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I wonder how many marriages were arranged by Chuck Norris.

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The question we all need answered.

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The canceling of the American mind is an overall reality particularly on social media. Because the Left is afraid to debate/defend their positions; they think their views are so superior that debate is beneath them or a combination of the two most social media has become an echo chamber or is ghettoized into separate tribes. Thankfully, because God is the ultimate reality the truth will finally break through, but unfortunately with a lot of carnage in the meantime.

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My experience was that it felt like the world became fundamentally different after 2012. That was the year the smart phone became ubiquitous. Pre-2012 I still knew people who had flip phones and some who didn’t even have a cell phone; after 2012 everyone I knew had a smart phone.

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2014: I've heard this year referred to as the "Great Awokening" as well. The consensus appears to be pretty broad that this is the year many things began changing; the proximate cause being Ferguson, but the actual cause being a cascade of other changes.

The rises of Woke, Trump, and Covid seem to have done a lot to discredit Haidt's original "Moral Foundations Theory" in which the left is supposedly LESS concerned with "purity" and "authority". Still, I thought his last book was decent, and I'm sure I'll read the new one.

The Marines: One thing that makes this figure even more impressive is that the Marines today are only slightly smaller than they were in the 1975-1990 era. The Army, by contrast, sat at something like 750,000-800,000 active duty during this era, and is now struggling to maintain a force of 450,000-500,000. The declines in Navy and Air Force are similar. The US simply could not build the Reagan-era military without a draft now.

See here: https://historyinpieces.com/research/us-military-personnel-1954-2014

But I recall the observation being made 20 years ago that the Marines generally did better at recruiting because they stressed the warrior ethos over career benefits. It's hard to change an institutional culture that quickly and I don't think the other branches ever really tried. Maybe some of their marketing tried, but some of their marketing also tried hard to do the opposite (the Army cartoon ad that featured a female soldier going to her lesbian wedding was probably the epitome of "doing the opposite").

The Marines are forced to acknowledge Pride month now (and are called "Woke" for doing so), but I don't think they've ever put out a super-Woke recruiting ad, and in the infamous chart in which employees of nearly all large organizations are shown to have donated more to Biden than Trump, the Marines stand almost alone with the NYPD on the Republican side.

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