{"id":75070,"date":"2022-10-22T01:00:28","date_gmt":"2022-10-22T05:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=75070"},"modified":"2022-10-21T08:39:38","modified_gmt":"2022-10-21T12:39:38","slug":"qotd-ocs-in-the-era-of-the-snowflake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2022\/10\/22\/qotd-ocs-in-the-era-of-the-snowflake\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: OCS in the era of the snowflake"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Recruiting posters used to pitch “join the army; earn money for college”. I haven’t seen nearly as much of that lately, with one huge exception: Officers. Since you have to have a college degree to be an officer, they make that a huge part of their pitch. I’m pretty sure they’re offering to wipe some big amount of student loan debt if you sign up for OCS, and if they haven’t, I’d bet long money it’s coming soon enough. They already do it for medics \u2014 I know a couple guys who paid off their med school loans that way. You get some kind of abbreviated Basic, then an even more abbreviated OCS<\/acronym> \u2014 learning where to stick the insignia, basically \u2014 and you’re out as a captain (I think) in the medical service.<\/p>\n

But \u2014 and this is the point \u2014 college these days is the END of what you might call the “special snowflake” pipeline.<\/p>\n

They can put medicos through that “just learn where to stick the insignia” course because medicos aren’t line officers, are never expected to be line officers, and will probably never come within 500 miles of the sound of gunfire. Kids recruited out of college, on the other hand, are going into line units. What kind of Special Snowflake is going to put up with even a tiny fraction of the chickenshit even the loosest army in the world is going to put them through?<\/p>\n

And it doesn’t help sticking them with the service troops, because in any army I’ve ever heard of, the chickenshit is actually much worse in the rear with the gear. All of which is the deepest possible affront to a Snowflake’s amour propre<\/em>, which is why xzhey will never sign up …<\/p>\n

… or, worse, consider the kind of Snowflake that would<\/em> sign up. I think “a Dunning-Krugerrand who is also a diagnosable sadist” would probably cover it.<\/p>\n

Think of what that must do to morale … and from that, to effectiveness in general.<\/p>\n

Severian, “Alt Thread: Officer Psychology”, Founding Questions<\/em><\/a>, 2022-07-12.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recruiting posters used to pitch “join the army; earn money for college”. I haven’t seen nearly as much of that lately, with one huge exception: Officers. Since you have to have a college degree to be an officer, they make that a huge part of their pitch. I’m pretty sure they’re offering to wipe some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,5,41,13],"tags":[31,1065,1106,572,1462,764],"class_list":["post-75070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-military","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-army","tag-dunningkrugereffect","tag-genz","tag-leadership","tag-severian","tag-university"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-jwO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75070"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75070\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77353,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75070\/revisions\/77353"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}