psyops

a classic fun wikipedia page is the one on different shibboleths. Most of these hinge on the fact that pronunciation (phonetics, phonology) is locked in early in native speakers and it's exceedingly rare and difficult to adopt a nonnative language's pronunciation without flaw in adulthood. Morphosyntax, word order, and other stuff might be hard to acquire as an adult, but they're vastly easier in comparison. This is why you often hear hypercompetent nonnative speakers still have accents and it's rare to nonexistant to find someone who can perfectly pronounce a language they learned as an adult but who sucks at the morphosyntax.

Pronunciation-based shibboleths work, but imagine you had a shibboleth that was lexical, word-based but one that could pronounced in any old way. It'd be way weaker. Which brings me to the thing where people rail against how being suitably woke/pc/whatever changes every five minutes. This isn't wrong, but the constant shifting of correct words seems to be the result of using a shibboleth system that isn't based on pronunciation. Or at least the speed of the shifting seems to be the result of this.

For a variety of dumb reasons we exist so much in text on the internet and pronunciation is not gonna cut it as a means to distinguish the in-group from the out-. Marginalized people rightfully want a way to know who's down and who isn't, but we're in a bind because the medium only allows for shitty shibboleths. We/they have to keep everything changing because cooption can happen just as fast. Anyone can cop a new word on the internet. I don't need to know how to pronounce latinx if all I have to do it type it.

Rapidly changing the terms seems like a fine defense mechanism in this light, but it is still a bummer because it makes being down such an immaterial bore. It's way harder to fake other things, eg pronunciation, but more importantly: showing up with your physical body and doing real shit irl. This is basically not possible with quarantine mandates.

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I got real high the other night was thinking about psyops, who to trust, is brace belden cia, etc, lol. I do this half-intentionally because I find it entertaining, but I also think these are real questions. And you can devote a lot of thought and energy to them without really getting anywhere. Is any given thing presented in the media a psyop to keep us pacified, or not? Maybe I think the chapo guys are earnest and funny and flawed in a trustworthy way because they've been precisely calibrated to neuter any nascent potentially insurrection-y types (I don't consider myself an insurrectionary type, but maybe they know more about me and my ilk than I do).

There's no way to know, but these are frets that only the weakest Left would ever grapple with. Frets about psyops or even sheepdogs only really have teeth when there is no ground game physical shibboleths to trust. It's relatively easy to fake a podcast or campaign like Warren's. It's really hard to fake irl action, still possible, but the barrier's higher