One analysis of the Roman Empire says that it reached a point where the cost of maintaining the empire exceeded the benefits of empire. The investments required to maintain the complex social and political structures to maintain the empire continued to rise while the benefits slowly fell to zero. This is the general thesis presented by Joseph Tainter in his book The Collapse of Complex Societies. Complex solutions eventually reach a point of diminishing marginal returns.
We may be seeing a similar issue with the Global America Empire. On the one hand, we have the massive amount of debt accumulation to maintain the global military presence required to maintain the empire. The official United States military budget exceeds the combined total of the other great powers. No one really knows what the actual cost of the military is, as so much of it is off budget. Of course, this allows many of the rulers to get rich in the process.
On the other hand. Enormous amounts of time and energy are invested in maintaining the rationale for the empire. Unlike the Roman empire, which was ruled by a small number of men, democratic empire must continue to provide energy to the spring of democracy, which is moral certainty. Rome conquered because it could, while America conquers because it has a moral duty. “Our democracy” requires an endless war against those who resist being crushed by “our democracy.”
What this means is that in addition to the trillions spent on weapons and armies, trillions are also spent on maintaining the moral framework. This cost is not strictly a government expense, but the system requires it, so corporations are as engaged in narrative maintenance as government entities. Companies embrace degenerate social fads, like crossdressing, because they support the system. They support the system because it is the system that makes them possible.
The most obvious example is the media. Thirty years ago, much of what a newspaper did, even the big broadsheets like the Washington Post and New York Times, was report on the mundane affairs of the world. They promoted left-wing causes on the editorial side, but the news side was the boring stuff of the news. Today, the entirety of the mass media is engaged in the support of narratives. These entities are staffed with content creators and storytellers.
Here is an example in the Washington Post. Three people were assigned the job of creating a story to explain the mass shooter phenomenon. The plot here is that crazy white people are irrationally paranoid about crime, so they are going shooty all of sudden, for no reason at all! You see, crime is just fine. In fact, under the patient rule of Dear Leader, crime is better now. The real problem is these heavily armed white people and their racism.
Of course, the mass shooter phenomenon is a narrative created by the same people now trying to explain it. The fact is, America is a big country. That means there are lots of potential crackpots, compared to a small country like Norway. When you look at the numbers on mass shootings, America is doing better than most. Norway, on the other hand, seems to have a problem. While “per capita” is a racist trope, it is the best way to understand crime data.
Enormous amounts of time and money are directed by the regime into gun grabbing and concealing the color of crime. The Mexican national who went on a killing spree in Texas had his picture whitened by the news media. This is a thing that started with the “white Hispanic” George Zimmerman who did the world a favor and killed Trayvon Martin ten years ago. Every media company now has people whose sole job is to whitewash criminals this way.
The color of crime is just one tiny area of the narrative support system. The New York Times had a whole floor full of content creators pushing various aspects of the Russian collusion hoax during the Trump years. Thousands of people in the media are now used to push the Ukraine story. Think about the cost in time and money that is required to fake a Joe Biden press conference. The entire media complex is now employed in the creation and support of narratives.
Again, the media has always been run by regime toadies, but thirty years ago most of what they did was reporting. The bigshot columnists and editors were allowed to put their thumb on the scale in terms of what got promoted. The rest of the people produced mundane news accounts. What we see today is an industrial bullshit machine that exists only to crank out new narratives in support of the regime or new tales to promote existing regime narratives.
This is just one small part of the narrative industrial complex. Tens of thousands of people in government have been repurposed to the task. Corporations have whole floors of people dedicated to the job of pushing the latest thing. Hollywood is just another marketing arm of the regime. Of course, the big tech platforms have dedicated themselves to protecting and promoting regime narratives. More people engage in censoring the internet now than in maintaining it.
The Twitter experience offers some insight into the cost of this. When Musk took over, he fired waves of people. His rule was that if you wrote code, you stayed, but if not then you were gone unless you could explain yourself. He eventually fired eighty percent of the staff. The website was unaffected. The reason is those fired people were employed to police and promote the current narratives. They did nothing to keep the site running or make the business profitable.
What all of this suggests is that the cost of maintaining the rationale for the Global American Empire has reached the point of diminishing returns. Just as the Roman empire’s investment in complex systems to maintain itself reached the point of diminishing returns, the cost of the imperial bullshit system has reached that point and maybe blown way past it. The more they try to sell the latest narrative, the less likely people are to accept the next narrative.
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I went to find some specific septic system regulation for my state and came upon a training manual for those hoping to get state certified to do septic work. 125 pages, of septic regs. It’s not light reading either as it’s basically a long list of sentences where the reader can see that at some point someone thought it was a bright idea to install his system under a power pole, or discharge all the storm water runoff through it, etc. It’s self-defeating now as getting one installed is now so prohibitively expensive (if it can be done at all) that, as I “joke”, one is better off finding an Amish guy to pay cash to and getting it installed in the middle of the night (backhoe usage would be tricky though).
14
where I live there is literally no one available (within a one year out time frame) to do affordable and reliable repairs of a septic, electrical wiring, house painting, roof repair, chimney cleaning or washer repair and they don’t even call you back to tell you they cannot help you. If I want gravel for my driveway it isn’t a stretch to saying we might have to break the rocks ourselves. This also contributes to the general deterioration of properties as the older people occupying them can no longer afford or be physically able to do these things. When your 30 year old metal roof rusts through, just throw a blue tarp over it and put a couple tires on top to hold it down.
8
We in fact painted and repaired a metal roof a few years earlier than necessary precisely because it seems likely that workers and materials may not be readily available, if at all, in another few years.
2
Just as the Romans left Britain first during their long withdrawal, I wonder where the US a will leave first? Africa? SE Asia?
They’ve already left California.
18
It will be the Middle East and Central Asia. Afghanistan was the start of the long withdrawal. The GAE is in retreat. We still have an enormous military, but the peak is past.
We’re sending arms to Ukraine but we’re not occupying it, and we certainly haven’t formally declared war on Russia. Because we can’t and we won’t. All we can do is send arms.
As for Taiwan, it will be similar. If China invades, our media will just get the Taiwan pins out and send arms. But Taiwan is an island fortress and China has the patience of Job. Nothing to see there.
There’s your daily whitepill.
9
this same lack of abiiity to enforce their will applies to their domestic plans; they can’t build a police state because they can’t build.
1
Reporters also used to come from the dirt people. I remember when every city newspaper had some disheveled townie barfly who would report on petty corruption and the goings-on in the halls of power and in the courts. He got to know contacts over decades. He wasn’t going anywhere. He had a bias, but he was doing legwork and making calls and hanging around drab buildings.
Though back then, college cost about $1000 so even a dirt person who wrote well could join a city newspaper as a cub reporter, eventually becoming a well-known columnist. Nowadays you have to go to J-school and it costs north of $100K, so only the cloud people (or diversity picks) can get a foot in the door. And you know the kind of biases they have, and none of them would dare work for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for more than a couple years.
20
All these tent poles to prop up this corrupt and debauched empire. You can even see it in the funding sent out to foreign NGOs and others to promote the evil GAE agenda.
Look at this little innocuous tidbit in the news:
‘’ Biden administration is offering a $500,000 grant to help teach the English language in Pakistan, in part by providing “intensive professional development courses for Pakistani transgender youth.‘’
Not really that much but imagine different forms times thousands across the globe and you can see an infrastructure being being developed.
Tent poles.
9
We need to look at Mexico as a decent example of how the culture won’t be able to support widespread complex systems except for those that seriously impact the elite.
The rest of the populace will get used to substandard products and services whether utilities, law enforcement, building quality or car maintenance just to name a few.
Life will go on. Yes, white people expect more but our replacements don’t.
25
“They promoted left-wing causes on the editorial side, but the news side was the boring stuff of the news. Today, the entirety of the mass media is engaged in the support of narratives.”
Twas always so. Remember Walter Duranty, NYT reporter, dissolute living in Moscow and telling the world that there was no famine in Ukraine? Robert Conquest detailed it in ‘Harvest of Sorrow.’ Duranty’s Pulitzer has never been rescinded.
Then there was Herbert Matthews, the NYT reporter who invented the mythos of Fidel Castro and happily fed State Dept. propaganda to the culterati.
Judith Miller, pushing Cheney’s lies about yellow cake so Cheney could go on the Sunday talking head shows and push his own narrative that got front paged. Kristof’s lies about Steven Hatfill and the anthrax killer. Jayson Blair.
I could go on but you get the point.
8
And we can go even further back; at least to 1898. That was when we got Hearst’s, “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.”
Mass media has always been just a propaganda machine.
10
Beyond the diminishing returns of complexity, there is also the issues of diversity, distrust, and bad faith actors.
The complex society we live in was built under a more homogeneous demographic, high levels of trust and better overall moral behavior.
We are taking this hugely complex, intricate machine and substituting in off-brand parts from various sources that were never meant to work together. The parts are then feeding bad functionality into the system and requiring more maintenance.
Overlaying this is the dishonesty and lies that are pervasive under which the system must be maintained. The elite may now the real score, but the low to mid level managers who must keep the machine running are basing their decisions on outright falsehoods.
A severe reduction in complexity is almost inevitable unless certain AI scenarios play out.
3
Like trying to repair your car engine with a bicycle. “You have two giraffes-the government requires you to take harmonica lessons.”
1
If one were truly blackpilled, one would see the firings of the Narrative-makers at e.g. Twitter as the Empire’s “saving throw.” Stick with me here: People are always asking what’s to become of all the people thrown out of work by the Robot Revolution. Since we’re Reality people, when we think about this problem, we think about the average-or-slightly-lower IQ guy who had a good factory job in the 1950s, but is now on the dole.
But the AI revolution is putting the Laptop Class out of work equally fast. Musk can fire those people because they did nothing technical; but they can’t get new jobs because why does any other company need them, when ChatGPT can do their “jobs” — Narrative Maintenance — better than they can, faster, and for free?
One traditional method for soaking up excess labor is: Cannon Fodder. And if we’re going to have a big war with China — currently scheduled for Summer 2025, per the Pentagon itself — we’re gonna need a much bigger army. It seems weird — the Laptop Class are NOT, to put it mildly, physically fit — but consider that the ones scheduling the war are True Believers, who really think that men can become women, and vice versa, just by declaring their pronouns. Why not put them all in the infantry? If Bruce is really Caitlyn — and of course he is, you haters! — then Snowflake Mc iPad really is an infantryman; just look at all the army stuff she’s wearing in her selfies!
11
They also can convince themselves everything is fine and prosperity either is here or right around the corner, too. That doesn’t preclude the South China Sea boogie, of course, since they can entertain many fantasies at once.
2
I been around now for about 2/3rds of a century, and to the best of my knowledge, have never known anyone who read the NY Times or Washington Post. Nor have I read so much as a single article in either of these publications EVER. Any yet, I am continually assaulted by references to them in other media (like this blog), which is the only exposure to them that i ever get. The experience is like stepping in dog shit diarrhea while out for a pleasant walk. I DON’T CARE ABOUT MANUFACTURED NARRATIVES BY PEOPLE WHO ARE INSANE AND MALICIOUS. And I can’t stop it, so the best I can do is to proactively avoid it.
And I think a lot of people are just like me, i.e. fed up with the permanent stink of narratives that permeate everything and everywhere. It’s like living next to a sewage treatment plant and being downwind.
But this is another problem that is cured by collapse. All the worthless shit mongers will be out of work and likely starving because the demand for shit shovelers will fall to zero.
18
1
When you are exposed do you have fantasies of cutting out forked tounges? I do.
Does that make me a paranoid crazy white man or am I one of those by default?
What about the fact that I’m always armed? Some might say that proves their point. Others consider being armed prudent.
4
I live in rural Pennsylvania. I do not think I have encountered a single person in the last two years who supports Biden or anything his cabal is doing. In fact, most people with whom I have social intercourse do not hesitate to express their disdain for him and his crew as well as a great deal of concern for the direction we are being taken by that crew. When one uses the term “normie,” I can’t think of a group of people who fit that definition better than those in my immediate surroundings, yet none of them merit the scorn heaped on them by those who, like Wkathman, seem to believe they are unaware of what is transpiring and/or too passive to do anything about it. I mean no offense, but I would not be so quick to judge everyone who fails to pass some ideological purity test. Such a reflexive condemnation is something more suited to those on the left.
4
1
“…I can’t think of a group of people who fit that definition better…”
IMO, there you are wrong. And enjoying NOT living among the “Normie” types. Using the term of an enemy combatant, I dare say you are instead describing the “deplorables.” Dastardly Trump supporters.
On the other hand, I live within 100 miles of a blue shitlibopolous. About 75% of the people around me fit the “Normie” tag to a tee. Even the ones that are ‘concerned about the direction of the country’ regurgitate all the known tropes and will swallow and spit back up whatever new ones come along.
3
It’s not reflexive, it’s observational.
somebody in that state voted for fetterman.
Exactly,Tom.
They say the biggest lie ever told was that the Devil doesn’t exist.
But that’s a piker compared with the real biggest lie ever told. The ‘biggest lie” ever told is that the bullshit produced by MTV, MSNBC, the DC-oriented reassurance machines, and the captive schools is American Culture.
They do not represent Americans’ dreams, urges or traditions. They exist to misrepresent Americans to themselves and to antagonistic foreigners. Their products ARE NOT America.
“What all of this suggests is that the cost of maintaining the rationale for the Global American Empire has reached the point of diminishing returns”
For the System as a whole, yes. For the Elite at the top, no. They can just tax us at gunpoint and force tribute by way of debt, military threats and seigniorage on foreign peoples. Just as in Rome, this can go on for a long time before the inexorable forces of Thermodynamics assert themselves.
The narrative system is the Psyop that accompanies this process. The plunder requires moral justification. Enter the media toadies.
Yet the system does require occasional victories and a good Caesar every now and then. We’ve had a few Caligulas and Neros recently, so you would think we might get a Marcus Aurelius at some point. Or could the Persians capture Uncle Joe at some point?
5
“Industrial bullshit machine.” What a glorious phrase! It distills the systems of the modern West to their essence about as succinctly as possible. Zman really crushed it with this essay today. It puts me in mind of the following quote:
“America’s leading industry is still the manufacture, packaging, distribution, and marketing of bullshit. High-quality, grade-A, prime-cut, pure, American bullshit.”
– George Carlin
Though Carlin was a leftist, he at least exhibited skepticism/cynicism toward the system. He is among those leftists of yesteryear whom I (sort of) miss, no matter how wrong-headed they may have been about a lot of matters. The spirit of rebellion is somewhat admirable even when it’s misguided. Today’s progressives have devolved into mindless lackeys.
13
And yet the leftists still think of themselves as bold, independent free-thinkers, while WE are the docile servants of authority. After all, Trump was an “authoritarian”, right? And so everyone vaguely on “his side” is just searching for a martinet to swing into position behind, and longing for the sharp crack of the whip. I can’t talk to these people anymore; I feel offended and grieved on behalf of the English language, that such perversion of words can exist.
9
Suppose I’ve resigned myself to leftists demonstrating rather breathtaking self-unawareness. I consequently find it perversely amusing that they can essentially control all the major apparatuses of our culture yet still consider themselves radicals in the vanguard of righteous resistance. There appears no limit to the ability of humans to delude themselves about themselves. Ego is quite the manipulator. That applies to ALL of us, not simply leftists. Beware.
4
Leftists are about to experience cognitive dissonance if RFK Jr’s campaign gathers some momentum. He polls at 19 percent currently.
Since he’s a Kennedy, the leftists should like him, right? Yet he’s talking about things like corporate control of government. In the recent past, the leftists would be on board with that.
But now things have changed. Since the corporations (really BlackRock) push DIE and ESG scores, they’re the Good Guys to the left. So it’s confusing. But it’s going to be amusing to watch.
8
Even if by the end of June ALL of Ukraine is overrun by Russia, I don’t think Normie will break free of his normalcy bias. If you point out to him that the same people who lied about Russiagate and the southern border are the same people who lied about Ukraine, it will make no difference. “Russia/Putin is evil” is a mantra so firmly ensconced by the Lügenpresse that most simply will not be able to reach escape velocity from this strange attraction to the Narrative/Industrial complex. It will take something more catastrophic to blast out of that bubble.
7
Milošević is mustache man. Saddam is mustache man. Putin is mustache man. Trump is mustache man. They lack any type of intellectual nuance, so they sound like toddlers. When my daughter was first learning words, all birds were ducks. A swan is a duck. A goose is a duck. A pigeon is a duck.
17
My daughter too. Everything was “cat”. A car, a tree, a shoe – all nouns were “cat” to her.
2
Jazzhands McFeels calls that “light-switch brain.” On—-off, Good Guy—-Bad Guy.
2
I have friends who are reluctantly starting to come around to the idea that 9-11 was an inside job probably done with assistance from at least one of our so called allies.
They cannot however accept that the Ukraine bilge put out by the media is all a lie. To me very strange psychology.
5
“The more they try to sell the latest narrative, the less likely people are to accept the next narrative.”
I want to believe that. I really do. However, a stroll over to a normie con site like dailywire makes one a bit depressed. You have plenty over there that shouted about the lies of covid, and then turned the page and believed the media was telling the stone cold truth about Ukraine. It’s remarkable really. Maybe I should look be more optimistic and see that while the majority bought into things like Iraq, now the majority (even there) seems skeptical of this war.
9
1
Normies are psychologically incapable of grappling with the possibility that EVERYTHING their political, cultural, and economic superiors tells them may be suspect. Normies can handle the idea that 25 % or even half of what they’re expected to believe is bunk. But the possibility that ALL of it demands their utmost skepticism? That’s apparently a terrifying place where normies fear to tread.
11
“Normies are psychologically incapable of grappling with the possibility that EVERYTHING their political, cultural, and economic superiors tells them may be suspect.”
This × 2. In my experience with older relatives, born before World War 2.
They went from ‘I don’t trust the government’ to total trust in “the vaccine.”
Recent wars bad (starting with Vietnam) but World War 2, “we won that” and it was the good war to them.
However, unlike discovering someone you know is a liar, then re-assessing every word that comes out of their mouth, and HAS come out, it seems if they look back with a critical eye, somehow their entire lives would be invalidated.
And thus they take the comfortable, safe route to protect their psyches. It is sad, but they’ll take their programming to the grave.
7
Stroll over to a normie church (no 🌈 flags), a.gun range, hardware store, etc. And see who is buying all the bs. .
3
The problem the narrative makers have isn’t gullible and stupid Normies but the ability to put out and maintain new narratives at an increasing rate due to the velocity of information. It is the old saw about keeping the “story straight,” sort of. Orwell’s concept of an endless present has proved true like much he suggested, but he could not anticipate the technology would outstrip the ability to maintain a narrative, I think. I’m not optimistic about Normie, either, but the likely inability to maintain the pace of narrative now required offers some hope.
5
Saw that over the course of 24 hours on Fedi servers when that tranny shot the kids in Kentucky. The regime sock puppets started at “ban all guns”, to (interestingly) “trannies are making gay people look bad”, to finally “police were too violent and the victims did something to deserve it anyway”. Even they were exhausted carrying that much water so that with that last shooting it was mostly quiet with a “wait and see” approach.
3
The overwhelming bureaucratic government, corporate and academic bloat dedicated to bull*** narrative engineering and driving those who can see to darker and darker thoughts around here is off the charts. And about 99.9% needs to be put out of our misery. It’s like those monstrous fat slobs on “my 600/1000 lb life”. They’re not going to meaningfully reform, so…
5
Question if you will, Z: what changed over that 30-year period? The costs or something else? I agree that it did change, but remain unclear as to why. If the costs of maintaining empire have increased, and they most certainly have, I don’t see off hand how that translates into the requirement to switch from some narratives to all narratives.
As an aside, it will be impossible to keep changing and updating narratives since technology has increased the velocity and availability of information. Orwell was right in his concept of endless present but that presupposed information disseminated at a slower rate as has turned out. There is an attempt at an eternal now but it seems unworkable as things have turned out.
Anyhow, thanks if you can answer.
1
That’s also my comforting thought when comparisons to the Roman Empire come up. “Well, Rome took hundreds of years to fall, so this will go on for ages and we won’t live to see the end of the GAE.” Yeah, but in Rome information moved at the pace of a horse, and commerce at the speed of an ox cart. I don’t think our decline and fall will be so leisurely.
11
collapse of AINO won’t be one big event. there will be multiple partial collapses followed by periods of equilibrium. and the collapse of the regime is a political phenomena, for the most part. the private sphere may very well prosper (locally) as fedgov dies and retreats its tentacles.
5
And wait till AI gets it’s tentacles into everything.
2
Tech and demographics would be my guess. The internet and widespread technology adoption meant that what was way too much work before to even command became just as easy as sending an email. At the exact time more weight (in every way) was being added to the government, competency began decreasing for all the usual reasons. Now you have California sending an email to ban diesel trucks using an army of mystery-meats to implement their dreams.
3
I think it goes well past 30 years. I remember the kvetching about how people are reading less newspapers in the 80s. A lot of the consolidation started back then.
It has always been truly amazing to me how they could blame the readers for falling circulation as they became ever more progressive and ever more anti-white. You would think there would be even one major newspaper that would change and just try being normal and covering stuff people want to read about and without all the moralizing and anti-whiteness. But this is too much to ask.
3
I think the urgency of the Cold War kept the ruling class locked into a combination of the covenant and the creed. They had the duty to defend the free world, but the duty not to blow it up in a war with Russia. This necessitated keeping the fanatics on a tight leash. There was a time, believe it or not, when the Democrat party was embarrassed by people like Schumer and Pelosi. These types took off when the Cold War ended and the old restraints were relaxed.
I wish I could say it will burn itself out and we return to normalcy, but I do not believe it.
9
Thank you. Yeah, the Cold War united the leadership across the board, not just the so-called “conservative movement.” I think that very well may be it as the time corresponds as well.
I don’t think the clock can be reset, either, and that is a terrible loss, particularly for those of us who lived at the height of empire.
4
Religions often consume/sacrifice enormous portions of the GDP before they flame out. I imagine the Catholic Church held probably half the wealth of Europe at one point in time. We are far from that tipping point.
1
Trying to convince people that ever more preposterous lies are true gets exponentially more expensive as time goes on. This empire is obviously collapsing, but I never thought of it in terms of the cost of lies.
9
Right. It also gets more difficult for the narrative makers. I don’t have any confidence at all that Normie will develop an effective bullshit detector but that ability to keep pumping out more and more narratives, some contradictory, at an increasing rate may prove impossible.
I didn’t consider the off-the-rails lying as part of the collapse, either, but, yeah.
6
i don’t think normis is the target audience. it’s not like there is anything that would get him off the couch. the narrative is for the true believer cadres; they are the ones that need constant reassurance.
7
That’s the old philosophy “The beatings will continue until morale improves”.
Much of it is a never-ending circle jerk, to be sure. But the same inability to reset and maneuver applies to the narratives created for the True Believer class.
If we only had the technology of the 60’s, they would not be able to lie so brazenly and communicate the new narrative so seamlessly. Modern social media has created the emergence of a powerful hive-mind that we haven’t found the anti-bodies for yet.
Once the social media craze starts to crash, it will be interesting to see how the dopamine addicts survive. We’re already down in attention span to one minute Tik-Tok videos of people making crazy faces, and soon attention span will be too low to send any clear signals at all.
8
I think it is quite the opposite, actually. Slower dissemination of information allowed the narrative to be more carefully crafted and maintained. “Keeping the story straight” is easier when the Current Thing has been the Current Thing for a long time.
I do agree that the near-non-existent attention span is proving counterproductive to the narrative makers. I’ve even seen instances when they forget what the most recent narrative is.
3
Yes, it is a Hive Mind, one that waits eagerly preprogrammed for reception of each forthcoming Hive Command, the latest even more destructive and transgressive than the last.
The Hive is largely a female/feminine entity because human females are collectivist creatures operating under syndicalist natures. Put ’em in a house together they all start menstruating as one.
When the latest luciferian decree issues forth from Goddess Columbia’s District, the bees thrill to receive the latest tool of power with which they can dishearten, demean, and destroy those outside the Hive. This is why when you meet a Hive member, very soon he/she/zir will pose a question designed to ascertain immediately whether you are Hive or Not Hive.
As the OP points out, social media technology sent the dronies into frenzy, stimulated constantly by dopamine hits and the unique thrill of being on the dominant/winning team, with others under your power.
3
Speaking of 🤣
https://youtu.be/osXyIrWnxkM
5
That’s great! The United States Attorney barfing out the preferred narrative almost is as funny as the guy being honest about so-called “diversity.”
2
It’s not just the media and Hollywood. The universities and public school systems are an integral part of the “industrial bullshit machine.”
The universities are all subsidized by the government, and K-12 is compulsory. You might be one of the few who is willing to turn the media off but not until you’ve been subjected to 12 years of forced indoctrination, and strongly encouraged to submit to another 4 years. And after all of that if you are still willing to turn the media off you are probably going to be regarded as some sort of freakish anti-social oddball..
“Freedom,” my ass.
14
Yes, the public schools, colleges and universities are simply media companies. Furthermore, due to their addiction to government funding and supination before adverse regulations like Title IX, they are even more captured by BigGov than a broadcast corporation like Fox or CNN is.
But, for a host of reasons, when Conservatives label the media ‘the enemy of the people,” they give the Uni’s a complete pass. Until we eradicate this blind spot, we can never really reform the lying media in America.
3
The cost of empire for the US has been the loss of a huge portion of our industrial base. To keep the dollar as the global reserve currency means running big deficits, particularly with industrial countries who need the dollars to buy energy, which means that our trade deficit is heavily in manufactured goods.
The cost of empire has been a hollowing out of the Rust Belt. It also means that we had huge government debt. Both of those are needed to keep the system running and GAE afloat. Just Rome needed to conquer new territories, we need to keep running big deficits.
But with the rise of China, that cost is being exposed. Europe was willing to accept our dollars for manufactured goods. China is getting tired of that deal and is starting to use our dollars to buy things instead of treasuries. China also wants to develop its own domestic demand.
If the world slows (not stops, just slows) its purchases of treasuries, we’ll discover very quickly the true cost of empire.
3
The narrative industrial complex reminds me of an army of Winston Smiths, laboring away in various departments of the Ministry of Truth. Whereas, Orwell’s Winston Smith diligently altered the records of the Party’s past in Oceania, the media apparatchiks of our current regime assiduously work to alter perceptions of the present.
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The USSR is a great example of this. Something you don’t have to reach back 200 years to a different time to see. By the mid 1980’s everyone knew it was morally bankrupt except for most hardened communists. The ones who saw communism as a religion the way the purple hairs see things today. But everyone shuffled along and did their thing because the ruble did indeed still buy a bottle of vodka, a loaf of bread, and a pack of terrible cigarettes. The people themselves considered it to be a net win, barely, because they still had things like heat. It wasn’t until the currency failed circa 1991 that it all crashed down.
The vast majority of human beings can be bought, and cheaply. It’s only when they can no longer be bought when the real problems start for a regime. One thing I admire about the French, is at least they demand an ever so slightly higher price to be bought. “I’m not just a whore, I’m a French whore and you will pay me the value of being a French whore.” Americans on the other hand, even with vast amounts of firearms, could likely be bribed with free Taco Bell coupons.
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The decline of this system is hastened because it’s also no longer permitted by the state religion to select for skills, competence, or intelligence. Aisha with a 91 IQ and a flare for bossiness captaining the $3B Arleigh Burke destroyer is indicative of this nonsense.
The system necessitates high levels of highly capable people for it to run. On the aggregate, this means that the outputs will decline rapidly as the able and exceptional are replaced by the stupid and politically connected. But it’s ok, because the decline is the cost of “who we are” and we cannot change “who we are.”
Couple this with the rather rapid decline of the dollar as a reserve currency and we are in for a drastic reduction in standard of living. US now has an average IQ of 97.5 and this will probably fall to the low 90s by 2035. We will get an economy, a country, and a system that reflects this reality. Closer to Queens than it will be to Fairfax County. And the powers that be simply don’t care. They’ll take away your rifle, your gas stove and your meat. But they’ll have all of those things and live in Fairfax while telling us how racist and evil we are.
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