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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026

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Sounds like you're not actually disputing any of his observations, as much as trying to dismiss their relevance to the conclusion because they individually make sense as tools.

Which is how most professional military, and paramilitary, things turn out to work when broke down into individual components. There are no magical secret ninja techniques to running a military, or an insurgency. At its heart, it's all a combination of individually simple, logical concepts that make sense with just a bid of explanation. It does not require a college degree, not least because they are often constructed to be executed by people without such credentials.

And yet, there remains a wide gulf between professional/competent organizations and those that fumble about. A large part of that comes from not only having the drive to actually make sure everything that needs to be done gets done, but also knowing the scope of things that needs to get done for a specific ends, and how to organize the allocation of tasks of develop those particular means, as opposed to getting drawn into irrelevant rabbit holes. That is where the indication of exceptional understanding, and deliberate intent, comes in.

So when you say things like this-

I mean yeah, this is just specialization of labor, well-understood by humans for many thousands of years. Pretty much anyone who has been on a sports team or has had a job understands the idea of having different members of the organization focus on what they're good at.

In response to this-

Dedicated roles: mobile chasers, plate checkers logging vehicle data into shared databases

That the [specialization of labor] is developing a shared database, which entails a host of specialized efforts, and developing specialized reconnaissance efforts for the deliberate purpose of the database, which entails a host of allocation decisions, is far more important than the presence of [specialization of labor]. [Specialization of labor] is a means, not a reason, to develop such a database.

'Just specialization of labor' could be found anywhere, in any protest movement. Not any given protest movement has a reason to develop the means to build vehicle databases of law enforcement agencies. Even fewer have a need to develop such a database for the purpose of establishing real-time tracking networks of law enforcement agencies in the process of their work. Even fewer yet have a legal basis to use said real-time tracking networks for the purpose of targeting law enforcement agencies in the middle of their activities with the intent of disrupting those activities.

And because these reasons, needs, and basis are so rare, all the steps and sub-steps required to do them are not obvious common knowledge. They are not obvious common knowledge for people even when they intend to disrupt ongoing law enforcement agencies. The insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan underwent darwinian evolution to such collections of both deliberate targetting and operational security precisely because all the required elements were not inherently obvious to the people who got taken out.

In turn, we know that Americans don't know all these techniques either. You yourself admit to not recognizing the implications of signal chat caps or the call rotations. We have various Americans openly publishing their participation and crowdfunding off of it, which both the funders and fundees would recognize as a terrible idea if they actually cared about the OPSEC. Protestors are consistently inconsistent about whether they need face masks to protect their identity or not. They are not subject to darwinian organizational evolution.

These are not the people who know the various insurgency mechanics to start building into the organizing infrastructure. They do not know the 'sensible' things, or the importance of enforcing it with regularity, or the longer why's behind various guidance. They merely fall into the architecture that was set up for the purpose.

That architecture, in turn, required both specialized knowledge, and intent. No one 'accidentally' develops a government license plate tracking network. That the people who have are coincidentally cribbing from insurgency network practices is, as the tweet says, concerning.