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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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telling them that they are stupid failures

Sorry, what? You're just off the mark. Aside from the inherent differences between adversarial processes and other dynamic processes.

Maybe "But don't tell people that utterly destroying enemy doesn't work, because it does." would be better?

I don't know how this analogy is supposed to work. The point of the development of military doctrine is to build up a body of professional knowledge, generally to the purpose of, indeed, destroying the enemy (though there are sometimes tweaks for political constraints or other political objectives). This is, indeed, intended to be "what works".

Is the point of your analogy that the endeavor of developing military doctrine is simply fallacious from the get-go? This has other implications that I can think of. For example, rather than moving TRADOC, as Trump did, I think this point of view says that he should have simply eliminated it altogether. Of course, I think you can tell that I don't think that this is the point of the analogy, but I'm kind of struggling to see what the point is.

Maybe, on the other end, it's something along the lines of, "It's not terribly helpful to be a 400lb guy in a bed who just writes somewhere on the internet, 'Hurr durr, have you tried killing the bad guys?'"? I mean, sure? Yeah, I just don't get what you're going for, and I don't get how it's relevant to what I've said.

trying to not overeat vs extreme marketing of hyperpalatable foods is an adversarial process

Mathematically speaking, I would distinguish the two. This may be a complicated and difficult environment, but it is not an adversarial one. There are deep mathematical differences between the two.

Oh, well then this is just the standard, all-too-common, strawman. You're responding to a figment of your imagination, not anything I've written.