From an European perspective, even suggesting that the Democrats are left-wingish is, well, cute.
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… and if you really are into self flagellation, here’s the full transcript:
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There’s still a lot of Eagle Scouts around.
Contrary to the majority of users in /r/TheDonald, I don’t think a bunch of 12-year-olds really give a rat’s ass about how well Trump did in Wisconsin last November.
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I just ran across this article and thought I’d share it with y’all. Tillerson is an eagle scout. He was the president of the BSA until taking the SecState job and he pushed for the BSA to stop hating on gays - not because he was pro-equality, but to help ensure that the BSA didn’t hate its way into irrelevancy.
Poorly sourced rumours are that Der Drumpf’s speech has him questioning if he wants to bail out of the administration. Whatever the case, he’s MIA and the State Dept spokeslady was weird about his absence.
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The scuttlebutt is that Tillerson is considering jumping over Trump’s attacks on Sessions and Mueller over the last week or so. And those rumors predate this speech by a several days.
It probably doesn’t help. A bunch a uniformed kids chanting and cheering for Trump’s horseshit just like at one of his violent, fucked up rallies has to reflect poorly on the former scout official who works for the guy.
But I think you’re crossing the streams there.
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True. But all that says about the global scouting movement is that scouting, globally speaking, is not vastly more progressive than the rest of the planet. To be a global organization, we have to tolerate a lot of differences.
So when the local scout organization of Saudi Arabia runs Arabian scouting by Arabian values, they wont be kicked out. And as long as they aren’t more old fashioned than the Arabian scouts, the BSA won’t be kicked out either.
What’s special about 1967? They’ve had 107 years in the US. But then, would you have expected them to be modern in a 2017 sense fifty years ago?
Of course. That would be Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the scout movement. If a youth group calls itself “scouts”, that’s where they’ve got their roots.
The ideological base being “the early 20th century”. What people thought back then is pretty troubling by modern standards; luckily people and their thoughts have never stopped evolving.
I feel personally offended by this. And you don’t know what you’re talking about.
No.
In fact, they were inspired by all the youth groups that existed in Germany at the time. Scouting was one of them, but not the only one, and Scouting in Germany had already been mixing and exchanging ideas with other local groups. During the NS regime, scouting, along with all other non-Hitler-Youth groups, was outlawed. Most scouts were not in favor of Hitler at all.
“The skills of military scouts” - surviving out in nature, or at least pretending to be able to. Very evil, apparently.
Dogmatic? No. The BSA, maybe.
Mainstream values? As opposed to what, fringe values?
Instilling values? Why the hell not?
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I noticed that immediately upon seeing the pictures yesterday, and had a guilty chuckle over it. Guilty because the choice those kids had was go to the Jamboree and get stuck sitting for hours waiting for 45 to poop a bunch of word salad out of his mouthhole, or not go to the Jamboree.
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I would argue that it was actually William Alexander Smith
B-P was a vice president of the BB before he founded the scouts. If B-P wanted a militaristic youth organisation then he was already a member of one at that point, but he decided to form his own organisation instead. Note that @Enkita’s earlier comment
is entirely accurate.
I still say that the early Scouts were hippies in comparison to the BB, and the gap has only widened in the UK. The BB still has militaristic ranks (and, yes, they are important in the organisation).
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Not quite to the year, but the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 is usually seen as the watershed moment when the US right went batshit insane. Desegregation of public education drove the explosion in segregated religious schools which drove the rise of the religious right.
It’s apparently when the BSA turned:
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To be fair - almost any organisation are hippies in comparison to the BB.
The early scouts were, as you say, the BB. As I understand it Baden-Powell didn’t actually want to set up a new organisation, just widen the appeal of existing ones like the BB.
As for ‘de-militarising’ the Scouts, the early editions of Scouting for Boys are fairly explicit that the end result of the training is a good, little citizen prepared (both in the sense of willingness and ability) to do his bit for King & Empire.
There’s also a whole bunch of fairly unpleasant class oppression going on if I remember correctly - things like noticing that someone was a wrong’un because he used the wrong fork or hadn’t shaved recently (those examples are hyperbole - I don’t have my copy to hand and I can’t seem to find early editions on the net.)
There is this though which makes the point pretty clearly:
Young Knights of the Empire by R B-P.
Published in 1917 admittedly so hardly surprising that it’s a full on propaganda piece in favour of doing one’s bit for Blighty.
Likewise it’s hardly surprising that the training manual written by the premier military hero of the day which was only popular because of his military fame drew pretty heavily on his military experiences and pro-establishment views.
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What I am trying to say is that the scouts in the UK have moved on from their original start in the BB to be a more accepting organisation, but the BB still sticks to it’s Christian and military roots.
Of course I am probably biased by being a former BB member and hating it (it was fun until I left juniors, then the weekly drill practice made me wish I was doing something, anything, else). Being afraid they would find out I was trans* didn’t help, they were sexist and homophobic as it was.
The BB is probably the perfect organisation for US religious conservatives though, and it would allow the BSA to reform itself.
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Well, why not?
What’s so important about being a global organisation if the members don’t support the values of Scouting?
If they stay in, then Scouting as a whole has to live with the fact that people will assume that Scouting as a whole is OK with what each Scout Org. is doing.
Well, that’s rather the question being asked isn’t it? Have Scouting’s attitudes evolved? Have they evolved to where they should be?
Regardless of what your view is, people are entitled to ask and come up with answers that don’t agree with yours.
Could you explain which parts of “They are all weird paramilitary groups for kids” you find offensive?
Weird, I can understand complaining about, especially if you are a member. It has to be said that for an outsider, Scouting - like any organisation with it’s own rituals and conventions (take rugby or the House of Lords 
) - looks odd.
For kids? Well, definitely.
Paramilitary? That also seems obvious. The uniforms and Scout Leaders do rather give the origins away. Do they still have Patrols?
Is that necessarily sinister? Not in my view but I guess that depends on whether you support the aims and baked-in principles and assumptions that the organisation seeks to instil.
Are there positives to being a Scout -sure.
Can they be achieved without the hangovers of Imperial legacy and pseudo-militarism?
Probably, see the numerous groups that split off from Scouting to get away from the military aspects.
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No harm. I’m pretty sure that even jackals know they’re several steps up from Trump.
Like I said there’s some creepy, troubling stuff in the history of scouting in general.
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The idea that different people from different nations, cultures and traditions can come together in peace is among the core values of scouting.
Of course, we could also make sure we have nothing to do with organizations that differ from us in any way. It would mean defending our values better. I should never get along with people who don’t share all of my values, and I should never attempt to find something in common with them or even do things together with them.
Really, it’s much more in keeping with my values to tell kids that there are scouts all over the world, and wherever they may go, they will find friends who have something in common with them. I won’t tell them that the scouts of Saudi Arabia aren’t real scouts because Saudi Arabia is an evil place where they don’t share my values.
Name an issue. I’ll be happy to tell you where Austrian scouts stand on that (if they agree at all). I’d say that Austrian scouts are on average definitely on the progressive side of things with respect to Austrian standards. Many countries are more conservative than Austria, others less. The same is true for scouts.
As a long-time volunteer / scouter / scoutmaster / scout leader, I embrace the “weird” label if it’s applied in a positive way; I’m offended by it if it’s applied in conjunction with some completely off-base prejudice.
Paramilitary? Probably depends on how you define the term. We Austrian scouts are antimilitarist enough to be offended by the word. Yes, we have uniforms derived from miltary tradition. So does the Red Cross.
How do Scout Leaders “give it away”?
And yes, we still have things called “patrols”. It’s the traditional name for a group of usually about 5 to 8 kids who do things together; it’s been shown again and again to be the ideal group size for kids organizing themselves to do stuff. So, when we’ve got a group of, say 18 scouts, we’ll split them up into 3 “patrols”. Those patrols won’t go “on patrol”, but many things that need doing and many things that come up during games and other activities will be done in those small groups.
The “Imperial legacy” never really made it out of Britain, who else would care about the British empire? I might not know what you’re talking about.
I wouldn’t call intentionally taking British boys from different classes in 1907, sticking them all in a uniform so that you can’t tell their social class from their clothing, and telling them all to use the right fork and shave regularly (once they get older) “class oppression”. I’d rather call it a 1907 attempt at working towards class equality.
There’s a grain of truth there; scouts, on the whole, are not anti-establishment. Mostly, we’re trying to help raise kids who will be “good citizens” in that they constructively take part in society and improve what needs improving. We usually don’t encourage them to become all-out rebels who want to tear down everything but end up achieving nothing before they grow old and settle down. If that’s not enough anarchism for some people, I can respect that, but it’s a far cry from instilling conformism.
Have a look at the vision statement of the Austrian scouts:
https://www.ppoe.at/service/pdf/leitbild_englisch.pdf
Interesting. I have no idea about all the groups that split off in the US; locally, all the groups that split off from “mainstream” scouting that I am aware of are on the conservative side of things and did not want to evolve.
Not sure how much I would agree; after all, there was a lot of self-organisation involved with how scouting started internationally. Scout groups that were popping up all over the world basically had Baden-Powell’s writings to go on, and only some lose contacts with the people involved with British scouting at first.
So Smith and the BB were largely unknown to the early founders of scouting in most other countries. It only had indirect influence by affecting the ideas and writings of Baden-Powell.
At the same time, in Germany and Austria, ideas from other local youth movements had more influence. I guess the story is similar for most places.
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Dude named his daughter after a jewelry store and his son after a newspaper.
I can’t get over it.
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Be happy he didn’t give a speech to the Girl Scouts.
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Every Trump Speech:
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I have no idea about what split off from Scouting in the US either. I agree most of the groups that split off do seem to be more on the “conservative” end of things - which doesn’t help of course.
To an outsider one group of kids in uniforms with neck scarves and woggles and badges looks just like another. It’s only when you look closely that you see the dodgy wolves’ heads and almost swastikas.
In the UK, we had/have groups like this as well though:
I gather Germany and Austria sort of went the opposite route. You had similar movements (Wandervoegel, etc.) and they were then influenced by scouting.
All of these organisations of course have their beginning as part of the same big societal trends. Groups and group activities of all kinds were popular. Uniforms were fashionable (still are of course). The infrastructure was there to get children out into the outdoors and back to the cities. There’s the reaction against industrialisation, and so on.
So you have all sorts of organisations basically offering the same thing. If one of them had to end up being the most popular worldwide, Scouting’s certainly not the worst one.
Just to be clear (in case it wasn’t sufficiently) I don’t have anything against scouts or scouting - although BSA does sound like an organisation I would really not be happy to be a member of. I was a Beaver and cub scout myself before dropping out of scouting.
I was trying to make the point that while you, as a scout, have strong views about what scouting is and isn’t, those views come from your being a member of the organisation as it currently exists and as you currently experience it.
If it looks different to an outsider, there are various ways to deal with that.
One can ignore it.
One can try and educate the outsider. In that case telling them that they know nothing about the organisation or don’t know what they are talking about is probably counter-productive.
One can consider whether maybe the organisation one belongs to does not do as good a job as it could of promoting its values to outsiders.
One can consider whether the outsider might not have a point in at least some of what is being said.
For example, while you can take the view that your particular scouting organisation is not paramilitary, it does have at its base the uniforms and organisational principles derived from military experience. Hence, the uniforms, the Scout Leaders and organisation into ‘Patrols’.
The Red Cross is probably not the best example given that they were explicitly set up to be war-time medical assistance for wounded soldiers and therefore definitely were paramilitary at the time.
The orders of St John (Johanniter) and Malta (Malteser) are of course explicit successors/offshoots of a paramilitary organisation.
As you say Scouting is a global organisation and has a ‘big tent’ approach. I’m afraid that does mean that Austrian scouts do get lumped in with every other Scout organisation worldwide.
Your scout movement may do things in certain ways but it is trying to remain connected to organisations which take in some cases very different attitudes.
The desire to “get along with people who don’t share all my values” and “find something in common with them”, etc. is laudable and I agree with it in principle.
It does mean though that people are entitled to take the view that Scouting as a whole condones the attitudes embraced by its constituent parts.
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