It's actually a good thing to point out, because it shows that those people are out of control and exceeding their authority, and need to be reined in.

No need to die on the hill, but point out that there's a consistent pattern of lawless power-grabbing.

You're talking about an administration that barred the AP from pressed briefings because they didn't call it the Gulf of America. This is not a bikeshed.

> It's really not the right thing to be bikeshedding. The people calling the shots call themselves the Department of War. No need to die on hills that don't matter.

From the first chapter of the book On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder, an historian of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust:

> Do not obey in advance.

* https://timothysnyder.org/on-tyranny

* https://archive.org/details/on-tyranny-twenty-lessons-from-t...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Snyder

I wouldn’t call a brief comment on the matter dying on a hill fcs

TIL of Bikeshedding, or Parkinson’s Law of Triviality.

Defined as the tendency for teams to devote disproportionate time and energy to trivial, easy-to-understand issues while neglecting complex, high-stakes decisions. Originating from the example of arguing over a bike shed's color instead of a nuclear plant's design, it represents a wasteful focus on minor details.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

---

I deal with this day in and day out. Thank you for informing me of the word that describes the laughable nightmares I deal with on the regular.

It's a funny thing that the most war-loving people and the most peace-loving people both love calling it "Department of War" - just for different reasons.

But the reason for "Department of Defense" name was bureaucratic. It's also not true that DOD is hard to understand.

The Department of the Army is what was previously called the Department of War. The Department of Defense is new, dating to just after WWII.

Naming is important because it intuits what we expect to do with a thing. The Department of Defense invading Greenland is more invocative to inquiry than the Department of War invading Greenland because that's what a department of war would do.

It's one of the reasons why people get annoyed at jargon or are pissed off about pronouns, because it highlights that they should be putting mental effort into understanding why they're current mental model doesn't fit. It's much easier to ignore and be comfortable if there's not glaring sirens saying you've got some learning to do.

Most of us can't (or won't) be aware of everything that should be important to us, having glaring context clues that we should take notice of something incongruous is important. It's also why the Trump media approach works so well it's basically a case of alarm fatigue as republicans who would normally side against any particular one of his actions don't listen because they agreed with some of the actions that democrats previously raised alarms about.

Doublespeak, so to speak.

How about the Department of Mass Murder? That would communicate its purpose even better, I think. Why stop at "War"?

Of appeasement and bootlicking, yes.

Remember, this is the same administration that barred the AP from the Oval Office because they wouldn't rename the Gulf of Mexico. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/11/associated-p...

While this action may indeed cause the DoD to blacklist Anthropic from doing business w/the government, they probably were being as careful as they could be not to double down on the nose-thumbing.

This. They even put a "wArFiGhTers" in there.

I don't think it's addressed to Hegseth, but to anyone who might be sympathetic to Hegseth. Which I think actually strengthens your point, the goal appears to be to make it so the only possible complaint with the letter for someone sympathetic to the administration is "but mass domestic surveillance / fully autonomous weapons are legal" and not "look at this lunatic leftist who calls it the department of defense".

Maybe this is the DoW Pam Bondi was referring to.

The Department of Defense was named in 1949, not 1947, and the thing that it was renamed from was the National Military Establishment, which was newly created in 1947 to be put over the two old military departments (War, which was over the Army only, and Navy, which was over the Navy including the Marine Corps)

At the same time as the NME was created, the Army was split into the Army and Air Force and the Department of War was also split in two, becoming the Department of the Army and the Department of the Air Force.

Often offensive and also often defensive of others.. so if renaming is on the table, it’s probably most apt to call it the Dept of Security since the vast majority of what it does is maintaining the security umbrella that has helped suppress world war since the last one. Of course, facts or opinions on whether it succeeds on the security front depend on which side of the umbrella you’re on.

Those of us with a firm grip on reality do not currently live under fascism.

> All that matters is that everyone calls it the Department of War, and regards it as such, which everyone does.

What you just described is consensus, and framing it as fascism damages the credibility of your stance. There are better arguments to make, which don’t require framing a label update as oppression.

> And what if congress renames it tomorrow?

Then tomorrow it will be the Department of War. Just like When Congress voted to split the old Department of War into the Department of the Army and the Department of the Air Force, and to take both of those and the previously-separate Department of the Navy under a new National Military Establishment led by the newly-created Secretary of Defense (and when it later to voted to rename the NME as “Department of Defense”), things changed in the past.

> They have the votes.

Perhaps, but the law doesn't change because the votes are in a whip count on a hypothetical change, it changes because they are actually cast on a bill making a concrete change.