this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
840 points (97.8% liked)
People Twitter
7400 readers
2109 users here now
People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
- Mark NSFW content.
- No doxxing people.
- Must be a pic of the tweet or similar. No direct links to the tweet.
- No bullying or international politcs
- Be excellent to each other.
- Provide an archived link to the tweet (or similar) being shown if it's a major figure or a politician.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Given that Fortunate Son was playing as one of the songs...
Fucking of course it was.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Or they did it as protest instead of not caring. Some might have cared a lot.
Glad he owned up to the mistake.
I was only in marching band. 25 years later, I promise I could still do it with zero practice. This was on purpose.
If you were in marching band, there's a good possibility that you had more thorough training in marching than what's given in basic training, especially if you went to competitions. Marching makes up like half the activity of marching band (it's in the name). Marching is only one of a plethora of things that are taught during the few months of basic training, and once you're out of basic, you may never have to march again.
I also think your expectations on how rhythmically-inclined the average person (or soldier) is might be on the high side based on your experience in an activity with a bunch of highly rhythmically-inclined people.
I was in army cadets for like 2 years about 17 years ago and could still do this with 0 effort and I have a very poor sense of rhythm.
Trust me, anyone that's spent more than like an hour learning to march could still do it with ease decades later.
load more comments
(6 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
I am surprised at how many people do not get it. In military you cannot not comply with the orders, especially whan there is clearly nothing criminal with it. The guys doing sloppy marching is pretty much the only agency they have and the only way to protest and boycot that ridiculous parade.
Malicious compliance
This. NATO has us troops stationed all over europe. They marched just fine during european parades.
load more comments
(7 replies)
probably one of the first things every soldier world wide learns is marching. Malicious compliance it is.
Somehow I doubt that someone in a professional armed forces can't fucking march. It's just left, left, left right left
load more comments
(4 replies)
The way the marines, in particular, marched… no. That was sloppy and looked intentional.
it was intentional… they also didn’t look at or salute the Dump when he stood to salute them, under the giant Coinbase signs….
A real President, sponsorships notwithstanding.
Lol he did approach his problem with science and eventually was happy with the solution, but in the interim he also sentenced the person that proposed the scientific solution to death against gladiator and only changed his tune when someone illegally filmed the unexpected plant growth so 5/10
What we are seeing right now is how a society sleepwalks to that point.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
I mean, if they'd been ordered eyes right and present arms, they would've.
But they probably didn't plan for him to salute so no one knew what to do and just walked on by.
in just about every snippet of a military parade i’ve seen, they show the part where troops walk by the president and he’s saluting and they salute back… and they know how to march in synch….
this was malicious compliance.
Saw a short video of an ex drill instructor saying your first week in boot besides getting oriented and shit was learning to march. You dont ever forget it. That if it starts getting sloppy, the seargent or whatever starts saying left, right, left to coordinate again. The guy said it was very intentional .
Yeah, I did basic training decades ago, and could probably do it right with maybe an hour-long refresher course. Even without that I'd probably be be fine just marching, it's more the "eyes left", "present arms", handling turns, etc. that would need work.
That said, you tend to follow someone's lead. From what I remember, they declare it like "by the left, quick march" and that means you're marching at a standard "quick" pace and you're lining up with whoever's to your left, and the left column follows the person in front of them, so basically led by whoever's in the front-left position of the formation. That means if people to your left, or people on the left-most column are out of step, it will have a cascading effect through the ranks.
But yeah, it's pretty standard to call out the march, and they'd definitely do that if they cared.
What's also funny is that at one point as the soldiers were marching past, they were playing "Fortunate Son" on the PA system. Now, that's massively ironic given that the song is basically about Vietnam-era draft dodgers who used their family's wealth to get out of Vietnam service like Trump.
But, making it worse is that the song has a slightly faster pace than your typical rock song at 135ish BPM. The US military generally marches at 120 BPM. It's actually really hard to hear a song at 135 BPM and march at 120 BPM. That's why generally marching music is at 120 BPM so you march to the beat. The result is that some soldiers kept marching at 120 BPM, others adjusted to match the song, and it all generally looked like shit.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
I think the way they marched says more about trump than it does their ability to march. I very much doubt they forgot how to do it.
Like riding a bike. Those soldiers were doing their best to sham in plain sight and right in front of that bloated tangerine, I’ve never been so proud of the E-4 mafia in my life.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Actually, they do train for this. So nice try. They hate Trump.
If they're all really so unhappy to do this, I'm not saying they should do a coup... but I'm not not saying that, either.
I'm sure they felt very proud being brought on and ordered to march on display like trained monkeys.
Story time, boys and girls.
When I joined the Army and went to basic training, one of the first things they did was show us how to stand at attention, at-ease, right face, left face, and about face. Then they turned the training unit and marched off.
And then stopped and screamed at us for marching like Nazis.
Turns out, you don't see US soldiers marching like that because it's stupid as hell, and you can't do it for twenty miles with a rucksack. The US military for all their many, many faults, is real good at war, and marching like a toy soldier doesn't help you do war.
So we learned how to march like Americans, which is much more casual. The only thing you've gotta do is make sure you match the stride length of the soldier in front of you, but even that is more of a suggestion than a hard rule. We got good, though, because we were assholes.
We would ease out behind someone who was walking somewhere and roughly the same height, and step slightly faster than the person in front of us, until we were close behind them. Then you perform a little skip at the last second to get back to the same stride and close the last few inches. The end result is that your chest is hovering about an inch from their back, your nose is an inch from the back of their head, and your hands are swinging right behind theirs. While walking at full speed.
You haven't had a jump scare until you've marched two blocks, turned your head, and glimpsed someone's face an inch from your own.
The US military for all their many, many faults, is real good at war, and marching like a toy soldier doesn't help you do war.
The point of a uniformed service is to show your enemy that you have control and command over people who will follow your orders. Demonstrating this lowers your enemy's will to fight back. It gets soldiers on the other side to think "If these guys are so organized that they march in unison, we don't stand a chance."
These military parades are no longer valuable except to authoritarians. Normal functioning democracies don't use national military forces to project power. They do so using diplomacy and other political methods.
But Trump, Kim Jung Un, Modi, and Putin all use it to flex their authority to their base.
It will not surprise me if in the next year, a new division in the army is created for parade duty for the president's birthday where next year their marching will be perfect.
All so that Trump can get his dick hard.
The British can all do it for things like the Queen's funeral.
The USA absolutely uses military prowess to project power. It just happens to be that marching soldiers no longer does that anymore; that's what Air Force flybys at college football games are for.
The point of a uniformed service is to show your enemy that you have control and command over people who will follow your orders. Demonstrating this lowers your enemy's will to fight back. It gets soldiers on the other side to think "If these guys are so organized that they march in unison, we don't stand a chance."
Fair enough.
It will not surprise me if in the next year, a new division in the army is created for parade duty for the president's birthday where next year their marching will be perfect.
That would just be the chefs kiss of silly bullshit on top of everything else.
load more comments
(1 replies)
The entire thing screamed humiliation display more than anything else. And the anything else was like a half assed shitty commercial for military equipment. They had actual soldiers playing dress up for no fucking reason while wasting a fuck ton of money the VA could’ve used. Just despicable all around.
It's like in Catch-22 when Lieutenant Scheisskopf thinks that it's in vogue to march with your arms barely moving, and no one knows any better.
At least Trump seemed not to enjoy any of it, so hopefully we can put this whole stupid episode behind us, and move on to the next stupid episode.
load more comments
(6 replies)