Left-Wing Grifters

Posted on November 15, 2021 by thezman

Note: The regular Monday Taki post is up. This week I have some comparisons of our present state to the old Soviet Union. Behind the green door is the Sunday podcast and two movie reviews. If you are a subscriber, thank you for your support. If not, may Allah send the fleas of a thousand camels to nest in your groin.

A popular topic on this side of the great divide is who is and who is not a grifter, a shill or controlled opposition. The general assumption is that the people with perches in Conservative Inc. are working some sort of con. Maybe their racket is to keep people from looking over the great divide. These are the gatekeepers. Others may co-opt a dissident idea and then neuter it. They say things like Critical Race Theory is actually an attack on nonwhites so white people can oppose it.

Often forgotten is that the other side has their fair share of grifters who make a comfortable living working the true believers. Here is an example from the Daily Beast of what can be called woo-woo for the wokies. The writer is telling them that their newly minted hero, Liz Cheney, and an old has-been named Chris Christie, will give Trump a run for his money in the 2024 Republican primary. The Twitter thread on this topic is an amusing window into political mental illness.

The writer is someone calling himself Matt Lewis. He used to play the role of snarky conservative, but that was just an act. At a young age he was harvested and cultivated by the neoconservatives. When the fortunes of the neocons faded, he did what all rats do on a sinking ship. He now peddles his wares as a reformed conservative to a gullible audience at the Daily Beast. It is a trip that so many have made that it has become a stock figure in the American political drama.

As you see with the grifters of Conservative Inc., the left-wing variety sells the true believers the latest items from the one true faith. In this case the item for sale is that Liz Cheney is a folk hero for finking on her party and her voters. She has signed onto the Stalin-esque show trial called the January 6 Commission. This is where the Left gets to claim that normal white people exercising their ancient rights are white supremacist insurrectionists and a threat to “our democracy”.

The main difference between the woke grifters and the conservative grifters is the former works in a world of pure imagination. Say what you want about Ben Shapiro, but he is not wrong about the “constitutional principle” business. If we had a ruling class that enforced the old rules, things would be better for everyone. His grift lies in convincing people that it is still possible with this ruling class. He turns a virtue into the vice of defending the enemies of the people.

Because the left-wing grifter operates in the world of fantasy, he has an easier time of it, but is barred from factual reality. At some level, they must believe the same nonsense as their intended suckers. In the case of neocons like Matt Lewis, he harbors the same hatred for the white people as the true believers. The neocons may be driven by hyperviolent fantasies about world conquest, but they also detest the heritage population every bit as much as the wokest wokie.

It is that blind hatred that allows the crazies to now embrace Liz Cheney. You have to admire the skill with which the neocons have ingratiated themselves with their old friends on the Left. Not long ago the name “Cheney” was spelled H-i-t-l-e-r by the readers of the Daily Beast. He was the master of the Haliburton Hurricane Machine that devastated New Orleans and unleashed hell on the Arabs. It requires a special brand of crazy to do a heel turn like that in such a short time.

Of course, what wads a lot of this together into a slimy ball of hatred for the average American is a sense of class consciousness. The new religion is the religion of the new class, the managerial class that now commands the high ground. The middling celebrities of the commentariat are driven as much by their duty to their own class as they are by genuine belief. To people like Matt Lewis, those Trump voters outside the hive walls are a threat to his people.

It is completely bonkers that anyone would think that Liz Cheney has a future in Republican politics. That is one of those bits of good news, a little green shoot, that should give the good guys a little hope. The people on the other side are increasingly driven mad by the contradictions of their new religion. If the good guys could create and insert chaos agents into the system, Liz Cheney would be a good example. Every time she speaks in public, another dissident is born.

Another bit of good news in stories like this is that the neoconservatives have really fallen on hard times. That cabal now exists on an island off the coasty of crazy-ville, supported by a billionaire Persian who thinks he may be Cyrus the Great. The second generation of neocons squandered the tribal fortune and the third generation makes the Kennedy gene pool like deep. Like so much of the managerial class, neoconservatism now reeks of its own decay.

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The Reality Of The Show

Posted on October 20, 2021 by thezman

If a man had fallen asleep in 1980 and woke up in this age, he would be amazed at many things. We can easily think of the technological stuff like social media, Zoom calls and mobile devices. Then you have the cynical stull like the failure get back to the moon, much less Mars. One less obvious change is the explosion of entertainment and the public obsession with being entertained. Forty years ago, people did not expect to be constantly entertained throughout their day.

One aspect of the saturation of entertainment is how public affairs transformed into something like Vaudeville. People dream up new acts and new characters to play on-line and on television. If the act works, we get a flood of imitators. Once that runs its course, someone cooks up a new way to separate from the rest of the performers and they have their run on the big stage. Politics in this age is pure theater, centered on various acts making claims to certain audiences.

Unlike jugglers or sword swallowers, political theater is not transactional. In the conventional form, entertainment is about the performer getting your attention, which causes you to pay to see their act. There is no connection between the audience and the performer, beyond the implicit agreement that he will do his best to entertain you and you will applaud when he does. In political theater, you are supposed to care about the performer and do what you can to boost his career.

This post over at American Greatness gets at this odd nature of political entertainment with regards to Conservative Inc.. The post is a takeoff on something Michael Anton said about the conservative rackets. Wealthy people lavish conservative rackets with cash, despite the fact they accomplish nothing. In fact, it is fair to say that Conservative Inc. is just an enabler of the things they pretend to oppose. In other words, they lose on purpose, and they know they are losing on purpose.

The post goes on to talk about how easily conservative donors are duped by people like Jonah Goldberg or Ramesh Ponnuru into handing over cash. National Review just raised $100,000 on-line despite having no audience outside the institutions of Conservative Inc. and even that is debatable. The Bulwark and Dispatch have billionaire support even though they have no audience. Why is it that smart people with money are easily fooled by these hustlers?

One reason is the nature of political entertainment. When you watch a movie or television show, it is a passive act. There is a clear divide between you and the performers on stage. In political theater, each member of the audience is drawn into the act, feeling like they have an impact on the performance. Even when it is not interactive, the person watching tends to feel like his caring about what he sees and hears can change what is happening in the show.

Jonah Goldberg is a useful example in that he is one of the more successful political entertainers of this age. He is also a creature of the new political entertainment that emerged in the 1990’s with the widescale adoption of the internet. He started out fetching coffee for the far-left extremist Ben Wattenberg, who had a long running show on state television. In prior times, this would have been about as far as Goldberg would go in the realm of current events programming.

Instead, he landed the role of internet slacker for National Review’s new on-line venture that was aimed at a younger and hipper crowd. Goldberg’s role required him to blend official dogma with snarky pop culture references. Early in his role, he often made jokes about his slacker lifestyle. He invited readers to e-mail him, and he would often post about the exchanges. Later, comments were added to the site, and he would respond to them from time to time.

Goldberg got famous and very rich despite being as dumb as a goldfish and peddling boilerplate neoconservatism. The reason for this is his fans felt like they were a part of his act and there were having an impact on what he was saying. Despite the fact that he and his neocon cronies have slithered back to the Left, many of his fans still follow him at his new venture. In other words, even after it is clear that Goldberg would happily gas his readership, many remain engaged with him.

The main result of the relationship between political performers and their marks is that they are able to transfer their interests onto the audience. That is, the audience for this stuff cares about things that are good for the guys who they follow. The donors who get to have dinner with the team at the Dispatch are not thinking about the issues being promoted so much as the people promoting them. They feel like they are part of the show and have some input on the performance.

Conservative Inc. is a long sophisticated confidence game. It was not always this way, but it evolved into a racket in the 1990’s. It coincides with the explosion of mass media and the emerging entertainment culture. Going back to the Rip Van Winkle at the start of this post, he would be baffled by how people identify themselves by the types of entertainment they consume. Putting your sports teams in your social media profile would seem bizarre to a man from the 1980’s.

This is something Ryszard Legutko noted in his excellent book, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies. Legutko is a polish politician who was involved in the Solidarity Movement. Among many excellent observations, he notes the lack of seriousness in liberal democratic politics. Everyone is consumed with leisure and being entertained. Adults are encouraged to act like children, even in areas like politics which should be the domain of the sober minded.

In this light, the boiling off of serious political actors from the large public stages is perfectly rational. The serious critics of the war machine, for example, may be correct in their observations, but they get marginalized because they do not offer the larger audience the thing they crave. They are the party poopers who yell at the people at the party for not caring about some cause. Worse yet, they remind adults that they are acting like children, so they are shunned.

The same can be said for the fringe on the other side. Immigration patriots are not littering their commentary with pop culture references. They are not flattering their audience with the promise that if they care enough, the ending of the show will be just as they imagined. Instead, they warn about demographic collapse and that is just a total downer, and no one wants to hear it. The most hated man is the serious person in a room full of silly people looking for a good time.

What this suggests is that outsiders have two choices. One is to put on the grease paint and get out there and please the crowd. The people demanding Medicare for all need to make it fun to care about such things. The Straussian critics of conservatism have to put on a better show, out-clown people like David French. Otherwise, the alternative is to work the small stage waiting for when the times need serious men and the people in charge are not up for the task.

Those are not pleasant options, but adults are supposed to accept that often the choices are not very good. Serious people know that the best you can do sometimes is play a bad hand so you can play the next hand. They are also supposed to know that society is a big complicated thing and you cannot easily alter it. often, you just have to let things play out and prepare for it. The antidote to frivolity is not more frivolity but a sober-minded acceptance of reality, no matter how unpopular.

Hacks

Posted on June 9, 2021 by thezman

The term “standing head” is a newspaper term that goes back to the days when the papers were printed by typesetters. It means regular or recurring content, such as the headline for a feature like “Box Scores” in the sports section or “aspiring rapper” in the crime blotter. The term is used to so often that the old typesetters would have it as a block ready to use when needed. It also came to be known as a trope, stereotype, or a euphemism that was commonly used in the news.

In the modern age, the word “hacked” has become a standing head, in that it is something like a catchall answer for all sorts of things. If a celebrity gets drunk and posts N-bombs on Twitter, she claims she was hacked. If a company loses customer information, they claim it was hackers. Whenever someone does not want to take responsibility for their own mistakes, they fob it off on hackers. Hackers are the digital version of Loki the trickster.

One reason for this is that the modern media seems to select for narcissistic dullards at all levels of the system. This is not just the airheads who read the teleprompter on television during news shows. Throughout the media, the system rewards those willing to fall for the most ridiculous nonsense if it comes from authority. The more gullible and naïve, the greater the access. The more willing a “reporter” is to repeat verbatim what he has been told, the greater the access.

When some official tells a “reporter” that the problem is due to hackers, the reporter never questions it. After all, they are selected for their obsequiousness, so they never question authority. They are also too stupid to see the hacking claim is ridiculous, so even if they were feeling rebellious, they would not know what to ask. That was a big part of the Russian hacking nonsense back in 2016. Even those who play the skeptic role in the media were too dumb to see the absurdity.

It appears we have another version of that involving the Colonial Pipeline shutdown form a couple of weeks ago. The company claimed they were hacked by wily Russians, probably the same Russians who were in league with Trump. They had no choice but to pay those hackers millions in Bitcoin to get unhacked. The story was obviously rather fishy, but no one in the media questioned it. After all, hackers are the universal hobgoblins of this age, so why question it?

Now the FBI is peddling a story that is so ridiculous that it should come with a laugh track, but it is being promoted by the media. Here is a tweet from a simpleton in the White House press team. claiming the FBI got the crypto back from the hackers by using their special James Bond skills. This is a follow up tweet from the same simpleton claiming the hackers used a server in California to store their ill-gotten loot from the Colonial Pipeline hack.

The absurdity of this is a good example of the credulity of the media. We have these super-villain hackers from Russia, who foolishly leave their crypto lying around on American servers for the FBI to locate. This is right out of the bad Hollywood script department where the villain always makes a rookie error, like leaving part of the Death Star easily accessible to the enemy. In this case, we have people expert at cracking security, but use no security in their own operation.

Then we have the claim the FBI recovered the exact same Bitcoin that was paid to the hackers by the company. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of how crypto works knows this is a nonsense claim. In order to know that the FBI would have to tie the address to a person and that person to the crime. If they have proof that the person is the culprit, then they can just arrest that person. There is no need for their dramatic caper where they seize the crypto from the server stash.

Probably the most laughable bit of the story is these super villain hackers from Russia were using a Coinbase account. Again, everyone with the slightest knowledge of crypto knows Coinbase is mobbed up by US security. In order for them to remain in existence and become a publicly traded company they had to give the FBI and NSA free access to their system. Yet these super-villain hackers from Russia decided to use the NSA’s preferred crypto vendor to fence their ransom money?

Of course, people who have used crypto exchanges like Coinbase know that they use multifactor authentication. That means you need more than just a user name and password to access your account. Typically it means entering a code that is texted to the phone registered with the account. That means the FBI had the phone number and user credentials of the hackers. That only makes complete sense if the hackers were located at Langley or the Hoover building.

Everything about this story from the FBI, DOJ and the company is utter nonsense, but none of it matters. In our precious democracy, no one in the media dares utter a discouraging word about anything from official circles. Even if one of the stooges in the media got rambunctious, they are too stupid to know who to ask about the claims made in these stories. The mass media is now fully staffed with toddlers, trusting everything they are told by the people in charge.

The old Hoffer line about mass movements become rackets in America gets overused, but it is amazingly accurate. Democracy in America is just a racket, an ongoing bust out enabled by an army of hacks in the administrative state. Real hackers are never caught, because they work for the people running the system, like the pirates working for the crown during the age of sail. Meanwhile, the hacks in the system are always ready to look the other way, as long as the paycheck clears.

In fairness, calling it a racket seems unfair. Most of the people involved are simply too stupid to run a racket. Most of the people involved are like Geoff Bennett, the guy from NBC in those tweets. He is a gullible doofus who checks the right boxes on the casting form, so he gets to play White House reporter. Anyone with something on the ball is boiled off or they are cast on the other side of the dynamic. They get to make up official whoppers for the media to report. This is the hack-a-rama.

Lawless And Chaotic

Posted on March 30, 2021 by thezman

The main difference in form between a liberal democracy and a republic is that the latter is defined by a fixed set of rules. The former, in contrast, is formless as it is defined by the will of fifty percent plus one. The republic has clearly defined roles for itself, including limits on its power. In a liberal democracy, there are no limits, because truth itself is just a simple majority, so the roles and limits of the liberal democracy are whatever the people want at the moment.

When the truth is defined by the majority of the mob, this must inevitably lead to chaos, as we can no longer live in a world of fixed rules. Present experience suggests that rules themselves are seen as the enemy in a liberal democracy. We see this in the language used by the most pious of liberal democrats. They want to disrupt the status quo, break barriers and open everything up to the world. The end of this project is never mentioned, as it does not matter. They just like smashing things.

We see this most clearly in the transformation of the mass media. A generation ago the core of the media was a tool of the ruling class, but it had lots of tentacles that functioned as a check on the ruling class. There was a relationship between the media and the ruling class. The media could be very useful in promoting the interests of the ruling class, but it could also turn on its masters. The media needed to maintain some distance as the fourth estate in the republic.

That old set of arrangements are gone now. Today, the media operates like the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution in Iran. Their job is to hunt for heretics and witches, which they currently call white nationalists. Whether real or imaginary, they exist to root out these evil doers and expose them to the world. They have lots of names for these evil doers, but white nationalist is the official name, the one they chant when they seek to summon forth the arch demon of their faith.

In present day America, being a white nationalist is just about the worst thing you can be, as it includes all of the worst heresies of the age. It means primarily that you hate all of the things a good person is supposed to love. If you are accused of being a white nationalist, whether you are one or not, you are subject to the worst punishments we currently have now. You can be proscribed. This is a form of internal banishment in which you are treated as a pariah by society.

White nationalists don’t like this for two reasons. One is that they don’t think there is anything immoral about being a white nationalist. They point out that black nationalists do not suffer from this moral prohibition. Jewish nationalists are celebrated. The other reason white nationalist object to the current use of the label is they correctly point out that the definition used by our betters is a lie. White nationalism is just nationalism for white people, not a bundle of hatreds against others.

None of this matters, as the accusation is enough to cause real harm to the life of the person accused of being a white nationalist. This is why VDare sued the New York Times last year. If the label sticks, it basically places the accused outside legal protection, which at this time is limited to financial and cyber-attacks, but in the near future it may include physical attacks as well. How long before “he was a white nationalist” is a justification for intentional homicide?

Now, the VDare case was dismissed and in that dismissal we get a glimpse of why the truth has no place in a liberal democracy. The Times, you see, never accused Brimelow and VDare of being heretics. They repeated the claims made by others. This is how the game is played. A pipsqueak outfit like the Daily Beast circulates the accusation and then it is repeated by a major publication. The Times just has to pretend they are reporting the charge and they get away with libel.

This sleight of hand turns up all over the media. Mark Steyn, in his often amusing deposition in the Michael Mann case, pointed out that National Review is now claiming they are not a publisher. You see, because they allow highly filtered and censored comments, they now qualify as a public platform. They are protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This means they are free to libel anyone they like as long as there are some comments allowed on the post.

Of course, the big social media players have been exploiting this new truth for a long time now. They do all of the things that a publisher would do, like promote content, edit content and block content, but that is now proof that they are not a publisher. For example, they accuse rivals of having malware on their sites by posting warnings to their links. If you click the BitChute link in this tweet, for example, you are given a warning about BitChute’s shady technology practices.

What’s happened to the media in America is the result of living in a world where the truth is fifty percent plus one. In a world where the truth is defined by a majority, all the incentives shift from truth telling to persuasion. Facts become sparingly used props in the argument to persuade the public. Facts are sprinkled in to give the argument authenticity in order to trick the audience. The truth is therefore defined by who wins the argument and winning by any means necessary is now a virtue.

We now live in an age in which we are awash in mass media, but the only truth is that nothing in the media is true. Even provable fact is positioned as to be in service to some lie aimed at deceiving the public. Of course, a world without truth is a world without rules, which is a world without limits. Anyone can do anything to anybody if they can convince a simple majority of it. The law, which is about limits, ceases to exist because in a world where everything is possible, there can be no limits.

Perversely, every new law, every new effort to limit the assault on truth becomes a weapon against the truth. We see that with Section 230. A law to place limits on these platforms and their potential opponents, is now a license for the platforms and their former adversaries to wage war on the truth. The mass media is a defamation machine in service to the most gifted liars in society. Liberal democracy has become a theocracy in which the lie is the god and truth is Satan.

A new year brings new changes. The same is true for this site as we adjust to the reality of managerial authoritarianism. That means embracing crypto for when the inevitable happens and the traditional outlets are closed. Now more than ever it is important to support the voices that support you. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you prefer other ways of donating, look at the donate page. Thank you.

The Lefty Devil

Posted on March 11, 2021 by thezman

One of the most important things the Left in America does in the culture war is convince their opponents to play the role of devil for them. The American Left operates like a religious movement, but one without an inherent purpose. That purpose must be supplied from outside the movement. It is like a beehive without a queen, always searching for a queen that will define the threat for them, so they can act on their nature and attack the enemy in what they believe is defense of the hive.

That is what these causes are for the American Left. The cause itself is meaningless, because that is just a plot device in the story. It is why they can be so callous to the people they claim to be championing. The Left is now attacking feminists who oppose allowing men in dresses to play girls’ sports. Progressives used to talk about girls playing sports like it was the most important thing ever, but men in dresses are now providing the devil, so trannies are what matter most.

This is something right-wing people of all types have never been able to accept, because right-wing people are wedded to bourgeois objectivism. There must be some practical reason for why the Left is doing something. Alternatively, in the case of the tranny-feminist conflict, the Right starts hooting about hypocrisy, as if that has ever mattered to the Left on anything. If facts and reason mattered to the America Left, the American Left would not exist.

What the American Left is all about is the devil, the great tempter. That last bit is the important part, because it gets to the heart of the matter. People join causes out of necessity, self-defense for example, or self-loathing. The former is a temporary condition forced on people by circumstance, like an invasion or some terrible natural calamity like an earthquake. The latter is a permanent state of mind. The true believer is always running from himself.

You see this in the latest left-wing fetish for disinformation. They have created a new form of shaman called the disinformation expert. The job of this shaman is to point out targets for the Left to attack. Disinformation, of course, is false information issued by an institution, like the media, which is intended to mislead. To be an expert in this craft is to have been in an institution practicing it. In other words, the point of this disinformation fixation is to shift the focus from the people responsible for it.

That is another thing that the Right has always missed. The reason the Left is always accusing others of things they are doing or have done is they desperately want to avoid having to even think about themselves. They are expert at deflection, because the Left is composed of people riddled with self-loathing. These are people who have organized their lives around avoiding any conversation about their nature. They instinctively shift the focus from themselves to others.

This is why a rich guy comfortably ensconced in the system can go on jihad against a 22-year-old young man on Twitter. Wajahat Ali issuing fatwas on Twitter against a kid working from his basement is ridiculous on its face. Ali works in Hollywood; he writes for the major broadsheets like the New York Times. Fuentes, on the other hand, is a kid working from zero institutional support. Yet, Ali and his wealthy audience are sure Fuentes is powerful and they are weak.

Now, Ali is just a grifter who should never have been allowed in the country, but his marks in the ruling class are true believers. They are rich and powerful people, holding positions of authority in the managerial class. His patrons, who use him like a shaman to direct these people, are also true believers. These people need an enemy, a devil onto whom they can focus their gaze. Otherwise, they are left to contemplate their loathsome selves, which is a fate worse than death for them.

This is why the tech platforms seem so incoherent in their censorship. They ban some people but leave others alone. It never makes a lot of sense until you realize that they want their enemies coming back on the platforms. They need their enemies in the same way normal people need oxygen. They keep creating new versions of their platforms in order to get more devils to attack. The chat site Clubhouse is the latest example of a site created to manufacture more devils to fight.

The reason our side keeps losing is our guys are stupid and keep playing the role of bogeyman for the Left. “They are going to call us [fill in name of bogeyman here], so we may as be [fill in name of bogeyman here]” is the mantra of the perpetual loser. It is the fuel the Left needs to survive. Whether it is responding to left-wing media or playing the role on their platforms, the right-wing response to the Left has been conditioned to feed into the innate desires of the Left and give them purpose.

Counterintuitively, the best weapon against the America Left is to speak clinically of the Left and about what motivates them. It seems like these lefty scolds want attention, but in reality, they fear the spotlight. The last thing they want to do is defend their motivations and actions. Alternatively, the best defense against these left-wing provocations is to ignore them. If Fuentes had not taken the bait, Wajahat Ali would not be flying around on his carpet right now as the coolest djinn on Twitter.

That is the thing the successful right-wing movement will accept. The currency of the Left is the attention from the Right. The Left needs an enemy, a devil, in order to have purpose to their lives. These are starving souls looking for grace, which comes in the form of attention from their enemies, real and imagined. The successful right-wing movement uses this reality to turn the tables, putting the leash on lefty’s neck, using his desire to be a good boy to its advantage.

The Modern Prison State

Posted on March 3, 2021 by thezman

One of the unexpected consequences of the information age is that we have less reliable information, despite have vastly more data. We have facts about the world now that were unimaginable a generation ago. The facts of our society are stashed in massive searchable databases that are accessible to most everyone. You may need some skill to access them, but the data is there. Even data that should be private is available if you are willing to pay for it.

In contrast, the information about our world that we can trust has collapsed into the set of things we can verify on our own. Information is not the same as data, which is a collection of facts. How many miles you drive to work every day is a fact. Information is what we can derive from those facts. If your commute takes an hour and it is 50 miles, we can conclude that you mostly use the highway to get to work, based on some simple math using those two data points.

In theory, information should be value free, as it is facts plus testable logic, with the result being subject to comparisons with the reality. If the information you derive from someone’s driving data indicates he is breaking the speed of sound on his way to work, we know your facts or logic are wrong. The trouble here is that information is not readily testable against reality. We tend to rely on the reputation of the person providing the information and how it fits within our own observations.

That’s the other important distinction between data and information, at least regarding the way in which these words are used in popular discourse. While they are often used interchangeably, data is an objectively true fact, while information is true according to a set of logical rules. Since those rules can be conditional, information can be valid and invalid, depending upon those conditions. “All bachelors are unmarried” is true as long as the word “bachelor” is defined to mean “a man who has not married.”

This may seem a bit esoteric, but it gets to the heart of the crisis in the West. For most of human history and all of Western history, the relationship between data and information was different than we see today. For medieval man, there was never a lot of data about the world, but he could trust the information about it. This was not just the natural world. He could trust the truths about his society, his gods, the people in charge of his society and the sources of his information.

In the modern age, and really just in the last generation, this relationship has flipped around the other way. We have all the data we need for any question. We know more about world than we really want or need to know. What we lack is information and more important, trustworthy sources of information. Medieval man could rely on the Church or the local lord to maintain the rules of society. The only thing modern man can know about his sources of information is they are wrong.

Modern man is now awash in both misinformation and disinformation, in addition to false information. Misinformation is deliberately inaccurate information, which is intended to deceive. Disinformation is deliberately inaccurate information, but from an institution like the state or the media. Of course, false information is information that is inaccurate due to bad data or logic. Compounding this is the current campaign against misinformation and disinformation.

The first thing you should notice is the people most responsible for the tsunami of disinformation are claiming to be at war with disinformation. Unless this results in mass suicide by media and entertainment, it means they are lying. Note also the use of the term “expert” in that piece. There is no such thing as a disinformation expert, outside of the institutions promulgating disinformation. One cannot be an expert at doing something unless you are actually doing that thing.

Note also how the primary sources of both misinformation and disinformation talk about this phenomenon as if they are the victims of it. The managerial class is the single source for the flood of false information. Pranksters may post gags on line to fool people, but the practical joke has been a part of life since the stone age. The online version is just an extension of the flaming bag of dog poo. What the managerial class is doing is a firehose of falsehoods with the stamp of authority.

Put another way, the new phase of the misinformation/disinformation tsunami is the managerial state crying out in pain as it strikes the society over which it rules. The next front in the crisis will be agents of the state arresting people on trumped up charges, for imaginary crimes against the state. This is the Douglas Mackey case. An entirely powerless person is arrested for a crime that does not exist, because the disinformation system says he was passing misinformation on-line.

Since the first humans began to settle into large communities, human organization has relied upon social trust, enforced by a code. Social trust worked in two directions, vertically and horizontally. People could trust their neighbors because they were like them and accepted the same codes of conduct. People trusted their rulers because those rulers enforced the code and attained their positions based on the logic in that code of society. Trust was side-to-side and up-and-down.

Modern economics is turning the horizontal trust of American society into cash equivalents and hauling it away to the pirate coves of finance capital. Americans are living in a world of strangers. The disinformation campaigns intended to distract from this realty are eating away at the vertical trust. Americans no longer trust the people in charge of their society. That distrust is quickly morphing into a distrust of and contempt for the system itself.

Smart people look at the economic model of America and wonder how it can keep going on as it is. The fact that it does go on suggests it can keep going on, but it seems to be violating the rules of the universe. The same can be said for the collapse of social trust and the growing contempt for the system. How long can the people in charge expect to remain in charge when the people over whom they rule are increasingly convinced the rulers and their system are evil and corrupt?

Perhaps that is the final trick of financialization. The first trick was to subvert the basic rules of exchange between people. All of those rules we learned from economics no longer make any sense. The final trick is to subvert the rules of logic themselves, making it so no one can believe or trust anything or anyone. The disinformation age is the final part of the modern prison. Everyone is alone, no one can trust anything, even the laws of the universe. You just have to do what you are told.

The Ongoing Panic

Posted on March 2, 2021 by thezman

Depending upon when you mark the start of the Covid mass hysteria, we are either coming up on the one year anniversary or have just past it. Panic was setting in as early as January, but that was mostly with people who saw a profit in it. It was in February when the mass media started picking up on it. For example, no one was wearing a mask at CPAC 2020, which was in February. By March you could not buy a mask anywhere, along with toiletries and paper products.

A year on, we are getting a better picture of what happened in what may go down as one of the great mass panics in human history. Given that the panic is still with us, the picture that is emerging is blurry and incomplete. In parts of the US and Europe, Covid has turned into a weird religion. It is not just a public health issue to be managed and navigated, but a stand-in for Old Scratch. The faithful are not only vigilant, they are Covid vigilantes, minding everyone’s business about it.

One thing we are seeing is a collapse in the number of confirmed cases. This is in line with what we know about past pandemics. The number of cases is slow at first, often because we have no way of testing for the new bug. Then the number of cases rises quickly, partly due to awareness and partly due to panic. In the mass media age, the need for attention surely drove the case count. Contrary to media narratives, the drop in cases has nothing to do with government efforts.

In fact, there is no evidence that any of the measures, public or private, had any impact on the spread of Covid. The fact is the only way to slow the spread of a virus like this is what the Chinese did and that is lock everyone in their homes. Even the Chinese found this to be close to impossible. What the West could do and is doing is theater. It is about protecting the political health of the ruling class, by convincing enough people that the government is doing something about the virus.

Political theater is an essential element of liberal democracy. We live in the modern version of a Dionysian age. All public acts are public performances, and all public performances are part of the larger morality play of politics. Facts and the discourse upon facts is purely a private affair. It is why everything about Covid has been politicized and only came to our attention when it could be politicized. For a year we have been watching Covid theater, rather than a public health response.

Once the drama runs its course on the big stage, and it seems to be reaching that point now that Mumbly Joe is staggering around the White House, it will go off-Broadway and then close up shop entirely. The mass roll out of vaccines with highly questionable claims to effectiveness looks like the way out for government. Once the old people are vaccinated, they can then claim herd immunity has been reached and the rest of the public can get the jab at their leisure.

One caveat to that prediction is that the Covidians are getting worked up over the new strain of Covid. This is the super-Covid that the oracles prophesied back in the before times when this all started. This one is “armed with enhanced capabilities.” Apparently it has infrared vision and portable drones. Additionally, the Nth wave people will be with us forever, it seems. Then you have the Covid industrial complex that has invested heavily in lockdowns and all that surrounds it.

Assuming that the panic does end, and this drama moves off the stage this year, we will also start to get a sense of the degree of madness we have witnesses. For example, we are already getting a hint in the annual flu numbers. In Britain, the number of influenza cases was zero this flu season. Maybe we have witnessed a miracle or maybe Covid kills the influenza virus. Most likely, the flu numbers have been re-classed as Covid, which appears to be the case in the US.

The truth is most cases we call the flu are caused by unknown pathogens. In fact, only about 20% of flu cases treated by the medical system are known to be the flu. The rest are from something else. Since the medicines for treating the symptoms do the job, no one really cares what caused the symptoms. It is why we do not mandate testing for the flu or the common cold. Up until the past year, we just accepted the fact that people get sick in winter and sometimes need to be treated for it.

Once the dust settles and the sober minded can begin to look at the data, what we will find is that the number of deaths was wildly exaggerated. Similarly, the number of people needing hospitalization was also exaggerated. This is common to all pandemics in the modern age. Even the Spanish Flu was exaggerated. A lot of the deaths attributed to it were from other factors, like poor hospital conditions, poorly trained doctors, bad nutrition, and other pathogens.

Another lesson will be that modern government is not capable of managing a genuine crisis, even a mild one like Covid. The story emerging from New York shows that the people making the decisions not only lacked the basic skills to manage a crisis, but they were obsessed with the politics of the moment. Like everything about partisan politics, everyone chose sides. The left-wing states chose first, so the right-wing states were left with the right answer by default. That is no way to run a country.

It is not just a partisan political problem. It is a systemic one. This paper examining the political economy of this panic looks at the role of mass media. The initial reality of the virus was amplified by the mass media, which the decision makers in government rely upon as their primary information source. They acted on the exaggerated claims, which had the effect of confirming those claims to the public. This was picked up and magnified by the media and we had a vicious cycle.

The interesting bit in that paper is the parallel between how a virus spreading faster in a dense population and how panic spreads in a media dense population. Before the mass media age, most people were outside the media environment, in the same way most people were outside urban areas in agrarian times. Just as a pathogen needs a network of people, bad information needs a way to pass from person to person. Our connected age is now a breeding ground for informational pandemics.

Another aspect to this is a growing number of people seem to need the emotional energy that comes from crisis. We saw this in the early days of Covid. The auxiliary volunteer army of scolds were suddenly swarming the public square. That energy eventually transferred to fighting the virus that they call Trump supporters and insurrectionists but is now looking for a new host. They will need another panic this spring and you can be sure one will be supplied.

Media Man

Posted on February 7, 2021 by thezman

There are many things that one can point to in the current age as the cause of what we are experiencing. Social crisis is always the result of many factors. There is never one single cause. Even so, examining the individual causes has some utility. It helps provide a little sanity for those living through it. If nothing else, it is like the band playing on the Titanic in that if provides those who are condemned to live through the crisis with a bit of dignity as they sink into the abyss.

Anyway, one of the things that has made modern life such a mess is the vast chorus of nitwits who fill our lives with their voices. They repeat whatever has been placed in their hymnals by people with agendas. One person says something that gets them some attention and then everyone repeats it. The thing is, these people position themselves as authorities on various topics, so when they repeat what they hear, they inevitably lend authority to it. The fact is, they know not what they say.

A good example is this post at the ironically named American Conservative. The post is the generic libertarian boilerplate about the creative destruction and how this means retail will go the way of the buggy whip. In this case, the writer argues that GameStop, the company at the heart of the short squeeze initiated by a gang of retail investors, is a dead company that has no future. He thinks the run up in their shares was due to nostalgia for a bygone era of retail.

The post is complete nonsense, but it is popular nonsense repeated by these sorts of people on many different platforms. In this case, the writer is Addison Del Mastro and he is, according to his bio, the assistant editor and social media manager of The American Conservative. He is a graduate of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and writes on urbanism, place, and popular and cultural history. According to his resume, he has never worked in the private sector.

That last bit is typical. Few people in any type of media job have ever worked in the dreaded private sector. Mr. Del Mastro is probably a great guy who does a bang-up job as the social media manager, but he is wholly unqualified to have an opinion on this topic or anything related to it. Maybe he can offer an informed opinion about the social media aspect, but otherwise, the cleaning lady at American Conservative is better qualified to discuss business and finance.

The great conservative philosopher Joseph de Maistre observed that “False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing.” This is exactly what we see with the mass media. The public square is flooded with the sound of the ignorant repeating falsehoods they heard from one another. It is a cacophony of half-truths, distortions and outright lies repeated by the unqualified.

The fact is, if you want to understand the GameStop story, you need to know a little about finance and have some experience as a day trader. You should also know how to read a financial statement. At the minimum, that lets you examine the facts and sort the truth from the fiction. Unless you are inside the group that pushed the stock or on the other end of it, you know you are only getting some of the story. That would be the basis for good media analysis or responsible commentary on the story.

That sort of humility is not what we get from managerial man, the type of person who takes up space in the media. Knowing practical things like how to read an income statement is for prols. The managerial man does not have time for that. That is why the media is stocked to the gills with people who know nothing. They spent all of their time accumulating esoteric credentials that they can wear as moral signifiers. These impress the other managerial types. The result is a class of know-nothings.

This is not a new phenomenon. Last year First Things published an interesting article on the Russian intelligentsia prior to and during the revolution. The intelligent was a member of the intelligentsia. Unlike an intellectual, who is a curious and educated person, the intelligent was its opposite. The art of not knowing practical things was a big part of the life of a Russian intelligent. They took pride in not having practical skills or having a useful occupation.

This is close to what we see with managerial man. At all levels, even those who see themselves as critics, they have made sure to never learn anything useful. At the bottom layer, where the media exists, the result is a vast collection of chattering skulls with no useful knowledge of their own. Above them is a vast army of people with no idea how anything works. They crash about from crisis to crisis, hoping the big machine they inherited rights itself before something bad happens.

The remarkable thing about the media is their confidence. These people repeat things with total conviction and certainty. They don’t seem to notice that they are just channeling what they heard from other chattering skulls or what was fed to them by people with an obvious agenda. These hyper-confident morons fill the public space with whatever idiotic thing they heard last. The result is we are inundated by the blather of people who have turned ignorance into a virtue.

The thing that has prevented our ruling class from bringing the roof down on all of us is the system they inherited was very strong. It evolved over many generations of struggle by a competent people with a good foundation. But even the toughest structure will eventually succumb to the wrecking ball of incompetency. Eventually, the collection of jabbering airheads we see in charge of society will push the wrong combination of buttons the end times are upon us.

Nashville

Posted on December 26, 2020 by thezman

It appears that 2020 will go out with one last bit of madness in the form of what appears to be a random bombing in Nashville. On Christmas morning, according to the police and media, a camper van exploded on an empty downtown street. Supposedly, the police were warned there was a bomb in the area, so they cleared the streets and nearby buildings before the bomb went off. As unlikely as that sounds, it is the story they are currently pushing through the official media organs.

Obviously, the point of the bombing is the story. In a case like this, you have several possible motivations. One is political. The bomber is trying to make a political point that will eventually be revealed. Given the location, it seems unlikely. There is no government facility at the bombing sight. Nashville has not been a hotbed of radical unrest like Portland or Seattle. There has been little in the way of BLM activity or any made-up claims of right-wing activity.

That does not rule out politics, but it probably means the bomber or bombers are well outside the mainstream. In other words, they are crazies who found a reason to be crazy in this way. A lot of what gets classified as terrorism is in fact crazy people acting on something they picked up from the media. Dylann Roof is the media’s favorite terrorist, but in reality, he is a kid with severe psychological problems. Ted Kaczynski is probably the most famous case of crazy man politics.

You also have the more mundane explanations. The bomber could have been in a dispute with the owner of the building. He may have been romantically involved with someone that works in the building. The man responsible for the worst school shooting in American history was a guy who snapped after a local election. Andrew Kehoe went bonkers, killed his wife, burned down his farm and then went to the local school and killed 38 people before blowing himself up in a truck bomb.

Of course, the usual suspects will be flooding the internet with claims that the bomber is part of some wide-ranging secret conspiracy. He was sent by the deep state or maybe he was sent by Q to attack the deep state. This type of event is catnip for the sorts of people into conspiracy theories. Since it fits in well with the Q-grift and the plan-trusting grift, it will draw in the usual crowd. In fairness, the constant lying by people in authority is driving the rise in conspiracy mongering.

That is not to say there is no conspiracy behind this event. We still have no idea what really happened with the Las Vegas shooting. The assassination of Seth Rich on the streets of DC has never been explained. The truth of the FBI conspiracy to overturn the 2016 election has never been explained. You can make a long list of events over the last decade that have been covered up by the government or explained in a way that strains credulity. People are right to be skeptical.

This is the fruit of ruling class corruption. They refuse to abide by the rules and adequately enforce the rules. This lowers public trust. Then the ruling class tolerates an army of incompetents in the bureaucracy, which only makes the public more skeptical of their institutions. To remedy that problem, the media manufactures lies to explain it all, but those lies are rather easy to disprove. Our authoritarian overclass is a toxic blend of mendacity and mediocrity. They can no longer be trusted on anything.

The thing is it could very well be a sign of things to come. Make enough of the people miserable and some of them will respond. Unlike the old Soviet Union or modern China, the American ruling class is fully exposed. They do not live in guarded compounds surrounded by armed guards. They also rely on a managerial class to implement their rules and policies. Those credentialed managers live in easily accessed neighborhoods and travel around in public, totally unprotected.

Then you have the fact that America has tens of millions of people capable of making a decent truck bomb with common materials. How many people walking around in America have been trained by the military on the basics of this stuff? Think about how many guys saw how IED’s and car bombs were used in the Middle East. You do not even have to have had direct experience with these tactics. The use of car bombs and IED’s has been a staple of the mass media for a generation now.

It may seem farfetched but think about what has been normalized this year that was considered crazy talk in 2019. We have widescale lock downs of the population and official talk of internal passports and social credit systems. As America lurches into a high-tech prison state, expect the inmates to respond accordingly. The IRA made war on the support system of the British occupation this way. They used bombs to tell those people that the British could not protect them. It could happen here.

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How Fake Is It?

Posted on October 31, 2020 by thezman

An old expression in the collectibles world is that anything that has value will eventually be faked or stolen. Art is faked so often that certain types of art have lost all value, because no one can tell the fakes from the genuine items. It’s not just crooks trying to beat the rules of the game. The people responsible for policing the fraud are often the people perpetrating the fraud. The truth is, anything that does not have objective value, but relies on insiders, will be subject to fraud and theft.

It is something to keep mind when thinking about the future of internet properties like the big socials and media sites. They rely on traffic to generate revenues from advertisers and those interested in their traffic data. Twitter does not make much from actual ads on the platform, but they sell user information to those interested in tracking your whereabouts on-line and in the real world. That traffic data is essentially what makes it possible for internet properties to thrive.

That brings up that old maxim of the collectibles business. Who is authenticating the data and appraising its value? There are sites that claim to measure web traffic. Like the ratings services for radio and television, they claim to have a secret way to sample traffic and then estimate over all traffic. Obviously, the sites themselves have their traffic, which they use to pitch advertisers, investors and in the case of politics, the donors that keep these operations running.

Of course, the ratings systems for radio and television have been subject to shenanigans for the same reason art is faked. Those ratings have value, so if you can fake those ratings, it’s like having free access to the bank vault. The ratings themselves are published so the unscrupulous can make bold claims. “We’re number one among left-handed Korean midgets” becomes “we’re number one in our segment.” It is a bandit market and the ratings help facilitate it.

In the internet world, capturing web traffic is a bit more complex. That’s where services like SimilarWeb and Alexa step in to provide hard data. Well, it is supposed to be hard data, but where they get their data is not easy to know. They are a bit cagey about how they arrive at their numbers. Alexa claims to rely on a browser plugin and site owners installing their script. SimilarWeb claims to get data from a panel of hundreds of millions of web users, as well as a sample of websites.

How accurate is the data? Probably not very accurate at all. Consider the British political site Unherd. The Alexa rankings don’t give us overall traffic, but the SimilarWeb ratings tell us they get 1.6 million visitors per month. Is that real? There’s no way to know based on the data provided. It looks like a lot of their traffic comes from aggregators, rather than real people. Then again, how many of their readers would install an Alexa browser plugin? Probably very few.

For small sites that deal in politics, traffic is not that big of an issue, as their donors are not targeting a mass audience. What about other types of data like YouTube views or Twitter followers? If that data real? It’s clear that Twitter is loaded with fake accounts, but how many are their fake accounts? It could be millions by now. How many are used by Twitter to boost users they like? No one can know, but it is not hard to see how that would be something they do for public relations reasons.

Think about it. Twitter is the preferred social media platform of the establishment media, so it is Twitter’s interest to make them happy. That is, in part, why they are feverishly scrubbing anything that vexes the gentle souls in the press corps. How hard would it be for them to ramp up the follower counts and likes on those same media accounts with their army of robot user accounts? Follower counts have value, so it is a safe bet those follower counts are being faked by all interested parties.

It is not just fraud, which is probably rampant in all of these measures of internet activity, but incompetence plays a role. YouTube views will go backwards, because thousands of accounts have been purged. This happens on Twitter as well. Of course, Google breaking its own search algorithm to prevent you from seeing what you like has probably crippled the view counts on YouTube. In other words, One type of deception is colliding with another type of deception.

The big players who make up the bulk of ad buying are starting to figure out that web traffic is not all it is claimed to be. Placing ads on a social media platform is worse than a waste of money. If a company made a video of the executive burning piles of their cash and then posted it on YouTube, they would get more sales from that video than running a regular YouTube ad. Eventually, this becomes obvious to everyone and the ad market on-line begins to dry up for these sites.

The real value in these internet properties, obviously, is in the data they steal from users and sell to governments and corporations. Like the ad business, the fraud in this data will eventually become an issue. We very well may be seeing the high water point for the big social media players. Like the market for certain types of art, the inability to tell the real thing from the fakes will collapse the market. In the end, it will not be public contempt but their own shenanigans that ends their reign of terror.

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