Suppose a girl wants to study at a military university, but they mostly take guys. What to do?

Provide a quota for girls? Let me say right away that this nonsense—claiming “we will establish a proper system where selection will be unbiased”—doesn’t work, because at the moment “this selection is also unbiased,” yet they still predominantly take guys, and it is difficult for a girl to get in.

liberal

It is a time of anarchy, capitalism, heat, and summer. A young woman submits an application to an educational institution where they teach effective ways of killing people and destroying material assets as part of organized groups and using various specialized equipment. In essence, this is as ordinary an event as if a girl were applying to an educational institution where they would tell her the history of how people effectively killed people as part of armed groups and so on—that is, a faculty of history.

What interests guide the institution when accepting her application? It expects to make a profit. What ways does it have to profit from educating students in the absence of state funding (due to the absence of the state)? There are two main ways. First, trading in knowledge—that is, educating for money anyone who is willing to pay. Second, trading in prestige—that is, implementing a strict selection process, providing the most effective knowledge and skills, and hoping that graduates will be maximally successful in life and then, out of gratitude, contribute to the endowment fund of their beloved university. The education itself might even be free, because the university here effectively acts as a venture capital fund.

If the military university in question makes money by selling knowledge, the girl has no problems. She pays—she receives what she bought. But if the university considers itself prestigious, then the girl has a chance of encountering disproportionately serious difficulties right at the admission stage.

Let’s start with the fact that historically, the army is a male brotherhood, and the entry of women into it often dealt a blow to the prestige of the army (historian Martin van Creveld talks about this interestingly in his book Transformation of War, I highly recommend it). We do not know to what extent patriarchal snobs will form the core of organized armed formations under ancap conditions, and how fundamental it will be for them that women not only do not enter the army, but do not even study military science. I find this unlikely, simply because trends have changed, inclusivity is in fashion, and work in the army looks less and less like a brutal slugfest and more and more like working in a delivery service or other logistics businesses.

Secondly, the army still places significant physical fitness requirements on soldiers, including those related to lifting heavy weights and other disciplines in which women are relatively weak simply by virtue of their constitution. Theoretically, this should not become an obstacle to university admission, as it should, at worst, only narrow the range of available specializations. However, if physical training turns out to be one of the admission criteria at the university, then our hypothetical applicant faces obvious, though surmountable, difficulties.

So your fears are quite justified; it is unlikely that it will be much easier for girls to become specialists in the military sphere under ancap. Then again, this sphere itself does not look particularly promising, so it’s not like anyone really wanted it that much.

March 8

Congratulations for March 8th are already starting to arrive, which is a great occasion to say a few words about gender equality.

Law is a spontaneous order. Here in our cozy chat, we decided to analyze one article per day by Vladimir Zolotorev from the series “What is the State and Where Does it Come From”. Today we happened to reach the article “Morality and Law”, which worked out perfectly.

I have repeatedly defined law as a complex of approaches to conflict resolution. Zolotorev goes further and describes it as a language of human interaction, meaning all spontaneously emerging rules that people follow when interacting with one another.

Within both my definition and Zolotorev’s, there is no such thing as gender equality. It simply does not emerge spontaneously, due to clear differences in approaches to human interaction, or even at least to conflict resolution, if we narrow the topic to my definition of law.

A sufficiently obvious reason why representatives of different biological sexes tend to use different approaches to interaction is that human behavior is largely hormonally determined, and hormone levels differ between the sexes. However, the higher the level of abstraction of the rules, the smaller the role these differences play, and that is normal. Therefore, demanding gender equality at the family level is damn strange, while at the level of large communities, it is damn natural. There is no contradiction here; one simply should not force absolutes everywhere and engage in Procrusteanism (damn, I’m starting to self-cite and invent my own language; soon I’ll become completely incomprehensible to the reader).

Happy holiday, everyone! I want to go to the sea!

If a man could read a woman’s thoughts, would he be able to understand anything?)

Anonymous question

Sometimes it’s worth answering questions that aren’t about politics too)

I think he would have understood a lot, but how exactly he would have understood these thoughts would have surprised the woman quite a bit. For a man, roughly speaking, “50 Shades of Grey” is about a failed deal, not about pride and prejudice, and “The Fountainhead” is about architecture, not about the meaning of life.