
@Chetan Murthy:
@Chetan Murthy: It’s also no surprise that Chua’s husband, Jed Rubenfeld, was suspended from teaching at Yale for sexually harassing female students.
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: I simply refused to acknowledge its existence until now. And I now regret not continuing that policy.
Steeplejack
@Another Scott:
This is why I’m already leaning toward telling him to take it to Best Buy or some tech shop and have them do it. I used to be up on all the disk-doinking software and did a fair amount of that work for friends and clients, but it has been a while. I think that I even offered to fix this for my brother on one of my housesitting trips to Las Vegas, but for some reason he didn’t want to do it then. And I don’t think I would be comfortable trying to talk him through it on the phone. Too many bad memories of friends and clients.
Chetan Murthy
@Adam L Silverman: C’mon, Adam! That first night of “Shock and Awe” was all it took to convert Iraq from a dictatorship to a Heritage Foundation Poster Child For Democracy, right? Right? Right?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@sab:
Whoever wins we all lose. The OH GOP is full of nutcases. A local state Rep wanted to rename a state park after Trump and has put forward a bill to do so. Admittedly, Republicans didn’t wait until St Ronald was dead to rename Washington National after him, but at least Reagan had been out of office for a decade by that point
@Kay:
That’s a pretty a common critique of HE and spot on. He tried to play armchair sociologist and it’s just the worst stereotypes surrounding poor white people.
I came across this interesting LA Mag article about Ron Howard’s dance to try to separate Vance’s politics from the movie
I was really disappointed to hear that Howard was directing it. I liked his other films (Apollo 13, Beautiful Mind). It seems he had no problem with the book’s underlying politics. Possibly because of his own family’s rural origins, as the article and Howard himself alludes to
Starboard Tack
@Steeplejack:
This might do.
https://www.easeus.com/partition-manager/epm-pro.html
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
I was thinking he could be placed in front of a tank, pontificating about all he knows about the military. He’d be tied to the hood of a junk car of course and the tank’s one job is to crush the car, regardless of any complaints, which of course couldn’t be heard inside the tank in any event. Do you think there might be volunteers to drive the tank?
Steeplejack
@Starboard Tack:
Thanks, will give it a look.
Ken
@Steeplejack:
Them: “Your video driver software is out of date. Click ‘Accept’ to install new driver software.” Should I click ‘Accept’?
[Silence. Moral struggle.]
Me: What the hell, yes…
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Ruckus:
I like the way you think. Maybe a pillow party before hand? ?
Adam L Silverman
@rp: It’s excerpted from a larger takedown of some snooty history professor from 2013.
Kay
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
But that’s where the Right’s approach fails, I think because it’s NOT hopeful or optimistic. Not at all. It’s whiny and aggrieved and resentful. Everything is a threat.
Bill Clinton made the same journey JD Vance did and he managed not to resent everyone and see enemies everywhere while doing it.
Ken
@Ruckus: I was going to say overly-derivative of Idiocracy, but I’ve decided to treat is as an homage.
Starboard Tack
@Steeplejack:
I can check my desktop to see what I used on it last, if you want, but I can’t do it until tomorrow because I have to reconfigure my network for remote access. Can I e-mail to you or some other method?
Also, an external device to back everything up first is always wise, you know.
Omnes Omnibus
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Pillow party?
Ruckus
@Kelly:
A cousin’s husband spent his entire AF career either in college or on planning boards for one thing or another. Leadership requires people who can solve problems, issues, human interaction on a basis beyond “Do as I say!” Officers needed that or they were ineffective and hated for their lack of ability and privilege that they had not earned in any way. Enlisted leadership requires that as well, it often does not come with as much responsibility, but sometimes it does and that includes the ability to work under a lack of leadership and still get the job done.
Ruckus
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Not for me, thanks.
Another Scott
@Steeplejack: Yup. It’s something that one needs to have some comfort in doing oneself.
And it’s s l o w to move partition boundaries around on a disk that’s nearly full. It would probably be faster to do the cloning and copying.
It’s easy to do – new drives usually come with a download key for free cloning software and it’s pretty bullet-proof. (He would need a USB to SATA dock/adapter as well.) And if he really only has data on the 1.8 TB drive, then he should be back in business pretty easily.
Doing this via replacing the drive enables one to replace the hard drive with a SSD and greatly speeds up disk access. E.g. $215 for 2TB Crucial SATA SSD. (I assume his motherboard doesn’t have an NVMe slot. NVMe drives are lightning fast.)
You’re right to tell him to “Pay The Man” and have someone else fight with it. :-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Starboard Tack
@Omnes Omnibus:
Blanket fight?
Omnes Omnibus
@Kay:
Hell, his whole autobiography is a series of thank you notes to everyone who ever offered him the least bit of encouragement in life.
Omnes Omnibus
@Starboard Tack: GAH!!!!!
mrmoshpotato
@Steeplejack: After the fun responses, I gotta get in on this.
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman:
It’s still twaddle.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@PJ:
These people all deserve each other, don’t they? What a wonderful bunch. Chua, her husband, Vance, and Peter Thiel
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Omnes Omnibus:
Sorry, I meant a blanket party
Kay
@Omnes Omnibus:
This is a really common story in US politics- “my life had adversity but my people had THESE values and I relied on that and prevailed”. Clinton had one, Obama had one (his grandparents) Biden has one but the difference is they didn’t assume we would look down on and sneer at their relatives, and of course we didn’t. Vance has managed to take this story and turn it into something divisive and hateful, which is a real accomplishment, given that it all turned out so well for him.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Chetan Murthy:
That makes sense. Would explain Trump for sure
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Omnes Omnibus:
@Ruckus:
Eh, sorry if I stuck a nerve. It’s a horrible, awful practice IRL
Omnes Omnibus
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): FWIW I had two experiences with those while I was in Basic. I don’t find then all that funny. The first was when our drill sergeants more or less hinted that a soldier on our platoon should be given one for being a fuck-up. I refused to take part – because it was wrong and, because the guy was a fuck-up a blanket party wouldn’t teach him anything, it was merely cruel. Because I was the one hold out, I realized that I was going to be next so that I could be taught a lesson. I spent the next several nights waiting for them to organize their attack. When they came for me, I was ready and had a bar of soap in a pillowcase. I jumped up with it swinging and convinced my platoon mates that coming after me was a bad idea. Basic training sucked. OCS was better. The artillery course was even better. But airborne schools was the best – they let you jump off of and out of things , including planes.
Steeplejack
@Starboard Tack:
No need for more. The info you sent was very useful. I’m leaning toward telling him to take it to a shop.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Steeplejack: I use Minitool Partition Wizzard.
Starboard Tack
@Steeplejack:
Discretion. Valor.
Chetan Murthy
@Omnes Omnibus:
Jesus.
Steeplejack
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Thanks, I’ll look at that, too, for future reference.
Omnes Omnibus
@Chetan Murthy: I said basic training sucked.
James E Powell
I feel like you’re not giving Stanford its due.
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
I was in 2 companies in boot camp, due to being in the hospital for over a week, so I had to be put into another. The difference between the enlisted men in charge of the companies was the difference between Captain Bligh and an actual human being. Both ended up teaching the same thing but the results seemed far better with the actual human in charge. We did have a shower party for the one ass who could not take a shower in front of other humans. I had to stand guard in case Captain Bligh showed up but I think he would have fully understood. The navy does actually work hard to teach everyone how to live in close quarters and support each other and it comes in handy after weeks at sea in tight quarters and shitty living conditions. At least they did over 50 yrs ago
I should have added that we found out what the bars of lye soap and scrub brushes were for, and it wasn’t for the floor and tile.
Omnes Omnibus
@James E Powell: Wasn’t around in the 1820s.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ruckus:
There is a lesson to be learned there rather than just beating on someone stupid. The stupid guy ended up washing out.
StringOnAStick
@Chetan Murthy: That was my reaction too. The rabid pack nature of some male groups is scary. It’s like morals shrink as group identity solidifies around violence and punishing the one not striving to join the pack or not doing it properly. As a female it completely creeps me out because I recognised it in two guys who were manoeuvring to assault me on a job site until I said that their boss knew I was at this location. Their demeanour instantly changed, otherwise I’m sure I was this close to rape, murder and my body being disposed of in a mine shaft. That was 42 years ago, and I don’t think that job is safely doable under current conditions given the hatred these guys now have for the Feds (I was doing field work for the USGS).
JWR
@Steeplejack: Not sure it it’ll help, but several years ago, I found a free, (for x number of uses), thing called, I think, Ghost Drive, (can’t find it now), and if it’s a big-box item, the C drive may have a hidden recovery partition. Really helped when installing a new, larger HDD for a friend’s HP book store computer. Something like that might work if you just buy a new HDD and clone everything to that. OTOH, probably best to follow the Cloud advice of others.
jl
@Chetan Murthy: I’m sorry to hear that an officer would egg on his troops to gang up on one of their peers. Sounds like Full Metal Jacket type of officer screw up.
But, fact that Omnes thought it through and was ready showed he was officer material, IMHO though what would I know about it.
Edit: But drill sergeants are enlisted, right? See, I don’t know much about it. But close enough to officers in my book.
Chetan Murthy
@StringOnAStick: Oh god. That’s even *worse*.
All I can think is: men tell women they’re necessary, to defend them. But they’re defending them from other men. Ugh.
Omnes Omnibus
@StringOnAStick: FWIW I would guess that you would find very similar behavior in a female basic training unit.
jl
@Chetan Murthy: Come to think of it, being a human male is kind of sleazy racket. I’ll take a time out for some self-reflection now.
Starboard Tack
Grauniad reports the people killed in the spa shootings in Georgia are:
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I still call the airport Washington National and call the hospital at UCLA, UCLA Medical Center.
jl
@StringOnAStick: I should have looked up your comment first. That is horrible, and if you were out in the boondocks, your fears were sadly justified. Hope those guys got some payback, somehow or other.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Omnes Omnibus:
Jesus Christ that’s awful! And the drill sergeants encouraged it. Fuck that’s awful. And then the others had the fucking gall to try to assult you just for standing by your principles. What a bunch of pieces of shit. Why were they so pissed that you wouldn’t go along?
Honus
@J R in WV: and Vance is on the wrong side of the Ohio to be a hillbilly
Martin
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I cannot express how many Chinese parents have told me with a straight face that their kid can’t get into college unless they excel at violin or piano. The pie chart of my life experience has a wedge dedicated to dispelling that, I’ve had to say it so many times.
Somewhere, someone mentioned ‘violin or piano’ as a stand-in for any extracurricular activity and it was taken literally and become some American cultural rule passed around Chinese immigrant families. I’ve not seen it among other asian immigrant families.
Omnes Omnibus
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I know people in the Chicago area who still call part of I-290 the Congress not the Eisenhower.
Steeplejack
@Another Scott, @?BillinGlendaleCA, @Starboard Tack:
Thanks, all, for the advice. I am thinking that I will upsell my brother on the idea of a speedy SSD drive and having a local shop transfer his system and data. Plus I had the horrifying thought that it’s not impossible that my brother actually has two physical hard disks and misunderstood my talk about “partitions,” “drives,” etc. Ugh.
jl
@Martin: A couple of thousand years of extremely arcane and useless civil service exams can leave a mark on a culture, or at least on some of its more insecure and status conscious members.
Edit: I think there are subcultures in the US that have the same hang-ups. HS varsity sports in some places, prestigious foreign languages in others.
Starboard Tack
@Omnes Omnibus:
The things you learn first stick fast. I remember the phone number we had when I was 5.
Starboard Tack
@Steeplejack:
A laptop isn’t likely to have two physical drives, but an SSD is a good upgrade. It can really speed up file access and partially make up for not having much RAM.
Steeplejack
@JWR:
Thanks for the input.
mrmoshpotato
Got Fish? Don’t mind if I do!
Martin
@jl: Yeah, higher education is so lacking in transparency and clear guidance that you pretty much have to work there to have a clear understanding of how best to prepare. So there’s a mountain of misunderstandings and urban legends of what schools are actually looking for – but the Chinese immigrant families won the consistency contest. They got one thing wrong and stuck to it.
Some of it is just hard to deliver. Telling parents that their kid would be best off in the top 10% of a so-so HS than top 20% of a top HS is hard. Parents here routinely move from one city to another or even one neighborhood to another to chase the best ranked schools, and we’re constantly telling them to stop doing that – it makes things worse for the schools and worse for their chances of getting into college, and it’s expensive.
James E Powell
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
The Republican speaker of the Ohio House was indicted for federal racketeering conspiracy in July 2020. Republicans refuse to make him step down.
The Cleveland news source helps out Republicans by saying that “lawmakers” won’t get rid of him; they always protect Republican.
They are scum. All of them.
Omnes Omnibus
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): You are learning to do things as a group. Not to be a civilian. In a way though, I wasn’t really a part of the group; I wasn’t going to be an enlisted soldier. I was going on to be an officer. In some ways, it was easy not to be fully part of the group. At the beginning of basic, the people in my platoon thought it was great that I was going to be an officer and be able to “boss” drill sergeants around. Then they realized that I would be able to boss them around – that, they liked less. Also, creating an in group is easier if you have an out group. The drill sergeants used me for that a bit. I got KP on parade days and that kind of thing – a drill sergeant actually said to me that for me it was no big deal because I would have a lot more parades and ceremonies in my career. He was right. One final note, at one point, we were cleaning the offices at our brigade HQ and the colonel happened to ask me a few questions. When he found out I was going to be going to OCS next, he asked how long it was. I said 14 weeks and he said, “Hell, you can stand on your dick in corner for that long.” Words of encouragement.
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
They didn’t beat on him, they gave him the shower he wouldn’t take on his own. And he made sure that he took a shower every day after that and announced that he was going to do so.
Do remember than living aboard ship 50 yrs ago was not all that pleasant. Better than a foxhole or worse, but it loses a lot of the appeal if one of you reeks a lot worse than everyone else. I’ve had to go weeks without a shower because we didn’t have enough fresh water, which also meant any clean clothes or bedding. Ripe did not begin to describe it. The only thing was that every one on board was in the same condition. We had 80 people in a boot camp company and I lived for 2 yrs in a 40×40 compartment with 80 guys, which was also the operating room if necessary, with a steam sterilizer, tables that could be used for operating if necessary, entry ladders, half of a missile magazine, 80 racks and lockers. It wasn’t a WWII sub but it wasn’t a suite at the Ritz either. Some ships were worse, some better but nobody shot at me or the ship the entire time. In 2 yrs we had 5 captains. 2 were competent, 2 were not and one was exceptional. That ratio pretty much comprised every department from the newest to the oldest member.
Omnes Omnibus
@Martin:
I played violin and look how I turned out.
L85NJGT
Katie Rife’s review of Hillbilly Elegy is a good read.
Steeplejack
@Starboard Tack:
His computer is a big desktop unit.
Also, I will allow myself a slight flex and mention that I worked as a software programmer and consultant for 25 years.
Martin
@Omnes Omnibus: My grandmother went through OCS with Clark Gable and was paired up with him for social events for Army PR.
Some have an easier time of it than others.
Starboard Tack
Do any Coloradans know anything about Grow United, Inc.? Mother Jones has an article that says it’s based in Colorado and was involved in the fuckery around the Rodriguez-Garcia Florida state senate race last fall.
James E Powell
@Omnes Omnibus:
But they’re working hard to catch up.
Martin
@Omnes Omnibus: So did I. I sucked at it. I think I would have been better with piano or another instrument that was a bit less analogue. Or at least one that I chose. I was sick the day kids picked instruments and there’s no such thing as too many violins in an orchestra.
Starboard Tack
@Steeplejack:
I did that for awhile, too. I liked embedded controllers best. Of course, now they’re in everything. I did some work with the PIC stuff. Harvard architecture, 8 bit data, 12 bit instruction.
JWR
@Steeplejack:
Oops. Shoulda kep mah big mouf shut.
;)
Martin
@Starboard Tack: Embedded is pretty fun now. My son does a lot with ATmega controllers (descendants of PIC, also Harvard architecture) – Arduino is based on these. I like the STM ones better – ARM based – Raspberry Pi’s architecture.
Sloane Ranger
The whole right wing anti-education thing seems to be based on the idea that any education beyond secondary school leads to the creation of an effete leadership cadre with a tendency to over-think and over-complicate things.
I think this attitude comes from a teenage addiction to watching the genre of films/TV series where a rough tough NCO or junior officer cuts through the red tape and destroys the enemy while the brass are still debating the strategic and tactical implications involved, which is presented as indecisiveness.
Omnes Omnibus
@Sloane Ranger: Patton was very well read. So was Shan Hackett. Oddly, lots of great and innovative military leaders were quite well educated in a very traditional sense.
Starboard Tack
@Sloane Ranger:
A lot of Right Wing ideas boil down to “My ignorance is better than your expertise.”
Sloane Ranger
@Omnes Omnibus: You know that, I know that but, to the right, displays of testosterone fuelled action solves everything.
Starboard Tack
@Martin:
Thanks. I know people working with Arduino and Pi boards but I didn’t know the difference. I like a lot about the ARM features, but I’ve not worked with it.
Steeplejack
@JWR:
No, you were fine. I just wanted to calibrate the advice level a little above the absolute basics.
Comrade Colette
@Omnes Omnibus:
OH FUCK NO. Don’t even go there. Male-on-female violence is a plague with no equal, no comparison, no “not-all-men,” no “some-women.” You have no personal experience of this and no way, no matter how empathetic you might try to be, to ever truly feel that fear. And it’s a fear we feel every fucking day of our lives.
Just don’t.
Redleg
I can’t decide whether J.D. Vance knows less about the military or about liberal arts education. Either way, he really showed his ass on this one. I don’t have a liberal arts degree (BA in Political Science, Masters and Ph.D. in behavioral science) but my undergrad degree was useful when I was an Army field artillery officer. Even us dumb combat arms officers had use for critical thinking, reading, and writing skills plus it was kind of nice to know something about the U.S. Constitution, to which we took an oath. The nonsense about liberal arts education turning people into soft “woke” wimps is just more right-wing noise.
Ruckus
@Comrade Colette:
I don’t think that’s what he meant at all.
Boot camp is a process where a group of people who don’t know each other have to learn to help each other, live with each other, protect each other and get a job done – together. And in the end, often lives depend on that basis. The point is that women together or men together likely have differences but also similarities in how they get along in larger groups than people normally work/live within, not how they often treat or get treated by the other group. And it also depends on the people in the group and the person trying to get them to do all the group requirements as a unit.
I would agree that it is far more possible that men might be crueler and more physical but as a male who has been stabbed by his older sister for not getting his elbow off the table I’m going to take exception to there are not similarities. Granted it’s not always anywhere near balanced but similarities can exist. ( Sister and I became very good friends a few years later and no retribution happened. She had enjoyed the power that an older and up till then a larger person could. I think we both learned from this)
evodevo
@StringOnAStick:
Yep…a good family friend who is male used to work for the Environmental section of KY dept of natural resources and go all over eastern KY monitoring coal mine stream pollution etc. THAT was dangerous work…he has some tales to tell…I can’t imagine being a lone female doing that kind of stuff – I would be carrying, bigtime…
evodevo
@Honus: Yep…you have to be east of Chillicothe lol
Ramalama
@Barbara: Maybe he’s vying for David Brooks’ job.
Omnes Omnibus
@Comrade Colette: I wasn’t talking about male on female violence or trying to “not all men.” I was talking about the group dynamics within a basic training unit and the likelihood that female trainees would turn on an out member as quickly as male trainees.
henqiguai
@Another Scott: #80
Late to this party. My approach is to have two physical disks – C: for system stuff which includes OS plus any installations of applications. D: (or in my case up around F:) for data. That way system drive can be imaged and forgotten until the next major upgrade, and data can be backed up regularly. And when one drive croaks, it’s relatively easy to recover. Helps that I have an external docking station to dump stuff to an internal drive without having to open the system box.
artem1s
@zhena gogolia:
THE Ohio State University is THE Vo-Ag school. Ohio University is THE liberal art college in Ohio. OU was the FIRST land grant university in OH and perhaps outside the original 13 colonies. It was established to do exactly what Adam indicated – train kids who were never going to get to go the West Point or Harvard. OU at one time was commonly referred to as the Harvard on the Hocking.
StringOnAStick
@Omnes Omnibus: I read a few books by the sociolinguist Deborah Tannen. In general she found that starting at a very young age, boys compete within their peer group for position/status, girls compete for if you are even allowed to be in the group. In male peer groups, the question was ranking and competition for status, so the least successful were at the bottom. In female groups it was less about rank but the least accepted potential group member was completely cast out of the group.
laura
@Chetan Murthy: clerk for Kavanaugh.
Steeplejack
@henqiguai:
That’s a good approach, but way overkill for my brother’s primitive setup. I’m not sure how much “data” he actually has, just that with the system files it’s too much to fit on his current C drive. I think I’m going to tell him to get an SSD drive and have some local techno-weenies set up everything.
henqiguai
@Steeplejack: #175
If it’s a desktop (i.e. not a laptop), I’d still recommend a two drive solution. Once the SSDD is set up, wipe the old hard drive and use it as a data-only drive. Put all his system stuff on that C-drive and all his data on the hard drive. But I will admit to a strong bias; my engineering career started out, fresh from Howard U’s Physics program, as a construction/failure analysis engineer at Goddard Space (Flight) Center. I started out being trained to accept there-will-be-failures, so I tend to go for fallbacks and redundancies.
Barry
I think that what’s motivating Vance, Rod Dreher and others is at least half that the US military leadership clearly wouldn’t
do their patriotic maga dutybreak the law for Trump. The right assumed that those guys were right-wingers and crooked referees who would in the end make sure that Trump won. They feel like they bribed the ref, and that the ref wasn’t crooked.Miss Bianca
@Redleg:
Errr…you *don’t* think that political and behavioral sciences are part of the liberal arts?
J R in WV
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
“Team Building” by attacking someone not willing to be on the team delegated to beat someone else. Shitty.
WeThey did have a shower party for a guy who couldn’t bathe himself properly, no blood was shed, but being washed with scrub brushes is no joke either. I did not participate, you don’t need 45 guys for that.Everyone in a boot company suffers [or did back in 1970] when one guy gets gigged over and over for failing to be “squared away.” Once you see that happen a couple of times, anger towards the jerk can build up pretty fast
J R in WV
@Redleg:
I would beg to differ with you — your education is totally a liberal arts program… What, do you think you need to be an English or Art History major?
Nope.
PoliSci and behavioral science are dead center of the liberal arts universe!
ETA: I see I’m not the only person to go there…
Fancycwabs
Careful, I’m currently in Twitter jail just because I said JD Vance is a jumped up redneck who thinks he’s smart because he got into Yale based as a diversity hillbilly quota.