I’m GenX, a child of the cold war. “Tradecraft” is what spooks and spies do. It’s espionage and poisoning enemy agents and infiltration and shit.
So what the fuck?
The idea of ‘trades’, as in construction trades like electricians, plumbers, carpenters, etc, has become pretty popular recently. The idea that you can get into a trade and make a good living without going to college has taken off as a response to the “forgive college loans” push. The right will often talk about trades as “real jobs” in contrast to people who go to college, rack up a ton of debt, and get degrees in fields that aren’t high paying or don’t directly translate into jobs right-wingers can easily understand. So talking about trades is a dig at ‘college educated liberals’. Among certain segments of the right, even just mentioning trades will illicit images of big burly men working with their hands doing manual labor raking in gobs of cash and lording their superiority over unemployed, highly-educated Democratic voters with liberal arts degrees and huge college debt. It’s become a meme they can use to quickly and easily convey that idea.
This is totally separate from the type of factory work they talk about trying to bring back to America by boosting domestic manufacturing. There’s really not a lot of construction trade work in factories. The type of factory work they’re talking about are typically unskilled jobs that pay much lower than skilled construction trades. But they also promised their voters they’d be creating high paying factory jobs. As much as they enact policies which suggest the opposite, the fascists running the government can understand simple economics. They know that an iPhone (for example) isn’t going to be built in the US by workers getting paid $30/hour. They know any factory manufacturing jobs their policies might create will be as close to minimum wage as possible with no benefits, ridiculous working conditions, and extremely high turnover. But they also know they have to promise the moon to maintain their sycophantic cult.
So they just words like “tradecraft” when talking about factory jobs because it illicits the idea of high paying skilled trades, but doesn’t actually outright say it. They want people to think electrician, plumber, carpenter, HVAC tech, etc, but also the deniability to say “I never said that.” If they came out and said “trade jobs” a bunch of industry and labor people would be like “uh… there are no electricians or plumbers working on factory floors.” Instead, if they get pushback they can just say, “I didn’t say that. I said ‘tradecraft’.”
It’s just Orwellian nonsense to obscure lies.
(Note: when I say ‘unskilled’ or ‘skilled’ here, I don’t mean to imply that factory work doesn’t require specific skills that can be honed and improved. I don’t mean to imply that any rando with no experience could do the job just as well as someone with a lot of experience. I’m using the terms to refer to the amount of formal training/licensing required to do them, and their relative pay levels. ‘Unskilled’ jobs typically require no formal training outside the workplace or licensing, and typically pay lower than ‘skilled’ jobs.)
Yes. TL;DR, “tradecraft” as a synonym for spy-work was borrowed by the intelligence community from industry. Very likely, introduced by John le Carré, although he admitted that he could no longer remember which terms he introduced that were adopted by intelligence, and which he picked up from them.
But that term originates in 1810, and refers to the work of skilled trade laborers.
one moron musta heard the word in a movie or something, and then it spread like stupid.
They don’t get out much. It’s why orangedturd was fascinated with the word groceries.
