• 🇨🇦GreenBeard🇨🇦@lemmy.ca
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    3 days ago

    Exactly. They’ve been working real hard to make it about gas masks in the military, which is a thing, but that’s not why they’re going off about it. “Beardos and Weirdos” specifically is a dog-whistle for men who actually have honestly held values, don’t consider sex, violence, and substance abuse the point of life, and try to be a mentor, a partner, a part of a community or who otherwise contradicts their narrow, machismo-laced, lecherous and reductive definition of “Man.”

    • JoeBigelow@lemmy.ca
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      3 days ago

      Look here now, a man can enjoy sex, violence, and substance abuse(not necessarily in that order) a whole lot without it becoming a part of their personality. Plenty of us are happy to be degenerates in private

    • Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      No it’s just a racist dog whistle. By far the group that gets the most facial hair waivers in the military are black men. They just don’t want blacks in the military anymore.

      • Enkrod@feddit.org
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        3 days ago

        To explain the facial hair wavers to my fellow straight-hair-phenotypes: forcing to shave too closely, can lead to really big, painful infections and scars from ingrown hairs if you have curly-phenotype hair.

        You can shave close enough for a gas mask to work, but in an organization that had its rules build around the bodily and cultural “normal” of white people, you might still need a facial hair waver.

        • Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          Yeah the waivers are definitely a good thing. Black men often have very coarse, tightly wound facial hair. Some of the dudes I served with would get the worst ingrowns and without a waiver they’d still have to just shave over them, causing nasty sores.

    • killea@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Oh ya I get it, just wanted to shorten your more complex definition for some folks. I can hardly comprehend the amount of fucking idiocy and blind hate occurring in the us gov right now. They shit all over the so-called values they very vaguely pretend to support.

    • jve@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Holy shit I’m inadvertently outing myself as giving a shit about people.

    • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz
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      2 days ago

      Damn, and here I was thinking it was about no-shave chits (which has racial undertones, because black men are more prone to razorbumps (basically ingrown hairs which can be extremely painful)).

      • 🇨🇦GreenBeard🇨🇦@lemmy.ca
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        2 days ago

        I mean, it’s the US, you dig into anything deep enough and you can find racist undertones, because American society is built on racism. That said the particular phrase “Beardos and Weirdos” did in fact evolve out of the manosphere to describe any man of any race who didn’t fall in line with them ideologically. Like so much of what they do, it just happens to also particularly disadvantage black men by virtue of their ideal being grounded in “whiteness.”

        • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz
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          2 days ago

          Well I’m saying that in the military context specifically, it’s well-known that the vast majority of shave-chit holders (i.e., people who can have beards) are black men. There was a whole thing a few months ago when they banned shave-chits, and a large part of the discussion was how it would disproportionately affect black men, and how this is one part of a larger strategy to push black men out of the military.

          So within that context, yes, this statement by Hegseth absolutely does carry racial undertones, and you don’t have to dig very deep to uncover that. It’s not a conjecture, that statement was thinly-veiled racism.

          • 🇨🇦GreenBeard🇨🇦@lemmy.ca
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            2 days ago

            I’m not disagreeing. The policy itself is definitely an attack on black people. His choice of phrasing merely suggests he was trying to slur a lot of people, black people chief among them as usual.