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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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But Eli Crane isn't thinking this way because Eli Crane is a SEAL. That's a hypermasculine world where everyone talks shit about everyone all the time. If there's a real problem it is handled directly and head on - "hey, bro, you and me slug it out in the parking lot." That was his professional calibration for years. And I am very happy we have thousands of other men like him on our side with their guns pointed in the other direction. But the job of "warrior" today (in the most traditional sense -- being an Air Force cyber general doesn't quite relate) is a hyper-specialized role because today's true warriors are the best in history; they are in the best physical shape, with the longest and most rigorous training, with an insane level of technological proficiency, and a support structure that costs billions of dollars.

Applied to other domains, however, they don't generalize well. So, back to the archetype, the problem here is that what the archtype assumes (at a higher level of resolution) is the JFK (and generations past) version of a warrior; a dashing young officer (because enlisted is low class, ew) who did a few years of service but not a full career, maybe saw some combat, and was in an elegant role; Navy PT boat captain, a British Cavalry officer, WW2 Fighter Ace.

I think actually this is exactly the mindset needed to fix most of our political problems. We absolutely need no nonsense leaders who aren’t afraid to at least verbally meet each other on the parking lot after work. The current crop of “leaders” have long since perfected the art of doing things that they procedurally cannot do (thus ducking the responsibility of not actually doing the things that need doing), or hiding really bad ideas in thousand page bills full of nonsense and then pretending that in order to get something done, they simply had to vote yes on a bill with “let’s shoot Taylor Swift” in it, because it had something else in there. You still own voting to shoot Taylor Swift. The mindset drilled into the elite and leadership of the military is that you are responsible. You are responsible for yourself, your team, the results of actions you took or didn’t take, and the actions and decisions of your team that you didn’t do anything about. They are not likely to pull the same kinds of things that our leadership does now.