All Dread

In a pretty package

I write all these posts as I go along in haste with only a general idea, no outline, and the clock ticking away. So they don’t all clearly make the point that I intended - and by the time they’re done, it can be impossible to shove that point smoothly into whatever structures they have.

I wasn’t thrilled with last night’s post …

… because its point was buried. Namely, that even though the seven proposed military telescopes on Maui appear to be the perfect targets for local outrage - even worse than the civilian telesKKKope that enraged the state six years ago -

- they’ve been a collective nothingburger so far, ironically because they matter. The military wants them, and the military will get its way. The uproar over the earlier civilian telesKKKope allowed the military to get its way next door.

And although the diehard Democrat public of Hawaii is not exactly gung-ho about American forces occupying their land, they are more respectful toward them than you might expect.

“They” includes the superblue readers of Hipsta Pravda who beLIEve the septet of telescopes are needed to ‘protect’ their islands, the United States, and even the entire Pacific from Trump’s buddy Putin. OMG, that madman¹ will no doubt attack us after he takes Vilnius and Riga … any day after he crushes Kyiv unless we give MOAR to holy Ukraine.

It’s not just Russophobia that make Goodthinkers write a blank check for the military. It’s also lifelong conditioning by the USSA media. Like seven TV series about the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) including NCIS: Hawaiʻi (2021-2024).

(I know a deep blue fan of that show.)

So I got carried away writing about the cult of Godforce, the USSA military. And yet I forgot to quote the late Vietnam veteran John T. Reed (1946-2026), who opened my eyes to the mystique of Godforce: e.g.,

To ascribe some sort of powerful mystique or expertise to all of us who spent time in a combat zone is dumb and misplaced.

[…]

Others risk their lives without acquiring the mystique and awe of combat veterans—like police, firemen, Alaska crab fishermen. I read that the most dangerous job in terms of death rate is actually highway worker. If we are to show enormous deference to the opinions of combat vets, some of whom spent their entire time in Vietnam repairing trucks in Danang, how much more awe and deference must we show to king crab fishermen or guys who hold the “slow/stop” sign?

[…]

Military people pursue all sort of overhyped mystique. For example, airborne and ranger school in the Army. I graduated from both of those schools and I served in the 82nd Airborne Division before I went to Vietnam. Airborne (paratrooper) is easy. Anyone can jump out of a plane. My oldest son and his wife did it one day on a lark. Furthermore, they jumped from 14,000 feet. Army jumps are usually at 1,200 feet. My daughter-in-law’s eyes would screwed up for a while—extremely bloodshot—afterward because of the low air pressure at 14,000 feet. Former President George H.W. Bush famously make a parachute jump every five years including in 2009 on his 85th birthday. Couples have had sex or gotten married while sky diving.

But the military and its airborne members would have you believe that wearing the airborne wings indicates you are a far better person than non-airborne. They wear different combat boots (Corcoran’s) than non-airborne—paying extra for them out of their own pocket. They are more likely to parade around in civilian areas like airports with all sorts of doodads designed to make them look like combat heroes.

His stance² was what I needed after hanging out with Godforce-worshipping neoCONs for so long:

Mystique is dishonest. SEAL training is tough, but it does not sound especially useful for missions.

Useful takes a backseat to cool.

SEALs, rangers, marines, paratroopers are human. Their combat records are mixed. Their limitations are so great that it is hard to find missions that actually fit their capabilities and limitations. The public needs to know all this. […] Reducing the hype [about SEALs] would reduce all the misbehavior regarding releasing details of secret ops by simply making the SEALs less attractive to Hollywood and Fox News etc.

And making them less attractive to politics:

A former SEAL named Eric Greitens who has written three books about himself is now [in 2016] running for MO [Missouri] governor. (Over 100 books about themselves have been published by SEALs since 2001.) Some of his fellow former SEALs have done a YouTube criticizing him for exaggerating his record according to the NY Times.

Greitens won the election.³

The SEAL mystique can also pay off on a personal level. Literally. Ask Derek Alldred. Or rather, ask Brave AI about him:

The cult of Godforce was that fake Navy SEAL’s key to cash. Women conditioned to blindly respect men in uniform trusted him - even with their guns. (Surely a ‘warrior’ like him would know how to use them even better than they did!)

But take away the costume, and he was just another thug in mugshots.

Source: The Colony Police Department

He also exploited the cults of Godmed and Godlaw by posing as a doctor and a lawyer.

In my last post, I pointed out how Japanese pop culture doesn’t glorify Japan’s Self-Defense Forces.

As far as I know, Japanese pop culture also doesn’t glorify doctors or lawyers. (But I could be wrong because I stopped watching ‘realistic’ Japanese TV after the eighties, and I stopped regularly watching any Japanese TV after the nineties.)

I’m almost out of time, and I don’t want to get on a tangent about Godmed (which facilitated CONvid) and Godlaw.

I’ll just close to noting that Alldred reminded me of Martha Stout’s description of a sociopath (emphasis hers) in The Sociopath Next Door:

Imagine—if you can—not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken.

The rest of Brave AI’s description of Alldred. I doubt the guy has any regret. “Horrible boyfriend” sounds like an attempt at self-deprecating humor.

And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools. Now add to this strange fantasy the ability to conceal from other people that your psychological makeup is radically different from theirs. Since everyone simply assumes that conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the fact that you are conscience-free is nearly effortless. You are not held back from any of your desires by guilt or shame, and you are never confronted by others for your cold-bloodedness. The ice water in your veins is so bizarre, so completely outside of their personal experience, that they seldom even guess at your condition.

In other words, you are completely free of internal restraints, and your unhampered liberty to do just as you please, with no pangs of conscience, is conveniently invisible to the world. You can do anything at all, and still your strange advantage over the majority of people, who are kept in line by their consciences, will most likely remain undiscovered.

Alldred - “all dread” - what a name! - superficially resembled the sociopathic superman of my fantasies. But the reality was that he was brought down by his own stupidity and carelessness, unintentionally leaving clues for his victims - educated, wealthy women⁴ - to figure out who he really was and team up against him.

If only all sociopaths were as stupid and careless …

1. More like “treacherous puppet“ and/or “incompetent buffoon”. A distinction without a real difference:

Regardless of whether Putin is morally retarded or just treacherously competent, the decisions that the Kremlin makes will be the same — consistently BAD.

Is Putin a Treacherous Puppet or an Incompetent "Bafoon"?

2. By “his stance”, I refer only to Reed’s quotations here and similar ones of his elsewhere about military mystique. I do not endorse all his views about the military: e.g., his belief that there should be a draft. Or all his views about any other subject: e.g., he believed that everyone should be tested for CONvid and that anyone who refused “would be assumed infected and quarantined.” Although I have read a lot of Reed’s pre-CONvid writing and regard him as an influence, he was never my idol, not even when my views were a lot closer to his. I am certain he would have hated me if he had met me.

3. Greitens then resigned seventeen months later, but that’s another story.

4. Alldred could have more easily fooled uneducated poor women, but he wanted rich fish.