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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.

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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 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.

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