Nothing brings home the Orwellian nature of USA 2026 more for me than the word "warfighter".
To me the most Orwellian thing is everyone using the newspeak name for the DoD.
Just because a name is more accurate doesn't mean that it's its new name. Otherwise we wouldn't be the United States of America (we are literally not united bc Hawaii and Alaska are not contiguous, and we are figuratively not united because... Well, you know)
> DoW is newspeak. Thats not it's name.
I understood that comment I was replying to was responding to was replying to the latter part of the comment.
Discussions and threads can evolve. They are not static.
In case anyone else reading this was not aware of this, this is what I discovered.
It's a term from George Orwell's 1984, describing a language used to make thoughts unthinkable by removing words from the language. It has nothing to do with "age of the term."
Hence, Dept of Defense is indeed newspeak. Dept of War, while being a new name for the dept, is too literal to be newspeak.
Thanks for the opportunity for me to learn something!
I think Department of War is also newspeak. Or at least, they didn't change the name just to get the name in line with the amount of war the department does.
They changed it because they wanted to do more even more war. The amount of war the department does under the name "Defense" has been status quo for a long time, and my take is they wanted us to think of them differently so they could do even more war, which they have since been doing.
The problem will get worse as we have a generation raised by LLMs.
Some of his arguments:
It used to be called the department of war, and it had a better track record with regard to foreign conflict, under that name then it did under the DoD name.
Department of war is a more honest name, department of defense is a somewhat newspeak term, although "Department of Peace" would be worse.
It's harder to seek funding for "war", then it is to seek funding for "defense". If you ask someone, "Do you want to spend money on education or war?", you will get a different answer asking, "Do you want to spend money on education or defense?".
[0] Palmer Luckey talking to Mike Rowe about the name change: https://youtu.be/dejWbn_-gUQ?t=1007
I'm confused. This seems like a bad change.
Regarding Luckey's other statements, I can almost assure you that the administration did not think as much about it as Luckey has. Insecure Pete just thought the title "Secretary of Defense" was too wussy so he wanted to be Secretary of War.
Also, I think people mainly have issue with the fact that Trump is just randomly and unilaterally renaming random stuff and demolishing buildings without congressional approval. If he had gone through the correct alleys then maybe people could ignore it. Maybe. We'd probably still have qualms about it, but at least we'd know that our representatives had a say.
It’s a good change in that it discourages unwarranted funding. Bad for the DoD’s budget, good for the country.
It’s analogous to why `React.__SECRET_INTERNALS_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED` is a pretty good name.
(But even if it's a decent name in isolation, it isn't actually the name of the department, and using it is a tacit submission to the power of the executive over congress. So… bad overall.)
The flaw in this logic is maddening
However I suppose Amodei in this context can be included in the former group.
Edit: not sure if you're talking about the term warfighters or dept of war. Either way, warfighters just sounds silly, regardless of how long its been in use, and dept of war also sounds silly. It's like what my 5 year old nephew would call his fictitious military agency.
It’s exactly the kind of language people like Hegseth love.
They changed the name and it matches the intention. It is not a newspeak name anymore.
No, they didn't. The name of the department at issue is “the Department of Defense” and of its head the “Secretary of Defense” — these are set in statute (the latter for slightly longer time than the former) and the relevant statutes has not been changed, since the office of the Secretary of Defense was created in 1947 and the Department of Defense was created in 1949. The executive branch has just decided to use a nickname for a government department (which is the historical name for a prior department which was split to form two of what are now the three main direct subordinate elements within that department.)
"When the way prevails in the empire, fleet-footed horses are relegated to ploughing the fields; when the way does not prevail in the empire, war-horses breed on the border." Tao Te Ching chapter 46.
It's pretty wild to observe you all getting firmware updates in real time. At least it proves, once and for all, that any attempt at reasoning is futile.