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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   30516 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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so why the race to bend the knee all of a sudden?

taps sign

Because the State Department and the CIA were looking at the dwindling military recruitment numbers in light of an imminent great power conflict, and decided that wokeness was becoming a liability to empire and had to go.

Wokeness is a great ideology for an empire standing at Fukuyama’s end of history, when the main priority is global resource extraction and the only threats are threats from within. It gives infinite excuses for neo-colonialist wars overseas (those tribals in the mountains need to be enlightened about trans rights and feminism by the application of a few 2000 lb JDAMs). It also gives infinite excuses to repress political opposition at home (we have to destroy democracy in order to save Our Democracy). There’s a reason the Obama administration decided to retool the entire military around counter insurgency, and it wasn’t just for conflicts in the Middle East. The military was literally running war games about how they were going to “pacify” troublesome towns in middle America. The only “conspiracy” part about the Jade Helm conspiracy theory was whether Obama was actually planning on using the many many contingency plans that had been drawn up to turn the Midwest into one giant Chechnya, not whether those plans had been made. The military would be turned into a politicized Syria/Iraq style Republican Guard, and minimized in size to make it easier for the political branches to control. Politically unreliable demographics would be driven out and replaced with ones that could be counted on to open fire on the plebes of it ever became necessary.

Unfortunately, all of that stuff is a giant liability when you actually have to think about fighting another country. When Russian tanks rolled over the ceasefire line in the Donbas and Chinese fleets started conducting practice encirclements of Taiwan, the US military establishment started shitting bricks when it realized that the nu-military would last about three weeks in that kind of conflict. There is no buy-in from the civilian population, so no one wants to join anymore. A draft would be a a complete non starter because everyone now realizes how much the government despises them. All the old patriotic illusions are gone. So now the deep state is scrambling to try and do damage control to get everyone back in line.

I don’t think they’re enthusiastic about working with Trump but I think they prefer it to the French Revolution nightmare scenario of an existential overseas foreign conflict running simultaneously with a hot civil war at home. Especially given that unlike back in 2010, if a civil war kicked off now, all parties involved would suddenly be getting mysterious crates of military equipment with Cyrillic writing all over them.

The military was literally running war games about how they were going to “pacify” troublesome towns in middle America. The only “conspiracy” part about the Jade Helm conspiracy theory was whether Obama was actually planning on using the many many contingency plans that had been drawn up to turn the Midwest into one giant Chechnya, not whether those plans had been made.

Where is a good place to read about these war games? Are these contingency plans documented somewhere?

If it's the war games I'm thinking of, these are random towns that get picked to play not-Iraqi villages in wargames because they happen to be located the right distance from the military bases in question. It's a thing that exists but it isn't about oppressing Americans, it's about practicing winning over local powerbrokers in the next pointless middle eastern forever war.

taps sign

here is the sign hosted on kiwifarms so nsfw categorically

The possible (if they succeeded at supplanting their enemies) new elite is much more hawkish on China, at least rhetorically, than the clueless one that's on the way out.

But war..yeah, could break out. But barring an unlikely military/industrial renaissance- the entire military procurement market is as corrupt as the legacy space launch was-, such hot conflict could only go one way.

I guess they're banking on AI being able to do what Soros, NED and Gene Sharp couldn't.

It gives infinite excuses for neo-colonialist wars overseas (those tribals in the mountains need to be enlightened about trans rights and feminism by the application of a few 2000 lb JDAMs)

Woke people in the west would be exactly the demographic to fetishize such communities and most vocally oppose bombing them.

If the woke were intellectually honest/consistant perhaps this would be the case, but this has not been the case historically.

Yes, I think the Columbia pro-Palestine protests were worrying to the establishment because it showed that the younger generations actually wanted an internally consistent and strict application of woke ideology and weren’t content to just go in whatever direction they were pointed in.

How did that George Floyd mural make it to Kabul then?

Found this on Stupidpol Reddit:

In any given country with a very strong religious culture and extreme certainty about its values, traditions and beliefs, there will usually be some small group of people who live entirely off social media and Western liberal thought.

In this case the mural was painted by something called Artlords, set up by Omaid Sharifi, a British Council staff member, Atlantic Council fellow, and holder of a (Donald) Rumsfeld fellowship.

So essentially these are people paid large amounts of money in local terms to express the values of the West in those countries. They will enjoy the patronage of Western media, and we won't really hear the authentic beliefs of the local population, who, typically, hold extreme far-right social views by Western standards but this is obfuscated by using these convenient brown people who the actual residents of the country have never heard of and don't agree with on any matter at all.

The Artlords stuff got lots of fawning coverage from Western liberals, but the fact that it has a George Floyd mural tells you how inauthentic it is.

Sharifi of course is safely in Dubai having fled the country asap

Either deliberate policy(which could well be local allies aping something going on in the US, maybe without knowledge of why it's absurd), or black soldiers who don't necessarily buy into the rest of wokeness but unironically believe anti-black racism is a major problem killing hundreds of black men at the hands of police violence(and make no mistake- this idea originates in the black community itself, not from academia. Academic theoreticians have the good sense to make their incorrect mental models of the world non-falsifiable, eg trans stuff. The black community already unironically believed that racially motivated police violence was a huge problem with a large bodycount being covered up by anti-black racism in society at large; SJWs were late to the bandwagon.)

Probably because there are black people in the military? I think if you polled people who had been on a BLM protest the vast majority would oppose the US having any presence in Kabul.

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