Deltas Don't Ever Learn
J.D. Vance just can't seem to stop playing self-defense attorney
JD Vance has been a better vice-president than I expected, but he’s repeatedly shown himself to be susceptible to rhetoric due to what appears to be uncontrollable Delta narcissism. Don’t be misled by the media’s narrative when it comes to Vance’s latest public misstep, however. Because while he did make another one already, it isn’t what the media would like us to believe it was.
JD Vance was today branded 'shameful' after the US Vice President appeared to dismiss Britain as a 'random country that hasn't fought a war in 30 or 40 years'.
Military veterans and MPs from across the House of Commons led a furious backlash against Mr Vance's 'shameful' comments and called on him to apologise. They pointed out that 636 British troops died in Afghanistan and Iraq after the UK allied with the US to join military action in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks.
Mr Vance was accused of 'erasing from history' the sacrifice of UK personnel in those bloody conflicts, with his remarks labelled 'deeply disrespectful'.
The Vice President ramped up transatlantic tensions as he poured cold water over Sir Keir Starmer's plan for a 'coalition of the willing' to secure peace in Ukraine. He dismissed the PM's offer of a peacekeeping force with UK and French boots on the ground and instead piled pressure on Ukraine to sign a minerals deal with the US.
Mr Vance told Fox News: 'If you want real security guarantees, if you want to actually ensure that Vladimir Putin does not invade Ukraine again, the very best security guarantee is to give Americans economic upside in the future of Ukraine. That is a way better security guarantee than 20,000 troops from some random country that hasn't fought a war in 30 or 40 years.'
The Vice President later scrambled to claw back his remarks as he faced widespread anger at his intervention. He claimed he hadn't been aiming his barb at Britain or France - the only two countries to publicly commit to a peacekeeping force in Ukraine - but failed to clarify which nations he had been referring to.
One hopes the Vice-President won’t be dumb enough to actually take the bait and apologize. Although, since he’s already been dumb enough to a) permit the media to make a perfectly relevant observation about himself and b) tell a stupid and obvious lie about his previous observation, one can’t rule out the possibility.
The fact is that sending a few thousand troops to engage in a futile occupation of a hostile nation conquered by your much more powerful ally is not, by any reasonable definition, “fighting a war”. Even the 10-week Falklands War of 1982 can barely be counted as a war by any reasonable definition.
WAR: A state of open, armed, often prolonged conflict carried on between nations, states, or parties.
During the 13 years that Britain was sending as many 9,500 troops into Afghanistan, of whom 636 were killed, more than 85,693 individuals born in Afghanistan were registered as residents in the 2021 census for England and Wales. If Britain can be said to have fought a war with Afghanistan, then it must be said that it lost that war.
Regardless, to even try to compare a minor role in an unsuccessful police action to the continental war presently raging in Ukraine and Russia is a category error. The entire British armed forces wouldn’t last one month against the Russian army and everyone involved knows it, including Vice-President Vance.
Which is why his instinctive resort to a “please don’t hit me” response is so disappointingly craven. Because it demonstrates how even in the aftermath of his failure during the Zelensky summit, Vance is incapable of learning from his mistakes and controlling his instinctive Delta responses to rhetorical attakcs that urge him to defend himself and everything he says with futile dialectic.
Please note that this is not advice to always double down on everything you say or to refuse to admit error when error has clearly been committed. SSH is not SJW. The point is that one should refuse to back down, retreat, or scramble to claw back anything you have said that was true!
What should Vance have done? He simply should have kept his mouth shut the second time. He should learn to stop responding and reacting, and stick to prepared statements that allow him to take the offensive, at which he is effective, and avoid unnecessarily putting himself in positions where he finds himself on the defensive, where he is observably vulnerable.
A comment yesterday explains why Vance keeps making the same mistake.
Training is absolutely not instinct. The real internal pattern reveals itself in moments of pressure or surprise. Readers take note of that, the internal instinct of a man is always lurking under their skin. Look at user Bryce, as soon as the most minor amount of pressure was applied on his ego the full gamma rage came out. Similarly the more pressure got put on Vance the more he struggled with Delta tendencies. If a surprise missile suddenly hit the White House Trump would be 100% Alpha and Vance would suddenly have trouble not being a 100% Delta.
As for those who want to know what a Sigma would have done, I would think the answer is pretty obvious: take advantage of the media’s attempted narrative change and utilize it as an opportunity to attack the larger narrative with rhetorical jujitsu. While there are many ways that could be accomplished, here is what I considered to be the most obvious example that immediately occurred to me.
“What is shameful is the waste of 636 British lives in support of a failed occupation by the same global imperialists who now want to waste even more British lives in a futile defense of an already-defeated Kiev regime. What is shameful is the corrupt British media’s attempt to sacrifice more brave British soldiers on the evil altar of globalist imperialism! The fact, the truth, and the observable reality is that Great Britain hasn’t fought a war in the last 40 years, and it does not have the knowledge, the equipment, or the manpower to fight a war today. An army with more horses than tanks and a navy that was unable to defend the British Isles from invasion by 11.5 million foreigners are obviously incapable of defending the borders of Ukraine from the Russian army.
Do you think the media really wants to have that conversation?
Deltas fall back on defensive dialectic because, while our narcissism tells us we are right, we fear that our idiosyncratic views will alienate us from the hierarchy. Thus even when we’re appropriately confrontational we need support and validation from higher status men.
I think it comes back to the lack of empathy.
The Delta throws out a brilliant initial rhetorical salvo, without instinctively knowing how his opponent will react to it. He is then caught off guard when his opponent comes back with a surprising rhetorical response.
The Sigma knows exactly what he is trying to say and why he said it. He either knows how his opponent will react to it, or has a new angle of his own such that it doesn’t matter.