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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30044 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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John Carter: The Bud Light Military
(Or, to use the better title from the comments: "Achilles Shrugged")

I'm not familiar with the author, who seems to be yet another online right substackker. He asserts that America's military capabilities are being stretched increasingly thin (Ukraine, possibly Israel, potentially Taiwan) while the armed forces are missing their recruiting targets. This is the background to his main claim: that the core demographics of America's fighting force ("the Scots-Irish of the Appalachian regions, the good ol’ boys of the South, and the farm boys of the Midwest. Hillbillies and rednecks") have become so sick of the sneering racist abuse that they aren't signing up to fight any more, and while the US Army has tried to go back to a more "traditional" style of ad where white men parachute out of a helicopter, it's failed to bring back the volunteers. Carter compares a previous ad for the US Army ("Emma", the girl with two moms who operates Patriot missile defense systems, roundly mocked at the time by comparisons to a Russian recruiting ad) to the new ad that dropped on 11/6, "Jump" (Twitter, YouTube). Carter parallels it with the attempt at brand rehabilitation like the one Bud Light tried after the Dylan Mulvaney boycott, and if the comment sections of Twitter, YouTube, and his article are anything to go by, it's not going to work either.

There's nothing the military could really do. While tempting for my own biases, "recruitment is down because woke institutions alienated poor conservative whites and catered to effete progressives" doesn't eat like a full meal to me. The woke ads didn't help, sure. And it also doesn't help that the current ruling ideology of the USA skims close to condemning the USA's very history and existence.

But fundamentally, the nationstate is past its expiration date. People need to belong to a tribe. Historically, the local church, one's birth neighborhood, and the ethnic nation filled that void, but now the internet exists. Globalization happened. These forces have channeled people into particularist tribes which are divorced from their geographic location.

So today, you can find people who would be willing to fight and die for LGBT rights, the white race, or classical liberalism if such armies were recruiting. Not so many willing to die for their hometown of Mobile, Alabama.

I expect militaries to regress to a pre-Napoleonic model in the future: an elite professional core with mercenaries who are in it for the cash and prizes.

Militaries cannot return to the pre-Napoleonic model because we don't live in a pre-Napoleonic economy. The median 17th century Irishman had basically zero choices for personal advancement other than military adventure. Whereas nowadays, particularly in the US, it's not that hard to make money without getting shot at or having to deploy to the Middle East.

In pre-Napoleonic militaries, mercenaries were often foreigners, in particularly the Swiss (poor region and neutral, so it was unlikely that they would stab you in the back). The US can just hire South Americans or such. Perhaps with citizenship as a reward.

Isn’t that how the US has worked since Vietnam killed all desire for a draft? A professional core of career soldiers, but also a bunch of single-tour grunts. It looks like the reenlistment rate is anywhere from 40 to 70 percent depending on service. And “cash and prizes” definitely have a lot to do with it. Unless you specifically mean plunder and pillage rather than state incentives?

There’s also the mandatory service model (Singapore, Korea, Switzerland…). It guarantees a constant supply of fresh recruits, but still requires a professional core. No hope of plunder there, though.

Really, I think the only time you don’t get this professional/mercenary distinction is under conscription.

Nobody cares about this country anymore. We live in a country where people just want to take without giving anything back. There has always been some of this in every society, but today it's endemic in the West. Even without the mass immigration and anti-white propaganda this author is worried about, I don't think people would be joining the military. There was a 9/11 bump and I think there was still a bit of the old spirit of America in millenials and gen x, but those days are gone now and they aren't coming back. I honestly think if 9/11 happened today, half this country would say we deserved it. I'm part of the problem too since I'm doing literally nothing about this except complain on the internet.

I was watching some random youtube recommendation, and they were talking about Britain not meeting recruiting targets either. And one of them quipped "Nobody wants to fight and die for an economic zone."

I may not have gotten the words precisely the way they said them.

All the same, it hit the mark for me. You fight and die for a nation. A nation that performs some combination of representing and defending your values, family, and prosperity. These days the governments of our open borders economic zones actively undermine our values, attack our families, and pillage our future.

That's a bit of an over-simplification, isn't it? Mercenaries have been a thing all through history, but it's an economic zone isn't going to inspire a volunteer army.

Why should I not simply open the gates of the city if I feel that the rule of my external enemy would be less repressive than the enemy that already rules over me?

(Alternately: if the women aren't putting out for me, what would the enemy fucking them change? If I don't fight, I'll probably survive; if the enemy is more enlightened than my culture so much the better for me. The women can defend themselves- they keep asserting they can anyway.)

This is the defining question of what a nation is. The fact that Western societies aren't currently at war with each other (mostly because they're American protectorates, but also because nobody's managed to onshore the resources and manufacturing know-how to be able to credibly threaten their neighbors) is ultimately what has allowed the vast majority of those nations to be consumed by what is, at a population level, husband vs. wife power struggles.

An economic zone that cannot or will not pay its soldiers sufficiently well that they are willing to fight because the pay is worth it considering the risk does not deserve the name of "economic zone". It's legitimate for economic zones to exist, and there are benefits of being an economic zone rather than a nation, but if a geopolitical body goes that route they should not expect to reap the benefits of being an economic zone while getting culturally-unified-nation levels of devotion in their armed forces.

The opening image, quote and first sentence are like a parody of these pretentious dissident right bloggers.

I think the article is big on Vibes, Narrative, and Metaphor but pretty light on reason or evidence. If you buy all the authors premises its a nice polemic but as someone skeptical I found basically nothing in it convincing.

What sort of statistical evidence do you need? There's a lot of objective fact in there - recruiting issues among specific demographics are not exactly "vibes", and I don't think anyone disagrees that this phenomenon is taking place. This is one attempt to provide an explanation, and it matches up extremely well with a lot of the comments made by people in the demographics that aren't showing up for military service.

Where does the article cite to any evidence, or provide any numbers, to demonstrate the "recruiting issues among specific demographics?" As far as I can tell its only external links are to an army ad and Twitter reaction.

Sorry, you're completely right - I'd been doing some research on this anyway and my mind simply matched the claims in the article to the reports I'd been reading. The army is set to fall 15,000 recruits short this year, and there's been a lot of discussion about the issue in public. https://www.military.com/daily-news/2023/10/13/big-bonuses-relaxed-policies-new-slogan-none-of-it-saved-military-recruiting-crisis-2023.html is one article containing a lot of words about it, but finding actual direct statistics is proving annoying because I don't think information behind paywalls is worth citing. One of the bigger areas the military directly complained about is their recruiting from people who have military family members - that's in large part the demographic that the article is talking about.

I did not enlist in the military when I was younger because I did not make the cut medically, even after carefully tailoring my statements to be not-exactly-lies as my recruiter instructed. As such, I have no firsthand information on this topic.

With that disclaimer out of the way, I do have some interesting secondhand information about this topic. I have quite a few friends and family who are active military, and every single one of them has told me that the higher-ups are pushing pretty much anyone who can string two words together into a sentence to move into recruiting. I have a few coworkers who did their time and got out who are receiving attractive offers to go back into the service, but specifically as recruiters.

While those facts could be coincidence, it does suggest there's a level of concern brewing in the upper ranks.

As @JTarrou mentioned below:

But there might be a kernel of truth that the sort of people who generally staff the pointy bits of the military are increasingly skeptical of their role as the enforcers of a world order that is explicitly hostile to them, their families, states, politics and demographics.

The gym where I lift has a pretty hard driving, ooh-rah, red-white-and-blue bloooded, America Fuck Yeah clientele. In the last three years, I've heard far more anti-government and anti-military sentiment than I had in the decade prior. A lot of it seems to stem from the fact that the COVID vaccine mandate, whether intentionally or not, was a de facto soft purge of that kind of person. I've heard the literal phrase "die for Israel" come out of more than one recent high-school graduate's mouth at as they hang around the squat rack.

This is anecdotal, but I spent the weekend with deep red tribe boomercons who just a few years ago would have been talking about the need to hit Iran before they can hit us- the sentiment was that the USA is fucked up and overextended with a government that’s increasingly telling lies to try to drag out their time before the music stops, foreign entanglements are mostly wrongheaded, and the government is as hostile to its own people as to anyone else. ‘Crimea is part of Russia but I don’t like Russia. Ukraine needs to admit they lost.’ ‘Israel is a wealthy country and should pay cash for their weapons.’ ‘The government and the media lie to us about race to cover up for the dysfunction in black culture, why should we take the blame for it? Without whites they’d be living in mud huts, or be someone else’s slaves.’ ‘The government is importing as many illegals as possible to make it look like economic growth so they can get away with running up a deficit.’

Just a few years ago it would be ‘the economy will get better, all this gay stuff’ll blow over, we need to hem Russia in on the world stage’. The red tribe disillusionment with the federal government is real, and since recruiting is mostly from the red tribe, I’d be shocked if it wasn’t affecting recruiting.

With that disclaimer out of the way, I do have some interesting secondhand information about this topic. I have quite a few friends and family who are active military, and every single one of them has told me that the higher-ups are pushing pretty much anyone who can string two words together into a sentence to move into recruiting.

Yep. They just hey-you-ed a bunch of people trying to fill recruiting ranks.

I didn't read the substack in question and don't have a particular opinion on it, but from personal discussions / observations / distant review, the issue is more the aging-out/retering cohort's effect on military families and communities.

While there is a core demographic argument, the demographic is more regional/cultural than demographic per see. South/MidWest/etc. have always been over-represented. The thing the OP's summary paragraph doesn't seem to address is that a lot of enlistment is from military families/communities, rather than blank regional. I forgot the statistics precisely, but in generally any country you go you're likely to see far more volunteers from people with parents/grandparents who were in the military than a random first-generation enlistment. There's a family, not just demographic, dynamic in play, which means if the family member advises against rather than for the enlistment... well, 'I'll join the military' isn't exactly social rebellion.

The issue for the US's current recruitment woes comes from how the generational transition has matched to politics. The 9-11 recruitment cohort is dead, dead, dead. If you look at age averages, the vast majority of US service members were born after 9-11. If you joined just after 9-11, you are that tiny minority of people who serve a full 20 (for a pension) or go beyond. That means people who joined during the Bush years, have gradually and progressively lost during the Obama years / saw the Trump years / are back in the Obama 2.0/Biden years. There's any number of things that could justify a feeling of disenchantment, from perceptions of futility of the wars, to the progression culture war aspects into military culture/life, and so on.

This is purely anecdoctal, but the straw that broke the back for some life-longers was how the Biden administration approached the Covid vaccine mandates. The US military, like many in the world, is legally allowed to employ experimental medicines / vaccines on the forces. US troops have been used not only for experimental medical treaments, but also as medical experiment test subjects in the past. When the Biden administration decided to make Covid vaccines mandatory for all forces no matter what, they weren't on particularly legally shakey ground.

What they did run aground on, however, was the disparity between culture war politics and needs-based buy-in. Whatever your competence-expectation for the average junior soldier, US career military professionals are career professionals. They are not only educated, but educated with an eye to practical implications and effects and cross-specialty coordination that many topic-focused specialists are not. And the politically inconvenient facts of COVID- such as that it was not a death plague for the young and the healthy (which most of the armed forces are) or the sort of politically-influenced media pressures were being used in a propagandaist fashion (which the military is above-average aware of as both a target and a perpetrator of) or active suppression of inconvenient medical dissent (which the more conservative-tuned military would be more aware of)- where thus part of the awareness environment even as the administration used brute force command-control precisions to not only demand, but overrule requests for exceptions despite cases of special forces personnel (a highly respect internal community) requesting exceptions for practical concerns, religious personnel requesting exceptions on religious grounds (which have variously been respected in the past), and so on. The evidence that the Covid vaccine wasn't even stopping transitions- and as such not making self-vaccination a breakwater to protect others- undermined a public good argument that the pandemic would end once everyone was vaccinated to stop transmissions. Instead, it was pure formal power demands on institutions of people who are explicitly trained on formal versus informal power dynamics as part of good-leadership training on the assumption that demands from compliance on basis of formal authority is bad leadership. Instead, people that people knew- people with long terms of service, unquestioned loyalty, generally high levels of competence, people who had put up with the worst of the military life and some of the worst strategic decisions of national leadership in a generation- were systematically kicked out for not bending to the political hysteria of the moment. People for whom loyalty was not an ironic thing, for whom a culture of reciprocal loyalty both up and down was both the formal instruction and often found informally, were kicked aside saying 'your services aren't needed anymore.'

What did anyone expect them to tell their families? Or for their friends who kept their heads down but also got out to tell theirs?

American military recruiting was always declining as the 9-11/War on Terror legitimacy faded, but Covid was an inflexion point in at least some US military family circles, where the military went from 'you can be safe and have a successful career as long as you keep your politics to yourself,' to 'you are not safe if you do not defer to the demands for conformity by politically-driven misinformation.' This would be unhelpful regardless, but is especially counter-productive if you (a) are drawing recruitment from the political opposition, and (b) embitter a core part of your informal recruitment advocates who shape the willingness of those most open to joining.

A few things about this -

1.) As other people have noted, the economy is really good for entry-level work, the type that competes with people who end up signing up for the Army via a recruiter. The reality is, post-World War II, and especially post-Vietnam, the military is a jobs program, both in the form of the disparate congressional districts everything is built and being a fairly decent choice for a young person without many prospects in the many less than favorable part of the US.

2.) I'm old enough to remember when the macho Russian military with their un-woke ways were going to roll over anybody put in front of them, especially the SJW military that'd been feminized, etc., etc., In reality, what happened was those macho Russian soldiers got nailed with missiles by Ukranian's who were given targeting information by some trans furries working at an army base in Nevada.

3.) To follow up on that, one positive of the US military, compared to many militaries around the world, including even some friendly to us, is that isn't not haven of a specific ethnic group, geographic region, or familial background. It's a fairly meritocratic institution that will do what it's told, as long as it doesn't break the Constitution. Want to invade Iraq, and wreck Baghdad? Great. Want to be more friendly to women, LGBT, and other minority soldiers because we need them to fulfill specific roles in a new generation of warfare? Sure. So on and so forth.

It's a fantastic thing the military doesn't have to kneel to a bunch of Southerners upset it's not 1985 (and if I was being less charitable, 1925) anymore, and an army base doesn't look like a John Wayne film anymore. Because it means leadership can be found among the wide swath of America, as opposed to just the parts that certain demographics approve of.

4.) Even though I disagree, I have some sympathy for normal people who lost their jobs because of COVID. When it comes to the military, sorry, Charlie. You signed away that whole freedom thing. If they can send you to die in the middle of Ukraine possibly, they can make you get the jab.

5.) I'm perfectly happy to let the Right give away the military, along with football, and a ton of other things bit of the reactionary online right (including folks like Blake Masters) have soured on in the past few years.

6.) Finally, we're still the world's hyperpower, no matter what people upset with some social policy may claim online. If you look into any actual wargames we've lost, you quickly find we put so many limits on our own equipment, just to make things interesting. Yes, random think tankers, Congressman, and such, all whom either work closely with military contractors or whom have jobs in their district, will talk about China as some massive threat militarily, along with ideologues who dislike current American society.

The reality is, the way war is going for the US military, and I actually make the distinction here, is we actually need more people who are open and OK with lots of different types of people, as long as they can "shoot straight," to use a quote from Barry Goldwater, as opposed to a bunch of people with nostalgic ideas about the past of the military. I'm sure there were military families who talked about not sending the next generation, whenever things became a little more open.

But, hey like I said, if the Right also wants to totally hand the military over to us, we'll take it.

2.) I'm old enough to remember when the macho Russian military with their un-woke ways were going to roll over anybody put in front of them, especially the SJW military that'd been feminized, etc., etc., In reality, what happened was those macho Russian soldiers got nailed with missiles by Ukranian's who were given targeting information by some trans furries working at an army base in Nevada.

God made men, and God made women, but Lockheed Martin made them equal.

This is an odd post, because it's framed as a disagreement without an actual disputing of the higher level post premise (broader and family-recruitment), makes some odd claims of a political shift in recruitment not actually observed (there is a recruitment crisis because fewer people are joining, without evidence of a meaningful change in overall recruitment allocatio), and yet somehow still adopts that curious twixt of 'there's no problem happening, and if it is it's good and you deserve it.'

This is without the oddness like 'If they can send you to die in the middle of Ukraine possibly,' given that the US military... can't send combat forces to Ukraine at this time. Which not only undermines the metaphor to the jab, but ignores that the higher post explicitly acknowledged that the legal basis for enforcement wasn't disputed.

But, hey like I said, if the Right also wants to totally hand the military over to us, we'll take it.

You can take it.

Let the women, LGBT, minorities die for Israel.

The reality is, the way war is going for the US military, and I actually make the distinction here, is we actually need more people who are open and OK with lots of different types of people, as long as they can "shoot straight,"

What does that even mean?

Some kind of Dirlewanger Brigade?

I forgot the statistics precisely, but in generally any country you go you're likely to see far more volunteers from people with parents/grandparents who were in the military than a random first-generation enlistment.

Seventy percent of military recruits have a family member in the United States armed forces.

Seventy fucking percent. I admittedly wasn't expecting that high a number. I still marvel at it, at times.

Makes me wonder what the rate is for other professions.

I'm a 4th generation doctor, and certainly the kids of doctors are over represented in med school, not that I have firm numbers at hand, let alone for the US.

I was one of the one-term-and-done enlisters, like my forefathers before me. Back in the 00s, we had similar problems with the anthrax vaccine. I think the strangest side effect of that round of shots was a new allergy to eggshells? I'm sure there were probably worse that existed, but this was what my cohort experienced. Most of the people who were most vocal to me about anthrax were also the least fit. I noticed this, got the shots, and kept my opinions to myself.

A 9/11 joiner in my circles literally walked away from retirement due to the Covid vaccine. While I do not agree with his decision, he approached it with an honor that I can respect. He also went through the anthrax bit, so I will eventually need to remind myself of his change in position.

I wish I could give more than anecdotes, but that's all I have to give.

The issue for the US's current recruitment woes comes from how the generational transition has matched to politics. The 9-11 recruitment cohort is dead, dead, dead. If you look at age averages, the vast majority of US service members were born after 9-11. If you joined just after 9-11, you are that tiny minority of people who serve a full 20 (for a pension) or go beyond. That means people who joined during the Bush years, have gradually and progressively lost during the Obama years / saw the Trump years / are back in the Obama 2.0/Biden years. There's any number of things that could justify a feeling of disenchantment, from perceptions of futility of the wars, to the progression culture war aspects into military culture/life, and so on.

AARGH. I have lived longer since 9/11 than I had lived before 9/11. I am OLD. I will DIE. NOOOOOO. Why did you have to point this out?

Seriously, middle-aged people underestimate how long ago the worldview-forming events of their youth are. The Boomers used to be the main culprits - Vietnam is about equidistant between WW1 and the present, let alone WW2 - but it is starting to hit Xers and Millenials like me. I work as a risk manager, and my number 1 piece of advice to noobs is "The next Great Crash will happen when the people who remember 2008 look like old fogies. And I am part of the youngest cohort who remember 2008, so be very careful if you think I am an old fogie."

AARGH. I have lived longer since 9/11 than I had lived before 9/11. I am OLD. I will DIE. NOOOOOO. Why did you have to point this out?

It's become a source of perverse joy that I can make people who would still like to consider themselves young accept that they aren't.

It's a multitude of factors. The military is not very attractive career-wise.

Only people running out of choices or committed military-lovers would join. Perhaps they need to be more flexible with drug use in the military, it would make it easier to scrape the bottom of the barrel.

Perhaps the NYT was wrong and American men are not desperate to go die for Israel after all.

The military was already purged of American patriots after the January 6th mostly peaceful elections protests, so let them have it. Feminism won, it's time to #DraftOurDaughters.

Exercising is right-wing, law enforcement is fascism, guns are evil...

The people who buy in the media narratives are not attracted to any of the day-to-day aspects of the military.

The people who do not buy them may not want to have to enforce these narratives on their fellow patriots at gun point.

Perhaps they're simply going back to white men in ads as they ran out of DEI actors without pending criminal charges?

You had three warnings last month, and one of them was specifically for posting "low-effort boo-light memes".

https://www.themotte.org/post/687/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/143928?context=8#context

You are doing it again. The warning didn't stick apparently.

3 day ban for now, please try and lurk some more and get a sense of the expected level of engagement and participation.

While granting that it's probably a small part of the zeitgeist, who the hell wants these women for commanding officers? Worse than the general impression from the photo and worse still than the display of naked racial supremacy is knowing that the top brass above that will simply lie about plain statutes to protect these favored regime pets:

The inquiry concluded that the photo was among several taken in the spur-of-the-moment. It was intended to demonstrate “unity” and “pride,” according to the findings of the inquiry.

In addition to concluding there was no violation of DOD Directive 1344.10, the findings state, “that based upon available evidence none of the participants, through their actions, intended to show support for a political movement.”

This is ridiculous! They're throwing up a classic gesture of racial and leftist politics. One finds it hard to believe that a group of white male cadets performing a Roman salute would be able to get away with claiming that it was mere unity and pride, and therefore a non-political gesture, worthy of no discipline.

Does this sort of thing matter? I genuinely don't know. I'm not hanging around 18-year old kids that are looking at entering enlisted ranks. I have no idea if they're even cognizant of these sorts of things. If they are, I would certainly expect it to be discouraging and demoralizing to know the politics of the officer corps and top brass.

Does this sort of thing matter? I genuinely don't know. I'm not hanging around 18-year old kids that are looking at entering enlisted ranks. I have no idea if they're even cognizant of these sorts of things. If they are, I would certainly expect it to be discouraging and demoralizing to know the politics of the officer corps and top brass.

Being working class, young, and male, I can chime in that young working class men mostly want very little to do with woke narratives that don’t benefit them, personally, and especially have very little interest in putting up with female authority figures pushing that crap on them, and are perfectly cognizant that the military is going through a ‘woke’ phase, but are not particularly monitoring military news.

I wonder if the drop in recruitment is impacted by the drop in college enrollment by young men? I might be a victim of selection bias due to my social circles, but a lot of the people I know that went into the military did so as a way to pay for college. If tuition really was a significant incentive that drove previous recruiting, a decline in the number of young men interested in college would see a corresponding decline in the number of young men interested in using the military to pay for college.

The GI bill also covers trade school, and trade school enrollment has gone up ~60% since 1999 (the US population has only increased by around 20% since then). Though I imagine a lot of people doing trade school don't feel the need to pay for it with the GI bill since they feel confident in their money making abilities after graduation. That and the increasing ease with which to get student loans etc.

And trade school is often much cheaper or paid for by an employer.

What jumps out the most about this substack piece is the writer's remarkably over-inflated sense of self-importance. This ad may very well have fallen on deaf ears (or maybe it didn't, idk. Like someone else pointed out, it came out a week ago), but his evidence for that is that it was mocked on dissident RW twitter, which does not exactly have its finger on the pulse of American public opinion, or even American right-wing public opinion. Later he claims that Assadist gas attacks were an attempt by "the regime" to manufacture consent for, I guess an invasion of Syria (?), but that this was narrowly thwarted only by anons on twitter and 4chan ("weaponized autism").

As a sidenote, the author takes a bunch of jabs at the "official" 9/11 story over the course of his article, pretty clearly indicating he believes it was a US government op done with the help of the Mossad ("dancing Israelis" etc.) I haven't looked particularly deeply into 9/11 conspiracies but I've never understood what was supposed to be so ridiculous about passports being recovered from the crash sites. The official story is that three out of nineteen hijackers' passports were found semi-intact, two of them in Shanksville, where one would expect the recovery of onboard items to be significantly easier than at WTC or the Pentagon, since it was an empty field with nothing else around.

Mexico, which I can't recall the US invading

Well, not recently.

the countries which send the most immigrants to the US are India, China and the Phillipines.

Yes, countries which have the most people send the most immigrants.

People often underestimate the magnitude of immigration from the some of the less savory countries. In the 1960s, U.S. immigration from Africa was 9,314. In the 2010s it was 686,698.

https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2022

The U.S. doesn't collect seem to collect stats on Iraq and Afghanistan immigration, but it's certainly up a lot. And there are lots of people who seem hell bent on celebrating mass immigration from these countries under a sort of "you broke it, you bought it" principle.

Philippines is #12 in population. In 2020, the country sending the most immigrants is Mexico and the Dominican Republic, #87 in population, sent the fourth most immigrants.

Well, I buy into it, but then again, I would.

It won't be the only tell, but I think this thesis would more or less be proven out if you began to see the same leviathan of three letter agencies and NGOs that appeared so often in the Twitter Files turn it's baleful gaze on any and all reporting that disincentives people from joining a woke military. Articles like this one at Newsweek may find themselves getting the Hunter Biden Laptop treatment, being utterly memory holed or suppressed on social media. Or maybe they'll pluck some low hanging fruit and throw a few poor tempered journalist into solitary confinement for raising awareness that the government hates you and you shouldn't fight for it.

Well, I buy into it, but then again, I would.

That's the thing, isn't it? When the author equates Briseis with (waves hands) everything: the economy, housing unaffordability (including BlackRock namedrop), the degeneration of The American Woman, the lack of respect from all of society including the command hierarchy, it'll either resonate with a reader as a summary of all the wrongs that have happened lately, or be an unconvincing gish-gallop of vibes. It's not clear to me how much traction articles like this one will gain outside of the online twitter right. Is there any way to know?

the economy, housing unaffordability (including BlackRock namedrop), the degeneration of The American Woman, the lack of respect from all of society including the command hierarchy,

These are all largely the same thing. From the perspective of the heterosexual male warrior-type, the ability to support and defend a woman/family is extremely important. He's not tying it in to everything, all of those seemingly disparate concepts roll straight back to being able to satisfy the drive for a woman to have kids with.

These are all largely the same thing. From the perspective of the heterosexual male warrior-type, the ability to support and defend a woman/family is extremely important. He's not tying it in to everything, all of those seemingly disparate concepts roll straight back to being able to satisfy the drive for a woman to have kids with.

And now I'm reminded of a recent IRL conversation where someone made a similar point in the course of arguing that white, working-class Republican voters are fascists.

I mean, it's a vibes based world. And it's impossible to avoid the vibes, as a normal white married male or female with kids, that all the institutions of this country now hate you. No matter where you traverse, you'll have you own bundle of malicious slights that didn't used to be there. Whether it's because you were extirpated from media, hobbies and fandoms you used to consider yourself a part of. Or because your kid's school district is teaching them nightmarishly evil things that seek to actively undermine every moral lesson you'd want your kids to learn. Or maybe it's just the relentless parade of celebrating everyone else's identity... except yours. Maybe it's how casually and nonchalantly every talking head on every radio station, news channel, or local newpaper blames nearly every social problem on you via privilege discourse. Maybe it's the way literally every single story you grew up with and learned moral lessons from has been purposely inverted. Not only do your ancestral tales not even feature your people, but they teach precisely the opposite morality.

Did turbo autist on 4chan really stop an invasion of Syria? No, I doubt it. I think that had more to do with Trump's reticence to start any new wars. Maybe he really does have good instinct. Although if I recall correctly, he did bomb/missile the shit out of Syria in a token response to the most likely faked gas attack. Even so, while that author probably has a different set of personal anecdotes to justify his vibes, it's impossible to avoid the vibes.

It’s really not a vibes-based world. It’s a team-based one where the teams are perfectly capable of mining the relevant Facts and Logic for their position. That this author chooses not to do so, and leans into the vibes, is not particularly encouraging.

I don't view this as disproving anything. The existence of popular counter programming means little. Sure it might have stellar ratings. But as a proportion of content it's scant. It's also relentless maligned, lawfared, keeps shit canning it's most effective programming, and takes on more and more appearance of just being controlled opposition. It's either fake, or legally prohibited from living it's values. Which does a lot to undermine those values.

In my opinion, the existence of Fox News does no more to disprove my point than the existence of pirate radio in other oppressive regimes, no matter how many people desperately tune in to hear their values reflected and not feel alone and crazy. That some small counter programming exists doesn't change the fact that demoralization propaganda is being piped at you from literally every institutional organ of society 24/7. The small light in the darkness doesn't remove the vibes from the massive shroud of darkness hovering over every aspect of your life.

The Jump ad has a conspicuous black guy at the end.

All I ask is that these ads be more or less representative of reality, and the reality is that there are plenty of black men in the military; more than enough for an ad to include one without it being political. Messaging that the military is for women is on balance harmful imo, while messaging that the military is for men of all races is much better than the alternative, especially if done in a way that doesn't alienate white men.

Why should they be representative of reality?

Like, literally asking, they are not a documentary, nor even an intricately crafted worldbuilding exercise. They're just marketing tools, trying to accomplish a goal.

Obviously one of their goals is increasing recruitment among women, which I'm guessing makes sense in a modern army that's as much about piloting drones and filing paperwork as it is about carrying a hundred pound pack 40 miles through the desert or w/e.

Maybe it was a bad strategy to try to recruit women with that type of ad (though I wouldn't conclude that based solely on this blog's argument), but I don't see why it's bad for an advertisement to not be reflective of reality?

Most ads are not.

I don't see why it's bad for an advertisement to not be reflective of reality?

A second-hand anecdote, for what it's worth:

Shortly after I graduated high school, but while both my younger brothers were still attending the same institution (a little over 20 years ago now), our mother began volunteering in our school's (small, poorly-maintained) library. And after Middle Brother graduated, Mom undertook to fix up and update the library's rather terrible collection of college prep/research/application materials, having then helped two kids through the process.

As a result of this, she also ended up with students asking for help searching the materials for schools of particular interest. And in one memorable incident, one girl (for context, an upper class white girl), after looking through the materials from various schools with an eye to their ethnic make-up, asked my mother for help in finding a school that wasn't "too white," since the best she could find was "only" a quarter black. How, my Mom asked, was that "too white"? Well, you see, this high school senior didn't want to attend a university that was "boring" and "racist," and so wanted one whose school body reflected the American population — you know, about one third black.

So my mom attempted, with the help of handy reference books containing government-sourced figures, to inform this young women as to the country's actual demographics. She didn't want to hear it, insisting that those figures had to be wrong, because she could clearly see for herself that America has a lot more black people than that any time she watches TV.

(So my mom just dug out the brochure they had for a historically black college, handed it off, and moved on.)

Yes, one teenager a couple decades ago does not alone a pattern make, but media representation does indeed influence people's views, for better or worse.

I don't see why it's bad for an advertisement to not be reflective of reality?

I think people are pretty susceptible to propaganda, and even subtle things like tweaking racial/sexual makeups of a military squadron go a long way to feeding people false beliefs about the military. I don't want people to be stupid or have false beliefs, so I dislike these unrepresentative ads. That's pretty much it from a marketing standpoint.

From the military's standpoint, I think such ads are pretty ungrateful. Sending the message "the military is for women" also sends the message, at least partially, "the military is not for men." If all your ads feature crowds 90% composed of interracial female technicians building missiles, the real life white men working on the missiles are given proportionally somewhere between half and 1/10 of the recognition they deserve, and the women are given somewhere between 2x and 10x their earned recognition. This rises to the level of annoyance when everyone is doing it, because if you're not specifically paying attention you'll get the impression that every business is manned (sorry) by such groups while the men sit around at home or something.

Furthermore I think it's harmful for more women to join the military. Good for the military, sure--I'm sure they'll be helpful there--but all this stuff pushing women into traditionally male roles just harms both genders.

In the end I don't feel too strongly about it though, and it comes down to ingroup/outgroup signaling more than anything else. I want big powerful institutions to be on my team.

I doubt you can extrapolate much from a year or so of missed recruiting goals in a strong job market.

But there might be a kernel of truth that the sort of people who generally staff the pointy bits of the military are increasingly skeptical of their role as the enforcers of a world order that is explicitly hostile to them, their families, states, politics and demographics.

while the US Army has tried to go back to a more "traditional" style of ad where white men parachute out of a helicopter, it's failed to bring back the volunteers[.…]the new ad that dropped on 11/6, "Jump" (Twitter, YouTube)

Failed to bring back the volunteers…in 5 days?

Does it not seem more likely that the US is at full employment and military pay is dogshit? Junior enlisted soldiers in the army are paid, it seems, less than $25,000 a year. There may be additional pay for various things, but given a young man (even with only a high school education) can make double that in some low skill jobs or triple (or quadruple) that in the trades, why would anyone become a soldier? In 2009 when there were no jobs anything was better than nothing. Today, blue collar work is in an extraordinary boom.

It’s interesting that many pieces note the last time there was such a big recruitment shortage in the military was in 1999. What else was the case in 1999? A booming US economy and a thirty year low in the unemployment rate. This seems like antiwoke opinion writers projecting their politics onto the more mundane material considerations that more likely affect military recruitment.

This is definitely a big component. I'm from a key recruiting demographic area (southern borderer whites and similar culture blacks, not a lot of jobs around) and over the 2000s and into the early 2010s a huge portion of the young men enlisted. Due to the massive amount of civilian contractor work available for people with a security clearance, bad job market, and lowered standards for the troop surge everybody and their dog enlisted.

It started seriously reducing in the early-mid 2010s, at first with the fracking boom when sitting in a company truck or hauling pipes in Texas or the Dakotas would make triple or quadruple in a season what a soldier makes in a year. Also there was a glut of 11B infantrymen coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan with no real job skills stuck working as mall cops, bouncers and corrections officers and telling all their younger siblings to do something else for a career.

Most subsequent cohorts of 18 y/os are going for learning a trade like pipefitting or electrical work and following plant shutdowns and startups around the country, doing a couple months insanely intensive work then just hanging out for a few months, on and off. Same story for seasonal tourist work waiting tables and guiding rich people that want to LARP as outdoorsmen in Alaska and Colorado.

If you're not planning to go to college anyway and think you're probably dying in your sixties, it's much more attractive to go with the higher paying job where you have some level of choice in where you work and what you do versus being Uncle Sam's bitch for years and getting paid peanuts at that.

I think the "troop surge" also did some damage. It was like a lite version of "McNamara's Morons" and all the meth tweakers, biker gang members, serial DUI offenders and Jerry Springer guest stars wandering around loudly crowing about their military status and still being general fuckups in life afterwards made it seem like less of a guarantee of a successful career than local civilian jobs, and did a real number on the amount of automatic respect one would get for having been in the military.

I have never known anyone to join the military because of pay. If anything, the military for many when I was younger was a way to receive training in some of the blue collar trades they would later join on discharge. Then of course some just joined to kick ass in Iraq (I was 21 when the Gulf War occurred.)

I was born and raised in the South fwiw, and though my own family also had its share of military service going back generations, I was, in my youth, much more a pacifist. I still did Peace Corps because you didn't just age up without serving your country in some way, or that was the thinking (and PC was in some way "serving" albeit that may have been my rationalization.)

Of course, times may have changed.

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