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Department of War @DeptofWar - We’re advancing President Trump’s executive order on nuclear energy.
Moments from now, we will airlift a next-generation nuclear reactor.
https://x.com/DeptofWar/status/2023102371572883562
Department of War @DeptofWar - Video: On May 23, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to deploy advanced nuclear reactor technologies for national security purposes.
Yesterday, we took the next step toward achieving this historic mission.
https://x.com/DeptofWar/status/2023416588641423424
Department of War @DeptofWar - Actor and filmmaker Robert Duvall grew up a @USNavy brat but decided to enlist in the @USArmy in 1953, just after the end of the #koreanwar. His GI Bill benefits helped him attend acting classes to start his career. Read more: https://www.war.gov/News/Feature-Stories/Story/Article/2897826/actor-filmmaker-robert-duvall-was-navy-brat-turned-soldier/
https://x.com/DeptofWar/status/1487380002962554880
derek guy @dieworkwear - I've seen so many tweets in response to Paul Graham's post that I have to chime in.
Everyone who has replied to Paul's post misses an important dimension to taste: social relations.
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Taste touches on everything — film, music, art, furniture, industrial design, cars, etc. For obvious reasons, I can't talk about all of these subjects, not just because I'm not an expert, but also because this is Twitter. Thus, I will stick to what I know, fashion, which happens to be the topic that sparked this conversation.
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Everyone who has replied so far takes beauty as an objective variable, like scientific laws or mathematical truths (which, if you dig deep enough, turn out to be conditional, but we'll set that aside). In this regard, a person's taste is their ability to identify some objective truth in beauty. It's asserted that a person who has good taste in fashion must have good taste in furniture and art. So on and so forth.
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In reality, our judgments of taste are not neutral or objective. They are extensions of our social relations. We know this because the suit spread around the world on the back of the Second British Empire. By any reasonable measure, elite men's dress in regions stretching from France to China was obviously superior in cut and styling. But as the British Empire spread around the world, this colorful, extravagant garb was slowly pushed aside by the austere, drab clothes once promoted by Beau Brummell.
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We can also see this relationship happen within English society. In the early 20th century, elite Guardsmen commissioned Edwardian-style suits from Savile Row tailors. But when lower, working-class youths started to buy ready-to-wear imitations of these clothes — wearing them while causing a ruckus on the streets — the elites dropped the style and moved on.
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This gets back to a very simple dynamic that German sociologist Georg Simmel wrote about in his 1902 essay "On Fashion." As he observed, fashion is often a game of imitation, with people copying their supposed "social betters." When they succeed, those at the top of the hierarchy move on to distinguish themselves. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu put it more succinctly when he said that our notions of "good taste" are often nothing more than the preferences and habits of the ruling class.
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In response to Paul's tweet, @nntaleb wrote yesterday: "Your sense of aesthetics is best reflected in the way you dress & the way you organize your surroundings. [...] Without aesthetics (elegance in both looks and behavior), a human is no human."
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But what does it mean to "dress elegantly?" Most people assume this means wearing upper-class British dress. Critical theorist Max Horkheimer would have described this dynamic as a kind of internalized repression — a way of "inserting social power more deeply into the very bodies of those it subjugates."
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