Interesting, you gave me a lot more than I was anticipating. I’ve had a couple friends in the military, and even in high school, it was pretty common for them to be watching liveleak videos and shit like that. I guess, yeah, it would make more sense as something that’s kind of like, that’s kind of something that people promulgate themselves, just sort of internally. People are a little bit fucked up, huh? I’ve also heard from them that it’s pretty common that someone offs themselves in basic almost every time, or you get attempted suicides, I think one of them was talking about some guy that tried to snap his neck with something heavy thrown out of a window, might’ve been a forklift, or something to that effect, can’t quite recall. I’d be interested to know whether or not that’s an abnormal amount of suicide, or if that’s just kind of the expected rates for what I would assume to be a heavily male subset in an environment where there’s easy access to firearms and a bunch of other potential ways to kill yourself.

Also I gotta ask, and I’m sure I could find this out via google, but do they still use quicklime for body detail, or do they have some sort of other chemical disincorporation that they’ve moved to? Pretty grim stuff, in any case. I don’t envy that, not a big fan of mindlessly digging a bunch of holes. Makes sense that most people wouldn’t be prepared for it, I’d imagine the smell is also pretty bad, in combination with the sight of it. People don’t really think about it much, but while you can close your eyes, or avoid trying to look directly at something, you can’t really shut off your sense of smell in the same way.

I dunno, it’s interesting because on one hand, the humor is used to inoculate you to traumatic shit, right, but on the other hand, it’s also a kind of like, if only aesthetically, comedically, the humor presents a kind of functional ideology to people. It’s going to propagate because of the environment, because it makes the job easier, and then the job is selecting for people who will naturally not be disgusted by the humor, who will find it funny, and, you know, the cycle feeds back into itself. Same shit as why rich people litter their house with self-help books, so they can get rid of their wealth guilt.

Also yeah, the whole like, it’s just a job, is also kind of concerning. Basically everyone I know that got in, got in just for the free college alone, which, you know, also having healthcare and a steady job right out of high school is nice, if you can swing it. I’ve never really encountered anyone, outside of old people, that kind of view the military as being something that they have a kind of moral calling to. If they do, that’s sort of a thing that comes as like an “also, I think it’s a good thing”, rather than their primary motivation. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, right, I would expect it to be a job, but it’s just kind of weird, mostly. It’s like an extreme disillusionment. I dunno whether or not it’s a good thing, to be able to morally recognize and then square away that, oh, this isn’t a great thing, right, we can dispel the illusion that we’re morally righteous and are fighting a “good war”, but at the same time, it’s just replaced with nihilism, and the effects end up working out to be the same. Such is our postmodern condition, I suppose.

Also, yeah the acronyms make sense, when you consider the amount of information, sort of a self-contained mnemonic. It’s self-referential, isolated, standalone, compared to calling, like, a cigarette a “cowboy killer” or something, which might rely more on external information. It’s a good point. I’m sure they have some sort of evidence based thing related to how they train it, but I do kind of wonder like, just a general thing, about the lingo, the jargon, of a bunch of different fields. Like how science uses latin all the time, or how engineering disciplines can call something a flange, programming calls shit bits and bytes, or folders and documents and desktops, since it’s all digitized bureaucracy. It’s fascinating because the things kind of evolve into whatever is functional for the field, but it’s also entirely and completely arbitrary, and things end up carrying a lot of baggage.

So I dunno. We moved from a kind of, and this was true of broad culture at the time, I suppose (maybe, I might just be an dumb zoomer idiot though), but we moved from a kind of culture where things were named relatively arbitrarily, right, nicknamed, or just named after whoever the designer was. Oh, that’s the jerry-can, oh, they have shell-shock, stuff like that. Now we have PFCs and PTSD. We went from picture boxes, to televisions, to TVs. I dunno, maybe that’s just a result of a kind of rapid systematization of things, everything needs formal codes that you can write down and file. Maybe a side effect of digitization, more than post-war. Maybe as a result of having so much information to digest, right, for the troops, but also it might be having so much information to digest even for the people actively working with it. Oh, we need a clever new word for this new thingamabob! uhhh, uhh, I dunno, maybe we just give it a kind of protracted, proper name, and then we just shorten it to an acronym. Easier than trying to give it a “clever”, natural name, that’s maybe going to rely on external reference or information to get across. We can just say the full name once or twice, and then have a self-referential piece of information we can refer to now, very easily.

Edit: also about the UAPs, I find it really funny that they tried to distance themselves from it by changing acronyms, right, but then everyone still basically did the same shit they did with UFOs to it, and just treated it exactly like a UFO. Word substitution. Strikes me as a very funny, especially military kind of decision to make about it. I don’t know why, but it does.