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I dunno, it’s a pretty huge deal of a change. It’s literally historic and a major sign of the times. As others have pointed out, I actually enjoy this less duplicitous name. But the context of the change does not bode well.
So, yes and no - It was the “Department of War” for most of the country’s existence. Truman changed it in 1947 when doing a massive overhaul of the military and intel parts of the government. Also, just calling “Department of Defense” hasn’t prevented us from getting into a whole mess of wars since then.
I do agree that it’s a sign of the times in terms of “everything old is new again” and undoing the 20th century, which is the T47/project 2025 stated goal. Sure as shit, we’re making incredible progress towards returning to 1860.
FDR changes name from War to Defense, and Congress hasn’t declared War since. They’re just special military operations
Pretty much. We bombed Vietnam and killed a bunch of middle eastern people. Just a bunch of special military operations.
Looking into it, the department of war had removed the navy 150 years before. Arguably the DoD was a new department to encompass the department of the navy and the department of the army(the previous department of war) without the implication that the army was in charge being associated with the war department without the navy for so long. The naming, I could argue, is disrespectful to the US Navy of the late 1790s to the late 1940s.
Well, the overhaul in 1947 was huge, so it made sense to wrap it all up into something that also, in a post-WWII country, didn’t make it sound like “OK, we have this amazing military apparatus and now we’ve consolidated power, and let’s see where else to point it at…” I get it.
Personally, I think the “Department of International Violence” sounds more appropriate.
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1860 had vaccine mandates.
God DAMMIT we are so bad at science now
Might as well call it what it is. “The Department of Imperialism”.
I thought that was the CIA
That was when we still cared about being part of the UN so we would just quietly do it behind the scenes
Yeah, Department of Defense always reminded me of 1984:
The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.
So the orange Cheeto, who is trying to get the Noble Peace Prize… just wrote an EO rename things to the Department of War
God I wish you could turn cognitive dissonance into harnessable energy.
He was also an undercover FBI informant in the Democraric hoax that are the Epstein files.
Plus the FBI just released an official document setting the record straight; Definitely not a small penis.
Straight up Q-Anon bullshit.
Deep undercover raping and trafficking kids
Some alien-believers think humans are a source of energy for an alien race that feeds off negative energy. It’s concerning how plausible it’s beginning to feel.
Used to have a roommate like this in first year of college. They just stick to this one stupid thing that they think are hyper-masculine (in his case, it was going shooting and owning big guns) and they won’t shut up about it. These fuckers are so annoying. Like we get it bro, you’re a big manly man, now stfu about it. These are usually the most childish people irl.
This is what happens when you have no personality.
And lots of insecurities.
Pete small dick hegseth, is my head canon tbh
The insecurities ARE the personality, aka Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
And I’ll be a ten that he’s complained about “vegans always telling everyone about it”.
OMG lol
We even had some arguments about it. (All things considered, it was s miracle that he’d take our arguments in good faith, and not be bitter about it.) I’m not vegan, but I totally get their point.
I hope he found Crossfit, at least then it’s expected.
Secretary of DUI, Kegseth
Liver damage needs to hurry TF up breh, he’s so embarrassing.You mean cirrhosis?
Look, man, I’m doing my best on a motor with no compression here 😔
Liver sclerosis would be pretty bad too, if it were a thing
For those like me who don’t know what tf it is:
Sclerosis (from Ancient Greek σκληρός (sklērós) ‘hard’) is the stiffening of a tissue or anatomical feature, usually caused by a replacement of the normal organ-specific tissue with connective tissue. The structure may be said to have undergone sclerotic changes or display sclerotic lesions, which refers to the process of sclerosis.
Secretary of w-here are the fucking epstein files?
That man yells out his own name during sex
Dude needs a mirror to masturbate
In his defense, it’s also the name of his only sexual partner.
In his
defensewar…FTFY
did they officially change it from defense? that might be the first honest thing they’ve done in their miserable lives in pursuit of fascistic grandstanding.
Right now it’s an alternate name via executive order. Officially changing the name from Department of Defense to Department of War requires an act of Congress.
Congress is already warming up their hands to make sure the ball fondling pleases Trump.
My first split-second initial reaction was “oh hey they’re being honest for once”, but that was very swiftly followed by “oh fuck what are they teeing up here, they’re not doing this for no reason”
Trump has been calling himself a war-time president (the war is unspecified) and saying how nice it would be if he could suspend elections and stay in power due to a war. This has been in the making for a while. If he’s still alive in 3 years, he’ll start a war to stay in power.
I think they are just trying to start some wars so Trump can stay in power. Probably in central america? They did just sink a boat / murdered some people there.
Calling the military “defense” has always been doublespeak. Its literally the opposite of what they do. Department of war is the correct term.
Obviously this administration are all monsters, and they’re changing the name because they think they think it sounds intimidating. But the name change is the one good thing this administration has done, clearly in error.
DoD uses to be called DoW, but was changed to give a better image of the country. Reverting back to DoW under this administration, is not the good sign people think it is.
Also, that joke Pete Hegseth can’t even do a proper pull up, let alone a chin up. Pathetic.
I was thinking maybe the American public will start to question why we are spending so much on war. It is an insane budget and the doublespeak of it being for defense helped selling the idea to the public. Maybe he accidentally did something will will help reign in our over spending on war…
I hate that my Q family will believe exactly this: that he did it with the goal of waking people up.
I can see him stumble into some progressive policies…He will kill the economy and have enough of an outrage about cutting Medicaid that enough of his supporters will demand trumpcare. He can also start trump bucks, a monthly payout, so that the economy will still be stimulated. Just pitch it to him as something he can take away from US citizens, if they protest against him. He loves his name on shit, so just name the policies after him and he’ll probably think it’s a good deal.
I was thinking maybe the American public will start to question why we are spending so much on war.
To Keep Us Safe! To Defeat The Foreign Evil! To Bring Godlessness Back To Our Broken World!
It is an insane budget
I would be more comfortable with the US government taking its $1.4T national security budget and throwing it in a big burn pit than I am with our current policy. I’m less concerned with the volume of money than in what it is being spent on.
Department of war is the correct term.
I’m reminded of when Google took the “Don’t Be Evil” motto off their homepage.
Yeah, it was corporate bullshit. Yeah, they’ve been up to no good for a while. But when you start changing out the “We’re just here to do a good job” curtains for the “They’re red so the bloodstains are less visible” ones, it can’t help but make you a little nervous.
Isn’t it interesting? For people who hate “woke” and rally against gender identity transitioning, they sure love transitioning the identity of an entire government department and complaining when people dead name it. Snowflakes, the lot of them.
Edit: For bonus points, remember that these are the kind of conservative that bitch about LGBTQ people “making it everyone else’s business,” while they themselves are extremely in-your-face about these changes.
It’s the Gulf of MEXICO goddamnit
In your face about god too,
And their weird sexual hang ups. What they think should be allowed, what shouldn’t, etc.
My dad’s Facebook bio is “Trans-Millionaire” even though he makes less than 6 figures. I don’t think my dad has ever seen a million dollars in his bank account but to him he is just as important as those rich assholes who sit on top and make it harder for the rest to breathe clean air. My dad, as you guessed it, is extremely transphobic and a cunt (they are pretty synonymous)
You can point this out to the average person, they’ll still say you’re overreacting.
Like between this rename, and the “trump was fbi informant” bs, I’m wondering if I’m in a simulation, cuz this is absolutely insane, literally is amateur tv script, unbelievable, if this aired on TV, it would have worse rating than GoT season 8.
But its the real world unfortunately, it looks so stupid from the outside but I have lost all my friends to MAGA. Tell me how an evil orange clown controls the narrative for more than half the new coverage. He only supports his cronies and gives the middle finger to anyone who makes less than million dollars annually. This our collective timeline, fucking hell.
Secretary of binge drinking
At least it is accurate. The Americans are a warlike nation founded on a genocide. Orwell wrote extensively on the power of words to change a narrative and the way we feel, it is insidious and very common in the world of politics and business in a way that it is absolutely uncommon in the world of science where only the truth matters. The oil industry convinced us that we ought to soften Global Warming to the more benign Climate Change for no other reason than it makes them look less culpable. Hilarious that trump would choose this thing to tell us the truth. Gotta start someplace I guess.
I mean, climate change is probably a more accurate description of the situation. Sure, globally on average the planet is warming alarmingly quickly, but it doesn’t always feel that way on a local scale, so a lot of people had an easy time ignoring it, but it’s almost impossible to deny, wherever you live, that our climate is changing if one is capable of remembering their childhood. Temperature extremes get more extreme each year, storms get more intense, ocean levels rise, ecosystems vanish and change, etc. All of these things are a result of warming and greenhouse gases, but unless you’ve got a hard science background, you probably wouldn’t intuitively link all of these things together, so I can see a compelling argument for a better umbrella term. All that said, though, we all kept ignoring it regardless, so what the fuck do I know.
As for your point about America, though, I 100% agree. “The Department of Defense” has always been a euphemism, the convenient kind that lets you look pretty and get away with murder. What’s concerning to me, though, is that a Euphemism only dies for one of two reasons. Either everybody realizes what the euphemism actually means and it becomes synonymous with the phrase they were trying to avoid, or (and this is the much more common case) it becomes unneeded because they no longer need to varnish the truth; a mask off moment. And generally? The euphemism dies right before things get much, much worse.
All I can hope, as an American, is that we come out the other side of this fucking ashamed. Ashamed of ourselves, our beliefs, our actions, and our countrymen. Maybe then we can actually build a nation worthy of calling great, but I’m not holding my breath.
Perhaps climate change is a more appropriate description for our lived experience, I’m open to a well reasoned argument. We don’t have to go far to see practical examples of the effect of greenhouse gases, with Venus at 500C average surface temperature due to CO2 atmosphere or consider xkcd’s temperature timeline with the insanely vertiginous ascent during the last two hundo years. My proposals:
- Spicy Climate Change
- Sport Utility Environment
- Sweaty Ecological Catastrophe
- Gucci Sweats Planet
Forgot what we were talking about. Department of war. Listening to Sarah Paine on YT, clearly there have been and still are many Americans trying to do the right thing but that isn’t what grabs the headlines. The political landscape in general is getting ugly. Far right populists are emerging in Europe and these incels have been emboldened by the facist turn in America. Convenient for the billionaire class and their stooges.
Sorry I’m late to reply but I agree 100%. It would be reductive to say that no Americans are making or have made an effort to do the right thing - I know plenty personally who act as excellent countervailing evidence, and that’s in fucking Utah - and my primary issue with the American political climate isn’t even the rise of the far right, as you’re spot on that far right populism is on the rise globally; people are suffering under late capitalism and they want a change, any change, and we aren’t unique there. My main gripe is more at the lack of will in the American public (outside of the far right) to actually do anything about it. The 2024 election could not have been more clearly a Rubicon-type moment going into it; Republicans had already given us their entire playbook with Project 2025 and they did not mask the language there. Still, somehow, even a Republican-endorsed book that is essentially “US Authoritarian takeover for Dummies” wasn’t enough to galvanize the American people into actually showing up, so now we find ourselves here. We’ve taken “it’s the economy, stupid” and turned it into “stupidly, it’s the economy” and if we won’t even change our voting priorities for something like the continued existence of our democratic structures, that tells me that we need a fundamental cultural shift about what your civic duties are as a citizen in a democracy. Shame did the trick for Germany (sort of, that’s also kind of reductive but it serves a point), so maybe if we’re lucky we can do the same and find some semblance of a silver lining there.
Also, Gucci Sweats Planet is a banger. Five stars. If we want a sci-fi edge we could always go with “High Octane Terraforming”. Sounds cool, covers the unprecedentedly rapid change in temperature, contains a reference to gasoline, is future proofed for our inbound nuclear winter(s), and has an apt acronym.
I feel like we need a rap battle to decide this. We already have the name of our first collaborative album: High Octane Terraforming, featuring Gucci Sweats Planet. Eventually there will be beef with accusations about Gucci Sweats Planet’s environmental credentials.
Civic duty is tough one when you can barely afford rent but all you see on your IG feed is wealthy people blasting off to space and driving Lambo’s, however unrealistic that is. I listened to a pod on voting reform and their thesis was that the US system can be traced back to 1215 and the Magna Carta, when English feudal rule ended and the eventual emergence of first past the post voting. The English exported that shit all over the world.
I believe that switching to a proportional representation system is an essential component of the solution to the current situation. It’s completely insane to have the current level of wealth inequality and concentration of power in the hands of so few. We need some way of voicing our dissent other than the way Luigi and whoever offed Kirk have used.
“Global Warming” tended to generate doubters each time winter was cold, unfortunately - the bathtub analogy helped a bit.
So Donald or anyone in his family are going to do their service now then?
Right?
