This historically illiterate thread:
This is funny.
But the future of warfare is actually neither “based” nor “woke”. It’s all drones.
WW1 opened with horses, which were cut to ribbons by machine guns. Our vision of the military is similarly antiquated: fitness is great, but muscular men lose to unmanned drones. https://t.co/q6D3hFCpWF
— balajis.com (@balajis) May 21, 2021
Soon, men in combat = horses in combat.
It’s all unmanned war, robot war, drone war, information war, cyber war.https://t.co/kSVNS9AyH1 pic.twitter.com/70J50Lesbp
— balajis.com (@balajis) May 21, 2021
Btw, to give some credit to the woke, as silly as this specific ad is, they are better at mind control than the based.
That’s why they are running the military.
But mind control doesn’t work on drones.https://t.co/q6D3hFCpWF
— balajis.com (@balajis) May 21, 2021
Basically, propaganda > pushups.
Why are these ads being produced by the CIA and US military, after all? Because wokes are in control. These particular ads are misfires, but who’s in control is not in doubt. And it’s not the pushup guys. https://t.co/EM1NGm7Zx3
— balajis.com (@balajis) May 21, 2021
In XCom, the physically fragile Sectoids have a key ability: mind control. Every muscular soldier they flip is -1 for your side, +1 for theirs.
Now apply this to wokes-vs-drones. Woke mind control flipped the pushup guys in the US military, but won’t work on Chinese drones. pic.twitter.com/PXLKexAyXz
— balajis.com (@balajis) May 22, 2021
Why are psyops key to the military?
If 1000 drones are coming at you, you can shoot them down 1-by-1. Or you can hack them, to turn them around on their sender.
If 1000 soldiers are coming at you, you can shoot them 1-by-1. Or you can propagandize them to turn on their sender. pic.twitter.com/FWc0B4NSmS
— balajis.com (@balajis) May 22, 2021
Because “woke” is better at mind control than “based”, it is consolidating power at the national level in the US. After all: woke deplatforms based, not vice versa.
But there are more than 2 factions. Wokes can’t easily mind control PRC drones or deplatform international crypto.
— balajis.com (@balajis) May 22, 2021
In the early 20th century there were many ideologies, which eventually fell away. And a title fight ensued between Communism vs Fascism vs Democratic Capitalism.
This century likewise may eventually reduce to Woke Capital vs Communist Capital vs Crypto Capital.
— balajis.com (@balajis) May 22, 2021
Some have said “drones can’t hold territory”. But autonomous robots in general most certainly can.https://t.co/JvFYdexlCG
— balajis.com (@balajis) May 23, 2021
If I understand his two theses:
One – a Woke army is stronger because its fundamentalist ideology is more resistant to enemy propaganda and therefore less likely to switch sides. Woke is mentally tougher than based or anything else.
Two – wrong men are irrelevant because war will become technology-driven instead of manpower-driven, to the point where boots on the ground are obsolete.
I’ve heard this before. Remember that Richard Jordan Gatling wanted to develop a weapon so destructive that no one would want to fight a war ever again. The same thing was said about the first automatic weapons prior to WWI.
Airplanes, submarines, helicopters, ballistic missiles, stealth every new level of technology hasn’t been able to erase the fact that the more war changes the more war stays the same, i.e., rough men killing other rough men. A handful of drones in a field or patrolling the air is not going to hold a country.
To the first point, psy-ops in war isn’t all that effective. The number of soldiers we had defected to the Nazis was one, I believe. We didn’t have Americans jumping over the Berlin wall to join the Soviets. We’re not likely to have middle Americans who sign up out of patriotic duty jump over to the CCP. The kids more likely to defect are the ones motivated by selfish values like identity than selfles values like patriotism and duty.
Secondly, Woke is the worst possibly fundamentalist ideology to base a side around. Woke spend as much time canceling each other as they do outsiders. There is no cohesion. A Woke army will fail for exactly the same reason that the Afghani army fails. When soldiers refuse to take orders because command is of a different race or gender or sex, and units fight among themselves over identity, they can’t fight a unified front.
Just wait until some new trans Lieutenant refuses to obey the order of a “cis-het” Colonel because the Colonel is an oppressor who doesn’t recognize the Liuetenatn’s lived experiences. This is what kids are doing to their professors on campus, now we’re going to commission those kids into the military.
But, according to this guy, that’s okay because Woke Lt is not going to get swayed by CCO psy-ops, and as long as Woke Lt can hack a CCP drone, who cares if Woke Lt can even do a pushup from zir desk chair.
This guy mentions the “push-up guys” so often that it sounds like a personal grudge. In other words, he could never compete with them on that level and is trying to convince himself that his brainpower is physically stronger.
Laughable and pathetic.
He’s citing X-Com? Seriously? And the magical mind-control abilities in it?
At least Heinlein was: 1) a veteran, 2) exposed to WWII planning from behind the scenes, and 3) a serious thinker about military matters. His conclusion was that push-button warfare WON’T be the end-all: it takes troops to control territory.
Those drones balajis wants to use to control territory? Does he have ANY idea about the lessons learned from tank warfare from WWI to today? You need infantry to support the tanks, because there’s not enough visibility from inside a tank — or over remote cameras — to cover all the approaches that let someone sneak a man-portable anti-tank weapon close enough to use.
Western civilization has at least 3000 years of experience building militaries that work, and NONE have emphasized personal identity as a way to build cohesion. The effective forces have always emphasized commonality, unity, SHARED IDENTITY.
What happens when the boots on the ground take out his control center?
He wets himself, starts crying, and hopes the defunded police come to save him.
That would never happen because shut up bigot.
There’s so much wrong in this guy’s theory that I wonder if it’s a parody.
He bangs on about ‘autonomous’ drones. ‘Autonomous’ does not mean ‘intelligent’. An autonomous drone is limited by its programming.
(I’m not even getting into what you have to do to ‘harden’ an electronic system for combat here.)
Using XCOM as an example is so absurd I can’t even begin to start. And mind you, I like video games, and have played XCOM. I see he’s using the later Firaxis reboot, too, not the original where you could lose half your deployed squad because someone panicked and fired the rocket launcher. The human element is chaos and it’s HARD to program for chaos.
Hell’s bells, if he’s any kind of gamer he should KNOW that current-gen AI is vulnerable to being fooled, subverted, or distracted.
Also, wokeism is not ‘mind control’. It’s social subversion, yes, but as brainwashing goes it’s pretty fragile. It’s fascinating how many people get ‘redpilled’ when their blinders get yanked off.
It’s highly likely that the idjit, watching the recent vids of the robot men, robot dogs etc ‘dancing’, came to the conclusion that they were doing that on their own after receiving some simple command.
It doesn’t enter his train of thought that all of that ‘dance’ had been precisely choreographed and painstakingly programmed.
Of course the manufacturers don’t go into that little nagging detail in their advertising do they? And we have no information about how many times all of that had to be reworked after a simple coding error presented itself……
This is how stupid this balaji and his kind are are. They believe that science fiction is real
War..War never Changes
I am no expert on PsyOps, but I imagine to be good at it, you have to understand your opponent intimately. Have you listened to them? They don’t understand their own country. They think everything outside of a city or south of the Mason Dixon line is Deliverance. They think everyone who doesn’t think like them is inferior and stupid.
Pride goeth before a fall.
Funny you mention that. There were some studies a while back that showed that while conservatives could comprehend liberal views (even if they didn’t agree with them), the reverse was NOT true. Liberals had an extraordinarily difficult time analyzing conservative viewpoints or even understanding them.
A clue: when I started comprehending conservative views, I started adopting them. The “liberal” (actually, very illiberal indeed) bubble must be vigorously maintained to prevent apostasy.
As the saying goes, “If you’re not liberal by the time you’re 20, you don’t have a heart, and if you’re not conservative by the time you’re 40, you don’t have a brain.”
The Rt. Hon. Winston S. Churchill, if I remember correctly.
How many times have you carefully explained your reasoning, cited evidence, and presented, calmly, to a leftist why you hold the beliefs you do — and the very next words from them is the declaration you’re lying and “here’s what you really believe”?
They don’t want to understand other people. They have everything figured out, after all.
“…but I imagine to be good at it, you have to understand your opponent intimately….”
Winner!
Seriously, woke psy ops works on other woke people. I would challenge any “woke” individual to try and change my mind. After the 3rd time I punched them in the nose, they might get the point.
Yes, and all that is why the jihadis have been beaten to mush and Afganistan is now a Jeffersonian democracy. Right?
Also, picking a nit; in the original, “Pride goes before destruction. A haughty manner precedes a fall.”