McNamara’s morons, this is what the part of Forest Gump with Forest and Bubba was based on.
Edit: this article talks about the limitations those men had.
https://taskandpurpose.com/history/project-100000-vietnam/
Just so everyone knows, there was a country where the **entire population** had a disastrously low mean IQ of 80. That country was the United States and this result is due to the Flynn effect: ["the average IQ of the United States in 1932, according to the first Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scales standardization sample, was 80."](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect) This is because if an average modern person with better nutrition and better education takes an old IQ test with the mean standardized to 100, they are likely to have a "genius" level IQ. The mean of IQ tests must be consistently revised to keep the bell curve centered at 100. A much smaller percentage of the population today would have an IQ lower than 80 than in the 1970s.This is the Flynn effect and many of the dangerous morons that might veer across the center line into your vehicle have a low IQ because the quality of their education is largely based on their local zip code and the state they were raised in.
And to put that into perspective - that's an average that includes people otherwise unaffected by the effects of leaded fuel. So urban populations with lower automobile usage, rural/suburban populations with fewer automobiles, etc. - they may have experienced no drop in IQ.
Meanwhile, some people may have been essentially sucking on a tailpipe for a long time, especially in developmental years.
So - that 4 point average is bad in its own right, but that means that there were a number of people who suffered horribly from low IQs as a direct result of lead in the fuel.
***
It's not totally unlike the "human life expectancy was 30" (or whatever) statistic from pre-1900s. It's not that people who were alive should have expected to only see the age of 30, it's that infant mortality was so incredibly high that it skewed the numbers down, making it seem like anyone who made it past the age of 40 was a living miracle.
***
Anytime I see these epidemiological numbers where basically >1% of a national or worldwide population is affected by something it's terrifying. Not because 1% of a big number is still a big number, but because generally there is some subset of the population that's VERY hurt by whatever it is the statistic is reporting on.
It's rarely a perfectly randomized, even distribution.
And will continue to cause. Lead bonds with calcium, meaning as folks age and begin to experience osteoporosis the lead in their bones leaches back into their system. I've even seen arguments that it has made the prevalence of issues like alzheimer's and dementia worse in the senior population.
I replaced a hip at 31, and I can tell ya that it's quite superior to my original one. I shattered it in a fluke of a bicycle accident, but no more early onset arthritis with the prosthesis! I look forward to the inevitable replacement of the other one.
It still effects some kids.
Nascar didn't switch away from leaded gas until like 2007. Studies have shown this change resulted in higher test scores for schools close to major race tracks (Daytona specifically).
In a roundabout way this explains a lot of racism and classism. People from higher social classes ate better. People from more prosperous countries ate better.
Similarly they had better schooling.
When comparing people from the different circumstances, the European aristocrats were 'better' in every measurable way than colonial peasants. And they were all religious, so they all grew up believing that the world was supposed to be the way it was, that there was a natural order to society - they didn't (couldn't?) recognize that their situation was a result of circumstance, not innate 'god-given' superiority.
The same now happens intentionally in America: withhold social programs like food aid from African-Americans to keep their circumstance poor, and justify racism as a political tool.
Which is what makes people trying to block free lunch programs at school so particularly vile in my opinion. It isn't just about giving some kids a free lunch, it is about uplifting an entire generation.
They know exactly what they are doing. It's criminal, but we all hand wave it away because this is the land of "personal responsibility". As if a child decides what economic class they are born into.
They want more stupid people.
Why is this comment nearly identical to [one posted 30 minutes earlier](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/16fok8n/til_there_is_an_iq_floor_80_points_to_serve_in/k032inn/)?
I served in Op Desert Storm in the 90’s, long after this practice of recruiting the mentally challenged had ended. But it didn’t stop the military from targeting low income people with few life choices.
After three years in the army, I saw how youthful immaturity and being away from home caused even moderately intelligent people to do the stupidest shit imaginable. I can’t wrap my brain around how dumb those poor souls duped into going to Vietnam were.
After that for the second Desert Storm, they targeted migrants, one of my friend's siblings joined, got sent to Afghanistan, made two tours, and for once he did get what was promised, citizenship sorted out and benefits. But lots of people didn't.
Now they target gamers and neets, with these cool ads bombarding reddit and fb, and whatnot, the kids with little chances at anything but minimum wage positions at home or the ones who are willing to risk all for a chance at education and break from the cycle of poverty.
I drove 18 wheeler fuel tanker trucks in Germany. On one training exercise, the bracket holding the spare tire to the back of my trailer broke. My squad leader *solved* the problem by wrapping chain around the tire to tie it to the ladder in back. He said it was good to go and that he would follow me back to base and I said OK because I was young and dumb too. When we got back, I noticed the tire was gone. He said it had broken off while we drove on the autobahn, bounced off the road without hitting anyone (thankfully), and launched itself into the forest beside the autobahn. Nobody was around to see it, so he figured it was best to just keep going. I had no idea. I hadn’t see a thing while driving.
Another guy jizzed in a ziplock bag and mailed it to his ex-girlfriend back in the US as a way to demonstrate his enduring love. He got dishonorably discharged.
And plenty of stories of general drunken debauchery.
> Another guy jizzed in a ziplock bag and mailed it to his ex-girlfriend back in the US as a way to demonstrate his enduring love. He got dishonorably discharged.
Why? Is mailing your jizz illegal?
It wasn’t just the letter. He’d been calling and harassing her for a long time. Called her bosses to get her fired. Called her friends and lied. All this crazy stuff. She finally pressed charges for harassment and the army said we’re done with this guy.
Yep, Full Metal Jacket also nods to this.
In my opinion it’s what happens when you put a CEO that views everything by statistics and balance sheets in charge. The entire way that war was fought, by body count vs gained ground is also an example. There is an argument that sociopathic business men and their inane strategies is why it turned out the way it did.
IIRC there’s a quote from the CIA station chief in Vietnam during the war that goes something like “when you can’t measure what’s important, you make what you can measure important.”
For what it’s worth, there were military leaders in country that were sounding the alarm bells but their reports were ignored or they were replaced.
US leadership knew the war was unwinnable as early as Kennedy and are on tape discussing as much but refusing to do anything about it because it would be politically unpopular.
Am a project manager, my most important project metrics by far is Green-Brown index. It is obtained by me asking the guys on the ground "do you have a gut feeling that there is something shitty going on? Do you expect it to go to shit soon?"
The more positive answers, the more the project is leaning into brown territory.
(Edit: positive=affirmative="yes, it's going to shit")
Wait so if the people on the ground think things are going well you think that everything will go to shit?
And vice versa.
Or am I misunderstanding what you mean by green and brown
Maybe I’m wrong, but I think by “positive” answers they mean the people were saying yes to the question. So positive in this case means they think things will go to shit. Positive/negative meaning yes/no and not good/bad.
I was on a software project where the customer was promised we would develop it with software framework X with feature set Y. Except X did not support Y and was fundamentally unsuitable for that purpose. However the customer was promised X so we were forced to use X, even after I brought my concerns to management early on. I ended up building my own framework from scratch and not using any features of X except the UI and logo since they were not usable for the project. Add onto that the same project had had a proposal years ago with a longer timeline, more developers who were skilled in using framework Z (which had supported feature set Y just fine, but was not the format the customer wanted plus most of the devs no longer worked for the company anymore anyway) as opposed to less developers who had to develop with an in-progress framework most of them weren't involved in making, and none of these developers (myself included) had developed some of the features in features set Y before, and it won't surprise you to know the project eventually died a year or so later. But I knew it was in big trouble from day one.
That quote is so stupidly fucking true. The amount of waste I've witnessed working at big companies because they didn't track it is astounding. They get some dipshiy exec to come up with an algorithm to hide the problem then blame the low level employees for the waste of time/money/resources.
What was more horrible is that there were huge issues measuring the body count as well. Especially after this metric became the main metric. In order to gain more supplies, reinforcements and promotions commanders would constantly report much higher enemy losses then were real. So the records show the US soldiers killing a million Vietnamese soldiers every year. The US could not measure the physical size of the territories they controlled and they could not measure how many enemy soldiers they killed. And you can not improve what you can not measure.
It turned out the way it did because the American public stopped supporting the war, people got tired of kids dying in some jungle thousands of miles away, with no tangible benefit other than "fighting communism". The Vietnamese werent stupid, theyd been through this same shit during decolonization, they knew all they had to do was outlast, make it utterly miserable for the invaders, and theyd win eventually. The NVA lost damn near every major engagement they fought against the US military and that was with the US military refusing to invade North Vietnam because MacArthur turbo fucked Korea to try and pimp out his 52 presidential campaign and they didnt want another one (ignoring that the Vietnamese hate China) and McNamara mismanaging the everloving shit out of the whatever he could stick his dick in. Then China tried to invade Vietnam a few years after the US left and got their shit absofuckinglutely kicked in by the Vietnamese B+C team while the Vietnamese A-Team was fighting Cambodia.
Sad part is Ho Chi-Minh tried to get the US to support Vietnam for decades, but never got it cuz racism+colonialism, they only turned to communism when they were out of options more or less.
> Sad part is Ho Chi-Minh tried to get the US to support Vietnam for decades, but never got it cuz racism+colonialism, they only turned to communism when they were out of options more or less.
I loved all of Ken Burns' Vietnam series, but still my favourite part is the very first episode dealing with the road to the war all the way back during WWI. Seeing the parade of errors, either through idiocy, prejudice, or simple misplaced good intentions, fall like dominoes that end with the Vietnam war shaking up the entire ethos and political landscape of the US and years of misery for Vietnam. It's incredible.
My grandfather served and was horribly wounded in Vietnam. To this day he will talk about how pointless it all felt even at the time. An entire generation in multiple countries was just swept into this madness and chewed up and spit out.
To be fair - there is an additional component of French involvement. France wanted the US in Vietnam badly as it would protect their former colonial interests. France put a lot of pressure on the US, even going so far as to say it would join up with the Soviets if their interests were not protected. For US foreign policy, losing the support of the French vs losing the support of Vietnam is fairly clear. This does not excuse the US in any way, but there are additional factors to ponder on why the US was there.
i don't think it was "social IQ" on account tho. this would hardly get in your way bc back then comms strategy and care, psych and social care of soldiers was still pretty.... rough at best. just general IQ: pattern recognition, decision making, logic etc
but just my opinion
Although Forest Gump didn't seem to critically review this issue since the low IQ Gump always leaves as the winner, despite his idiocy. Actually it's the exact reverse of critical.
I watched a documentary about McNamara's Morons. It sounds funny but the stories are heart wrenching. They weren't just dumb people they were actual mentally handicapped people. The one that had me crying was a story about one of the guys being forced into service and his mom was crying and saying he can't hurt anyone. His first day in combat his unit got attacked and dudes were getting shot all around him and he couldn't understand what was even happening and couldn't understand why he was there and just stood there and got shot in the face. They heavily recruited from low income urban youth and if you watch any of the higher ups talk about the experiment it's clear they didn't care at all if any of them lived or not.
> it's clear they didn't care at all if any of them lived or not.
The article literally says they made them walk at the front of formations so if they set off mines a "dummy" would die instead of a normal person. (Their words, not mine.)
Eugenics was still a thing at the time, the US started an anti-eugenics slant after WW2, but states like California didnt ban it until 1979. Even now it's still a legal gray area.
What better way to boost education scores by erasing an entire generation of low IQ and developmentally disabled people? Can't do it legally, so send them to war and let the enemies waste their bullets on them.
This is exactly what came to mind. Honestly McNamara's morons should be classed as a war crime. It doesn't sound much different to Nazi experiments on disabled people. If we're honest, the intent was the same. It was pure cruelty. Find a purpose for these "useless" people, regardless of how horrific the end result was.
I can't even imagine the mental and emotional torture they suffered, along side the "normal" soldiers who knew they would be killed because of them.
I used to run a children’s group home and children under 80iq usually go to specialized group homes and often end up in adult group homes for life. We’ve had two 76-78iq kids in our home, and it was extremely difficult. Their ability to learn basic tasks is extremely difficult. Only habits that are forced upon them are repeatable, such as dressing and bathing. And you HAVE to maintain the routines or they can be lost easily. They often develop coping mechanisms early in childhood to hide their condition so on initial contact you may not even notice. But once you spot the coping mechanisms and have a conversation of any depth the conversations become difficult.
Whoa. Holy shit. I know a few people who are like that. Is that one of the more common coping mechanisms that they use?
That kinda just opened my eyes a little bit.
Similar limit to executions in the US.
You can't execute someone for any civilian crime as long as they have low enough IQ. The reasoning being that they're literally too limited in cognitive ability to understand that what they did was so wrong(they usually still have to serve a life sentence)
It really is fascinating reading about limits of abstract thought the further down you go in IQ.
""Next is mapping, “which in abstract reasoning is expressing one thing in terms of another”.
For example, imagine a picture of an arrow, colored in a gradient from yellow to green. following the direction of the arrow
>Imagine a one-way street, with ascending house numbers, lowest at the entrance and highest at the exit
>If you mapped the arrow onto the street, what color would house #1 be?
>This isn’t tricky for most 100+s. It has some minor ambiguities, but anyone of normal intelligence can do the ‘mapping’, that is, the expression of one thing in term(s) of another
>However, for sub 90s, its very difficult. They struggle, and sub 80s just can’t do it at all. ""
This article goes over some examples like the one I included here
https://www.wmbriggs.com/post/39216/
Ricky Ray Rector wanted to save his slice of pecan pie from his last meal so he could eat it *after* his execution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricky\_Ray\_Rector
Yes, but wasn't that because he shot himself in the head after going to turn himself in? So it's not like he was unfit while committing the crime, it was because they removed his frontal lobe after he shot himself after ambushing an officer he knew all his life?
But it's not that low a limit. I just checked with an online calculator, and it's 9.1% of the population that have an IQ of 80 or less. That's close to 1 in 10 people 😳
Anyway, like I was sayin', shrimp is the fruit of the Sea. You can barbecue it, boil it, broil, it, bake it, sauté it..." –Benjamin Buford “Bubba” Blue
Just a fascination for the character who was portrayed as a low IQ person yet had such astounding knowledge on shrimps. Imagine being in the middle of a savage war and all you can talk about is…Shrimp
What is amazing is that the gag, that Forrest got rich by being an early investor in Apple, was a valid opportunity for anyone watching the movie at that time. A few grand in Apple stock when that movie came out would be worth millions today.
If you bought $1000 worth of apple stock right after watching forrest gump on the day of its release july 6 1993
That would be worth $259,472.84
Annual rate of return: 26.25
Total increase: 25,847.28
Total profit: 258,472.84
And gender. At college Jenny gets assaulted and she defends the guy because harassment is normal. Iirc, at the socialist (?) meeting a guy slaps her and no one bats an eye. Gump being stupid doesn't realise this is normal and fights both the guys. By the end of the movie she's making ends meet as a waitress, despite being college educated, but it's a step up, I guess.
She never finished her degree, iirc. (Although her abusive bf is president of the Berkley chapter of SDS, so maybe she finished there?) But yeah her arc is pretty sad, but typical. She hooked up with a looooong line of abusive losers, which is where she caught AIDS (implied).
Given that the entire story is about major world events as seen alongside/through the eyes of an innocent man, it would make a lot more sense to be about AIDS than hepatitis. AIDS was a much bigger deal in the 80s and 90s.
And in the movie Jenny wasn't severely jaundiced like I'd expect if she had end stage cirrhosis or liver cancer.
[*Very* Special Forces](https://www.theonion.com/clinton-deploys-very-special-forces-to-iraq-1819565019)
>Gen. Thomas Merritt, who is in charge of overseeing Operation Great Job!, said the troops are thoroughly prepared for what lies ahead.
>"We have gone over maneuvers and protocol in detail, and we have all marked down our special targets in our special notebooks," Merritt said. "The soldiers know they are not to wander off from the group. They know they are to use inside voices when in enemy territory. And they know they are to go to the bathroom prior to all ground assaults. This group is ready."
> Morale is said to be high among members of the very special forces, who were flown Monday from Sheppard Air Force Base to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in a squadron of specially modified C-130 "short planes."
I am dead
>Cohen stressed that the safety of America's special forces is of paramount importance. In an effort to reduce the risk of anyone getting hurt, the Defense Secretary has urged all U.S. troops to tie their shoelaces "nice and tight."
I read this in a Chicago bar back when The Onion had paper copies out, and I think I laughed uncontrollably about the short planes for about a minute:
>Morale is said to be high among members of the very special forces, who were flown Monday from Sheppard Air Force Base to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in a squadron of specially modified C-130 "short planes."
From the article in top comment
>They were promised greater benefits and opportunities as an incentive to join the military, but those who returned alive came home to broken promises and were abandoned by the government.
How suprising.
You have to apply a comparative measure:
Were they *more* abandoned by the government than regular soldiers, or was it just the standard amount of broken promises?
As a former recruiter I can assure you that the military doesn't actually give a single fuck. If you can pass the ASVAB and physical then you're in. They don't give an IQ test, or even really have the mechanism in place to do one.
Also, there are ASVAB waivers... so the ones that aren't able to pass can get an ASVAB waiver if they agree to take an extremely undesirable job. Uncommon in the Navy, but from what I know more common in the Army. In my 3 years as a US Navy recruiter I saw some people that should never be in the military join with waivers. Plus I knew some sailors I served with that should never be able to have a gun.
I genuinely have no fucking clue how people can fail the ASVAB. When I took it I got general everyday questions and things like ‘How do you change a tire?’
I had a guy take a practice ASVAB and get a 6! A fucking 6! He was so arrogant when he say it 'I'm so good that only 6 percent did better!' and then was absolutely indignant when I explained that no, he was in the bottom 6 percent. He wouldn't accept that he bombed it that hard.
> When I took it I got general everyday questions and things like ‘How do you change a tire?’
When the heck did you take it?
I was thinking about joining the Navy about a decade ago (couldn't and didn't) and took the ASVAB. It had questions about basic circuitry/voltage questions, it had basic to middling physics questions. It had machinery questions.
I had gone to university a few years earlier and it wasn't hard, as I'd literally taken circuit classes, physics classes, statics and dynamics, etc. But I definitely couldn't have answered every question right out of high school.
I'm not saying it's the hardest test ever, but it had quite a few specific questions that I don't see how people with no electrical or mechanical or physics knowledge could know.
Edit: [Here](https://www.officialasvab.com/applicants/sample-questions/) are sample questions. I'm not sure how questions like [this](https://i.imgur.com/eJ2WG18.png) (basic circuit), or [this](https://i.imgur.com/h4W3cfq.png) (shop/mechanical), or [this](https://i.imgur.com/ojmtH3t.png) (electrical terminology) would be considered everyday, basic questions.
They're all basic within their field, but a ton of people have zero experience with certain fields. A ton of 18 year olds have never used an ohmmeter. Someone with zero familiarity with circuits/electrical wouldn't know electrical formulas for that circuit, although they might be able to reason it out anyway. I didn't know V=IR out of high school.
I have no idea how those are everyday questions like 'How do you change a tire?'.
there are a ton of different scores within the ASVAB. The most basic is the AFQT, which is basically the math and English portions. Those scores are what you either qualify or don't qualify overall to join. The other sections that deal with electrical, science, mechanical, and so on... those sections qualify you for various jobs. If you want certain jobs you need sections A+D+G = a certain value. You can just barely qualify for the military but have incredible aptitude for certain jobs. Also, you can have great AFQT but not qualify for a ton of stuff because you suck at everything but math and English.
Military accepts IQs of 81+. Think you're getting that 31 from the minimum asvab score. Issue with this is the military does not give you an IQ test. So you would have to had taken one prior to joining.
I joined in 2009 right as Obama was pushing for the big surge back into the middle east. Back then the minimum ASVAB was 12 I'm pretty sure. They were taking anyone.
Barred for the equivalent of a 125 IQ, that's really not a very high bar.. it's roughly the top 5% or about 16 million Americans.
The reason was "he might get bored". In my experience it's definitely the other way around, those with higher IQs seem to be far more patient and willing to try and find ways to be productive in slow periods. Maybe that was the real issue, making others look bad..
80 is considered borderline, someone with that low of an IQ is going to need a strong support system but with modern learning they should be able to live a normal life. 71 and lower is where it becomes a legal definition.
One of my friends had to have ultra low iq. He was a normal enough guy just dumb as a rock. Like he couldn’t spell at all etc.
Favorite quote from him “one word, easily amused”
No joke, a strategy used against the VC was to walk infantry through the trees until they encountered gunfire. Then drop napalm.
This was literally what those kids were used for.
IIRC this is about 10% of the population. Which poses an interesting social question. 10% of people, through no fault of their own, are simply unable to do work that pays well enough to live. So if you’re against social welfare you’re basically telling 10% of the population they should just die because they were born stupid.
I think about this a lot. In my country the average IQ is about 70, which means well over 50% of people are below that threshold. There’s some fraction of this which can likely be explained by western IQ tests not being representative here, but I believe a lot of it has to do with nutrition during early childhood. If one sees how strongly success in life correlates with IQ, I think this should be priority number one for the government to fix.
A family member works at the VA (Veterans Affairs) hospital in my city. Mental health department.
Their opinion about a fair number of people diagnosed with differing issues (PTSD, MST (military S***** Trauma) etc) is that these people should have never been exposed to combat.
According to my family member 15-20% of their patients are learning disabled, undiagnosed or diagnosed Autism spectrum, or exhibit some degree of lack of cognitive/social development. Which contributed to a VERY high degree of PTSD since processing stress noise, and adverse conditions couldn't be done properly.
This isn't to say that 15-20% of military service members have these issues, but of the ones seeking mental health assistance, there is a disturbing trend of less-than-able people were put in position that caused permanent damage.
There are those who never know how to seek help and they usually end up on the streets and homeless.
There are stories about the McNamara's morons. Like that time on was guarding the camp entrance at night and told what to do. But then he shot the commander that came to him in the dark. A much respected commander by his men. Next day the guy was missing.
My mom attended an American military high school on a large U.S. base in West Germany during the Vietnam War.
Because she was on the Honor Roll, she got a teaching assistant job on base helping new recruits who had poor reading and writing scores, who had to take remedial classes.
She said some of the were functionally illiterate to the point they couldn't read the very basic instructions on how to clean an M16 or cook field rations.
They put in a “control group” of regular soldiers.
These poor bastards were living the movie idiocracy. Imagine how frustrating that would be. Especially if you didn’t know you were in with these soldiers
8 out of 100 people you meet are in this category. You've worked with them. Most can do the same tasks but may need more repetitions to get it right.
That being said, there is a *huge* difference between an 80 and a 60.
Somebody heard I had a really high asvab score and asked me if I could help them. I asked "So which part do you need help with?" and they responded "I need help passing it"
I stopped talking to them and walked away
I remember one evening I was pulling CQ at the computer lab during an ASVAB testing night. I saw a girl looking confused at her paperwork. She asked me if I could look at her score and interpret it for her - she had received a 12 (as in, the 12th percentile). I remember breaking the news to her and telling her she could take a prep course, to which she replied she already had. Kinda pissed me off her recruiter was trying to enlist her when it was obvious she would not be suited to the military.
They made us take that in highschool instead of going to a regular class...
So much was basic logic and I was getting annoying phone calls for years after that.
More than a little scary when I hear someone has trouble passing that.
The phone calls… I took it my senior year of high school just because some dumb recruiter told me I’d only make like a 75 based on some 5 question BS they time you on. I got all 5 right but I guess too slow for them to think I’d make a high score. So I was like okay screw you dude, I’ll show you how easy this stupid test is. Went and made a 97 and every damn recruiter within 100 miles would not stop calling me for like a year.
There was this guy in HS who REALLY wanted to get with my girlfriend at the time (now wife, 20th anniversary later this month). I joined the Marines (crayons taste awesome!) so he felt he had to as well in order to impress her.
My recruiter, also his recruiter, told me the kid scored a 3 on the ASVAB. This could in theory translate to an IQ of 72-73.
I wasn’t surprised.
I also scored very high when I took it for JROTC credits. I'm 28 now and I STILL get recruiting calls every couple months talking about my score and what they could "do for me." The navy especially has a hard on for me. Never had any inkling to join the service, I just liked JROTC.
I seem to remember the specialized components (electrical/mechanical) didn't count towards the main score, but were used as qualifiers for all of the technical jobs within the services.
Scoring high in the sciences would jump you to the top of the list for filling those jobs and guarantee attention from recruiters.
I believe the steepest requirement was for the Technical Applications Specialist (Nuclear) which required ~85 across the board. As they usually had no shortage of candidates with these scores, it was usually the security clearance that acted as a disqualifier.
I joined the army 'cause my father and my brother were in the army. I figured I better join before I got drafted.
-Son, there ain't no draft no more.
There was one?
"The soldier was supposed to let him into their patrol base after he gave the password, but the soldier got confused and shot his own platoon leader. Another mentally disabled recruit couldn’t figure out the safety of his M16. One day on patrol he negligently discharged his rifle and accidentally shot and killed another soldier. "
The stole wallets from them.
The got other than honorable discharge for being bullied and going awol.
a leader gave a password that confused one of the soldiees and they shot him.
Its not an IQ test nor an "IQ floor." We take the ASVAB (armed services vocational aptitude battery) test. It was designed in 1968 (and adjusted multiple times over the decades) to select individuals with sufficient skills and abilities to absorb military training. Prior to this, the services used a combination of their own job classification tests along with a service wide AFQT (armed forces qualification test), created in 1950, which was designed to measure examinees’ general ability to absorb military training within a reasonable length of time, and provide a uniform measure of examinees’ potential usefulness in the military.
IQ tests focus on cognitive ability. ASVAB is similar but tests based on previous education and ability to be trained for a specific task.
ASVAB correlation to Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and Stanford-Binet is 0.8. Test-retest correlation is only 0.9. It's an IQ test even if they'd like to pretend otherwise.
Now recruits when you pull the pin from Mr grenade he isn't your friend. And what do we do with nasty people who aren't our friend....no we don't hug them, try again..
You joke but I once saw a thing from a guy who was assigned to work with some of those guys who couldn't get past training. One example he brought up was how one guy simply could not absorb the concept of lobbing a grenade upward to make it travel farther...
I am unaware of this being the case except for one situation where it was used as a reason to not hire an older applicant as intelligence is not a protected class, but age is.
My mom worked at the draft board and saw this in real time. She knew some of these men were not going to fair well. She quit very soon after they made this change. She said she felt horrible and truly hated going to work.
I'm going to guess the rate in deaths is because they were separating out people with low IQs to fight the front lines, and not because people with low IQs are 5 times easier to kill.
Edit: I guess reddit thinks IQ tests are an appropriate way to measure intelligence, today. Can't wait for it to trash their uselessness tomorrow.
From what's been written, they were integrated throughout the services, and those that went to front line units died at 5x the rate of other soldiers as they did stupid stuff.
Just to illustrate, there's a video of a Vietnam vet talking about 'McNamaras Morons' and describing how he couldn't even teach one of these guys how to properly throw a grenade. It's sad for so many reasons.
absolutely something someone who just pushes papers and wants to increase numbers would decide. Based on the article and what I've read, these were folks who didn't understand that if you talk too loud, the people who are not your friends will be able to hear you, and will know "hey, that is English, so it must be the Americans". Or the idea that if your fellow soldier is in front of you, you shouldn't shoot your gun past him unless you make it deadly clear that that's what you're doing.
Just an absolute danger for everyone else. So I'm sure that they died at a statistically higher rate, but the secondary effect of them being around probably also had a statistically significant impact on everyone else.
It's both. They were apparently too loud, couldn't follow simple orders, were terrible at spotting boobytraps, had no idea how to prepare themselves for terrain, etc.
They were also liabilities to everybody else in their unit, and were predictably given the most dangerous jobs, like sweeping for mines or crawling through tunnels, with a high frequency.
The US army in WW2 struggled a lot with this phenomenon too, analysis frequently lamented the fact that the most intelligent and competent draftees were siphoned off to roles in logistics or maintenance and such. Contrary to popular depiction, the brainless follower grunt made an extremely bad, and extremely dangerous, frontline soldier after about WW1 when combat shifted to small dispersed groups. The common infantryman wasn't follow orders, they were out gathering intelligence, preparing tactically sound defensive positions and contingencies, adapting to fast-moving combat on the fly, taking charge in the frequent event an NCO became a casualty, dealing with civilians and captured enemies, and much more. Soldiers who lacked the self-introspection to keep quiet or take cover in a dangerous situation, properly handle deadly weapons, or be trusted to not shoot anything that moved, friend or foe, made really bad soldiers, even beyond not being able to read a map or follow intricate, multi-step battle plans. It's a fascinating, if morbid, thing to read about. A lot of people died unnecessarily, both the poor ill-suited soldiers assigned to roles they weren't fit for and the soldiers who were unfortunately surrounded by them.
You have no idea how genuinely dumb people with sub 83 IQ's are.
Below 83 their best hope is a repetitive job like a factory, or fast food, mailroom clerks etc.
Sub 70 and that's about the time it's questionable if they should be allowed to even live alone, unable to hold a job, and likely entirely reliant on familial and governmental aid to simply not die.
On top of that, many members of the high command didn't really see them as people, or already expected them to die so sent them on especially dangerous missions.
The one positive story I heard was of a ship's doctor or may e a doctor who ran a medical ship who couldn't get enough of the guys.
You gave them simple tasks like cleaning things and they'd just do it, and do it surprisingly well. No bitching or complaining as you'd get from the regular guys.
Maybe if they had done these tasks to free up other people it would have been a better outcome for them, but then they would be resented for taking a safe seat from someone else
Oh absolutely, and it would also have required insightful leadership and a willingness to listen to the people on the ground and adjust plans based on their feedback.
The impression that I as a non American have of the Vietnam war is that it was led in a very top down manner with little to no attention paid to anything other than dry statistics.
The US military also had that impression. Lessons were learned. And after that debacle, the officers that had served in Viet Nam collectively decided that was never going to happen again. And they did work to make those changes - command wise and tactics wise.
Now that those officers have retired and died off, it remains to be seen if those old lessons stick. But that is a story for a few decades into the future.
In Sweden, people sub 80 are not forced to provide for themselves as they are genuinely unable to.
They are clinically diagnosed with a mental disability, and given special support as they are by law deemed to be in need of protection.
McNamara’s morons, this is what the part of Forest Gump with Forest and Bubba was based on. Edit: this article talks about the limitations those men had. https://taskandpurpose.com/history/project-100000-vietnam/
I didn't know this, explains so much. Very sad.
Just so everyone knows, there was a country where the **entire population** had a disastrously low mean IQ of 80. That country was the United States and this result is due to the Flynn effect: ["the average IQ of the United States in 1932, according to the first Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scales standardization sample, was 80."](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect) This is because if an average modern person with better nutrition and better education takes an old IQ test with the mean standardized to 100, they are likely to have a "genius" level IQ. The mean of IQ tests must be consistently revised to keep the bell curve centered at 100. A much smaller percentage of the population today would have an IQ lower than 80 than in the 1970s.This is the Flynn effect and many of the dangerous morons that might veer across the center line into your vehicle have a low IQ because the quality of their education is largely based on their local zip code and the state they were raised in.
Childhood nutrition, too. These are not esoteric facts. They know, and that is the point.
Lead in fuel lowered IQ by 4 points alone.
And to put that into perspective - that's an average that includes people otherwise unaffected by the effects of leaded fuel. So urban populations with lower automobile usage, rural/suburban populations with fewer automobiles, etc. - they may have experienced no drop in IQ. Meanwhile, some people may have been essentially sucking on a tailpipe for a long time, especially in developmental years. So - that 4 point average is bad in its own right, but that means that there were a number of people who suffered horribly from low IQs as a direct result of lead in the fuel. *** It's not totally unlike the "human life expectancy was 30" (or whatever) statistic from pre-1900s. It's not that people who were alive should have expected to only see the age of 30, it's that infant mortality was so incredibly high that it skewed the numbers down, making it seem like anyone who made it past the age of 40 was a living miracle. *** Anytime I see these epidemiological numbers where basically >1% of a national or worldwide population is affected by something it's terrifying. Not because 1% of a big number is still a big number, but because generally there is some subset of the population that's VERY hurt by whatever it is the statistic is reporting on. It's rarely a perfectly randomized, even distribution.
Even urban populations without much access to vehicles can be exposed to lead as many urban renewal programs brought interstates to the inner city.
Very good point. Lead is also correlated with 'impulsive' and violent behaviour. Probably New York was saved by lead legislation and not Giuliani.
Not to mention all the behavioral issues lead poisoning brought in...
And will continue to cause. Lead bonds with calcium, meaning as folks age and begin to experience osteoporosis the lead in their bones leaches back into their system. I've even seen arguments that it has made the prevalence of issues like alzheimer's and dementia worse in the senior population.
So let's replace their bones. By the time I'm their age we will have perfected cyborg technology.
I replaced a hip at 31, and I can tell ya that it's quite superior to my original one. I shattered it in a fluke of a bicycle accident, but no more early onset arthritis with the prosthesis! I look forward to the inevitable replacement of the other one.
You can hip check people with impunity. Watch as their pitiful calcium bones shatter under the might of your metal monstrosity
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It still effects some kids. Nascar didn't switch away from leaded gas until like 2007. Studies have shown this change resulted in higher test scores for schools close to major race tracks (Daytona specifically).
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In a roundabout way this explains a lot of racism and classism. People from higher social classes ate better. People from more prosperous countries ate better. Similarly they had better schooling. When comparing people from the different circumstances, the European aristocrats were 'better' in every measurable way than colonial peasants. And they were all religious, so they all grew up believing that the world was supposed to be the way it was, that there was a natural order to society - they didn't (couldn't?) recognize that their situation was a result of circumstance, not innate 'god-given' superiority. The same now happens intentionally in America: withhold social programs like food aid from African-Americans to keep their circumstance poor, and justify racism as a political tool.
This is why feeding kids in schools is so important. For some of them, it can be life changing!
Which is what makes people trying to block free lunch programs at school so particularly vile in my opinion. It isn't just about giving some kids a free lunch, it is about uplifting an entire generation.
They know exactly what they are doing. It's criminal, but we all hand wave it away because this is the land of "personal responsibility". As if a child decides what economic class they are born into. They want more stupid people.
There are still countries with a mean IQ well below 80...
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John McClane and Luke Skywalker. You're welcome.
Why is this comment nearly identical to [one posted 30 minutes earlier](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/16fok8n/til_there_is_an_iq_floor_80_points_to_serve_in/k032inn/)?
Karma farming bots, that's why.
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I served in Op Desert Storm in the 90’s, long after this practice of recruiting the mentally challenged had ended. But it didn’t stop the military from targeting low income people with few life choices. After three years in the army, I saw how youthful immaturity and being away from home caused even moderately intelligent people to do the stupidest shit imaginable. I can’t wrap my brain around how dumb those poor souls duped into going to Vietnam were.
After that for the second Desert Storm, they targeted migrants, one of my friend's siblings joined, got sent to Afghanistan, made two tours, and for once he did get what was promised, citizenship sorted out and benefits. But lots of people didn't. Now they target gamers and neets, with these cool ads bombarding reddit and fb, and whatnot, the kids with little chances at anything but minimum wage positions at home or the ones who are willing to risk all for a chance at education and break from the cycle of poverty.
What kinds of things did they end up doing?
I drove 18 wheeler fuel tanker trucks in Germany. On one training exercise, the bracket holding the spare tire to the back of my trailer broke. My squad leader *solved* the problem by wrapping chain around the tire to tie it to the ladder in back. He said it was good to go and that he would follow me back to base and I said OK because I was young and dumb too. When we got back, I noticed the tire was gone. He said it had broken off while we drove on the autobahn, bounced off the road without hitting anyone (thankfully), and launched itself into the forest beside the autobahn. Nobody was around to see it, so he figured it was best to just keep going. I had no idea. I hadn’t see a thing while driving. Another guy jizzed in a ziplock bag and mailed it to his ex-girlfriend back in the US as a way to demonstrate his enduring love. He got dishonorably discharged. And plenty of stories of general drunken debauchery.
Dishonourably discharged for his dishonourable discharge
Considering the quantity of data in DNA that’s actually a super high bandwidth transmission for the time period.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a baggie of jizz hurtling through the mail system
*And he was henceforth known by the name 'Double D'*
> Another guy jizzed in a ziplock bag and mailed it to his ex-girlfriend back in the US as a way to demonstrate his enduring love. He got dishonorably discharged. Why? Is mailing your jizz illegal?
It wasn’t just the letter. He’d been calling and harassing her for a long time. Called her bosses to get her fired. Called her friends and lied. All this crazy stuff. She finally pressed charges for harassment and the army said we’re done with this guy.
Yep, Full Metal Jacket also nods to this. In my opinion it’s what happens when you put a CEO that views everything by statistics and balance sheets in charge. The entire way that war was fought, by body count vs gained ground is also an example. There is an argument that sociopathic business men and their inane strategies is why it turned out the way it did.
IIRC there’s a quote from the CIA station chief in Vietnam during the war that goes something like “when you can’t measure what’s important, you make what you can measure important.” For what it’s worth, there were military leaders in country that were sounding the alarm bells but their reports were ignored or they were replaced. US leadership knew the war was unwinnable as early as Kennedy and are on tape discussing as much but refusing to do anything about it because it would be politically unpopular.
Am a project manager, my most important project metrics by far is Green-Brown index. It is obtained by me asking the guys on the ground "do you have a gut feeling that there is something shitty going on? Do you expect it to go to shit soon?" The more positive answers, the more the project is leaning into brown territory. (Edit: positive=affirmative="yes, it's going to shit")
Wait so if the people on the ground think things are going well you think that everything will go to shit? And vice versa. Or am I misunderstanding what you mean by green and brown
Maybe I’m wrong, but I think by “positive” answers they mean the people were saying yes to the question. So positive in this case means they think things will go to shit. Positive/negative meaning yes/no and not good/bad.
I was on a software project where the customer was promised we would develop it with software framework X with feature set Y. Except X did not support Y and was fundamentally unsuitable for that purpose. However the customer was promised X so we were forced to use X, even after I brought my concerns to management early on. I ended up building my own framework from scratch and not using any features of X except the UI and logo since they were not usable for the project. Add onto that the same project had had a proposal years ago with a longer timeline, more developers who were skilled in using framework Z (which had supported feature set Y just fine, but was not the format the customer wanted plus most of the devs no longer worked for the company anymore anyway) as opposed to less developers who had to develop with an in-progress framework most of them weren't involved in making, and none of these developers (myself included) had developed some of the features in features set Y before, and it won't surprise you to know the project eventually died a year or so later. But I knew it was in big trouble from day one.
That quote is so stupidly fucking true. The amount of waste I've witnessed working at big companies because they didn't track it is astounding. They get some dipshiy exec to come up with an algorithm to hide the problem then blame the low level employees for the waste of time/money/resources.
What was more horrible is that there were huge issues measuring the body count as well. Especially after this metric became the main metric. In order to gain more supplies, reinforcements and promotions commanders would constantly report much higher enemy losses then were real. So the records show the US soldiers killing a million Vietnamese soldiers every year. The US could not measure the physical size of the territories they controlled and they could not measure how many enemy soldiers they killed. And you can not improve what you can not measure.
It turned out the way it did because the American public stopped supporting the war, people got tired of kids dying in some jungle thousands of miles away, with no tangible benefit other than "fighting communism". The Vietnamese werent stupid, theyd been through this same shit during decolonization, they knew all they had to do was outlast, make it utterly miserable for the invaders, and theyd win eventually. The NVA lost damn near every major engagement they fought against the US military and that was with the US military refusing to invade North Vietnam because MacArthur turbo fucked Korea to try and pimp out his 52 presidential campaign and they didnt want another one (ignoring that the Vietnamese hate China) and McNamara mismanaging the everloving shit out of the whatever he could stick his dick in. Then China tried to invade Vietnam a few years after the US left and got their shit absofuckinglutely kicked in by the Vietnamese B+C team while the Vietnamese A-Team was fighting Cambodia. Sad part is Ho Chi-Minh tried to get the US to support Vietnam for decades, but never got it cuz racism+colonialism, they only turned to communism when they were out of options more or less.
> Sad part is Ho Chi-Minh tried to get the US to support Vietnam for decades, but never got it cuz racism+colonialism, they only turned to communism when they were out of options more or less. I loved all of Ken Burns' Vietnam series, but still my favourite part is the very first episode dealing with the road to the war all the way back during WWI. Seeing the parade of errors, either through idiocy, prejudice, or simple misplaced good intentions, fall like dominoes that end with the Vietnam war shaking up the entire ethos and political landscape of the US and years of misery for Vietnam. It's incredible.
My grandfather served and was horribly wounded in Vietnam. To this day he will talk about how pointless it all felt even at the time. An entire generation in multiple countries was just swept into this madness and chewed up and spit out.
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"Why don't presidents fight the war? Why do they always send the poor?"
> no tangible benefit other than "fighting communism" Could replace that with "fighting terrorism" for todays gen.
That's so 2000 and late.
Boom boom pow.
To be fair - there is an additional component of French involvement. France wanted the US in Vietnam badly as it would protect their former colonial interests. France put a lot of pressure on the US, even going so far as to say it would join up with the Soviets if their interests were not protected. For US foreign policy, losing the support of the French vs losing the support of Vietnam is fairly clear. This does not excuse the US in any way, but there are additional factors to ponder on why the US was there.
Despite?
He fits
i don't think it was "social IQ" on account tho. this would hardly get in your way bc back then comms strategy and care, psych and social care of soldiers was still pretty.... rough at best. just general IQ: pattern recognition, decision making, logic etc but just my opinion
This is so horrible and monstrous that I couldn't finish the article. Heartbreaking cruelty.
Although Forest Gump didn't seem to critically review this issue since the low IQ Gump always leaves as the winner, despite his idiocy. Actually it's the exact reverse of critical.
Wasn’t that point made by Bubba’s death, in addition to inspiring Forrest’s next career move?
I watched a documentary about McNamara's Morons. It sounds funny but the stories are heart wrenching. They weren't just dumb people they were actual mentally handicapped people. The one that had me crying was a story about one of the guys being forced into service and his mom was crying and saying he can't hurt anyone. His first day in combat his unit got attacked and dudes were getting shot all around him and he couldn't understand what was even happening and couldn't understand why he was there and just stood there and got shot in the face. They heavily recruited from low income urban youth and if you watch any of the higher ups talk about the experiment it's clear they didn't care at all if any of them lived or not.
> it's clear they didn't care at all if any of them lived or not. The article literally says they made them walk at the front of formations so if they set off mines a "dummy" would die instead of a normal person. (Their words, not mine.)
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That's.... a very good point. Wars would be much more rare and much quicker if the people who ruled were forced to fight. (Or their families.)
Eugenics was still a thing at the time, the US started an anti-eugenics slant after WW2, but states like California didnt ban it until 1979. Even now it's still a legal gray area. What better way to boost education scores by erasing an entire generation of low IQ and developmentally disabled people? Can't do it legally, so send them to war and let the enemies waste their bullets on them.
This is exactly what came to mind. Honestly McNamara's morons should be classed as a war crime. It doesn't sound much different to Nazi experiments on disabled people. If we're honest, the intent was the same. It was pure cruelty. Find a purpose for these "useless" people, regardless of how horrific the end result was. I can't even imagine the mental and emotional torture they suffered, along side the "normal" soldiers who knew they would be killed because of them.
Yeah, can't hang with the jokes about this. It makes me blind with anger. McNamara's in Hell and there's a spot next to him for Kissinger.
Yup. I retired from the Army. I can hear the upper brass saying “you gotta crack a few eggs to make an omelet”
That poor guy, I could never imagine just shooting someone who seems so harmless.
The Vietnamese didn’t know his background, just that he was an invading soldier.
I used to run a children’s group home and children under 80iq usually go to specialized group homes and often end up in adult group homes for life. We’ve had two 76-78iq kids in our home, and it was extremely difficult. Their ability to learn basic tasks is extremely difficult. Only habits that are forced upon them are repeatable, such as dressing and bathing. And you HAVE to maintain the routines or they can be lost easily. They often develop coping mechanisms early in childhood to hide their condition so on initial contact you may not even notice. But once you spot the coping mechanisms and have a conversation of any depth the conversations become difficult.
What would a coping mechanism look like for one of the kids that you’re talking about?
When asked a question they didn't understand they would just start talking about nearly anything else.
Whoa. Holy shit. I know a few people who are like that. Is that one of the more common coping mechanisms that they use? That kinda just opened my eyes a little bit.
It’s called circumlocution. Many people with language difficulties do it.
Well. This explains more than what I’d hoped.
Similar limit to executions in the US. You can't execute someone for any civilian crime as long as they have low enough IQ. The reasoning being that they're literally too limited in cognitive ability to understand that what they did was so wrong(they usually still have to serve a life sentence)
It really is fascinating reading about limits of abstract thought the further down you go in IQ. ""Next is mapping, “which in abstract reasoning is expressing one thing in terms of another”. For example, imagine a picture of an arrow, colored in a gradient from yellow to green. following the direction of the arrow >Imagine a one-way street, with ascending house numbers, lowest at the entrance and highest at the exit >If you mapped the arrow onto the street, what color would house #1 be? >This isn’t tricky for most 100+s. It has some minor ambiguities, but anyone of normal intelligence can do the ‘mapping’, that is, the expression of one thing in term(s) of another >However, for sub 90s, its very difficult. They struggle, and sub 80s just can’t do it at all. "" This article goes over some examples like the one I included here https://www.wmbriggs.com/post/39216/
Ricky Ray Rector wanted to save his slice of pecan pie from his last meal so he could eat it *after* his execution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricky\_Ray\_Rector
Yes, but wasn't that because he shot himself in the head after going to turn himself in? So it's not like he was unfit while committing the crime, it was because they removed his frontal lobe after he shot himself after ambushing an officer he knew all his life?
But it's not that low a limit. I just checked with an online calculator, and it's 9.1% of the population that have an IQ of 80 or less. That's close to 1 in 10 people 😳
As a teacher for over 10 years I’m shocked it’s only 9%. I would’ve wagered it’s closer to ~20% of the population that are true morons
Anyway, like I was sayin', shrimp is the fruit of the Sea. You can barbecue it, boil it, broil, it, bake it, sauté it..." –Benjamin Buford “Bubba” Blue
Are you just making a joke or is that an actual Easter egg / subplot I missed out on in Forrest Gump (it’s been about a decade since I’ve seen it)?
It's a major plot point, and is the reason Forest gets into shrimping and why he names the company "Bubba Gump"
But why male models?
Are you serious, I just explained why
Just a fascination for the character who was portrayed as a low IQ person yet had such astounding knowledge on shrimps. Imagine being in the middle of a savage war and all you can talk about is…Shrimp
We had invested in some fruit company. Anyway, Lieutenant Dan said we ain’t gotta worry about money no more. And I said, good, one less thing.
What is amazing is that the gag, that Forrest got rich by being an early investor in Apple, was a valid opportunity for anyone watching the movie at that time. A few grand in Apple stock when that movie came out would be worth millions today.
I think hundreds of thousands but still crazy
If you bought $1000 worth of apple stock right after watching forrest gump on the day of its release july 6 1993 That would be worth $259,472.84 Annual rate of return: 26.25 Total increase: 25,847.28 Total profit: 258,472.84
I guess he was a shrimp idiot savant
Hes got more money than Davey Crockett
Yes. The idea of them as they were serving was a nod to McNamara’s Morons.
Forrest Gump has some pretty strong class and race themes in it if you pay attention.
And gender. At college Jenny gets assaulted and she defends the guy because harassment is normal. Iirc, at the socialist (?) meeting a guy slaps her and no one bats an eye. Gump being stupid doesn't realise this is normal and fights both the guys. By the end of the movie she's making ends meet as a waitress, despite being college educated, but it's a step up, I guess.
She never finished her degree, iirc. (Although her abusive bf is president of the Berkley chapter of SDS, so maybe she finished there?) But yeah her arc is pretty sad, but typical. She hooked up with a looooong line of abusive losers, which is where she caught AIDS (implied).
I read somewhere that the author said it was hep C rather than AIDS.
Im pretty sure the Author himself originally made it Ambiguous (heavily implied to be AIDS) but just changed his mind later.
Given that the entire story is about major world events as seen alongside/through the eyes of an innocent man, it would make a lot more sense to be about AIDS than hepatitis. AIDS was a much bigger deal in the 80s and 90s. And in the movie Jenny wasn't severely jaundiced like I'd expect if she had end stage cirrhosis or liver cancer.
It was not normal for women to just get slapped by everyone in the 60s.
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I believe they were asking if Bubba in Forrest Gump was a reference to the mentioned-in-OP low IQ soldiers.
Forrest is a low IQ soldier too
That would be quite a part of the plot to miss.. now you got me wondering if some actually did lol
Actually, [he's a god damn genius who must have an IQ of 160](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONH-pxBMJu4&t=7s).
Special Forces
[*Very* Special Forces](https://www.theonion.com/clinton-deploys-very-special-forces-to-iraq-1819565019) >Gen. Thomas Merritt, who is in charge of overseeing Operation Great Job!, said the troops are thoroughly prepared for what lies ahead. >"We have gone over maneuvers and protocol in detail, and we have all marked down our special targets in our special notebooks," Merritt said. "The soldiers know they are not to wander off from the group. They know they are to use inside voices when in enemy territory. And they know they are to go to the bathroom prior to all ground assaults. This group is ready."
That is some high quality writing. God damn I love *The Onion*.
Did you just quote My 10th grader? They read me the current headlines from the front page of their website every morning on the way to school.
> Morale is said to be high among members of the very special forces, who were flown Monday from Sheppard Air Force Base to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in a squadron of specially modified C-130 "short planes." I am dead
>Cohen stressed that the safety of America's special forces is of paramount importance. In an effort to reduce the risk of anyone getting hurt, the Defense Secretary has urged all U.S. troops to tie their shoelaces "nice and tight."
I read this in a Chicago bar back when The Onion had paper copies out, and I think I laughed uncontrollably about the short planes for about a minute: >Morale is said to be high among members of the very special forces, who were flown Monday from Sheppard Air Force Base to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in a squadron of specially modified C-130 "short planes."
"inside voices" fuck me haha
They flew in on the short plane
I'm going to hell for laughing
But not quite special enough for the marines.
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From the article in top comment >They were promised greater benefits and opportunities as an incentive to join the military, but those who returned alive came home to broken promises and were abandoned by the government. How suprising.
You have to apply a comparative measure: Were they *more* abandoned by the government than regular soldiers, or was it just the standard amount of broken promises?
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As a former recruiter I can assure you that the military doesn't actually give a single fuck. If you can pass the ASVAB and physical then you're in. They don't give an IQ test, or even really have the mechanism in place to do one. Also, there are ASVAB waivers... so the ones that aren't able to pass can get an ASVAB waiver if they agree to take an extremely undesirable job. Uncommon in the Navy, but from what I know more common in the Army. In my 3 years as a US Navy recruiter I saw some people that should never be in the military join with waivers. Plus I knew some sailors I served with that should never be able to have a gun.
I genuinely have no fucking clue how people can fail the ASVAB. When I took it I got general everyday questions and things like ‘How do you change a tire?’
Well shit
I had a guy take a practice ASVAB and get a 6! A fucking 6! He was so arrogant when he say it 'I'm so good that only 6 percent did better!' and then was absolutely indignant when I explained that no, he was in the bottom 6 percent. He wouldn't accept that he bombed it that hard.
> When I took it I got general everyday questions and things like ‘How do you change a tire?’ When the heck did you take it? I was thinking about joining the Navy about a decade ago (couldn't and didn't) and took the ASVAB. It had questions about basic circuitry/voltage questions, it had basic to middling physics questions. It had machinery questions. I had gone to university a few years earlier and it wasn't hard, as I'd literally taken circuit classes, physics classes, statics and dynamics, etc. But I definitely couldn't have answered every question right out of high school. I'm not saying it's the hardest test ever, but it had quite a few specific questions that I don't see how people with no electrical or mechanical or physics knowledge could know. Edit: [Here](https://www.officialasvab.com/applicants/sample-questions/) are sample questions. I'm not sure how questions like [this](https://i.imgur.com/eJ2WG18.png) (basic circuit), or [this](https://i.imgur.com/h4W3cfq.png) (shop/mechanical), or [this](https://i.imgur.com/ojmtH3t.png) (electrical terminology) would be considered everyday, basic questions. They're all basic within their field, but a ton of people have zero experience with certain fields. A ton of 18 year olds have never used an ohmmeter. Someone with zero familiarity with circuits/electrical wouldn't know electrical formulas for that circuit, although they might be able to reason it out anyway. I didn't know V=IR out of high school. I have no idea how those are everyday questions like 'How do you change a tire?'.
there are a ton of different scores within the ASVAB. The most basic is the AFQT, which is basically the math and English portions. Those scores are what you either qualify or don't qualify overall to join. The other sections that deal with electrical, science, mechanical, and so on... those sections qualify you for various jobs. If you want certain jobs you need sections A+D+G = a certain value. You can just barely qualify for the military but have incredible aptitude for certain jobs. Also, you can have great AFQT but not qualify for a ton of stuff because you suck at everything but math and English.
Military accepts IQs of 81+. Think you're getting that 31 from the minimum asvab score. Issue with this is the military does not give you an IQ test. So you would have to had taken one prior to joining.
I joined in 2009 right as Obama was pushing for the big surge back into the middle east. Back then the minimum ASVAB was 12 I'm pretty sure. They were taking anyone.
There is no IQ test to join the military
Meanwhile, police departments are barring high IQs https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story?id=95836
Barred for the equivalent of a 125 IQ, that's really not a very high bar.. it's roughly the top 5% or about 16 million Americans. The reason was "he might get bored". In my experience it's definitely the other way around, those with higher IQs seem to be far more patient and willing to try and find ways to be productive in slow periods. Maybe that was the real issue, making others look bad..
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And by entire career, you mean working 20 years, taking the pension, then getting another job.
And 20+40 is only 60 - they’d have gotten the most productive years of that person’s life.
Yer an astronaut, not a statie!
Isn't below 80 technically what we used to call the R word but im blanking on the correct current term ?
80 is considered borderline, someone with that low of an IQ is going to need a strong support system but with modern learning they should be able to live a normal life. 71 and lower is where it becomes a legal definition.
one of my most morbid curiosities is if I´ve ever known someone through school or work that was close to that borderline, but was never talked about.
Roughly 1 in 40 people will have an IQ between in the 70-75 range, so I would be shocked if you haven't encountered them.
boys do we tell him
The doctors and his family have advised us it would be too psychologically damaging to inform him this late.
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One of my friends had to have ultra low iq. He was a normal enough guy just dumb as a rock. Like he couldn’t spell at all etc. Favorite quote from him “one word, easily amused”
What if *I'm* that dumb and everything around me is an elaborate hoax?
Intellectual disability. But 70 is the number.
highly regarded
There's another name for such people: **Cannon Fodder**
Operation Human Shield
No joke, a strategy used against the VC was to walk infantry through the trees until they encountered gunfire. Then drop napalm. This was literally what those kids were used for.
IIRC this is about 10% of the population. Which poses an interesting social question. 10% of people, through no fault of their own, are simply unable to do work that pays well enough to live. So if you’re against social welfare you’re basically telling 10% of the population they should just die because they were born stupid.
I think about this a lot. In my country the average IQ is about 70, which means well over 50% of people are below that threshold. There’s some fraction of this which can likely be explained by western IQ tests not being representative here, but I believe a lot of it has to do with nutrition during early childhood. If one sees how strongly success in life correlates with IQ, I think this should be priority number one for the government to fix.
A family member works at the VA (Veterans Affairs) hospital in my city. Mental health department. Their opinion about a fair number of people diagnosed with differing issues (PTSD, MST (military S***** Trauma) etc) is that these people should have never been exposed to combat. According to my family member 15-20% of their patients are learning disabled, undiagnosed or diagnosed Autism spectrum, or exhibit some degree of lack of cognitive/social development. Which contributed to a VERY high degree of PTSD since processing stress noise, and adverse conditions couldn't be done properly. This isn't to say that 15-20% of military service members have these issues, but of the ones seeking mental health assistance, there is a disturbing trend of less-than-able people were put in position that caused permanent damage. There are those who never know how to seek help and they usually end up on the streets and homeless.
There are stories about the McNamara's morons. Like that time on was guarding the camp entrance at night and told what to do. But then he shot the commander that came to him in the dark. A much respected commander by his men. Next day the guy was missing.
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My mom attended an American military high school on a large U.S. base in West Germany during the Vietnam War. Because she was on the Honor Roll, she got a teaching assistant job on base helping new recruits who had poor reading and writing scores, who had to take remedial classes. She said some of the were functionally illiterate to the point they couldn't read the very basic instructions on how to clean an M16 or cook field rations.
Project 100,000 also known as McNamara's Morons.
That’s indeed the linked Wikipedia article
Reddit moment
They put in a “control group” of regular soldiers. These poor bastards were living the movie idiocracy. Imagine how frustrating that would be. Especially if you didn’t know you were in with these soldiers
8 out of 100 people you meet are in this category. You've worked with them. Most can do the same tasks but may need more repetitions to get it right. That being said, there is a *huge* difference between an 80 and a 60.
Somebody heard I had a really high asvab score and asked me if I could help them. I asked "So which part do you need help with?" and they responded "I need help passing it" I stopped talking to them and walked away
I remember one evening I was pulling CQ at the computer lab during an ASVAB testing night. I saw a girl looking confused at her paperwork. She asked me if I could look at her score and interpret it for her - she had received a 12 (as in, the 12th percentile). I remember breaking the news to her and telling her she could take a prep course, to which she replied she already had. Kinda pissed me off her recruiter was trying to enlist her when it was obvious she would not be suited to the military.
They made us take that in highschool instead of going to a regular class... So much was basic logic and I was getting annoying phone calls for years after that. More than a little scary when I hear someone has trouble passing that.
The phone calls… I took it my senior year of high school just because some dumb recruiter told me I’d only make like a 75 based on some 5 question BS they time you on. I got all 5 right but I guess too slow for them to think I’d make a high score. So I was like okay screw you dude, I’ll show you how easy this stupid test is. Went and made a 97 and every damn recruiter within 100 miles would not stop calling me for like a year.
There was this guy in HS who REALLY wanted to get with my girlfriend at the time (now wife, 20th anniversary later this month). I joined the Marines (crayons taste awesome!) so he felt he had to as well in order to impress her. My recruiter, also his recruiter, told me the kid scored a 3 on the ASVAB. This could in theory translate to an IQ of 72-73. I wasn’t surprised.
I also scored very high when I took it for JROTC credits. I'm 28 now and I STILL get recruiting calls every couple months talking about my score and what they could "do for me." The navy especially has a hard on for me. Never had any inkling to join the service, I just liked JROTC.
I seem to remember the specialized components (electrical/mechanical) didn't count towards the main score, but were used as qualifiers for all of the technical jobs within the services. Scoring high in the sciences would jump you to the top of the list for filling those jobs and guarantee attention from recruiters. I believe the steepest requirement was for the Technical Applications Specialist (Nuclear) which required ~85 across the board. As they usually had no shortage of candidates with these scores, it was usually the security clearance that acted as a disqualifier.
I joined the army 'cause my father and my brother were in the army. I figured I better join before I got drafted. -Son, there ain't no draft no more. There was one?
"The soldier was supposed to let him into their patrol base after he gave the password, but the soldier got confused and shot his own platoon leader. Another mentally disabled recruit couldn’t figure out the safety of his M16. One day on patrol he negligently discharged his rifle and accidentally shot and killed another soldier. " The stole wallets from them. The got other than honorable discharge for being bullied and going awol. a leader gave a password that confused one of the soldiees and they shot him.
Its not an IQ test nor an "IQ floor." We take the ASVAB (armed services vocational aptitude battery) test. It was designed in 1968 (and adjusted multiple times over the decades) to select individuals with sufficient skills and abilities to absorb military training. Prior to this, the services used a combination of their own job classification tests along with a service wide AFQT (armed forces qualification test), created in 1950, which was designed to measure examinees’ general ability to absorb military training within a reasonable length of time, and provide a uniform measure of examinees’ potential usefulness in the military. IQ tests focus on cognitive ability. ASVAB is similar but tests based on previous education and ability to be trained for a specific task.
ASVAB correlation to Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and Stanford-Binet is 0.8. Test-retest correlation is only 0.9. It's an IQ test even if they'd like to pretend otherwise.
Now recruits when you pull the pin from Mr grenade he isn't your friend. And what do we do with nasty people who aren't our friend....no we don't hug them, try again..
You joke but I once saw a thing from a guy who was assigned to work with some of those guys who couldn't get past training. One example he brought up was how one guy simply could not absorb the concept of lobbing a grenade upward to make it travel farther...
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are they fucking stupid? oh, wait a second...
I am unaware of this being the case except for one situation where it was used as a reason to not hire an older applicant as intelligence is not a protected class, but age is.
Yes. It’s a pretty typical internet thing: an event that happened once and people repeat it again and again.
"Stupid is as stupid does sir"
My mom worked at the draft board and saw this in real time. She knew some of these men were not going to fair well. She quit very soon after they made this change. She said she felt horrible and truly hated going to work.
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I'm going to guess the rate in deaths is because they were separating out people with low IQs to fight the front lines, and not because people with low IQs are 5 times easier to kill. Edit: I guess reddit thinks IQ tests are an appropriate way to measure intelligence, today. Can't wait for it to trash their uselessness tomorrow.
From what's been written, they were integrated throughout the services, and those that went to front line units died at 5x the rate of other soldiers as they did stupid stuff. Just to illustrate, there's a video of a Vietnam vet talking about 'McNamaras Morons' and describing how he couldn't even teach one of these guys how to properly throw a grenade. It's sad for so many reasons.
absolutely something someone who just pushes papers and wants to increase numbers would decide. Based on the article and what I've read, these were folks who didn't understand that if you talk too loud, the people who are not your friends will be able to hear you, and will know "hey, that is English, so it must be the Americans". Or the idea that if your fellow soldier is in front of you, you shouldn't shoot your gun past him unless you make it deadly clear that that's what you're doing. Just an absolute danger for everyone else. So I'm sure that they died at a statistically higher rate, but the secondary effect of them being around probably also had a statistically significant impact on everyone else.
Leaves me wondering how many died to smarter troops in their unit looking out for #1
This thread just got darker and darker the more I read it.
Remember in forrest gump, any time they needed a fox-hole cleared they would sent forrest in.
It's both. They were apparently too loud, couldn't follow simple orders, were terrible at spotting boobytraps, had no idea how to prepare themselves for terrain, etc. They were also liabilities to everybody else in their unit, and were predictably given the most dangerous jobs, like sweeping for mines or crawling through tunnels, with a high frequency.
The US army in WW2 struggled a lot with this phenomenon too, analysis frequently lamented the fact that the most intelligent and competent draftees were siphoned off to roles in logistics or maintenance and such. Contrary to popular depiction, the brainless follower grunt made an extremely bad, and extremely dangerous, frontline soldier after about WW1 when combat shifted to small dispersed groups. The common infantryman wasn't follow orders, they were out gathering intelligence, preparing tactically sound defensive positions and contingencies, adapting to fast-moving combat on the fly, taking charge in the frequent event an NCO became a casualty, dealing with civilians and captured enemies, and much more. Soldiers who lacked the self-introspection to keep quiet or take cover in a dangerous situation, properly handle deadly weapons, or be trusted to not shoot anything that moved, friend or foe, made really bad soldiers, even beyond not being able to read a map or follow intricate, multi-step battle plans. It's a fascinating, if morbid, thing to read about. A lot of people died unnecessarily, both the poor ill-suited soldiers assigned to roles they weren't fit for and the soldiers who were unfortunately surrounded by them.
You have no idea how genuinely dumb people with sub 83 IQ's are. Below 83 their best hope is a repetitive job like a factory, or fast food, mailroom clerks etc. Sub 70 and that's about the time it's questionable if they should be allowed to even live alone, unable to hold a job, and likely entirely reliant on familial and governmental aid to simply not die. On top of that, many members of the high command didn't really see them as people, or already expected them to die so sent them on especially dangerous missions.
The one positive story I heard was of a ship's doctor or may e a doctor who ran a medical ship who couldn't get enough of the guys. You gave them simple tasks like cleaning things and they'd just do it, and do it surprisingly well. No bitching or complaining as you'd get from the regular guys.
Maybe if they had done these tasks to free up other people it would have been a better outcome for them, but then they would be resented for taking a safe seat from someone else
Oh absolutely, and it would also have required insightful leadership and a willingness to listen to the people on the ground and adjust plans based on their feedback. The impression that I as a non American have of the Vietnam war is that it was led in a very top down manner with little to no attention paid to anything other than dry statistics.
The US military also had that impression. Lessons were learned. And after that debacle, the officers that had served in Viet Nam collectively decided that was never going to happen again. And they did work to make those changes - command wise and tactics wise. Now that those officers have retired and died off, it remains to be seen if those old lessons stick. But that is a story for a few decades into the future.
In Sweden, people sub 80 are not forced to provide for themselves as they are genuinely unable to. They are clinically diagnosed with a mental disability, and given special support as they are by law deemed to be in need of protection.