No beard is key to survival, not faith. The whole point to serving in the military is to protect our freedoms. If you want a beard, or a turban, or a strainer then so be it. However unlikely it is, when your ass gets gassed in combat there is no changing your mind over shaving or not.
I’m sure very few people on this site have gone through the CS gas chamber in basic training to confirm that your mask does work. (minus the beard, of course)
A sweet mustache would be ok though?
The Royal Navy has always allowed beards, but never moustaches alone, since the early 20th century. If however, an individual cannot grow a “Full Set” (i.e. a full beard and moustache), a commanding officer may well tell the individual to shave it off.
Please do tell me which freedoms the military defended when the USA started their latest Iraq war based on lies about WMDs? Which freedoms were threatened 1965 by the Vietnamese?
The US military doesn’t defend anyones freedom. That notion is idiotic propaganda for the gullible.
cuz… 'murica?
I really don’t understand why our grooming standards are so outdated. Quite a lot of other militaries allow for beards.
You’re not wrong, but it’s a lot more complicated than that. If the US were physically attacked tomorrow, the military would certainly be fighting to protect our “freedom” in the sense that they’re fighting to protect the country from foreign invaders.
The problem is that “protecting freedom” isn’t their whole job. That was updated a long time ago to include “protecting American interests abroad” and if that sounds incredibly, intentionally vague to you, then you’d be right, and that’s the point. The military, or rather the people who run it, can justify virtually anything in the name of “protecting American interests” and that’s resulted in us injecting ourselves into a lot of things that we shouldn’t have, and turning a blind eye to a lot of things that “good guys” (as the US often likes to see itself) would definitely intervene to stop.
I’m not a military apologist. War is a means of conflict resolution that is severely outmoded and completely unnecessary apart from the fact that we’re still basically slightly-smart apes that can’t seem to resist using it whenever possible.I am, however, against un-nuanced rhetoric that ends up dividing more than it does unifying.
It’s our responsibility to help bring people around to the ideas that non-violent conflict resolution and cooperative action universally produce better results than murder and wasteful competition.
I thought that was him!
Speaking as a Wiccan pagan, I am not aware of any of our traditions that require beards. We also do not call our spiritual tradition our “faith”, which is a theistic term.
I presume those traditions are based on beliefs, and faith is a belief system? I dunno, just thinking out loud.
Just as I know Christians that are irritated by the homophobes that have tried to monopolize the term, I know pagans that are irritated by the white supremacists that try to lay claim to the old gods.
I don’t doubt it.
Kind of weird that the military’s official recognition of Odinism came at the same time it started becoming the trendy new faith of choice for white supremacists, though.
OTOH, as the GWOT dragged along for more than a decade, and the demand for recruits started to exceed the supply, the military started granting more waivers for criminal activity, which was a statistically significant bar to enlistment for many in the lowest quintile of income.
If you are in the Royal Navy and can’t grow an Uncle Albert then you have no right trying to grow facial hair.
The question of recruit demographics is a different question than the one of whether military service is used as a means of advancement for socioeconomically disadvantaged. You might as well be posting evidence that wealthy people go to college at a higher rate than poor people as an argument that poor people don’t use higher education as a way to better themselves.
There are plenty of reasons to dislike the US military, but trying to minimize some of its spinoff benefits by misusing statistics this way is rhetorically sloppy and doesn’t help make the case. As a scientist you should know better than this, and honestly I’m surprised at your reposting tweets from people with less expertise on this kind of analysis than you yourself have.
Following the Crimean War, the British Army made moustaches, although not beards, compulsory. The regulation was only abolished in 1916. The Royal Navy allows beards (but not only a moustache), although the sailor must get permission from a superior officer beforehand.
Our traditions are based on cultural practices, mythopoesis, and the Wiccan Rede, not “beliefs”. Belief is not central to paganism - action and practice are, however.
There’s been some interesting discussion on these themes on recent episodies of the Hell of a Way to Die podcast.
(relevant bit starts at 28:03)
The basic gist of it was that, during good economic times, recruiters spend much of their time struggling to sneak marginal candidates (school dropouts/failures/expulsions, minor criminal records, low IQ, etc.) past the requirements.
OTOH, in bad economic times, they start getting a lot more applicants who are just normal people, and are now free to dismiss the most flawed candidates.
But in both cases, those applicants come from a spread of economic backgrounds. Working class and middle class fuckups in the good times, working class and middle class regular folks in the bad times.
So economics plays a role, but not in a simplistic “working class army” sort of way.
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