#grey discourse

[thegreatkoga]

The grey discourse is the funniest thing ever. But it was caused my friends to call each other heathens for spelling it differently. I spell it 'grey' @bugwiki and @lanceologist are to blame for this. But keep going I'm wheezing

[smalltownmayor]

@steel-song, shadow-reblogging https://steel-song.tumblr.com/post/168484466461/how-about-firefighters-are-they-real-greys and tagging you because, as you correctly noted, kindnessismandatory shouldn’t have to be part of this conversation.

I’m not a diplomat, but I’ve studied a little foreign affairs. To measure “military power”, broadly defined, there are four basic variables that you can toss at every country in the world to generate a ranking. Sophisticated analysis is more complicated, taking into account terrain, leadership, experience, etc, but the basic model is a remarkably good predictor of success.

The factors are the size of the economy, the fraction of that economy devoted to manufacturing/industry, the annual budget of the military before the war, and the number of greys in the country.

Relatedly, you may have noticed that we have a grey unemployment problem. Every country wants to have greys to defend itself in case of need, wants them to be well-trained reservists, wants some available as a well trained and smooth officer (including non-com officer) corp, but mostly just tries to have them waiting around.

So we subsidize sports; debate grey basic incomes; declare “everyone’s a half-grey so they can all fight”; debate letting half-greys serve (which is politically inconvenient and a small-magnitude solution to a large-magnitude solution [I’m aware that this phrase doesn’t always translate well, it means that you’re proposing something that at most could fix 11% of a problem as if it will fix everything], a classic green idea if ever there was one; blur the line between acting and fighting; and most importantly make more jobs grey.

Sex workers. Bookies. Dance callers. These jobs don’t emphasize grey virtues, as you identify them. But every grey sex worker is someone who can, when the war comes, at least help with transportation (and there’s a long history of grey camp followers who assisted with all sorts of work in addition to sex on Spring campaigns). Every dance caller can help with getting a crowd from point A to point B, an important skill if your military isn’t yet well-disciplined, perhaps because a large number of troops were recently added. Every bookie can help check ammo and food supplies. And these are roles where it’s really valuable for the person doing them to be able to pick up a gun in case of need. And, of course, reserve duty is an option if and only if there are greys with primary jobs who can use their spare time for the military. Sex workers are particularly convenient for this, as they spend about a fourth of the year very busy and the rest of the time trying to make ends meet.