The below blog post, brought to our attention by a recently retired USAF Brigadier General, brings up an important point. Air Force Academy cadets are told not to lie or tolerate those who do, according to the USAFA Honor Code.
Recently a male officer who thinks he is now a female spoke to cadets at NCLS. The truth is he is a male, yet Air Force policy about not calling someone by their “preferred pronouns” is considered discrimination which may end up as an EEO complaint.
So the Air Force is saying cadets have to LIE about reality (“the emperor has such beautiful clothes on!”) and participate in a pseudo unreality. Since they are LYING, they are violating the Honor Code. But apparently it’s okay to lie about this according to the Air Force. And there goes the slippery slope of lying about other things.
The other part of the Honor Code is not tolerating those who lie. What are cadets supposed to do while others around them have drunk the kool-aide and say a lie that this man is actually a woman? They are being told by their leaders it’s not only okay to tolerate this lie but that policy is telling them they HAVE to. Soviet indeed.
See Solzhenitsyn’s speech, Live Not By Lies
By David | Thompson Blog
Lt. Col. Bree Fram, a trans U.S. Space Force official spoke to the U.S. Air Force about inclusion and DEMANDED everyone to respect LGBTQ people and use pronouns.
The world is laughing at us pic.twitter.com/I9gftUQWYX
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) March 1, 2024
In the above, we see Lieutenant Colonel Bree Fram – a man pretending to be a woman – invoking “dignity and respect,” while peevishly insulting his audience by insisting that they should also aspire to pretence – by which I mean habitual dishonesty – that they should abandon probity, disregard the evidence staring them in the face, and become cowed, cartoonish, and absurd. Lest they be denounced as bad people.
From here, it looks an awful lot like an attempt at psychological bullying and demoralisation, a kind of abuse. Which, given the rote intimations of victimhood, is a tad ironic.
One might say perverse. As noted previously, those who play The Pronoun Game, and who insist that others play along too, may not be as benign and morally fragrant as they would have the rest of us believe:
And so, we arrive at a familiar question.
If someone will lie about that, something so obviously untrue, what else would they lie about?
Again, what we’re seeing has the air of a civilisational shit test. One underway on many fronts, and often with serious consequences for those who dare to retain a sense of realism.
And in entirely unrelated news, which I mention for no reason whatsoever, the US Air Force is currently facing a “critical staffing shortage,” with a “persistent shortfall” of around 2,000 pilots, and with recruitment levels so bad – the prospect of joining so unenticing – that the service is seeking out retirees to return to active duty.
Readers may, however, wish to speculate as to whether the kinds of people who would be most drawn to serving in the armed forces, and most suited to roles therein, are overly enthused by “unconscious bias diversity training,” a growing number of officers appearing publicly in drag, and scolding sessions on the importance of repeating those cross-dressing officers’ fabulist pronouns.
Or by the news that a failure to do so – to lie on demand and thereby become absurd – could be considered “discrimination” and a basis for disciplinary action.
In light of which, the prospect of alienation doesn’t seem entirely far-fetched.
Those with a taste for condescension and farce will find more of Lieutenant Colonel Fram’s pronouncements here.
Among them, a belief that the competence of the US military, and thus the fate of the world, may hinge on whether modern warriors stipulate their pronouns in all of their emails.
“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better.
When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity.
To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed.
A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
–Theodore Dalrymple, Frontpage Magazine interview (August 31, 2005). Archived from the original on June 29, 2013.
The Nature of Pseudo-Reality (New Discourses)
In a recent long-form essay on New Discourses, James Lindsay explained the origins of totalitarianism in a single word: psychopathy. There, he explained that totalitarianism arises from people who cannot cope with reality as it is, and yet who are content to manipulate others, constructing a “pseudo-reality” in service to a vision of the world that serves their needs. That pseudo-reality holds as its North Star a Utopian vision that aligns with artificial resolutions to their inability to cope with reality as it is, and it thereby attracts others who have similar issues.
By constructing a false logic (a paralogic) and a false morality (a paramorality) to define and enforce the pseudo-reality, they can gather supporters in a cult-like fashion.
In the end, those ensnared lose the ability to distinguish reality and pseudo-reality almost entirely and become functionally psychopathic, and if they gain enough social, cultural, economic, and political power, they can hold hostage entire societies that are, in effect, on the march to totalitarianism and, eventually, total catastrophic collapse.
The essay is an important read, but it is also a difficult one. In this episode of the New Discourses podcast, James seeks to explain the essay in easier language and to flesh out its ideas one by one. He sees this process of unpacking the essay as his next major work, and in this podcast, he begins the process of linking the concept of “ideological pseudo-reality” to more familiar examples, not least Wokeness.
Critical Race Theory, for example, is a pseudo-reality that positions racism as the ordinary state of affairs in society, not an immoral aberration from them.
Queer Theory is a pseudo-reality in which being normal with regard to sex, gender, and sexuality is a problem while being in some way deviant (which is not the same as being gay or even trans) is elevated as normal.
Communism is a pseudo-reality that deems socially engineered command economies as effective and efficient ways to maximize human flourishing.
Covid-19 is a pseudo-reality built to enact control around a genuine and serious virus called SARS-CoV-2.
These topics and more are presented in this episode of the New Discourses podcast to help people understand and, hopefully, able to see reality for itself again.
Leave a Comment