site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4056 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 17, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

IDK if this is too CW for FFT. I sometimes find myself thinking that all memes and social movements are the partial result of influence by intelligence agencies. However, I realized there’s a fun and easy disproof of this: the existence of anti-military sentiment. Memes and so on which discourage people from joining the military have been common and popular for a while, sometimes getting to the front page of Reddit. You’ll see something like “you’re only fighting for oil companies”. This is strong proof that intelligence agencies aren’t manipulating public opinion all too much, because one of their priorities should be to get more applicants into the military. So the fact that we have very little propaganda about joining the military is actually a good proof that there’s not a significant amount of government propaganda effectively targeting the populace.

With that said, I have actually noticed less anti-military sentiment memes, so maybe this is changing, who knows.

I just don't think the memes and the sentiment, rubber hits the road, *do *that much. Look how America pivoted behind Bush after 9/11; look how the blue-pilled urbanites, the most pacifistic anti-interventionist of the lot, were the prototypical Ukraine flag-fliers. People I've known who've joined the military do it because of the steady job and benefits, and because they're not straight-up spit-in-a-cop's-face anti-fed. Most military propaganda is just trying to make it seem like the actual job of being a soldier won't be *that *bad, either by making it seem cool or valorous, or, well - I found this lil compilation on 4chan the other day:

https://imgur.com/a/X89B3Mf

Behold, recruitment for Gen Z! It doesn't even try to be something other than what it is; if you try to be too sneaky, it tends to backfire. But showing a cute young woman doing military stuff, playing with your thoughts, even teasing you about your suspicions that she might be trying to recruit you...

Nothing new, of course, just a new medium. Remember when they used to put pin-up drawings on fighter jets?

I think it's likely various agencies have dabbled into meme psy ops to try to push influence, but I doubt it's that common. Making funny memes isn't that easy, and you'd have to put a lot of time in making and sharing them to have much real world influence given the vast and low attention span space the internet is.

this is strong proof that intelligence agencies aren’t manipulating public opinion all too much, because one of their priorities should be to get more applicants into the military

Why?

What if intelligence agencies think war is wasteful and are instead aiming for a 'cultural victory' where influence and media corrupt the systems of other countries so thoroughly they stop caring about their own interests ?

If that's the case, they'd allow antimilitary sentiments to go on. Or they simply prioritise their own psyops instead of combating existing ones. Displace and dilute.

Or maybe it's beneficial to inoculate people with leftist anti war memes against the stronger right wing/isolationist/coup d'etat anti establishment memes? You can always push the conspiracy one step further!

For example, take the argument that all war films are inherently pro war. Guys who join the Marines today quote Full Metal Jacket and Zero Dark Thirty to each other like those movies don't portray the USA as morally disgusting. If you can make people think the US military it's awful and amoral and ACCEPT IT; isn't that more convenient than pretending it's all shiny John Wayne good guys riding over the hill? Get people cynical enough and you won't even need to pretend an intervention is justified, people will just accept that we've always been at war with EastAsia. So what you perceive as anti military memes might serve the purposes of the intelligence agencies.

No war for oil, which I made t shirts for in shop class in middle school, was wildly ineffective as a meme. I was early, for a brief second when American Idiot topped the charts I gave a bunch to friends, by 2007 no one gave a shit, by 2009 we forgot all about it as Obama/Gates started the no end in sight drone policy. Maybe bad anti war memes are worse than nothing?

I would put out Mobile Suit Gundam as evidence that maybe anti-war memes in general have a hard time taking root. The entire franchise generally shows war as bad, and yet, you still got this meme decades after the original TV series aired in 1979. There was even an OVA from 1989, War in the Pocket, poking fun/pointing some criticism at both the anime fans who were there for the cool robot fights as well as the Gunpla fanatics--but then, the franchise has continued because it's basically owned by a gigantic toy company, and to further confound this, Japan itself has been comparably quite pacifistic (what other country has protests against the removal of a constitutional limit on military capability?).

Is gundam strictly anti-war? I'm not all that familiar with it, but the bits I caught looked like the traditional Japanese "war is the worst thing in the world except all the things that are worse... Like foreigners in your country" moral

I would definitely say that it's not that kind of moral. Rather, in Gundam, war is generally depicted negatively, warts and all, but there is the undertone that, when war is already all around you, it is still necessary to fight to live and to bring forth a better tomorrow.

The deeper message of many Gundam stories, in addition, is "we must learn how to truly and honestly communicate with one another, regardless of if it brings conflict or peace."

I like the model of the US government as the State department competing with the Pentagon for power. If Langley has fallen in with Foggy Bottom, anti military memes would be in the shared interest of t least some portion of the intelligence community.

That's a quite popular model, broadly aligned with what genuine competition there exists between GOP and Democratic party.

Military and its various offshoots, defense contractors on one side, CIA, State department and iirc also FBI on the other.

I think so. In an ideal world you'd want to be easily hitting your recruitment numbers so you could scale up if needed. Could the current U.S. sustain a Vietnam-level conflict without conscription? Seems unlikely.

Fitness, drug policies, criminal records hit American recruitment harder than pacifism. And we've barely tapped into the late Roman policy of citizenship for service.

Reports in the US are that they're missing targets by 1/4 - 1/3 and that it's totally not woke shit putting off the the traditionally non-woke cohort that enlists.

It’s realistically because the army made it harder to lie about medical records as much as it is that.

It’s going to be a big problem if a chunk of Americans, especially healthy young intelligent people, refuse to join the military on principle, especially for filling up analytic high skilled roles. On the flip side, pro military propaganda would be a boon, because you have more high quality applicants to choose from.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats