An absurd Navy training video teaching sailors to respect gender pronouns has leaked and it is making its rounds on the internet and other media. Sadly, few are now surprised that our military spends its training time indoctrinating members in how to create a safe and inclusive environment. What is truly striking about the video, however, is its juvenile nature. The background set features the horrific flat-human art that has become ubiquitous in all government and corporate HR propaganda. The hosts are terribly awkward and use the stilted yet patronizing speech of a 1980s after-school special repurposed to push the woke agenda. It serves as a reminder that even the most serious and critical institutions in our nation are subject to the buffoonish social codes that now define every human interaction.
It also has the advantage of serving no other purpose. Covid masks make/made a good marker of allegiance, but are justified in some minds as having legit utility. Doing something explicitly retarded makes you admit to yourself and others that you're just a thrall. The old X-Wing series once theorized that this was why the Emperor named all his Star Destroyers "The Domestic Abuser" and whatnot.
The downside is that this takes the elite a step closer to upgrading their street enforcers from random punks to uniformed and uniformed brute squads. The upside is this pants-on-head behavior might be a boon to us. If tens of thousands of essentially normal people get ejected from the hierarchy, what can they do except parallelism?
The regime is gambling, whether it knows it or not, that its technology and processes are advanced enough that they can afford to jettison the worthwhile people. We'll see.
I find it helpful to conceptualize the political opposition as extremely cunning - they're always up to something, especially when it seems non threatening.
One dynamic I think about frequently is why organizing by ideology and narrative has been so effective for them. Most political movements across both space and time don't organize by ideology. Any sort of organization by tribe, nation, class, race, social club, labor union, etc. isn't really ideological. And as has been pointed out many times, D & R didn't used to be ideological coalitions.
But in the modern US - it's ideology everywhere. What gives?
Presumably there are lots of different reasons, but one I think about often is that it allows for subversive organization - difficult for outsiders to correctly perceive.
So for example if I'm a Sikh, organized with other Sikhs into a political movement, there's sort of no way to disguise that. Everyone can see what I'm doing, and everyone that isn't a Sikh can reasonably guess that we will have some level of diverging interests. If we go out and do a big rally, everyone keeps an eye on us instinctively.
But if I organize around a nonthreatening "bromide" ideology, like women's rights (everyone likes women, don't they?) it allows me to build infrastructure, organization, and political energy in plain sight and have little to no pushback. Then, once I've "charged up", I can pick specific political objectives and declare them "women's issues" and then put my organization to work in ways that political opposition may not be well prepared for.
So to bring that back to this piece, one element of "speaking nonsense" is that it hides political organization. Average people look at the nonsense and don't see anything threatening - but that's only because the political capacitor is being charged and hasn't been wired up yet.
It's sort of a way of hiding in plain sight while building a political movement. Build the army pretending it's organized around nonsense, and then once it's at scale, the ringleaders convert to non-nonsense objectives and catch the rest of society off guard.
Knowingly commiting to lies corrupts your soul.
It also has the advantage of serving no other purpose. Covid masks make/made a good marker of allegiance, but are justified in some minds as having legit utility. Doing something explicitly retarded makes you admit to yourself and others that you're just a thrall. The old X-Wing series once theorized that this was why the Emperor named all his Star Destroyers "The Domestic Abuser" and whatnot.
The downside is that this takes the elite a step closer to upgrading their street enforcers from random punks to uniformed and uniformed brute squads. The upside is this pants-on-head behavior might be a boon to us. If tens of thousands of essentially normal people get ejected from the hierarchy, what can they do except parallelism?
The regime is gambling, whether it knows it or not, that its technology and processes are advanced enough that they can afford to jettison the worthwhile people. We'll see.
I find it helpful to conceptualize the political opposition as extremely cunning - they're always up to something, especially when it seems non threatening.
One dynamic I think about frequently is why organizing by ideology and narrative has been so effective for them. Most political movements across both space and time don't organize by ideology. Any sort of organization by tribe, nation, class, race, social club, labor union, etc. isn't really ideological. And as has been pointed out many times, D & R didn't used to be ideological coalitions.
But in the modern US - it's ideology everywhere. What gives?
Presumably there are lots of different reasons, but one I think about often is that it allows for subversive organization - difficult for outsiders to correctly perceive.
So for example if I'm a Sikh, organized with other Sikhs into a political movement, there's sort of no way to disguise that. Everyone can see what I'm doing, and everyone that isn't a Sikh can reasonably guess that we will have some level of diverging interests. If we go out and do a big rally, everyone keeps an eye on us instinctively.
But if I organize around a nonthreatening "bromide" ideology, like women's rights (everyone likes women, don't they?) it allows me to build infrastructure, organization, and political energy in plain sight and have little to no pushback. Then, once I've "charged up", I can pick specific political objectives and declare them "women's issues" and then put my organization to work in ways that political opposition may not be well prepared for.
So to bring that back to this piece, one element of "speaking nonsense" is that it hides political organization. Average people look at the nonsense and don't see anything threatening - but that's only because the political capacitor is being charged and hasn't been wired up yet.
It's sort of a way of hiding in plain sight while building a political movement. Build the army pretending it's organized around nonsense, and then once it's at scale, the ringleaders convert to non-nonsense objectives and catch the rest of society off guard.