The Language Spell is the Base Spell

Mark Kelly is deeply concerned about Pete Hegseth, because Hegseth keeps talking about lethality. That’s very violent and macho, see, and that’s not how military leaders ever speak, or how they ever should.

Hegseth, Kelly concludes, runs around on stage “like a 12 year-old playing army.”

Of course, Mark Kelly flew the A-6e attack plane off of aircraft carriers. Famously, naval aviators have no patience for machismo or swagger, and they never use the language of violence or aggression, regarding it as vulgar. They’re like a subdued little cadre of gray-suited accountants, fundamentally reticent. It can be quite difficult to even get them to mention that they’re pilots, because they just live by such a stern code of rhetorical sobriety.

Kelly is performing, playacting the feminized ritual language that serves as a marker of status in a mimetic society. He doesn’t believe any of this, although he may have convinced himself of the need to pretend to believe it, which psychologically resembles “believing it.” In the combat arms, where Kelly comes from, Hegseth is as normal as a cheeseburger; in the Beltway performative classes, where he lives now, Hegseth is low-status and trailer-parky. Kelly adopts the demeanor and attitude of his new social station. He’s an arriviste, the political equivalent of the nouveau riche. Jay Gatsby performs high status. Mark Kelly is a senator, now, and pretty obviously still a climber, so he finds the hard language of violence to be tasteless. As he aspires, so then does he speak.

I’ve ignored the idiotic “double-tap” controversy, which is predictably imploding on schedule without my tiny little intervention. But the whole thing, yet again, is a performance of language as pure ritual, disconnected from the thing being discussed. For the first time in the history of the world, a military leader is openly using violent language!

The ritual invocations are ritual invocations. They aren’t arguments. They aren’t supposed to make sense. They’re a cultural fence, enclosing an inside class and excluding the outside classes. Trespassing dangerously into the world of fact, if you believe this week’s much-repeated argument that it’s always a war crime to fire on the wounded, and it’s simply a thing that has never been done before…

…spend three minutes to watch this. “He’s wounded — hit him.”

I think there are arguments for and against the boat strikes, and I’m open to the discussion. The loudest arguments against are so far too stupid to take seriously.

Similarly, I thought Vinay Prasad used the language of logic and reason to discuss the harms of Covid-19 vaccines, but mimetic regulation excludes his performance on the basis on his failure to comply with the ritual norms. He is declaratively low-status.

He’s an outcast, so. Experts say this is not to be considered as true, friend.

The CDC reports every week on the percentage of the American population that is currently up-to-date on Covid-19 vaccines:

It’s pretty much nobody. The country has quite solidly abandoned these pharmaceutical products, while the expert classes continue to perform the Ritual of Pharmaceutical Infallibility, the central rite of the quasi-religion.

Extrapolating from polling data, tens of millions of Americans believe they were harmed by Covid-19 vaccines, a number that includes “more than 17 million who experienced major side effects.” In exclusionary ritualspeak, not one of those people can show peer-reviewed evidence of their injuries, which cannot then be said to exist.

Compare:

1. The thing that 90+% of the population believes on the basis of direct experience, as proved by their behavior

2. What high-status experts believe

You can see this with Covid-19 vaccines, but go back to the top: Mark Kelly says it’s bizarre and insane for…a military leader…to talk about lethality. He’s being so macho, and that’s wrong! Again, what would you guess the majority of American normals think the military actually does?

An era of of psychological warfare through “sentiment engineering” requires the success of ritual fences and mimetic performance. It’s irresponsible for a military leader to talk about violence, and there’s no evidence that Covid-19 vaccines are anything but the SALVATION OF HUMANITY. All of the delusions and brokenness start with the explanatory crime of boundary language about the things you must believe and may not believe.

That ritual fence has been doing more work than we tend to notice, and it’s breaking. Every American who notices that Mark Kelly is an absurd self-promoting jackass is doing important cultural work.