Category: history
last enslaver in senate
irony as a mode of political action
Edit: included rebuttal
IRONY AS A MODE OF POLITICAL ACTION
We are generally used to the assumption that the motivation driving political action is sincere. All past political movements fit that criteria. Progressives were, and still are sincere about curing racism from the world. Nazis were sincere about doing Nazi things. And so were Protestants, Catholics. Augustus Caesar and his army were sincere in wanting to rule an empire.
There is a growing current now, present particularly in forms of youth culture like 4chan and now TikTok, that everything cool and memetically attractive should be deeply layered in irony. The most striking example to me was a series of TikToks about Holocaust themed pornography, that were lambasted by mainstream media - but the culture that produced them continues to go on unabated.
This sort of phenomenon wouldn’t be news to Baudrillard or Nietschze - the lack of sincerity of belief would just be an obvious symptom of modern life. Normally, these insincere people are cast as politically helpless, last men and slaves to a few rules who control their lives effortlessly. But suppose that the way to move them into taking action was through the opposite of sincere ideology, instead only through the insincere.
The most clear, and perhaps only example of this - was the debacle involving the Gamestop stock. A bunch of normal people were willing to throw their money at something for reasons that were mostly insincere: memes and shitposting at the man. Mocking the man with graffiti is nothing new, but usually there is a framework held in opposition to what the man believes. The 60s radicals had their communism to hold against the pseudocapitalism of 60s America. Antifa today still does, and still is sincere, even if their ideas are pathetic and wrongheaded. But what does r/wsb believe in?
Stalin believed he was a social scientist
Gradually their loyalty to the ideas became more and more instrumental, more and more a matter of what the ideas would let them grip in their two hands…
Stalin had been a gangster who really believed he was a social scientist. Khruschev was a gangster who hoped he was a social scientist. But the moment was drawing irresistibly closer when the idealism would rot away by one more degree, and the Soviet Union would be governed by gangsters who were only pretending to be social scientists.
- /u/FCfromSSC quoting Red Plenty by Francis Spufford
F-35 was a success
The reason the F-35 was ‘worth’ the trouble is that it got over a dozen first-world militaries using the same combat system, rather than every nation trying to create less effective national champions. Aside from raising the standard, the distributed industrial base and procurement means that everyone involved- which is to say- American allies- can cross-train, cross-supply, and even loan/borrow/otherwise support eachother’s air operations with minimal trouble, greatly increasing the self-reinforcing nature of the American alliance network. While- at the same time- ensuring that all participants are tied to the American logistic chain, meaning that anyone who wants to keep a world-leading aircraft operational won’t go rogue against American interests.
The F35 is a political and logistical success as much as a technological success, and those are far harder to arrange at scale.
vietnam POWs
How were South Vietnamese, in general, treated by North Vietnam ?
warrior society
The problem with all this is China’s reversal of fortune was not “sudden” at all: the country had been in a perpetual civil war for three decades before World War 2, and, though under-equipped, its armies had exceptional infantry and officers who consistently surprised the Japanese. It would not be an exaggeration to call interwar China the period’s only “warrior society”. As Jonathan Fenby points out, most of the men had been levied to fight for this or that warlord, usually several times in their lives, and often starting as child soldiers. This gave all Chinese warlords - Mao included - a massive reserve of military talent to tap into. Contra popular belief, the Chinese army that entered Korea received no extensive Communist training before entering the country and was made up mostly of new volunteers and Kuomintang defectors. “PLA tactics” were nothing unique, but simply standard operating procedure for Chinese armies, developed over decades of fighting and familiar to tens of millions of veterans. It is telling that once this “warrior generation” aged out of military eligibility, the PLA completely floundered in Vietnam.
Reminds me of the Taliban