In American mythology, enemies of the peopel come to the attention of the state because they are doing something that worries the state. The people who got in trouble with the Soviets, for example, were either freedom fighters, skeptics of communism or religious people just trying to practice their faith. In other words, the person getting the business from the state, were both heretics and a specific threat. The state rationally picked them out from among the population for special treatment by the goons of the system.
The truth is, there is a great deal of chance involved in these situations. The Chinese have always understood this. The Chinese curse, “May you be recognized by people in high places” captures the serendipity that is always part of government. There are minor nuisances, who get caught up in the government dragnet, while others, who are very serious subversives escape attention. Sometimes it is simply a matter of pissing off the right person, or wrong person. Sometimes it’s just bad luck or bad timing.
Ideological government, either the hard type like the Soviets or the soft sort like we have in America, needs enemies. More specifically, it needs examples. In order to reinforce the rightness of the civic religion, they need to demonstrate the wrongness of heresy. That means the demand for heretics is constant. Finding heretics one at a time is expensive, so it soon becomes a bulk operation. They cast the net, pull in some trouble makers, throw away the small ones and keep the useful ones.
Social media has proven to be excellent fishing waters for this sort of operation. The need to preen and signal, means left-wing fanatics flood these sites. They become chum, attracting the sorts who enjoy criticizing Progressive piety. Every once in a while, a heretic gets caught up in the nets and is hauled aboard for defenestration. It’s no surprise that doxing, the tactic of leftists where they harass heretics at their work and school, almost always starts on social media. Swim near the trawlers, risk getting caught in the net.
There seems to be a corollary to this practice in the realm of official propaganda. The fire hose of fake news, conspiracy tales, and selective reporting is also an economical way of solving the propaganda issue. Instead of spending time and money coming up with credible narratives and high production values, the ideological state can simply reduce the verity of all social information to zero. If everyone comes to believe everything they hear is false, the critics of the regime have no way to convince the public.
Think of it this way. Imagine JFK was actually assassinated by a secret cabal within the government. In order to avoid detection they could find a sucker to setup for the crime, but there’s the risk someone could notice defects in the narrative. What if the sap they selected has an alibi or some physical evidence contradicts the story? The other choice is to try and erase all evidence pointing to the conspiracy, but this is hard to do. There’s always a few bread crumbs that point investigators in the right direction.
A third option is to create and promote a wide range of conspiracy theories that are plausible, but lack proof. This not only muddies the waters, it attracts the sorts of people who seek attention. Before long all of the Mike Cernovich types are promoting their favorite theory of the crime. Not only does this obscure the facts of the crime, it makes the real theory seem just as nutty as the fake conspiracies. The very act of trying to identify who killed Kennedy disqualifies the person doing it.
This is a pattern, by the way, we see with lots of unsolved mysteries. The official inquiry comes up dry or seems to lack official support, so there is a flood of conspiracy theories by professional conspiracy mongers. Obama’s birth certificate is a great example. Team Obama let that linger, because they wanted people talking about the birth certificate, rather than the gaping holes in Obama’s official biography. Before long, anyone puzzling over his backstory was cast as a “birther” and laughed off the stage.
Maybe that’s what has happened to our media over the last few decades. The ideological state no longer has to sell a credible narrative. They just have to allow the fake news to flood the zone so that the public assumes everything is fake, even the people criticizing the ideologues in charge. In a zero trust society, the value of subversion falls to zero, but the value of the institutions grows geometrically. Therefore, the people controlling the institutions increase their power, even as they become less credible.
That’s not to say the people in charge sorted this in advance. That would be a conspiracy theory of its own. No, these things may simply evolve. In the late stages of the Soviet Union, dark humor about the near total lack of trust in Russian society was common. It’s probably not an accident that some of those jokes are making a comeback in modern America, particularly in response to the Russia conspiracies. In a world where there is no truth and no one can trust anything, all you can do is laugh.
>In a zero trust society, the value of subversion falls to zero, but the value of the institutions grows geometrically. Therefore, the people controlling the institutions increase their power, even as they become less credible.
I think it is wrong. In a low trust society what you do is to trust selected persons, because they are your relatives, friends, or have a good history, or just look very charismatic and trustworthy. It is precisely institutions that lose trust first, because they are faceless. And thus it moves towards personal rule which is precisely what you see in Eastern Europe. People say to the hell with institutions, laws, processes and everything, because I do not know who is enforcing them and in whose pocket he is. But that one dude, I trust him, so let him run everything.
And this is the Trump phenomenon in America. Institutions like the CNN are not trusted, one person is.
pareisagō is the greek term. to introduce or bring in secretly or craftily
You’re over-thinking it Z. You assume that because you’re logical, and you are goal oriented – that they are too. Their whole thought process starts and stops with virtue signalling. That’s it. There’s a rude joke on Gab right now that shows the democrat voting guide. If ya vote for Bernie over Warren – yer sexist!!! If ya vote for him over Kamala – you’re racist!!! If ya don’t vote for that queer that threw his hat into the ring – you’re a homophobe!!! The only thing those democrat a-holes can agree on is that there can be no room for white males in their party except in subservient roles.
I see a political vacuum being created – that may end up being filled by a third political party.
Glen, we need to distinguish between the Outer Party and the Inner Party. For the Outer Party, I think you’re right: their whole thought process starts and stops with virtue signalling.
The Inner Party makes skillful use of other people’s need to virtue signal. It is one of their most powerful tools. However, I doubt it is where their thought process starts and ends.
Hmmm. Good point.
“Inner party?” You really, truly think there is a mind behind that ravenous, drooling beast snarling for your lifeblood and the extinction of your people? Stare into the void a little deeper – it’s a void looking back, not a mind. Some of them keep the mask in place better, but do not forget for a moment that every last one of them wants you broke and dead, your women raped, your children enslaved, and they think it’s funny. They know that Camp of the Saints is a how-to manual, buddy.
It’s all Gay Divorce Court now, and Laqisha would watch the sh*t out of Gay Divorce Court!
Bitch said what!
Who fucked who!
A rich old Jew went to the same massage parlor he’s been going to for years! Rap gangsta nailed some groupies! Those were the headlines- HEADLINES- every half hour on the East Coast yesterday, morning til midnite.
All our evil overlords had to do was unleash the Mean Grrrls, and it’s Brave New 1984.
The good news is, no bomb craters needed. All the assets stay intact!
One has to assume that this Jussie Smollett fellow has hired legal experts to help him with the mess he’s in, and that everything he says or does going forward will be on their advice, to minimize a bad outcome for him.
But a question as a thought experiment: what would be the best thing he could say or do to make a positive, helpful influence on American society? If he were to give a public appearance and come clean about the whole thing, and tell people exactly what he was thinking and why, and whether or not he was honestly sorry about any of it (maybe he isn’t; that itself would be of interest) , would that be helpful? Would it be more helpful to the country for him to just keep his mouth shut and endure whatever legal and media spanking machine is coming his way?
I honestly can’t tell what should happen next — I don’t mean procedurally, it’ll run whatever course it runs. I mean, what would be a plot twist that would benefit American society.
What we’re seeing is that there really, really is no such thing as “Trump’s America”, meaning some twisted, hate-filled, venal society full of racist white maniacs. It doesn’t exist, but there are millions of people who believe it, and who seem to WANT to believe it. The Smollett scandal has shined a weird light on the whole mess. What could be an outcome that made things a little better rather than worse?
A person who just wants to live a normal life in a normal country, and who doesn’t want to be forced to live cheek by jowl in a giant overstuffed rat cage filled with every bizarre foreigner on the planet, is not a hate-filled lunatic. That’s a legitimate desire. Nobody wants to put nooses on gay black actors, nobody seems to want to hurt them, but lots of people don’t want their small children being constantly lectured about transsexuals either. We seem to have lost the ability to think reasonably, which is what this whole affair seems to show — we’ve become prone to hysteria over every imaginary monster under the couch. Is there a course of action in this little soap opera that could restore a smidgen of sanity?
Smallett should just keep his mouth shut and let the lawyers do the talking. As I see it, the Chicago/Federal justice system has already signaled to Smallett their intention to go easy on him. If there are no Federal charges next week, JS is home free. Look for JS to do no time and serve his 3 years on probation. There might be a small fine, but even that I doubt. It serves the interest of the elite to bury this incident as fast as possible.
“It serves the interest of the elite to bury this incident as fast as possible.” It’s not always obvious what’s in the interest of the elite. As usual those in power have two basic choices. 1. Do the right thing, to provide an image of legitimacy. 2. Do the selfish unjust thing, to reinforce image of untouchable authority. Since the Smollet story is so big, they can’t make it just go away quickly. Whatever they do with him will be remembered and used against them. If they’re smart, they’ll punish him fairly hard. But it’s difficult to say just how much their black-homo contingent will force them to take the selfish-unjust option.
Two out of three Kennedy brothers didn’t get the memo on supporting Israel. The third became an enthusiastic ally.
Very good post; observations are spot-on. I would just go further & state that most of us simply need to go on an electronic fast, and then discipline ourselves to only consume as much information as we’re capable of processing. Information processing = thinking, connecting dots, finding logical fallacies, deducing nonsense, separating chaff from wheat … this is stuff that typically requires a quiet place to think without buzzing, ringing & vibrating i-devices. We rag on the youngsters & their low attention span … I know a lot of adults – even those with a dissident/conservative bent – who aren’t much better. Go on a camping trip with “connected” friends & see how they do after 4 hrs of wi-fi withdrawal … it ain’t pretty.
As an aside, I think writing things down – lucidly, cogently – is the key for the wannabe thinking man. That’s why your posts are one of about two or three that I regularly read & absorb … you obviously make time to think things through.
Yes, to all of this. I would add the following . . . make and pursue near-term attainable goals and get daily exercise.
I’m recommending the movie The Death of Stalin. I have nothing else to add
The Shoah boys did JFK this week.
One guess as to who was behind it…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT2jzQI1NNw
Yesterday, probably after binging on episodes of Dragnet on YT, I stumbled upon the pilot for Pettycoat Junction. Now it was unquestionably a Hollywood whitewash of small-town America in the mid-fifties; but its propaganda was so pure, white and wholesome — utterly unlike the filth we are are constantly bathed in today — that I actually wept. I am done with today’s America. The trawlers ARE too close, with nets deployed! Like a man seeking obscurity, and perhaps oblivion, in the Foreign Legion; I declare: “VERITAS PATRIA MEA.” I am gladdened by this backwater of truth seekers.
I’m pretty sure Petticoat Junction is on Amazon Prime, if you have that.
Thoroughly destroying the credibility of the news media is an old totalitarian trick. Once upon a time Americans looked to the media to find the facts and report them. Now, Soviet style, we have no expectation that corruption will be brought to light. Which suits the crooks just fine.
There were times when local papers actually did support a local community but that was always rare and broadly the media in the US has always served the elite against the people. C.F. Hearst and the Spanish American War.
The saying has always been “Freedom of the Press belong to those who own one.”
Newspapers and Media were just megaphones of the rich and its only recently that Joe Schmo has one of his own.
Yeah yeah you’re right, that’s exactly it. The culprit is who jack ruby tells us it is, and more or less some weighted version of Unzs story. So there’s a flood of the media with Bizzarre conspiracy theories and kook books, all of which seem to fail to mention the actual probable perps. Oliver Stone weighs in with his movie. doesn’t it seem like when these issues are always in the air, he creates a movie to white wash the narrative? Think of Wall Street and Gordon gecko, which was a response to the savings and loan crisis, and W., no mention of neocons or anything else. If he’s fired up about a social issue, it means or something being left out.
Now, conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination are the realm of the aluminum foil hat set. Everybody has his wacko theory, and it’s the stuff of low comedy. The truth will never be known. It’s a brilliant propaganda strategy really.
In a world of societal and institutional dysfunction, all you can do is improve your own robustness and reproduce. Large government has become a living thing in itself, and it treats dissenters as a disease that must be cured. And the US federal government has the strongest survival imperative of any living thing on the planet. And the DNA of a democratically elected government is the demographics of the voting population. And the composition of the voting demographic is now determined by who can be most easily bribed with government gravy. And the end result is a growing parasite population. And it will continue until it can’t.
Which is why I keep bringing up the money thing.
It ALL runs on money – YOUR money.
With this ludicrious “Modern Monetary Theory” that I recently noticed gaining traction – what we’re looking at is the end stages.
“Modern Monetary Theory” has been practiced in Germany during the Weimar Republic – and illustrious places like Zimbabwe.
As soon as the government gets hold of the means of printing money – that’s what they will do, especially given the current crop of leftist lunatics.
What comes after that is hyperinflation – and collapse.
What comes after that is the cleanup.
Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe- but also 1970s US, Japan since the 1990’s, Greece from the 1960’s until the EU… It is not fatal in itself. You cannot, on history alone, prove “MMT” MUST result in collapse. A system run on hope only collapses if hope evaporates (Argentina 2001, USSR). Don’t see that happening here, as the people doing the hoping are getting a reach around from those exploiting the hope. No one at US Treasury/Goldman Sachs is going home poor, so the machine keeps running bc the next guy in line wants his, too.
“However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing.”
I totally agree. Also, in a zero credibility environment you have zero loyalty. A state can’t have leaders with zero credibility and expect loyalty from either the citizens, the bureaucrats, or even the minor politicians, especially in far-flung places.
I have no doubt that when the big red Soviet flag was hoisted in red square every morning, the random Muscovites who saw that flag either felt nothing and paid no attention, felt fear and trepidation, or felt a flash of anger towards a system that was impoverishing them. But at no time, except for maybe half a percent of the population, was there a feeling of pride, love, togetherness, and all the things that one should feel when they see the flag of their country. In a few short years that flag ceased to exist, and new flags were seen.
The interesting thing about living in CA, is that I see way more California Republic flags hanging in front of houses than American flags. When I go to the Northwest I’m seeing more and more of those Cascadia flags and T-shirts. The west has always been geographically removed from D.C. That’s why the movie industry evolved in LA and not NY or somewhere else. When my east coast relatives come to the west coast they sometimes say, “I feel like I’m in another country.” Maybe they are already and don’t know it.
A country as large as America could only hold together so long as there was a certain amount of homogeneity, a feeling of a shared past and a shared destiny. Since the floodgates of the third world have been opened, the social trust has not only weakened through population replacement by wildly different tribes, but broken the bonds of White Americans, as Putnam found. These might be the birthing pangs of a collapse of the Empire and a splitting into independent, more ethnically based nations.
The current state of the Democratic Party is where we are all headed. Totally incoherent and at each other’s throats. The republicans will hold the mastery even without the majority by dint of having a coherent philosophy and intelligent strategy. Much the way white European minorities dominate Latin American countries. That’s what we’re converging towards.
I don’t see that. I find the Democrats to have a much more coherent philosophy, a failed one, but a coherent one. It even has a sort of utopian vision at the end, which is very appealing to the janitor in some office building. Republicans have always been defined as the low tax party. It’s really the only thing that most Republicans agree on. I consider myself to be more conservative than most Republicans, yet I’m an independent. I find the foreign adventurism of that party to be appalling, and too many are Paul Ryan clones that whore themselves to the Fortune 500 with no centered ethos at all. I detest so many of the John Bolton types and the mind numbed GOP crowd that thinks people like that a “securin’ the homeland.” Trump is utterly finished after signing that bill two weeks ago. Bernie could beat him.
I can absolutely see a lot of rich white Democrats flocking back to the GOP, which they left circa 1988. It would be a homecoming so to speak. The Republicans will have all the money in the world to campaign, but will still have to convince 6 out of 10 voters (mostly non-white) who literally don’t have $300 in a bank account, to support “freedum” and “open markets, etc.” Sorry, Maria and Shanequa and even Crystal from Kentucky want their freebees. It’s over. We’re Brazil. Sure you can still have white liberals in the ruling class, but the ideas of the state not being the center of our lives is a white phenomenon. Shhhh, don’t tell libertarians…you’ll only upset them.
Thanks for saying this. The Right keeps losing because they are led by people who don’t have any kind of core belief system beyond looting.
The leadership is fine with this since they are products of the Left and like losing so long as they get the loot.they want. Its all kabuki theater put on to distract us,
President Trump didn’t exactly change that but he does want an American where businesses like his can thrive and if we are all poor and each others throats for scraps, no one is going to eat overpriced steaks or go to casino hotels
Our leaders can’t have this, they are thoroughly zero sum game and if we get anything, they don’t
This is why people like AOC and Bernie to a lesser degree are such threats, they mean what they say and will redistribute wealth by seizing it in an emergency if they have to.
Thus far they’ve been contained but the Left is persistent and they are not kidding . If they ever get smart drop gun control beyond the local level anti White racism , mass immigration and can manage to maintain the coalition , go full Wobbly basically, they’ll dominate every election and deserve it.
I suspect this will not happen as the Neo Cons and Neo Libs will try and destroy the US before they give up power since they are also derived from Communists (Trotskyites in their case) . They know what will happen to them.
Long term Brazil is a likely outcome that or collapse maybe after a protracted civil war unless the Dissident Right especially embraces ideology and authority. At that point the Republic has a chance .
totally agree.
Another Latin America are white theory
Sorry pal, It doesn’t matter who run the state when state are full brown backward state
What’s the point you become a white while surround by backwardness
Latin America have white minority crap should be stop now since they are so desperate to prove themselves as Non-European Savages
” The republicans will hold the mastery even without the majority by dint of having a coherent philosophy and intelligent strategy. ”
I do like well done satire.
Please play again soon.
If only we find the right argument, the correct syllogism, the scales will fall from their eyes and they will no longer be consumed by their foundational religious desire to kill, rape, and eat us, amiright?
I agree. We are a tribe of money, nothing more, held together by the dollar bill. This is ephemeral, and doesn’t get a country through the hard times, which all countries have every so many decades. The Soviet Union couldn’t be held together with rubles, subsidies and welfare checks, so when the hard times came, there was nothing worth protecting.
Yeah but religion is a huge thing in the Republican Party. Abortion and gay stuff are a huge motivator for much of flyover. I agree that up until now “hate whitey” had been the great unifier of the left, but at least right now all the democrats seem to be at one another’s throats. The coloreds are hostile to the old guard of whites men, with the racist charges against Nothram and the attempt to “me too” Sanders. The Muslims versus the zionists, the zionists against Gabbard. All seem to be hawking ludicrous healthcare and socialist policies. I can’t see how they are ever all going to get behind one person as an organized force
One measure of size is sq. miles. Another is in terms of technology. 100 SM was big and the ppl who lived there relatively easy to control when we lived in the age of stage coaches, sail boats, family farms, and the telegraph. 10,000 SM is nothing in an age of automobiles, ocean liners, TV, the internet, agribusiness, the U.N. and the ppl who live there are easy to control. Billionare global elites see borders and nationalism a hinderance to profit, and the world is their oyster.
JR, a small quibble. NY is the birthplace of film. I grew up a few blocks from the studios in Astoria. They are still there and last I heard were operational. The bulk of production moved to LA when early on there was need for more outdoor filming and of course, better weather. CA had sun and plenty of room to film. Not sure we can interpret anything political as this happened way back in the 20’s when East and West were not as polarized as today.
Z: “The demand for heretics is constant…Swim near the trawlers, risk getting caught in the net.” Those two paragraphs were funny great.
Z: “In a world where there is no truth and no one can trust anything, all you can do is laugh.” I guess that’s why the Manhattan shrug became so well known. The guys living there have long experienced our world of confusion to come.
In information theory this is called “chaffing”, that is, you flood the wheat with chaff in order to hide it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaffing_and_winnowing
Good catch. I was going to go in that direction, but I’m saving that for another post. Hiding the truth in plain sight is going to become more important as the surveillance increases. Prisoners are adept at this.
pareisagō is the greek term. to introduce or bring in secretly or craftily. Sorry for the repeat post.
The bottom line is that our overlords want us powerless. Whether it’s flooding us with foreigners or fake news and wacky conspiracy theories, the result is a public less able to trust, bond and unite with each other over a common cause.
That shit only works on white Americans because we’re already fragmented beyond belief and have no fight left in us.
OTOH the ruling class is signing it’s death warrant by importing all these 3rd worlders. Once the population of Brownskins and Shariah types gets big enough they will simply sweep away the Cosmic whites and business types who have been running the the show until then.
Why? These people have a strong ethnic identity, they aren’t afraid to fight and do prison time either. So they aren’t cowed like whites. Their gangs are often a extension of their ethnic community.
Whites could learn a lot from them, but won’t. Hell we can’t even start our own Yellow Vest protests. The Alt-Right is a joke and collection of nerds who can’t even organize a cook out.
To be fair, the FBI would be at that cookout attempting to entrap you. The primary reason there aren’t any proximate white community anolgoues, many of which did exist and still do in limited fashion (eg. fraternal orgs), is because whites didn’t get civil rights in the 60s and are thus second class. It’s absolutely legitimate for diaspora organizations to stalk and harass any whites they dislike for any reason. The reverse would be a civil rights violation.
This is the reason that theories of your decline ought to be expunged of tautology. “White civilization is in decline because it is exhibiting this behavior of a civilization in decline,” doesn’t work. You want actionable, in a productive and legal manner, waypoints not a call to nihilism.
Again, Zman, interesting insight. Reminds me a bit of signal to noise ratio study from college days. Run up the noise and the signal becomes less detectable. However, I’m a hopeless optimist I guess. I still believe there is signal detectable in the mountain of noise being shoved at us. You’ve just got to be savvy wrt to detecting and discarding the noise. Part of that process is using one’s common sense, developing critical thinking skills, and reading some of the heavy thinkers out there for guidance. MSM is almost never useful. But like the old TV show refrain…The truth is out there.
Perhaps a bit tangental, but the image of the Obama birth certificate posted by the gov could readily be seen to be a fake by anyone who has ever used Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. Not saying there isn’t a real one but I wonder if it was someone’s sense of humor to post such an obvious fake.
The fact that the people most invested in the birther stuff were liberal propagandist was the tell. It was a straw man they loved, because it was a great distraction. It’s why Team Obama dragged their feet on the birth certificate. They thought it was great for their side.
The QAnon stuff, by the way, was an obvious liberal troll on the dumb and the gullible.
You mean like Arpio and Trump? Both them were invested in exposing Obama’s fake BC.
The reason it had traction because much of Obama’s past is shrouded in secrecy. Here’s man who comes out of the cornfield and becomes president. Anyone who is the least bit curious who wounder who exactly is Obama and what’s his background. For the most part he seemed to be a artificial creation.
Obviously not. As I used to phrase it back then. Only liberals and lunatics are invested in this story. In the liberal press did not promote it, no one, including Trump, would have cared.
re: Obama Birth Certificate
Technically the Obama Birth Certificate has been shown to be a fake. There is no getting around that. Zman your insouciant attitude demonstrates that you are ruled by your left brain.
Dan Kurt
p.s. Otherwise great post.
I wish we could ship you guys off to Conspiratorial Guinea.
It seems likely that if they’re hiding anything about Obama’s origin, it’s that he’s the son of Frank Marshall Davis, rather than Barack Obama Sr. The Kenya thing seems more like disinformation then anything else: a ludicrous myth abetted by TPTB to make birthers look ridiculous and to discourage normies from looking too closely at the cipher governing the country.
Lawrence Auster had Obama’s measure back in 2008, and it’s a shame he didn’t live to see himself vindicated. Auster identified Obama as an alien being, a man who had spent the bulk of his life outside the American heartland, with no affinity or affection towards the country that had placed him in its highest office. As Auster kept repeating after the 2008 election, “It’s their country now.”
IMO, what they are hiding is that his Mom and GrandMa were both CIA operatives. And anti-American ones too. And that they were part of an anti American. canal within “the intelligence community”.
Which I realize sound kooky, but remember that an open communist dupe was director of the Agency under Obama, and that he had worked there for decades.
Oh, and I think the deep secret that they’re hiding about his birth certificate is that his races is listed as “white”.
If Davis were his father, Obama would be an American citizen three times over: mother American, father American, born in America.
I think Obama *is* an American on paper. He’s just not American in any way that really matters. He spent his formative years either in foreign countries (Indonesia), or in weird colonial outposts of the US (Hawaii). And once he got to America proper, he was quickly adopted by handlers and immersed into their own looking-glass version of America. He doesn’t understand or like America as it really is, and Auster was one of the first to recognize this.
In 1922, under Lenin, the USSR started a humor magazine, Krokodil. It lasted until 2000. It lampooned stupid bureaucrats, bread lines, etc., letting off steam for the regime, which itself never was criticized. And it attacked the regime’s enemies. Sort of like the allowed humor today in the USA.
Interesting. Given the most dangerous drug in Russia , basically codeine cut with gasoline was called Krokodil says something about the Russian personality and sense of humor